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 lost my oldest daughter, age 25 a few months ago and I'm struggling
with a couple of things.
She struggled with her mental health for a few years but after finally getting a good
diagnosis she was doing well and it really felt like 2024 would be her year.
She had about six months of doing well before she died of an unexplained stroke.
How cruel that she fought so hard through multiple breakdowns, hospitalizations and losing
her dream job and was beginning to create a new life when she died.
She was just getting her feet under her and starting to find a new dream for herself.
It's so unfair she didn't get to complete that turn into the new life she was creating.
I feel extremely guilty for feeling some sense of freedom from the daily check-ins
and interpreting her tone and responses to see if she was starting to take a bad turn
or not taking her meds.
I kept paid time off and savings in case I needed to drop everything and make sure she
got the care she needed if she crashed again.
I feel a sort of emotional release because now I'm no longer second-guessing whether or
not everything she did was a manic episode and the beginning of a downward spiral or if
she was being 25 and living carefree and happy as she should be able to do.
How can I feel relief when my baby is gone?
When she didn't get to live her full adult life we'd always assumed she'd have.
She wanted so badly to be a mom and we talked about how she could manage that by building
support systems and so on.
She had a great boyfriend and was talking about how to manage a relationship with mental
illness.
At times I'd feel overwhelmed by the prospect of her struggling with mental illness her entire
adult life the future stretched out ahead of her.
How often would she want to stop her meds, spiral and then have to get back on them?
How would the hormones of pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum affect her?
If she stayed close by I could be on hand as much as necessary and be able to see how
she was doing.
These are thoughts I would have about her future, living with mental illness and its cyclical
roller coaster.
I feel like a horrible person and I can't wrap my head around the fact I won't see her or
hug her or hear her laugh again until it's my time.
I'm realizing I've been living my life in the margins sitting on standby when she needed
me for two years and now I don't need to.
I hadn't realized I'd set my life on hold to such a great degree.
My mother was never there for me even when I asked for help.
I have no memory even as a child of trusting her or of her comforting me.
So it's extremely important to me that my girls always know I'm there.
It's the drive behind my mothering decisions even now that they're adults.
I never wanted them to question if they needed mom, I'd be there.
But now I can take a trip and not worry that my daughter will have an episode without
me nearby.
I can spend that money I set aside or just take a paid day off for myself and not worry
whether I'll need to take PTO later to take care of her.
I feel so guilty and ashamed that I feel relief and freedom from this aspect of my daughter's
life.
Her dying means that her care does not need to be managed in some part by me for the rest
of my life.
I'd trade it all to have her back but the feeling is still present and I can't seem to
reconcile it.
She cared so much about other people and wanted people to be happy and cared for.
I know she wouldn't want me to feel this way but I can't shake the thoughts from ashamed
to be relieved.
Hi there, ashamed to be relieved.
I can feel the back and forth the pendulum swinging side to side in this letter that you've
written, your massive, massive grief and pain and heartache at the unfair, unjust, too soon,
death of your daughter from something not even tied to her mental illness.
And also your relief in this, in this lightning of a load, this freedom of not needing to
spend so much of your time and energy devoted to monitoring where she was in the world, how
she was in the world and who she was showing up as in the world.
Grief is so incredibly full of paradoxes.
It's like mind numbing.
Sometimes how many things are true in grief and for you I hear just a few relief and agony,
a sense of freedom and a sense of feeling trapped by the guilt or by the shame of the feeling
free, the injustice of your daughter's death and the awful reality that we're all going
to die and we have no idea when you are living in the middle of it all.
I want to invite you.
As you do your best to reconcile these thoughts to make as much room in your brain and your
heart and your soul if you feel that's applicable to you for both and for as many am's as you can
stand to hold.
I feel so much grief that she is not here.
I feel so much agony that I will never get to hold her again or listen to the sound of
her laugh or hear the sound of her voice or be beside her on the couch.
I feel so much relief and freedom and not needing to keep eyes and ears on her on the phone
on the text, the check ins.
I feel so much shame for feeling relief.
Shouldn't it all just be a hundred percent grief all the time maybe?
Usually not for most people though but I invite you a shame to be relieved.
To picture each of these emotional statements, I feel this, I feel that, I feel this, I feel
that as individual entities maybe as as books or juggling balls or I don't know articles
of clothing and see how many you can hold metaphorically.
See how many you can wear at one time because underneath those books, underneath those balls,
underneath those clothes, you are still you, you are the container where all of these
emotions are happening and one of the great challenges of grief is expanding yourself
big enough and it feels like real-ass growing pains especially in the early days to hold
all of the things that are now true for you.
Truths are heavy and grief brings you a whole heck of a lot of them and so carry these all
at once right now because they are suddenly all true all at once and goodness it takes such
a long time in such repeated practice to hold all of these things together and my etymology
nerd brain etymology is the meaning of words has to pause for a second on the word reconcile.
Re, the root re, re means to go back or to go back again like to revert or to rewind so
to reconcile con means to bring together or to bring along with to reconcile something
is to bring things together over and over and over and over again and I don't know a shame
to be relieved if you're into what my wife and I call string sports knitting crocheting
embroidering weaving but I often picture the art of reconciliation, the act of reconciliation
of weaving something together or a lot of some things together over and over and over
again it is a repetitive motion not because there's something wrong with you but because
reconciling is simply a lot of work to be done and it is done on repeat.
I anticipate that you will be holding some semblance of these feelings for the rest of
your life.
The trick is in reconciliation to not make them agree with each other it's not like cake
batter where you're stirring everything together and eventually it becomes one unit.
These feelings can't necessarily be broken up and blended in a blender or mixing bowl they
may never become one thing.
They may always be their own individual threads in this larger piece that you are weaving
but again just like you held all the books just like you hold all the balls just like you
wear all the articles of clothing the foundation underneath all of that is that you are still
here.
You are the container the vessel that is containing and holding all of these things to be true and
that is the balancing act of holding paradox and grief.
Another thing I want to offer you is the distinction between guilt and shame and disappointment.
This is something we talk about in life after loss academy because so many grieving people
come to me and say I feel so guilty about this element of my grief story in particular
and I notice you wrote it in your letter a couple of times too is I feel so guilty for feeling
relief in my daughter's death and I wonder and you signed off this way if what you're actually
feeling is shame.
Because shame okay let's start with guilt actually guilt is I did something bad.
I went against some moral code some ethical code some legal code.
The example that the author Bernay Brown often uses is I took a candy bar from the store
when I was a kid and I knew it was wrong and I felt guilt about that I broke some sort of
societal or written down rule some agreed upon way that we are humans together I broke a
rule and I feel guilty about an action that I took.
A lot of people use the word guilt to describe what they're feeling in grief but most of
the time through some definition through some more word nerdery we can see that what most
griebers are feeling is either shame or disappointment.
So shame what you signed off as a shame to be relieved is a belief that you are bad as
a person.
This is heartbreaking in grief because a lot of times society tells us that because we
feel paradoxes because grief is not a hundred percent mourning or a hundred percent despair
that they're not here or a hundred percent longing that there's something wrong with
us and we should be ashamed of how we feel.
When in fact grief is a very very very complex beast.
In my own mother's death I felt sadness yeah but if I had to put it on a pie chart anger
it was at least 50 percent.
I was mad that she died in the middle of a fight and I was pissed that I would never ever
get to have my say.
I was also relieved to see her out of pain.
Relieved that I didn't have to fight her anymore in life and wouldn't have to feel the
anguish she pointed in my direction with her words and her actions.
I was also grieving for a future that I didn't even know was coming.
Grieving for our past together and her role as a historian and also grieving intangible
things like a sense of home and my role as her daughter and the thing that we called family.
The four of us as a whole unit together there was a lot in there besides a hundred percent
sadness.
And kind of like you I felt shame for not being able to adhere to society's expectation
of grief which is this person was so great and in their death we feel all sad.
It's a nice story for a movie for a TV show but in real life we know things are different.
I want to discuss one more definition with you though because I wonder if we might
shift some of what you refer to as shame to disappointment.
And I know disappointment feels like maybe too small of an emotion to describe what you're
feeling but disappointment is simply I expected things to go one way and they went another.
I had expectations and reality slammed a frigging door in my face.
And the author Bernay Brown says that the weight of disappointment is equal to the weight of
expectation.
You expected your daughter to live longer.
You expected her to continue to struggle with mental illness.
You both expected her to become a mother to live a full joyful life.
You expected to always be able to be there for her in life.
You expected to constantly be setting aside time and money to tend to her to keep watch,
to be a sort of century over her, a mother over her to offer that protection from nearby.
You expected things to be different.
And in feeling disappointment you are grieving all the ways that all of those expectations
have been shattered and we also set expectations of ourselves as grievers.
I expected to feel sad.
I expected to miss her at a hundred percent.
I expected to look at my paid time off, to look at my savings accounts with resentment not
relief.
I expected to only feel agony at her absence.
Not relief that she's out of pain and out of the suffering, the mental anguish that
she felt.
So to have our expectations, meet reality and grief too can also be a kind of disappointment.
We can be disappointed by how the loss went, how everything unfolded, and we can also be
disappointed by how we are expressing our grief.
So I'm not going to tell you you're disappointed.
And I'm not going to tell you that you're full of shame.
I want you to decide what that experience is for you.
Are you ashamed to be relieved?
Are you disappointed that your daughter died the way she is and relief is a byproduct of
that?
Or is it some mixture of both?
Is there I am 80 percent ashamed and I am 20 percent disappointed you decide and it
may change by the day.
It may change by the hour.
But I invite you to see yourself through slightly more compassionate goggles.
Of I am not a bad person for feeling this way.
I am disappointed, so fearfully, massively disappointed in how this all unfolded.
I want to offer you another thing to ashamed to be relieved.
You never called yourself this in your letter.
But you were a caregiver to your daughter.
Maybe not in the hospice end of life sense.
Maybe not in the bedside sense.
Maybe not in the I anticipatory grief for them because they had a terminal to diagnosis
sense.
But in the sense that you were on call, you were monitoring, you were on standby.
You set aside time, money, energy to tend to your daughter with a mental illness.
That is taking a caregiver role and holding a caregiver role in her life.
I hope, I hope, I hope if nothing else from this podcast that you will research, do a Google
caregiver resources specifically about the relief of feeling unburdened or feeling free.
One loved one dies, but also the mourning that takes place and the shame or the self hatred
of feeling relief in their death.
This is an experience that so many caregivers have, whether they're related to the person
who died, they're married to the person who died, they're a friend of the person who died,
they're a medical professional.
For the person who died, there is a very unique and specific experience of being a caregiver
in any fashion.
Physically, mentally, emotionally, logistically, spiritually.
For someone who died, the agony of witnessing their death, of grieving the fact they are no longer
here and being so relieved that they're suffering and your devotion to that suffering, to caretaking
for that suffering, has come to an end.
Both are true and there are so many incredible articles and YouTube videos and speakers and
grief professionals and books if you're up for reading at the moment that speaks specifically
to the grief of relief as a caregiver and I want you to refer to yourself as that and
I hope you feel permission to attach that label to yourself, especially as you continue
to grief.
The last thing I want to say, and this is with reference to how you spoke about your own
mother, how she was not there for you, even when you asked for help.
And I don't know where this is coming from, so this may be a sort of blessing from your
daughter by way of me.
I would like to think of it as that, but these are the words that came to me specifically
for you.
Mom, you have completed the mission.
You have completed the mission for your daughter in life on earth.
You broke the cycle of abandonment that your mother passed down to you in a single generation.
Shit like this sometimes takes multiple generations to reverse, to heal, to come to some semblance
of goodness and my God, you did it in one generation.
I deeply want you to be proud of that.
You were there for your daughter until her dying day.
You devoted time, energy, money, resources.
I imagine sleepless nights.
I imagine busy, hectic, distracted days.
Or your job as a mother was notice my daughter.
Keep track of my daughter, tend to my daughter, be a mother to my daughter.
And for her life on earth, you have completed the mission.
You guided her into a good life.
I know it was cut short.
And you can continue to be a mother to her in death.
One of my favorite interviews I ever did happened.
I'm going to guess 2017, 2018 with somebody named Emily Ruth, whose twins died.
And she talked about how motherhood doesn't end when your babies die.
No matter how old they are, something you might ask yourself going forward is how can I continue
to mother my daughter beyond her time on earth?
Can I create space for her in my home?
Can I talk with her through letters or through voice notes?
Or even by creating some sort of ritual with her sister?
Can I have a day or a week even with that PTO, with those savings that I take off in her
honor?
Grief vacations are a very real thing.
How can I carry her forward in a way that I know she would like to be carried?
You might consider the ways that she needs you differently in death.
Then she did in life.
She may require less of your time, money, and energy than she did in life, but she still
needs you.
You might imagine how you can use your resources as a mom because you are still her mom to
offer her mothering from where you are on planet earth.
As you said, until you meet again.
So if that's something that you believe in or something that resonates with you, that
is how you can continue to take that mission of motherhood forward into the future.
So a shame to be relieved.
My hope for you is that the shame, lightens, softens, maybe gets fuzzy around the edges.
I hope you feel more permission to hold all of your grief things together in one place
with no pressure for them to mix because remember reconciliation is about going back and bringing
things together over and over and over again.
Not about forcing them to agree with each other or to blend into one thing, but to coexist
together both and both and both and both and.
I hope you will perceive of yourself as a caregiver and seek out resources in that vein
many local places and online places offer resources for caregivers who are grieving and
dealing with that complex emotion of relief.
And I hope that you will pause and recognize how you have broken a generational cycle in a
single generation and find creative ways to carry your mothering actions and intentions
forward into the future with you.
I am so, so glad you wrote to me and I wish you the very best of 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 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.