Death & Grief

This episode was recorded in 2021, a little over a year after my mother died. I didn’t sit down to “process” it. I sat down because people kept asking whether I was grieving, as if grief follows a schedule or needs outside verification to be legitimate.

Here’s the part that makes people uncomfortable: I grieved before she died. I grieved when I saw her soul leave in a dream. I grieved during those three weeks in the ICU when it became clear she wasn’t coming home. By the time her body finally let go, the truth had already arrived. That didn’t make the moment easy. It made it honest.

Being forced to make the decision to remove life support is one of the most violent forms of love there is. You’re not choosing death. You’re choosing to stop pretending control still exists. I cried. I broke. I unraveled. Anyone who thinks acceptance looks clean has never been anywhere near a hospital room like that.

And yes, it still hurts. It always will. Pain doesn’t expire. What changes is whether you let it hollow you out or integrate it into who you are becoming. I see her often now, just not the way people like. She shows up carrying other people’s bad news, and I do what I’ve always done: translate it so someone else can survive what’s coming. That’s the work.

What I refuse to sugarcoat is this: many people are not grieving. They are suffering inside grief and calling it loyalty. Years pass. Seven. Eight. Medications stack. Alcohol becomes ritual. The pain doesn’t soften because it’s being preserved, not metabolized. I’ve watched this destroy lives in real time.

One cousin drank herself into cirrhosis after her mother died. Nonstop. That isn’t metaphor. That is liver failure. She left behind children who were too young to understand why their mother disappeared the way she did. The damage didn’t end with her death. It multiplied. Was it selfish? Yes. Was it also uninformed, unresourced, and untreated? Also yes. Both can be true at the same time.

Grief doesn’t make you virtuous. It makes you vulnerable. What you do from that place matters. Especially when other lives depend on you.

I didn’t edit this episode much because death is not a concept. It’s an experience. A human one. My mother died helping others. I will too. That isn’t martyrdom. It’s pattern.

Death is brutal when you don’t know it. Grief is unbearable when you refuse to learn how to carry it.