This Is Healing
https://sarahlheringer.substack.com/ Wife. Witness. Writer. Survivor. Reluctant activist. Relentless truth-teller .I did not ask for this. But I will not look away. On June 4, 2025, my husband Patrick was murdered in our home while protecting me from a man who should never have been free. A man with a violent record, with open warrants, with a past the city ignored—and a blade in his hand. Patrick died in my arms.There are no metaphors for that. Only blood, memory, and silence.What followed was the unraveling of everything I thought was safe.What I write here is not for spectacle. It is not curated grief. It is not a campaign. It is a reckoning. With systems. With silence. With myself. I write because I need somewhere to put it.The grief. The fury. The facts. The failures.I write about public safety because no one else will say the quiet part out loud: that our leaders are protecting power, not people. That our systems are engineered to delay, distract, and discard the victims. That negligence is not a policy—it’s a pattern.I write about trauma in real time. I record podcasts from the dead center of it. Not once I’ve healed, but while I’m trying to.You’ll hear my voice shake. You’ll hear me try to laugh. You’ll hear a woman unlearning how to be agreeable and learning instead how to be impossible.Because being impossible might be the only way anything changes. This publication is a record.A record of a woman fighting for her own life after the one she loved was taken. A record of a broken city pretending it’s functioning. A record of truth-telling in a landscape built on press releases and public amnesia.There is poetry here. Not the pretty kind. The kind found at the bottom of grief, where language turns feral and light only filters in when you stop pretending you’re okay.There is politics here. But not in the way you’ve seen it. This is not partisan. It’s personal. This is about justice that was promised and never delivered.This is about what needs to be said, what needs to be burned down, and what must be rebuilt in its place. If you're here, I hope it’s because you’re willing to look.Not just at the facts, but at the fractures. Not just at the grief, but at what it demands of us.Because I am not a victim. I am what comes after. And I’m not writing this to be understood. I’m writing it so no one can say they didn’t know.Welcome to the fight. Welcome to the fire.
Episodes
In this episode, I talk about the emotional backlash that follows moments of feeling alive, how my relationships are changing, and what Patrick’s birthday actually felt like.
This is an honest look at grief, the body, and continuing to live after everything changes.
This episode is called Liminal Timeline because that is where I am. The in-between. Not who I was and not yet whoever comes next.
This week I flew to Cincinnati for...
Have you ever wondered what grief actually does to the body?Nine months ago my husband was murdered in our home. This morning I finished the CrossFit Open ranked in the top ninety four percent in the world.
Which raises a strange question.How do you keep living after everything changes?
In this episode I talk about trauma, grief, nerv...
This is a ten-day window into what grief actually looks like inside a body. The watching. The wanting. The ego. The collapse. The seventy dollars of DoorDash. The prison sentence feeling. The nervous system spiral. The choice to interrupt it.
I talk about being watched by men again and what that wakes up in m...
In this episode, I talk about what grief actually asks of me. Not emotionally. Socially. Physically. Relationally.
Grief doesn’t just live in my heart.
It lives in my body.
It lives in my relationships.
And it lives in how I move through the world with other people.
I share what has helped, what hasn’t, how masking my grief shows up in my nervous system, and what I’m learning about ...
I share what it was like to be pulled back into early grief by a song from The National, how en...
This is a fireside reflection on why I left Cincinnati when I did, and why it was never just about the cold. It was the gray. Grief already compromises the nervous system. Season...
Not as a celebration. Not as a resolution.
Just a pause.
I recorded this at seven o’clock, sitting among half-packed boxes, the year ending without ceremony. A threshold moment. Quiet. Undecorated. Honest.
This episode is a fireside reflection on presence, grief, and identity. On what it means to live after an ending that doesn’t resolve. On the loss of a life, a future, a role, and the vers...
I talk about the kind of grief that takes more than a person. The grief that dismantles identity. The loss of high functioning. The loss of certainty. The loss of the self who...
From there, the conversation widens into two things that quietly determine how grief shapes a person over time: your worldview and your capacity. If you believe this world is all there is, grief can become existential. If you hold even the pos...
I talk about the physical reality of grief, the shock of naming what happened, the first winter without him, and the moment I woke up and didn’t have to remember he was ...
I talk about the desert, the condo I almost bought, Phoenix, survival, spirit visitations, and what it means to choose the next breadcrumb instead of...
It keeps reaching for what it knew—his weight, his breath, the pattern of safety that lived in his skin.
It’s not metaphor. It’s biology. The absence has chemistry.
Since Patrick was killed, my nervous system has been running old code: the body hunting for touch, for regulation, for proof of existence. I wake up in the middle of the night crying and...
And I’m not supposed to do shaman things to other people. Everything I learned was for me—to practice, to embody, to remember how to heal myself first.
This episode is a ritual. We start with a prayer—an invitation, not a command—then get honest about what shamanic work actually is: humility, reciprocity, perception.
I’ll take you through Snake medicine, core w...
In this episode, I talk about taking his ashes back to Colorado, the place where our story began, and how the land i...
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