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, the situation has been really bothering me and I feel like I can't turn
to anyone in my life.
A friend of nearly 12 years who used to watch my cat and whom I called his uncle has not
been supportive at all of my grief.
Let's call him Roger.
Three years ago my cat passed away a day after my birthday on Halloween.
When I shared the news with Roger he gave the least empathetic "aw I'm sorry ever" and
didn't say or do anything else.
In the weeks and months that followed I left our interactions feeling terrible.
During our first get together a few months after my cat's death, Roger took me to a cat
cafe but ended the night driving by his ex's house as if to say "see I'm going through
something too."
He and his girlfriend broke up in April 2021 just a few months before my cat died.
Fast forward to now and I've adopted another cat, losing my first cat was incredibly hard
and I told him that I'll never love another cat like my last one.
Roger keeps telling me he doesn't like me saying that.
He compares it to his breakup saying it's the same for him because a breakup is like
total emotional destruction.
I feel like my friend keeps comparing his grief to mine.
Am I going crazy?
I've been in a serious relationship twice as long as the one he's upset over and was
completely blindsided.
He and this girl were together for one year already broke up once and at the end of the
day they had different values but it's not about comparing, it's about being there for
your friend.
I really feel like Roger is trying to validate his feelings by invalidating mine and it
really hurts.
Does what he's doing make any sense at all?
Am I being too sensitive?
I find apples and oranges.
Hello there, apples and oranges.
I love your signature because you're right comparing griefs to each other is like comparing
apples and oranges but I think a lot of people don't even like that phrase apples and oranges
because you can put them both in the category of fruits.
It's like comparing apples and like pointalism which is a form of fine art painting.
It's like where do these two things belong in a world next to each other?
Maybe that they're both colorful?
Maybe that in some ways especially with the work of farmers and agriculture they are manufactured
by humankind?
That's about where it stops.
Maybe we can compare apples to construction equipment or apples to philosophy or apples
to any other sort of thing that really cannot be compared to them because here's the thing.
I've mentioned this on a few podcast episodes before both on Deer grief guide and in other
shows where I've been interviewed.
The only person who can rank or compare your griefs is you and you can only rank or compare
your own losses to each other.
So for me I have my own personal ranking system of which of my losses is the worst and frankly
if I'm honest with you it changes by the day.
Is my mom's death the worst today or my best friend's death the worst today or the sudden
breakup of my engagement the worst today or the death of my cat the worst today?
Which of these things feels like the worst today for me?
It's a constantly shuffling and re-rotating like a leaderboard on an arcade game constantly
changing by who's winning and whose initials are in those top slots.
For a lot of other people I think they rank their losses by the order in which they happened
because some measure of youth is tied up into how bad the loss is felt.
For a lot of people closeness or proximity to the person who died or the significance of
the loss is how they rank their losses but again the ranking systems we have for our own
personal grief are as different as we are.
So I can't look at my experience of losing my mother and look at somebody else's experience
of losing their mother and compare them much less look at my experience of losing my
mother and somebody else's experience of losing a mother and compare them much less look
at my experience of losing a mother and somebody else's experience of major job loss and compare
them.
They are different.
Every single loss is different.
You can lose the same role of a person in your life.
You can be grieving the same thing such as a pet or a disease diagnosis or an animal or
a pregnancy loss.
You can be grieving the same category of a thing but the depth and the richness and the
nuance of your relationship to that thing or person or animal that cannot ever be compared.
I don't think you're crazy.
I think what's happening is that Roger is playing a long game three years now of suffering
Olympics where in some ways and you even got the sense when he drove by his ex's house
he's trying to let you know that he is suffering too and perhaps that he is suffering worse
than you are.
He is trying to do this thing where he's relating to your pain by sharing his own but what
ultimately happens it sounds like is that you don't feel seen and heard and he doesn't
feel seen and heard and so your friendship is really damaged and impacted negatively because
of it and it really sounds like he is trying his best to relate and it's it's not great.
It's not a good time. It's not anything that is resonating with you.
It sounds like he doesn't have the capacity to make space for the significance of your grief
and significance of your loss without also injecting his own life experience with grief to
the depth and the level that he knows it.
I think you phrased this very well that Roger validates his grief by invalidating yours
something about needing to prove his pain or needing to demonstrate or show his pain
is coming up.
I really can't psychoanalyze him very far because I don't know him but I wonder if you have
capacity, if you have it in you, if this is a friendship that you would like to maintain
if there is room between the two of you to issue an invitation to him of an alternate
way of being when it comes to grief.
So for example you could say something like, "Hey, instead of bringing up your ex whenever
I talk about my cat, I would actually really love it if we could share some memories of
my cat."
Here his uncle in life and in death and you have just as many silly memories of him as
I do.
I'm not sure if you enjoyed visiting the cat cafe but maybe that's a place you could
visit together.
I know for me I would not want to visit a cat cafe after the death of my cat but maybe
that's something that's comforting to you so if it is that could be a place where you
regularly gather together around cat-oriented activities.
And so saying something like, "Hey, instead of driving by your ex's house again, why don't
we set a date to go to the cat cafe in the future?"
And based on what you've written, based on how you speak about Roger and the impact that
he has on your life, I get the sense that maybe he's not a person you can share your cat's
memory with or maybe just your grief with and if that's true, if that is the reality that
you're living in right now, that no matter how hard you've tried, no matter what way or
what phrase you've used to ask, no matter how many boundaries you've set, no matter how
many times you've let Roger know clearly and maybe passively that you don't appreciate
having your grief compared to each other.
Maybe it's time to release this relationship.
This is worth grieving though, if that's the conclusion you've come to, because it sounds
like your cat was really close to Roger and Roger was close to your cat and you had a lot
of memories tangled up together, like there is a chapter in your life that was written
and cannot be unwritten that includes you and Roger and your cat all alive, all existing
in the same little life together and to write chapters now in the future where Roger is
not included and your cat is dead.
There is a grief for the cat's absence and there is also a grief for Roger's absence as
well, especially when you may have hoped for or wished for Roger's presence to continue
even after the death of your cat.
I think that we don't talk enough about how friendships change in the aftermath of loss,
one of the most popular workshops I lead and one of the most popular sections of life
after loss academy is all about establishing relationships that honor our grief because
how we are supported in life after loss makes all the difference between feeling lonely
and unseen and unheard and frankly feeling loved and it sounds like right now you feel
very alone in a room with two people in it, one of those people being Roger.
I hope that he has the capacity to change, that he has the capacity to hear you because
that's the first step to changing his behavior, changing how you interact with each other.
I hope that he has learned more about grief by knowing you and by living three more years
on the planet because God knows the longer we live, the more education we get on grief
and I hope that you can tune into the part of yourself or that you believe that to be
your head, your heart, your gut, your soul, your spirit, whatever you call it to advise
you when it feels safe enough to stay and when if this time comes you are ready to say goodbye
to this relationship.
I am wishing you so much love and luck, loving blessings for your cat who died and blessings
for this new cat who is in your life too and the joy and the value and the love that they
bring alongside, both of them, all of them together.
I hope this helps.
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.
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through.
You can submit your anonymous letter for the show and find additional grief support at
shallbeforsitia.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.