#54 - Why Does Some Grief Get to Be Spoken Out Loud — and Some Doesn't?
This week's caller is joining us internationally, and the grief in this conversation is universal.
They've lost a lot over the years. Their mom at twenty-two, a cat who carried them through years of hard times, and a dog they describe as an extension of themselves. And when the conversation turns to which loss hit hardest, the answer is not the one you might expect. It's one of those moments that quietly reframes everything that came before it.
They're now a grief recovery specialist, building a practice around the losses that rarely get acknowledged -- animals, ecosystems, the slow grief of a world changing faster than we can process. They have a name for all of it, and a reason it matters, and a lot of hard-won experience behind both.
This conversation is warm and wide-ranging. It gets into souls and reincarnation, old souls versus new ones, and whether time even exists in whatever comes next. It gets into ecological grief and what it means to mourn a planet. And it gets into the particular embarrassment of loving an animal so completely that losing them undoes you, and why that embarrassment has no place in honest grief work.
There's also a moment near the end that I've been sitting with. About what it would look like to attend a funeral where people wear white and celebrate instead of mourn. And what it might mean to actually believe that life is not the opposite of death.
Book recommendation: The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
If you’d like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.
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