August 8, 2024 • 14 mins
Welcome to The One Podcast, your guide to living a vibrant and authentic life. Hosted by Gina Catherine, a coach, writer, and speaker, this episode delves into the profound experience of grief and loss.
Gina shares a deeply personal story of her mother’s final days and the journey through hospice care. She reflects on the raw emotions and the unique process of grieving, offering heartfelt insights and practical advice for those navigating similar paths.
Discover how to connect with your pain in small, intentional moments, the importance of not isolating yourself, and how to build new relationships with the departed. Gina emphasizes the non-linear nature of grief and encourages listeners to embrace it as a healer, guiding them toward a life with more power and joy.
Tune in for a compassionate and empowering discussion that challenges conventional stages of grief and provides a roadmap for personal healing and growth.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Music.
(00:06):
Welcome to The One Podcast, the podcast for living from your most vibrant and
authentic self. My name is Gina Catherine.
I am a coach, a writer, and a speaker.
My mission is to help you deeply connect to your body, heart,
mind, and soul with curiosity, compassion, and play.
While I offer these words from the perspective of a usually straight,
(00:27):
cisgendered, able-bodied white woman, it is my heartfelt hope that this podcast
holds nuggets of inspiration for anyone who feels like they could step more
fully into their own life.
Music.
If you want more love, more intimacy, and more play in your life,
you're in the right spot.
The one exists, and they are you.
(00:54):
My mother stopped eating on New Year's Eve 2021.
I was called home 2,815 miles from DC to Oregon to be with her at the end of her life.
I decided not to adjust to the three-hour time difference so that I could take
the 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. shift and give her the painkillers and just whatever care I could offer.
(01:17):
I was prepared for my mom's death. Two months earlier, she came out of a really long cancer remission.
I don't want to play who had the worst type of cancer, but she had multiple myeloma.
Google that and tell me she didn't pull the short straw.
One month after that remission, she called me and asked me to come home and
help place her into hospice care.
(01:39):
Her pain was was just unbearable.
And so I was prepared for her death in a very real way.
I had taken some preemptive grief counseling, and she and I talked about it.
I asked her if she wanted to tell me what she wanted to do after her death, and she said yes.
And so she told me, and I promised her that I would make sure it happened just
(02:00):
the way that she wanted it.
Her death, I was prepared for, like the fact of it. The two things that nothing
could prepare me for were the watching her die and the rest of my life without her.
The hospice nurses left a little
pamphlet with the timeline of what end of life sometimes looks like.
I looked at that pamphlet every day and then I watched her for signs.
(02:24):
Over and over again I googled, how long can a person live without food or water?
I was there three weeks and she didn't eat. This beautiful woman who used to, like,
sneak soda drinks from a two-liter bottle while standing in front of my refrigerator
when she was visiting me was now getting water pressed against her lips from
(02:45):
a small square sponge at the end of a stick like the world's most depressing lollipop.
The hospice workers left my brother, my stepdad, and I enough drugs on a tray
to kill all of us, and we were supposed to give her, discern what to give her, what she needed.
We spent a lot of time in discussion of the right ratio of painkillers and anxiety meds.
(03:08):
We selfishly wanted her to be lucid, and we compassionately wanted her to feel
no pain, and there didn't seemed to be a perfect or even a right combination.
Maybe talking about it gave us something to do while we waited.
It's a weird feeling to care for someone who is dying in hospice.
The goal is to not make them healthy.
(03:30):
My brother and I actually got
a scolding when we were trying to make her drink more and stay hydrated.
Hydration is for people who will live. At 16 days without food or water.
I was with her one night and she overheard me talking about food for the men.
And she said in her own silky strong voice, what should we eat, sissy?
(03:51):
And I said, what do you want to eat? And she said, chocolate. And I wanted to cry.
This was my mama who had a sweet tooth for chocolate.
We must have gifted one another 300 pounds of truffles and chocolates over the years, the decades.
And I also wanted to cry because the pamphlet said that often the appetite returns in the very final days.
(04:16):
And I also wanted to cry because I'm not medically trained and I didn't know
if it was okay for her to have any solid food.
But I said to her, you're in luck because I just bought chocolate today. And I had.
I melted and cooled a square of Ghirardelli's salted dark chocolate and I put
it on the back of a really small spoon and I pressed it against her lips like
(04:37):
lip balm, and she smiled her smile.
And she said to me, how did you learn this? And I said, learn what?
And she said, your wonderfulness.
And then I smiled. That was such a gift, that moment.
And three days later, I woke up at four for my normal care shift.
My brother didn't say much when I relieved him.
(05:00):
The little chart where we wrote down meds that we gave her was empty.
She had not woken up at all in the night. It was a big change from waking up
every two hours and receiving many droppers full of painkillers and anxiety meds.
My little brother has the biggest
brown eyes, and they looked wide and scared when he left that house.
(05:22):
I got a coffee, and I just sat with her.
Her breath was like this fish-out-of-water breathing, and after about two hours,
it became very labored and erratic, like she was having a bad dream.
Her breathing became very panicked, and I started to panic, and I wondered if
I should call someone to help, and then I remembered why I was there.
(05:44):
I started doing a breathing practice called Tonglin.
I breathed in her pain, and I breathed out a blessing.
I cycled our breath together, and she calmed down. My mom had not spoken or
opened her eyes since the chocolate night, and they stayed closed,
and I breathed in her pain, and I breathed out a blessing over and over.
(06:05):
And something, spirit or intuition, made me begin saying things to her on the exhale.
We know how much you love us, Mom. You are so loved by us, Mom.
It's okay. Everything is okay.
And her frantic breath stopped, and then all the breath stopped.
(06:26):
She opened her eyes and looked right at me when she died, and then I was alone,
and there was a service and a burial, my kids flew in, and then I was home with
my dog and my son in my house.
I feel so fortunate that I've been coaching for many years by this time.
I like to joke that I'm an emotional powerhouse. I really don't shy away from
(06:49):
feelings or discomfort anymore.
I knew a thing or two about loss and grieving from when I had lost a baby and a marriage.
I knew that I would not hide from this, but I also knew that I had very little
bandwidth for a deep dive into this loss. And so here's what I did.
I started by saying, fuck you, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and your five stages of grief.
(07:13):
And I wish to say to you that though Kubler-Ross brought grief into the open,
there really aren't five distinct stages, and they certainly are not linear.
Our grief does not follow a script. Denial, anger, bargaining,
depression, and acceptance are basically in a mosh pit together,
or an orgy if you're not shy, talking about sex and death in the same sentence, which I am not.
(07:39):
Your grief journey is yours alone.
It is so unique. unique, but in that uniqueness, I can offer you some common
practices that may help.
The first is acknowledge your loss is big and that it sucks.
Connect with the pain of the loss in very tiny and intentional moments.
(07:59):
For me, I sat in meditation and I let that black tar feeling pull my heart into my stomach.
I invited it when I was not feeling sad.
At first, for 30 seconds only.
I built up to 5 minutes over the course of months, but no more.
I have clients who don't meditate and we just have them listen to a song that
(08:21):
evokes that kind of a sadness.
They invite the grief into this music, they feel the physical sensation, and they get out.
This tiny practice helped me
sleep because what I ran from during the day was what kept me up at night.
But it also helped me to not be suddenly bowled over by a wave while I was like
(08:43):
ordering popcorn or something at the movies.
That still happened, but a lot less when I did my little salute to grief every morning.
Secondly, or thirdly, where am I? I made sure that I did not isolate.
This one is so hard. I share my grief on this podcast not to get attention,
(09:03):
but to change a world where grieving people do not feel like they can share out in the open.
We don't want to be a burden or a downer to others, and we don't want to be seen as weak.
But I know my strength, and I know that the currency I used to buy that strength
was not faking it, but with authentic and truthful expression,
(09:23):
just like I'm doing here.
Grief is healed ideally in circles,
but allow yourself to be witnessed in grief by one person at least.
Tell people, this will feel so hard.
Get help with that discomfort because you're not getting better without the connection.
When that piece gets a little easier and you feel ready, make room for expression.
(09:48):
And this expression could be expression of emotion.
So connecting and spending time with all of the different feelings.
And it's also an expression of how this new relationship you will have with the dead.
Can we heal relationship with dead people? I think so.
Not in a psychic medium type way, but go you if that's your thing,
(10:11):
but in a telling the absolute truth about your loss, the absolute truth about the relationship,
about what you needed and you didn't get, or what you got and you still need.
My mom will never play with my hair again. That sucks.
What did I feel though when she did that? Did I feel adored?
(10:32):
Did I feel pampered? Did I feel valued or special?
How can I cultivate that feeling in my life now?
Accept grief as the healer that she is. Try not to make grief the dark villain.
What if grief is here to escort us from our old life without the loss to the
new life with more power?
(10:54):
Grief is not to get stuck on like an elevator that jams up between floors.
Allow yourself to move in the direction of joy.
So many people hesitate to let go of the grief, the pain, because it is all
that they have left of the person.
It is a process, a healing to find that person, to find that feeling with clarity
(11:17):
and without the veil of sadness.
What wisdom will you find there? I sat in prayer and meditation and I started
to hear my mom's voice without all of her trauma.
Trauma and what that brought me was this permission to let go of stories that
weren't mine that I realized were holding me back.
(11:38):
I couldn't have that when she was alive.
It was only after I did these practices that I got that type of clarity.
It was really such a gift.
My final and most important offering is to go slowly with grief.
Your brain had a shock that registers as a threat to your life and your body.
(11:59):
Learn how to come down from that fight or flight reaction.
Journaling, dance, yoga, theater, meditation, breathwork, singing,
humming, somatic movements, all of these will help to soothe you,
to help regulate your nervous system.
And these you could do before you're in a hole. Like you don't have to do them
(12:19):
when you're in this pit of sadness.
If you have a little practices, practices every day, the other healing modalities
will be able to soak in. They'll be able to reach you.
So in other words, don't use these practices as medicine, but as vitamins.
Grief is never a just push through type of operation.
It is a very tender paying attention, paying attention to what's going on in
(12:44):
your mind, your body, your feelings, so that you can get the life that you You
were meant to live, and this takes practice and guidance.
If you find yourself seeking some of this guidance, I have a 20-week private
program where you take my hand
and we wade into all of the grief and the practices to bring joy back.
(13:05):
Please reach out to me if you feel like my grief space would improve your life. You are loved by me.
Music.
Heartfelt thank you for listening. I am honored every time you choose the one podcast.
(13:26):
Intimacy does not require perfection. Big, juicy love requires us to get curious,
to offer ourselves what we are searching for in others.
From that place, relationships feel easier.
If you feel like someone you know would really like this episode,
send them the link right now. Let's courageously practice love together.
(13:46):
Life is an absolute blast when you.
Music.
Music.
(00:06):
Welcome to The One Podcast, the podcast for living from your most vibrant and
authentic self. My name is Gina Catherine.
I am a coach, a writer, and a speaker.
My mission is to help you deeply connect to your body, heart,
mind, and soul with curiosity, compassion, and play.
While I offer these words from the perspective of a usually straight,
(00:27):
cisgendered, able-bodied white woman, it is my heartfelt hope that this podcast
holds nuggets of inspiration for anyone who feels like they could step more
fully into their own life.
Music.
If you want more love, more intimacy, and more play in your life,
you're in the right spot.
The one exists, and they are you.
(00:54):
My mother stopped eating on New Year's Eve 2021.
I was called home 2,815 miles from DC to Oregon to be with her at the end of her life.
I decided not to adjust to the three-hour time difference so that I could take
the 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. shift and give her the painkillers and just whatever care I could offer.
(01:17):
I was prepared for my mom's death. Two months earlier, she came out of a really long cancer remission.
I don't want to play who had the worst type of cancer, but she had multiple myeloma.
Google that and tell me she didn't pull the short straw.
One month after that remission, she called me and asked me to come home and
help place her into hospice care.
(01:39):
Her pain was was just unbearable.
And so I was prepared for her death in a very real way.
I had taken some preemptive grief counseling, and she and I talked about it.
I asked her if she wanted to tell me what she wanted to do after her death, and she said yes.
And so she told me, and I promised her that I would make sure it happened just
(02:00):
the way that she wanted it.
Her death, I was prepared for, like the fact of it. The two things that nothing
could prepare me for were the watching her die and the rest of my life without her.
The hospice nurses left a little
pamphlet with the timeline of what end of life sometimes looks like.
I looked at that pamphlet every day and then I watched her for signs.
(02:24):
Over and over again I googled, how long can a person live without food or water?
I was there three weeks and she didn't eat. This beautiful woman who used to, like,
sneak soda drinks from a two-liter bottle while standing in front of my refrigerator
when she was visiting me was now getting water pressed against her lips from
(02:45):
a small square sponge at the end of a stick like the world's most depressing lollipop.
The hospice workers left my brother, my stepdad, and I enough drugs on a tray
to kill all of us, and we were supposed to give her, discern what to give her, what she needed.
We spent a lot of time in discussion of the right ratio of painkillers and anxiety meds.
(03:08):
We selfishly wanted her to be lucid, and we compassionately wanted her to feel
no pain, and there didn't seemed to be a perfect or even a right combination.
Maybe talking about it gave us something to do while we waited.
It's a weird feeling to care for someone who is dying in hospice.
The goal is to not make them healthy.
(03:30):
My brother and I actually got
a scolding when we were trying to make her drink more and stay hydrated.
Hydration is for people who will live. At 16 days without food or water.
I was with her one night and she overheard me talking about food for the men.
And she said in her own silky strong voice, what should we eat, sissy?
(03:51):
And I said, what do you want to eat? And she said, chocolate. And I wanted to cry.
This was my mama who had a sweet tooth for chocolate.
We must have gifted one another 300 pounds of truffles and chocolates over the years, the decades.
And I also wanted to cry because the pamphlet said that often the appetite returns in the very final days.
(04:16):
And I also wanted to cry because I'm not medically trained and I didn't know
if it was okay for her to have any solid food.
But I said to her, you're in luck because I just bought chocolate today. And I had.
I melted and cooled a square of Ghirardelli's salted dark chocolate and I put
it on the back of a really small spoon and I pressed it against her lips like
(04:37):
lip balm, and she smiled her smile.
And she said to me, how did you learn this? And I said, learn what?
And she said, your wonderfulness.
And then I smiled. That was such a gift, that moment.
And three days later, I woke up at four for my normal care shift.
My brother didn't say much when I relieved him.
(05:00):
The little chart where we wrote down meds that we gave her was empty.
She had not woken up at all in the night. It was a big change from waking up
every two hours and receiving many droppers full of painkillers and anxiety meds.
My little brother has the biggest
brown eyes, and they looked wide and scared when he left that house.
(05:22):
I got a coffee, and I just sat with her.
Her breath was like this fish-out-of-water breathing, and after about two hours,
it became very labored and erratic, like she was having a bad dream.
Her breathing became very panicked, and I started to panic, and I wondered if
I should call someone to help, and then I remembered why I was there.
(05:44):
I started doing a breathing practice called Tonglin.
I breathed in her pain, and I breathed out a blessing.
I cycled our breath together, and she calmed down. My mom had not spoken or
opened her eyes since the chocolate night, and they stayed closed,
and I breathed in her pain, and I breathed out a blessing over and over.
(06:05):
And something, spirit or intuition, made me begin saying things to her on the exhale.
We know how much you love us, Mom. You are so loved by us, Mom.
It's okay. Everything is okay.
And her frantic breath stopped, and then all the breath stopped.
(06:26):
She opened her eyes and looked right at me when she died, and then I was alone,
and there was a service and a burial, my kids flew in, and then I was home with
my dog and my son in my house.
I feel so fortunate that I've been coaching for many years by this time.
I like to joke that I'm an emotional powerhouse. I really don't shy away from
(06:49):
feelings or discomfort anymore.
I knew a thing or two about loss and grieving from when I had lost a baby and a marriage.
I knew that I would not hide from this, but I also knew that I had very little
bandwidth for a deep dive into this loss. And so here's what I did.
I started by saying, fuck you, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and your five stages of grief.
(07:13):
And I wish to say to you that though Kubler-Ross brought grief into the open,
there really aren't five distinct stages, and they certainly are not linear.
Our grief does not follow a script. Denial, anger, bargaining,
depression, and acceptance are basically in a mosh pit together,
or an orgy if you're not shy, talking about sex and death in the same sentence, which I am not.
(07:39):
Your grief journey is yours alone.
It is so unique. unique, but in that uniqueness, I can offer you some common
practices that may help.
The first is acknowledge your loss is big and that it sucks.
Connect with the pain of the loss in very tiny and intentional moments.
(07:59):
For me, I sat in meditation and I let that black tar feeling pull my heart into my stomach.
I invited it when I was not feeling sad.
At first, for 30 seconds only.
I built up to 5 minutes over the course of months, but no more.
I have clients who don't meditate and we just have them listen to a song that
(08:21):
evokes that kind of a sadness.
They invite the grief into this music, they feel the physical sensation, and they get out.
This tiny practice helped me
sleep because what I ran from during the day was what kept me up at night.
But it also helped me to not be suddenly bowled over by a wave while I was like
(08:43):
ordering popcorn or something at the movies.
That still happened, but a lot less when I did my little salute to grief every morning.
Secondly, or thirdly, where am I? I made sure that I did not isolate.
This one is so hard. I share my grief on this podcast not to get attention,
(09:03):
but to change a world where grieving people do not feel like they can share out in the open.
We don't want to be a burden or a downer to others, and we don't want to be seen as weak.
But I know my strength, and I know that the currency I used to buy that strength
was not faking it, but with authentic and truthful expression,
(09:23):
just like I'm doing here.
Grief is healed ideally in circles,
but allow yourself to be witnessed in grief by one person at least.
Tell people, this will feel so hard.
Get help with that discomfort because you're not getting better without the connection.
When that piece gets a little easier and you feel ready, make room for expression.
(09:48):
And this expression could be expression of emotion.
So connecting and spending time with all of the different feelings.
And it's also an expression of how this new relationship you will have with the dead.
Can we heal relationship with dead people? I think so.
Not in a psychic medium type way, but go you if that's your thing,
(10:11):
but in a telling the absolute truth about your loss, the absolute truth about the relationship,
about what you needed and you didn't get, or what you got and you still need.
My mom will never play with my hair again. That sucks.
What did I feel though when she did that? Did I feel adored?
(10:32):
Did I feel pampered? Did I feel valued or special?
How can I cultivate that feeling in my life now?
Accept grief as the healer that she is. Try not to make grief the dark villain.
What if grief is here to escort us from our old life without the loss to the
new life with more power?
(10:54):
Grief is not to get stuck on like an elevator that jams up between floors.
Allow yourself to move in the direction of joy.
So many people hesitate to let go of the grief, the pain, because it is all
that they have left of the person.
It is a process, a healing to find that person, to find that feeling with clarity
(11:17):
and without the veil of sadness.
What wisdom will you find there? I sat in prayer and meditation and I started
to hear my mom's voice without all of her trauma.
Trauma and what that brought me was this permission to let go of stories that
weren't mine that I realized were holding me back.
(11:38):
I couldn't have that when she was alive.
It was only after I did these practices that I got that type of clarity.
It was really such a gift.
My final and most important offering is to go slowly with grief.
Your brain had a shock that registers as a threat to your life and your body.
(11:59):
Learn how to come down from that fight or flight reaction.
Journaling, dance, yoga, theater, meditation, breathwork, singing,
humming, somatic movements, all of these will help to soothe you,
to help regulate your nervous system.
And these you could do before you're in a hole. Like you don't have to do them
(12:19):
when you're in this pit of sadness.
If you have a little practices, practices every day, the other healing modalities
will be able to soak in. They'll be able to reach you.
So in other words, don't use these practices as medicine, but as vitamins.
Grief is never a just push through type of operation.
It is a very tender paying attention, paying attention to what's going on in
(12:44):
your mind, your body, your feelings, so that you can get the life that you You
were meant to live, and this takes practice and guidance.
If you find yourself seeking some of this guidance, I have a 20-week private
program where you take my hand
and we wade into all of the grief and the practices to bring joy back.
(13:05):
Please reach out to me if you feel like my grief space would improve your life. You are loved by me.
Music.
Heartfelt thank you for listening. I am honored every time you choose the one podcast.
(13:26):
Intimacy does not require perfection. Big, juicy love requires us to get curious,
to offer ourselves what we are searching for in others.
From that place, relationships feel easier.
If you feel like someone you know would really like this episode,
send them the link right now. Let's courageously practice love together.
(13:46):
Life is an absolute blast when you.
Music.
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