Run Your Life Show With Andy Vasily #296- One Family's Walk Through Loss with Frank Stepnowski and Sam Welch
In today’s episode, we’re going to sit with something that every one of us will face in our lives, but most of us struggle to talk about openly: grief.
My guests are author and educator Frank Stepnowski and his daughter, Sam Welch. Together, they’ve created a beautiful and deeply moving picture book called Where Did Cain Go? A Family’s Walk Through Loss—a book that grew out of the death of Frank’s son and Sam’s brother, Cain, who died at just 13 days old from a congenital heart defect.
This conversation is not about neat answers or tidy closure. It’s about what it actually feels like to live with loss over years and decades. You’ll hear Frank talk about what it meant to carry his infant son’s coffin, to try to stay strong when everyone else went silent not knowing what to say or how to act around Frank and his wife Dawn after their profound loss. You’ll hear Sam share what it was like to grow up sensing a grief she couldn’t fully understand, and how later losses—of her uncle, her grandparents, and a pregnancy—reshaped her understanding of her parents’ pain and her own.
We explore how grief and love mirror each other, how gratitude can slowly change the way we carry our pain, and how art, story, and honest conversation can help families—especially children—talk about death in a more compassionate and grounded way.
We also get into ideas from positive psychology, the power of journaling, and the Japanese art of Kintsugi as a metaphor for putting ourselves back together with gold after we’ve been broken.
My hope is that as you listen, you don’t just think about loss in an abstract way, but gently reflect on the people you’ve loved and lost, and on the legacy they continue to have in your life.
Connect with Frank and Sam
Frank- Facebook
Sam- Facebook
Where to purchase their book: Amazon and Barnes and Noble