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Grief Changes The Relationship · The soulnotskin Podcast with Jen SluMac

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: A friend of mine gave me a book that she received when she lost her son.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: And the book is a daily reader, a morning inspiration, something to start your day dealing with grief.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: The one I read today said something along the lines of When you lose somebody that you love, it doesn't end the relationship, it changes the relationship.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: From a physical one to a spiritual one.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than living with the physical person, now you're living with the memory of them.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's said that sometimes when you lose the one that you love, their absence can help you grow stronger.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Which I thought was kind of wild.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: I have felt pieces of that.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: I have felt surges of creativity since I lost my mom.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's been four months today that I lost my mother to some cocktail of cancer, radiation, chemotherapy, dementia.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Body just couldn't take it anymore.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: 77 years old.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: And with all of the challenges we faced as a family, my best friend on the planet.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: So when it said that, it kind of made sense.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, a few thoughts that I've had, one of which was wow, this creative surge is really something.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: I have to listen to it, but it doesn't, I can't really fit it into my life.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: But I've made some changes in my life to make room for it.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like standing in the closet when my mom died.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like standing in her closet and she's looking through her clothing and she pulls out a shirt that is creativity, that is her crafts that she's done her whole life, or her ink drawings, or her uh flower arrangements, or her garden, you know, all of that summed up in this uh metaphorical shirt that she pulls off the hanger and sort of snaps to straighten it out and holds it up and says, Would you wear this?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna need this anymore.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Would you wear it?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want it?
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's what it feels like.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: It feels like my mother gave me the best parts of herself to carry on, which is pretty beautiful.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: She used to say that me and my brothers are the best things she ever did.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: We are the best parts of her.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think she was pretty exceptional on her own, but uh, I also appreciate that.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like there's a bit of her having stumbled through the latter part of her life's race, but handing me the baton.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And when she did sort of collapsing and saying, I know you can, sweetheart.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: I love you.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Go get him.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Which she had a habit of saying to me her whole life, one way or another, anyhow.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: I do think that there's something to be said about grief sharpening your senses.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard that too.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: I probably butchered it, but I know what I mean.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Something about how, you know, the absence really just sort of puts things in perspective.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it did for me suddenly, uh, it was very clear that while I could align with the mission of the company that I was working for and the intentions behind the motivations of all that we did, being on the executive team of this organization uh began to prove itself far more stressful and uh soul-sucking than I was willing to do.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's something about sitting at your mother's bedside as she fades, watching the life weave, stop animating her body, her personality, her smiles.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, with the week where she just stops opening her eyes or she just stops talking, but she's still there, but she's not there.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's something about watching your mother lose her faculties to dementia, something about when she looks at you in the hospital bed and says, Honey, I'll think I'm dying.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: There's something about those moments, as precious and as tragic and as beautiful and as painful as they are, all at once, wrapped up in one.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's something about it that really makes you want to pay attention to the way that you're spending your time and your money and your breath.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I had to reconsider what I was doing.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: It also makes you look at your idea of God.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Some people they came up in the tradition of Christianity or something like that, super clear on what it is that they believe, what the tradition in their family believes, what their parents believe, what they were told to believe, all of these things, very clear on it.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Even when somebody dies, they say beautiful things like they went home to Jesus, or they're in a better place, or they're not in pain anymore.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: I tell you, faith of my youth, the faith of my family, the tradition of my family's faith has been a challenge for me for myriad reasons.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I've been coming back to it more recently.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: I have to tell you that when my mom died and we had to go and sign papers for the cremation.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: I really started to doubt everything that I've learned.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: Very fantastical, very wild in terms of wait.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: There is nobody.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: How is she back in her best body?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, where is she?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: Can she hear me?
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Can she see me?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: What is God?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Where did she go?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: What happened to the hands that used to hold me?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: What happened to the voice that could talk me down from a tree?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Not literally.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: But when I would make myself crazy, what happened to the voice that yelled at me to try to set me straight when I was a knucklehead?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: What happened to the sounds of the brush?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: When she would flip her hair upside down and brush it out and then flip it back and brush it down?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Where'd she go?
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: Can she hear me?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Can she see me?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Does she still boil cinnamon on the stove on the days off for me to come home from school to?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Does she still like the windows open in the middle of winter?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: Just for the fresh air.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: I believe God is good and God is love.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: I start to struggle when you try to embody God.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: When you try to engender God.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: When you try to putting a race on God.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: I understand the story of Jesus being God in the flesh and having a Jewish an I mean, I get it.