#51 - The Grief That Broke My Family and the Fear of Death I Never Outgrew
What does it look like to spend your whole life afraid of death, and then build a life that keeps walking straight toward it?
This call is a conversation with an anonymous caller from rural Maine. They're a death doula, a trauma-informed yoga instructor, and a Reiki master, and they came to all of it the long way around. Their baby brother died on Thanksgiving Day when they were five. They watched grief reshape their family in ways nobody had language for yet. And somewhere along the way, they stopped trying to get rid of the fear and started learning to move with it instead.
A lot of the conversation is about that contradiction. Holding space for mass shooting survivors while carrying your own deep anxiety about dying. Doing death doula training while not yet having sat with someone at end of life. Finding that being present for other people's grief quietly does something for your own.
We also talk about forgiveness, and what it actually means when the relationship was never quite what you believed it was. About a late-night departure that ended things with their father, and the slow work of arriving at a place that isn't bitterness or guilt but something closer to clarity. And about a theory they'd never said out loud before this call: that dying might be less like an ending and more like waking up somewhere new, without the weight of how you arrived.
Book recommendation: Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul by Stephen Jenkinson
If you’d like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.
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