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Hello and welcome to Dear grief Guide.
A podcast where each week I answer one anonymous letter
from a listener feeling lost, stuck, heartbroken,
or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.
My name is Shelby Fercitya.
I'm a grief coach and author,
and I'm here to help you create a life you love
from the life lost forced you to live.
Let's get to today's letter.
Dear grief guide, I'm reaching out to you
because I'm disappointed in the support system
I thought I had.
About eight months ago, I lost my beloved grandma,
and I turned my two closest friends for comfort.
Initially, they offered condolences
and seemed understanding of my pain.
However, as time has passed, their support has dwindled,
leaving me feeling abandoned and alone in my grief.
I live in a studio by myself with no family nearby,
making my friends' presence even more important to me.
Yet it seems like right at the six-month mark
they stopped caring about me at all.
I've received nothing but silence from them.
No texts, no calls, no gestures of support.
This weekend, as I tried my best to ride the waves
of overwhelming grief emotions,
which are still very present for me,
I couldn't shake the feelings of anger
and betrayal at their sudden absence.
Even though I still very much need it,
my support system is fading.
I decided to talk to my friends about their lack of support,
hoping for understanding and empathy.
While one friend acknowledged her oversight, expressed remorse,
and promised to check on me more often,
the others seemed to deflect responsibility entirely,
placing the burden on me to reach out if I needed anything.
I was left feeling invalidated and misunderstood.
Now I'm questioning the depth of our entire friendship.
I read some articles online about how to support someone
after a loss, just to reassure myself
that my expectations aren't crazy or unreasonable.
Everything I found emphasized the importance
of consistent check-ins and specific offers of support,
which my two friends can't seem to do.
In times of grief, they say you find out who your real friends are.
Perhaps there's some truth to that,
though it's a painful realization to confront.
I understand that people struggle to know what to say
when someone dies,
but I had hoped for more from those closest to me.
Griefguide, is there a better way to ask for what I need?
Or should I let go of my expectations
for how my support system was supposed to look
and try to get help elsewhere?
Sincerely, abandoned and alone.
Hi there, abandoned and alone.
I hear you.
I see you in this place of,
I thought this is how they would be there for me
and how long they would be there for me,
and they're simply not.
And that's disappointing.
And I don't want to wave this off as, as tried.
I think that a lot of people think that disappointment
is a small or a petty emotion.
Like, oh, I dropped my ice cream on the sidewalk,
that's disappointing.
But the author, Bernée Brown writes
that our disappointment is equal to the weight
of our expectation.
And if you expected your friends to support you
through the entire rest of your life,
which is very reasonable after the death of your grandmother
as your grief shifts and changes and looks differently.
Through those years, it's not intense, intense support
for unending periods of time.
And then for them not to do that is disappointing,
is disheartening is an expectation in your brain,
however reasonable or unreasonable that has gone unmed.
So yes, in response to your question,
I think you can do both in this situation
and see what happens.
That's the invitational offer you today
is to do both and see what happens.
So is there a better way to ask for what I need?
Perhaps I can give you some.
In life after laws academy,
I devote an entire section of the course
to negotiating relationships with people who are close to you
because once you've kind of figured out how you do grief,
how you express grief, how you want to be in partnership
with grief, then we take grief outside of yourself.
We start talking about how do you do grief in relationships.
And part of that is identifying what's hurting you
in a relationship and naming it and speaking it out loud
and then offering substitute behaviors.
So you can say something like,
it's hurt me that it seems like at the six month mark,
you just kind of dropped off the map.
I'm not mad necessarily, but I do want to understand.
And I've noticed that with friends, family members,
online grief support, it's been really helpful to me.
If you'd ask me more about my grandmother,
I love telling stories about her
and I feel like I don't get to talk about her much anymore
because she's not alive.
So you are saying this is the behavior of yours
that is hurt me or I feel hurt by this.
And then you're offering a substitute behavior
based on what you've learned feels supportive in your grief.
So you could say, I really hate when you compare
your losses to mine.
That's really hurtful to me and makes me feel like
my losses don't matter and will never matter.
In your eyes, instead, I wonder if you could just acknowledge
the fact that I'm in a lot of pain right now.
And then maybe we could do an activity together
like go for a walk or bit cookies or whatever it happens to be.
So offer it's kind of sandwiching it in,
this is what's hurtful and why.
This is a substitute behavior.
I hope we can repair because ultimately from the sound
of your letter, you want to stay friends with these people.
These are people who have supported you
and other seasons and other moments of your life.
And at least one of them is curious about or interested in
being better in checking on you.
The next thing I'll offer you in the due both,
the second half of due both, is to release expectations
of how you thought your support system was supposed to look
and to try and get help elsewhere.
So in another section of life after loss Academy,
I teach grieving people how to release the expectations
not just of the life they were supposed to live
but how things were supposed to go.
After their grief, including who was supposed to be there
for them and how and why and for how long,
because these expectations we have of our friends,
sometimes we don't even know that we have them until,
until they're not met, until it seems like people abandoned us
or they fail us or they hurt us
or they pepper us with cliches and we're like,
"Whoa, I didn't expect that.
I didn't see that one coming."
And then we must grieve how our reality is different
than our expectations.
So in some way, however it's impactful to you
and if you're not sure how to do this,
I would encourage you to come join us in life after loss Academy
and I'll walk you through it step by step
to create some sort of ritual for naming and releasing.
Here's my expectation and here's the reality
and they're different from each other
and that is worthy of grieving.
And I want to reiterate again that your disappointment is not,
it's not insignificant, it matters
that you thought these people would be different.
They would behave differently, they would support you differently
and it's also okay to be a person with needs.
Grief makes us inherently needy of others.
We need their comfort, we need their presence,
we need their validation, we need their support.
It is okay to have needs and to be leaning on people
for help and support.
And we don't talk about how our friendships change
in the aftermath of loss enough,
which is why I have spent so much time in energy
answering questions like yours here under your grief guide
but also building these tools for renegotiating friendships
after loss into the work that I teach.
I will say this in terms of finding support elsewhere
because it sounds like these two friends
have been your biggest scaffolds
since the loss of your grandmother.
They may be a little tired.
For as much as it is exhausting to be a grieving person,
it is also exhausting to support a grieving person.
And that I know less of in my life to tell you
that God's honest truth, I know a lot more
about what it is to grieve than what it is
to support someone who is grieving.
And I can imagine based on what my friends have told me,
based on what my partner has told me,
based on what my sister has told me,
how exhausting it is to maintain a connection with somebody
who is grieving.
And that's not to say it's all exhausting all the time,
but the intensity of their grief,
the unfixableness of their pain.
It's not going, taking a trip to the mall
and buying a pair of pants together
and they don't have your size and stock.
It's someone significant has died
and neither of you can fix it.
And now you're sitting in this place of, well, now what?
We are together in a place of great pain.
There's nothing to solve or fix or do,
but to simply be and to hold space for that energy
as a friend.
There is a tax to that.
I often call it a joke and call it the grief tax.
(laughs)
So maybe if that resonates with you,
you're free to bring that language
into your friendship with these two people.
But that being said,
that's a very roundabout way of me saying
that it's okay to look for support outside these two people.
I'll give you a whole bunch of options right here.
First and of course, shameless plug.
If you'd like to join life after a loss academy,
it's not just courses and lessons.
It is also an online community of people
who are grieving, people who listen to this podcast.
Just like you, people who are looking for support and validation
and a knowing that they're not crazy for grieving
and that they're not alone
and that it's okay for grief to continue
past that six month mark.
So many people who join the course
are months, if not multiple years, into their losses
and just now really learning what it means
to carry grief with them for the rest of their lives.
I'll also say this too because often
the best supporters of grievers
are grieving people themselves.
Are there grief groups in your area or online
that you'd be interested in attending,
even if you're just expressing your grief
to someone during a Zoom workshop
or during a virtual call
where you don't necessarily need to be in conversation
with somebody all the time
but can just participate in a way that honors your grief.
They have been massively helpful to me
and my grief is to find these spaces
where my grief is welcome
because the space is inherently designed to honor grief.
It is grief welcoming by its design.
And then the last thing I'll offer you,
especially for your friend who's willing to be coached,
is a service and I'm not sure where in the world you live
but a service called Help Texts.
And this is a text messaging company
that will text you twice a week with tips
for moving through your grief
as you grieve the death of your grandmother
and you can put in your relationship to her,
she was your grandmother, your grandchild,
what she died from, how long ago,
significant dates, birthdays, anniversaries,
all that jazz and twice a week,
it will send you text messages with ideas and tools
and practical suggestions for coping with
her loss.
And then on top of that,
you can add your two friends
to your text message subscription and once a week,
they'll get tips for supporting you.
This is one of my all time favorite tools for grief and loss
because it's so easy,
there's not, after you sign up,
there's nothing more you need to do.
To get these text messages and get the support to your phone,
you don't have to show up to a grief support group
and sit in a circle of folding chairs
with the box of tissues and tell your whole life story.
You don't have to take time out of your week
to travel to any sort of group
or even devote to studying something like an online course.
It is really a simple and easy and wonderful way
to get grief support in a way that is low touch
but high impact.
So if you're interested in help texts,
I do have a promo code for this one.
So I am an affiliate of their service.
I actually was employed by help texts
for more than a year and a half
and wrote many of the text messages that you'll receive.
So you'll be getting wisdom in my voice
if that's something you would like
and that your friends would be receptive to also.
And you can go to helptext.com/shellbeforsitia
to sign up and you will get a discount
on a full year of text messages from help texts.
I will say abandoned and alone.
I don't know that you are as abandoned and alone
as you think, even by this one friend who's like,
"Yeah, I'm willing to check in more often."
It's a shame and I've said this before on the podcast,
it's a shame that as grieving people,
we must be the teachers of our grief
that we must take time out of our lives and our days
and our morning processes to educate the people around us
or to ask more from them.
It's a shame that we aren't taught societally, inherently.
How to do that?
And that that needs to be done
for long after the first month or six months.
And also, I wonder if there's a way to reprioritize
your grief in your friendships with these people
simply to make that as a request.
I feel like I haven't gotten to talk about my grandmother
very much or I feel like it's been hard to stay in touch
or that you've been a little distant.
Maybe even asking, "Is everything okay in your world?"
I know my loss happened,
but what are you going through right now?
Oftentimes holding space for a friend's pain
can help you both make space for each other's pain
without it feeling icky or competitive or one-upy or gross.
I think there's a lot of ways to invite in
mending and repair here, abandoned and alone.
And I also think there's a lot of ways
to seek out support outside of these two friends
as you continue to grieve the death of your beloved Krama.
I am thinking of you.
I am thinking of those you are currently surrounded by
and those friends you've not met
that are waiting in the wings to surround you
whenever you are ready to seek us out
'cause we are out here.
And I am holding space for your heart
and hoping it will not feel so abandoned
and alone here in the very near future.
My heart is with you.
(soft music)
That's all for this episode of Dear Grave Guide.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
If you're feeling lost, stuck, heartbroken
or overwhelmed in the midst of your own grief,
check out my free workshop Grow Through Grave,
three ways to stop feeling stuck and start moving forward.
I'll give you three easy actionable tools
for navigating life after loss
and show you how you can create peace, stability
and compassion right there
in the middle of grief's confusion and uncertainty.
You can find the workshop link in the show notes.
If this podcast helped you feel a little less alone
in your grief, please subscribe
and leave a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify,
or wherever you're listening.
And be sure to share Dear Grave Guide with a friend
because you'll never know what someone you love
is going through.
You can submit your anonymous letter for the show
and find additional grief support at shellbeforsitia.com.
Music for Dear Grave Guide is performed by Eddie Goldstein,
editing by Ruth Spence of Celebio.
Until next time, I see you.
I am so proud of you and the work that you're doing
in the world and I love you.
Because even through grief, we are growing.
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