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 Farsithia.
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 grandfather passed during COVID and my family is getting ready to hold an in-person memorial
for him in February on the second anniversary of his death.
When he died, it felt too risky to get everyone together in person, especially my grandmother
and the older aunts and uncles.
Around the one year anniversary of his death, my sister had a baby with massive medical
complications and we chose to collectively support her instead of navigating the logistics
of intercontinental travel.
This year is the year though and my mom and her siblings have banded together to orchestrate
a full on celebration of life weekend.
Here's the thing though, I don't want to go to the funeral.
For a variety of reasons including emotional and physical abuse as well as a tendency towards
alcoholism and denial of bad behavior, I'm estranged from most of my family including
my grandfather who I lived with for eight unpleasant years of my childhood.
I've been getting constant messages from people, everyone from distant cousins to my grandfather's
old co-workers asking me if I'm going to the celebration of life.
I know that it would not serve me to go in any way so I say, "I'm not sure."
Then I'm met with messages like, "Oh it would be good for you to go" or your grandfather
would want you to be there.
I feel guilty for dodging their encouragement but I don't feel like I should have to constantly
explain to people why I'm not going.
My question is, what's the best way to respond to these messages?
I know my grandfather's close friends and family meanwhile but the dynamic between us has
so many layers.
If I went, I know I'd only be there because other people pressured me to go and I don't
think I can stand sitting in a room where people are, by and large, singing his praises
and grieving the fact that he is no longer with us.
I have a great, great support group and friends who've told me it's okay not to attend but
these constant messages from people who I haven't spoken to in many years are getting to be
too much.
Signed, "Od man out."
Hi there, "Od man out" and thank you so much for this letter because I think in the
grief space there is a lot of conversation about grieving loved ones.
There is less conversation about grieving less than loved ones, people who have heard us,
people who have done us wrong, people who have wounded us in ways that we do our best to
repair for the rest of our lives.
I think the first thing I'm picking up on in your letter is that you're certain.
You are certain that you do not want to go to the celebration of life for you.
It is not a celebration of his life.
It would be an instance where you show up as a part of a family and put on a face of wholeness
or togetherness or mourning that does not feel true or authentic to you.
I am not going to be a person that tells you you should go and that your grandfather would
want you there or that he would be proud or that it would be good for you because it
sounds very much like going to the celebration of life of someone who has wounded you deeply
in many ways.
Some that you've shared here, some that I imagine you have not.
It would not be healing for your heart.
It would not be restorative.
It would not be a place where your grief, your specific flavor of grief regarding your
specific relationship to your grandfather, would be welcome.
There is not a lot, this is sad to say and there is grief in this statement in and of itself,
but there is not a lot of room for complexity in memorials and celebrations of life and
funerals.
There is a large societal assumption that if you are attending a funeral, you deeply love
and miss the person who is no longer here.
And that saddens my heart because I think for so many grieving people, even for people
who would refer to somebody that they lost as a loved one, there is still complication
in every, in every relationship.
And I'm not sure this is a larger topic than I can get into today, but I would love
to see a world where there is space for complex relationships at memorials and funerals.
Whether we have specific rituals for that, whether we talk about the full picture of a deceased
person as opposed to honoring them as a saint who lived a perfect life because nobody lives
a perfect life, including me, I hope people talk about me honestly when I die.
Yes, this is, yeah, this is a whole other tangent, but I get the sense from how you speak
about what's being planned and who is pressuring you to go and why they're pressuring you
to go, that this is not a space where your grief would be welcome.
And I'm gonna, I'm gonna push on you a little bit, odd man out, because the way that you
are responding to these messages, I think, invites people to try to convince you to go to
these services.
So if your grandfather's old co-worker is texting you and saying, hey, are you gonna be there
at the celebration of life looking forward to seeing you and you say, I'm not sure what
that comes across as or what that can sound like to people who've sent you that message is,
oh, odd man out needs convincing that this would be good for them to go or that their grandfather
would want them there or that this would be healing or seeing all their friends and family
again or being in this space would be connecting or restoring.
So now it's on me as the person who asked if they're going to convince odd man out to go,
which is why you're getting these responses of, oh, it would be so good for you to go or
your grandfather would want you there or your mom needs your support or whatever other
logic people are tossing your way, whether actually logical or illogical to insist that
your presence be at this event.
So I'm gonna ask you to stop responding that way to these messages, stop saying, I'm not
sure.
You are very sure of what you want and why you want it.
That being said, you are not required to explain to anybody else why you're not going.
You do not have to get into and I'm gonna make up some stories for you here because I
don't know the full extent of your relationship to your grandfather, but you don't have to
respond to these messages with my grandfather was my greatest abuser in life.
He physically assaulted me.
He would get drunk and come home and do all these, this, that and the other like you do not
have to go into this is who your grandfather was to you and this was the extent of your
relationship.
You do not have to explain to other people why you are not going for two reasons.
One, because that in a lot of ways can feel like an invasion of your privacy and things
that maybe you're not ready to share with other people.
And two, because maybe you feel and this is something that I understand a lot of people
who are grieving toxic people abuser's and assholes are mindful of is you don't want to
take other people's relationships with the person who died.
So maybe your grandfather's co-worker had a great relationship with him and they, you know,
would go out after work and drive around and talk about life and maybe it was a fabulous
relationship and it would hurt them in some way to know the full extent of who your grandfather
was to you.
And maybe you don't want to be that bearer of bad news for that person.
You're like, I'm not willing to take on that role in this person's life.
And that's okay.
You do not have to be that bearer of bad news for somebody who had a good relationship
with your grandfather.
Something that's been remarkable to me as I have watched my aunts grieve my grandfather
is something that they shared with me after, after his death.
And then I knew my grandfather is, you know, kind of this like, this grumpy old man who was
really lovely and kind of routine oriented and playful and dirty joke telling, like fart
jokes with us as we were growing up and he'd always have kids cereal in the house and he would
take us out and show us his farm equipment and just enjoyed being a grumpy old grumpy
parent was his vibe.
And we didn't see him very often and he was a beloved part of my life and he died when
I was in the fifth grade.
And something I am hearing more of as I'm getting into my thirties, so this is more than,
more than 15 years later after his death.
My answer is sharing stories of their negative relationships with him.
As a father, he was not the greatest person in the world to that.
I won't go into too much detail, but the ways that he showed discipline and the ways he
failed to show love and ways that they needed to receive it are things that really hurt
them and things that they remember in years going forward.
And it was jarring to them.
They've told me to be at his funeral and to be surrounded by all these people he worked
with and all these people that he knew as distant relatives who, who just praised who he
was as a man for many people.
He was their greatest mentor or their confidant or the person who financially helped him out
when, when their farm was failing.
There were so many things that he did that made him a good person and a good man in the
eyes of so many people.
And yet my aunts, his own children, did not necessarily have that relationship with him.
And it's not that it's all or nothing.
It's not, it's not a hundred percent bad or a hundred percent good in this case in the
story of my family.
And I knew him as an entirely different person than my aunts did and as my mother did.
And I think there's just a lot of room and space here to acknowledge the complexity of
who, who people are to us.
But that's not your job to explain to everybody who's asking you if you're going to the celebration
of life.
So I want to give you an alternative.
Something you can say when people ask you, are you going to the celebration of life in
February?
You can say, no, I have found my own ways of honoring my grandfather's death so I will not
be attending.
And that's all you need to say.
My way of saying this is, I'm not going to be there that weekend, but I am working with
a grief support group to find my own ways of honoring my relationship with him or releasing
my grief or coping with his loss or however you'd like to phrase that.
So you can say, I've already found my own ways to do this or I'm working with another group
to, to find ways to do this.
You can wish them well.
You can say, I hope seeing all of his friends and family together in one place brings
you peace.
You hear some wonderful stories of him or get to share ones of your own.
I hope it brings back a lot of fond memories for you.
You do not have to relay a sense of judgment or dismissal about the fact that they're
going.
You're like, I'm happy for you that you're going.
I feel this will bring about something that you need or I hope it will be helpful to
you as you go.
I hope it will be healing for you.
But for me, as for me in my house, we ain't going.
And we have found our own ways to cope with his loss.
And that's all you have to say.
And if people push you for more information, you can say something like, I'm not ready to
share that or that's not something I share publicly, which makes it sound like as Gretchen
Rubin would phrase it a personal rule.
You can say, that's just not a story I share publicly with anybody.
I have a personal rule that I do not divulge that part of my life to anybody except maybe
my grief group, my therapist and people tend to respect things like that.
And if they badger you for going or not going, you can say, I need you to respect this boundary.
And if you can't respect this boundary, I'm going to leave this conversation.
I will no longer be responding to your messages or your texts or your calls or your emails
or however they're trying to get in touch with you.
You have the right to draw that protective circle around yourself, especially as you're
grieving.
Another thing I want to mention too, Adman Out, is that if people respond well to you saying
you're not going to the celebration of life that you've found other ways to honor your grandfather
and they're like, oh, okay.
I hope that's healing for your heart or however they phrase it.
You can say something like, thanks for supporting my decision not to go.
And if you like them enough, if you feel supported by them in your grief, Adman Out, I would
encourage you to invite them to follow up with you.
You can say something like, no, I'm not going to the celebration of life.
I'm finding other ways to honor him.
But I wonder if you and I could get coffee in like a month or two to talk about my grandfather
or to talk about our shared grief or shared experience of him.
Maybe you're not the only one in your family who's had this experience or who has a similar
complicated grief over him or grief with multiple layers over the person that he was in life
or somebody may respond if like, okay, that makes perfect sense.
I can see how you got there.
I can see why you're not going.
It makes sense to me that you would not be present for his celebration of life.
You can say something like, well, I would love to follow up with with a phone call.
Maybe sometime next week, what are you up to?
So you can open yourself to connecting with people who knew your grandfather without having
to show up for this one specific ceremony.
Yes, your absence will be noticed.
No, it does not have to mean.
The end of all relationships with everybody who's at that service or at that ceremony.
It's a very paradoxical balancing act.
So if you can make room for this in your heart that there are people who will go to the celebration
of life who can make room for the complex nature of your relationship to your grandfather
and still want to support you as a grieving person.
If you get that vibe from them or if they clearly state, I get why you're not going.
Your grandfather was a mean old guy to me as well.
And he was also one of my greatest mentors, balancing the two, but would love to catch up.
I wonder what it would be like for you to make space for those people in your life who can
hold all of the complexity of that relationship and honor all of your grief as well.
That's a really special treasure to find that and anybody, whether they be one of your relatives
or somebody that your grandfather knew in life, it's really a gift to interact with people
who can hold all of that at once and understand that showing up at one event does not mean
you didn't love a person or that they didn't influence your life or that you don't miss
them because all of those things can still be true even if the person you're grieving
is somebody that you might consider a less than loved one.
This is a really heavy question.
I am so glad that you wrote in with this because I think there are many more people than
say it out loud who are grieving somebody that was not kind to them in life to say the least.
And there is this societal pressure to show up to be a body and a face at a public event
grieving this person.
And if you're not, then it opens the door to drama and suspicion and gossip and all of these
other things that we wrap in so much unpleasantness surrounding a death and odd man out.
I so deeply trust your knowing of yourself.
I do not know the whole story.
I trust you as the grieving person who knows and can imagine what it would feel like to
be in that room with all of those people singing your grandfather's praises and missing
the fact that he is gone and I can hear through your words how painful that would be for
you.
It is okay to avoid this kind of pain to not put yourself through this kind of pain when
you're grieving.
It is okay to not go.
It is okay to find ways to grave your grandfather and the ways he was not kind to you in your own
way.
It is okay to surround yourself with the support of this grief support group and your friends
which I am so glad that you have.
And it is okay to very clearly state, no, I'm not going, but I hope we can catch up soon.
I am so incredibly proud of you for writing in with this and I wish you so well.
I hope you'll circle back with me in February.
So long.
That's all for this episode of Dear Grief Guide.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
If you're ready to start moving forward after a loss, consider joining my online course in
community, Life After Loss Academy.
There, you'll find video lessons you can work through at your own pace.
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You can find the link to learn more and join today in the show notes.
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You can submit your anonymous letter for the show and find additional grief support at
shelbyforsithia.com.
Music for Dear Grief 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 Grief Guide.
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