The Caring Death Doula
In a world that rushes past death and ignores grief, The Caring Death Doula stops to listen with tenderness, truth, and time. Whether you are grieving right now or here to learn how to help those grieving, join your host, Frances, a certified grief educator on the journey of finding connection, conversations, and comfort. Let's make grief and death a natural part of our conversations.
The Caring Death Doula
Don't Beat Yourself Up: A Compassionate Look at Grief's Complexity
Have you ever been blindsided by grief when you least expected it? That's exactly what happened to me recently and suddenly I was in tears.
Grief works in mysterious ways, striking without warning through the most random connections.
This episode explores the unpredictable nature of grief and how it can be ambush us during ordinary moments.
I share my personal experience with grief waves 18 months after my father's passing, and how they've revealed an important truth: we're not the same people we were when our loved ones were alive. Part of what we grieve is the relationship that could have existed between our evolved selves and those we've lost—conversations never had, connections never deepened.
But here's the crucial lesson I've learned: don't beat yourself up over what "could have been." We weren't the people we are now back then, and importantly, the dynamics between you weren't solely your responsibility.
This perspective can be immensely freeing, releasing you from the burden of thinking you could have single-handedly created a perfect relationship.
Allow yourself to feel grief when it surfaces, but try not to dwell permanently in the land of "what ifs." You did the best you could with who you were then.
Honor both your memories and your growth.
If you have experienced something similar, I'd love to hear your story in the comments or through a message.
This is The Caring Death Doula,and I am here for you.
Click here to send me a text. I would love to hear from you your thoughts on this episode.
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Welcome back to the Caring Death, doula. I am so glad you are here with me. I'll be honest with you. I'll be open and honest with you. I've had some rough days lately. It just seems like my grief for my dad. He died in January of 2024. So it's been a year and a half.
Speaker 1:But it is really crazy and I know you know it is really crazy how it can just hit you out of the blue. I had the TV on. It was muted. I was busy doing something else and I looked up and there was a commercial for air freshener and my thoughts went oh, that's air fresheners. Oh, those aren't good for you. It's going to stink up your house. It's not healthy. Oh, dad always put dryer sheets all over his house because he had believed that they took care of I. Didn't even get any further than just oh, dad had those all over his house when the tears started coming and I have just really been struggling.
Speaker 1:It's just been popping up for the last several days and I'm just, and it's just hard, isn't it? It is just really hard because then you just want to sit down and cry and it's okay to do that. I'm not saying we can't, but to me. It just amazes me how you're not even thinking about your loved one and you're not even hearing their favorite song or seeing their favorite item about your house or a book or something they gave you. It's like some stupid commercial on TV that goes from one thought to the next thought to the next thought and all of a sudden you're in your grief and you're missing your loved one. It is just so crazy. I just find it so amazing. It's just so amazing.
Speaker 1:And the other thing that gets me because then you start I don't know, it seems like for me, or at least in this time period right now, I've had it several times it's like all of a sudden I start tearing up, just like that, just something comes up and my thoughts just all of a sudden they're over here, when they were way over there, and so I don't know I haven't really documented whether it goes in cycles like this where you're going to have a couple days and then you might go months. I don't know whether you get hit by one one month and you could go three months before you get hit one day. I've never really noticed, paid attention, documented, journaled, any of that. But what I'm finding very interesting and I want to encourage you in this is the person you are today is not the same person that you were when your loved one was still alive. Am not the same person today, in 2025, that I was back in 2023, 2020, 2015.
Speaker 1:You know the history I have with my dad, the years that I had with my dad. I am not the same person, and part of my grief that's been coming up these last few days is that I'm grieving the relationship that we could have had, the relationship that we have no chance to improve on. There's no way of my dad getting to know who I am now, and perhaps I believe that we could have had a different relationship, a better relationship. We could have had conversations, because I know he would have loved the things that I have been learning and growing in and changing in my life, and he was very much a person that would have wanted to talk about that, and so sometimes you can grieve what you can't have anymore, and I want you to know that that's okay. It's okay to shed tears about that, it's okay to grieve over that, but what I want to encourage you not to do is to not beat yourself up. I don't want you looking back and going, oh man, if only I had known what I know. If only I was the person back then that I am today. Oh, I would have loved my dad better, or we would have done this more, or we would have had a better relationship, or whatever. Whatever, blah, blah, blah. Right, don't beat yourself up, don't shame yourself, don't do any of that negative stuff, because you can't change it, we can't go back. And you weren't. I wasn't the person I am now, back then.
Speaker 1:And the other thing when you are in those times when you want to beat yourself up, when you want to stay in that grief and just grieve over that loss of what it could have been or what it should have been, I want you to know, though, I want you to think. I want you to think even if you could go back and you are a new person, you are a better person, a different person. However you want to phrase it, your loved one is still the same as he or she was back five years ago, two years ago, six months ago, whatever time frame you're looking at, your loved one is still the same person, and so your relationship that you had with that person, with your loved one. It wasn't all about you, was it? I want you to remember that you weren't in control of the relationship that you had with your loved one. They had a responsibility, they had a part in how good your relationship was, how strong it was, how close it was. It wasn't just all on you and you may have been trying your best. You were trying your best back in that time and maybe they didn't want a connection, maybe they didn't want a deeper relationship or to spend more time with you or whatever you're thinking today, whatever you're thinking today and beating yourself up, please stop, because you weren't in total control of that relationship. So even if you could go back, it may not be any different. Maybe your responses are different, maybe the way you handle things are different, but it doesn't mean that you would be closer or you would have more time together or be in a better relationship or any of that, because they still have a say. So please don't beat yourself up. It is wonderful if you are a different, better, more beautiful person now than you were then, or even if you're the same.
Speaker 1:Grieving what should have been or what could have been doesn't help you. Grieving that if they were still alive we would have this or that. We don't know those things. We don't have complete control over any of this, over any of our relationship. Only on our side, and back then, when your loved one was alive, you did the best you could. You did the best you knew how to do so please, don't beat yourself up today, in the present, and don't stay in the grief of what could have been, what should have been. Don't do that to yourself. Yes, go ahead and grieve, cry a little bit if you need to Cry a lot, but don't stay in it. Don't stay in it. Don't stay in it. This is the Caring Death, doula, and I am here for you.