102 | When Mother's Day Hurts, Modern Loss, Grief, and Finding Meaning with Rebecca Soffer

There is a version of Mother's Day we all know. The brunches, the bouquets, the Hallmark cards. And then there is the version so many women carry quietly underneath — the grief of a mother who is gone, of never becoming one, of a child lost, of the mother we needed and never had, and the grief of a mother who is still here but already somehow leaving.

This episode of Pleasure in the Pause makes space for that fuller truth. Host Gabriela Espinosa sits down with Rebecca Soffer, co-founder of Modern Loss and bestselling author of the Modern Loss Handbook, for one of the most tender and honest conversations this show has ever had. Whether Mother's Day brings up something heavy for you this year or you are simply learning to live alongside a loss that has no clear shape, this episode gives you permission to feel all of it.

Rebecca Soffer is cofounder of Modern Loss, a media platform and global movement offering creative, meaningful and resonant content and connection addressing the long arc of grief. She is also the author of the bestselling The Modern Loss Handbook: An Interactive Guide to Moving Through Grief and Building Your Resilience and of Modern Loss: Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome, and writes the Modern Loss Substack, one of the platform's top Health and Wellness publications.

Together, we talk about:
✨ The many forms of Mother’s Day grief that often go unseen
✨ Grieving a mother who is still alive but changing through dementia or illness
 ✨ How to support someone who may be hurting this Mother’s Day
 ✨ Finding connection, community, and meaning after loss
 ✨ Why grief and pleasure can coexist

Grief does not move in a straight line. It lives in us, shifts with us, and shows up in the most unexpected moments years after we thought we had made peace with it. What changes is not that it goes away. What changes is that we get better at knowing what we need when it arrives.

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The information shared on Pleasure in the Pause is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider before making any decisions about your health or treatment. The views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the host or Pleasure in the Pause.

Transcript

Podcast Welcome and Purpose

Gabriella Espinosa 0:27

Welcome to Pleasure in the Pause, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife women to connect with their bodies, pleasure and power in Perimenopause, Menopause, and beyond. I am your host, Gabriela Espinoza. Each week I sit down with leading medical experts, thought leaders, and trailblazers for bold, thought-provoking conversations that educate, inspire, and challenge the myths we've been taught about our bodies, aging, and sexuality. I also share solo episodes with evidence-based insights and real talk to help you feel informed, supported, and in charge of your health and pleasure in this season of life. Because your pleasure matters in and out of the bedroom. So take a deep breath, settle into your body, and let's begin. Hello, beautiful listeners. Welcome back to Pleasure and the Pause. There's a version of Mother's Day we all know. The brunches, the bouquets, the Hallmark cards, honoring the woman we call mother. And then there's a version we don't talk about as much. The one so many women are quietly carrying underneath. The grief of a mother who's gone, of never becoming one, of a child lost, of a mother we needed and didn't have, and the grief of a mother who's still here, but already somehow leaving. That last one is the one I'm sitting in this year. My mom is 88, and I'm so grateful she's still here, still in her own home. But dementia has begun to take pieces of her and pieces of us. There are conversations I won't get to have with her now. Things I was waiting to say. And I know I'm not the only one. So many of you have shared how you are sitting with a version of this. So this week I wanted to make space for the fuller truth of what this day actually holds. And I can't think of anyone better to have this conversation with than Rebecca Sofer. Rebecca is the co-founder of Modern Loss, a media platform and substat community that's changing how we talk about grief. It's honest, it's human, sometimes it's even funny. She's the best-selling author of the Modern Loss Handbook, an interactive guide to moving through grief and building your resilience. She's also a Peabody Award-winning former producer for the Colbort Report and one of the most thoughtful voices on grief and resilience working today. In our conversation, Rebecca shares the story of losing her own mother and how that loss became the seed for modern loss, a community built so others wouldn't have to grieve in silence. We talk about the many griefs of Mother's Day, the ones the culture sees and the ones it doesn't. Anticipatory loss and what it means to lose a mother before she's gone. Holding gratitude and grief in the same hand. Where to find support while we're grieving. How friends can actually show up for the women in their lives who are hurting on this day. Plus practical tools from her handbook for moving through loss in whatever form it's taking. And toward the end, we go into something rarely spoken about finding our way back to pleasure after loss. Because grief and pleasure aren't opposites. Returning to pleasure after loss isn't a betrayal. It's the body's way of remembering we're still alive. I hope this episode gives you permission to shape this day the way you truly want to feel it. So let's get into it and welcome Rebecca Sofer to the show. Welcome Rebecca to Pleasure in the Pause. It's very nice to be here today, taking a pause in my day with you. I was happy when I met you recently at an event here in Austin, Texas. And when you told me about your beautiful body of work, I thought, oh my gosh, I have to have you here on the podcast. So let's start with you. Take us back to the beginning, to who you were before grief became the center of your life's work, and to what losing your mother and then your father opened up in you.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

It's definitely safe to say that if I didn't have personal experience with loss and grief at a relatively young age, that I would have probably actively chosen to not be working in anything related to loss and grief. There are a lot of really amazing, compassionate humans out there who make it their trajectory, regardless of what their personal experience is. I'm not one of those people. I'm a journalist. And I was working, so I'm originally from Philadelphia, and then I lived in New York for a billion and a half years and had many wonderful lives there. And one of those was being an original staff member on the Colbert Report, working for Stephen Colbert. I had just gotten my master's from Columbia Journalism School. And I was like finally starting to cook with guests in my career of choice because I was 30. So I was like post-masters. So I'm really on my track now. Always wanted to do journalism, always did journalism my whole life, but finally felt like I was in the right place doing God's work for Comedy Central, making politicians. And then suddenly, about a year after I started working for Steven, my mom was killed in a car crash. And I was living in New York. And it was right after she dropped me off with my dad after a family camping trip, which we always took every year in upstate New York. It was as awful as anybody could just sit and imagine it feeling like. It was very traumatic. It was very violent. And from one second to the next, I went from having a living mom who was my best friend and a dad who was like my other best friend. Like we were like a real trio to having a dead mom who was my best friend, but who I could no longer ever speak to again. And it was extremely destabilizing. Not only was it just totally unexpected and traumatic and killing all the things, all the adjectives you would associate with something like that, but I also was working in daily television. I was working in daily comedy. I was single, living in New York, building up my life with all the energy in the world. And all of a sudden, I was slammed with profound grief. And I was faced with having to figure out how to build up a life while also navigating extreme loss and doing it in a world which I increasingly realized was not comfortable with that. Just didn't really want to hear actually how I was doing on any given day because that felt awkward to people, or maybe tired of not seeing me snap back to my old self after a certain period of time, or struggling with trying to understand what my new priorities were. It was just the world doesn't really like to deal with situations, especially in our culture, our Western American culture, that don't fit neatly into containers and definitions. And what I realized not only immediately, but also as time went on, and grief didn't get better. It got worse as I ran myself into the ground because I was working all the time and I was worrying about my dad who was in the car with my mom and survived. And I was trying to go out and trying to date and trying to have a life and pay my rent, like trying to keep all the balls in the air, was that we really do a great job of turning an experience like loss, which is always individualized because it is, no matter even if you're in the same family and going through loss, you're going to deal with it in your own way. We turn something individualized into something isolating. And I found that to be ridiculous because it made me realize that I was spending a lot more energy pretending I was okay or putting on different bases and trying to like kind of bullshit my way through my day, make everybody feel like I had everything together when I didn't. I actually had a lot together, absolutely. And I didn't have everything together because how could somebody who was having nightmares of their dying mom on the New Jersey Turnpike tell waking up at 6:30 a.m. for work? And as you mentioned in the intro, unfortunately, three years after my mom died, my dad died of a heart attack. So this was absolutely not my life plan. It definitely didn't go according to script. And I just was like, I cannot be the only person who is in desperate need of community to talk about this stuff in ways that aren't clinical or religious or cheesy, like anchored in platitudes, making me feel uncomfortable or like something is wrong with me. I just need community because I still want to work and I want to laugh and I want to be gross and I want to date. I still want to be the person in the world that I am, but I don't think that I can be that full self unless I feel like there are areas in which I'm feeling seen and heard in the hard thing that I'm going through. And I don't have that forum right now. And so in 2013, my co-founder on our website, Modern Loss, Gabby and I, Gabby Berkner, we launched Modern Loss, which was initially an online magazine and still is. We kind of had no idea what we were doing technologically and digitally, but editorially we did. We didn't know what would happen with it, but we knew that there needed to be a place that kind of filled the white space in how we needed to talk about greed, which was in a very let it all hang out way.

Gabriella Espinosa 10:28

Rebecca, thank you so much for sharing your story. I have so many questions, so much that came up for me while listening to you talk yours about your story. One thing for sure is the need for community, the need for a language to talk about it, because we, as I've heard you say, we suck at it. We suck at talking about grief and loss and just being able to be seen and heard in our journey. You built modern loss, something I don't think exists anywhere else, a media platform and a substack community where people have honest, sometimes funny, deeply human conversations about grief. Like you said, without the platitudes and the awkwardness most of us are used to. And it started as a conversation between friends, you and Gabby, I believe.

Reclaiming Mothers Day and Finding Support

SPEAKER_01 11:20

It started mostly when I was in my room at two in the morning, working full-time, wondering if I was the only person going through such a thing, which obviously I am far from the only person going through such a thing. But then one day, not too long after my mom died, I got an invitation from a girlfriend in New York saying, Listen, my dad died when I was like 18. And like, I know like three other women now who have dead parents. Why don't we have dinner? To me, that sounded pretty cool because it also sounded terrifying. But it was like the invitation that I had been waiting for, where I just felt like maybe we were all coming from the same perspective, even with different stories and personalities and dynamics. We just all knew what it felt like to live with really big grief. And so that dinner was really motivating for me because it really made me feel like, oh, this is what it feels like when you're in a room and then everyone feels awkward, and then someone finally speaks, and then we're all speaking, and then we can't shut up because it just feels so good to talk about this stuff. And I didn't want to start like a support circle or anything like that, but I wanted to start an online and do a lot of offline things, community and platform that gave people that feeling, gave people the feeling of, oh, I'm in a community of people who get it. Even if I don't say anything, even if I never post anything or publish anything or speak up, I'm still part of this community by virtue of reading the content or commuting with it. So yeah, that was like a real inspiration for me.

Gabriella Espinosa 12:49

Yeah, and it definitely feels that way when you go onto Substack and go into Modern Loss. It's so beautiful. The breadth and depth of what people share is so moving. With everything you just shared in mind, I want to turn towards Mother's Day because that's what's coming up and that's what inspired me to reach out to you. We live in a culture that has decided this day is full of bouquets, brunches, the perfect tribute. But for so many of us, it's one of the heaviest days of the year. What does Mother's Day mean to you now after everything that you've gone through?

SPEAKER_01 13:33

I hate Mother's Day. Wrong. I totally hate it. But I say that and I can laugh because I just hate it. I hate any day. To be fair, I hate any day that makes me feel like there's a lot of pressure on the day, symbolize and encompass an entire existence and experience. For example, I'll have birthdays where I'm like, oh my God, this is the shittiest day because it's supposed to be amazing. And I'm like doing another turn around the sun, but it wasn't the perfect day. So maybe it wasn't great. So I feel like Mother's Day is just one of those, it's a hallmark holiday, obviously. It means nothing to some people and means everything to others, and that's okay. And that's what it should mean. I don't care what it means to anybody else. And if it's important to someone else, I'll honor that for them with respect. I just don't need it to mean everything to me because I don't think I'm gonna get out of it what I would like to, which is my mom alive. I'm never gonna have that, or my kids meeting my mom, which they never will, or seeing her play with them. Uh, it's just never gonna happen. And I feel that this is a day where, in addition, it's not just a day, right? It's not like Arbor Day, where you look at your calendar and you're like, oh, it's Arbor Day. Who knew? You're highly aware that Mother's Day is coming for three months beforehand because every marketer possible makes you aware of it. So it's not like just May 10th. It's like the three months leading up to it when your inbox is being assaulted by deals and by don't forget, Mother's Day is around the corner and you're like, I freaking no. And so it's like a season. So we turn something that's like a Hallmark holiday into a season of barrage emails and messages, and even you go to Julube and they have Mother's Day specials. So is it any wonder that this is a highly triggering, you know, stretch of time for people? No. And it's not just for people who have dead moms like I do. If Mother's Day is hard for you for any reason, then that's a valid reason, right? I'm always somebody who makes it clear like all feelings are welcome, all behaviors are not. Who is to argue with a feeling that you're having? If you feel like Mother's Day is hard because you're a bit estranged from your mom, or you don't feel close to her, or she's dead, or your sister and you had an argument, or your partner and you aren't getting along, or you don't have kids, or you had a miscarriage, you're dealing with infertility, or you are single and just somehow feeling like a tinge of wow, Mother's Day, why is it affecting me so much? I'm happily childless by choice, that's still affecting me. That's all okay and valid, right? We can control how we feel about these things.

Gabriella Espinosa 16:17

You name a very good point. And I think, yeah, most people imagine Mother's Day grief as a grief of a mother who has died, and that's real and it's enormous. Yeah, but the more I sit with this day, the more I see how many other griefs live underneath it. And you just named them, right? Griefs that don't always get a card.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

Very few cards for like all these different permutations and combinations. And that's why at Modern Loss, when my second child was a newborn, I have nine-year-old and 12-year-old boys. So my nine-year-old was a month old. I looked at the calendar and I was like, oh crap, like Mother's Day. And I was like, God, I just that's so annoying. I don't know how to deal with it. And it was easy to not really deal with because I was newly postpartum and I was floating through time. But I was like, you know what? I'm really tired of this day, feeling like a day where I'm not using my agency at all. And I think a lot of other people are feeling the same. And so I embarked upon this really bizarre experiment that now is in its 10th year, which is I do something every year called the, and I do it for Father's Day and I do it for the winter holidays, the modern loss gift swap. So right now we're in the middle of the Mother's Day gift swap for modern loss, and I put a signal out there on all the communication channels, and I say, if Mother's Day sucks for you for any reason, I don't care what reason, sign up for our gift swap, and we're gonna pair you with somebody else that also feels like it sucks. And you're gonna send each other a gift and a card, and we're gonna create a connection and we're gonna give you this way to reclaim this hallmark day for yourself with whatever that means to you. And sometimes it makes people feel amazing to just have a mandate to listen. You need to make someone else feel better now. You feel like shit, guess what? So does Jane, who I'm matching you with. And I want you to send Jane a card and a gift that's$25 or under and make her have something to look forward to. And it's been this incredible experiment. And to this day, I think I've matched almost 3,000 people over the last decade. And it's just been awesome. I love doing it. And so to me, Mother's Day really does. I'm like, oh, it's the swap. I get to match perfect strangers, and that makes me really happy. So I feel like in my experience, I've taken a thread from this day and turned it into something that makes me feel really nice.

Gabriella Espinosa 18:46

That's so beautiful to acknowledge just the full spectrum of grief, especially around this holiday. And I'm curious, listening to you speak and about Mother's Day, has you personally becoming a mother changed anything for you around this day or around your perspective around your mother and what you were able to share with her or not?

SPEAKER_01 19:09

The best advice I ever got was from a member of the Modern Lost community who said, just let the day be the day. I always like to have a general plan in the back of my head, always. So what would I like to do that Sunday? All right, cool. Do I want to go to brunch with my family? Do I want to exercise? Or I want to do something fancy for myself? Normally not. Normally it involves just like exercising and eating something really good that like then negates the exercise. But I also just like knowing in the back of my head that if I don't feel like doing this stuff on the actual day, I'm allowed to do that. Like I'm allowed to wake up and say, you know what, I want to toss all the plans out the window and do this instead. And that is the best advice I ever got, which is you can call an Audible whenever you want. If you're in a period of time or like a time of year or like a season when you're feeling like extra heightened, you're allowed to do that for yourself. And I think people shy away from that. And especially, frankly, mothers and especially mothers of maybe younger kids where we feel like we have to keep everything going and make all the magic and have the macaroni bracelets made and all that stuff. And like the reality is you don't, and maybe I'm in the minority of voices there, but I just think that there's a lot more value in you choosing what feels right for you in the moment.

Gabriella Espinosa 20:27

I love that agency over the stake is experience that conflict too. Well, do I have these expectations? Do I not? I'm making it be performative when I really don't care. I'd really rather just have the day off to myself and just go do my own thing.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

Take that day. You know, we are living in difficult times, and women in particular are going through enormously difficult times. We're seeing a lot of legislation that's being passed that's making freedom more difficult, freedom of choice. We're seeing a lot of headlines that are proving to us that maybe we are not getting the respect for our bodies, for our identities as we should. We don't feel safe. There's a lot of violence against women and female identifying people. And so I think that we're in the perfect time of history to not cave and go with the performative aspect of things.

Gabriella Espinosa 21:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:27

I think it's time to just own it and say, look, I'm not into it, or I'd rather do this. I wrote a piece for Time magazine over the winter, the holiday season, the festive season, which she's saying, quotes, and the thesis statement was basically like, it's time for women to stop feeling like they have to create all the magic during this holiday season. Because every single woman you know is going through one to 17 layers of hard things. If it fuels them to create all the magic and do it, then yes. But if it doesn't, and if it will then make it more difficult for themselves to feel equilibrium or something close to that, then don't. Please don't, because you're suffering more than anybody else because of men.

Gabriella Espinosa 22:09

Yeah, no, having that choice is so important that I, again, I feel a lot about being a woman is the narrative we carry of just having to perform or be obligated to do, to play out our role of whatever it is, whether it's a mother, a sister, all of that obligation.

SPEAKER_01 22:27

It's like, where is it written in the universe? That's our job all the time. Like I think sometimes we get to take care of ourselves. And I always preach this message at Modern Loss, like whenever anybody will listen to me, which is that it's really hard to feel like you're healing from something hard unless you feel seen in it first. It's really hard. Like, how can we be expected to provide for others and give up ourselves and be compassionate and be empathetic and perform at work to the best of our abilities and still pick up from the soccer game and whatever if we're not feeling like someone is legitimizing us in our hard thing?

Gabriella Espinosa 23:05

How do we begin to name that if we have experienced a loss that people can't see us living in? Whether it's a loss of the grief of an estranged relationship or the mother you needed but didn't have, or a miscarriage, how do we begin to name a loss, especially if those people are still in the world, or if we're supposed to be just showing up as people, women, and doing our jobs, right? I think that's so hard for women, I think, to just name it and be seen in that.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

Very hard. And yet your question is an excellent one because the answer is within your question. It's you name it. That's how you start. You start by naming it. And you don't have to name it to everyone. You're like saying is with your sister. You don't have to start by naming it to your sister, right? Or if it's with your mom or whatever. You don't have to name it to the person that is most directly associated with the hard situation, but you name it to someone with whom you feel safe, even if that's someone who you're giving legal tender to to help you with this issue, like a therapist or a friend who might get it. And it may not be your best friend. It might be just someone you know who you know might have gone through something similar or is compassionate. Or guess what? It might just be with yourself. It might just be in naming it out loud to yourself in a quiet room. And that is how you start. Nothing heals without you figuring out what it is in the first place, what the hard thing is, right? You sit and say, What is the hard thing? What am I feeling right now? And you say it out loud or you write it down, you sit and you think with it, or you think on it for a while. And once you name it, it's amazing how all of a sudden some clarity comes because then you feel legitimized in it. You really feel like if you're like, I know what feels hard, this is what feels hard, and maybe because of these things. Once you say it out loud, it's almost not like you have all the answers, but you realize that you have an obligation to yourself to give yourself what you need to move through this in a supported way. And that's when you can sit and nap out. Do I need a combination? Normally it's a range of support that we need. We need community support, which is what modern loss is. I'm not a therapist. I never want to be a therapist. But also grief and loss is they're not pathologies. They're not medical maladies or mental health illnesses. They're just universal experiences. So I don't need to be a therapist to talk about this stuff. So you need communal support because you need to feel like you have people in your life who you can talk to. You need support if you're at the workplace. You need to figure out how to talk to managers and colleagues in ways that feel really safe and comfortable to you because you're not going to last if you're burning the candle at both ends nonstop and you're working really hard. You're not going to last. You need to speak up for some needs and see if they can speak with you in ways that might help you be a little flexible, where you might need flexibility. That could be in maybe a flexible schedule for a certain period of time. Or in my case, when I was working in TV for Steven, eventually I was like, oh my God, I don't think I'm going to last unless I can see a grief counselor once a week. And that sounds so silly. But if you're working at a daily TV show, that is an unheard of thing to leave a studio in the middle of the day to go see a therapist. But I figured out how to stand up for what I needed and ask for it. And I didn't get everything, but I got some of the things. You're never going to get even one thing unless you ask for it and seek it out. And that involves communal support, support at work, and especially therapeutic support.

Gabriella Espinosa 26:40

I just spoke to a psychotherapist, Brooke Brayle, on last week's episode about therapy and how essential it is, because things like a death, losing your mother can be traumatic on so many levels, right? And that's something that we hold in the body for years, right? And so making sure that you receive trauma-informed care from a qualified therapist is so important.

SPEAKER_01 27:07

Can I add on to that? So two things. First, definitely if you have a death in your life, let's say it's your mom, partner, whatnot, please, yes, get some therapy. Not because anything is wrong with you, but because you deserve to have somebody whose sole job is to be a non-judgmental sounding board for you and what you're going through. You deserve to have somebody who doesn't have any pre-existing feelings about dynamics and whatnot, like family members do, and that you can feel like you can share anything with them. And that their job is to help you figure out ways to cope with it and think through it. And you deserve that. But also, it's not really just trauma. Grief and trauma are not always hand in hand. Just because you're grieving doesn't mean you're traumatized. So it's not so much finding a trauma therapist, it's finding a grief-informed therapist. Because not all therapists are grief-informed.

Gabriella Espinosa 28:08

Can you talk to us about what grief-informed therapy is and how can someone find a grief-informed therapist?

SPEAKER_01 28:15

It sometimes is really an interviewing process. You should never ever feel like you need to stick with a therapist because that's the one you found. Don't ever feel that way. Sometimes it is not a fit, personality-wise or scheduling-wise. If you feel like you can't get on the schedule, you can only see them first thing in the morning, and that is really not convenient for you. Maybe it's not the right person for you. Or if that person is just feeling unempathetic when their responses, maybe it's not the right person for you. It doesn't make them bad therapists. It's just that this is so highly personal that it just has to feel like a fit in your gut.

Gabriella Espinosa 28:53

Brooke Braylab has a methodology called art, accelerated resolution therapy, which is an offshoot of EMDR. If people want to go listen to that and explore that modality, it uses eye movements, which is what EMDR used, you know, also uses bringing up voluntary images, which you can then shift in your mind's. Highly recommend people going to listen to that episode and learn more about that modality, which sounds so powerful. If you're not a therapist, you're just a normal everyday person, there's a certain level of awkwardness, not knowing what to say, but you want to feel agency about speaking your truth and being seen as you are. And a lot of us can do that. But then what do we say if we're on the receiving end of that?

What to Say in Grief

Boundaries and Limited Friends

SPEAKER_01 29:41

It's not your fault that you don't know what to say. We just weren't trained. We don't have the lexicon for this stuff because we suck. We are so uncomfortable around the topics of grief and loss that even people who live with grief sometimes don't know how to speak to other people who are living with grief because everyone's grief is individualized, right? We are so bad at it. We don't like to think that maybe we're gonna catch whatever someone else is dealing with, like that by virtue of listening to the really scary details or hard feelings, that maybe we're exposing ourselves to it somehow. And I really believe that's sometimes how we think about it. It's whenever we say we can't imagine. You can't imagine you don't like what it feels like because it feels really uncomfortable. And so you stop imagining. But then by extension, you're not really doing the person who's in the tough place any favors. You're just deepening the line that you're drawing between you and them. This is your stuff, and this is me over here. And so the good news is that we spend so much time thinking about the perfect thing to say because we like fixing things. We like having the answer, we like being productive, but grief is not fixable. It's not like there's no vaccine for it, there's no medication, there's no nothing. There's just doing it, moving through it. And there's no endpoint, there's just moving through it. And so no one person has powers that are magical enough to remove the pain from anybody else. You're not that important and you don't have that power. And that's a very mean-sounding thing to say, but it's meant to kind of let you off the hook. No one has that power. You're not supposed to come up with the perfect thing to say. You are supposed to not say things that make it worse. And that's the one place that I always say I never pass judgment at modern loss. We always say we don't pass judgment, except for we reserve a little judgment for a suite of things that we really want people to not do and say when they're around people who are living with loss. And I'll get to that. And so I always say the perfect thing to say when you cannot think of the perfect thing to say is I wish I knew the perfect thing to say. I care about you. You're a smart person. You can come up with your version of I care about you, or you're my friend, or you're my coworker, and this looks so hard what you're going through. I wish I knew the perfect thing to say. And I honestly realize that I don't think I do, but I really care. I'm here for you. And I just want, I do want to understand what you're going through. And if you're willing to share with me, I really am here to listen and I'm here to check in with you on a regular basis and just see what it is that you need on any given week and like how it can be helpful. This is the perfect thing to say. The perfect thing to say is making it clear that you care, that you're not scared off, and that you're in it for the long run. You're not offering one time offering of if there's ever anything I can do, and then trailing off and then going away into the abyss, which is what a lot of people do. You're offering your presence and the statement that you are not scared of this because you know that you're not going to catch whatever it is they're going through. People just need to know that someone's willing to sit in the muck with them and not be scared off. And that means everything. They will never ever forget that you did that for them. And conversely, they'll probably always remember if you consistently only offer statements like they're in a better place, or you can always get pregnant again, or at least you had 50 years with her, or you know what you should do, you should do this. And not one of those things are just the worst thing to ever say to someone. But if you're only providing support that falls within those categories of telling people what they should do, and you don't know what they should do, or at least them, which is basically negating any desire they have to share with you what they're actually feeling. You're just rushing it aside. At least you had a good relationship. At least you have another healthy child. People do say this. They say this stuff all the time. It doesn't make them bad people at all. It means they're uncomfortable with talking about loss. And that's not their fault. We don't have a grief literate society. I'm doing my very tiny minuscule part to try and change that.

Gabriella Espinosa 34:11

Thanks so much for the work that you're doing. Listening to you speak, I think it makes me wonder, but what if you are that friend who doesn't have the skill or the capacity to actually offer the kind of support that person needs? You can listen, maybe lend a listening ear, but you don't have that capacity because you don't have that literacy. Is that okay too? Or do you write that person off? Or what do you do as a greeting person when you know you have people around you who cannot offer you the support that you need, but they're still in your life?

Mother’s Day Ritual Toolbox

SPEAKER_01 34:43

Yeah, I think that you eventually, if you want to keep them in your life, and if they're not toxic presences, if they're toxic presences in your life, I am always an advocate for laying down boundaries. I really am. I don't care if they're your sister. You need to lay boundaries down. If you're consistently saying to your sister, it makes me feel badly when you say this to me, or I really need this from you. Is there any way you can do this for me, be it through a behavior or an action, and they just can't? It means that they are limited. And it just is what it is, which is a very powerful, by the way, mindset to really own. And it took me years to get into that mindset. People are who they are, and they will only change their actions if they want to. That is the only way. You cannot make anybody change how they respond to you, how they support you, how they don't support you. There is no way you can do that. What you can do is express what would make it so helpful to you if they were willing to do something. And if they can't do that, then you have control over your actions. You have control over laying down boundaries with certain people and behaviors that are making you feel like crap, making you angry, making you feel slighted, invisible, making you feel worse. And I don't care if these people are your relatives, you still should be laying boundaries down. I also encourage you to think about doing this in conversation with a therapist to figure out like, how do we do this? Nothing was ever really gained by nonstop scream bests or silent treatments. But sometimes being able to say, listen, when you consistently speak like this to me, you make me feel like it's like, why am I even bothering opening my mouth? Because you're not hearing me. You're making me feel worse, invisible. You're making me stressed. I'm feeling so much stress whenever we have an interaction.

Gabriella Espinosa 36:39

I want to go to your handbook, the Modern Loss Handbook. It's so beautifully practical, full of rituals, prompts, exercises rather than platitudes for a woman approaching this Mother's Day with a heavy heart, whatever the reason. What's one tool or practice from the book you put into her hands?

SPEAKER_01 37:05

The book is divided into three sections. And the reason I love this book is because I truly do wish it was something that someone could have handed to me. I think it's good for someone at any time after a loss, like even 20 years, 30 years afterwards, because it really aims to help people stay connected to themselves, stay connected with their person or their pet or whatever loss they're dealing with, and then stay connected to the world around them. You have to still stay connected to your friendships, your work relationships, your intimate relationships. I feel like that's the mandate in living with loss. It's just like, how do you stay connected to those three areas in your life? And once you figure out ways within each bucket to help yourself, even if they don't work in every given moment, because nothing ever does. But once you build up enough of a toolbox of coping mechanisms that are creative and sometimes therapeutic and whatnot, physical, then you really do realize that you do have agency over moving through something that is very amorphous and that doesn't have any linear progression. But you've got this in some ways. You know how to take care of yourself, even if what you're doing in a moment is asking someone else to help take care of you. And so I could talk for an hour about things you could do for when you're approaching Mother's Day and jetting it. But there's a whole section on memory and ritual. And obviously, there are things that you could do that are very obvious. Like you could make their favorite meal or wear something of theirs and do that. Or what is it that you need? Sit and think about what do you want? Do you want to feel connected with your mom who's no longer here? Do you want to feel distracted? Right? Some people do. They don't want to sit and bathe in Mother's Day. They kind of want to ignore it. Do you have friends who could pull you into something where you might be yanked out of that state of mind because you'll be kept busy? You'll be as distracted as you can possibly be. Do you want to feel like you're doing something that is service-oriented, that kind of connects with their ethos and the things that were important to them, or something that you shared together? And I'm not talking about you don't always have to brand a marathon in somebody's name, but is it like a service project? One thing I would love to do this Mother's Day, and I don't know if it's actually legal. I have to just see because I rent my house, is I would love to put a little free library on my property because my mom just she's responsible for my love of reading. She's one of the primary reasons I became a writer. And she was a very beloved docent at an incredible art museum in Philadelphia where I grew up. And so I want to fill it with like all of her favorite books and have that energy be put into the world and have people get to witness my mom's existence, even though they will never know what it is they're dealing with when they take a book out of it, but all know. So it's like, what is it that you want out of it? What feeling would you like to have on that Sunday of Mother's Day? Is it one of fraction? Is it one of feeling lighter? Is it one of feeling connected? And so instead of giving specific ideas, I always like to ask people, what do you want to feel? What are you feeling most right now? Do you need a catharsis? Do you just need to fucking cry your eyes out for a couple hours? Then I would tell them to Noah Con has a new album out, and it is wildly depressing that I've been listening to it nonstop. Put that on and it'll be very cathartic for you. There are so many different things. But I also look around at your social circle. And if you feel like you really do want to have the company of a friend or many friends who would make you feel better, just like with their companionship and friendship, then send a note out and say, look, I'm really not looking forward to Mother's Day. I know that some of you are probably going to be busy that day. Do you think we could do something on Saturday? Can we get drinks on Saturday, or can we go for a walk, or can we go see this concert or whatever? Try and think about what are times around this day where you can set yourself up for getting the support that you need without setting yourself up for getting a lot of, oh, I'm so sorry, I wish I could, but I'm busy.

Gabriella Espinosa 41:24

Those are great tips. And I feel it just honors where you are. That prompt of like, how do you want to feel today is so exactly it's today.

Anticipatory Grief and Pleasure

SPEAKER_01 41:34

Anchoring it in the moment. Like, how many times have you never responded truthfully when someone asks, How are you? when you're really not doing well. Normally you're like, I'm fine, because it's clear that they don't actually want to know the answer because they and they don't know what else to say, right? And so anchoring it in the moment, which is what do I want today? What do I want out of this Mother's Day? And also reminding yourself that you're not gonna feel this way every Mother's Day. There are some Mother's Days where you're probably not gonna care. You're gonna be fine. Then there are others where it's gonna take you by surprise and you're gonna feel awful, even years into something hard, and you're gonna kick yourself and say, What's wrong with me? It's so long after this thing happened. Guess what? Who cares? The universe doesn't care. And that's just proof that loss is a forever thing and it's a living thing. It is something that is living because we are alive. And as long as we are alive, then our relationship with our losses will never stop shifting and ebbing and flowing and taking on new forms and becoming easier and harder because our lives are expanding and contracting and our relationship with our loss is evolving. And once you realize that and own it, it becomes less of the thing where you kick yourself when you're having a tough time. You're like, oh, I guess I'm just here right now. And instead of spending all the time kicking yourself, you say, All right, what do I need right now? And you give it to yourself unapologetically.

Gabriella Espinosa 43:07

Yeah, I love that nonlinear fluid aspect of it. I wanted to go back to this anticipatory loss because I think I shared with you before we started recording that I think that's what I'm experiencing when you have a living person in front of you, my mom who is experiencing cognitive decline, dementia. I have friends around me whose moms are also going through that Alzheimer's. Their mothers are alive and in front of them, physically okay, but they're not the same person, right? There's no way to communicate to them or to get through to them or to recall memories or positive aspects of your relationship together. And so you're already grieving that person because she's no longer the mother you thought she was. Is that what you would consider anticipatory loss? One million percent. How do you recommend dealing with that anticipatory loss?

SPEAKER_01 44:04

And it because it can be long, that trajectory of navigating dementia and Alzheimer's. I just want to legitimize what is anticipatory grief. A lot of us think, oh, my mom has Alzheimer's and this is a long road. And eventually when she dies, I'm really going to need some help. When the grief sets in, you're grieving now. And I think that we also don't spend a lot of time talking. out loud about caregiving somebody who with an illness or who was just getting older or who has dementia or who has the real like cancer or something like that is grief. You are grieving what was what they were. You're grieving maybe the loss of their independence, of their mobility. You're grieving the loss of whatever you're experiencing because chances are you're giving something up as well, even if you're even part-time, even quarter time caretaking, or even spending a quarter of your brain on worrying about that person. And so that is grief. And I always encourage people to get support when they're in that stage of anticipatory grief as well. Because I think a lot of the times we make the mistake of like, oh, when they die, I'm really going to need the support. You need the support now. So I just wanted to say that because I think that we have to get much better at recognizing that for ourselves. There are just so many unknowns associated with this. And yes, that is grief. Like anticipatory grief is this. You are experiencing the loss of almost like a feeling of certainty, which is a joke. The joke is always on us because we never were living with certainty. Nothing is ever certain in life. But we felt, you know, it's like you're like, I know my mom. Like my mom is here and this is the way she is. And all of a sudden she's not and you don't know who she's going to be on any given day. A very close family member is caring for his mom who has rapidly progressing dementia. It's like a roller coaster ride. There are some days where like we have to laugh hysterically because of the ludicrous things that come out of this. This person like tried to rob a CBS not because she was trying to steal, but because she just insisted that everything she was getting was worth$20 and that's what it was worth. And frankly when I heard the list I'm like yeah it's worth about$20, but that's not what it was priced at. And so it's like there are moments where like you have to laugh because this experience is so ludicrous, right? But it's so gut-wrenching. And so it comes with the full range of human emotions and that is grief. That's why I always say like when you're dealing with something like this, especially like a parent or a relative or someone close to you who has dementia like you need help. You need support. You need caregiving support. Emma Hemming Willis, Bruce Willis's wife, she writes a lot about caregivering I think it's frontotemporal dementia. Don't like super quote me on that, but I think that's the type of dementia that he has. She has spoken so much about this about how she was burning out because she was putting it all on herself to be like the perfect caregiver and the perfect wife and she can handle this. You can't no one can handle such a thing alone. And it involves getting yourself the logistical support you need but also the therapeutic support you need because you're also grieving not just the person, but your mother and what memories she'll lose and your witness you're losing the witness to your life. You're losing the person who's hopefully maybe proud of you. Who knows? Or you're losing opportunities to mend things that needed to be fixed maybe in the past that maybe you're never going to get fixed because of her disease. And so you need the support because it's a long road or it's a short road but you don't know what it's going to be. The reality is that there's so many different types of therapy out there. There's clinical therapy like talk therapy and then there's more like model like cognitive behavioral therapy and there's somatic therapy. There's EMDR, which is like a trauma therapy, which I I really swear by I it helped me enormously in the wake of my mom's death because I was having PTSD like symptoms. So there are just so many different roads that you can go down. But the first step is really in finding someone to help you get to the right person if you don't feel like you can do it on your own. And yes, not all grief is trauma. Sometimes grief is grief. My mom's mom died six months before my own mom died. My grandmom Sylvia died from a stroke when she was 89 six months before my own mom's car accident. And I watched my mom grieve and she, oh God, she loved her mother and we just adored my grandmother tight, but I didn't see my mom as being in trauma. She was just deeply grieving. Not everybody needs a trauma therapist, but I think that the great place to start out is in speaking with a grief counselor. And now that can be somebody who has a PhD, who has a psyche, who is even has a master's in social work. Some of the best grief counselors I know are social workers. Sometimes it's kind of like dating. I encourage people to have conversations, have an initial conversation with somebody and ask them how do they talk about grief with their clients? What is their grief informed process? And when I say grief informed it's yes do you view grief as a linear thing? Do you view it as a malady? Is that person maybe going to diagnose you with something like a prolonged grief disorder? Or are they going to try and help you figure out different coping mechanisms that you can use to move through what is essentially a universal human experience that the majority of human beings will move through in ways that don't require like added emergency intervention. Some will about 10 ish percent of the population will have something that is called prolonged grief disorder, which is in the DSM V I don't love the name, but that's what they named it. And it basically is if you after the period of say a year are really having trouble with your day-to-day life like functioning, like working responsibilities at home, friendships, are you totally withdrawn? Are you really unable to truly function, then you really might need some additional support. You might need some medication, you might need different interventions. But the majority of people truly will move through grief with a combination of solid therapeutic support, which is like someone who believes that grief is not a linear process, that it is just like ever shifting, that they will do their best to help you get to a place where you can figure out how to tease meaning out of your life and also figure out how to get communal support.

Gabriella Espinosa 50:41

Rebecca, I read this beautiful piece on modern loss about how this couple who were grieving the loss of a child move through that grease by finding their way back through pleasure, intimacy and their own sexuality. This podcast is all about finding your way back to pleasure. I'd loved for you to speak to that if you can how we can move through grief by tuning into pleasure, tuning into intimacy, tuning into sexuality.

SPEAKER_01 51:10

That's a great question. So first of all, modern loss really exists to always talk about the underbelly of this experience. And when I say underbelly, I don't mean sensationalize things, the stuff that people really are going through that we don't talk about in polite conversation. And it's not because it's not happening, it's because no one's talking about it. And once you talk about it then you're like oh yeah that's the way I feel and that's why I love this endeavor so much because it really helps people to start having these conversations. And the piece that you're referencing is a piece by Colin Campbell who is a professor out in LA. And he and his wife Gail had terrible losses. Their twin teenagers were killed by a junk driver several years ago and he's fabulous and we have done projects together. And he and I were talking about I'm like I really want you to contribute a piece to Modern Loss and we started talking about sex. And I was like yeah that's what I want you to write about. And he was like do you think it would be appropriate for me to write about the first time that my wife and I had sex after our kids died, but really had sex went at it. And I was like yeah because that is what people do. We just don't talk about it. And he wrote this incredible piece about the guilt associated with it like how his children weren't there like how could he be getting a heart on looking at his wife like how dare he but there is very little that makes us feel the need to feel alive like grief. We hover so close to loss all the time life is a series of losses but especially as it relates to death and imminent death and decline what more would make us feel alive than intimacy, right? Respecting of life in awe of life in awe of the fact that we are here and that we deserve to be here and we have to own the fact that we're here than intimacy. And I'm not even just talking about with a long-term partner on Modern Loss I have pieces written by people about how they just really needed to sleep with a lot of people after someone died or the taboo of sleeping with someone after a partner died and the judgment that they got from people around them and how it's like you don't know what it feels like in my body. I'm not looking to fall in love right now. I'm just looking to feel sexualized and alive and a reminder of the fact that I wasn't just a nurse and a caregiver for six years. That is what I became my body became medicalized and my partner's body who died became medicalized and we removed that aspect from our lives and I need to reclaim that somehow. I love writing and talking about intimacy as it relates to grief because it we don't talk about it enough. And I think there's a lot of shame and taboo associated with it. I have a piece on modern loss about sexual bereavement. It was a woman who's older and she wrote about how after her husband died, a lot of people were like oh yeah you must miss going to the grocery store together because they were in their 70s are like oh you must miss those times when you're like sitting around the fireplace. She's like yeah I also miss when we were like having a lot of sex I miss that he was my husband for 35 years. Am I not allowed to talk about how I miss turning him on. So we don't talk about it enough. Yeah in my book I write about how touch isn't just intimate sexualized touch. Sometimes we just need to be touched when we're grieving there's it's like skin to skin when you have a baby it's so important. It's calming right it's like a somatic response or when you have a child who's really upset and you just provide a calm presence with them and you touch them calmly they will mirror you. You will calm them down. And so I write about how sometimes you just need to get some gentle touch. And if that can't come in the form of intimate contact go get a pedicure and get the extra 15 minutes of foot massage or get one of those head massages, right? Or something like that. You can pay somebody to touch you in ways that are very appropriate and still feel like oh I just needed that a little bit healing. You need that.

Gabriella Espinosa 55:24

Thank you so much for that yeah that piece was so beautiful and it reminded me about that spectrum of grief and our sexuality that lives in this spectrum of pain and pleasure, right? Learning to navigate it by really diving into it in the way that the gentleman who wrote the piece did was just so extraordinary and being able to talk about it. One last question if a woman is listening right now and Mother's Day is bringing up something heavy grief, longing complication silence, what's one small mission you'd offer her going into this day?

SPEAKER_01 55:57

Let the day be the day. Someone gave me that advice a long time ago and it is the most valuable thing that I repeat to myself. I don't really like using the words like mantra but it's it's like a thing I say to myself a lot let the day be the day. You will load yourself up with expectations coulda shoulda woulda's because we're women and let's stereotype here we like putting pressure on ourselves and we shouldn't put so much pressure on ourselves. It's a little silly but we do. And so I want to take the pressure off you this will never ever be the perfect day and it also never was beforehand. Was anything really perfect before loss so it's not going to be perfect after loss. It's just going to be maybe more emotionally charged in a different way. And so make a plan that feels nice to you even if it goes against what you feel like you should be doing. Do whatever feels right and let the day be the day. If you don't want to go to the barbecue don't freaking go to the barbecue if you want to see a movie do that. If you want to see art immerse yourself in music do that. If you want to take a walk with a friend do that. If you want to eat the double bacon cheeseburger because that's what feels right maybe not every day but that day do that.

Gabriella Espinosa 57:22

That is my best possible advice thank you so much for this conversation Rebecca I learned so much and really feel more enlivened by the topic of grief. Thank you so much. I'll make sure to add all the links to your Substack to your beautiful book to your website in the show notes and that's where they can find you and to join your beautiful community Modern Loss. Thank you once again. Thank you for having me. After this conversation with Rebecca there's just one more thing I want to say if this episode brought up anything for you this Mother's Day grief, longing gratitude sadness love or simply a feeling you can't quite name I hope you know there are so many women quietly carrying similar feelings too Mother's Day can hold so many different experiences at the same time for some it's joyful for others it brings up loss disappointment loneliness or complicated emotions that don't always have a place to be spoken out loud. You may be grieving your mother you may be missing a child you may be navigating estrangement infertility or watching someone you love slowly change through illness or dementia and sometimes the grief isn't even visible to anyone else it just lives quietly inside of you. Whatever this day feels like for you I hope you allow yourself to feel what is true for you without comparing your experience to everyone else's highlight reel online. Because behind all the flowers, brunches and smiling family photos are real women carrying invisible stories, private griefs and tender longings And if this day feels especially heavy I want you to know I see you you don't have to move through this day perfectly you don't have to perform happiness you don't even have to explain your feelings to anyone you're allowed to rest to laugh to cry to feel pleasure and grief all at the very same time and if someone came to mind while listening to this episode a friend a sister a colleague someone who may be hurting this Mother's Day reach out to them. You don't need the perfect words sometimes a simple text saying I'm thinking of you today or you've been on my mind can mean more than you realize. You can send them this episode and you can remind them that they have permission to let the day be the day. Thank you for being here with me for these conversations that help us feel a little less alone in the complicated, messy, meaningful parts of being human. However this Mother's Day feels for you, I hope you know there's space for all of it. Until next time, remember your pleasure matters. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Pleasure in the Pause. Want to help me spread more pleasure in the world? Please hit subscribe to the podcast and share this episode with a friend, a sister or any woman you care about. Because when we share these conversations we remind each other we are not alone. Together we create ripples of empowerment and support that reach far beyond ourselves. Your support means the world to me. Thank you. Remember your pleasure matters. The information shared on this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and it's not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider before making any decisions about your health or treatment. The views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the host or pleasure in the pause.