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, it's been a year since my dad who adopted me passed away from a sudden
heart attack.
He was my rock, the first person in my life who offered me stability and unconditional
love.
I grieve for him every day, not on a large emotional scale but a small one, like a constant
low buzz in my head reminding me that he's gone.
My dad always wanted the best for me, encouraging me to be better, to chase joy and to succeed
at my passions and I did really well while he was alive.
But now without him here, it's like the stakes are higher.
I can't help but feel like I'm falling short.
I feel like I have to make him proud to honor his life by being the very best version
of myself.
The tricky part is this.
Once his death I've experienced several scary medical events that I've cooked with using
drugs and alcohol.
A year later, I'm now clean and sober, but I feel a lot of shame for even turning to those
things when I know that's not what he'd want for me.
The whole time I was using, I could hear his voice in my head, gently reminding me that
there are better ways to be, better ways to deal with life's hardships.
I know he'd want me to be happy, to live my life to the fullest but sometimes even
now it feels like I'm failing him.
Every small setback feels like a disappointment, like I'm letting him down.
He was such a great man.
I want to be a great man like him too.
How do I navigate this overwhelming pressure to live up to the magnitude of his love for me?
How can I find peace in knowing that I'm enough, even if I haven't been perfect?
Thank you for listening.
And seriously, struggling to measure up.
Hi there, struggling.
Thank you so much for writing in today with this because it has many layers, many questions
attached to it.
It's not just what do I do after his death.
It's how do I carry on his memory?
It's how do I continue to be a person that he would be proud of?
It's how do I know that I'm good?
How do I know that I'm enough?
How do I know that these things are still true without him here to validate me?
And if I think he would be disappointed in me, how do I find some sort of forgiveness or
some sort of reconciliation with that?
Because he hasn't been here to get me through this and I'm not sure he would have been proud
of how I handled it.
There's so much here and at the core of it all, and I want this to be your focus, is the
relationship with and the love you had for your dad.
What you two had together as a father and a son is unique and special and only you can
know.
The depth and the nuance and the intimacy and the beauty and the mutual regard, I think
in healthy male relationships especially, there is a freedom from competitiveness or a need
to meet a standard or beat each other at something.
There is a mutual regard of staring at each other saying, "You are a good man."
And being reflected back, you are also a good man.
That's the sense I get from how you describe your father, not that he has high expectations
of you, not that you need to succeed or make a crap load of money or achieve at the highest
level, but to be the most whole and actualized and fulfilled version of yourself, whatever
that looks like.
And it sounds like life after his death has been really hard.
And I really, really want to honor that, that mutual regard in his death has gone missing,
has gone missing.
I want to acknowledge that at least in my world view, and I know that there are other people
who share this world view, that people don't turn to things like drugs and alcohol for
fun.
And not at an extreme level or an addictive level.
It is to try to cope in the best way you possibly can with the tools you have available to you
or don't have available to you with a great deal of pain, and uncertainty, and fear, and
just overwhelm, just overwhelm.
When seeking drugs and alcohol oftentimes, I think as humans, we are seeking relief or
escape or just a temporary pause in the fire hose of pain and emotions and overwhelm
that is pointed directly at our chests, I get the sense that this might be true for you.
In your story, you had a series of very scary medical events, things that perhaps were
life altering, if not potentially life ending, that your father could not be there for because
of his recent death.
And so it makes sense to me that you coped using drugs and alcohol in your words.
You are now clean and sober.
In in under a year, you are now clean and sober, yet the dominant emotion that you feel
is shame because on some level you know that it would have made your dad sad.
It would make his heart heart to know that this is what you chose during a very difficult
season of your life.
I wonder though too, if in your father's heart there was also room for mercy.
If he is that source of unconditional love that you mention, if there would still be room
in space in his heart, in his story, in his world for you, even though that was your coping
mechanism for something that was a really hard experience.
I wonder if in some way he would be proud of you for that, for not making the decision
to use drugs and alcohol, but for finding and fighting for as so many people often say
sobriety, achieving that clean and sober status after a really, really double triple whammy
hard season of your life.
You might write a letter to him.
I'm not sure how you communicate with him right now if at all, but to ask for his forgiveness
or his understanding of what you've been through, just really bearing your soul and saying,
I know this isn't what you would have wanted for me.
It's still what I chose.
I'm not proud of it.
I'm not proud of myself, but I am proud of myself for no longer using in this way, for
having other coping mechanisms that work for finding different outlets for the pain.
These are things that I know I can be proud of for myself.
I wonder, and I know I'm just asking a lot of questions here, but instead of asking the
question, is this enough for him?
Would he be proud of your life right now?
I wonder if it would feel helpful to turn it on yourself.
Is this enough for you?
Are you proud of the life that you've made for yourself in your father's absence and
your father's stead in the aftermath of his death?
And if not, how would you like things to change an important caveat here moving forward?
None of us can go back and change what has happened, and it's one of the hardest truths
of being human.
And you can, by all means, you can beat yourself up for the decisions that you made, but an alternative
to that is compassion, mercy, summoning this kind and unconditionally loving heart of your
father whom you admire so much.
And saying, yeah, even that, even that choice, even that decision, even that path is welcome
because you are my son.
And I am your dad.
And that cannot be severed, that cannot be changed even in death, even with addiction.
So is this enough for you, the life you've made for yourself right now?
And are you proud of yourself?
And then moving forward, struggling.
I wonder, you might like to develop a ritual for cataloging your accomplishments.
Our brains with their lovely negativity bias have such a hard time reminding us that we
are good people doing good things in the world because we focus on the one time that we weren't.
I worked with a client once who every day after her husband's death would post a picture
to social media of one reason she was proud of herself for getting up that morning.
And it may have been making cup of tea.
It may have been driving to the mall to return a pair of shoes.
It may have been working in the garden.
They were small things to her, but they were also things that felt very hard as she was grieving
and so to catalog them to sort of create this virtual scrapbook online of like, here's
all the ways I'm proud of myself.
It helped her to recognize all the ways she was continuing forward and building resilience
and practice in being alive after a very sudden and devastating loss.
You could take walks and talk to your dad about things that you are proud of in your life,
things that you've accomplished that you know he'd be interested in.
You might collect things, write them down, put them in a jar and read them aloud whether
on his birthday, his death anniversary, your sobriety anniversary, whichever of those days
resonates most with you.
If he has a grave or someplace you go to visit him, you might do this there as well.
But just cataloging somewhere, having some dedicated place for what the author Gretchen Ruben would
call a "todallist" instead of a "todallist" look what I have done, look what I have made,
look who I've become.
Already.
And even if the list is small, I know even just based on the way you describe your dad, he
would be so proud that you are continuing on, that you are continuing to be someone largely
good, that you are continuing to do things that are largely good, that you have the self-reflection
and the self-awareness to even write in a letter like this to a grief podcast and say,
"Help!
I want to be better."
And that striving for betterness even is something to be proud of and to admire.
You are choosing paths because of paths you've chosen in the past we all are.
We walk forward now, not with no context.
We walk forward with all of the context that lies behind us, everything that has come.
Maybe sobriety is an opportunity to make your dad proud of you in a new way, in a way he's
never been proud of you before.
Even a way and with a pride that knows from experience that there are other paths you could
be choosing right now.
You know from your experience with drugs and alcohol that you could choose that path
it can, because we all have free will.
You are saying no to that because you are saying yes to other things, to moving forward in
different ways, to honoring your dad in different ways, to coping with scary medical issues.
In new and different ways and that is something to be proud of.
Just because he's never been proud of you for this specific thing before, does not mean
he can't be proud of you now.
If you believe there is still a connection between the two of you.
And something else the last thing I'll mention is that if you are looking for ways to summon
that fatherly pride in the present, take a look back at what he was really proud of you
for in the past.
Was he proud of you for winning a race?
Was he proud of you for standing up to a bully?
Was he proud of you for becoming a source of sturdiness and stability to other people in
your life?
Perhaps a partner, perhaps a pet, perhaps children?
Was he proud of you for doing things that showed your independence?
Like getting a home or applying for a job by yourself or driving a car?
Or was he proud of you for rescuing a friend from a really hard situation?
What were some very specific things that he was proud of you for in life?
I would encourage you to list at least 10, but if you can do more, do more, do more, do more.
Because the question that follows that for every item on your list, ask yourself, how can
I replicate this kind of event in the present?
How can I show independence?
How can I win a race?
How can I be stable for my friends or my family?
How can I be this person that I know my father was proud of me for being in the past?
And how can I bring that version of myself and that version of him and his pride and his
love forward into the present?
Struggling, I know you have this in you.
I am so grateful you've written to me today about feeling this pressure to make your father
proud and with all of your layers and with all of these questions.
May you know that there are ways to release this grip or this laser focus on what you believe
you've done wrong or how you've been bad and shifting, reorienting that focus to what
good you have done and that there still is to do.
What you are capable of and who he knows you to be, how you can see yourself and the
world through his eyes.
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
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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
shelbyforsitia.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.
Music for Dear Grave Guide is performed by Eddie Goldstein, editing by Eddie Goldstein.