Hi there, Grave Growers.
Really quickly before we jump into the show today,
I wanted to let you know that my third book called,
"Of course I'm here right now."
Three actually helpful things to say to someone grieving
is now available for pre-order.
It comes out in March of 2026,
and honestly, I had every intention of waiting longer
to make this announcement
because most authors start talking about their books
around the six month mark,
which would have been September for me,
but my publishing team let me know last night
that Barnes and Noble is running a special promotion
this week only to get 25% off the list price of the book.
So you can pre-order in advance
by going to Barnes and Noble's website
and finding the book and typing in the code pre-order25.
That's all one word pre-order25 to get 25% off
as many copies of my book as you would like
until July 11th at midnight.
And if you'd prefer to support your local bookstore,
you can certainly pre-order as well through bookshop.org,
which is offering free shipping
on all of its books right now
through July 11th at midnight, including mine.
Both of these incredible bookstore deals
are in direct competition with Amazon's infamous prime day.
So if you are boycotting Amazon,
divesting your money, pulling it away from billionaires,
and want to save money supporting a queer grief author,
yours truly, this is absolutely the best way to do it.
Thank you so much for supporting my work,
whether you purchase the book
and pre-order the book or not
or just support me by listening here,
I will say there is so much more to come
about this little teeny guide book
for what to say to support and comfort somebody
after a devastating loss,
and you will hear it all on the show.
You can find the link to pre-order your copy
from Barnes & Noble or bookshop in the show notes.
Now onto the show.
They shut you down or they say just let it go,
it makes it feel like you have a problem
or you are a problem for holding onto your grief
or for still carrying grief in the way that you do
and you are told to let go of the pain to move on,
to leave the past behind.
As if grief is magically somehow this thing you can drop
and walk away from, like it never mattered.
(gentle music)
- Hi there grief growers, I am so honored to be here
with you as always.
If you have been growing alongside me for a while,
welcome back.
If you're new to me and my work, hello.
My name is Shelby for Scythia, I am a grief coach,
two times soon to be three time author
and founder of Life After Loss Academy.
I have had the joy of helping thousands of grieving people
stop being lost, stuck, broken and alone inside their grief
and start building lives that they truly love
from the lives that loss forced them to live.
This includes not only death-related losses,
but also losses like divorce and breakup,
major diagnosis and basically any other loss
that changes your life.
Here on the show we believe that grief is not something
to get over, it is something that we grow with
and alongside for the rest of our lives
and that when we stop treating grief less like a problem
to be solved and more like an invitation to live more deeply,
we create meaningful lives that are rich with the memories
that we carry and the struggles that we faced
and the preciousness, the hard one preciousness
of we know what it's like to be right here, right now.
Today on the show I wanna get into one of the stickiest questions
that I get from grieving people after a devastating loss
and it's about this letting go business.
How do I let go of grief?
How do I let go of the pain of loss without letting go of love?
And I would love to introduce you to two lists
that help you release the pain that you carry.
Because this phrase, like just let it go, let go and let be,
let go and let go.
All of these things can feel really, really infuriating
when you're grieving.
It's like one of these grief phrases that is allegedly,
I say that with like heavy raised eyebrows
for those of you who are listening and not watching on YouTube,
it's allegedly well meaning,
but it's actually a deeply dismissive phrase
and ends up being really hurtful to the grievous who hear it
because if you think about this,
if you bring your pain or your suffering or your grief
to somebody if you lay it at their feet
and I talk about this in my new book, of course,
I'm here right now and they shut you down
or they say just let it go,
it makes it feel like you have a problem
or you are a problem for holding on to your grief
or for still carrying grief in the way that you do
and you are told to let go of the pain to move on
to leave the past behind.
As if grief is magically somehow this thing you can drop
and walk away from like it never mattered.
So I wanted to get into what it means
to really let go after a loss and answer the question,
is it even possible to let go without also letting go
of your memories and your identity
and potentially if you're grieving a death related loss,
the person who died.
To me, the truth is like a foundational truth is,
letting go is not about forgetting
and it's not about pretending that you're over it
because remember grief is not something to get over
and it is definitely not about leaving your loved one
again if you're grieving a death or your grief behind.
Letting go to me in the work that I teach
and that so many other grief experts teach as well
is about releasing the pain that you carry bit by bit
over time.
It is about loosening your grip on the weight
of what can no longer be true, what loss took away from you
and letting go is about making space for where you're going
without erasing where you came from.
It's about letting all of the everything come with you
while also grieving the things that loss stole.
So if you are asking this question of how do I let go
or how do I release the pain of life after loss,
this is where two of my favorite lists come in
and I'll introduce them to you in a second.
But first I want to talk about letting go versus releasing
and why the distinction between that language matters
in grief because you might already have like your hackles up,
you might be resistant to the phrase let it go
and I gotta tell you, you have a very good reason
to feel that way.
First off, it's vague, it's like this fog let go.
How?
Where's the instruction manual for this?
Who has a structure or a format or a manual
for how to let go?
Another thing I don't like about let go is it sounds final.
Just let it go, just leave it back there.
And it is often said by people who don't understand
what it means to live life alongside grief.
It is often said by people who think it's possible
to leave grief in the past like a toy
that you've outgrown or a pair of pants
that no longer fit.
And we have so much more of an emotional physical,
spiritual, mental connection to the things we are trying
to quote let go of than a pair of pants that no longer fit.
So if you are feeling a pressure to leave grief back there,
you might consider shifting the order, the misses,
to let it go into reframe, an invitation
to release what you can.
And I want to read you an excerpt from my guide book,
Your Greer Greer Way, which is my second book.
I'm talking about my books a lot in the show today.
It didn't really mean to do that, but here we are.
In the March 2nd entry, this is on page 35
if you have the English version of the book.
It's also in Portuguese.
It says, "Well-meaning friends and family
will tell you to just let it go, but how can you?
It seems impossible to just let go of the pain,
the heartache, or the memories of your loved one."
So instead of using let it go, try using release.
Release comes from the Latin word relax-ra, which
means to loosen, to free from confinement and obligation.
And that can feel much clearer than just let it go.
Ask yourself what you would like to loosen and free
from confinement and obligation.
Maybe you want to release the thoughts of your loved one's
final moments.
Perhaps you want to release the obligation
to chair your neighborhood's block party this year.
When you feel like you're holding on too tight,
finish this sentence.
Right now, I would like to release blank insert thing
to be released here.
And again, this is from the March 2nd entry of your grief
your way.
And this is kind of a fun fact that's not related to anything.
But this was my editor's favorite passage in the book.
She's a word nerd like me.
And so she was really excited to learn kind
of the Latin etymological origins of the word release
and how release can be a better reframe than let it go
in life after loss.
And this type of releasing, this flavor of releasing
is exactly what we do inside life after loss academy.
For me and the students that I teach,
letting go after a loss is not about a racing grief,
like scrubbing it from your file of your life.
It is about choosing, again and again,
what you feel ready enough to loosen your grip on
or something that losses clearly taken away from you
and then building some sort of ritual or memorial around that.
It does not look like releasing all of grief.
And certainly not all at once.
It is one thing at a time and generally one thing
that you choose for yourself.
So now's the part where I want to introduce you
to the two lists that I use to help graving people inside life
after loss academy.
So this is kind of continuing our sneak peak
that we're doing throughout the summer of the releasing
lists that I share with students inside the private course
and community.
OK, the first list is called the identity list.
And this is all about letting go of the person that you used
to be because regardless of the type of loss
that you face, death, divorce, diagnosis, the 3Ds,
or something else, grief goes way beyond mourning the person
or the thing that you lost.
It also includes grieving identities and roles
in parts of yourself.
These are often roles that loss stole or took away
or invalidated.
So for instance, you might grieve your role as a caregiver
after the person you were caring for dies.
You might also grieve your status as a healthy or an able
body person after a life-changing diagnosis.
There are other lesser acknowledged roles or identities,
things that are emotional or logistical or spiritual
or functional.
So for example, you might grieve being perceived
as the strong one in your family or the planner or the mom
in your friend group or the productive employee at your job.
And even more abstract identities
that I've seen tons and tons of grieving people mourn,
as I've worked with them in more than eight years as a grief
coach, is things like safe, innocent, protected,
and known by somebody else.
These are identities that we can hold very deeply
at our core, creative.
That's an identity that I've seen so, so many grieving people,
grief.
I'll tell you one of the weird identities
that I grieved after my mom's death in 2013
was mourning person.
The exhaustion of grief made me want to sleep all the time.
And that included to my surprise and distress sleeping in.
And while this might not feel like a big deal to a lot of people,
it really, really messed with my sense of identity.
Because after all, I had gotten up with the sun,
whether I liked it or not, for 21 straight years of my life.
And I would look in the mirror and think,
who is this stranger that can sleep until noon?
I did not recognize her.
Yet here she was taking up space in my body.
And that totally freaked me out.
Another one for you, when my best friend Tammy
died in 2022, I grieved my identity as someone training
for the Chicago Marathon.
She and I were training together.
She was doing Detroit.
I was going to do Chicago.
And I was diagnosed with a chronic illness,
so kind of a double whammy, her death, chronic illness,
at the same time that she died.
And it was strongly recommended that I discontinue
any intensive exercise immediately.
So the last long run that I took--
it was like a 10 mile or 16 mile or--
was one that I took with Tammy.
Both of those things for me have died.
And I have not run another long run since.
So like many gravers, I wonder if this is resonating
with you wherever you are in your grief, wherever you are
in the world.
I was not only graving my person who died or the thing
that I lost.
I was also grieving the person I used to be.
And all of these things were happening all together
at the same time.
So the identity list, this first one that I'm offering to you,
helps you name who you no longer are.
So you can begin to release the pressure
to keep performing those roles, to try and fit yourself back
into the box of who you used to be.
It also helps you wrap language around some part of you
that may be missing, but maybe you haven't put words to yet,
and putting words to how you, as an individual,
have changed because of your loss,
is such a powerful exercise.
So if you're in a place where you can write things down,
I invite you to try this.
If you're driving or walking somewhere
you need to be aware of your surroundings,
you can save this and come back later.
But try this.
Write down all of the roles or titles or ways of being
that are no longer available to you because of your loss.
These are just a few examples to get you started.
You might write down spouse or partner of a living person.
You might write down parent of a living child.
You might write down married person, caregiver,
the productive employee, the social butterfly,
the quick thinker, morning person, marathon runner,
safe, innocent, protected, creative, known.
What are identities in yourself,
roles that you play, ways of being,
that you moved around in the world with,
that are no longer true, that are rendered false
because of loss.
And once you've got this list, it might be quite long,
so I encourage you to maybe set a timer,
and so there's a bit of a limit on how long you can ponder on this.
Once you've made this list, ask yourself,
how might I ritualize and release one of these identities
or say goodbye to this version of me
in a way that feels meaningful?
So for instance, I might grieve my identity
as a marathon runner by leaving like a special rock
or a little totem or a flower at one of my
and Tammy's favorite running destinations.
I might box up and say goodbye to, out loud or in my head,
to my running gear, donating to somebody
who can really use it.
I might light a candle and write a letter to my body,
reliving our mind and my bodies,
running memories together and sending it care
and then good health as it is right now.
These are three different ways to grieve and release
and ritualize one single identity that I'm mourning,
and you can do this for all of the identities on your list.
This will take some time.
This is not something that will happen overnight,
but it's something where you can fit the ritual or routine
for how you specifically would like to release this.
I'm not gonna tell you what your routine should be
'cause I don't think I'm the person to do that.
I think you know your loss, you know your grief,
you know what would feel good to your soul.
You decide how you would like to release your identity
and there are honestly countless ways to do it
and tons and tons of ideas, both in real life,
in the media, online.
You can find so many different rituals for saying goodbye
to something that is no longer possible or no longer true
because of loss.
And I will say if your identity list,
the thing you have made is overwhelming to you,
that's okay, it is like very normal to see,
to witness the enormity of what can no longer be about you,
the place where you live and get overwhelmed.
So if you find yourself in that headspace,
please just take a break and put this list away
for a while, just making the list in the first place
is a really powerful first step and you can decide
which identity would like to release first
and the ritual that you would like to pair with that later.
It does not all have to be done today.
And of course, I will always issue you this invitation as well.
If you want help inventing releasing rituals,
if you're like, "I'm not very creative
"or I want some more ideas from other grievers
"or I want a brainstorm with you, Shelby,
"especially about abstract things,
"like how do I release and grieve safety,
"how do I release and grieve being a morning person?"
For instance, you can always join us anytime
in life after a loss academy.
This is something we do in Module 2 of the course.
And I devote a thing about four or five lessons
to releasing based on these two lists.
And speaking of two lists, let's get to the second one.
This one is called the Hope's Dreams and Expectations list,
where you let go of what can no longer be.
Because when it comes to grieving after a loss,
we know to mourn the person or thing that is missing.
The person who died at the relationship we lost,
our former body.
We also know we can mourn the irreversible event
that happened, I'm thinking natural disasters,
terrorist attacks, wars, things of that nature.
But we are really given space and permission
and validation and especially instruction.
How do I do this?
When it comes to grieving, the future we can no longer have.
These are the Hope's Dreams and Expectations
you thought would happen, you expected to happen,
you wanted to happen, but that are now impossible
because of loss.
For many of my clients and students,
this includes vacations that will never be taken,
retirement that will never be shared, children that
or grandchildren that will never be raised,
and milestones that will never, ever be celebrated
together at least here on Earth.
These invisible losses of future hopes and plans
are just as real and just as devastating as the loss itself.
I'm gonna say that one more time
because I really want you to hear it.
These invisible losses of future hopes and plans,
even if they never materialized, are just as real
and just as devastating as the main loss itself
and naming them can feel to put it mildly
like a big huge bummer.
The bummer icing on the bummer cake, so to speak.
Long time followers of my work will know
that one of the biggest hopes and dreams
that I grieved after my mom's death
is the hope of reconciliation.
She and I were in the middle of a fight about my sexuality
when she died, my identity clashed with her religious beliefs,
and we never came to an understanding
while she was still here on Earth.
Another vivid example I have of grieving a future expectation
is when the person I was engaged to for a time
suddenly ended our relationship and overnight,
I went from engaged to single
and my plans for moving to be together with them,
crashed and burned.
I had to scramble to find a job and talk my landlord
to let him resign my lease when I had agreed to move out months earlier.
I was mourning not only the relationship that was supposed to be,
but the future life and the plans and everything we were supposed to do
and be for each other together.
And I had to do the work of grieving that alone.
So, so many grieving people are carrying around emotions
like disappointment and heartache and hopelessness,
really honestly very heavy things.
And it can be comforting in a weird way
to recognize that oftentimes these emotions,
disappointment, heartache, hopelessness,
are tied to unnamed dreams and expectations
that loss took away.
So the hopes, dreams and expectations list
is where you can name what can no longer happen
so that you can start beginning to slowly find meaning
in what still can happen,
what is now possible for you in your life after loss.
So try this, here's your invitation to actually do this exercise.
Again, if you're driving or walking and need to be aware of where you are,
save this podcast, come back to it later.
But if you're in a place where you can write this down,
write down the dreams you had for the future,
bigger, small, that are no longer possible,
these things may include growing old together,
watching your child graduate,
becoming a grandparent, adopting a pet together,
retiring or traveling, reconciling with someone who's now gone,
which is one that I carry, seeing someone heal.
This could be emotionally or from an addiction or something similar.
You could also be grieving the expectation
that you would never experience this kind of loss
or the world would never look like this
or that life would not turn out this way.
That is a grief of a hope, a dream or an expectation
that is more than valid to grieve.
And after you've got this list together,
again, it might help to set a timer for like five to 10 minutes or so.
Ask yourself, how might I ritualize and release
these hopes, dreams and expectations
in a way that feels meaningful to me?
One of my very favorite examples of this,
especially releasing after a breakup of a relationship,
is when I learned from my best friend Tammy,
when we were in college together,
one of our mutual friends got dumped by a guy
we all thought was mean to her, so none of us liked him.
We were like, we were kind of like, thank God,
but she was still devastated.
A big group of women from the volunteer organization
we went to our local thrift store near our college campus
and bought a bunch of cheap ceramic plates.
They were like a dollar plate.
And they used Sharpie markers to write her relationships
worst qualities on the plates, like no communication
or always came home later cheated on you
or whatever the case may be.
And then this huge horde of women, this group of women,
drove to a nearby mountain and tossed these plates off the side
of the mountain, of course, in a way
where they would not land on anyone.
While I cannot speak to the environmental friendliness
of this ritual, I actually know nothing
about what happens to ceramic in nature,
I can tell you that everyone came back feeling
like they had released something
that some sort of burden, emotional, mental,
spiritual, psychic, physical had been lifted.
Other examples of releasing rituals for a future
that can no longer be this kind of vague abstract thing,
but something that's important and heavy
and significant all the same, could include things
like writing on wish paper and safely setting it on fire
or dissolving it in water, releasing butterflies
or lanterns, planting seeds and watching them grow,
writing a song or making a piece of art
or relocating physical objects such as an ex's dusty couch
or wedding dress that you will never wear
for whatever reason, somewhere new or different.
One life after a loss academy student,
I will never forget, made her a list of future hopes
and expectations that can no longer be
and memorialized each one with a leaf
that she released down the river behind her house.
She was grieving her daughter
and as she watched the leaves float away,
she kind of had a little blessing
or a little meditation over each one
as she watched them float away and out of her view.
So again, as you can see, there are truly limitless ways
to ritualize and release plans and dreams
that loss rendered impossible.
And again, I will say, if your hopes and expectations list
is overwhelming to you and your nervous system,
it is okay.
Recognizing and absorbing the full picture of
what you have lost, what can no longer be,
can be incredibly painful.
So pause and set down your list for a bit,
validate even if just to yourself
that making the list in the first place
is a powerful step in the direction that you want to go.
And you can decide on your unique releasing rituals
or even what you'd like to release first at another time.
And of course, if you want help naming what you're releasing
or creating rituals to let go, join us.
Insight life after loss academy.
Every single week we meet together
and talk about what we're struggling with
or what we're working through at the moment.
And if grieving these more abstract things
or these identities or these hopes and expectations
is coming up for you, I would love to help guide you through it
even more deeply than just the list making
that we're doing right here right now.
Before we go, I want to tell you why these two lists matter
because I want you to notice, if you didn't already,
that neither of the lists made any mention
of letting go of love.
And this is a huge fear that grieving people have
is that if I let go, then I am losing everything.
There's kind of this extremeist thinking,
which is very fair after a loss
because if my person died a very extreme event,
then any sort of healing or action
I take in the aftermath of that will probably feel
or be extreme as well.
If I let go, then I let go everything.
That's not true.
Each list, the identity list
and the hopes, dreams and expectations list
asks you to name, invites you to name, specifically,
what it is you are releasing.
And I want to be very crystal clear here.
I might even repeat this again.
If there is love in the relationship, object, season
or transition you are grieving, you get to keep it.
If there is love in the relationship, object, season
or transition you are grieving,
who I'm tearing up here, you get to keep it.
This is the gift of shifting from thinking
that you have to let go,
to recognizing that you have the power to release.
And this just gets me right in the heart every time
because my mission as a grief coach
is not to pull your grief out of you
and to tie it to a post somewhere back there
so that you can walk on free and unburdened
into a painless future.
That is not an authentic way to live and be human.
And it totally negates everything that you have been through
that has gotten you to this point in your life.
My goal in inviting you to make these two lists,
the identity list and the hopes, dreams and expectations list,
is to help you identify exactly what you've lost
so that you know what you need to grieve and release.
But also so that you know what still gets to come with you
as you move forward.
You may be releasing a hell of a lot,
but you are not releasing everything.
There is so much from your life before
that still gets to come with you.
And this is the life changing shit
that we talk about in life after loss Academy
and so much of the rest of the work that I do
because I do not want to take a cosmic eraser to your life.
That is brutal and that forces you to
tear more from yourself than necessary
when loss has already taken so much.
When you write down the things that you've lost,
visible or invisible, you start to process them,
you start to soften around them
and sort of shake them loose from your heavy arms
that are doing so much work here in grief already.
You start to let go of identities and futures
that have very honestly died.
They are no longer possible for you.
In your own metaphorical way,
you are saying goodbye to them and burying them.
While also continuing to carry as much as much as much
of the love and memories and care as you want
and those things, do your grief growers, are not heavy.
These lists don't erase the pain.
They just give your pain clarity
and they give your pain somewhere to go.
And that is how releasing or heavy air quotes
letting go of grief works.
This is not, once again, this is not a one and done exercise.
It is not a switch you flip and suddenly
you have released ta-da, you're done.
This is a lifelong practice of checking in with yourself
and asking, "What am I still carrying that loss made untrue?
What would like to be loosened or set down
or freed from confinement?
What am I holding on to that actually wants to rest?"
I want to remind you again that you have the power to name it
and decide how you would uniquely
like to ritualize and release it.
When you do this, you practice, you write and you rewrite.
I've had grief growers in life after a loss academy
pinned their list up somewhere throughout the week
over the course of a month and just keep adding to it
because you're not going to recognize or know
all the identities or all the futures
that you're grieving all at once.
Even I, 11 years out from my loss,
cannot list in their entirety either one of those lists.
(laughs)
I need to sit with it for a while.
I need to let things float up to my consciousness and appears.
When you do this, you experiment with different rituals
to see what feels best to you.
Some people like to create things like art or music
or practices for themselves.
Some people like to destroy things
like burning paper throwing plates off a mountain.
You sleep on it.
You ask for help if you believe this to be true for you
from ancestors and guides and mentors.
Anybody else in your life you look up to about grief and loss.
You've released one way in one season
in a totally different way in another season.
I'll tell you, I'm releasing big time differently
than I did three years out from my mom's loss.
Now that I'm going on 12, it looks very, very different.
The work of releasing is done again and again.
Whenever your heart tells you it's time to look at this again.
In my FF2Loss Academy, we do not avoid the work of releasing
or letting go.
We embrace it.
We're looking right at it.
Gently and also with ongoing support.
And inside Module 2, which is called explicitly release
in the grief model, first week round,
which we talked about last week, then we release.
I walk you step by step through how to complete both
of these lists with care and clarity and community surrounding
you.
You will learn how to ritualize the act of release,
how to express your grief safely.
I'll give you a ton of different ideas as like jumping off
points.
And you will also learn how to gently soften
into a future that includes your losses,
but is no longer defined by what and which versions
of yourself they took from you.
So if you are ready to feel a little bit lighter,
a little bit more grounded, and a lot more empowered
as you release grief's heaviest and hardest emotions,
this is your invitation to join us.
You can become a member of Life After Lost Academy
whenever it resonates with you.
And if you're listening to this before August 31st, 2025,
you can use Code Grief Grower to get your first month free.
I am so glad to have been with you today
in this space talking about the sacred and heavy and hard
and heartwork of releasing in Life After Lost.
It is not letting go.
It is relax, sorry, loosening your grip on,
freeing from obligation.
And what I want you to take away from this more than anything
else is that you, even though loss took a lot away from you,
have the power and control to say what you are grieving,
when you are grieving it, when it comes to making both of these
lists you had no control over what loss took from you,
but how you'd like to grieve it, how you'd like to release it.
The ritual that speaks most to your heart,
these are things you do have power and autonomy
and control and blessing over in Life After Lost.
And that is not nothing.
(gentle music)
That's all for this episode of Grief Grower.
Thank you so very much for joining me today.
If you'd like to get support from me
for your unique loss experience, join us in Life After Lost Academy,
my online course in community.
As a student, I'll walk you through my five-step grief,
framework for rebuilding after loss,
and you can get live coaching from me every single week
to answer your questions.
Replays are always available if you can to 10 live.
It's just $33 a month to join,
$22 a month if you are marginalized
or financially stressed griver,
and you can cancel at any time.
Now through August 31st, you can try one month
of Life After Lost Academy, absolutely free,
with the code, Grief Grower.
You can find a link to do that in the show notes.
If this podcast felt validating, comforting,
educational, or otherwise helpful to you,
please subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts
or Spotify.
And be sure to share Grief Grower with a friend
because you never know what someone you love
is going through.
Grief Grower's hosted by yours truly.
She'll be for Cynthia with Music by Annie Goldstein.
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.
[Music]