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 should start by saying that this might be a sensitive topic for various
reasons because it involves children and parenting.
But it's part of my grief experience after my mom's death and I really want to know
what you think.
I never felt the desire to have kids, not even a little.
It's just not for me.
I believe it's the way I'm wired.
It took me many years to go public with this because it's still not very socially acceptable
in my country.
Despite this, I've started telling people that I want to remain child free for the rest
of my life.
But societal pressure is a side.
One thing that has really been bugging me lately.
Even though I told my mom a few months before she died that I didn't want to ever have
kids and she respected that and I am so grateful I told her, I sometimes feel this enormous
grief.
I can only describe it as the grief of not passing on the bits of my mom that live on
in me and thereby allowing the last physical pieces of her existence to disappear.
I've read the book Motherless Daughters in which the author and the women she interviews
describe how they could almost see their mother's presence in their own children and how
their grief came full circle after they became parents themselves.
Reading this made me feel envious and sad because I will not have that experience for myself.
I know I'm privileged to make the decision to not have kids where others are child free
due to infertility, timing or other struggles.
But I can't be the only one grieving not seeing my mom and my children even if I don't want
them.
I feel like I'm grieving a dream I never even wanted.
Could you offer some insights on this weird grief emotion?
Thanks.
Not undecided, but still sad.
Hello there, not undecided.
I see you.
This is a weird grief.
I think you chose the correct word for that in that this is one of the stranger letters
or questions that I have ever received about grief and loss.
I to this day I have not received anything else like this.
That does not mean it's bad or wrong or abnormal because I don't know that there's anything
in grief that's truly abnormal.
But this is an aspect, a component of grief that I suppose I've never thought of before.
So thank you for bringing this specific kind of grief here to Dear grief guide and for
trusting me with this in the inbox.
I want to start answering your question with a quote that has guided a lot of my grief
experience.
I believe it's from Donald Rumsfeld.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong though.
But it goes something like this.
There are known knowns.
These are things that we know.
There are known unknowns that is to say there are things that we don't know but we do know
that we don't know them.
But there are also unknown unknowns.
And these are things that we don't know that we don't know.
And this is a bit of like for lack of better phrasing a mind fuck to wrap your head around.
But basically with any situation there are things that you know.
These are facts.
These are information.
And then you also know that there's facts and information that you don't have yet that
they're going to appear at some point.
These are the known unknowns.
But then there's also a third category.
There are unknown unknowns.
There are things.
There's information.
There's knowledge.
There's experiences that you cannot anticipate because you don't know that you should be
anticipating them.
And I think this experience of specific grief that you're having is one of these that
falls into the third category of unknown unknowns.
I am grieving a dream.
I never even wanted.
I didn't know that I was ever going to have to anticipate and then grieve and release
this sort of emotion.
I didn't see that one coming.
And I'm laughing.
But there's can be these experience and grief where you find yourself mourning something
that you never even knew you were ever going to be attached to.
I'll give you an example.
My mother was not really to my memory a big holiday celebrator other than Christmas.
That was her favorite.
But like Easter, Mother's Day, a lot of holidays where people take their mothers out on holidays,
not really super celebrated in my family.
We would like go to church and then we'd go to lunch and go home.
But we did that every weekend.
So it wasn't really special.
And then when my mom died, I moved to Chicago and I became a server at a restaurant up here.
And Mother's Day, a Mother's Day buffet was just like this grand all out celebration and
seeing women in their 20s with moms in their 50s, 60s people around my mother's age.
I was struck just like bold over with the weight of grief that I felt.
And I sat back and I'm like, wait a minute, I've never wanted to take my mom to a fancy
Mother's Day lunch.
That's not who we are.
I don't know how I was raised.
That's not anything she really ever expressed that she wanted.
And yet here I was feeling this supreme jealousy and anger and deep sadness and kind of this
feeling of being other or left out in a room full of people that all belonged to each other.
At a time in my life, when I never expected that, I did not know to anticipate or to plan
for that kind of grief.
I knew Mother's Day would be hard just in general as a blanket statement.
Mother's Day is going to be hard for the rest of your life.
That's a known known.
I knew that Mother's Day would be hard in different ways as I grew up and grew older.
Those are known unknowns because I couldn't predict how it would be hard.
I would just know that it would be hard but something was coming.
But the unknown unknown is that I felt a deep grief experience about not getting to take
my mom to lunch at the place where I worked.
For all these other beautifully dressed people were having mimosas with their mothers and
daughters.
I did not know that I would grieve missing out on an experience that I'd never even had
or dreamt of having.
And this is exactly what I'm hearing from you.
Just through a different lens, through this very powerful and profound lens of ancestry
and DNA and the passage of self and loved ones onto another person.
I think you have so much clarity here in that you know you're like kids aren't for me.
This grief isn't going to change my mind.
So it's not that you're being influenced by this grief which I commend you on because
having a child just so you can see your parents' eyes or your parents' nose or your parents'
mannerisms in them is not a good enough reason to have children in my humble opinion.
There are many other reasons to have children.
And you can also hold so much space for yourself and make so much room for yourself and your
grief for having this experience of mourning that that will never be your reality.
It's not going to be your reality because you never desired it.
And it's not going to be your reality because you don't want it now.
This grief has not changed your mind.
And you know logically and you mention as well that you exist in a world where this gets
to happen for other people.
Other people get to take their moms to lunch.
Other people get to have children that remind them of their mothers and they have this kind
of three generations connection and maybe even more to women and their family based on their
choice, their decision to make children, to have children.
And that is something you will grieve being a bystander of for the rest of your life.
So I think in terms of any advice I can offer you, not undecided but still sad is to allow
that grief to surface and allow it to be irrational and allow it to not make sense and allow
it to be something you didn't plan for and allow it to not be rooted in something that
feels logical or oriented for you.
I think that's really valid.
I think this is one of those unknown unknowns in grief.
We're like, well, didn't plan to grieve for that, but I guess now I am.
And as much as you can invite humor into that or levity or lightness of well, that wasn't
on my bingo card, but here we are.
I think that will be helpful to you moving forward.
And on a practical level, I wonder if something like, and I teach this in my online course
Life After Laws Academy, but if crafting an escape plan for moments when you're in these
rooms with these other people and their children and they're talking about how precious it is
and how wonderful it is for their kids to remind them of their parents or to have all three
generations in a room together.
These things that you didn't get to experience and you more not experiencing even though you
never wanted them.
I would encourage you to craft some sort of escape plan for when those emotions feel
like too much.
How do you get out of there?
How do you make a graceful exit?
How do you say I need to protect myself in this moment so I'm going to leave and then
I'll follow up with you later or we'll hang out next week or whatever else is going to
happen because it is okay that your emotions around this are strong.
Again, even if it's something you never wanted and don't want now, even if it's something
your mom was totally okay with.
It's not like you're disappointing her letting her down in some way.
This is a really valid grief experience.
You are allowed to continue to have large emotions about it.
Even if there are all these ways you can logic or rationalize yourself out of it.
I hope this is helpful.
I know in the book, Motherless Daughters, Hope Edelman, who I interviewed for another podcast
that I did called Coming Back, she's written two, several, more than two wonderful books
called Her Famous Ones, Her Motherless Daughters and another one I love is called The After
Grief.
But you might actually pick up her second book, The After Grief.
It's about what she refers to as the long arc of loss.
As it goes beyond the first year or two of life after loss and goes into loss for a lifetime,
coping with grief for a lifetime, which is very much also what we talk about in life after
loss academy.
But this sense that your grief comes with you and there will be new things to grieve, whether
you anticipate them like birthdays and anniversaries and milestones, whether you know
they're coming, but you didn't know necessarily what form they would take, such as what's
going to happen on a wedding day or when you graduate or buy house or get this new job.
And then also grieving and coping with the things that you didn't anticipate coming that are
coming anyway.
She has a really lovely structure in her book The After Grief for that.
So if you have access to a bookstore or a library near you, that's one of my all time favorite
books for the years beyond the first few of grief for the five years and the decades
after devastating loss.
She has a lot more stories, a lot more research and it's really just a lovely book to pick
up.
So yes, those two things for you, those three things for you allow this unknown, unknown
to be okay with you as much as possible, allow this kind of grief, even though it's grief
over something you never wanted to bring its bags full of emotions to your feet, be
willing to unpack them with grief and honor them and validate them and say this is real.
Even though it doesn't feel rational or even though it doesn't feel warranted or even
though it doesn't feel like it should be that big of a deal.
If it's a big deal for you grief, we can allow it to be a big deal for both of us.
Craft an escape plan for these moments when it does get overwhelming because I sense
if you are around a lot of people with children that this will come up as you grow with them,
as you grow up with them and their children and also pick up a copy of the after grief.
Hope Edelman's book.
I hope it will be a nourishing and grounding and validating companion for you on this journey.
There is so much wisdom in her book, Motherless Daughters.
There is even more in the after grief.
I am wishing you so much love and so much luck in knowing that there will be more unknown
unknowns.
And I'm hoping you can use this call as sort of a grounding or a foundation for reckoning
with all of those unexpected grief waves as they arise in the future.
That's all for this episode of Dear Grave Guide.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
If you're ready to start moving forward after a loss, consider joining my online course
in community, Life After a Loss Academy.
There, you'll find video lessons you can work through at your own pace, weekly live calls
where I take your questions, and a welcoming community to talk about grief with others who
understand.
You can find the link to learn more and join today in the show notes.
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And be sure to share Dear Grave Guide with a friend, because you never know what someone
you love is going through.
You can submit your anonymous letter for the show and find additional grief support at
shelbyforcithia.com.
Music for Dear Grave Guide is performed by Eddie Goldstein, editing by Ruth Spence of
Sinivia.
Until next time, I see you.
I'm 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 for Dear Grave Guide is performed by Eddie Goldstein, editing by Eddie Goldstein.
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