In the chaotic moments that followed, Crosby-Pigott administered CPR while her youngest daughter and father-in-law watched nearby. In another room, her eldest daughter shielded her four-year-old child from the traumatic scene. Emergency medical technicians arrived shortly after, attempting to stabilize Rudy before rushing him to the hospital, with Crosby-Pigott and her father-in-law following close behind in their vehicle.
Upon arrival, the urgency that had characterized the initial emergency response gave way to a stark and quiet reality. Hospital staff escorted Crosby-Pigott and her father-in-law to a small waiting room situated at the back of the emergency department. The surrounding environment felt eerily tranquil and detached from the crisis unfolding within her family. Soon after, an emergency physician entered the room and delivered the fatal news with a simple statement: “I’m sorry.”
Crosby-Pigott recalled her immediate, shock-filled response to the attending physician: “Sorry? SORRY? How?” In that moment, her perception of time slowed dramatically, and a sense of profound disbelief took over as she struggled to process the reality of her husband’s passing.
A Season of Unimaginable Loss
The loss occurred just eight days prior to what would have been the couple’s fifteenth wedding anniversary. Furthermore, the tragedy struck a family that was already navigating deep sorrow. Only eighteen days before Rudy’s collapse, the father of Crosby-Pigott’s eldest son had also passed away. Within a span of less than three weeks, all four of her children had lost their fathers.
Facing the immediate aftermath required immense internal strength. Crosby-Pigott had to gather the courage to enter the room to see her husband one last time, remove his wedding ring, and eventually turn to leave the medical facility. Walking out of the hospital, she felt a disturbing disconnect between her personal devastation and the uninterrupted flow of the external world. Nurses continued their routines in the hallways, traffic moved steadily along the streets outside, and people elsewhere continued eating, laughing, sleeping, and planning for the future.
Upon returning home, Crosby-Pigott gathered her children upstairs to deliver the tragic news that their father had passed away. The announcement was followed by an overwhelming wave of grief that she described as a blood-curdling scream emanating from the deepest part of her soul, marking the complete collapse of the life she had previously known.
Despite the unbearable weight of her personal anguish, complete emotional surrender was not an option. Recognizing that her children were simultaneously processing immense trauma, Crosby-Pigott had to remain present as the surviving parent. She managed the dual responsibilities of parenting and grieving, organizing a memorial and funeral services, navigating official paperwork, answering endless inquiries, and providing leadership for her household while experiencing profound emotional pain.
Applying Engineering Principles: Assessing the "As-Found Condition"
In seeking a way through the chaos, Crosby-Pigott eventually found guidance in the analytical tools of her professional discipline. With more than twenty-five years of experience in cost engineering, planning, project controls, and project management, her career had involved managing complex multi-million and multi-billion dollar projects. Early in her career, her responsibilities included planning major industrial refinery outages from initial shutdown through final startup.
In project management methodology, a foundational step in rescuing a troubled or failing project is establishing and documenting the "as-found condition." This process requires an accurate, unfiltered assessment of the current state of affairs rather than an idealized outcome. Without establishing a truthful starting point, any subsequent recovery plan is fundamentally flawed.
Without initially realizing it, Crosby-Pigott began applying this exact methodology to her personal emotional recovery through journal writing. Her entries served as an unvarnished baseline of her mental and emotional state, stripping away any pretense of composure:
- I am not sleeping.
- I am angry at him for leaving.
- I am angry at God for taking him away from us.
- I do not know how to do this without him.
A few weeks after Rudy’s death, she cataloged her loss in a list titled The Things I Lost When Rudy Died. The list encompassed direct personal roles—her companion, lover, best friend, confidant, protector, and encourager—as well as practical, everyday contributions, such as her mechanic, grill master, handyman, and the sole person who shared her private jokes.
Through this exercise, Crosby-Pigott realized she was not simply grieving the physical loss of an individual, but the complete architecture of a life constructed around a shared partnership. Journaling provided a crucial space where she could stop pretending to be fine and plainly acknowledge her actual emotional reality, establishing the true baseline necessary for long-term recovery.
Stabilizing and Reducing the Scope
Less than a month into her grief, Crosby-Pigott documented the worsening emotional weight as the initial shock wore off, noting that the days were growing harder while simultaneously feeling strengthened and broken. As a professional planner whose career was built on forecasting milestones and anticipating future outcomes, she suddenly faced a dynamic where the future she had envisioned no longer existed. While her training had equipped her to manage project risk, it had not prepared her to plan for absolute personal absence.
Thirty-four days after her husband’s death, Crosby-Pigott shifted her strategy from trying to resolve her long-term future to radically reducing her operational scope. She wrote a simple prayer asking to be taught how to rest, deliberately narrowing her focus to the immediate present:
- Care for her children.
- Care for herself.
- Prioritize rest.
- Refrain from making long-term decisions prematurely.
She began managing her existence in microscopic increments—one second, one minute, one hour, and one day at a time. Despite attempting to maintain high functional capability for her family, her physical body eventually revealed the stress she was attempting to manage. Her hair began falling out in significant amounts, serving as a physiological reminder that high functional output is fundamentally distinct from genuine emotional healing.
Excavating Identity and Reclaiming "Angie"
Having spent eighteen years together with Rudy, including fifteen years of marriage, Crosby-Pigott was accustomed to operating within a shared partnership. The sudden termination of that dynamic forced an abrupt transition from a collective unit back to an individual existence. She was thrust into making solitary decisions, parenting alone, and structuring a reality she had not chosen.
This transition prompted a deep internal question regarding her underlying identity. In response, Crosby-Pigott looked back beyond her marriage into her early childhood to rediscover her core self.
She turned her focus toward "Angie"—the name used exclusively by her siblings and childhood friends. While she professionally and publicly answered to Angelina, the name Angie represented her origins and foundational identity. She recalled her nine-year-old self as an independent, fearless child who spoke her mind without hesitation. However, years of adult responsibilities, professional demands, and personal conditioning had obscured that early self.
Crosby-Pigott began an intentional process of internal excavation to uncover where she had buried parts of her identity due to pain, shame, or fear. Over decades, she had excelled at managing heavy burdens, developing high-level functionality in both her personal life and within corporate environments. Spending decades in male-dominated industries had required specific survival mechanisms: at times softening her expertise to avoid appearing intimidating, and at other times adopting a harder exterior to command professional respect.
While these strategic adjustments had facilitated career advancement and functional success, they had also gradually distanced her from her authentic identity. The loss of her husband in 2018 exposed the underlying ground, allowing her to realize that key parts of herself had been buried long before the tragedy occurred. By digging through these emotional layers, she began reconnecting with forgotten aspirations, personality traits, and personal stories, while simultaneously processing long-buried pain and unresolved grief.
The Coexistence of Joy and Grief
A pivotal moment in Crosby-Pigott’s healing journey came when she re-read an early journal entry from the weeks immediately following her loss. Amid explicit descriptions of intense emotional pain, she had casually noted a brief outing: Went to the beach with friends. We had a nice time.
For years, that sentence had seemed insignificant. Upon reflection, however, she recognized it as a vital truth regarding emotional recovery. It demonstrated that intense devastation and moments of genuine enjoyment could exist simultaneously within the same experience. Experience showed that joy did not require grief to vanish entirely before making an appearance.
This realization altered her understanding of moving forward. Rebuilding her life did not require dishonoring her late husband’s memory or loving their shared past any less. Furthermore, while strategic planning was valuable for managing actionable decisions, it could not alter the past or force reality to match personal preferences. Navigating recovery ultimately required surrender—defined not as passive defeat, but as relinquishing the demand that circumstances change before allowing oneself to resume living.
Looking back on her trajectory, Crosby-Pigott identified a natural, five-phase progression that governed her recovery: survive, stabilize, remember, rebuild, and rise. Rather than following an abstract theoretical model, she experienced the process firsthand before assigning formal terminology to it.
Today, as a mother of four and the founder of I AM Rising™, Crosby-Pigott utilizes her background as a cost engineer and project management professional with over twenty-five years of experience to write and speak about grief, identity, surrender, and intentional personal reconstruction. Her experience highlights the importance of starting with absolute reality, narrowing immediate focus during crisis, and gently excavating the underlying individual identity that remains even after life’s structures have been fundamentally altered.
