Latest / Soul Salon with Ayandastood / What your grieving loved one wishes you knew | Nonny Maphoka Mbathane

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What your grieving loved one wishes you knew | Nonny Maphoka Mbathane · Soul Salon with Ayandastood

• 0:00
  we are so not good at holding people through the eternal aspect of grief.
• 0:08
  And I'm just curious, like, what do you wish more people knew about what it is like to have these early experiences of death that carry with you?
• 0:18
  What do you wish that people asked more, said more, didn't say, didn't do?
• 0:27
  I want to hear what you've heard people say.
• 0:28
  I'll remind you.
• 0:30
  I'll park it in my head.
• 0:32
  Okay.
• 0:32
  Um...
• 0:34
  I want to first say that, you know, grief happens to all of us, all of us.
• 0:44
  Grief, I think also because of the words and the ways in which we see it displayed for us is usually around like death, you know, like loss, death, you know, transition.
• 0:58
  But grief happens all the time.
• 1:01
  I'm grieving now a life I used to have grieving.
• 1:05
  Um, how I wouldn't say how my family saw me, but I'm grieving.
• 1:17
  I'm grieving some of the connections that I know that now are either compromised or have to change or will be more uncomfortable for the people who have to adjust to who I have become, right?
• 1:30
  So I want to say that grief comes in so many different ways, but I know we're talking about the grief around transition and experiencing it at a very young age and what that does to you.
• 1:41
  I don't know what it does to many people.
• 1:43
  I know what it did to me.
• 1:45
  it made me feel unsafe.
• 1:48
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:53
  Because grief feels like the rug literally has been pulled right under you.
• 1:59
  And as a child, because no one sat me down and told me, these people are gone, right?
• 2:07
  You look around, you're like, okay, these people have that person.
• 2:11
  This, okay.
• 2:12
  Mine isn't here.
• 2:14
  Like maybe that's, like some people don't have this parenting, you know?
• 2:21
  But I'll tell you a little story.
• 2:23
  Funny enough, my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, Polina, I'd asked her around like, maybe I was like 12-ish.
• 2:35
  And I said to her, why didn't you tell me that my parents had passed away?
• 2:42
  Wow.
• 2:42
  Wow.
• 2:44
  And she said, I did.
• 2:46
  We did tell you.
• 2:48
  Because as a child growing up, I never wondered where they were.
• 2:53
  There was just kind of this acceptance of like, they're not here.
• 2:58
  There's no need for you to ask.
• 3:01
  They're not here.
• 3:02
  And that's what's supposed to be happening.
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  But I never could understand why I never asked, you know.
• 3:09
  And my grandmother said, no, we did tell you.
• 3:10
  And she explained in my culture or in our culture that when a parent passes on and the child's very young, we tell them while they're sleeping.
• 3:22
  So she said, I sat there and I told you what happened, what's going to happen now, what we're going to do with you, what are we going to do with you.
• 3:31
  She said, we told you everything.
• 3:34
  That reconciled that knowing that I had, that I never questioned.
• 3:39
  I never questioned it.
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  I was curious, but it wasn't this thing of like, where are my parents?
• 3:47
  And she said, yeah, we told you.
• 3:49
  You know, so.
• 3:54
  I'm really grateful for that conversation and that experience because grief to a child is,
• 4:03
  Man, it just, it, it, it, it makes you not see the world generously.
• 4:11
  Ooh.
• 4:12
  Wow.
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  It does not.
• 4:14
  It does not.
• 4:15
  And it makes you, for me, it made me feel, it made me grow up very quickly.
• 4:24
  Uh, because you feel like you have to parent yourself.
• 4:31
  You don't call it parenting when you're in child.
• 4:34
  As an adult, I know I'm constantly reparenting myself, right?
• 4:39
  But it just creates the sense of like you're in the wilderness.
• 4:43
  It's like you're with people, but you're in the wilderness.
• 4:46
  I think honestly, the best way to describe it for me, I was always around people, but I never felt like they were there, you know?
• 4:54
  So I think that's what grief does to a child.
• 4:56
  It makes you feel so.
• 5:00
  isolated.
• 5:01
  Yeah.
• 5:02
  It needs to feel isolated because there's also a lot of things you can't reconcile.
• 5:08
  Wow.
• 5:09
  That is so profound.
• 5:10
  Huh?
• 5:12
  The rug being pulled from under you that you described is exact image I had as well of moving homes constantly.
• 5:19
  So this rug constant, constantly never being able to feel secure in something.
• 5:25
  And then what you said about being in the wilderness, that was such a like powerful image where you're like there, but you're not in the same social world that your reality is completely different from everyone.
• 5:36
  It's very different.
• 5:37
  Yes.
• 5:39
  Even at school, if kids found out that I'd lost my parents, they'd just be like,
• 5:45
  how?
• 5:46
  Like, they just be like, you don't look like it.
• 5:48
  And they're kids.
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  I mean, they're right.
• 5:49
  They're just being honest.
• 5:50
  And I'm like, but what does it look like?
• 5:52
  Yeah.
• 5:54
  But it was just always like, oh, you wouldn't say, you know, and not that,
• 6:00
  there's anything special about me for having that experience.
• 6:06
  I think it's more of like, I just wish I had, yeah, I think I just wish I had a lot more care.
• 6:12
  And maybe that's why in my adult life, care is so important to me.
• 6:17
  And I've had to learn that that safety is an inside game.
• 6:21
  Hmm.
• 6:23
  Cause I was trying to find safety everywhere outside and it was, it just, it didn't even last.
• 6:29
  It wasn't sustainable, you know, safety is an inside game, but care for me is like at the center of everything I am because I need it for myself.
• 6:41
  And I, I, I relate with people through that, you know, because
• 6:49
  We need it.
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  Yes.
• 6:51
  We deserve it.
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  Yes.
• 6:52
  And it's so caring to your younger self to say, I needed a form of care I was not given.
• 6:57
  I needed it.
• 6:58
  And I have worked to understand and hold with compassion why the people around me could not care in the way that I needed or deserved.
• 7:08
  Because again, like, as you said, they can only care for me to the extent that they care for themselves and know how to give care.
• 7:14
  but that I deserve more care.
• 7:15
  And now I've become the care that I always needed.
• 7:19
  And I like to think also in like this collective body way, where now you have become part of the care system of the collective body.
• 7:27
  And there was, there's like an intelligence to healing that nature has that I think as humans that we either alchemize these pains or I know you mentioned resistance to the word alchemize, but we, we find a way to,
• 7:43
  feel pain and then become the healing or we do the opposite and we just perpetuate the pain and become a source of the same trauma that we faced.
• 7:52
  And so it's incredible to witness people who are on their own healing journey and then sharing that with others.
• 7:58
  And then also I just, the childhood feeling of like, why do other people have one of these and not me?
• 8:03
  Yeah.
• 8:04
  Wow.
• 8:05
  and also just craving that sit down and that conversation, how are you feeling?
• 8:10
  How is, you know, that, that you could now hold your younger self through, but that so many adults in our life, you know, also have just experienced so many traumas that they have just, you know, that's just not how we face trauma.
• 8:23
  We just like, you know, press on or keep going, whatever the language is.
• 8:27
  And so it's, it's, I keep saying this, but it feels like such a generosity, the way that you,
• 8:34
  I think it's very challenging and this is what artists do.
• 8:37
  We give language to experiences that are very hard to put language around and that many versions of you peep versions of people listening to this wouldn't have had whatever the courage, the resources, the, the,
• 8:52
  Patience, like all that to get to a place where you can express it in this way.
• 8:56
  And so that generosity of, okay, like you may not have words for this, but I lend you mine and I trust this is my experience, but I know so many people are going to feel like so seen by your words.
• 9:06
  And also that something is opening in them that maybe they have, as you said, just close themselves off to, or shut down within themselves.
• 9:16
  So I really do thank you for just the generosity of the language you've come to on this.