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, have you ever heard of a grieving person not getting a single sign,
dream or feeling of their lost loved ones presence?
My mom died on May 12th and I desperately want to experience anything that would connect
me with her again.
But all I feel is an icy cold absence.
I can't find her or see her in anything.
Dear family members dream about her and feel her presence all the time, but I only feel
pain and nothingness.
I'm jealous of their ability to connect so easily with her and I wonder if she's not
appearing to me for a reason.
I talk to my mom every day but I never get any sense that she hears me or is communicating
anything to me.
Do you have any tools that could help me?
I feel like I've been left here all alone.
And see her to quiet and quiback.
Pith her to quiet.
First off, I definitely want to encourage you to go back and listen to episode 15 of Dear
Grief Guide.
I received a letter from another grieving person who was struggling to feel her best friend
who died after she died from cancer.
I'm noting just because you mentioned your loss in terms of a date and not in number of
years that this loss, it seems, is still really new.
And I'm not sure how old you are or if you've experienced losses before and sometimes those
things matter, sometimes they don't.
But I wonder if in this case, if in some capacity, your nervous system, your body, your ability
to see beyond this present moment, to survive beyond this present moment, could be impacted
by shock or mere exhaustion.
Grief is freaking exhausting.
And something that is hard for us humans to do when we're tired and exhausted and in shock,
where our brains and our bodies are literally protecting us from a reality that we cannot
fathom even though it is very much true, is that our higher abilities to see signs and
put meanings together and feel as if we are surrounded by higher powers, those things are often
very diminished in the immediate aftermath of a loss.
I totally hear you in this envy of your friends and family members who are already seeing
signs from her and we can't know, you can't know, the loss experience or the grief experience
that they're having.
I know that for some people, this meaning-making is an immediate reach, an immediate need to
fill the void of a person's death with something, anything.
And for a lot of people, they believe these experiences to be genuine and real and they
may very well be.
I want to tell you something that I recently discussed with a one-on-one client who was
grieving her father and her brother and she was struggling to feel connected to them.
One's death was kind of expected, the other ones was not at all and they happened so close
together that she was really reeling and feeling disconnected from both of them and as if she
had been left alone on planet Earth.
And we came up with this what if circumstance and I don't know if this resonates with you,
and I really want to tell you anyway because it seemed to resonate with her.
And it is this, for as much as it takes us to adjust to being here on Earth without them,
it might be helpful to think about them needing time to adjust on the other side and the afterlife
wherever they may be to figuring out how to communicate with us.
It may be that your mom has ways to easily connect with other friends and family members or
that they're more easily able to connect with her for some random reason and she's still
working out her own unique and special way of connecting with you and I don't know if
that's comforting.
But sometimes it can help to visualize the people we love, especially if the loss was
sudden, being on the other side trying to figure out, all right, how does this thing work?
How does this new communications technology, this new phone, this new switchboard, this new
telegram sender, how does this work to get all the way back to Earth?
I'm trying to figure it out.
I will say this too.
Sometimes especially at the beginning when we're hearing nothing, it can be helpful to manufacture
a little bit of the signs and symbols that you want to see as a way of training your brain
to look for signs and symbols all around you to the point where someday you may see ones
that you didn't plan for that are unexpected that feel like messages from her and help you
feel surrounded at a time when you're feeling really alone.
So I encourage you on a day when you feel like you have the bandwidth or the capacity to
do so to just take out a piece of paper and write down a list, maybe of 10 things that remind
you of your mom.
I would encourage you to use multiple senses if possible.
Smiles that remind you of her sights that remind you of her sounds certainly maybe tastes
certain foods or spices or herbs and then touches fabrics or or tiles or anything that
reminds you of her, anything that helps you feel connected.
And then when you are out in the world, play I Spy with this list.
Oh, that person is wearing her favorite color red for instance, or I just ordered a cocktail
with basil in it and oh my gosh, she loved basil.
And to start looking for these things and doing these things based on things she loved,
it trades your brain to start to see her in small ways and to remember things she loved
in the world you're living in now without her.
And you can also do this with people.
Taking out a separate piece of paper making another list of traits that you loved about
her or admired in her kindness, generosity, humor, wit, whatever the case may be in each
time you spot it in another person around you whether they be someone you know or a stranger
you can say, oh, there's a glimpse of my mom for a second.
There she is.
And to start to train your brain, I'm going to say it again to see bits and pieces of her
all around you because what that does kind of like looking for red cars when you're on
a road trip, you start seeing red cars you would have never seen before simply because
you've asked your brain to start searching for them.
I also want to tell you some stories, one story, no two stories, I'll give you two stories
from my own life after the death of my mom.
Even having my own signs and symbols for her pennies, sparrows, songs, she showed up to
me in some weird ass ways after she died.
The first one was numbers.
I did not ask for numbers, she and I had no numerical connections or symbols whatsoever.
But in the first year, especially following her death, I saw nothing but palindrums.
My first address was 424 here in Chicago when I moved out to be by myself.
The bus I took to work today, the 151.
I would regularly be on streets or see numbers in newspapers or see numbers in the airport
or on public transit or on my phone.
I'd look down at the clock and palindrums would appear.
The same forwards as they were backwards.
It's 323 pm.
I would wake up at the same time in the morning at 454 and not understand why.
I kept seeing this over and over and over again.
So I started researching.
Did some deep dives.
I was like, what on earth do palindrums mean after the death of a parent?
And I realized after being on some online forums, some Reddit threads wherever I landed
in the corners of the internet that another palindrum is mom, M-O-M-4-5-4, 151-3-2-3.
So after that, I sought out palindrums like I was thirsty and they were water.
Everywhere in the world I could see them even if it felt like I was making it up even if
it didn't feel magical.
Every time I saw a palindrum, I would say, hey mom, or there she is, or I'm right here,
I feel you.
And they were added to my personal library of signs and symbols as a way to connect with
her.
I did the same thing creepily enough with spiders.
I cannot tell you in a major city too.
Spiders aren't the pests we generally have here.
They are other things like rats.
But I can't tell you how many spiders I saw.
In the first few years after my mother's death, they would descend from the ceiling right
in front of my face.
At my first job as a receptionist, they would be climbing all over my apartment windows
making beautiful webs.
I would go for runs in the park and I would see them on fence posts with the morning dew
still hanging on their creations.
And I'm like, what on earth are the spiders about Jesus Christ?
I could not understand.
I said, okay, what's with the spiders?
So again, God bless Google because it has helped me so much in my grief, even just speculate
about what things mean.
But the library is great for this too.
Friends and family members who are spiritual.
If you have an ancestral tradition of signs and symbols with numbers or animals really
helpful to ask the people around you, but I found out that spiders are symbol of feminine
creative energy, sometimes even motherhood energy.
So I chose to see these spiders creepy as they may be as much as they've wiggin me out
my whole dang life as symbols for my mother that she wants me to keep going and to keep making
beautiful things, which is something that I promise to her in her dying days is that I
will keep going.
I will keep singing.
I will keep trying.
And I did.
And every time I saw a spider after that, I was no longer intent on squashing it.
But on taking a deep breath and recognizing it for the sign and symbol, not necessarily
that it was, but that I wanted it to be.
And gradually those two things became one thing, a symbol for my mother, whether I manufactured
it and made it up, or whether it really is a sign from her.
Who's to say?
I have no certainty.
And I cannot have certainty in that department.
That is something that grief has asked me to release.
But I'll tell you this, it makes me feel surrounded.
It makes me feel closer to her.
It makes me laugh at her because she didn't like spiders in life either.
That I don't understand that I still do not comprandow.
That makes no sense to me at all.
And choosing to believe that has helped me feel like she is still present and that our bond
of sorts continues.
So if you can piggyback on the signs and symbols that others are getting, maybe they see powder
blue on a makeup counter.
That makes you think of your mom.
And so you start thinking of your mom every time you see powder blue.
Maybe other people are having their light bulbs blow out spontaneously.
Go buy a pack of light bulbs just in case.
Prepare for that to happen to you.
Maybe they hear certain songs, start playing those songs in your house, draw her closer
and bite her in for your own dictionary of signs and symbols and maybe piggybacking on
others too.
And making it something that you share with them as opposed to a reasoning for them being
the blessed chosen ones and you being left out in the cold.
I don't know much about you and I don't know much about your mother.
But from having lost my own mother, I'll tell you at some point in some way and it may
not be a way you expect that love will force its way from the other side to you.
Whether you feel it or see it through a sign and symbol, whether you receive it through
somebody else's experience, whether it comes to you in a totally unexpected flash, I am
holding out trust for you even if you can't hold that right now.
That something is coming your way.
May it happen soon.
May it be so loud.
Ask for this.
Make it so loud and so big that I can't miss it, mom.
I'm right here.
Or go waiting for a polo.
I am right here.
And to quiet and Quebec, I am right here with you.
I am wishing you luck.
Let'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.
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
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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.
Visit for Dear Grave Guide is performed by Eddie Goldstein, editing by Ruth Spence of
Celebria.
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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