And now I'm an adult orphan, not something I expected.
I feel like I've identified myself as a dead mom person for so long.
And it's not just that.
And here we are.
And it's still very surreal.
I feel like it hasn't all fully sunk in yet.
I don't know how long that's going to take.
[Music]
Hi there, Grave Growers, and welcome back to the Grave Grower podcast.
I am so honored to be sitting here across from you with you in your ears today.
If you have been growing alongside me in my work for a while, welcome back.
And if you are new to my work, hello.
My name is Shelby Frasithia.
I am a grief coach, a two-time author and the founder of Life After Loss Academy,
which is a course in community that has helped grievous stop feeling lost,
stuck, broken, and alone, and helped them gradually build lives they love
from the lives that loss has forced them to live.
Here on the show, we believe that loss and grief are not things to get over
or muscle through, but things that we walk alongside, that we integrate
and fold in for the rest of our lives, and that when we do life with grief
in ways that resonate with us, we can create beautiful lives from the ones
that loss has forced you to live, because you deserve a good life,
even if it wasn't the one that you thought that you would be living.
Today on the show, I am speaking with illustrator and author Tyler Federer,
whose mom died almost two decades ago, and whose dad died recently this past winter.
We are discussing the grief of cumulative loss facing more than one loss
in what feels to us like a short period of time.
How at some point no part of the calendar is safe from grief,
the relationship between grief and anxiety and how one can influence the other,
and how writing an art can help you process life after loss.
Here's a little bit about Tyler.
Tyler Federer is an artist whose work explores big feelings,
feminism and pop culture.
Her debut solo work, Dancing at the Pity Party,
a graphic memoir about the premature death of her super-cool mom,
won the Sydney Taylor Gold Medal for Young Adult Literature.
Tyler also wrote and illustrated the picture books, "Bodies are Cool" and "Are You Matty?"
Tyler, I am so excited to have you on "Greef Grower" because your book,
"Dancing at the Pity Party," which we'll talk about a fair bit,
was one that I picked up by accident because we're going way back to 2020,
but I bought a book from Anderson's bookstore in Naperville, Illinois,
because one of my favorite authors was coming through there on tour.
And then COVID happened, and Anderson's was like,
"We had to cancel the event. We've got your signed books here.
You got to come pick them up and show your little ticket receipt,
whatever, and so my best friend and I went out there."
And I was like, "Let's just look around, browse all the aisles while we're here,
and in the grief section, I saw your book, "Dancing at the Pity Party" and picked it.
I read the whole thing in the store and then I bought it.
[laughter]
And so I've been following you in your work ever since in the connections to
being in the Dead Moms Club, living in and around Chicago,
and just like losing a parent in what one of my former podcast interview hosts,
I was the person being interviewed called your Launchpad Years,
like when you're trying to figure out who you are as an adult and you're trying to leave the nest
and establish yourself in the world, and losing a parent then is a very particular sort of niche loss.
I think a lot of people imagine losing parents when they're in their 50s and their 60s,
not when they're 19 and 21 respectively.
And so I have just been like, tethered to your work ever since.
So if you could start us off, tell us a little bit first about "Dancing at the Pity Party"
and anything else regarding your losses plural now that you'd like to share.
And then we'll get into why we're actually having this conversation
and the Instagram DM that I sent you.
[laughter]
Right.
So until I was like just turned 19, I guess I had never had any major losses in my family.
And then when I was 19, I had a great grandma died in her 90s when I was like 12,
but we weren't super close because she was so unwell the whole time.
And I'd lost like distant people, but it felt like that's a thing for other people.
And then this summer before my sophomore year of college, my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
She lived for eight months. She died right after I came home for spring break.
That same school year that I was going into.
And it just was like a huge shock.
But there were so many shocks throughout.
And that I made this book "Dancing at the Pity Party" which is a graphic memoir
which I like to explain is not a memoir that has graphic detail, but...
I mean I guess it does a little bit.
Why would I never think of that as an interpretation? But you're right.
I feel like I don't know how common of an expression that is to people who aren't like in the comics world.
But basically it's like a comic book, but it's a memoir.
And I made it when my mom had been gone for 10 years.
And they had had a pretty significant chunk of time to process everything and kind of like come into who I am as a dead mom person.
And so it came out in April of 2020.
So I have this whole book tour planned.
And then everything got canceled.
And it came out like right after lockdown started.
I had a Zoom event and that was really cool.
And then between when the book came out and now two like close grandparents died.
And then my dad just died.
And December he had gotten cancer like multiple times pretty soon after my mom died.
And was in treatment for it.
And then it was in remission for a long time.
And it came back the January before last.
And then all of last year he was sick.
And it came back in stage four when he had had it.
It was like stage two maybe.
And he died in home hospice in early December.
And now I'm an adult orphan.
Not something I expected.
I feel like I've identified myself as a dead mom person for so long.
And it's warm now.
It's not just that.
And here we are.
And it's still very surreal.
I feel like it hasn't all fully sunk in yet.
I don't know how long that's going to take.
Yeah, and I morbidly laugh about that one as well.
Because despite the fact that my mom has been gone 11 years.
There are still days where I'm like, I don't know if it sunk in yet.
I don't know if that's all the way real.
And I don't know that it ever will be.
And I think a lot of like traditional or old fashioned grief experts might say something along the lines.
I'm like, oh, you're just still in denial.
I'm like, no, there's more to it than that.
But I think there's some really cool research coming up now.
I'm thinking of like Mary Frances O'Connor and the grieving brain of like my grieving brain is still trying to piece together.
Understanding or comprehension of a world where my mom doesn't physically exist.
Even though I like see and feel reminders of her all the time.
And so the sense that a loss could ever sink in 100%.
So that that's real.
I'm like, I think my mom is dead to me about like 97% of the time.
Maybe the percentage increases.
But I don't know that the that it ever feels all the way true.
Whether whether I think people listening are like, well, I still feel connected to them so they're never all the way gone.
Or it's like the reality has an ever fully landed.
It's kind of just hovering.
I still have times much less frequently than I used to, but where something will happen in my life or I'll hear like a bit of news or something and think, oh, I have to tell mom.
Yeah.
I'm like, it's been 16 years.
Like get it through your thick skull.
I like how you talk to yourself.
I'm very kind to myself.
I'm thinking of you.
I love I resonate with that.
And this is kind of the biggest reason I wanted to talk to you because the memoir and I love that it's a graphic memoir because as a kid, I was obsessed with reading like manga and not necessarily comic books.
But especially from Japan and other countries.
But then when I realized people were doing nonfiction through comic and illustration formats, I was like, oh, I'm into this.
And it's one of my all time favorite genres, not just of grief books, but of books in general.
And so I picked this up and especially for grief brain, when you can't read, I'm like, I can look at pictures.
It's so incredibly helpful.
And I say pictures, but your drawings are so relatable and clever.
But also at the same time feel like something I might have drawn like in the margins of like a high school or middle school notebook with like the little stars with a little raindrops of the little hearts of the smiley faces with sad faces.
And it feels like I don't it just like a it's a snapshot in time of how you draw and and how you relate.
So I just love that such a thing as a graphic memoir exists.
And the reason I reached out to you is because you recently drew a series of Instagram like a carousel.
And for people who are keeping score at home, it was posted on November 29th, 2024.
And I just scroll back on Tyler Federer's Instagram, you can see this post.
But I'm just going to read it because I can't show you the pictures here, but I'll link to it in the show notes.
You can go read it and then find out more about Tyler's work.
But she did a series of like panels illustrated panels where she writes in 2020.
I made my first book called Dancing at the Pity Party, a graphic memoir about losing my mom to cancer when I was 19.
What I left out of the book is that about a year after my mom died, my dad was diagnosed with cancer.
They caught it early though. He had surgery and then life got back to mostly normal.
And then there's like you in an armchair. Oh, thank God, which is perfect.
Until a few years past and the woman my dad was dating felt a lump in his breast.
Whenever I'd tell anyone my situation, it felt like I was a little kid making excuses for not doing my homework over explaining and adding so much detail that it all ends up sounding like a lie, which relatable because at some point you rack up so many losses that you're like, it feels like my life is not even real.
And I tell it to other people and that they think I'm making it all up. Absolutely.
Months later, after I'm a sect to me in many rounds of chemo, at the same place my mom went, "Oof, my dad went to, went into a mission."
And then you again, "Oh, thank God."
Years past, I got a book deal to write about my mom. My dad was thrilled.
He wrote me an extremely sweet goodreads review and constantly updated me on how many likes it his review was getting.
Shout out to your father, I love him so much.
Every year, he'd have a checkup with his oncologist and happily call us to say he's still good.
Finally, a cancer success story.
And then there's a picture of a shark fin in the bottom corner that says the jaw's theme intensifies.
At the beginning of this year, we found out it came back today he started hospice.
My emotional state has been fragile.
Some days I feel kind of numb but mostly stable.
Other days, it's like I got shot out of some kind of canon that is also a time machine.
It feels weird to talk about it here but it also feels weird not to talk about it.
When my mom was dying, I felt really isolated in my grief but today I feel so lucky to be a part of the community we have here.
I really value being able to dump messy emotions into art and then hear from readers and followers who relate.
I'm sure I'll make plenty of art about this in the future but for right now, I guess I just wanted you to know.
Thank you for being here.
And this comes right before you did another wonderful post.
Again, for people keeping square at home on December 5th, 2024, about your mom's death taking place in the spring.
And her in life counting down to spring and looking for signs of spring as an occasion because I think your birthday is in the spring to have that right.
And so like looking for bunnies and little robins and like flowers popping out of the earth.
It's so exciting to look forward to.
And then in her dying on the first ish day of spring.
There's this sense of I was counting down to her death.
And then with your dad beginning hospice in November and then dying in early December, there was a season of life that was full of grief and hard.
It was spring.
There is a new season that is full of grief and hard.
It is November December and I imagine all the holidays and New Year crap that comes with it.
And the biggest reason I wanted to have you on was to talk about how when you start accumulating losses, when you don't just experience one loss, you start having two or three or four, not to mention your grandparents, your great-grandparent, other losses that maybe aren't death related.
I'm thinking like breakups or job losses or COVID or things like that.
You go from having pockets or times in the calendar that feel safe from grief to suddenly having what feels like your entire calendar overrun by things that remind you of the people you've lost because there's like a tipping point where like I've now lost so many that I survived one season and I go immediately into surviving the next one.
So that's a very long-winded way of saying thank you for that piece you wrote and also I would love for you to speak more on the sensation of at first there was just one grief season in my calendar and how there are many.
Yeah, it's interesting before my dad was sick this last time I'd had a thing in therapy probably multiple times I was talking about how like my mom got sick over the summer so that was bad.
Then she was really into a lot of the Jewish holidays that are in fall sort of like the fall so that time of your makes me think of her and she died in spring so that makes me think of her and then her birthday is in December and we'd always celebrated on winter break so it was like every single season was related to her in some way.
But it definitely is that like very early spring that's the time that just feels like I mentioned in the comic I made it feels like right after a scab falls off and it's like you're healed technically but it still feels really uncomfortable for you.
And yeah now that my dad died I mean he was sick basically the entire calendar year so the grief is a little bit less concentrated than it was with my mom my mom was sick when I was in college and I went to college in a different state from where my family lived.
So I saw her at these like specific moments and then I would go back to college but with my dad he lived in Chicago just like me I saw him all the time.
So my sisters and I are just like figuring it out I think we all sort of feel like we just got like dumped somewhere like out of the sky.
And we realized during my dad's like a funeral and ship a period when we were spending a lot of time thinking about death we realized that my dad died two weeks roughly before my mom's birthday and my mom died roughly two weeks before my dad's birthday.
Wow there's like eerie in a way that I like like it feels like like a full circle kind of cool thing and we were like we should have like a thing that we do during those two two week periods so we are calling them spirit we like and.
Before homecoming they're not as planned out it's not like it's 90s day or wacky hair day.
I was not expecting that.
So much of grief sort of feels like when you're up really late and everything is just like surreal and funny and you can just laugh or cry at any moment.
So right now it's we're just treating them as like during these two two week periods we're going to be real gentle with ourselves.
It would be fun if we had like an activity or holiday or whatever each day and crazy have to.
I know you do the illustration challenge mood topper where you have to illustrate a new mood every day but it might be neat to do like spirit week illustration themes or something like that.
But I that's that's just one of my ideas but I love that this is thanks to like your sisters and like your community essentially it has turned into already.
A block of time on all of your calendars where it's like and this is where we honor our grief for this or this is where we carve out time to like go easy on ourselves maybe take time off work maybe.
See each other text each other more often or.
You know just ask how we're doing because yeah for sure and this reminds me of a practice that I do inside of the online course that I teach which is called life after loss academy.
It's like a community of grieving people from all over the world and there's literally like a printable PDF called the printable grief dates calendar and I ask people to go in and look at every month of the year and write down not just your death dates of people that you've lost but birthdays and aversaries.
There's these things I call dates of knowing so like maybe the date you or somebody love got a diagnosis or you found out a secret about a loss and it changed your life or you found out maybe a partner was cheating on you or something someday that pivoted your life in some major way and then the calendar is also full of major holidays and occasions that might influence your grief so like mother's day as a season Hanukkah is a holiday and so there's kind of like this whole layout and you can see all 12 months of like here's where my grief is really heavy or there's a lot of.
Concentrated grief in like these two months and then like for some reason July has nothing for some reason July is safe.
But then there are other seasons where it's like a little grief here a little grief there and what it does the goal of it is not to make you bummed out about how much grief is in your year because it could be a heck of a lot especially if you've experienced multiple losses or multiple types of loss but the goal is kind of to your point to say which seasons of the year and more grief heavy and how can I protect them.
Like how can I draw a circle around this spot or create something like spirit week or host a cookie marathon in honor of my aunt or something that we're all doing remotely from our different places or my best friend Tammy who died three years ago her death anniversary was three days ago at the time that we're recording this and every year.
As many of us as we can and the shape was just for us but we meet up at the memorial tree and bench that we had like established for her on the Chicago Lake front and then we all go get bubble tea like it's just there's just like little pockets of things that you can plan in advance for because so much of grief is unpredictable that it feels like a slight way to anchor yourself in the whole rest of the year and the whole rest of the timeline when like who knows what's going on economically politically socially fine.
And so I think it's really socially financially relationally like who knows what the hell is going to happen for the rest of the year especially as you accumulate losses so I love that even if it wasn't done with like that level of consciousness that instinct to create a barrier or like draw a circle around this and say it's spirit week and we have two of them every year now for our parents.
I just love that I just love that I love it to I something that I kind of like about grief is that for me it's pretty uncomplicated in general I like have anxiety and just like all the mental crap and every emotion just feels like it's a bunch of different things like nodded into a ball and there's guilt and with grief it's just like I'm sad because a bad thing.
Like it just it feels like if you break your leg and you're like I just have to heal my leg my leg hurts so there's a lot less like complicated difficult feeling about just being like this is a period that is an anniversary of of a sad time and so I'm just going to be nice to myself.
This it feels like like just planet and we're good and that's comforting to me.
I like that I've never I have genuinely never heard anybody else say that before but this sense of like yeah my grief's pretty straightforward it it's not layered with a bunch of emotional complexity it just asks that I look at it and take care of it and I'll see you next year or I'll see you.
Next year or see you next month or I'll see you tomorrow it's it's one of these things that's like I don't know if you would describe it as annoying but like for a lot of people I imagine like it's an annoying constant but it's a constant.
Yeah in my book I said that all the mentions of cancer everywhere in the world feel like my skido bites and it's just like stop like get away from me and it's not necessarily like you're getting like bit by a snake or something but it's not a thing that's not like a way to get away from me and it's not necessarily like you're getting like bit by a snake or something but it's not necessarily like you're getting like a bit by a snake or something but it's not like a little bit.
It's not necessarily like a little bit.
I kind of want to pivot to this idea of...
You've now lost two parents to cancer.
And I don't know if you've lost other people in your life to cancer as well.
But there's kind of this sense.
And you talk about this in your book of...
Being aware that this is a very real way people could die.
And I wonder how kind of living with that recognition of like uncertainty all the time, all the time.
All the time, all the time.
Just like impacts your life.
Like I or anybody else I know could have cancer at any time because it has now happened at least twice.
And that's something that lives in my brain pretty rat-free as well.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, it sucks that the cancer that my mom had,
we initially thought that it was ovarian cancer.
And then it ended up being this like rare one called choreocarsonoma.
That I saw one time on an episode of a medical show, but outside of it,
I never heard of anywhere ever.
It was just this like weird fluke.
And then my dad died of breast cancer.
He's a cis man.
And not a thing that people hear about a lot.
So it feels like...
I like to say if you hear that like there's a 99% chance that someone's going to be okay,
it makes me think, well, there's that 1% that they won't be okay.
And I'm just kind of on edge all the time.
It's one of the big pillars I think that I work on in the therapy is just how to live without being in a constant state of bracing myself for bad news about other people or about myself.
I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've thought I felt a lump somewhere that was a pimple or something.
Like I just keep counting. I have at least three that I can remember where I took myself to an urgent care,
but it has to be more than that at this point.
I had a time a few months ago when I thought I had this weird bump on my hand and I was like,
what is this? And I just watched that show Apple site, our vinegar, and Netflix.
I love that show.
I should not have watched it.
Like the amount of cancer and it was not good for me to see.
That's true. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So cancer people out there take take care when you're scrolling through Netflix.
Yeah.
But one of the people in that show gets cancer where it shows is like a source on her arm.
So I was like, how about I've hand cancer and I looked after like a good, I don't know, five minutes of straight panic.
I realized that the shape of the bump was identical to the like the little camera things on the back of my phone.
Like that and realized, oh, that's a mirror.
Even when I realized that, I still for a little while was like, I don't know, maybe it's a fluke.
And it's really exhausting to just be in that state all the time.
But it's tough when there's like literal proof that just something can happen and you don't even know.
Yeah, absolutely. And it's one of those things that I think that people who are alongside gravers or bosses of gravers or friends of gravers like don't think to think that we're thinking.
That's a lot of think in the same sentence.
But I think a lot of people look at me and they're like, oh, she lost her mom.
And she's wondering when everyone else around her is going to get cancer.
Like it's for me, it's a very clear line drawn to that conclusion.
And for a lot of other people, they would stop at you at catalogs.
And I'm like, I have a loss, but as a result, I have anxiety, recurring thoughts about everyone else's death probably to cancer around me all the time.
And it's never, I'll say gratefully for me, it's never been something that's like kept me from living my life or kept me from forming relationships with people necessarily.
But it is something I'm almost constantly wondering or thinking about.
Like it kind of just lives back there. It's like a record player that just keeps going.
And I can't lift the little needle on it. It just like just plays all the time.
And before my mom got sick, like when I was a little kid, I like started having anxiety when I was like being birthed, I think.
So I used to be scared that she would die in a car accident.
Like anytime she left the house when I wasn't in the car with her and I'd always, my love you by.
And she'd be like, I'm going to the grocery store.
And it after she got sick and died, I was like, did I know something?
But the truth is that like it just felt bad all those times.
Like I would have rather felt calm and not stressed during the time when she wasn't actively sick.
But I think like my brain chemistry and my life circumstance have sort of like combined to form the perfect like horrible combination of being freaked out about loss all the time.
Yeah, I wonder if you feel comfortable speaking more to that as like I grew up as somebody with anxiety and then grief added some more layers.
Maybe not made it worse, maybe not made it better, but just like added some different permutations and combinations to something that was already there because I think for so many people, this is why I ask.
Consider grief to be something that happens in a vacuum and anxiety to be something that happens in a vacuum.
And I think we forget sometimes that people who are anxious sometimes experience loss and it transforms their anxiety into something different or or grows it or deepens it or whatever.
Illustration you want to use for that and then sometimes grief happens and anxiety is a byproduct of it.
It's like the two things are often woven together and they're not necessarily bad that they're woven together or often come alongside in the same package.
But I'm curious about how your relationship with anxiety has changed with grief.
Yeah, I'm going to leave it there. I'm going to leave it there is a very open-ended.
Yeah, when I first was realized that anxiety was like an actual thing that you can be diagnosed with and it wasn't just me having a bad personality.
I was already like post mom death.
And for the first chunk of my life, I really just thought it was a social anxiety that was like my main thing.
I was super, super shy growing up and I still feel like that's my natural self.
Like me being more outgoing, whatever that looks like for me in social situations is like I'm just pushing myself all the time.
That was like the primary way that I thought of anxiety for a long time.
And then after my mom died and thinking about it more, I learned about generalizing anxiety disorder, which is just like being anxious about all kinds of stuff all the time.
And I was like, oh wait, that also applies. I'm not just anxious in social situations. I'm anxious that the elevator is going to break down while I'm on it or whatever that I have this career that I love and somehow it's all going to go away in a way that I can't predict.
And yeah, grief just kind of like expanded all of that, I think.
The possibilities are endless.
I will say that like particularly with losing my dad, I have noticed that there's an amount of anxiety that has gone away because I was just worried all the time about when he was going to die.
And now he's gone. So like that's obviously bad, but the uncertainty was just like killing me all the time.
And because he initially got sick so soon after my mom died, even though there was a really large chunk of time where he was in remission and we like barely talked about it at all.
There was still like a little thing in the back of my head of like, you never know. And now just that is gone.
That's pretty freeing and it's also something I'm working on in therapies like dealing with this weird relief that I feel and it feels like disloyal or unkind to my dad.
And I know logically that that's not true and he wouldn't want me to be upset or worried all the time, but it does feel yucky to have any kind of like slightly positive association with grief at all.
Yeah, or just the relief of it, but I really resonate with that sense of will that record of well, when's my dad going to die? My dad's going to die at some point my dad's going to die.
It has stopped playing and in a room or a brain, I'm making metaphors here.
That's full of constantly playing records that you can't turn off to have one stop playing. Yeah. I mean, I can see how that feels like a relief, especially.
And this is true for a lot of my students and clients who are in the same town or in the same home as somebody who's dying to no longer daily be face to face with their pain or their decline or their suffering or their.
Mentally or physically not being here or the questions that come up with it or the weird sibling dynamics or family dynamics that are surrounding it or the dread of having to essentially I heard memorial planning.
Being compared to like planning a party or planning a wedding immediately after somebody dies and I'm like, oh my god, we do expect people to throw a party after death and like handle the logistics of that.
So even the dread of that hanging over your head as well of like, I'm going to have to throw my world at them to figure out a logistics of this to have those that record or those records stop playing.
I can see how that feels like a relief and also that record in a way is a tether to your dad.
Not the only one, but to know that was playing is to know in some way you cared about him and were worried about him.
I don't want to have that one you're not going to be worried about them dying.
Yeah.
It was interesting we we had a sadder for Passover of my dad's wife's apartment.
We never called her a stepmom because I have that too.
Like so yeah, it was like late 20s or something. It just feels weird.
So I say my dad's wife, it sounds really impersonal, but she's like she feels like an aunt or something.
But we had the sadder at their apartment, the apartment that my dad lived in with her for eight years or something and it's the apartment where he died.
And that like halo or haze of stress and grief that was there for a long time, it just felt like it had like cleared away.
There's this levity there that I was not expecting.
And she had like gotten a new couch that she'd had the same couch in the living room the whole time that she and my dad lived there.
She got a new one that was like lighter and color and it just felt like we're all like taking a breath.
And there's still the sadness and the loss that's like very obvious.
But the impending doom of knowing someone is going to die, especially in hospice at the end, we learn there's the transition to the dying process and then the process of actively dying.
Such a weird concept.
But that whole thing, that was like so happy and tiring and sad and emotional and that is something that's like let go now and we can just sit with the memories and good and bad.
Yeah, it's like your job has changed.
Yeah, your job is no longer to worry to sit vigil to manage details potentially with hospice, especially to manage pain or manage logistics to plant a party.
Your job is now to relate, to remember, to with regard to your illustrations to like potentially create or make something to express.
And there's like I don't know that anybody really talks about the grief of having like your daily job change or like I suppose it can be related to like your identity changing.
It's like I was a caregiver, I was a watcher over her, I was a historian, I was a medication administrator, administerer.
And now I am a co-memory maker and a assembling remember on her holiday inventor and a couch appreciator.
That's the primary one.
Yes, and it just you are never sans job in grief, you're never without something to do, but sometimes there is grief in no longer having to do a job because it means that somebody's died.
Yeah, I like how you related to that or there's there's just like a lifting of that's not the job anymore and some jobs definitely feel harder or longer or more unbearable than others.
I think I mean there were so many moments when my dad was sick this last time where I would be feeling good for any given reason on a day and then be like way my dad is dying.
I should feel bad.
It's I'm not paying enough attention.
It was really complicated and that is like a less complicated thing about grief.
If I'm having a day where I feel good now I can be like my dad would be so glad that I'm feeling good and like that my sisters and I are still living and enjoying life even without him.
Yeah, but it sounds like it's easier to I don't know to feel like like your emotional experience is like all the way in alignment.
Yeah, that he's not actively leaving actively dying.
Thing has happened so I I don't have to deal with the thing.
I don't know the thing I was worried about for so long and that was complicating my life so much has happened and I'm dealing with the repercussions of it but the day and day out.
Exhaustion emotional exhaustion of it has dissipated.
Yeah, or the the should of I should be focused on his pain or the fact that I'm going to lose him soon has like transmuted to I can feel happiness or joy or lightness here and trust that.
Like he would want that or like he would be happy for me or like he's not here to worry about and so there's not like a counterweight on the other side of that being like no don't exactly an emotions cop.
I don't feel that.
Yeah, I resonate with that it definitely felt weird.
When my mom was dying and we honestly didn't have very long in her active dying process we were told we'd have like six weeks to six months and then she died in seven days but I remember when my art teacher and one of our school counselors like drove by the house this was during Christmas time to take my sister and I out for coffee and like Starbucks was a novelty back then.
So we were like the adults that we admire are taking us to Starbucks but we remember like laughing at a Starbucks at Christmas time with like all these carols playing and I had this vivid sense that I'm like I'm in the wrong place.
I should I should not be this person right now and the guilt of not being at home not staring at my mother 24 seven not like just orienting all of my focus energy devotion and her direction.
At 21 was a very surreal thing I had never had that.
That like juxtaposition before of like I'm not supposed to be here I'm supposed to be feeling like this and now I can very clearly point to it is like oh that's a great thing.
But it took a hot second to be like oh that's a great thing and not just I am bad or I am wrong thing because I think so many people think like I just experienced this individually for myself.
I want to get to in the last few minutes here some things that you I don't know if enjoys too positive of a word but like how drawing illustration comic creation folds into your grief and maybe from what I've seen and how you've evolved with your art through the years since 2020.
Like what it what it brings to your life.
It's such a positive impact on my life.
So my mom died my sophomore year of college and then my senior year of college I took this writing class called it was creative nonfiction.
So my job now and we had to write some kind of personal essay and somehow I did a comic for it about losing my mom and I'd never done anything like that before I'm not like one of those writers where it's like I was writing stories when I was a little kid like I wasn't I was drawing pictures all the time but not writing and the process of translating this memory and all these like.
Messy thoughts into drawing and writing at the same time just felt so like correct.
It was like the opposite of how you felt at Starbucks right like I'm doing the right thing for me and for my brain and now having made this book about grief which has been out for a few years now.
I've been in this like grief space for a while. It's how we met and it's how I've met a whole bunch of people that I can like relate to in this way that I had very few people to relate to when I was going through everything with my mom.
So like the process of making the art is very comforting and feels like a release getting to like take the stuff in my head and like dump it on the page but also knowing that this community that I have like that those are the people that are going to be receiving the art.
Talking to a friend like it just it is so so comforting.
I just I love like when people will write comments about things that aren't even about grief necessarily like I'll mention something annoying my mom did and someone will be like my mom does that annoying thing to me.
It just it like rounds everything out. Yeah it's just it's been so positive. I have to say Instagram and meta and everything it's all complicated but man I've gotten a lot of positive stuff out of that app.
And I like that you mentioned the audience factor to because it's one thing to it's definitely one thing to create for yourself and kind of put things on paper for your own brain and for your own heart and for your own grief.
But then also to have this community now of like people who you know are receiving your work but not just that but many of them are grieving people or people who are like emotionally tuned in or people who just value art made from a real place.
Of of this has actually happened to me of nonfiction place as opposed to fiction place.
It makes a huge difference of like who your work is going out to should you choose to share it it's one thing to put your work out to the masses is another thing to place it into the hands of people who are happy or excited to receive it or just like grateful to receive it.
And I want to nudge on this for people who are listening who might be early in their grief to what Tyler picked up on is that I had this as well especially in the first few years after my mom died I felt like I had no community that felt like this.
And there was kind of a bit of and I didn't even really consciously know I was doing this but I was like holding out to relate to people later and when I started forming those relationships not just through writing about grief some about writing through grief but some about just like looking more for people who also experience losses in the real world that weren't like connected to me professionally.
And just like asking better or different questions about people's histories or like what they were interested in or what they loved or who formed them what's your memorial tattoo about tell me more about that is one of my favorite openings because I'm like if it's on your body you might you might want to talk about it not everybody wants to talk about their tattoos but I just got better noticing the grief in the world and asking about it and then like relationships grew up from there.
But there is this a get the beginning for a community that gets it and also there's such an appreciation for when that community comes down the road it's like this is what I've been waiting for.
And so if you're in that early place of course connect with my work connect with Tyler's because you will find community in in both of our homes on the internet respectively.
But also there can be a bit of like a delayed community effect like those first few months years can feel extraordinarily lonely and also especially with the way the world has changed now in the world of podcasts and online grief support and audiobooks and things that like grief support on demand.
Community is coming together faster than ever but yeah this sense of it takes a little bit of time and focus to recalibrate the humans who are supporting you in the world and who end what you feel supported by because it's not always the same as who and what you felt supported by before your loss whether that's the death of a person or a divorce or a diagnosis or anything else that's changed your life as you've said.
Tyler want to give you a second to promo and plug your work obviously the book is dancing at the pity party it's still in print and my favorite part of it and I won't I won't share any pages of the book because I want people to go get it themselves but my favorite thing about Tyler's work is like the exaggeration of facial expressions.
In everything it's like I you know stepped on a Lego or like okay we'll show one but there's just like an ahh in the top left hand corner here but there's just like the way that you draw yourself experiencing a range of different emotions I'm like oh I've been there too I have also felt like a disemaguire cartoon character in my own brain.
That's what my art feels like oh my god yeah I'm like such a quiet private person and I feel like the way I am inside of my head is like wow so it comes out in my art but yes the dancing of the pity party is out it's in paperback now and then I
post comics I started this thing I was doing mood tober in October I was like I'm gonna do a journal comic about a different mood for a bunch of days in October and then my dad went into hospice in November and the whole thing just like fell apart so I've been just continuing to do it now I've done like a handful and it's may of the next year so
I'm pretty great for keeping it real loose but I occasionally post comics on my Instagram which is @tylerfetter and I also have a children's book bodies are cool that just came out in a board book format 10 days ago and I'm very excited about it it's it has the dreaded trans representation and it's so lots of
republicans paid it and makes me happy to bring yes one I love the idea you mentioned this in your post on Instagram you're like it's a board book now so you can like put it in your mouth or throw it across
like it's a kids book and so it's like you can be rough with it now without it being destroyed like the the first edition of bodies are cool it's like you could totally tear some pages out of that and you probably never see them again.
Yeah I love it and it's one of my favorite books about just like kind of like grief humans come in all sorts of iterations and shapes and sizes and and manifestations and instead of looking at that and being like why is that weird you look at that and say isn't that neat and it's just it's just a reframe of how fantastic it is to have a body here yeah so dancing at the pity party and bodies are cool absolutely add them to your bookshelf give them to a friend.
Well Tyler thank you so much for coming on grief grower to talk about the calendar and grief dates and anxiety and what it's like to draw your way through grief I'm really glad to have had you here today.
Thank you so much for having me.
That's all for this episode of grief grower thank you so much for joining me here today if you're looking for grief support beyond this show you can find free workshops blog articles and quizzes at shall be for sithia.com/links
If this podcast with Tyler felt validating comforting educational or otherwise helpful to you please 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.
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Grief growers hosted by yours truly Shelby for Sithia with theme music by Addy Goldstein until next time grief growers 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.
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