Tim Bigonia is a storyteller. He owns a photography studio in Mequon and a branding and video production business. He’s glad to lend a hand to his parish, Lumen Christi in Mequon, and tell the story of a school’s graduating class.
Perhaps the hardest story Bigonia tells, however, is that of his greatest pain: the continual grief from the loss of his wife, Colleen, due to cancer. But from that pain, God uses him to help heal others on their pathway of grief.
“It’s extremely accurate to say there’s never closure, but there’s still healing,” said Bigonia, who has turned his grief into a ministry via the “Journey to Grateful” podcast, which has now reached 175 episodes.
“Grief is a journey — truly, truly a journey. It has no timeline, it has no deadline, it constantly continues, and it ebbs and flows.”
His own journey came through the pain of losing Colleen in 2020, 3 years after she began treatment for breast cancer while they were parenting three children.
Colleen met Tim in 2003 after losing her first husband, Rob Leonhardt, due to an accident July 4, 1999.
“I was just fascinated by her story. And I was fascinated by her love of life even under those circumstances,” Bigonia says. “She said, ‘I had no other choice. I had my daughter, and I had to move on for her.’”
That moving on turned into marriage in 2005 and two sons together by 2007, ten years before doctors discovered Colleen’s breast cancer. Following 3 years of treatment and care, the cancer metastasized into brain tumors and doctors eventually could offer no more treatment options.
Through it all, Colleen remained committed to God.
“She was definitely strong in her faith,” Bigonia says. “There was rarely a Sunday Mass that she missed. It was always important for her and for us as a family to make sure that that was part of our life.”
She went to God on July 3, 2020, nearly 21 years to the day her first husband died.
“You are going to have moments months after your loss that you fall to your knees crying in your closet. Surprisingly, you will have those moments five, six, seven years down the road, and you don’t necessarily discover all of the reasons why you might hit a brick wall. How a song, a smell, a favorite food, and all the emotions become extremely present, and suddenly you’re crying. It’s what a friend in a bereavement group called a ‘grief bomb,’” Bigonia said.
“It’s extremely easy to explain why grief doesn’t have an end. My love for my wife was not going to and will not ever have an end. Grief is just the absence of where to put that love.”
Bigonia has found a place to put that love through his podcast which allows him to not only process that grief but also unveil it so that others can find healing on their own paths.
“Some people might wonder how in the world I have that much to talk about,” he joked.
“My podcast focus is to help people who are basically lost in this journey, the ones that are weeks or months into it, and the people that are five years, 10 years into it, as well as the people who are not experiencing this directly but are trying to support somebody. There’s many different aspects, many different facets to grief that people just don’t understand.”
In many ways, Bigonia sees this podcast as a tribute to Colleen, doing things to heal others in a way she did when her cancer journey began.
“When she became diagnosed and started going through the process of her treatment with breast cancer, she reached back out to her doctors several months after starting treatment and said, ‘If you have anybody who is newly diagnosed and are entering this world that I’m in right now, please let them reach out to me so that I can give them guideposts along the way,’” he said.
“I took note of that, and that’s basically what I’ve done with this podcast. I am doing what she did, just with grief, trying to allow others a slightly smoother path.”
Simply in loving others through their grief, both through the podcast and his time leading a bereavement group at Lumen Christi, Bigonia is allowing God to do the same for him.
“When this disease took my wife, I was not on good terms with God, but I understood that it was part of my life that I had to figure out,” he said.
“I would not be here if my wife, after losing her husband, didn’t allow a new conversation to enter her life. I’ve got to be the same way when it comes to God.”
A conversation that he’s holding, through his own podcast that God’s using to heal others — and himself.
The Bigonia family, including dad Tim and mom Colleen, enjoys time together at Covered Bridge Park in Cedarburg in 2011, nine years before Colleen passed away. (Submitted photo)
