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, I miss my friend Elle every single day.
We were friends for 15 years, met in college and we just clicked.
It was that special friendship where we didn't have to talk every day or week but we knew
the other was a phone call away.
Even when Elle moved hours away and we only saw each other once a year, our friendship
stayed strong.
How was that friend you don't always get in life?
She would do anything for me and I for her.
We would surprise each other with a visit to the other's town or a card in the mail.
We have seen all sides of each other.
She's even seen an ugly side of me that even my wife hasn't seen.
She is the person I call when something big happens, good or bad.
We never judged each other and we always supported the other through the good and bad.
I never took her for granted but I just expected 30 plus more years of friendship and now I feel
alone.
I have a wife and a child.
I have other friends, even ones that get close to what Elle and I had but I still feel lost
and scared at times.
What if something happens to my marriage or my child?
Who will I call?
Who will drop everything to come help me?
Elle was my safety net and I was hers and now I feel lost.
I don't know how to move on.
I desperately want another Elle in my life but it hurts to know it probably won't happen.
Not only is it hard to make friends in your late 30s but I do truly believe our friendship
is a once in a lifetime thing and not everyone gets that kind of friendship.
I love you Elle and I miss you every day.
I will try to make you proud in the profession we shared and I will try to always be the
positive and welcoming person you were.
I will find missing my best friend.
Hi there missing.
I know this loss in some capacity.
I'll never talk to anyone who writes a letter in on this show and say I know exactly how
you're feeling because I don't think that that's possible.
Even though we experience so many of the same relationship losses as other people, even
people we've never met before, letter writer you and I have never met.
You both experience the devastating loss of a friend.
I cannot know entirely how you feel because your relationship to Elle is different than my
relationship to my friend.
Dammy.
What I can tell you is this friendship loss and the loss the death of friends is underrepresented
grossly underrepresented, especially in Westernized society which at this time, at the time
of this recording, totally, totally, totally prioritizes and values, family ties above chosen
family, even an especially in our legal system.
You just take one quick look at who you are allowed to take time off to grieve in bereavement
policy in what is written into law in this country and you see where our values lie.
You see it also in healthcare decisions at end of life who you are allowed to make or
appoint as somebody who makes significant and important medical decisions for you.
There's a quote that's tossed around a lot that blood is thicker than water, but that's
not the full thing.
I don't know if you've heard this before missing, but it's not blood is thicker than water.
It's the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.
I.E.
The bonds that we choose for ourselves are stronger than the ones that are forged by
biology that we are born into.
Our friendships, the relationships that we mindfully choose to construct and participate
in, are often so much stronger and so much deeper than the relationships that we are assigned
by default, by the families and ancestry that we are born into.
I do not want to shivercoat this for you so I'm not going to.
You are correct.
You will never have another friend like out.
Just like I will never have another best friend like the friend that I had and when I
really seriously think about that, it hurts.
It wounds my soul on a cellular level to know that all I had of her is all I will ever have
of her because she died and I sense the same is true for you.
What I can tell you is this.
You will see glimpses of her in other people, but also in yourself.
One of my favorite authors who I've mentioned on this show at least once if not twice before
is Caleb Wilde and there's a chapter in his book, Confessions of a Funeral Director where
he talks about a child who dies and the people who come together to tell stories about her
life.
He writes this line or he expands on this metaphor that we are all mosaics of each other.
We can never bring back somebody we love who died, but if we put enough of us in the same
room together telling stories about them sometimes we can see just a glimpse of who they were,
even if these people never knew that person in life, even if they are new to our circle,
even if you met them after El's death is what I'm saying.
So something that might be helpful to you as you think about strengthening friendships
you already have that remind you of the one you had with El or seeking out new friendships
is making a list of your favorite qualities about her.
I'm thinking things like loyalty, safety net, always available to phone call just having
that sense of shared vulnerability and shared life together, maybe even sharing the same
profession.
Co-workers can make great friends, especially when they start off as cooperative or collaborative
co-workers.
At first we spent so much of our lives at work.
It might be valuable to you to find somebody else who was in a similar profession who you
can share your life with in the way that you did without.
I want you to know that it's normal to feel lost and scared.
After the death of a friend it is unmooring in ways that other losses are not especially
because friends act as these sort of third party witnesses to our lives.
They don't have a stake in the game from a familiar or biological perspective, but they
have a stake in the game because they've chosen to.
Again, it's that chosen family versus biological family thing.
They are in our lives because they choose to be and witnessing all of our milestones,
all of our character flaws and character gifts and everything in between.
It is truly a blessing to be witnessed in that way and to have lost her.
I hear you is extremely disorienting and reminds you that yeah, you live in a world where
anything can happen at any time to anyone.
And when it comes to feeling safe in the world again because without the safety net I get
the sense that you are an infinite free fall, perpetual falling.
Your focus in this season if I can give you a bit of homework is to be getting grounded,
seeing yourself as the one source of consistency in your life because that you can guarantee.
Everyone else in your life like you mentioned in your letter, your wife, your kids, maybe
even your profession, your future friendships, even if they remind you of L, those things
can fall away.
Everythings can fade away but what is consistent through your entire life, through all of your
losses, through all of your victories, through all of your successes, through all of your
milestones, that thing is you.
And so to ground with you at the center, it's not selfish, it's not self-absorbed, it's
not exclusive.
In any capacity it is very grounding to recognize I am the consistent thing in my life and coming
at your future, at your present and your future from that perspective is enormously helpful
and reorienting to the world again after devastating loss.
Now I want to ask you some reflection questions missing about your friend L. You can journal
about these, you can think about these, you can fall asleep pondering them, you can take
a voice memo of your responses to these, you can write down something about them now and
then revisit these questions in the next six months.
But I want you to allow her life and her memory to be able to come with you into the future.
Some of these may feel hard or scary to answer some of them maybe incredibly easy.
Here we go.
Number one.
In what ways did L show you how to live?
Number two.
What gifts did L give you?
Number three.
If you believe in this sort of thing, what strings do you think that L might be pulling
on the other side or in the afterlife?
Number four.
How would you like to carry L with you?
Or set another way? How do you bring a small piece of L into your life every day?
And finally, how would you like to make sure that your connection to L stays strong?
There's a model in grief support spaces called Continuing Bonds Theory.
And it basically, hypothesizes, shows that people grieve better when we continue bonds with
people we love who have died, even if the conversation is one sided, even if we're doing
most or all of the talking.
I want to know how you are continuing to bond yourself to L, not just by looking into
the past and reminiscing about old memories and grieving for what you lost.
So that is a form of continuing bonds, but transmuting that energy, that friendship, that glorious
time that she gave you, and that you had with her, that you gave her, you gave her a huge,
huge chunk of your life.
How do you take that and let it inform how you go forward?
And if you're having any struggles with this, if you want a roadmap to guide you here,
missing, I encourage you so strongly to join us in life after loss academy.
You will meet like-minded people who know what it is to grieve a friend, including myself.
I will show you tools for getting grounded for making yourself the source of consistency.
I can teach you ways to integrate L's life into your life so that the bonds continue on.
And I can show you how to foster a beautiful, whatever that means to you, long term relationship
with grief so that grief no longer feels like something you're fighting or something you
need to get over and move on from, but something that can come with you into the future and be
a part of your life in a way that informs how you'd like to live.
When taking grief into the long term I often refer to it as grief moving from your focus,
the only thing you can see, the thing that's staring you in the face, to slowly sinking
to your foundation.
Grief and loss and love and relationship being the thing you stand on, as you begin to
move forward.
This is what you can do with your friendship to hell.
There is no way she will ever be absent from your life.
You both made damn sure of that, that you are tied to each other.
Now then always forever into the future, amen, amen, amen, religiously or not, whichever
one resonates with you, the question now is, now that her death is true.
What will you do with the rest of your life?
And it can seem so overwhelming, I hear you for that decision making and that power and
that control and that determination, what's next to be entirely in your hands.
But the good news is you can take it one step at a time.
You do not have to have it figured out tonight, one of my favorite quotes from Morgan Harper
Nichols.
You do not have to figure it all out tonight.
And you also have so many people in your life, it sounds like your wife, your child, friendships
that are similar in some ways to hell.
Friendships you have yet to make that are here to scaffold and support you as you find
your way.
I'm thinking of you.
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.
Free 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'll 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.