The following is a conversation between Diana Hosford, Vice President of Sports & Entertainment for the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), and Monika Samtani, co-founder, The Fem Word.

Diana Hosford, TAPS (Photo Courtesy: TAPS) — Diana Hosford, TAPS *(Photo Courtesy: TAPS)*

Monika Samtani:

Hi everyone. This is The Fem Word and I'm your host, Monika Samtani. My co-founder Natasha and I hope that everyone listening is staying safe and sane during this time. It's been a really tough two months all over the world, and even once we start phasing out of this in the coming weeks and months, the longterm effects and repercussions are now becoming, to me, the big unknown. Today I am happy to introduce a guest that is doing life-changing work for an organization called TAPS, Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. It was founded in 1994 to provide comfort, care, and resources to those grieving the death of a military loved one. Thank you so much for joining us, Diana.

Diana Hosford:

So good to be with you. Thank you so much for having me.

Monika:

It is Military Appreciation Month, so thank you for your incredible work with those who need and deserve it the most. You have been working at your dream job for years. You built the sports program for TAPS after a trip to Afghanistan and it was all going so well until of course, COVID-19 hit and it changed everything. So now, you say that instead of sitting on the sidelines, it's time to pivot. Tell us about the COVID-19 task force that you are now working on for TAPS.

Diana:

TAPS developed a COVID-19 task force as a response to what's happening in the world right now, and one of the things that TAPS has done so beautifully is to recognize the needs of the American military family community over the years. TAPS was founded in 1994, so the chance to create opportunities to care for the families after loved ones have died, whether in training accidents or by suicide or illness, really develops. The program grows as the needs of America grow. For example, this was evident during the creation of The Suicide Program. When suicides began happening in the military, TAPS realized where there's one, there's many, and started an incredibly wonderful and comprehensive program of prevention and postvention in order to care for that population of surviving family members. So now, it's a natural pivot to care for those in need all over America. We have an incredible amount of experience, best practice, complicated and compounded grief, and we want to take that and open our doors and our hearts to the American public in a way that would be really meaningful. This will allow us to connect with them and provide them with the care and resources that we have.

Monika:

You had to build a plan pretty quickly though, and you saw the need that was real right now. I can imagine that the isolation and fear were only exacerbated by the situation we are all in. What did you do to get your plan to work well and virtually?

Diana:

Well, immediately TAPS went to virtual programming. We're having TAPS Talks every day to provide comfort and care to survivors. There have been several different opportunities to connect, like 11 o'clock coffees, or book readings for kids. We've also done Facebook lives with some of our professional athlete friends or celebrity chefs, like Robert Irvine. Different ways to make people feel connected. We couldn't be together, but we could be connected in terms of the task force. They're a group that comes together to see how we can provide resources to our community and care to our survivors. There's a curated TAPS Daily that goes out every day with information for our TAPS community, the veteran community, and the military community as a whole, which has been an incredible resource. Legislation is also being put forth to care for National Guard members. There's a member in New Jersey that passed away and it's important to make sure that their family is taken care of, just as any other military surviving family would be.

Monika:

I'm really happy to hear that things are in motion and this COVID-19 task force is taking place at the right time. Sometimes in the worst of situations, the best things come out of it. Don't you feel?

Diana:

I really feel like we're very much in a position to help America and it's really inspiring to see how our founder, Bonnie Carroll, who started TAPS in 1994, is making this pivot and asking after all of these years: how can we help everyone in America as they're grieving? Our whole nation is grieving a lot right now. We were talking about Memorial Day, which is really a day about celebrating the life and service of our fallen heroes, and how this year, Memorial Day really is the day that everybody will be thinking about loved ones. This includes our incredible heroic medical community and the civilian population, even people who are exposed to this awful virus and have passed away. All of those family members need care and comfort and we've been leading the way for so many years with TAPS that it just makes sense to provide as much as we can to anyone in need.

Monika:

It's amazing that you're providing this service to anyone in need. With the digital age, you are able to still do that if not physically, but at least by connecting virtually.

Diana:

We've talked about social distancing and what we want to really say is physical distancing. You and I can't be together right now, unfortunately, but we are connecting and sharing, and that's what we've been able to do with our families. We had an incredible outreach to the entire TAPS population. People were picking up the phones and making thousands of phone calls, just reaching out to survivors across the country and asking: "Are you okay? Is there anything we can do to support you? Is there anything you need right now?" because we know that there are survivors who may have lost their jobs, they're homeschooling children, or they're a single income family. How are they responding to all of this? And so we are there. We are there for the care and for our families as we always have been and always will be.

We're also seeing resilience. The military community, sadly, has had experience with sudden loss, death, illness, and as we've talked about, compounded grief and complicated grief. In some cases, this means not being able to have the remains of a loved one or not being with our loved ones at the end of their lives, if they die overseas elsewhere. Therefore, we and our survivors sort of have that experience and we're seeing some resiliency in very meaningful ways. People are connecting with one another and supporting each other. It's really amazing to see how the TAPS family has come together with love and care for each other, but also for the community as a whole.

Monika:

So inspiring, I love that so much. So, sports have been put aside for now, but this has opened up a new role for you. You are supported by an organization founded and run by women, as you've mentioned, with three vice presidents, who are all also women, and a TAPS COVID-19 task force run by a woman. Amazing. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Diana:

I will tell you, I speak often about the inspiration of working for very strong, powerful women. My mother is an amazing role model for me and always has been. I worked for Eunice Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics, and she was just amazing. I always say that she saw a hole in the world and filled it with love, joy, and opportunity for a whole community of people with intellectual disabilities and did it in the most amazing way. She made it meaningful and powerful. She made them feel like rock stars and she did it with such love. Then, I started working for Bonnie Carroll, who was a military surviving spouse. She too saw a hole in the world and filled it with love, hope, comfort, and compassion for the entire military population.

TAPS has many active duty military mentors, who mentor our bereaved military children, and they've often said that Bonnie has given them the comfort that if anything happens to them, TAPS will take care of their families. For those who never had anybody to walk the journey with them, Bonnie has given joy, comfort, love, and community to so many people. Working for women like her, and being raised by someone like my mother, I guess I was always looking for that hole in the world I could try and fill. I went to Afghanistan in 2013 with Bonnie. She invited me and I think I had been working for TAPS for about 10 weeks. I was so unbelievably inspired by everything I saw there: the 1200 allied forces on base in Kabul and their strategic planning, exercising, and working together. It was just unbelievable.

As I laid in my bed, on base in the middle of Kabul, Afghanistan, I thought to myself that I needed to bring something back from this experience. This couldn't be a boondoggle. There had to be something that came from this, something that was born from this experience. I began thinking about sports. I had worked for Special Olympics for seven years and I thought about the universality of sports and the joy that comes from them, and I just thought: I'm going to create a sport's program, that's what I need to do. So, I said to Bonnie on the flight back from Afghanistan, "I think I want to start a sports program" and she said, "go for it". Six months later, it began on November 1st, 2013 and now it's been seven years.

We do 200 plus events a year with sports teams and partners. We work very closely with the NBA, MLB, and other organizations. These groups present opportunities for the families of lost members to go stand in the middle of a baseball or football field, the same place where the families used to watch the game with their dad every Sunday with matching jerseys. That was their thing. That was their tradition. And then to go stand on that field and honor and celebrate his life and service, and do it with maybe a photo of him over your heart and meet his favorite player, it is just an incredible experience.

The Baltimore Orioles have been very good to us over the years, as have teams all across the country, more than that, just about 200 now. The Orioles offered us an opportunity to have someone sing the National Anthem on Memorial Day. There was a young woman that volunteered to sing and the last time that she saw her father before he was deployed was at an Orioles game. To have this young woman be able to sing on that same field many years later was truly something special. It can bring tears to your eyes. She stood proudly on the field, in her TAPS shirt, and sang the national anthem on Memorial Day in the stadium where she had last spent time with her hero.

We do things like that all over the country, all year long, and it's those connections and stories, those incredibly meaningful stories, where families just feel the love and the patriotism. Every month during the NATS baseball season, they salute the families of the fallen from TAPS and it's called Salute to Service. We're sitting behind home plate and the entire stadium stands up, they tip the cap, and the pictures of the fallen heroes are placed on the jumbotron. They did this during game three of the World Series.

Monika:

That's amazing. Did you cry? I mean, how could you not?

Diana:

Every game where we do that, I cry. It's just because it's so powerful. Honestly, I tear up at a lot of our events, but the opportunity to see someone celebrate the life and service of their loved one in that meaningful a way, in that meaningful of place, is an incredible experience. For our survivors, they just want their loved ones to be remembered. That's so important for them, and I think that will happen now within the American public. There are more than 70,000 people who've died from the Coronavirus and every single one of those people needs to be honored, celebrated, and remembered. We need to help the American public cope and that's what TAPS is eager to do, by providing these incredible resources on this civilian page with opportunities for care and support.

Monika:

Just a reminder to everybody, this is The Fem Word. I'm Monika Samtani and I'm speaking with Diana Hosford. She's with an incredible organization called TAPS, a military charity that cares for families of the fallen. I want to shift for a moment, Diana, to your story because you have had to pivot in your own life. Before your own story and journey is one of near tragedy, but ultimately one of great strength and resilience. Can you tell us what happened before you started with TAPS?

Diana:

In 1993, I was involved in a car accident that was awful. I had a lacerated liver, spleen, bladder, and colon, five broken ribs, a crushed pelvis, a collapsed lung, broken teeth, a severe closed head injury, and I was in a coma for a week. The doctors weren't really sure what was going to become of me. They knew what was going on sort of from the neck down, but from the neck up, they were not so sure when it came to a brain injury. I spent weeks in the hospital, came out of the coma, and went into rehab. I had to learn how to walk, how to speak, and how to do everything basically. I was really trying to build my life back.

I was in the hospital one night and they did a test on my heart. It was a Saturday night and the test didn't show what they wanted to see, so they had to come in and push down on my chest. It was an echocardiogram and it hurt because my ribs were broken, so they told me to turn on the television to get my mind off the pain. They had called my mom, so she was also there, and as I turned on the TV, I laughed because Adam Sandler was on the TV doing Opera Man. One day I will have to thank him in person for that. It turned out that everything was fine and I began the recovery process.

I was doing all the things I needed to do. Over the summer, I believe that's when it was, my mother reached out to Saturday Night Live and told them my story, that Adam Sandler and Opera Man had made me laugh when all I could do was cry and they'd have to bring me down for a show. I was really excited at the opportunity to go down there, and with my mom who had been stuck to me like glue for four months because she was just so concerned about everything that had happened. Totally understandable. She and I went down to 30 Rockefeller Plaza and we went to SNL. At the venue, there's some seating down by the stage and then there's some steep seating kind of further in a balcony. They said that they had one seat left by the stage and my mom said, "go ahead and take it" and I thought: she's like letting me!

So I'm all of, what, 18 years old? I'm head to toe in denim, and it's the early nineties. I thought I looked fantastic. It was a look. So, my mom is up wherever she is and I'm sitting in the seat and I am so excited. You know, it's live television, there are cameras, actors, and everything else. I think Christian Slater was the host and Counting Crows was the musical guest. As I was sitting in my seat someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, "we need to put a camera in this seat. Can you step to the back?”. Well, yeah, I have to. So I get up and I go to the back and Adam Sandler is standing there. This was my opportunity. So I just said to him, "My name's Diana, you made me laugh. And all I could do was cry. I had this horrible accident", and he was so kind. He said, "Oh yeah, I heard, I'm glad you could make it out", and I don't even remember what else he said. It was like the first time I met Prince Harry, I just couldn't even remember anything after my first 10 words. So, I went back to my seat and enjoyed the rest of the show and then we were walking out of NBC and I said to my mom, "This place is pretty cool. I should apply for an internship here,” and I did, and I thought, oh, you know what's going to happen? I'm going to get an internship on Saturday Night Live, and Adam Sandler is going to fall in love with me, and we're going to get married, and it's going to be great. So, I get the internship and I'm in news. However, I never saw Adam Sandler again.

Diana with her mom, Susan Roday, in the Rose Garden at the White House.Photo courtesy: Diana Hosford — Diana with her mom, Susan Roday, in the Rose Garden at the White House.
*Photo courtesy: Diana Hosford*

I ended up falling in love with news and I stuck with it in New York, and then I moved out to Washington during the 96 election and I've never left.

The opportunity that my mother created for me was probably what really created the fire in my belly in terms of helping people and giving back, while also making it meaningful. My mom knew how special that experience of watching Adam Sandler would be for me, so when thinking about the sports program and having it be meaningful, while also raising money and awareness, my mom was a really tremendous inspiration for that. My father passed away when I was 13 and he has also been a huge inspiration to me for my entire life. He was a World War II veteran and was absolutely incredible. When you lose a parent that young, a lot of times all you want to do is live to make them proud. I frequently wonder, would my father be proud? He never got to see me get married or meet my daughter, but would he be proud of what I'm doing? My parents have been really influential in everything that I've done in terms of caring for people and creating joyful opportunities.

Monika:

I mean, what a story and thank you for sharing that because it's inspiring and again, it shows your strength and resilience, and how you have pivoted in your own life to make it a success and meaningful as well. Can you look back at a highlight of your career at TAPS? Have there been certain moments where you really see the difference that you are making in the lives of military families?

Diana:

At every event we get to honor a fallen hero and get to celebrate their life and service with their family. It's truly beautiful and meaningful. In particular, the opportunity to walk in the National's World Series parade with those families was amazing. We also do the Pro Bowl with the NFL and that's been great. Our first teams, including the Washington Capitals, have done some very meaningful things. Every year, the players connect with the families and ask: "Oh, how are you?" "How's school going?". Players such as John Carlson and TJ Oshie still have families that they remember year after year. There are many events that really warm my heart, but I have to say that the NFL Draft is really something special.

The first time that we did the NFL draft was with the Philadelphia Eagles. We had a hometown fallen hero with a beautiful family and widow, and a little boy named Chris Frison. They stood on the stage of the NFL Draft and did the second round pick with the commissioner of the NFL. The commissioner wore a photo button of their fallen hero and the boys did as well. The were thousands of people in front of the stage cheering "USA, USA, USA" and millions of people at home watching. I just stood off to the side of the stage with tears in my eyes. Like I said, I cried at a lot of the events. The opportunity to celebrate their life and service, and do it in this beautiful, meaningful, and public way so that everybody will remember is just amazing. Thousands to millions of people get to celebrate with you and it's just an amazing way to honor and recognize the family because when one person serves, a family serves.

Monika:

Very true. Now, the TAPS COVID-19 task force is open to the American public so that anyone grieving can access the tax resources, how and where do people who need help or want to help find you?

Diana:

There's a landing page on our website. It is taps.org/COVID/together and that'll be out on our social media platforms and several of our partners and sponsors will be sharing that as well. They all know how precious and wonderful our resources are to support military families, so I think that they're all excited at the opportunity to share that with the American public.

Monika:

Again, Diana, I'm blessed to have the opportunity to know you. I really am.

Diana:

Oh, you are too kind and thank you for allowing me to share. It's a wonderful opportunity to do so and thank you for inviting me to share words with you on the Fireside Chat. That was really meaningful for me. I think the first time I really put down on paper how special it is, what I have been able to pivot to as a New Yorker, I talked about how heartbreaking it was to see tents erected in New York and know that I couldn't be there with my mom, sister, and other family members. However, the fact that I have the ability to do things from right where I am is so special. This pivot has given me the opportunity to give back in a different way. It means a lot to me and had you not asked me to put that together, I'm not sure I would have done that, so I thank you for giving me that outlet and platform. I'm grateful to you.

Monika:

Wow. I'm just so floored right now. Thank you for saying that. I really appreciate that!

In your words on The Fem Word Fireside page on Facebook, “We all have to pivot, we all have find inspiration, and we all have to stand together.”

We wish you the best and please keep in touch, Diana. Thank you. Stay safe and healthy.

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The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Fem Word organization. Any content provided by our authors are of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.

Diana Hosford, TAPS | Washington, D.C.