Gissele: [00:00:00] Welcome to our award-winning podcast, Love and Compassion Podcast with Gisele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content.
Gissele: Today we’re talking about compassion and grief, and we’re talking to Maria Belanic, who is a bereaved mother, certified grief educator, and a coach who supports grieving parents discovering how love and loss can exist in the same breath.
Gissele: Her eldest sons , Stephan was diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer at 16. After an 11 year struggle he died. Six months later Maria’s dad also died. What followed was limbo. 10 years of trying to fix her grief pretending she was fine when she wasn’t.
Gissele: Today Maria guides other grieving parents to carry love and loss together without pretending that everything is okay. You don’t have to be fine. Hi, Maria. Thank you for being on the show Hi. [00:01:00]
Maria: Hi, Gisele. It’s such an honor to be on your show. Thank you.
Gissele: Thank you.
Gissele: Thank you very much. I was wondering if you could start telling the audience a little bit abouthow you guys found out about the diagnosis and how the journey led to you actually helping other grief parents.
Maria: Okay. The diagnosis was actually something that we hadn’t even expected.
Maria: As a teenager, he was 15, 16. He was having not so much health issues, but things that the doctors go, “Oh, it’s a growth spurt. It’s this and that.” They couldn’t really explain what was happening. And of course, they found out that one of his organs was larger than what they had thought of, so they sent him for tests and things like that.
Maria: And that’s when it came back that he had a blood cancer, and then they found out that it’s really quite rare ’cause it only affects men in their later years. And my son was the youngest that they had ever seen it, [00:02:00] and they had no idea what it entailed and where it was going, ’cause most people most men who had it died within two to three years.
Maria: So to live with it for 11 years was actually something the doctors hadn’t seen
Gissele: And walk us through the process. So he fought for 11 years. That must have been really difficult for him and for you guys as well. And then at the end trying to grieve the loss of your son while at the same time trying to also grieve the loss of your dad.
Gissele: I’m wondering if you could share sort of what the journey was like? W- were there feelings of anger and frustration? And I know that as a parent myself, I love my children so much, as I’m sure you do too. It would have been really difficult for me to trust life, to trust God, source, universe。 and to try to understand such a significant loss as a parent.
Gissele: We always expect them to mourn us later on not expect [00:03:00] to bury your own children. So that’s probably one of the most difficult challenging concepts to get our heads around.
Maria: It is. It’s actually unimaginable to envision that your own child will die before you do, and it’s something that basically breaks the order of what we expect life to be.
Maria: And part of that, I always call the cancer journey became like a roller coaster that was our normal. It became part of our life. So after a while, you just… like the treatments, the tests, the hospital rooms, the crisis after crises became that cycle that you go, “Oh yeah, this is what life
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