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.
My wife Sarah died by suicide 12 weeks ago.
Her death wasn't entirely unexpected.
She struggled for years with borderline personality disorder and a chronic physical condition.
She fought hard to get help for her illnesses, but after countless failed treatments her pain
became too much.
On some level her passing has been a relief because I know she's no longer suffering.
I can't tell you how many nights I held her hand while she cried knowing there was nothing
more I could do to ease her pain except just be there.
But even though I can rationalize it, the emotional and physical loss of her presence is unbearable.
Sarah was my soulmate and my best friend.
We built a world together that no one else was a part of.
Little things that just belonged to us, like how she always knew she could cheer me up by
putting on our wedding song and asking me to dance or how we trade off bringing coffee to
each other in the morning based on who got up first.
Those things haunt me because they're gone too.
I've tried staying connected with her family.
We share memories via text and WhatsApp often, which brings some comfort.
She was a big believer in after-death signs and I've noticed a few unexplainable things
that I chalk up to her pulling some strings in the afterlife.
Knowing she's still around in some way helps me in the moment, but for the most part the
emptiness I feel remains.
I guess I'm just really realizing that no one will ever take her place.
I miss everything about her from our deep bond to how physically attracted I was to her.
The whole grief thing really sucks and I don't know how long it'll take to have what I had
with my wife with someone else.
Much less feel whole again.
And soulmate in limbo.
Hi there, soulmate in limbo.
Thank you so much for writing this letter to me.
And I am so sorry and so sad that this is the way that your wife's time on this earth ended.
I wholeheartedly hear you that there is a relief in her death because it seemed like her life
was full of a lot of pain.
And this is true for a lot of people who die by suicide.
I remember on another podcast I hosted way back when 2017 to 2020, I spoke with somebody
named Cindy Klinger whose father died in a similar way and there were almost warning signs
that this was how he would go.
But that doesn't make the pain of grief or the fact that grief exists any easier.
So know that my heart really goes out to you even if you can see it coming.
It does not make the pain of her death hurt any less.
And I'm just really sad that in whatever ways society, our medical system, whatever circumstances
surrounded her life, it sounds like there were things that could not help her in ways that
maybe they should have or could have.
And that's just always hard and sad.
The uncertainty of that and then the finality of it is absolutely a thing worth grieving.
I want to focus my response to your letter on your last paragraph.
This paragraph about recognizing that nobody can ever take Sarah's place and your right,
the thing I'm going to tell you is your right.
I think there may be a lot of people in your life, sometimes in TV and movies and even
in music that talk about finding love again or falling in love again or having somebody
come in and fill the hole in your heart and call me biased because of my own losses.
But I just simply cannot and have never agreed with that.
That has never resonated with me.
And I want to see if this metaphor aligns with what you're feeling right now because if
it does, it might be something that you can take forward with you.
I hope that you can release the pressure that you feel to have what you had with Sarah
with somebody new because here's the metaphor I want to share with you.
You and your wife planted, cultivated, grew, weathered the seasons of a beautiful and
expansive garden together.
This garden metaphorically of your relationship that you tended and that you repaired and that
you weathered through hard seasons and that you watched grow and spill over with beautiful
harvests and that you sat up with through the night when the birds stopped singing and
the flowers were drawn in for the night and all you knew was the frozenness of winter and
pain in these dark nights of the soul.
All of those seasons, this garden, this relationship that you cultivated together is still
a place that you can go and visit.
It's sometimes even still a place where new things can be planted as you find ways to
remember your wife and death.
As she sends you signs and symbols from the afterlife, those are things that can be planted
and grown all their own.
There's a whole theory called continuing bonds that speaks about how we maintain and continue
and grow in deep in relationships with people who have died and these are things you can
add to that garden that you grew with Sarah in life.
But to find what you had again with her, with somebody else, implies that there is a way
to essentially copy and paste this garden in your life.
To take as my wife would say the all of the everything that you built together and just
poof, reproduce it in another relationship, in another location.
And you definitely don't want to replace this garden that you built with Sarah because
to do so would imply that you go into that garden and tear up and rip up and uproot everything
that you build only to try to plant and grow new things in that soil that was intended for
and created by just the two of you.
Let that garden exist and continue to exist and keep growing and keep thriving and please
go back and visit it.
I know that she waits for you there.
I get chills saying this because I believe that that is a space in your world and your life
and your heart that she can still inhabit safely, holy.
You use this word about feeling whole again, W-H-O-L-L-Y.
She lives in that space all of her.
And all of you, you live in that space too.
And together that garden is a metaphorical representation of your wholeness as two people
who came together to be one thing in relationship.
You cannot compare that garden to any garden that you might cultivate with somebody new.
Partially because this person will be different, they will have their own joys and heartaches,
their own loves and losses.
You will have different dynamics, different plants, different conflicts, different seasons,
different storms that you weather together.
There may be things that you can cultivate from one garden to another, lessons that Sarah
taught you, bits and pieces of those can be snipped off and planted in this new place.
Look at this wonderful thing that my wife taught me that I can bring into this new relationship.
You may even find that some things get cross-pollinated.
Little bees and butterflies visit Sarah's garden and come over into this new one to create
new species and new varieties of flowers that bloom with her touch and your relationship
as magic behind them.
That's a possibility.
But you cannot compare these two gardens.
This new one you will start from scratch whenever you are ready, whenever that happens for
you, whenever that moment in your life comes when you feel prepared or sufficiently healed
enough and that bar is different for everyone to begin doing that work and it is work to
grow and cultivate a metaphorical garden with somebody else.
Some language that you might apply to this new garden, to this new relationship is one
that I often hear in stepfamilies and that is bonus when kids have a mom and then their
parents get divorced and dad marries a new woman.
Sometimes they call her bonus mom.
In this instance you might consider this new garden that you cultivate with another person,
a bonus garden.
If we are lucky, if we are looking for love in our lifetimes, we get one really beautiful
garden.
When we lose someone we love and we feel sufficiently healed enough to try again, sometimes we get
the gift of a bonus garden and it can be a beautiful thing.
It is beautiful in an entirely different flavor than the garden we had with our person who
died and what the cool thing is is that you are not limited to your access to Sarah's garden
just because you are cultivating another.
It is like you can't be barred from the art museum simply because you are also now going
to this symphony.
You get to experience this new kind of art, this new kind of co-mingling, this new kind
of partnered dance while also holding memories and remembering lessons and taking things with
you from this old garden it will still produce bountiful and beautiful things for you.
That's what it means to have Sarah's life come with you into the future.
The things that you planted will produce fruit metaphorically in your life for the rest
of yours and whether or not you choose to grow a new garden with somebody else is up to
you and up to them.
But the fruits of what you grew with Sarah will keep enhancing and enriching your life for
years and years to come.
That is what I know for sure for you.
In terms of this question, will I ever feel whole again?
I think as humans we can experience different kinds of wholeness.
There is a wholeness we experience entirely by ourselves.
There is a wholeness we experience in partnership with others.
And there is a wholeness we experience when we hold all of it again as my wife says all
of the everything together.
When we stretch our arms wide enough to embrace the entirety of our lives all in one place
you are the place where the love has happened.
You are also the place where the grief has happened.
And to honor both of those things all at once at the same time and the same breath even
in the brokenness of grief and feeling so discombobulated and torn apart, there is a wholeness
in acknowledging that.
I am the sight of all of this love and care and I am also the sight of all of this grief
and pain and all of that together is in and of itself a kind of wholeness.
So soulmate in limbo, I believe that you are whole right now.
I believe that you were whole in a different way with Sarah.
I believe that you will be whole again in the future with someone else should you choose
that path to grow that new garden, that bonus garden in your life.
You can be whole with friends, you can be whole with family, you can be whole with pets,
and you are already whole just as you are.
You are not wrong that no one can replace her and you are not wrong that this grief thing
really sucks.
But I know that what you have grown will keep growing, it has not vanished into the ether.
You are attending to it right now as you live and grieve and you will grow new things as
you continue to grow forward.
Every one of us who has ever grieved does.
We must.
As we live we grieve and as we grieve we grow.
You are not alone in that garden.
That's all for this episode of Dear Grave Guide.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
If you are feeling lost, stuck, heartbroken or overwhelmed in the midst of your own grief,
check out my free workshop Grow Through Grief, three ways to stop feeling stuck and start moving
forward.
I will 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
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 is performed by Eddie Goldstein, editing by Eddie Goldstein.