Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
40. Can't We Catch A Break? - With Shelby Forsythia
70 Plays4 years ago
In this conversation with Shelby Forsythia she shares about the “four years of hell’ that she and her family lived through, which in hindsight she is grateful for because it’s allowed her to understand others who experience grief.
They faced many different types of grief, one thing right after another, as if they could not catch a break! It all started when her dad lost his job, then shortly after he was diagnosed with two brain aneurisms. Not too long after that Shelby shared with her family that she was gay, which tested their relationship. Then her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, and after a short time undergoing treatment, she died the day after Christmas.
Shelby shares with us all about her grief journey, and the tools she has found to be helpful through her grief. She is now the author of several books on the topic of grief, Your Grief, Your way and Permission to Grieve as well as podcast host of Grief Book Review and Coming Back: Conversations on Life After Loss. She an intuitive grief guide she is helping people reclaim their power and peace of mind after devastating loss.
Contact Shelby Forsythia : https://www.shelbyforsythia.com/
Contact Kendra Rinaldi to be a guest or for a complimentary coaching session: http://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com
IG: http://www.instagram.com/griefgratitudepodcast
FB: http://www.facebook.com/griefgratitudepodcast
Email: griefgratitudepodcast@gmail.com
Music: http://www.oneplanetmusic.com
Production: Carlos Andres Londono
Recommended
Transcript
Realization and Fear of Coming Out
00:00:01
Speaker
I knew that I was different when I was 14 or 15, definitely in high school, but I knew or felt maybe that it wasn't safe to say anything until I had somewhere else to go, i.e. like a college campus, because I was very afraid that I was going to be kicked out of my house and I wasn't
00:00:21
Speaker
but I was also told that I would be eternally separated from my family in hell. And so there was love there. It's like, we love you, you are our child, and also we can't accept this because it goes against our religion. And gosh, I've done so many other podcast interviews about this part of my grief story specifically because my mom died not accepting this piece of me.
Podcast Introduction: Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between
00:00:50
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between podcast. This podcast is about exploring the grief that occurs at different times in our lives in which we have had major changes and transitions that literally shake us to the core and make us experience grief.
00:01:13
Speaker
I created this podcast for people to feel a little less hopeless and alone in their own grief process as they hear the stories of others who have had similar journeys. I'm Kendra Rinaldi, your host. Now, let's dive right in to today's episode.
00:01:36
Speaker
Thank you for tuning in to today's episode.
Meet Shelby Forsythia
00:01:39
Speaker
Today, I have Shelby Forsythia. She is an author. She's written two books. She's written Permission to Grief. And she also recently launched her other book, which is called Your Grief, Your Way. And she is also a fellow podcaster. She's been doing that a little bit longer than I have, for sure. And that podcast is called Coming Back.
00:02:03
Speaker
And it is about exploring all the different ways in which people come back after devastating loss, either of grief and divorce and all other aspects of life. I'm sure we'll dive into that in a little bit. And so I'd like to welcome you, Shelby, to the podcast. Thank you so much, Kendra. I'm really, really glad to be here today.
00:02:24
Speaker
I'm so glad you are. And by the way, everybody just like listen to her voice and you know I just met his zone into this meditative state because it is just so soothing. I was just telling Shelby before we started recording, I was listening to her podcast as I was walking my dog yesterday and I was like, oh, it's so soothing. And so what is your background
The Influence of Voice and Theatre on Podcasting
00:02:47
Speaker
again?
00:02:47
Speaker
Oh, yes, I was as a kid, I was classically trained in voice and musical theater for about 12 years. And then when I started doing grief work, I had enough people ask, Hey, you should produce a podcast, or are you going to make something that we can listen to an audio? And so many people said it as like, you know, maybe I should. And then I found that the training translated really, really well.
00:03:08
Speaker
Well, that is amazing. Well, and it definitely does. You have an amazing voice. I think I should just be quiet in this episode and just let you speak. Like a lullaby. It's like a sweet lullaby. So tell us, Shelby, a little bit
The Move from Chicago to Washington
00:03:22
Speaker
about you. We were talking about where you are currently living and where you're from, and then we'll dive into your grief story. So where are you at this moment?
00:03:32
Speaker
Yes, so I actually recently relocated to Washington State from Chicago, all entirely intuitive. I think grief does this thing sometimes where it tells us what we need before we even know that we need it. And something that my grief has been asking of me lately is green and silence.
00:03:49
Speaker
And that's not something I got a lot of in Chicago. I think when I moved to Chicago, I needed to feel a little bit anonymous after my mom's death, which we'll get into that story. But also I felt like I needed to access things pretty easily. So I'm thinking transit, grocery stores, jobs, availability. And Chicago provided me a lot of what I needed. And now Washington is
00:04:11
Speaker
what I need next. And my roots actually come from North Carolina, center of the state in the first 21 years of my life I spent there. So you are from the East, moved to Central, now you're West. Yes. So tell us, tell us where do you think, I mean, I know it's depending on what you need, like you just said,
Environmental Impact on Personal Growth
00:04:35
Speaker
what your
00:04:35
Speaker
your grief needs or your soul needs or whatever it is you need, but what have you thought of the experience of living on both coasts and then the central part of the United States? I think there's gifts everywhere.
00:04:51
Speaker
And that's not to say there's not inconveniences everywhere too because there certainly are. Depending on where you go, but I think they have very well, almost like wine and food pairings they've paired very well with where I needed to be in my life or what I was looking for what I was trying to
00:05:08
Speaker
turn myself into in those spaces. I think for as much as we choose where we live, places also get under our skin and do something to us. So we transform the places we live, but then we are also transformed by the places that we live. And so in North Carolina, I think I had the good grace, honestly, the luck and the privilege of being raised in a relatively solid place that
Reflections on a Stable Upbringing
00:05:34
Speaker
had
00:05:34
Speaker
structures like voice lessons like piano lessons like soccer practice and like a like a religion or like a home church that my parents very much wanted to provide for me and my sister and it was a very stable and sheltered and.
00:05:50
Speaker
kind of Disney upbringing is probably how I would label it. And then the first time to strike out on my own to go to a city that's close to family, have family outside of Chicago, but to be there by myself and to see what it's like to be independent in a place that has so many resources available to me. I kind of found out, okay, here's what resonates with me and here's what very much doesn't. And so it was almost like being in this divine dressing room, kind of trying on different articles of clothing and seeing what fit and then discarding what didn't. And I found a lot of what resonated with me and a lot of what didn't.
00:06:20
Speaker
While living in Chicago and now that I kind of have a little bit more of my Self-wisdom or identity
00:06:30
Speaker
I'm going to use the phrase down pat, but I feel I know myself a little bit more than I did. Then when I moved to Chicago, I feel that I can come to a place now where I'm able to rest or to stand still for longer. Chicago is a place of great movement and Washington thus far, especially with coronavirus right now is very much still. And so to, to be in a place that's so quiet and so green is very much the, the things
00:06:57
Speaker
that have always spoken to me. So the places I find inspiration for my books or the places I find healing in myself, they're able to be a little bit louder here because they're not drowned out by sirens or construction or cars or just general, everything's open 24 seven, it's very much not the case here. And so there's a different kind of community and a different kind of conversation that I'm having with myself in this place. But I think it fits exactly where I am in my life right now. If I had gone to Washington and then to Chicago, I think I would have
00:07:26
Speaker
been enormously, enormously lonely and felt isolated for the world. And so, yes. It was a good like in between. I still tell people I won't swear anything off indefinitely, but I don't think I'll be living anywhere in the real like south, southeast or southwest because I just can't take the heat. And that's a personal preference. And so I keep moving
00:07:48
Speaker
uh, colder and wetter everywhere I go. And so I don't know, I don't know what's next. I think if you'd asked me that question, I would have been very afraid because I literally just got here. Um, and I don't even know. When did you get there? So three months ago, literally in the middle of, of the whole pandemic, you moved.
00:08:06
Speaker
Right. Right. And so I am continuing to settle in. I'm still waiting for a sofa to arrive. So it's very much, you know, I have yet to actually put roots down in this place yet. Okay. So yeah, you're still, you're still vacationing to some extent. You're still in that transition mode. It's only a three, three months that you've been muddy. Yeah. Three months. It's still, it's still new. Now take us back. Then you were mentioning then about your childhood and upbringing then in North Carolina.
00:08:34
Speaker
So tell us then about your family unit. So it's you, your sister. Is your sister older, younger than you? She's younger. 18 months though. So she and I got mistaken for twins quite a bit growing up, which I hated and she loved because I was the older one and she was the younger one. So she always loved to be thought of as older and I was like, get out of my space, get out of my friend group, get out of my hobbies. And it's so funny how much we followed each other growing up and kind of stayed in the same orbit. And now even as adults, we are in
00:09:04
Speaker
similar spaces or fields and yet our lives look so very different. Um, and so it's kind of growing up to her. Yeah. Curious to hear how it ended up, uh, how grief, the passing of your mom ended up affecting each of you differently into your paths. So let's go into that. So what year did your mom pass away and what were the circumstances around that?
Family Challenges and Mother's Cancer Diagnosis
00:09:29
Speaker
Yeah, so she died in 2013, and leading up to her death, and I won't swear on this podcast because I know we had a conversation about it before we got on the mic. It's okay. By that time, I will switch. I promise I'll switch to something that I can actually make the particular episode explicit if needed. Well, I don't even know if you would mark this as explicit, but I affectionately refer to it as the four years of hell.
00:09:55
Speaker
the four years leading up to my mother's death. And it's not because she was being treated or actively dying during those four years, it was four years of unrelenting loss. And it was loss of all kinds. And this, in a way, looking back, it was kind of a blessing because now I can
00:10:11
Speaker
opened my eyes to so many more kinds of loss than just death. But so the first thing that happened, it was kind of like somebody was slowly sawing the legs off from under a stool. So the first thing to go was my dad's stable job, and so our family became financially unstable. And then he was diagnosed with two identical brain aneurysms, one on either side of his head.
00:10:31
Speaker
And they were some of the largest recorded in North Carolina and the medics at Duke Hospital were afraid for his life. And so we were as well. And shortly after that, I came out of the closet as a queer woman in North Carolina, which was
00:10:46
Speaker
both accepted and not. And so there was a lot of tension and fights about who I was and what my future was going to be in the world as a result of that. And a really tough, tough internship where I had to prove myself as a human. It was like door to door sales, which is soul sucking to me I've found. I developed an eating disorder. And then shortly after my dad was released from his final surgery, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.
00:11:11
Speaker
and did surgery, radiation, treatments for that for a year and a half. And as we thought we were out of the woods, like Thanksgiving of 2013, we more or less thought my mom had a cold that wouldn't go away. She was coughing a lot. She, you know, because chemo lowers your immune system. And so we just thought she had caught a bug from being out and about or had going to church or something like that.
00:11:33
Speaker
And by the time it got bad enough to take her into a hospital, they told us that her cancer had returned and metastasized to her lungs. And anything that doctors could do at that point would buy us time, but would no longer buy us.
00:11:48
Speaker
of any kind of cure, any kind of guarantee for longevity of her life. And so they went in, they did a few surgeries, my mom kind of hobbled along for about a month or so. But on December 19, they called our house, and I think my dad picked up the phone, but essentially the news was
00:12:04
Speaker
we've done all we can do on our end and so you should call in hospice and we would guess you have about six weeks to six months on the outside and then she died in seven days on the day after Christmas and so
00:12:21
Speaker
I'm sorry. I'm like, I need to. Hold on. Yeah. And let me, let me process it because it's the first time I'm hearing about all the different losses as well as the circumstances of your mom's, of your mom's death and your dad, like all of these different steps. So I'm kind of like, I'm like, Oh my gosh, I have a question about that. Oh, I have a question about because we could do a whole episode on each of those losses that you experienced pretty much because
00:12:46
Speaker
This episode is not like even like yours is your whole podcast as well Your is not just about the grief that occurs after death, but after any major transition in life Including happy ones including moves and things like that like you've experienced so I'm just in awe. May I ask how old were you when the whole so the four years prior then to your mom's
00:13:15
Speaker
So how old were you when your dad lost his job? I'm trying to even just perceive the age in which you experience these losses.
Coping with Multiple Losses
00:13:24
Speaker
So I had just turned 17 and then my mom died about four months after I turned 21. And so these are very, I was on another podcast recently and the host referred to these years as launch pad years. You're getting ready to, to thrust yourself into the world and declare who you are and start to take up your own space and your own world. And it's like, as that, as that rocket was launching, the thrusters were going out and I was losing screws and bolts and side paneling and everything was just coming apart at the seams and it really was,
00:13:55
Speaker
I mean, once my mom died, I crashed and burned, total. I use this phrasing with clients sometimes of like, you know how it feels like when the rug gets pulled out from under you? It's like somebody pulled out the rug and then the floor and then the foundation and then the ground and then the very center of the earth. And so there was literally at that point after all of that loss,
00:14:16
Speaker
I really had nothing left to stand on or to support me in that space. That's very much how I felt in the story that I believed to be true. I think it took a long time to
00:14:31
Speaker
create my own sources of foundation again and also see that all was not lost. But it's almost like, and we can get into this too as a separate question, but for me and my grief at least, I have to really feel the despair and the devastation of the story that everything is lost before I can get to the truth that not all is lost.
00:14:54
Speaker
because it's accepting a reality first to then be able to add to it. It's like everything was ripped from under you. So you're like, okay, seeing that reality that there's no, oh, there's no carpet anymore. There's no rug that you know, there's no rug.
00:15:10
Speaker
There's no floor. There's no foundation. Okay, that's my reality. Now it was like, oh, wait, but there's a pebble right here. There is one stone that was left and oh, wait, there's actually this. It's like, then you can start kind of seeing then the support or the little glimpses of gratitude in that whole emptiness to some extent as well. But accepting that reality was the first step for you to then build on that.
00:15:39
Speaker
Now, during those four years, what did you use as tools and how were you guys able to, let's say, even deal with your dad's diagnosis first off and then with the loss of his job? What were you guys using as a family or as individuals for support, emotional support during that time?
00:16:05
Speaker
Well, I can only really speak to myself because I don't know what the rest of my family was up to. And that kind of points to the fact that we did not grieve together. I don't think we acknowledged it as a grief event, really. Only now looking back, do I recognize it as a loss. But I know for me,
00:16:23
Speaker
Pretty much the day I got the news, I drove to the nearest mall, got Cinnabon and went shopping. And it's funny, funny not funny. It's interesting to look back and see how I coped then versus how I cope now because there's still these lingering
00:16:41
Speaker
Desires to escape into things that aren't necessarily quote-unquote good for me when I was being trained through the grief recovery method They talked about stirbs short-term energy relieving behaviors and everybody usually has a top two or a top three and in the United States Especially food and alcohol rank really high and then there's like drugs reckless driving fantasy which is like Netflix or romance novels or things that get you out of your
00:17:04
Speaker
And then like shopping or gambling gambling is definitely one Busy work worker holism, which is definitely something I thrust myself into as well. I think at first I
00:17:20
Speaker
I mean, if you had told me at the very beginning, you're about to enter four years of hell, I would not have believed you. And I would have fared a lot worse because I would know that something worse is coming. But in this case, we almost kind of went ahead with our lives. Like I went off to college and then my sister followed me two years after, because we thought at some point we would get back to some kind of normal. Like we retained this not blind optimism,
00:17:48
Speaker
but like a dogged optimism, like he's going to come through okay, our family's going to remain intact, like it's all going to turn out in the end somehow. And then when my mom died, I was like, it's not going to be okay, it's not going to turn out in the end. And that's when I really
00:18:05
Speaker
recognized, I was like, okay, optimism is the thing that got me up to this point. But optimism can carry me no further, you know, that I can no longer be optimistic about this. These are no longer the wheels under my feet that are moving me in any sort of motion. Because as we kind of got through each of these separate instances, you know, my dad losing his job, and then his brain surgeries, we had
00:18:28
Speaker
lovely support through the form of meal trains and car pulls and family and friends dropping by the house. So we were enormously held by a community in that space. And I remember after his last surgery, we were like, Oh, we don't have to do this again. And then just months later, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, and we were thrust into that whirlwind again. And it was like, wow,
00:18:47
Speaker
Can't we catch a break? Can't we breathe here? Yeah, and so I think it was like this belief in dogged optimism that was like, okay, somehow we're gonna make it through this and we're just gonna stick to that belief and not question it. And then for me, and this goes into the developing of the eating disorder, but food and shopping were very much how I made myself feel safe in a world that felt like it was falling apart around me.
00:19:14
Speaker
in that moment too, because you were struggling then also with maybe deciding to come out to your family as well,
Fear of Coming Out and Family Rejection
00:19:21
Speaker
right? So there was an internal turmoil probably occurring as well, right? So it's like, how do you even come out during this moment of time in which everybody's kind of trying to figure out where they hold on to their life? But at the same time, had you not come out during that time, I wonder,
00:19:43
Speaker
how much more drowned, you know what I mean? How much more underwater you would have been had you not even shared that with your family? Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it wasn't an easy thing to do either because I was raised in a very Christian home. It was not denominational, but it was still very Christian and a non-accepting of gay people sense. Because I know there's all kinds of Christianity that exist in the world now, and I was very convinced that I would be kicked out of my house.
00:20:12
Speaker
And my coming out came pretty early in this four year span. And so it's like my dad lost his job and then I came out of the closet. And I don't believe timing is foggy here because grief does a nutty thing.
00:20:28
Speaker
And especially when you have so many things, yeah, you have so many things all at once. I can't even imagine keeping track of the timing and the months. And sometimes I ask that, and I've realized that when I've asked people, so what year was that? Or like, ah, you stumped me on that. Like, I don't remember. Like, you know, because it does end up becoming a little bit of a fog. So, um, so yeah, so then you, you're, sorry, go back to what you were saying.
00:20:52
Speaker
Yeah, so it happened sometime within the first year of the four years of hell, but I can't tell you exactly when. I know it was around Christmas time within that first year and I had waited. I knew that I was different when I was 14 or 15, definitely in high school, but I knew or felt maybe that it wasn't safe to say anything until I had somewhere else to go, i.e. like a college campus, because I was very afraid that I was going to be kicked out of my house and I wasn't
00:21:21
Speaker
but i was also told that i would be eternally separated from my family in hell and so like there was love there it's like we love you you are our child and also we can't accept this because it goes against our religion and and
Mother's Passing and Unresolved Conflict
00:21:38
Speaker
Gosh, I've done so many other podcast interviews about this part of my grief story specifically because my mom died not accepting this piece of me and so she died while we were in the middle of a fight, essentially, energetically. And as I've gotten older and understood more about what religion is and was to her in life,
00:21:58
Speaker
I see very much putting myself into her shoes as she was trying to save her baby's life. Like she thought that I would die and die forever, and she was fighting tooth and nail the only way she knew how to save me from that, which was for me to magically no longer be queer.
00:22:16
Speaker
And I was trying to show up as a child who wanted to be fully seen by their parent of why can't you love, acknowledge, accept, embrace all of who I am without needing me to be different so that you'll be happy. But neither of us had those vocabularies at the time. So we just yelled a lot of Bible verses at each other and talked about my fictional wedding day whenever that was going to happen somewhere in the distant future.
00:22:42
Speaker
she and my dad both would throw jabs at the person that I was dating or not allow them into the house when my sister's boyfriends were very much welcome. And so it felt
00:22:54
Speaker
very isolating and then to have the losses on top of that and to try to be in college and making friends and dating for the first time and figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of the world. This is a phrase that's been coming to me a lot, especially coronavirus, but I'll look at my clients over Zoom and I'll say things like, this is a lot for one human to carry.
00:23:13
Speaker
And I look back at my 17, 18, 19, 20, 21-year-old self, and I'm like, that was a lot for one human to care. It was. I'm here, like, sitting in just absolute awe, because I'm here, again, I'm hearing this for the first time. And I just feel like I just want to embrace, embrace, you know, like, just, that's my empathetic self. I just, I'm like, oh, I just want to hug you right now. You know, like, you've just, it's so, so much. And what you were talking about,
00:23:41
Speaker
Being able to now, as the mature self you are now, view your mom's perspective now of knowing why it was that she was so, that it was so hard for her and that seeing it, again, having that empathy towards her too, now, that was also very moving when I heard that from you because it's like you're forgiving
00:24:07
Speaker
You're not forgetting, of course, that that was a situation that happened, but there's that forgiveness that comes from that love and understanding of what her point of view was, and that it was based out of her own idea of what love was. Tell me a little bit then what happened in the circumstances around when she passed away.
Experiencing Mother's Passing at Home
00:24:29
Speaker
Were you then in... Well, no, you were home then for Christmas, or were you in college at that time?
00:24:36
Speaker
So I was in college home for winter break and it was a very bizarre
00:24:44
Speaker
gift blessing in disguise i don't even know that i want to call it that but she she died while both my sister and i were able to be home and not miss any school it's it's like her i don't know how much meaning i can subscribe to this but um it's like the cancer decided to come back at a convenient time we had both just finished winter finals and we're home for christmas break and i mean we had been home for
00:25:12
Speaker
I don't know, four or five days before we got the call that there was nothing more they could do. So we need to call in hospice. They called in hospice and she died seven days later. It was like, wow, the amount of life that I lived
00:25:27
Speaker
in one winter break when by comparison I knew a lot of my friends are just loafing around the house eating meatballs at their parents' houses. In comparison I felt like I grew and aged and frankly was traumatized so much in a two and a half week span of time and then it was my parents deepest wish that I returned to school and so I went back in January for my last semester of college as a senior and it was awful.
00:25:55
Speaker
Where was that school? Where was that school located?
Grieving as a College Student
00:25:58
Speaker
In the mountains of North Carolina. It was about two and a half hours away from home, but it was still far enough away that it felt like a whole other planet. One of my favorite and least favorite things to talk about, least favorite because it's painful, favorite because we need to talk more about it, is I was a grieving person
00:26:18
Speaker
on a college campus. And that's a thing that not a lot of college campuses are prepared to handle, is grieving students. Right. And so the help that I received, no offense to any grad students who are listening to this, but I was receiving counseling from grad students who were learning what it was like to counsel for the first time. And so I was bringing my deep pain to somebody who was in training to hold
00:26:42
Speaker
deep pain in a general way, general counseling. And I found nobody really specialized in what I needed. And so the isolation there was very strong. And then my friend group of fellow 21 year olds, you know, their solution to problems was just drink or sleep. Yes. And so very, very hard to feel supported in that space. I felt I had very few allies on my side in that.
00:27:11
Speaker
Now how about with your sister, how far was she in her college from you? She was two years behind me so she was wrapping up her sophomore year when she went back and she was down in Charlotte, North Carolina. Would you guys talk on the phone? Did you guys use each other as support? Were you grieving very differently? What was that dynamic like and then your dad then being home?
00:27:33
Speaker
How did you all kind of support each other's grief separately, per se? I don't know if that makes, because you each were living in a different place right after your mom's death.
00:27:44
Speaker
Right, and so it was like we went from all of us being in the house, and then all of our friends and family being there, to suddenly everything becoming very quiet and very empty. Yeah, solo living. And I didn't really give that the space and honoring that it deserved at the time, because I was so focused on my own grief experience. I don't think I could have done it any other way. And so my dad was at home alone. I was in college alone, and my sister was in college alone. And I don't remember, this kind of goes back to the memory thing.
00:28:14
Speaker
There are whole months of time that I do not recall from that first six or seven month period after her death my final semester of college. I have flashes of being in classrooms, of interacting with professors, of graduation day,
00:28:29
Speaker
of quitting my job because I just couldn't handle having a job on top of everything else. I remember crying on one of my professor's couches in her office. And I remember very few of the meals I ate and the parties that I attended. But in terms of, did I talk to my father or my sister or how do we support each other? I don't know that we did. Something that I do remember is going home for the first time after my mom's death. So I went home in like February or March
00:28:57
Speaker
And just walking in and I heard my mom's voice ringing in my head of like what happened Because my father and my mother to put it very mildly have different organization styles and so to walk into the house and to not know either as a 21 year old girl the amount of paperwork that's involved after your spouse dies and
00:29:19
Speaker
And to just see everything covered by mountains and mountains of paper and everything was everywhere. There's absolutely no... To my mind, there was no system of organizing for the thing. It was horrifying to me and it really hit home that the house that I grew up in was no longer a place I could call home. The energy of my mother had gone forever.
00:29:43
Speaker
And so there was a re-grieving process of acknowledging that I have lost the physical childhood home. And then too, I don't remember all the facts of this correctly either, but what led to my father being diagnosed with brain aneurysms in 2011-2012 was him having seizures and some of his seizures returned.
00:30:03
Speaker
after my mom's death and I think it was just the sheer amount of stress that he was under but after having just lost one parent I was absolutely convinced that he was also going to die and so something that I remember my sister and I more or less banded together on was getting him to seek medical care to the point of even going to some of his appointments with him because we were so concerned that as daughters we were about to lose our
00:30:26
Speaker
second and only other parent. And that's about as much of the support that I can really remember us doing. I don't know that I really connected with my family again until about a year and a half or two years after my mom's death because I read this book called Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin where she talks about how our habits can make us
Diverse Grieving Methods in Family
00:30:46
Speaker
I don't know why I was reading a happiness hack book when I was grieving, but there I was. And she talked about how the number one measure of happiness in any human's life is their connections to other people. And I was like, well, I claim to love my family and to be connected to them, but do I ever talk to them? No, not really.
00:31:04
Speaker
And so from, from the time I'd read that book I started scheduling weekly phone calls with them and while we've kind of fallen off the map with those in coronavirus especially because we all have different jobs and different lives now. We still check in with each other or email or send funny videos or memes or things pretty regularly and so that feels
00:31:24
Speaker
maintained, but I think to your initial question, you were right, we all grieved very very differently. I'm learning as I get older that my father seems to be very open and shut. And so when he is done grieving my mother he is done grieving my mother. And in the sense that
00:31:41
Speaker
This past Christmas, my sister and I were home and went out to our mom's favorite restaurant for her death aversary the day after Christmas. And we assumed that my dad would be coming with us and then he did not. And there was a lot of pain in him removing himself from our, a ritual that we had been doing for the past six years. And he told us when we arrived home that he was done doing anything on that day to honor her memory.
00:32:09
Speaker
And that's hard. And my sister definitely leaned on God as a resource and a strength in her grief, and I definitely leaned out of God. I think I was angry at God for allowing my mother to die.
00:32:29
Speaker
And then there was the whole queer thing kind of wrapped up in that too. So I was like, not only are you going to send me to hell, but you just killed my mother. So I'm not really fond of you right now. And I've since come to my own kind of.
00:32:41
Speaker
a re-relationship with the thing that I believe to be God, which is very different, I think, than the God that I was raised in and under. But, yeah, wow, we all grieved extremely, extremely differently. So different. Because each of you, again, and I say this all the time, again, with you and your sister, I mean, it's your mother that died, but each of you is so unique, right? And so, again, grief is unique to the person that's living it.
00:33:07
Speaker
And it's also unique to the time in our life that we are and how grief comes out may be different. So in your dad's case, six years later when he was kind of done honoring your mom's death anniversary as you had never heard it that way.
00:33:28
Speaker
It only, I had only heard it like anniversary. You know, I had never heard it as, you know, Oh, I love the word death anniversary or grief anniversary. That day, you know, it was kind of like where he was, where he is in his life at this moment. That is not the way he wants to continue honoring in that way. And so, um, it is, it make, it can make it hard on those around. Yeah. I wanted to, um,
00:33:53
Speaker
to ask you regarding your something you said about your relationship then like kind of developing now your new relationship with whatever we want to call the uh creative force um i don't know what do you like to call the i know what you grew up believing in terms of of god but how how do you like to call that being or entity now oh interesting uh i usually say universe now it's almost like
00:34:24
Speaker
Like the thing that's bigger than God, or if I do use God, I use the lower case, uh, G instead of the capital G. I'm like, it's okay. I think they're okay with the lower case. Well, there's no ego. Well, yeah. Cause technically if we think of it, there's still no ego. It's just like, there's no ego in God. It's more us in a way of kind of like how we write it is just in a way of, of honoring, but God could care less. We wrote it with the Lord. Yeah, because there's no ego. Yeah. There's no ego.
00:34:54
Speaker
Yeah, but you know what I thought that it was really beautiful what you said that you are now forming your own way and your own relationship and it's kind of like Again going back to the analogy that you gave of the rug the floor the foundation You're building now something in which you can then stand and be like, okay this feels like the relationship I want to have with this creative force with the universe with God with whatever it is and this feels like a
00:35:24
Speaker
A good relationship it doesn't have to be the same one that i was brought up to have just because that was how my parents related to this creative force i can create my own way in which feels comfortable and.
00:35:41
Speaker
authentic to me. That's what it feels like you're doing in the process of doing, of building something new, a new something there. I don't know, is that the case? Do you feel that that's the case? Yes. Well, and I think the phrase that's coming to me right now is that
00:36:04
Speaker
I wanted a relationship with God that didn't have rules or criteria attached to it. Like if the thing that you are is infinite love, God, me talking to God, I'm like, if you're infinite love, how can you possibly put any sort of restrictions or qualifications on it? Like criteria of like, this is what gets you in the door. This is what qualifies or disqualifies you. This is XYZ. I just couldn't wrap my head around
00:36:32
Speaker
a loving universe that would require me to be different than what I am. And so it's almost as if I was allowed to evolve from a world or a religion that insisted on structure and rules and criteria into one where the kind of God or the kind of universe that I believe in
00:36:55
Speaker
those things don't exist, like error 404 not found. Like they don't even speak in that language.
00:37:05
Speaker
Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I completely honor that that is the way that you have the relationship. And I think that that is one of the things we can't just mimic necessarily the way that we've brought up being if it does not fit into what we believe. I think in the core, every individual has to be true to who they are and find their own way in which they interact with
00:37:35
Speaker
a higher being or if they believe in a higher being you know it doesn't necessarily have to be the one the same way in which our parents or siblings or people around us relate it has to be very uh yeah i think it has to be
00:37:54
Speaker
True. It just has to be true to you. It has to fit you. The other part I wanted to also ask you, so your sister, sorry, relied on then religion or getting close to God to then help her in her grief process. Tell us what tools you use then, because you mentioned school didn't have really that many resources you would go to.
00:38:19
Speaker
the ones that were studying to be therapists or whatever, student therapists to kind of talk to them. What was your way aside from the eating and the other aspects that were not that healthy? What were some of the ones that were healthy in your grief process? Yeah. I think something I allowed myself to do was
00:38:50
Speaker
Beheld by whoever was offering to hold me and This is different from beheld by the people you think should hold you because in the aftermath of loss I thought my nuclear family like my immediate family and even some of my closest friends Like you should be my support system right now I very much had that expectation of who they were going to be for me But my some of my greatest supporters after my mom died in terms of like emotional support I can call them anytime and we'll have a conversation
Support from Aunts and a Professor
00:39:18
Speaker
I can go cry on their couch and it's fine, or I can go, you know, have like a Sunday afternoon chat with them and just let it all hang out. Tears and rage and untrue angsty early 20s stories all tangled up in there were both of my aunts, my mom's sisters, and one of my college professors. And I think because they had seen
00:39:47
Speaker
such great loss before my aunts had lost both of their parents I mean this is a whole other part of my grief story but my mom lost her mom when she was 22 I lost my mom when I was 21 so she knew what she was about to
00:40:03
Speaker
not what she was about to do to us because she didn't cause her own death but she knew the life that we were about to live without her she had to get married without her mother she had kids without her mother and so my aunts also lived that life and then they lost their father my grandfather when i was in fifth grade and so they knew loss of a parent and they knew that pain and because they also knew my mother i could
00:40:24
Speaker
find pieces of her in them when we would talk in conversation. And then with this professor of mine, I'd had her in a class before and then I think she found out about my mother's death through Facebook or something because a group of us in my major were all kind of friends together on Facebook.
00:40:42
Speaker
And she approached me after class one day, or she called me aside, and she was like, there is a black cloud over your head. Do you want to come talk about it? And I was like, yeah. And I literally sat on her couch. Is it Linus? Pardon me? Is it Linus? Who's the one that walks around with the little, which one?
00:41:02
Speaker
Oh, I think it's pig pen, but it's because he's dirty. Oh, okay. Oh, because he's dirty. Oh, okay. But yeah, oh, similar. I was walking around in something like a cloud. I did not have my feet on the ground. I was not capable of feeling joy. The website, What's Your Grief, does this beautiful piece on a condition called temporary inability to see rainbows. And I think that happens to so many people after a loss, but that was me. I was like, anything good is impossible for me to see.
00:41:29
Speaker
And I don't think I needed to, but- Like a jaded way of seeing. Yeah, it's like a jaded kind of become a little jaded, a little dark, kind of like, no, there aren't any rainbows. Yeah. Yeah. Everything just gloom. Well, I had moved from jaded because jaded can imply some kind of resentment or like a disappointed envy. I had moved from that to total hopelessness. Like I was in a place of despair. I was like, there are no other people in the world. Nothing matters.
00:41:57
Speaker
It wasn't necessarily that everything would be better if I wasn't here, but the only way I could see a way out was for the pain to end. And I knew that wasn't going to happen. And so I was just very miserable in the meantime. But she saw that in my face. And as soon as she shut the door to her office, I burst into tears on her couch. And I was like, I just can't. And she ended up being the advisor to my thesis and really a grounding force in the very hardest semester of college I've ever had to take.
00:42:25
Speaker
That gives so much hope to the education system to have those type of teachers professors that really see their students and she saw you and the fact that she was able to acknowledge that and
00:42:38
Speaker
Allow you to be able to express your grief. Wow, like what a beautiful gift way more than anything she could have talked to you probably was just allowing you to be able to express your grief. What's that's beautiful. Do you still have a connection with her with this professor?
00:42:56
Speaker
some yeah and we kind of um orbit in and out of each other's lives every now and then um but uh i suppose like other things that helped me along the way aside from like human support systems i learned i tried on a lot of things going back to that divine dressing room of like try on what works for you and discard what doesn't chicago was very much a place for that
00:43:18
Speaker
And so I tried on a lot of different things, including Reiki, which is like a Japanese healing modality where you pay attention to different locations on your body. And for me, it allowed myself a way of healing where I didn't have to talk or put the experience of grief into words because I think that's a pressure that comes from traditional psychotherapy and other grief methods, even reading. I couldn't read for the first like seven or eight months after my mom died. I would look at a paragraph and be like, I know their words and I know they have meaning, but I can't possibly
00:43:48
Speaker
knit them together and form any comprehension from them. And so to find these spaces where I could literally just pay attention to myself without needing to talk or label anything was really powerful. And that helped a lot. And then eventually when I could read again, or even when I could start listening to things, I started with podcasts about grief. And so I'm forever grateful to this platform for even existing at all. And then books came my way. I had gotten my first library card since I was a kid.
00:44:17
Speaker
Chicago and start and just walk to the grief section and started checking on anything I could find And again, it was like that dressing room I would I would keep the things that resonated with me and if somebody was trying to tell me there was a certain way to do grief or Something restrictive about it or you should be overt by XYZ that book went right back on the shelf Candy story. Yeah, you don't have to it doesn't have to be one-size-fits-all there is something
00:44:45
Speaker
for everybody and there's a tool that works for each individual and you have to find what it is that fits you. And I love that concept of what you're saying of the dressing room kind of fitting, trying to fit into something. You know how you bring 15 pairs of pants in there and one fits? It's like that.
00:45:03
Speaker
And that in and of itself is an exhausting process. So for Grievous who are listening right now who feel like they're in the dressing room of their life, you know, like nothing fits. I'm like, yes, I know that struggle. I'm like, I take all these clothes into the dressing room and nothing fits or it's not my style. It's too long in the back or it's torn in the front or whatever the hell it is. It's like, yeah, and that process is also exhausting because I was literally trying to figure out who am I now in the world where my mom is dead.
00:45:27
Speaker
And so there's very much not only if what am I going to do from here, it's like, who am I from here? There's a rebuilding of identity that happens that's very hard.
00:45:35
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, there's just too many layers to even count of what all the different dynamics that change. You already mentioned the dynamics of even going into your family home, how that changed the moment she passed away. So there's just so many things. Now, I read a little part of the beginning of your book in which you basically, why you wrote the book you just explained right now was because even in your own grief, you could not find
Journey to Podcasting and Writing
00:46:04
Speaker
something that could even hold your attention long enough because I could barely even read a paragraph without already losing track of where I was. So tell us a little bit then about that, about all these now tools that now you have created for others and how that process came about. Yes. I was going to say to make a long story very short, but no, it's just kind of a long story. So as I started,
00:46:34
Speaker
uncovering these books about grief, these podcasts about grief, all of this information that I was learning from people who had grieved before me, I started posting it on my personal Facebook and I would have friends and family and even people I didn't know comment and be like, wow, I've never heard it this way before. Wow, this is really insightful. Or wow, this is helping me talk to my neighbor or my coworker, whoever, about their grief. Like you should do something with this. And I was like, oh, maybe I should. I didn't feel qualified in any way to be any kind of expert on grief, but, um,
00:47:04
Speaker
the people around me were asking for it to be greater than I was making it. And so I started doing
00:47:12
Speaker
public Facebook lives every Wednesday, where I would just talk about some topic related to grief. I talked about pet loss. I talked about being triggered. I talked about how it's actually worth it to feel the emotions of grief. And that kind of became a regular thing. And people are like, I wish there was a way to subscribe to this. You should make a podcast. And enough people told me to do that. That I looked into making a podcast and thought about how hard is this to do.
00:47:37
Speaker
I think I ended up setting it up within about two weeks or so but it took a while to actually figure out what I wanted to say and get it off the ground and that has grown into both of my books. Permission to Grieve was the first one and that was based on an experience I had about two years after my mom died and my wallet got stolen and I had an absolute meltdown about it. It was the first time since the day that she died that I allowed myself to grieve.
Inspiration Behind 'Permission to Grieve'
00:48:01
Speaker
And it was over a stolen wallet, but the stories, the world is an unsafe place. Everything I love has been taken from me. I am powerless. It's helpless. It's hopeless. We're very much the same. And when I had this meltdown in my room and allowed all this anger and these tears and this rage and this frustration to come out, the voice that came back to me, my own internal voice or the voice of the universe or whatever you'd like to call it, just said, you gave yourself permission to grieve.
00:48:26
Speaker
And so there was a very eye-opening experience in that. And from that point on, I was like, okay, how can I get more of this? Because that felt good. Instead of stifling what it is to grieve, like how can I give myself more freedom and permission to do so? And so that's the first book. And then this year in January, I was approached by Penguin Random House to write a non-religious daily devotional for grief that was not woo-woo or fluffy or like head in the clouds, but very practical and down to earth.
00:48:53
Speaker
And so when you flip open to any page, it's labeled for days of the year, so like January 17th or December 1st or kind of whatever resonates with you, you can follow it through the year. But whenever you flip open to any page, there's either a quote from a fellow greever, an author, a celebrity, just a grieving person in there, and a little bit of text below it, or there's some kind of practical exercise underneath it that you can actually do. So like a guided
00:49:17
Speaker
journaling, visualization, an exercise, a practice, a script to start using with your friends about your grief, a craft project, I mean there's all kinds of different ideas in here about here's where your grief can go as you're trying to figure out where it fits into your world and there's 366 days of this and it was such an honor to be contacted by a major publishing house to write a book about grief because holy cow like
00:49:44
Speaker
For as much as humans grieve and for as much as we covertly talk about loss in documentaries and in Netflix specials and nightly news stories and politics, for as much as we talk about loss and grief, there aren't a lot of books that exist on loss and grief. Like for as much as it's part of our culture, it's not a thing that we actually write about and produce. And so to be asked to produce something in this space was really powerful. And so your grief your way is
00:50:10
Speaker
I mean, even as the holidays are coming up, I might get get a copy for you and then get a copy for your friends because you will know somebody who experiences a loss in 2021. If you don't already know somebody who's experienced a loss in 2020. And then from there, from doing books, I've started working one on one with clients, I do live workshops on different topics surrounding grief like anger or guilt, or anticipatory grief, which is a big one right now.
00:50:35
Speaker
And I'm constantly creating new things all the time. It's very much a combination of what I feel called to put out into the world, so internally generated. But then there's also what the people I am in community with ask of me. And so they're like, I would really love if you could make something that felt like this or sounded like this or was this long or cost this much. And I do my very best to
00:50:58
Speaker
to fit into that space. I call myself an intuitive grief guide because so much of my work is practical guidance of here's some tools, here's some frameworks, here's some vocabulary, here's some actual logistical information to sit within your grief, but the intuitive part
00:51:14
Speaker
very much speaks to especially when I'm in a room with a client or in a workshop with people I'm like what what needs to be said that hasn't been said yet what's the truth that we're not speaking and maybe not because of avoidance but maybe because we don't have words for it and maybe because we just don't see it
00:51:29
Speaker
And maybe we have not asked the right question. Sometimes we have not asked that person the right, that's how I coach as well is intuitively. So the same, the right question can get you to that answer of what it is you are wondering, you know, what it is that you're still holding
00:51:49
Speaker
onto because sometimes it's not the actual grief itself of the person. If it has to do with the death of somebody, sometimes it's not that, that's the biggest even grieve that you're feeling at that moment. That could be the secondary losses too that could have made it even worse. Wow, that is so much. Did your first book, did you publish that one on your own? Did you do self-publish and then afterwards?
00:52:15
Speaker
What is it? Penguin Publishing House? Am I saying it right? Contacted you for the second one or how did you publish your first one?
00:52:24
Speaker
Yes, so I self-published the first one. You asked me earlier about audiobooks, but I did audiobook for that one. I did audiobook for this one. They're all available as ebooks and stuff and you can find them. You can find them wherever you find books. That's what I'm going to do with the audiobook. I love it. Love it. Yes, forewarning for anybody who is not okay with swear language, the first two chapters of Permission to Grief, do have some swear words in there. It's me retelling the day I found out about my mother's death.
00:52:53
Speaker
grief sometimes warrants the F word. And so there's a lot of that in there. But after the first two chapters or so, it's very much about the different types of permission that we can all give ourselves in the aftermath of loss, how we can ask for permission from people who are not giving us permission to grief, like bosses, family members, friends, and also how we can grant permission to others without using the word permission explicitly. So it's kind of like, how can we all help each other free each other from the restrictions that we place on each other surrounding grief?
00:53:23
Speaker
Yeah, giving each other the space needed and holding space for each other in that process. That's wonderful. Now, what's next? What is next for Shelby? What is up? Let's see. I'm so excited to see this. This has just been a six-year process since your mom passed away, but it's been three years since you've had your podcast, and it's been then... What year again was it? Two years later after your mom was passing is that you wrote the book?
00:53:53
Speaker
Actually, the book came much later. So the podcast came in 2017, the book came in 2019, and then Your Grief Your Way just came out a month ago. This way, yeah. On September 29th. So it seems to be on some kind of exponential curve. It's going very, very quickly. Well, for me, I always take off about a month between December and January. So about December 15th to January 15th, I take off just to honor
00:54:19
Speaker
death of my mom and my body very much remembers that season and so I feel I need to wind down or to sleep some more or kind of just go be quiet is the message I perpetually get in that season of my life.
Planning a Third Book on Grief Comfort
00:54:35
Speaker
I will say though too I feel that I'm always learning more about grief and always finding new ways to talk about the experience of grief
00:54:44
Speaker
So a third book is already in the works. It's on its way. And this is about three teeny tiny phrases that you can use to comfort people who are grieving. So if you're a grieving person, you can use them on yourself, but especially for friends, family, clergy people, nurses, funeral directors, people who are adjacent to the grieving on a regular basis. These are words beyond, I'm sorry for your loss, that you can say to people who are grieving to validate them in their grief.
00:55:13
Speaker
Yeah, I have friends. You know how you say that you were saying how people would like ask you, what do I say to somebody? Or when you would post on Facebook, people would say, oh, that's so helpful. Same. I get called, hey, I have this friend that died. I don't know what to do. What should I do? Like, what do I say? I'm like, okay, here's what you say. Here's what you don't say. Now, you might still put your foot in your mouth because I know I do. Even though I've experienced grief, I still sometimes say the wrong thing.
00:55:37
Speaker
And that is okay because we're humans, but that is wonderful that your book is based on these phrases that you can use to be able to comfort somebody that's going through that. Because sometimes, yeah, the words do come out all jumbled up when we're trying to express an emotion that is so deep as it is, you know, with grief. Yeah. It's like, how do you wrap words around something that's so absolutely emotional and so deep?
00:56:06
Speaker
for people who are witnessing it as friends and family and people who are grieving. It's like, okay, now what do I say to that? Because nothing I say could possibly, you know, make them feel better, make them happy. All the trite things that we try to try to do to comfort people who are grieving.
00:56:22
Speaker
And so that's actually my quote that's actually what I say exactly what you just said There's nothing I could say right now that could ease your pain That's one of that but I just want you to know I'm thinking of you that that is one of the phrases that comes out naturally because it's exactly that
00:56:38
Speaker
what you just said, there is no words right now that I could say that could bring any comfort. I know. I know that there's nothing that, the right words right now. So, uh, wow. Okay. Sorry. I keep on interrupting. I'm just so I go ahead, continue. It's a very exciting idea to talk about because I think it's a pain point that a lot of people have even so I'm writing the introduction for the book right now, but
00:57:02
Speaker
even I as a grieving person and a person who works with grieve or struggle with what to say and so it's like it's not a problem because you haven't grieved it's a problem because it's like words fail in the face of something so great and so the book lists three different phrases to say to comfort the grieving kind of based on where they are in their grief and what they're showing to you to be true um and then i have another i have about eight more books that are in me i think for sure and then oh my goodness
00:57:32
Speaker
Okay, now you're a musical, you studied musical theater. So, and so this whole like storytelling aspect in you, this is kind of how it's being birthed or what have you always liked to write? Did you ever write any books before these like in terms of storytelling and so forth at school?
00:57:52
Speaker
Well, and I say I studied musical theater, but that was kind of a, that was the lessons that I took when I wasn't in school. And so it wasn't the thing I studied.
00:58:01
Speaker
at a collegiate level. So I studied copywriting in the advertising industry. My point is to look in the corner of the room. Again, no learning is ever wasted. But I wanted to be a writer since the time I was five years old and I would write these stories about Happy Meal toys that I'd get from McDonald's. And I remember drawing little pictures. I wanted to be a writer and an illustrator. And so I had these little pictures that would go along with, and I tried to write a fantasy story in middle school.
00:58:32
Speaker
And then my mom made fun of me. And then my friends made fun of me. And I was like, oh, that kind of killed off that dream. And in the aftermath of my mom's death, I started writing as a way to cope, to get emotions out of my body, even if words were imperfect, that kind of captured it in some way and locked them onto paper so I'd have to carry them around anymore. And then as I started interviewing people for my podcast and doing this work as a speaker in this space and working with people one on one, they're like, you,
00:59:00
Speaker
You have words for this or frameworks for this or even metaphors like the dressing room for this that I have never heard before. You take the large abstract experience of grief and put legs on it and that helps. And so it becomes and continues to be a space where I feel very much called to show up is writing.
00:59:19
Speaker
That being said, I'm always open to where creativity wants to take me next. Just like your travels. Just like your travels. Have you noticed I don't really like to pin myself down very much?
00:59:34
Speaker
You know, you're flowing. You're flowing like the feather that's just kind of just going with the wind and just kind of seeing where it's going to rest upon next. But a feather will never stay still, right? It will still be able to just, again, wind comes through. It will pick up again and fly. So you're just...
00:59:50
Speaker
You're just going with it, your creativity as well as where you are physically. But I think that that is very important actually for a creative person to change the environment they're in physically. Personally, sorry, I feel that changing your environment physically does end up being able to spark a different energy, different ideas because your interactions are changing. So your flow of energy
01:00:17
Speaker
is different and more creative in that way than when you're stagnant. So I would say that easily you could probably still switch. If you have eight books in you, I could foresee a few more cities
01:00:39
Speaker
Yeah, just you know to see where else and and maybe you know the type of energy that that particular environment gives you is reflected in the type of book you write you know because it
01:00:52
Speaker
it will end up kind of infiltrating its way in there too. So that is, you know what I mean? Like what you would have written in Chicago is very different than what you're going to write out in the mountains and green places. This is again, this is coming from a theater person here like that, another artistic viewpoint here. And I could be totally wrong. I have never written a book, but I could just see it being very different. The energy that is,
01:01:21
Speaker
in you, depending on the environment you're in. And so therefore, your book is going to be a reflection of that. So I don't know, I may be wrong, but there's something. Well, I'm going to get my first book, Permission to Grief, which I wrote in 2018 to 2019. And then Your Grief, Your Way, I actually wrote it in the first two months of the pandemic here between March and May of 2020. And so the tone
01:01:48
Speaker
and the desire I have, like the message I'm trying to get across, it's still freeing yourself from the restrictions you have surrounding grief, giving yourself permission to grieve, but the messaging and the words that I'm using in there, vastly different. Sometimes I look at the two books, I'm like, I know I wrote both of these, but it's very,
01:02:05
Speaker
interesting to see how they're evolving both with time, with location, with my immaturity as a grief person, but then also with what's happening globally. So, yeah, fascinating to see. Yeah, I know that. It's going to be interesting to read, you know, when you compare, you know, book number eight to book number one, you're going to see all your growth. And I know you say grief growers to your podcast listeners,
01:02:30
Speaker
And that is what you're doing yourself. You're constantly growing and changing. And every individual in our life, whether it's from grief or any other aspect in our life, we're constantly growing and evolving. If not, I don't know what else would be the purpose of living were we not growing in the process. And all these tests, as we have witnessed here in your life, have definitely been catalysts for a lot of growth and therefore also a lot of
01:02:59
Speaker
giving back in that growth process now with all these platforms that you have and which you're doing. So thank you. Yes, and thank you too. I think there's this myth that growth needs to be visible and growth needs to be good. But sometimes growth is just getting more information about yourself or having lived more life. And sometimes it happens very slowly. And the reason I call my
01:03:24
Speaker
my community grief growers and the reason why my tagline is because even through grief we are growing, it's because I wish that someone had told me in the aftermath of my mom's death that I wasn't stuck, I wasn't going backwards, that even in the aftermath of her loss when I felt like I was standing still and the rest of the world was plowing ahead, that I was learning what it meant to grieve and I was learning who I was as a grieving person, I was learning what was healing to me and I was learning what was hurtful to me
01:03:52
Speaker
And all of that became the building blocks on which I am now standing. And so even in this place when I was absolutely convinced that growth was impossible or even going backwards, there was growth happening. And so even through grief, we are growing. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. Well, thank you. Is there anything else that you'd like to share? If you can definitely share your websites and stuff, but is there anything else regarding grief that I did not ask that you'd like to share?
01:04:21
Speaker
I think this was perfect. Good. Thank you. So if you want to say just quickly like your website and I'll definitely put it in the show notes. Oh, sure. Yes. You can find the podcasts, books, live workshops, work with me one-on-one. Everything lives at shelbyforcythia.com.
01:04:36
Speaker
Perfect. And they can find your links to also how to find you on Instagram and Facebook on that website as well. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Everything lives there. Spell your last name too, because it's the first time I see your last name, by the way. Sure. It's actually a flower that's native to North Carolina, which is why I use it as my business name. My given name is Forsyth. I added the IA both as an homage to my home state and also because I was a florist for a little bit. So it's a fun.
01:05:05
Speaker
It's a fun way out of words. Thank you. So Shelby S H E L B as in boy Y for Cynthia F O R S and Sam Y T H I A. And so like john Forsyth take off the E and then add an I A.
01:05:21
Speaker
You'll get pretty close. Thank you. That's wonderful. Thank you so much again for your time and for all the beautiful nuggets. I call them nuggets. I have not found nuggets, tips. I have to find another word, so I don't sound so repetitive saying nuggets of learning and so forth. I'll have to find. Do you have another synonym for nuggets or tips? Let's see. I usually say pieces of wisdom.
01:05:45
Speaker
Oh, I like that. That's a good one, but I can't steal that one. But yeah, it's those little learning tips that you gave us. So thank you once again. Thank you so much, Kendra.
01:06:06
Speaker
Thank you again so much for choosing to listen today. I hope that you can take away a few nuggets from today's episode that can bring you comfort in your times of grief. If so, it would mean so much to me if you would rate and comment on this episode. And if you feel inspired in some way to share it with someone who may need to hear this, please do so.
01:06:34
Speaker
Also, if you or someone you know has a story of grief and gratitude that should be shared so that others can be inspired as well, please reach out to me. And thanks once again for tuning into Grief Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.