Fourteen years ago, Julia lost her 18-year-old son to suicide. Losing her son upended everything she thought she knew about parenting, grief, and how to keep going. Today, she’s an outspoken advocate, helping others navigate the kind of loss she once thought she wouldn’t survive.
“It’s very hard at the beginning when you first lose them,” she says. “You’re so focused on the loss and how they died. But after a while of really processing grief, it’s such a joy to be able to look back and remember that they were so much more than how they died.”
Her son, Julian, was bright, compassionate, and deeply introspective. “Everything he did, he held onto it and always wanted to dig deeper.” Basketball was one of his early passions—he gave it his all. But after an injury and a long recovery, his mental health began to suffer.
Julia recalls noticing emotional shifts in her son even earlier, after his parents’ divorce. “He looked up to his dad, and it was a huge adjustment for him.” The change in family dynamics stayed with him from a young age.
As he moved through school, he faced challenges but found an outlet through photography and videography. “I knew that whatever he put his mind to, he would be successful because he always did it to the fullest.”
Like many teens, his inner world was difficult to access. Julia would ask surface-level questions like, “How was your day?” and now understands the value of digging deeper. “It’s important to ask the hard questions, sit with the discomfort, and really listen to your teen.”
After her son’s death in 2011, Julia found herself consumed by grief and guilt. “Looking back, I describe myself during that period of my life as broken. It’s something that I did not see coming, and my world got turned upside down.” She still had a daughter to raise despite her life being in turmoil.
Traditional therapy offered little relief. “Suicide is so complex,” she says. It wasn’t until she found Didi Hirsch that her path towards healing began. She went to an 8-week suicide bereavement group, Survivors After Suicide (SAS), offered by Didi Hirsch.
“It was lifechanging for me. To have a group of people that have actually experienced a suicide loss—it changes your perspective, and it was really lifesaving. I started having that glimmer of hope.”
She credits Didi Hirsch and her grief therapist, Dr. Jay Nagdimon, with saving her life. “All the thoughts I had going on in my head, all the guilt I had as a parent… it just kept running through my mind.” In the group, she found understanding, compassion, and a way forward.
Now, Julia serves on the Survivor’s After Suicide Advisory Group at Didi Hirsch and co-facilitates the same support group that helped her heal. She’s transformed loss into connection, heartbreak into a community.
“My grief has shifted tremendously in these 14 years,” she says. “Because I’ve gone from a broken person that lost her son to suicide, to helping others.”
She shares her hard-earned wisdom with other parents: ask more intentional questions, stay emotionally present, and never dismiss silence as typical teen behavior. “We all have struggles. As parents, I feel like sometimes we forget that children struggle too.”
She urges families to learn the signs of suicide, just as they would learn the signs of a heart attack. “Suicide does not discriminate. Someone in your family or someone close to you could be struggling. But you’re not going to know until you have those conversations.”
For Julia, helping others is how she keeps her son’s memory alive. “There is life after loss. And there is hope.”
Need to talk with someone? You can call or text 988 for free, confidential suicide & crisis support, 24/7. You’re not alone.
Teen Line offers free, confidential peer-to-peer support—for teens, by teens. Text ‘TEEN’ to 839863 (6 p.m. – 9 p.m. PST), call (800) 852-8336 (6 p.m. – 10 p.m. PST) or send an email.
