When Love Asks You to Let Go: Parenting, Grief, and Surrender with Dr. Tasha Faruqui

GRIEF AND LIGHT

GRIEF AND LIGHT
When Love Asks You to Let Go: Parenting, Grief, and Surrender with Dr. Tasha Faruqui
Oct 14, 2025 Season 4 Episode 89
Nina Rodriguez

A mother’s story of love, advocacy, and finding joy while parenting a child in hospice.

What happens when the life you imagined for your child suddenly changes forever?

For Dr. Tasha Faruqui, that question became her reality when her daughter, Soraya, was born with a rare and little-known genetic condition.

A doctor herself, Tasha thought she knew how to navigate the medical world. But nothing prepared her for the mix of love, fear, and relentless uncertainty that came with parenting a child whose life would look very different from what she’d dreamed.

In this week’s episode, Tasha — physician, advocate, and author of her debut book Keep Your Head Up: A Mother’s Story of Chasing Joy in the Face of Grief — opens up about what it means to grieve the child you imagined while fiercely loving the one in front of you.

We talk about how she’s learned to balance hope and surrender, the ways her other children have shaped her understanding of anticipatory grief, and how joy has become an act of resistance against the unfairness of it all.

Nina and Tasha explore:

  • What it means to grieve the ideal while embracing what is
  • How advocacy and agency intertwine in a child’s care
  • The quiet grief of siblings walking their own path beside medical complexity
  • Why hope and heartbreak can live side by side
  • How spirituality and creativity help her family keep going
  • Why joy isn’t found, it’s chosen, over and over again

If you’ve ever lived between grief and gratitude, this conversation will remind you you can hold both.

Guest: Tasha Faruqui, DO

Hosted by: Nina Rodriguez

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