Five years have passed since Elizabeth Lightfoot Jameson’s daughter, Bee, died by suicide.
The anniversary falls this week.
On Sunday, Jameson will launch a new podcast, The Remembering Way. It is not a coincidence. The first episode opens with Bee’s voice.
Bee’s story, Jameson says quietly, is “helping people through hard things.”
For Jameson, an Estes Park writer, contemplative teacher, retreat leader, and ordained Episcopal priest, the podcast represents the latest chapter in a lifelong search for healing shaped by profound grief, deep spiritual exploration, and an enduring belief that what breaks the human heart can also heal it.
“I’ve learned that what breaks us can also open us,” she said.
That conviction was hard won.
Jameson was 12 when her father died by suicide. Decades later, after a career in parish ministry and academic administration, tragedy struck again when her 18-year-old daughter, who prefered the nonbinary term “kiddo,” died by suicide after struggling with anxiety, depression, ADHD, an eating disorder, long mono, an abdominal surgery, and the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, all compounded by the trauma of a sexual assault.
“The weight of our generational pain landed on this kid,” Jameson said.
She speaks of her Bee’s suffering without minimizing it. She also speaks with striking tenderness about Bee’s creativity and compassion. Bee dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, a teacher, or an environmental advocate—someone who could make a difference in the world.
“She wanted to make movies that would help people go through hard things,” Jameson said. That dream now echoes through her mother’s work.
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
Jameson tells a profound story of symbolism and synchronicity. Bee, a student at DePaul University, had texted her mother and stepfather on the evening before her death with messages about love.
Reading between the lines, Jameson sensed something was wrong. There had been a previous suicide attempt a few months earlier. When Jameson was not able to reach Bee the next morning, she had a sinking feeling.
She called a friend who went to Bee’s apartment. Bee had left a note. Jameson called the police and caught the first plane to Chicago.
It took three agonizing days for authorities to find Bee’s body. On the morning the body was discovered, Jameson was walking along the Chicago lakefront, consumed by grief, when a blackbird suddenly struck her on the back of the head.
She stopped in her tracks.
Across many cultures and spiritual traditions, blackbirds represent mystery, intuition, and transformation. Their songs have also become symbols of hope, resilience, and renewal.
Earlier that very morning, Jameson had been singing “Blackbird,” a song that had become deeply meaningful to Bee. Returning to Bee’s apartment, Jameson noticed an unfinished bird puzzle left on the table. In the center was a blackbird missing a single piece, resting just beside the empty space.
The final song on Bee’s carefully assembled farewell playlist was “Blackbird.”
For Jameson, the moments were much more than coincidence. They became part of the spiritual language through which she understands loss—not as proof that grief disappears, but that love remains.
“I knew my heart was broken,” she said. “But I also knew Bee was finally free.”
That perspective has shaped everything that followed.
Transformations along the way
Eight years ago, before her daughter’s death, Jameson suffered a traumatic brain injury in a fall that ended her work in parish ministry. The injury unexpectedly redirected her vocation toward spiritual direction, writing, and contemplative teaching.
Today, she accompanies people seeking meaning and navigating existential uncertainty—people facing illness, grief, retirement, family estrangement, or the collapse of long-held beliefs.
“They’re questioning what once cohered,” she said. “What once held together no longer does.”
Her monthly Second Sundays gatherings invite people into conversations about spirituality, while her Substack essays, retreats, and now her podcast explore what she calls “the opening of the aperture”—expanding awareness beyond fear, certainty, and division.
Jameson’s spiritual path has taken her beyond traditional religious boundaries, but deeply grounded in Christianity.
A graduate of Harvard University and Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, Jameson later studied at the Center for Action and Contemplation’s Living School with Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault, and James Finley.
She draws from the Christian mystics, Zen practice, contemplative psychology, and other wisdom traditions. Rather than seeing them as competing systems, she believes they all point toward the same truth.
She explains that in Aramaic—the language Jesus spoke—the concept commonly translated as “sin” is better understood as entanglement. Sin is the act of becoming disconnected from one’s true center.
Healing, she believes, is the slow work of becoming untangled and returning to the center.
She contrasts that understanding with what she describes as a Western tendency, rooted in ancient Greek thought, to divide life into rigid binaries.
“We project our light and our shadow onto other people,” she said. “When we come home to the light that we are, we also come home to one another.”
Her own understanding of that truth emerged through the hardest season of her life.
As she accompanied Bee through repeated mental health crises, Jameson said she gradually realized she could not control another person’s journey, no matter how desperately she wanted to save them.
“I had to ask myself, ‘Am I acting from love, or am I acting from fear?’”
That question became transformative.
Instead of trying to rescue, she learned to love “center to center”—meeting another person without allowing fear to dictate every decision.
It is an approach she now shares with others who are navigating difficult circumstances and questioning things that once made sense.
Jameson readily acknowledges that grief never ends. She misses her daughter every day. But she also insists that joy and grief are not opposites.
“Love cannot be lost,” she said.
That conviction underlies the retreats she leads, the conversation she hosts on Second Sundays, and the new podcast, The Remembering Way.
She believes people often inherit and pass along deep emotional wounds that remain unhealed across generations. Her life’s work has become an invitation to choose healing. Not by escaping suffering. But by remembering, beneath every wound and every loss, the light that has been there all along.
“Come home,” she says. “Come home to the light that you are.”
As she prepares to share the first podcast on Sunday, Jameson is spending the week in Estes Park with her husband and son, remembering Bee while continuing the work that has become her life’s calling: helping others find meaning in suffering and, ultimately, healing.
The Remembering Way will be hosted on Jameson’s Broken Open Substack, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, wherever people listen to podcasts, and as an audio-only file on YouTube.