Episode 335: What Shapes Our Grief - Gwen

Holly was on this podcast 120 episodes ago, in Episode 251, just over two years into her grief. She said herself that she was still living in the land of complete oblivion back then. Still running on the fumes of shock and adrenaline. Still not fully understanding what she was carrying. She is back now, five years in. And what she has to say is something I have never heard anyone say quite this way before. Brit was Holly's daughter, a barrel racer and a brilliant young woman with high-functioning autism who was never healthy enough to ride that horse without being accessed through her port first, without oxygen and tubes and a daily routine that would exhaust most people just to read about. Holly fought for her for twenty years. She went to college with her. She slept on the floor of her room every night to catch the alarms. She never left her side for more than twenty-four hours at a time. And when Brit decided at twenty years old that it was time to go on hospice, Holly let her make that call, because Brit had always been the one who understood her own life best. Brit died on September 4th, 2021. She was twenty years old. And her book, written during her illness, is now selling in shops across Scotland, in a country she always dreamed of visiting but was never strong enough to reach. This episode is full of honest, unguarded moments. Holly went to Scotland this past summer and walked seven miles a morning crying while looking down to avoid the people coming toward her. She describes burying Brit's ashes just this week, in an old pecan orchard at the head of her grandmother's grave, lined with alfalfa because that was Brit's favorite smell, covered by hand while fire ants bit because the fire ants hurt less than what was happening on the inside. She talks about the fifth year being the hardest of all, and the way grief stacks without warning when you are just living moment to moment like a normal person. In the first year, you get all this grace, she says. Everyone marks the firsts. But nobody tells you that randomly, two years and seven months in, you are going to wake up and struggle for a week and not know why. And through all of it, Holly has arrived at something. She says she used to pray every morning asking God to tell Brit she was sorry. Sorry for where she had failed. Sorry she could not make it better. And then one day it hit her: Brit does not know any of that anymore. She does not know she was in pain. She does not know about the needles and the tubes and the held-down screaming. She has been released from all of it. And so Holly stopped apologizing. And started saying thank you. And then she said the thing that I want every grieving parent to carry with them. The only thing left that I can do for her as her mother is carry this pain. It is a privilege to carry this pain. It is the last thing we get to do as their mom. It will not get less, she says. But you will learn to carry it differently. And when you are deep in a wave of it, in the racking sobs and the lament, somehow you meet your child there. And when it passes, you feel just a little lighter. It will not go away. But it will get better. And it is a privilege to carry it.

For six years, Deborah carried this alone. Not entirely by choice. Just by circumstance, by distance, by the particular kind of grief that comes when your child dies as an adult with his own family, his own home, his own life four hundred miles away. The grief that sometimes gets treated as secondary. The grief that nobody quite knows what to do with. Matthew was Deborah's only son, born with powder blue eyes so big and beautiful that the year E.T. came out, people started calling him that. He grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York, became a tractor man through and through, and opened his own business, Cotton Tractor Repair, servicing three counties. He married Erin, had two boys, and was the kind of dad who made their breakfast, took them to school, and had them at the shop every day playing with toy tools. He waved to absolutely everyone when he drove through town. He called his mother Mommy well into adulthood and signed every card that way. He died on July 26th, 2020, three days before his 38th birthday, in an ATV accident on a country road. As he was being loaded into a helicopter, he said a few words. They were these: tell mom and dad I love them. What followed were six years of complicated grief. She was never told the full details of what happened to Matthew — people wanted to protect her, and she understood that, even as she ached to know. She was largely left out of his funeral arrangements, the particular pain of a mother who lived far away. She buried her ex-husband six months later. She flew back a year after Matthew's death to help care for her grandsons when Erin was seriously injured in a car accident. Through all of it, she put herself in the backseat. Through all of it, she kept going. And through all of it, she carried Bear. A stuffed Rottweiler dressed in Matthew's t-shirt and bandana, named for the big gentle dog Matthew kept at his shop. Bear has been to Ireland and Scotland. Wherever Deborah goes, Bear goes. Six years in, her grandsons are doing well. And for the first time, Deborah says she is giving herself permission to do her own grief work. She found this podcast two months ago, listened to over a hundred episodes, and found people who understood what she was carrying. She found her tribe. And she is finally ready to be in it.

Erin starts every conversation about her son the same way. He was the most interesting person I have ever known. And she means it. Max was quirky and eccentric and tender-hearted in equal measure. He spoke in full sentences at fifteen months. He memorized a thirty-page picture book and read it to his preschool class. He loved people deeply, inspired friendships that were somehow different from other friendships, and at three years old, walking into a restaurant holding his grandmother's hand, he picked up her hand and kissed it. She talked about that moment until the day she died. He was also a stand-up comic. An introvert who struggled with self-worth and depression, who somehow found the courage to walk onto a stage in front of strangers and make them laugh. His parents sat in the back of that bar, convinced they were going to have to fight somebody if anyone heckled him. Nobody heckled him. Max was diagnosed with major depressive disorder at eighteen and struggled with it for the next six or seven years. When things got bad, he always did one of two things — he would check himself into the hospital, or he would call and ask to come home. And so, when his parents got the call that he had taken his life on June 3rd, 2020, right in the early months of COVID when every single one of his coping strategies had been taken from him at once, they were absolutely blindsided. Because he always came home. He always asked for help. In this conversation, Erin speaks with remarkable honesty about what she did not understand when Max was alive. When he was in the depths of a depressive episode, she would drag him out of bed and take him to Target, thinking if he just got up and got moving he would feel better. She did these things because she was so afraid of his darkness that she could not sit in it with him. After Max died, she fell into a depression herself. And for the first time, she got a glimpse of the darkness he had been living with. That is when she understood what he had needed from her. Not to be pulled out of the pit. Just for her to get in beside him. It is one of the most honest and heartbreaking things any parent has said on this podcast. And it is also one of the most useful, because it is the same thing every grieving parent needs from the people who love them. Not someone to fix it. Not someone to cheer them up. Someone willing to climb down into the darkness and just sit there. Erin also talks about the marriage therapist who told her and her husband not to judge each other for the way they grieved, advice she credits with saving their marriage. The journal that became a book. The bird that appeared again and again after Max died and became the thread that runs through her memoir, My Unexpected Journey: Reflections After Losing My Son to Suicide. And she talks about what she has built from all of it — grief groups, webinars, experiential sessions where bereaved parents engage in hands-on creative work together. All of it born from the same hard-won knowledge: grief cannot be fixed. It can only be witnessed. You can find Erin and all of her resources at erinblechman.com.

Grief needs tending. That is one of the truest things Gwen said in this conversation, and it is also one of the hardest things about being a grieving parent. Because your children need tending too. And you cannot always do both at once. This episode is the audio version of our most recent livestream, and it is one of the most honest conversations Gwen and I have had. We asked our community how losing a child has changed their parenting, both positively and negatively, and the responses poured in. What emerged was a portrait of parents doing the impossible, every single day, and feeling like they are failing at it. The fear that arrived with grief and never quite left. The panic when a text goes unanswered for too long, when a phone rings at an odd hour, when a child does not come home when they said they would. One listener described it beautifully: her nerves were on the outside of her body. She knew, in a way she never did before, that if one child could die, anyone could. The critical thinking that used to come easily had been replaced by something rawer and more urgent. The short temper that lives alongside the patience. So many of our listeners named the same contradiction: they no longer sweat the small stuff, and yet they are more short-tempered than they ever were before. Grief stews in us. It sits just under the surface, and sometimes it spills out sideways, onto the people closest to us, the ones we love the most. The guilt of not being the parent you used to be. One listener said simply: before my son died, I knew I was a good mom. Afterwards, I doubted myself for several years. That doubt is real. That doubt is common. And it is not the whole truth. Because here is what Gwen reminded us near the end of this conversation, and what I want every grieving parent who listens to carry with them. Your children are watching you get up every day knowing the day has sadness in it. They are watching you make the lunches and get them dressed and take them to their places. They are watching you love them in the middle of the hardest thing you have ever been through. And that is not nothing. That is extraordinary. You are doing a great job. Even when it does not feel like it. Especially then.

Her name is Magnolia Song. Her father had always loved the name Maggie. Her mother Erin, a botanist, found the perfect origin for it, the magnolia tree, the oldest flowering species on earth, known for resilience and beauty. It felt exactly right for the little girl who arrived as the best surprise of their lives. And what a girl she was. Maggie loved water in every form, puddles, bath time, the surf at the beach. She was mesmerized by the redwood trees that swayed above her backyard. She had dark curly hair and a smile that could pull the biggest belly laughs out of her oldest brother like nobody else could. She played a delightful game of slowly moving a Lego toward her mouth while watching her mama out of the corner of her eye, just to see the reaction. And the week before she died, at just 15 months old, she walked herself an entire mile through the snow at Lake Tahoe - just a small, determined person moving through the world entirely on her own terms. Maggie was 15 months old when she died suddenly and unexpectedly on February 21st of this year. She had been perfectly healthy. She was smiling over her shoulder at Erin at 3:30 in the afternoon. By 1:00 in the morning she was gone, from an intestinal volvulus that twisted so quickly and so tightly that even the doctor who fought to save her looked Erin in the eyes three months later and said, I can say with 100% certainty that we did everything possible. There was no way to save her. On the evening of that first terrible day, the family gathered on the front porch, and a great horned owl landed on the telephone wire right in front of them. A bird Erin had never seen at that house before. It sat there for ten, fifteen minutes, hooing, looking right at them. They called the boys out. They all just listened. Erin has not seen that owl again. She is not sure what she believes about signs. She is a scientist by nature, and grief has cracked open questions in her she never expected to be asking. But she has come to a quiet conclusion about it: whether or not signs are real does not actually matter. If it comforts you, it is enough. That spirit of open, honest questioning is at the heart of everything Erin shares in this conversation. Six months into the most devastating loss of her life, she is not pretending to have answers. But she has made choices. She decided very early that she was going to lean in. She was not going to push Maggie aside. She was not going to avoid the grief or dress it up or rush through it. She drew a distinction that has helped her enormously, between grief, which is natural and healthy and necessary, and suffering, which lives in the guilt and the unanswerable whys. She could not choose whether Maggie lived. But she could choose how she was going to grieve. And she holds onto something she heard on this podcast in those first desperate weeks of searching for guidance. It is the love that connects. Not the grief. Maggie is still woven into the fabric of their daily life. The magnolia trees Erin planted in March are blooming. The boys still make her laugh. And the love is still the thread.