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 nine weeks since my cousin and aunt were taken from this
earth.
I still can't say they died.
The words dead, death, and killed make me sick to my stomach.
I loved them dearly and I still can't believe they're gone.
Today in therapy I expressed how everything feels wrong, like I'm living in an awful
episode of Black Mirror where something insidious is lurking below the pretty picture
of normal reality I see around me.
My therapist suggested I start to grow a life around my grief, asking me to consider
that it might be possible to build something that feels right in the midst of everything
feeling wrong.
But the thing is, I'm terrified.
Terrified that stepping back into the world and doing things like hanging out with friends
at places my cousin and aunt and I used to go are even forming new connections will make
me lose the small details, the quirks, mannerisms, and precious moments I want to hold on to so
desperately.
I don't want to forget the way my cousin lit up when she heard Beyoncé on the radio, or
the sloping curve of my aunt's beautiful cursive.
I don't want to forget their signature mac and cheese surprise or their shared love of
colorful scrunchies.
I am so, so afraid of forgetting them.
I understand I can't wallow an isolation forever, but engaging with the world feels overwhelming
without the two of them here with me.
I feel like I have to choose between my past, with them, and my future without them.
As if by moving on, I'm signing a contract where each day my memory of them grows fainter
and fainter until my brain is too full of the new to remember the old.
Have you ever had this fear, grief guide?
How did you navigate it?
I'm desperately seeking a way to preserve my memories while still moving forward.
I'm open to your advice, clinging to my memories.
Hello there, clinging.
I see you in your fear, and your pain, and just the terror of losing more than you have
already lost.
There is the physical loss of losing their bodies and their voices and making eye contact
with them across the room and being able to stand in pictures with them.
There is all of that that you lose, but there is also the mental, the emotional, the spiritual,
the connections that you shared, all the memories that you have with your aunt and with your
cousin that you are almost anticipatory, grieving.
You are anticipating in moving forward and whatever way makes sense to you, I will begin to
lose the things that feel so close and so precious and so accessible right now.
I get that.
I read that so clearly in every word of your letter.
And here's the hard truth.
There are many hard truths in grief, and this is one of them.
You cannot stop the passage of time.
And with time passing, often comes some measure of forgetting in living further away day by
day from the time when you knew them alive.
There are things that you do forget.
My mom died 10 years ago this past December and there are things about her that are fate
for me now.
It's hard for me to remember what her laugh sounded like.
I hear my laugh and I know it's close, but is it the same as hers?
I don't remember and there is a deep sense of mourning and soul distress for me in that.
I don't remember what her voicemail sounded like on our home phone.
I don't remember the exact year that she cut her hair.
And I don't remember how she held her pen when she wrote her own version of sloping cursive
just like you're aunt.
There are things that have faded for me and there is grief in that.
And I do not want to discount that fear that you have that the passage of time will mean
some sort of fading and forgetting.
And I want to offer you two things in response to your letter.
First, while they are fresh in your mind, I want you to write down everything you remember
about your cousin and your aunt, whether you buy a journal for each of them and fill the
pages, whether you have one place where you keep all of your memories of them like a
Google Drive or a Dropbox or a folder on your phone, a photographs or videos or voice
memos, anything that you shared together.
It can feel a lot like hoarding jewels like a greedy dragon when you're grieving, but
you know the preciousness of keeping all of these things so close to your heart.
When my very best friend Tammy died in 2022, one of the first things our friend group did
was create a Google Photos Drive where everyone dropped every photograph in every video they
had of her from the time she was a kid to up to a month before she died.
And I still have this folder on my phone and I still visit it on a very regular basis.
And it is something that brings me so much joy because seeing not just the photos I took
of her, but the pictures that other people took of her prompt these memories and these
moments of, oh, that was her favorite bracelet that she got from a friend or that was when
she traveled to this state to see her sister or there are just so many things that come
forward through just remembering pictures, not to mention the things I've written about
her or the bottle of perfume that I asked if I could take out of her bathroom so I can
still smell what it was like to her.
There are so many things that you can keep close to you and I encourage you to do so.
This is something I will not ask you to release.
And in fact, I will tell you to do the opposite. Hold on to everything you possibly have
access to of theirs that feels appropriate and so fulfilling to do so.
This is not a permission slip to leave the house unchanged or to hoard objects in a way
that hinders your life.
That is an aspect that sometimes appears in grief when people are afraid to release anything
at all.
Keep what feels really reminiscent of them and what you have access to.
Write down these memories, record these memories somewhere where you can have access to them
indeterminately and let those places be your treasure troves that you can visit whenever
you want these safe places that are like these jewelry boxes or these treasure chests for
your memories of them.
And as a bonus, I would encourage you to ask the people around you, people who also knew
your cousin and your aunt to contribute their own memories, objects, stories.
Do they have jewelry?
Do they have photos?
Do they have voice memos?
Do they have articles of clothing?
Do they have stories that you've never heard before?
I encourage you to maybe make this a personal project of yours, you're on a mission or you
can declare yourself, I am the family record keeper of memories of cousin A and aunt B.
I am the person who is gathering all of this.
So if you want a place for it, send it to me.
I am thrilled to hold on to it for you.
And almost as if you are curating a museum of their memories, it's a beautiful way to craft
a collection of things that will now and in the future be impossible to forget because
you have so much of them all in one place all at the same time.
The second thing I'll say, and this is the other thing I want to offer you in response to
your letter, is that in moving forward, you will have new connections, you will have new
experiences, you will have new events that you attend or milestones that you hit where
they are not present because they cannot be because they are gone.
And I encourage you in whatever way makes sense to you to invite them to show up.
Whether that's through signs and symbols, like seeing a cardinal or for me and my mom,
finding pennies on the ground, or inviting people who knew them to attend these things with
you or sharing them and their memories through stories, or inviting new people in your life
to look through these metaphorical or literal jewel boxes or treasure chests with you when
you feel safe enough to share these memories invite them to show up in the newness that
you are moving into by force because you must because time marches on and you can't stop
it.
And it's so frustrating and it's so hard.
And you are not caught in this trap of leaving the past in the past and having the future
be the future.
One of the most beautiful things you can do in grief and one of the few things you have
control and power over is how your past gets brought into the future with you.
And you can insist with every cell in your body that your aunt and your cousin are coming
with you, whether you wear a specific color and memory of them or a piece of jewelry or
you say a prayer to them every morning or do a meditation in their honor or or do a project
or run a marathon in their honor and then you meet new connections that way.
There are so many different ways to honor people that you love and to carry them with you
in spirit, in emotion, in mind, in body, into the present, into all of these new interactions
that your therapist is advising you to go off of.
There's a beautiful illustration that I love by the artist jar of salt and it says something
it's a bookshelf and it says something like grief day one and it's one giant black book
on a very empty bookshelf.
The next panel of the comic strip is something like grief day 642.
It's a random number but it is clear that time has passed and this black book on the shelf
has not moved but surrounding it are dozens of other new books that are placed around
this black book of grief.
The grief is not disappearing.
The grief is not stuck in the past.
The grief is present on this shelf in the future all of these memories you're creating,
all these experiences you're having, all of the milestones you're passing, all of the
new connections that you're forming, they are things that will slot into place around
your grief, around your cousin and your aunt and their importance to you and your life.
You can frame pictures of them and put them in your house.
You can wear their aprons every time you cook macaroni and cheese surprise.
You can share stories of them or write stories about them every time you choose to write
in cursive.
You can wear colorful scrunchies on special days.
You can carry them forward because that book of grief, that one that sits in the middle
of the shelf is your frame of reference is a sort of foundation for everything you will
build on top of in your life after loss.
So I invite you mentally, emotionally, spiritually, whatever you need to do, perhaps even physically,
safely to set fire to this contract that says you must leave the past in the past and the
future can only be the future where they are not here.
You do not have to live in a world where your memories grow fainter and fainter day by day
and where the new crowds out the old.
The old comes along for the journey.
The old informs the new.
In fact, the old, as you phrase it, is a foundation for everything that comes after loss.
It is the bedrock now on which you stand.
It is one of the things you know to be true, as you have a deep love of your cousin and
your aunt.
They are no longer here and you are living and must live in a world without them physically
present.
What will you do now?
I see your fear.
I hear your terror about moving forward and even I've got, I want to close with this even
in writing this letter.
You are sharing them in the future.
You are allowing your grief to come with you.
You are asking important questions about how they come along because you do not want to
forget.
It is not a clinging to memories.
It is an honoring of what was because what was matters more than anything as you step into
what is becoming.
I have faith in you.
That's all for this episode of Dear Grave Guide.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
If you are ready to start moving forward after a loss, consider joining my online course
in community, Life After a Loss Academy.
There, you will find video lessons you can work through at your own pace.
Weekly live calls where I take your questions and a welcoming community to talk about grief
with others who understand.
You can find the link to learn more and join today 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 listen.
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
shelbyforSythea.com.
Music for Dear Grave Guide is performed by Addy Goldstein, editing by Ruth Spence of
Sinivia.
Until next time, I see you.
I'm 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 Addy Goldstein, editing by Ruth Spence of Sinivia.
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