Live LIGHTER
Women are powerful. But somewhere between the responsibilities, the expectations, and the weight of everyone else's needs, we forget that.
Live Lighter is where we remember.
I'm Jessica Berg, and this podcast exists for one reason: to help women like you shed what's been holding you back: mentally, emotionally, physically, so you can step into the life you actually want. Not the one you've been performing. The one you've been dreaming about.
Every week, we talk about the real stuff. Identity. Pressure. The invisible weight women carry that no one talks about. And we do it because freedom isn't a luxury, it's your birthright.
You were never meant to carry this much. And you were never meant to do it alone.
Welcome to Live Lighter. Let's put it down.
Live LIGHTER
How Losing My Mom Changed My Relationship with Death...and Life
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For most of my life, I was terrified of death.
As a child, I can remember lying on the floor of my bedroom, overwhelmed by the realization that one day my mom would die. The fear was so intense it felt debilitating.
Then, 30 years later, my greatest fear became reality.
When my mom passed away in 2022, I expected my fear of death to grow stronger.
Instead, something unexpected happened.
In this episode, I share the story of losing my mom, the surprising relationship I've developed with death since her passing, and how what once felt terrifying has become one of the greatest sources of perspective, presence, and gratitude in my life.
This episode isn't really about death.
It's about life.
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Let's face it, you can have a life that looks successful and still feel like you're carrying way too much. The pressure, the overthinking, the constant weight of holding it all together. This is Live Lighter. I'm Jessica Berg, and this show is for women who are done living like that. Each week, we'll be breaking down what's actually keeping you stuck in that pressure and how to start letting it go so that your life doesn't just look good, it actually feels good. Hello and welcome to the Live Lighter Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Berg, and I'm so grateful to have you here today. I want to spend time on today's episode talking about death. And it's a very touchy subject. So trigger a warning. Chances are you saw the title of it, so you knew what you were getting into by pressing that play button. But for me, what I want to talk about is my experience with it and how I have truly started to no longer fear it. And I've started to, through my mom's passing, have really developed a positive, more comforting relationship with death, if that even sounds possible. So what I want to start with is maybe rewinding all the way back to childhood, right? And this isn't something that I have always had comfort with. And I can remember a lot of my anxiety from childhood. I literally remember being in my bedroom. I had sunflowers everywhere in Virginia. And I remember being in the floor and having what I do believe, now looking back, was a little bit of an anxiety attack. And I did suffer from anxiety from high school, probably till I was about 33 years old. I grew up in a household where my father was he is an alcoholic. It's a condition that you never say, I was. He has been sober for many years. But in growing up, it was a big part of my childhood and early adulthood was having a parent as an alcoholic. And naturally, as a result, I did develop an immense amount of anxiety. And I can remember when I was younger, and this was before I was really familiar with the anxiety that I had developed, but I remember imagining and realizing that my mom could die. And I was terrified and it was debilitating. And I remember I was literally in a fetal position and I just I felt warm all over my body. I felt like it just like all of a sudden like the world was caving in on me, and I was just frozen in time. And I don't know honestly what got me out of it, but the fear of death was so loud that that was one of the first encounters I had with really feeling that fear. And it's not something that ever went away. But what I can say is that when I actually did lose my mom back in 2022, so fast forward 30 some years, and she ended up getting pancreatic cancer. She was in the ICU. We thought that she was gonna get out of there because she had gotten discharged to the PCU. They were talking about palliative care. So we knew that the end was near, but we didn't realize how near that she ended up passing within two to three days of being discharged to the PCU. She'd never left the hospital. And when she passed, a lot of people were really worried about my overall well-being because through the years of my dad's drinking, my mother and I had been each other's rock. And my brother, right? The three of us. And my mother was truly my source of safety. She was my rock. She was one of my dearest friends and also my mother. And we had a truly beautiful mother-daughter relationship. I talked to her every single day, every single day, I called her. And so when she passed, a lot of people were worried about my overall well-being. And I do believe that because I had done a lot of the spiritual work leading up to this, where I feel that it was really preparing me for this moment with my mom. And I am a true believer that when someone passes this physical form, they're not gone. They're still there. They're just not in the way that we may want them to be there, or that we're familiar with them being there, where we want to touch them. We want to smell them. We want to hear their voice on the other end of the phone. We want to hold them and hug them. And when they leave the physical form, we we we don't have that, right? But I believe it's just this continuous just shifting in our realms, but we aren't ever really separate. And I really believe that. I feel my mother, I get signs from her all the time. Her song is Brown Eyed Girl, even though she has blue eyes. There's moments where that song will come on where it's just it's so kismet. I mean, this past Mother's Day where we walked up into this ice cream shop, and right when we walked in, the song that was playing on the radio was Brown Eye Girl. Or my dad'll come to visit. And the first day he comes, we usually always hear the song somewhere. And it's just there's these little signs that they give. And my husband got me this book called Signs. It talks about how loved ones are constantly communicating to us from the other side and how they are with us and how there isn't this like massive separation. It's just an adjustment to how they are around us. And so I do have this sense of peace with death because I I don't feel this separation from my mom. I do feel her with me, and it's given me an immense amount of peace. And to that point, I also use death as my motivation. I don't use it as this fear to stop me from doing things. I use it as motivation to be as present as possible, to make as aligned decisions as possible, because not one of us are guaranteed a certain amount of years in our lifetime. Not one of us knows when our last time here in this body is gonna be. Like if it's today, if it's tomorrow, if it's a year from now. Like none of us know that. And some people fear that I actually find it to be a beautiful mystery that motivates us to be as present and aligned and as intentional as possible. So for me, I do think about death, but not in a way that is morbid, but in a way that is really beautiful and celebratory and motivational. For example, if my husband and I get in an argument and he's the type of person that he'll just let it stew. And I'm I just I don't want to stew. I do feel that there's time where things need to settle and we need to process. Absolutely, but there's also times where it's just not worth it. What if I get in a car accident on the way home? It just puts things into perspective. That's the best way I could say it. And a friend told me that there's actually a um a name for this and it's called negative visualization. So I was doing something that I didn't even realize I was doing, where I was intentionally being mindful of I don't know when I'm gonna die. I don't know how long I have in this life. I hope I make it to my 90s. 80s would be great, 90s would be phenomenal, but I don't know. I don't know if I'm gonna be at my daughter's wedding. I hope I am. I really hope I am. And I am making really conscious decisions in what I eat and how I live and the movements I make in my life so that I can be at those life events for my daughter, for my son, for my husband, for me, but I don't know. And that's not morbid to me. That's that's really motivating to me that this life is so precious. This time that we get each day is so precious. And it makes it even more the reason to not pour into the energy and the stuff that drains us. It makes it even more important to be mindful of what matters in life versus what doesn't. And one of the things that I realize that has helped me really step into this, and this has naturally become just how I move through life, is I look back to the years with my dad's drinking. And while it was truly one of the primary sources of pain and heartache and hardship in my life, and having to navigate that with someone that I love with my whole entire heart, it also taught me that nothing is promised because with my dad's drinking, I would lose my dad and he would shake out of it and sober up, and then I'd have him again. But I I knew it wasn't guaranteed for how long and nothing is, and that's the thing. So I do look back at that as kind of this muscle that I was able to build and this familiarity with being mindful that nothing is promised. And because of that, we we get to really relish in what we have in this present moment. And that's why it's so important to be aware of the present, to be in the present moment, because it really is all we have. And the other thing that has been really beautiful in doing this inner child work, at first I was really resistant. It was really hard for me because my mom had passed. And I didn't want to admit where maybe my mom wasn't able to be there for me in the way that I needed her to be because she was a human operating from human wounds. And what I have found though is that by me doing this work, by me healing, it's actually strengthened our relationship. Our relationship has evolved. And that's the other thing that I just want to share with anyone who has lost a loved one or who is facing this or who is kind of bracing or scared of this, is that our relationship with the person that we love that has passed this physical form that is no longer here in the physical, that doesn't mean that our relationship doesn't get to continue to evolve and grow and flourish and become this beautiful thing, or just to continue to grow in beauty. And that's one of the incredible gifts that I have gotten from this work too, is not only am I able to have peace with death and really feel okay in that. And that came from before I started doing inner child work, but the inner child work, the gift that it's given me is the acknowledgement and the witnessing that my relationship with my mom gets to continue to grow as my relationship with myself continues to grow. And that is really unbelievably beautiful. So I honestly wanted to share this episode just from my heart, from my lived experience, on a topic that is very tender and can be scary and can be triggering for people. And I just wanted to share my experience in case it supports someone else who is going through it or who is fearful of it. So this is how I have gotten peace with death and how I use death as actually a motivator in how I live my life. Thank you so much for listening. If this episode resonated with you, please like, share, subscribe, get the word out there on different ways that you can live lighter and more than anything, be well. All right, so that's today's podcast. Thank you for listening. If you would like to learn more about the services that I provide to women, you can check out my website at Jessberg Coaching.com. That's J E S S B E R G C O A C H I N G dot com. Until next time, be well.