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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.
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- Dear grief guide,
my younger sister Janice passed away four years ago
on June 4th.
I recently realized I have not grieved her properly.
When I see posts about her or think about her,
I move on quickly and do not allow myself
to feel the full impact of the loss.
This has led me feeling profoundly sad.
She was a wonderful woman, only 63,
and we used to talk nearly every day.
I was the person who had to break the news
of Janice's death to our 93 year old mother,
and it was heartbreaking.
She passed away 11 weeks after my sister.
I was caring for her in a senior living facility,
and she was so sad after my sister died.
I sometimes wonder if my sister's death
broke my mother's heart,
and I regularly question if I've really grieved
my mother's loss as well.
On the anniversary of my sister's passing,
I posted photos of her on Facebook
and wrote some thoughts about her.
When I mentioned to a close friend
that I'd never really grieved Janice,
she wrote me privately a day later,
and suggested I get some help with this loss.
I recognize I need to grieve,
but I'm not sure how to process these deep losses.
Do you have any advice or know
of any support groups or classes
that can help me navigate this grief?
Thank you so much.
Signed, am I really graving?
Hi there, am I really?
I wonder, I hear so many statements
and so many stories like yours,
and so many people use this language of feeling like
I haven't grieved or I've not grieved properly,
or there's something that they haven't dived into
with regard to their grief
as if they haven't spent the time
in the time since their loved one's death, grieving,
as if that is not also grief.
For me personally, grief begins when the loss occurs,
sometimes even before if we're anticipating a loss,
we can very much grieve people and things
that are still alive,
and then we grieve them in new and different ways
after their deaths, literal or metaphorical,
such as in the case of a relationship ending.
So I wanna start this by asking a clarifying question,
what do you mean when you say grieve properly?
Because the answer is different for everybody.
For some people, grieve properly means
I haven't cried over yet,
or we never got to host a memorial,
or I didn't get to get together with people
and tell stories.
I feel like they don't have a proper place in my home.
I feel like I don't do enough to honor them
on significant milestone days.
I feel disconnected from them.
What are your individual benchmarks for you,
unique to you?
Am I really grieving?
What are your benchmarks of successful as you put it,
grieving, as much as you can frame grief
as anything that you can have success at?
Because I don't necessarily know that you can win at grief.
I think a lot of people perceive of grief as a game
or something to be overcome, especially in our society.
So I wanna get away from this idea of like,
I can win at grief or I can be done with grief,
but I wonder what you mean by?
What does it mean to succeed at properly grieving?
Framed another way?
What do you feel is missing from your grief experience?
Because in your letter you mentioned,
you're already remembering her
by sharing memories and telling stories on social media.
That is a way of grieving.
That's absolutely a way of mourning,
of remembering somebody, of carrying their life forward
and their impact on your life.
So what do you feel is not present in this picture
that you would like to be?
And then you could point at it and say,
"Now I've grieved.
I've done the work of grieving
or I have participated in my grief in some way."
You mentioned in the first paragraph of your letter
that you don't allow yourself to feel the full impact
of your loss.
And I wonder, I'm asking you a lot of questions here today,
but are you afraid to feel the full impact of the loss
there's so many people I work with
who speak of what they refer to
as like an emotional hangover.
I'm afraid of going into my grief.
I know I can, but I don't know if I'm gonna be able
to get back out again.
If I let myself feel that sad,
I may not be able to get unzad
or I may never feel happy again,
or I may break myself or I may go crazy
or at my very worst I might die.
The pain of that might actually kill me.
There is a very real fear that our grief brains can have
of dying or being destroyed if you quote unquote,
let it all in.
And I don't wanna discount that.
I think that is a very real fear
that a lot of grieving people had.
It's one that I had as well.
And when I finally allowed myself to whale
for my mother's death,
for everything that had been taken for me,
not just her life and our future together,
but my faith and my sense of home
and the way my life was supposed to go.
And just all the things that were supposed
to be true but couldn't be.
And all the things I lost in losing her,
the thing I feared the most didn't happen.
I didn't get committed to a mental institution.
I didn't have the police called on me
and I didn't die.
I was not broken.
In fact, and I write about this in my first book
called "Promission to Grieve,"
I felt like I had returned myself to myself
in some way.
Like I had finally led in something
that I was using a lot of energy to block out.
If you were afraid of feeling the full impact of this loss,
because you were scared of not being able to get back out
of those feelings again,
that the feelings may never end,
that there's no way through,
that it's just sinking into the quicksand of grief
and then there's no way out.
I really, really encourage you to join us
in life after a loss academy.
It's not a checklist for grief.
It's not, here's your assignments, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,
and now you've grieved and now you're complete.
But and it is a path.
It is a step-by-step roadmap that prepares you to feel,
hard things, the emotions of grief,
the experience of releasing,
what loss has made no longer true,
what the deaths of your sister and your mother
mean for your life,
both what you lost in the past
and what you will lose in the present,
because they are no longer here.
And then going forward, how to integrate their memories
and their lives into your life,
remembering them, allowing your grief to show up
in relationships with others
and ultimately finding a place for grief
to exist within your life that feels not threatening,
not like a thing that's still incomplete
that you have yet to do, but like a collaborator,
like something that is allowed to exist alongside you,
like something that wants to help.
That is the work that we do in life after loss academy
and so many grieving people I work with come in
feeling exactly this way.
If I have never grieved my loss,
I don't know how, I don't know how to grieve as a skill
and to be fair, none of us does until we go through it.
And then there are some people like myself
and thousands and thousands of others
who make up maps of here's how we get through it together.
And you do not have to go this alone.
You do not have to risk your heart going into grief
and not being able to get out again.
And I want to give you this permission slip too.
You do not have to measure your grief
based on what other people think it means to grieve.
You are not required to cry.
I have met grieving people who have never cried once
for their loss yet we still call it grief.
I have met people who feel like they may never get grief right
yet we still call it grief.
I have met people who are not sure what success
would mean to them in grief,
but they know that what they are going through is grief
that we can validate together.
I would so love to work with you
whether in life after loss academy
or on some one-on-one basis am I really grieving?
And one of the best places you can start
is at the workshop that I'll mention
at the end of this podcast.
It's free.
It's a taster of what you can expect
inside the course of what the course outline looks like
of what you'll learn.
And then I'll give you three tools
that you can use right away in your grief
to acknowledge the fact that it exists
to give yourself so much grace and compassion
and to stop feeling like you're forcing grief down
or away and start allowing grief to show up
in ways that feel generative and creative
and maybe in your language successful or proper.
I'm so curious to hear from you again.
I hope you'll write me back.
Or even just sit with these,
if you don't write me back just to sit with these questions
and come to some answers,
might be worth asking your grief, do your grief.
What does it mean to grief properly?
And listen for its answer because I bet it has some wisdom
for 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 Grief,
three 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 leave a review on Apple podcasts,
Spotify or wherever you're listening.
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 shallbeforcithia.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.
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