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, do you ever feel like an alien among people trying to get back to
normal after losing my dad is crazy.
He was a huge part of my life and navigating this new world without him feels like half
my brain was removed overnight.
I'm struggling to get moving while everyone else around me is trucking along like nothing
happened like he never even existed.
Moving around my friends makes me feel like I'm 15 years older than them.
I'm in my late 20s and no one in my age group has been through anything like this.
They're just now starting to lose their grandparents and have no idea what it's like to be in
my shoes.
They're making plans for holidays and birthdays while I'm still trying to plan a funeral.
They're ready for me to be normal and fun again, but I barely feel human.
I have no idea how to act anymore, in one of my group chats a friend freaked out because
she found her first gray hair referring to it as a quote unquote "crisis".
I just stared at my phone thinking how in hell do I even respond to that?
I'm just sad all the time and I don't have the energy to pretend.
My whole world has been shattered and I'm not the same.
It's like I'm an alien trying to integrate with humans.
I just keep thinking I don't fit in anymore.
Grief Guide, please help me.
How long does this feeling last?
Sincerely, no longer an earthling.
Hi there, alien, no longer an earthling.
I see you.
I feel you in this and I gotta tell you right up front, you're not wrong.
You don't fit in anymore.
And maybe this is counterintuitive and maybe what you want me to say is, of course you still
fit in.
Of course you're still among people.
Of course you're still among friends and humans and loved ones and all that jazz, no.
Grief makes you, makes each of us who grieves a sort of outsider, a sort of alien, a sort of
outcast looking through life that other people seem to be living through tinted or bubbly
glass.
It's like that world is no longer accessible to you anymore and that you've been cast out
of it.
I a thousand million percent resonate with that feeling.
I was in college when the biggest of my losses happened, what I affectionately refer to
as the first and the worst, my mother's death.
Two years before that, before she died when I was 19, my father was in and out of the
hospital for two brain aneurysms, one on either side of his head, each threatened to kill him.
And at 19, freshman, sophomore year in college, I was reckoning with what it would mean if
I got a phone call that my father died.
And I watched him reckon with his mortality and the fact that he might not make it through
this. And it was a very scary thing to have happen.
And yet to be going through the motions with all these other students going to classes,
going to parties, forming new friendships, all the things that you're supposed to quote
unquote normally do in college while it was like I was living this double grief life.
And then my mom got sick and then she died.
And that feeling of living a double life got bigger.
It was as if I was now living on an entirely different planet looking back at everyone
on earth that old life I used to live and thinking I have no idea how to access that.
I have no idea how to be a part of that.
I do not fit into that world anymore.
That world does not know me.
That world is not of me.
I am not of that world for lack of better phrasing.
I had friends who tried to be supportive but at 21 years old that looks a lot like, hey,
just distract yourself by coming to this party.
Hey, have a drink.
Hey, you know, ditch studying and come drive around with us.
It was a lot of distraction oriented coping, which is great if you make an F on a test.
A thing that's in consequential, a thing that in the grand scheme of things doesn't really
matter.
But what I was going through was something that mattered most of all and continues to matter
to this day.
This is my mother's death.
It has changed the entire trajectory of my life and the things that I could use to cope
with a bad grade on a test were not the same things I could use to cope with my mother's
death.
All people my age had to offer me.
Just like you, I had the people around me going through situations like breakups or getting
bad grades on tests or not knowing how to be around their family during the holidays
or having a conflict with a teacher or something like that.
They made them out to be crises.
All I could think in the same room as them is they were talking about their fears and
woes is you have no idea what a real crisis is.
What I am living through right now, I am inactive crisis and no one knows.
I remember this happening too later, years later, after my mother's death, I was serving
tables at an upscale restaurant in Chicago.
This woman chose to yell at me because of all the courses of her and her husband's meal.
There was one course where her dish came a few minutes before her husband's and she assumed
I wasn't paying attention.
She assumed it was the fault of the restaurant.
I imagined she was making a lot of assumptions and I also have no idea what she was going
through but she chose to yell at me and berate me in a crowded restaurant full of people.
It was as if that was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
I just stood there stone faced with a small smile of acknowledgement on my face and in the
back of my head all I could think was, "You can't scare me.
This isn't a crisis."
My mom died.
That's a crisis.
What you now have no longer an earthling is this perspective, this awful perspective on
what makes a crisis and what does not.
On what you are going through versus what others have yet to experience and there is a distance
in that.
I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that there is a way for your friends to understand
your grief and your pain.
There may not be.
The good news is, if there is good news to be had, is that there are communities of people
who get what you're going through.
The first thing I'll offer you, of course, is life after loss academy.
It is led by me, early 30s, had my loss in my early 20s, my first big loss, the first in
the worst, more losses to follow, unfortunately, sad but true.
There are other members of life after loss academy who are also in their 20s and 30s.
But the cool part too is that there are also people in life after loss academy in their 50s
and 60s who remember what it was like to experience loss in their 20s and 20s.
In 30s, what they needed, what they wish they had, what they wish someone had said to them.
And now with that wisdom, they apply that forward.
They pay it forward to the rest of us who are in this community together.
Another resource I'll offer you is the dinner party.
It is a grief support group explicitly, exclusively for people in their 20s and 30s.
To my knowledge, it is worldwide.
You can join a table at any time.
And it's sort of like a potluck grief support group where you enter someone's home or community
center or a local restaurant.
And there is this baseline level of understanding that even if everyone at the table is a stranger
when you get there, everyone has this baseline of having experienced some sort of devastating
loss and it is something I leaned on very heavily in the first few years after my mother's death.
The last resource I'll offer you in one of my favorites is modern loss.
And this is a blog, a community.
They put on series of workshops every now and then.
And it is written about what it's like to grieve in our modern age.
It was founded by two people who lost their parents in their early 20s and 30s.
The articles are written by people mostly millennials and younger who know what it's like to experience
loss and to grieve in this age where social media and smartphones and technology and AI
are are floating in the atmosphere of what it looks like to mourn someone we love who's
died.
They share advice, they share wisdom.
Sometimes it's funny, which can be a relief when you're grieving.
And they offer opportunities to make connections and form friendships with people who've experienced
similar losses.
And one of my favorite things you might like to take part of that modern loss does is gift
exchanges during the holidays, during mother's day and for you during father's day.
So you get paired with somebody else who is grieving and you can do a gift exchange with
them on a holiday that can be really shattering in the after wrath of loss.
And you feel like an alien in a world that used to feel like home.
One of the best things you can do for yourself is find others who have been alienated by grief.
And we are out here.
It doesn't mean ditching your friends, but it may mean taking a small step back or a big
step back or widening your venn diagram of connections to include maybe one or two circles
of people who are grieving just like you are, who know what it is to lose at that level,
to live life through this lens.
I don't think you're crazy for feeling like an alien and has a very normal, common experience
that grieving people have.
And to your last question, how long does this last I can't tell you.
I do know that the feeling of being an outsider, being an outcast standing outside that window
looking in and having no access to that life anymore, that's softened when another door
opened.
When I realized there was another community to join, another home with a warm fireplace
full of grieving people who understood what it meant, another planet that I was now a citizen
on.
I don't know that the feeling of being an alien by cause of grief ever really goes away,
but it does feel a lot better to be an alien when you're not the only one in the room.
No longer an earthling, I am sending you so much love and beaming you so much ease and
community in whatever form it takes in this season of your life.
Good luck.
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 never know what someone
you love is going through.
You can submit your anonymous letter for the show and find additional grief support at
shallbeforsitthia.com.
Music for Dear Grave Guide is performed by Eddie Goldstein, editing by Ruth Spence of
Sanivia.
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 for Dear Grave Guide is performed by Eddie Goldstein, editing by Eddie Goldstein.