Ep 198: But You're Here Now: On Grief, Presence, and What Truly Matters

We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives preparing to live them: working toward the thing, achieving the next milestone, building toward a future version of ourselves and our circumstances that will finally feel like enough.

We’re so focused on the arrival, but grief—real, irreversible, stopping-you-in-your-tracks grief—has a brutal and clarifying way of revealing that the moment we’ve been waiting to arrive in is happening right now. There is no future version of you or your life that is more real or more valuable than this one.

This episode is a little different. I don't have a tidy takeaway, three steps, or a framework for you to try. What I have is a sentence, and I hope something in it lands for you the way it landed for me:

"But you're here now. Don't waste a minute.”

Click HERE to get the full show notes.

Transcript

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hey there, beautiful humans. Welcome back to Your Favorite You. 

I'm still Melissa Parsons, your favorite life coach and podcast host. And today's episode is a little bit different. I am not coming to you today with a framework or a process. I'm coming with a morning, a very specific morning, yesterday morning, actually, where something cracked open in me and I knew I wanted to share it with you because I think it's going to land somewhere real for a lot of you. 

It started with a workout. It moved through a message from a friend, a reel about grief, and then a dream starring my dad. And I woke up with a sentence in my head that I haven't been able to shake since. 

But you're here now. Let's not waste a minute. That's what today's episode is about. Are you ready? Okay, I'm going to set the scene. Yesterday morning, I was working out with my trainer, Cassie. We were outside. 

It was an early summer morning. There was brilliant sunshine, no humidity, a bright blue sky, the kind of morning that felt like Ohio was really showing off. And I want to pause here for a second because the workout itself matters to the story. 

At 53 years old, I am in the best shape of my life. I'm lifting heavy weights. I'm doing yoga on a regular basis. Frank and I are out on our daily jaunt, taking a walk through our neighborhood. I consider myself an athlete. 

And that is not a sentence I would have said at any other point in my five-plus decades on this earth. For most of my life, I've had a complicated, critical, unkind relationship with my body. And I've done a lot of work to change that. 

And now I get to have mornings like this, hard, sweaty, glorious mornings where my body does things I ask it to do. And I am genuinely grateful to be living inside this body. After the workout, I felt fully alive, like myself in a way I've only recently learned to recognize. 

And after the workout, I picked up my phone and there was a message from my friend Tracy. For those of you who don't know Tracy's story, her sweet husband Paul died from cholangiocarcinoma, a rare and brutal form of cancer. 

He was diagnosed and then not long after he was gone, and Tracy has been living inside that loss, raising their children, rebuilding her life, surviving her own cancer diagnosis on top of all of that with a grace and a realness that takes my breath away. 

Recently, Tracy's been sending me messages about the podcast. And the one that she shared most recently was about my episode on rest is resistance. She told me that when Paul was sick and then after he died and then through her own diagnosis, she had no choice but to rest. 

That rest became survival. She had to rest. She had to stop in order to be able to keep going. And now that things are on more even ground, now that the acute crises have passed, she's noticed herself going back to overscheduling herself, letting things back onto her calendar that don't actually matter that much to her and filling up that space again. 

And I sat with that message for a long time because Tracy has been to the place where everything that doesn't matter falls away. She has stood in the fire of what actually counts. And even she, even someone who has lived that, finds herself in the ordinary resumed rhythm of life, letting the noise back in. 

And Tracy, I know you're listening. This is not a failure on your part. This is the most human thing I've ever heard. Along with Tracy's message, she sent me a reel. It was a clip from Anderson Cooper's podcast, All There Is, which if you've listened to it, is one of the most honest, tender, important things on the internet right now. 

Anderson made it after losing his mom, and it's become this extraordinary space where people talk about grief without flinching. In the reel, a woman named Steph calls in. She has two teenage children that died. 

And she talks about how before they died, she had this skewed sense of what mattered. The achievements, the awards, the external markers of a well-lived life. The things we spend so much of our time and so much of our energy chasing. 

And then her kids died. And all of it, every single achievement, every accolade, every milestone became utterly meaningless, not diminished, not less important, meaningless. What remained, what she said was the only thing that ever actually had any meaning, was connection, being with the people you love fully while you're still able. 

I watched the reel and just sat there because I know that I've heard that. We've all heard some version of that or lived some version of that. And somehow, somehow the noise of ordinary life still manages to drown it out. 

I went to sleep with all of that on my heart. And then I dreamed about my dad. I don't often have him come to me in dreams, but in this dream, I was working out in a basement. Normally, Cassie and I work out in the basement, so it was unusual that we were working out outside that day. 

And I don't know whose basement it was exactly. It was somewhere between my parents and mine, the way, you know, dreams do that, where you're kind of in this in-between place. But this basement gym was filled with amazing gym equipment. 

And there were these huge industrial fans keeping it nice and cool. And as I was down there just marveling at all of it, I hadn't started working out. I just saw this whole world of possibility I had access to. 

My dad walked in. I scared him. He didn't expect me to be there. And I thought, well, dad, I didn't expect you to be here either, because my dad died of colon cancer back in 2013. In the dream, he was sick. 

It was clear that he was sick, but he had come down to work out. And that's who my dad was. I'll never forget. We did the first jingle bell run with Jon's jinglers after Jon was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. 

And my dad had gone to chemo that Friday, and he was down here on that Saturday or Sunday, I think it was Saturday, running the 5K with us. He was always a person who moved his body. He took care of himself that way. 

And he showed up for physical things even when they were hard. And I like to think that now that I have finally, at 53, claimed the identity of athlete, now that I'm a person who lifts and moves and takes her body seriously, that somewhere he is excited about that, that he recognizes something of himself in me that I'm only just finding. 

In the dream, he had just gotten back some lab results and the results were okay. They were actually not that concerning. But I could tell that he knew it didn't change the ending, that the outcome was still going to be what it was going to be. 

And in the dream, I just kept hugging him and saying the same thing over and over. But you're here now. But you're here now, Dad. Let's not waste a minute. And then I woke up. I lay there that morning after the dream and I thought about his birthday. 

On his birthday, we went golfing, Jon, Jack, and me. It would have been his 79th birthday. We celebrated him on the course. We were happy to be somewhere that he would have loved doing something that he loved. 

And we were able to bring him with us that way. And I, of course, kept thinking about Jack and how much Jack resembles him. And also how different Jack is from him, how Jack is his own person entirely. 

But of course, shaped partly by this man he carries with him and partly by everything he's become all on his own. And of course, I wish my dad was there to see it, to see Jack, and of course, to see Owen, even though Owen wasn't on the golfing expedition with us, but to be on the course with us and know that the people he loves are still here, still together, still celebrating him. 

But you're here now. That's what the dream kept saying. Not, I wish you were here. Not, I miss you. You're here now, right now in this moment. Let's not waste a single minute of it. So I'm lying there in the early morning light and I'm holding the workout and Tracy's message and Steph's words and my dad's face in the dream. 

And I'm asking myself, what is this day trying to tell me? What is the thread running through all of it? And here's what I think it is. We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives preparing to live them, working toward the thing, achieving the next milestone, building toward a future version of ourselves and our circumstances that will finally, finally feel like enough, like an arrival, like now we can exhale and be here. 

And grief, real, irreversible, stopping you in your tracks, grief, has this brutal and clarifying way of revealing that the arrival was always now, that there is no future version of you or your life that is more real or more valuable than this one. 

That the people in front of you are the point. That this morning with the blue sky and the sweat and the feeling of being alive in your body is the thing, not the destination you're working toward. This right here. 

Steph knew this theoretically before she had the tragedy of her children dying. She probably even believed it. Most of us do on some level. And then ordinary life with its schedules and its obligations and its noise drowns it out again. 

Not because we're bad people, not because we're ungrateful, but because presence is genuinely hard. It requires practice. It requires choosing over and over and over again to come back to right now. I want to go back to the workout for a second because I think it belongs in this conversation in a specific way. 

When I am lifting, really lifting heavy and focused and present, I'm not anywhere else. I can't be. Lifting the weights demands all of me. My body demands all of me. And there's something in that, in the complete non-negotiable now-ness of physical effort, that's one of the most reliable ways I know to come home to myself. 

Like I said, my dad moved his body his whole life, even sick at the beginning of his illness. He was still working out. And I think about what that meant, the choice to inhabit your body fully, even when it's betraying you, even when the lab results only tell you so much, even toward the end. 

There's something profound about choosing to be in your body on purpose, not as punishment, not to change it, but because it's the only place you actually live. And every moment you spend at war with your body is a moment you spend slightly outside of your own life. 

And I spent years, a lot of years, slightly outside of my own life. I don't want to spend anymore. And then, of course, I keep coming back to what Tracy said, that when everything was stripped away, when there was no choice but to rest, no choice but to be fully present to what was happening, she found clarity. 

She found what mattered. And now back in the ordinary flow of life, she can feel herself kind of slipping back toward the noise, toward the overscheduling, toward the commitments that don't actually align with what she knows in her bones to be true. 

And I want to say something about that. Of course, not as a criticism of Tracy, never a criticism of you, Tracy, because like I said, it's the most human thing imaginable, but as an observation about all of us, the clarity that comes from loss is real. 

And it's also hard to sustain without the loss, hard to hold on to when the urgency is gone and life starts to get back into a normal rhythm again. This is why the work matters, not just when we're in crisis, but in the ordinary days, the Tuesday afternoons, the morning before anyone else is awake. 

This is when we practice presence, not because something terrible is happening, but because something precious is, right now, always. I don't have a tidy takeaway for you today. I don't have three steps or a framework. 

What I have is this morning and this sentence, and I hope that something in it lands for you the way it landed for me. But you're here now. Whoever you're thinking of right now, the person whose face just came to your mind when I said that, they're here now too. 

The relationship you've been meaning to tend to, the conversation you may be putting off, the ordinary Wednesday evening when you could actually be present with the people you love instead of halfway somewhere else in your head. 

The body you're living in right now, imperfect, always complicated, yours, is carrying you through this moment. Can you feel it? Can you be in it just for this minute? The achievements, of course, will come and go. 

The accolades will fade. They always do. The calendar will fill and empty and fill again. And none of it, not a single item on your to-do list will matter the way the people do, the way that presence does, the way that this exact moment does, if you let it. 

This is your invitation this week, not to overhaul anything, not to make a grand gesture, just to notice once today when you're halfway somewhere else in your head, on your phone, in the future, or back in the past, notice it and come back. 

Come back to whoever's in the room. Come back to your body. Come back to this moment right now, because you're here now. And that is the whole thing. Thank you for being here with me today, beautiful humans. 

If you couldn't tell, this one meant a lot to make for you all. I love you all. See you next time.

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

When we work together, you begin to develop a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You learn effective communication strategies, boundary-setting techniques, and self-care practices that will help you cultivate a more loving and supportive relationship with yourself and others.

While, of course, I can't guarantee specific outcomes, as everyone's journey is brilliantly unique, what I can promise is my unwavering commitment to providing you with the skills, tools, support, and guidance you need to create lasting changes in your life. With humor and a ton of compassion, I'll be available to mentor you as you do the work to become a favorite version of yourself.

You're ready to invest in yourself and embark on this journey, so head over to melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the work with me page, and book a consultation call. We can chat about all the support I can provide you with as we work together.

I am welcoming one-on-one coaching clients at this time, and, of course, I am also going to be offering the next round of group coaching soon. 

Thanks for tuning in. Go be amazing!