Adulting - Let's Talk About... Parent Mortality

Episode Date: July 27, 2024

Hello and welcome to Adulting, and the third episode of Let’s Talk About… a broadening of Adulting... where that was about all of the things we never got taught in school, this is almost like semi...nars on life; where my audience (that's you!), get to chat anonymously about things they couldn't necessarily discuss over lunch with their friends, or feel like they don't have anyone to talk to about whatever it may be.  To get involved, follow me on Instagram @oenone, where every Tuesday we vote on a topic, and every Wednesday we dig deep. Let’s Talk About…parent mortality. The submission read: parents mortality… my dad is terminally unwell and I am only 28. Before we begin I just wanted to give you a trigger/content warning. I received so many messages about parental loss, grief, being a carer, dealing with terminal illness, and so if any of those subjects are too close to home or may be too upsetting this episode might not be for you. Although despite the very difficult subject matter, so many of you expressed how much of a relief it is to actually talk about grief and loss in a culture that has a strange and fractured relationship with death. So many of us don’t really know what to say or how to talk about it, which is why I was so grateful that so many of you were so generous with your own experiences.Please do let me know any feedback and always, I'd love for you to rate, review & subscribe, it helps people to find the podcast,O Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Starting point is 00:00:18 Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Or visit connectsontario.ca. Select games only. Guarantee void if platform or game outages occur. Guarantee requires play by at least one customer until jackpot is awarded. Or 11 p.m. Eastern. Restrictions apply. See full terms at canada.casino.fandu.com. Please play responsibly. Hello and welcome to Adulting, the third episode of Let's Talk About, a broadening of Adulting where that was about all of the things we never got taught in school. This is almost like seminars on life where my audience, that's you, get to chat anonymously about things they couldn't necessarily discuss over lunch with their friends or feel like they don't have anyone to talk to about whatever it might be. To get involved in the initial discussion follow me on Instagram
Starting point is 00:01:00 at Anoni where every Tuesday we vote on a topic and every Wednesday we dig deep. Let's talk about parent mortality. The submission read, parents mortality, my dad is terminally unwell and I am only 28. Before we begin, I just wanted to give you a trigger content warning. I received so many messages about parental loss, grief, being a carer, dealing with terminal illness. And so if any of those subjects are too close to home, too upsetting, this episode might not be for you. Although despite the very difficult subject matter, so many of you expressed how much of a relief it is to actually talk about grief and loss in a culture that has such a strange and fractured relationship with death and grief.
Starting point is 00:01:45 So many of us don't really know what to say or how to talk about it, which is why I was so grateful that so many of you were so generous in sharing your own experiences. I wanted to read out a few messages. My dad died three years ago when I was 27, unexpectedly. It was a very intense experience. I was the first out of my close friends to experience a parent dying and it felt quite isolating. Something you learn quickly is often, not always, people don't know how to act or treat you when they haven't been through it themselves. It does feel like you mostly have yourself and family to rely on for strength. I believe it's made me a more compassionate person and better able to care
Starting point is 00:02:25 for others through the grieving process. To be honest, I'm surprised this is a topic people want to cover so much. I hadn't thought about my mortality at all until this death happened, but the experience does make you appreciate your finite life so much more. I'm glad we're talking about this as I find the British way of dealing with death very isolating and hidden, and it would be a lot easier for everyone if we were more open and knew how to express feelings around mortality in everyday life. Another message read, in my experience people really struggled to talk about the realities of death. Both my parents died by the time I was 31. Since my first bereavement at 21 it seems to have been my job to sanitise my grief in order for other people to tolerate it.
Starting point is 00:03:07 It seems to me as though this often comes from anxiety about the same thing happening to them. The most common question I get asked is how my parents died. I've never been asked what their names were or what our relationship was like. Engaging with who they were and what they meant to me would mean truly sitting with the pain of the loss whereas only engaging with their accident or illness is a way of assessing whether this could happen to you and your family and one more reads I lost my dad at 14 I'm now 27 and despite feeling like I missed out on a large part of growing up I'm at peace with it and have accepted the loss what I do feel uncomfortable about, however, is my inability to talk candidly about it with new people out of fear I'll make them uncomfortable.
Starting point is 00:03:52 I feel awkward telling new people that he died when I was younger, as they usually react in an uncomfortable or awkward manner, which I completely understand. Just find it interesting that I avoid that topic out of not wanting to make others feel uncomfortable and they probably do the same but vice versa. Thank you so much first of all for everyone who sent in their messages and I've got so many more that I'll read out throughout the episode but what kept coming up was this awkwardness and the sense of that especially British people do not know how to talk about death and interestingly the other conversation that we were kind of having in parallel to this was people who are scared of their parents' mortality, who were thinking about whether or not they should move abroad or make big life changes, that they should have children sooner in order to make the
Starting point is 00:04:35 most of the time that they have with their parents, because we never know how long it'll be. And so it's so interesting that we're all very conscious of the fact that our parents won't be around forever, but we also find it very difficult to face the fact that they will at some point die and I don't know where we're going wrong with this I haven't suffered with parental loss but I've lost all four of my grandparents and my dad's brother and his sister and I also lost a friend a few years ago to suicide and so I have experienced loss and all of those felt different my Nana my dad's mom who passed away most recently was well into her 90s and it felt kind of like a peaceful goodbye to the world whereas my dad's sister died quite unexpectedly when she was in her 40s and then my dad's brother got pancreatic cancer
Starting point is 00:05:25 and died very suddenly and and so those those deaths felt different felt more confusing and then probably the most confusing was our friend who passed away and actually it's her when this goes out it would have been her 30th birthday tomorrow and so I think that there is death as you get older it's one of those things that is really harrowingly you realize that you're constantly going to be losing people around you and whether it's someone that's farther away it's an acquaintance or perhaps a relative you don't know that well or someone really close to you as the years go by it's quite a hard thing to accept that every year, you know, someone within that large tapestry that makes up all of the connections you've ever
Starting point is 00:06:12 made in your life, maybe won't go on to reach that next stage or to be there for that next thing. And I think with parents, that's even more complicated because obviously completely dependent on your relationship with your parents but if you've had them around and they are your figure that that has looked after you that's been your stability that's been your sense of home that's the person you call when you have a question to ask losing them and especially losing them at a young age I can't even imagine how much that reshapes and reframes the way that you see the world and your sense of trust within the world. I find it really difficult to imagine. And I have to say, I'm also really bad at knowing what to say and how to talk about it. Although, and I hope you
Starting point is 00:07:01 won't mind me saying, my last relationship was with a man who had lost his mom and that really taught me so much about parental loss and so much about how important it is to try and always keep talking about people that we've lost and certainly with our friend one of the things that everyone always says just tell us another happy story if you ever come up with a memory of something that happened with her like share it with everyone because you can keep someone's memory alive by talking about them by thinking about things that they would have enjoyed and that's such a beautiful way of celebrating someone's life whereas I think our inclination in this culture can kind of be to be stoic to try and grieve in private to try and find an end point to when you will finally stop being upset and actually my
Starting point is 00:07:42 experience with grief and with looking around at others that are grieving is that that never really goes away. It kind of changes shape. It moves. It might pop up when you have a big life experience that you wish you could share with that person when it's like a big birthday. I don't think grief ever goes away. And that's why it's really important that we learn how to talk about it with people who have lost people because otherwise it can tend to this kind of shameful thing that we feel like we can't talk about another message I received read to help my friends once they start to experience parental loss a member of my grief group put it like this experiencing parental loss so young is like being at a house party where your friends are all in one room and you're alone in the next room. You can see all of your
Starting point is 00:08:29 friends through the door and you know that they'll eventually come through and join you, but for the moment there's a distance between you. Eventually they will walk through the door and you'll be there to welcome them. This experience has given me a stronger perspective, helping me appreciate all that I have and encouraging me to never take life for granted my mum's final wish was for me to just keep living life which has been the mantra carrying me through it all for anyone in the situation I recommend looking out for local support groups I'm a member of let's talk about loss which has been wonderful and that message just I don't know that, because it makes so much sense of, we are all going to lose our parents and it's such a hard thing to recognize. And I think
Starting point is 00:09:09 the reason this conversation was so fertile when we were having it is, I imagine lots of you are kind of at my age, in your late twenties or thirties, when suddenly it does start to feel more real. Maybe you're starting to notice, you know, your parents are maybe less mobile or less agile, or maybe you're just noticing signs of aging. And that can be really, really scary. Another message that came in kind of about the anxiety side of worrying about losing your parents read, a big one for me is that I know my dad will love being a grandparent, but I'm not that keen on children. Though I do want my own eventually, I'm worried about my parents not
Starting point is 00:09:45 living long enough to really know my kids I live in London and they live in the north of Scotland so I probably see them twice a year it's hard they both have health problems and I can't bear to think about it I think that there's so many things that come into this and not least like the complications of the modern world in that we are having children later on. So naturally, there's bigger gaps between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren. We're also traveling further for work. Lots of people might move out of their home city. And culturally in the UK, we don't have as much community sense. It's more unusual to have elder family members living within the home like you might see in other cultures. And more often, we don't have necessarily a village of people around us raising our children.
Starting point is 00:10:32 And being there as our parents get older, it might just not be feasible because of work or whatever. And so I think this is becoming more of a modern issue. It's definitely existed, but I think it's coming even more into great relief and it's something that I definitely think about as we spoke about in the milestones episode another message this is the topic I've been thinking about a lot my mum had me when she was 42 and my dad was 44 and my whole life everyone joked that they were my grandparents now I'm approaching my late 20s and they're in their 70s. I'm coming to realise, except, that they won't be around forever with decreases in their health, mobility, etc. I feel like I'm already playing the parent role in a way.
Starting point is 00:11:15 It's roles reversed. It makes me feel vulnerable as they are like a safety blanket. The thought of navigating the world without them is a bit frightening. With the week on milestones, I've also been reflecting on the fact that I may be keen for marriage, kids, etc. before I'm ready, ready, because I want to experience all of those things with them. I think this is such a common feeling. And I think that that interesting idea of the role reversal happens to us all at some point. I definitely feel it with my parents in terms of I'm not caring for them, but there has been sort of like a power dynamic switch where sometimes I
Starting point is 00:11:51 find myself worrying about them maybe more than they worry about me. And that's a really natural and kind of beautiful part of the circle of life and the way that our caregivers, you know, we then come to care for them. And again, culturally, that is something that I don't think perhaps we talk about enough or honour enough. Another message. I lost my dad at 27. It happened very suddenly. He had a stroke and two days later he died. I think I'm very lucky in that my main grief response seems to be overwhelming gratitude. I've realised I'm less sad about the big moments he might miss and more sad that I can't phone him for a chat or watch the news and political debates with him I'm not religious but I sort of feel like his spirit lives on even if it's just through a ripple effect I'm eternally grateful I had this magical man in my life he showed me how to live and I feel an extra buzz when I'm having a great time exploring, dancing, etc. because I know he'd love that and that makes
Starting point is 00:12:49 me sore. I'm very lucky that this is my reaction. I think it's partly because I didn't really have much left unsaid or much to regress about our relationship but this is also because I felt loved at all times and this definitely isn't the case for everyone. Such a beautiful message. And I wish that more of us could have that experience with grief. And I completely understand the idea of sort of like the spirit living on in you. And this is, I feel like this is a really selfish thing that I'm about to say because people have experienced this and I have people in my life who have lost their mothers. But my greatest fear is when I lose my mum because we're really really close and she is the person I call about everything and it's something that I think about and I have
Starting point is 00:13:31 to try and make myself sit with and I do feel like there's nothing left unsaid I feel like I've told her every single thing I could ever tell her and the one thing that I kind of in a weird way brings me comfort to know is how alike we are. And I can kind of imagine what she's going to say to me if I said something. And she always says to me that she still kind of talks to our granny, my granny, her mum. And I get that because I feel like I could, people do live on in you, especially your parents. You're such a product of them. So much of their personality is
Starting point is 00:14:05 literally in your genes loads of personality is literally genetic and so even when they're gone they will have left so much behind of them in you and if you can find a way to try and tap into that that's kind of the only thing that brings me comfort is that there'd be a way that I could kind of like summon my mum forward if I ever needed her help it's kind of I've got it within me I hope that isn't like a selfish thing to say because as I said like I haven't gone through it and so I don't want to minimize the fact that that is other people's lived experiences and that especially if you lose a parent at a young age it's such a different thing and I've had you know 30 years now with my mum and what great luck and gratitude I have
Starting point is 00:14:53 having had that someone wrote this topic came up in one of my sessions with my therapist and she explains that often when you lose a parent at a young age and during such formative years it can sort of shatter those rose-tinted glasses that most of us have. We all know that mortality is a fact but understandably most of us choose not to go around thinking about it. My experience is that I've become so much more aware of my own mortality as well as the mortality of my mum, siblings and partner. Although it does make you cherish time with your loved ones more, sometimes it can feel as though you're looking to the future and you know there's so much loss ahead of you, which is a tough thing to be so hyper aware of. It can be so difficult to explain this perspective to others
Starting point is 00:15:34 that haven't experienced this type of loss yet. I appreciate this will not be the case for everyone, but I just wanted to share this in case anyone else is feeling alone in these types of thoughts. I think that's, it's such a good point. And it's kind of what I was saying at the beginning where I guess it just gives you so much disappointment and distrust in the world because one of the most beautiful things about being alive is feeling loved and whether that's through family or community or relationships or friendships and knowing that at any point those things can go away is just such a horrifying truth and to experience such great loss at such a young age I completely can imagine that it then instills you with that sense of fear. A slightly different message reads I'm estranged
Starting point is 00:16:23 from my parents due to complicated reasons that I won't delve into here but needless to say A slightly different message reads, to be a part of it following the abuse I've endured from them. Meanwhile, the thought of losing my in-laws greatly upsets me. They are the parents I never had and I'm fortunate to have a very close bond with them. I struggle to think about them not being around and not getting to spend moments in life with them. I think the thing I wanted to highlight here is the difficulty surrounding complicated and unhappy relationships with parents and how one might handle their passing in such situations. I don't know what I'll do truthfully. Simultaneously I recognise how lucky I am to have the in-laws I do and of course the supportive partner who truly understands my situation. I can count on one hand those who actually get it. Perhaps this strays into the topic of estrangement and the heavy decision that it is although I know that for my mental well-being it was the right choice through therapy it has been
Starting point is 00:17:25 a key investment for my partner and I to get here and I think this is such an important angle because obviously so many people have such complicated relationships with their parents and actually it's not unusual to be estranged from your parents or to perhaps not have that love or that beautiful relationship that so many people have spoken about and certainly that then when they die how do you kind of how do you consolidate those feelings and I think that's something that's very complicated I think it's so wonderful that that person was able to find parental figures in their in-laws and I wanted to read another message actually which was similar about finding parents through non-biological parental figures. My step-mom died when I was 23 after a long battle with cancer. She meant the absolute world to me and was the mum I never had and my dad quickly
Starting point is 00:18:20 moved on after death. As a consequence our relationship changed so rapidly and I lost my dad. For context, I haven't had a relationship with my mum since I was a teenager due to abuse and addiction. I feel as though I've been grieving the actual loss of a parent who really loved me and two parents who are still alive and couldn't care if I existed or not. It's very complicated and you can experience grief on a whole spectrum. My whole world felt like it collapsed when my mum passed away and I still haven't moved on, whatever that means. It was a really isolating experience and I still have waves of grief and often have chats with my step mum as if she's still here to get through the most difficult days. Thanks for talking about this. Hope we can all help each other feel a
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Starting point is 00:19:22 Or visit connectsontario.ca. Select games only. Guarantee void if platform or game outages occur. Guar guarantee requires play by at least one customer until jackpot is awarded or 11 p.m eastern research and supply see full terms at canada.casino.fandu.com please play responsibly so i mentioned when we were talking about this on wednesday that carrie ad lloyd has an incredible podcast called grief cast and she talks about how there's people that are in the club, those people that have lost a parent or lost someone very close to them, and then those people that aren't in the club. And there's often this huge chasm between the two because those of us that haven't experienced
Starting point is 00:19:55 that kind of parental loss, especially at a young age, are often very ill-equipped in how to talk about it, how to comfort someone and how to actually put our own feelings aside, our own anxieties and fears about our own parents' mortality in order to actually make space for people to share their own grief and their loss. And whether that be through telling really joyous, gorgeous stories about the people that they've lost or just sitting in their pain with them. And I actually received a couple of voice notes from people talking about their experiences which I wanted to share with you now. Hi Anoni, thank you so much for making us talk about this subject because it's needed. Yeah so I've lost my father three days before my 18th birthday. That was about a few years ago now. And to be honest,
Starting point is 00:20:50 I think because we don't talk as much about death in parents, especially at a younger age, we don't really have a good way to cope with it when others do lose their parents early. And I was often struggling with my grief a lot more than would have been needed because people really didn't know how to react. They often made me feel worse with my grief, sitting with my grief. And I didn't really know how to grieve properly because people made me feel like that. Many people made me feel someone who had done something wrong was a weak part of society not really able to function anymore because something really bad happened to me and I think this is not just a case with losing parents but I think because we don't talk about it as much and because people
Starting point is 00:22:14 don't have coping strategies and don't know what to say, especially, they often make you feel like shit. And so often I would have preferred to have people ask me some questions about it, to have people talk to me about, yeah, specifics. Because so many people wanted to um to yeah treat me with with satin gloves they didn't want to trigger my emotions they didn't want to see my tears they um never even hugged me sometimes they were distant um closed off And yeah, that made the grief thing very hard, especially at that age and made me cope with it in strange ways, like abusing alcohol and shutting off completely from
Starting point is 00:23:17 people and even hiding that I've lost my father, which was definitely not the healthy way. And I also think that the whole thing should just be normalized more because I often feel like less because of losing my father, even though every single person in this world will at some point lose their parents if they don't have to go for them. And it's so universal. It's so normal. And if you can talk openly about grief and not make the loss the whole identity of a person, then we'd all be much better, I think. And yeah, the grief in itself is hard enough. And when people make you feel bad about it,
Starting point is 00:24:12 then it's even harder. I lost my dad six weeks ago from a four-month battle with metastatic brain cancer. And I've received an overwhelming amount of support and love from my friends and family, which I've hugely appreciated. But one thing I have noticed is that some people feel a lot of pressure to know what the right thing to say is and I always say to them relieve yourself of that pressure because you can't say the right thing or the wrong thing. If someone says something that
Starting point is 00:24:40 feels great and it's really supportive it helps in the moment and it's really nice but someone says the wrong thing, it doesn't change the fact that this horrible thing has happened. No one can change that. So whether you say the right thing or the wrong thing, I still appreciate that something has been said. And even just, oh, I'm really sorry to hear what's happened. And I'm here if you need me. It sounds like a little thing, but it actually goes a really long way. So don't feel the pressure to get it right. Something is more than enough and it goes a long way. I've been in situations where I'm with some friends that I know for a fact know what's happened and they haven't mentioned anything for fear of upsetting me or not wanting to bring it up because they feel awkward. And while I do fully understand that's where it's come from it's not a
Starting point is 00:25:25 lack of care or you know disinterest or anything it still feels a little bit upsetting and it feels like a big elephant in the room that everyone's thinking about but no one said and it's always in the back of my mind and anyone who's experienced grief is always in the back of your mind so not having it acknowledged feels difficult and isolating and yeah it's sad so if I start to cry because someone's asked me about it it's not their fault I'm upset anyway it's nice to be upset with people and to be able to speak about it and process it it's much better than being set in in isolation and not being able to ever talk about it or him with other people it's been such a weird one this week reading all of your messages because I read I read through all of them some people I was like
Starting point is 00:26:11 having conversations with and it just struck me how much we carry around grief as such a private thing and I was wondering where that comes from and I was trying to think about what my relationship is with when someone is going through grief and I think there's so many things that come into play here, whether it's religious ideology that we've absorbed from our parents, or whether it's just kind of like cultural norms about how we deal with death and grief. And I think sometimes it can be, we don't want to be the one to bring up that loss because is that making it about us? And maybe we don't want to show that we're sad. Sometimes there can be this weird hierarchy around grief where we feel like we aren't able or aren't deserving of feeling upset about someone or feeling grief
Starting point is 00:26:55 because they weren't close enough or we shouldn't bring it up because that might, as the person in the voice note said, you know, they don't want to be the one to bring it up. But actually it's really helpful. And I think the other thing with grief is, there's that phrase that I found really helpful when my friend died. Which was like, grief is when we have loads of love and nowhere to put it. It's just showing all the love that we have for this person and what an honour it is to feel it. But it's also anger and it's also resentment and frustration and feeling like you want to give up. And grief is such an all-consuming emotion of every kind of emotion.
Starting point is 00:27:33 So I think sometimes what's difficult is it's almost hard to define what we're feeling. And it's hard to, no one experiences grief in the same way and it's never always the same feeling. And there can be moments of levity you know you can find something really funny and then be crying five minutes later you can be so angry that they're gone and then so grateful that you had them and it just interested me reading all these messages it really kind of overwhelmed me and I actually found myself again it feels really selfish but I went for a walk and I had to like kind of stop and have a little cry which sounds really stupid because I just felt the weight of all of these messages and all of these people walking around carrying this thing which is like the most human of experiences
Starting point is 00:28:15 which is death and how strange it is that we don't talk about it in the same way as we do say like birth or marriage or bringing in new things into life and how other cultures see death as a celebration and how a funeral perhaps might be this amazing beautiful party being like thank god or thank whoever that this person was even alive like how amazing that they graced our lives for this amount of time or how lucky we are to experience their singular sense of humor or the way that they made us feel. And so I think everything is kind of cloaked and shrouded in this shame and darkness and sadness. And it is, so much of grief is sadness and loss. But I wonder if there's something that needs to happen where we're able to carry on talking about those people that we've lost for years come
Starting point is 00:29:05 by lose that sense of idea that once someone's gone there's going to be an end point when we don't think about them when the sadness won't be as sharp when the pain won't be as all-consuming and I don't really feel like there's a conclusion to this I just I do think it's been really helpful and really useful to talk about I think part of my like emotion was realizing how much I do bury that anxiety about parental mortality deep within me and whether it's I can't even show it to myself because it's too painful to deal with or because all of us are sort of collectively hiding in the shadows from this truth and as a lot of people who have messaged who've lost people feel like that they feel like I've through it, but no one really wants to acknowledge it because then they have to acknowledge the inevitable in their own lives.
Starting point is 00:29:50 On the topic of sort of having anxiety about making decisions which might put us farther away from our parents, such as like moving abroad or doing things that mean that maybe we won't be seeing our parents as often is a really tricky one. And I think it's so dependent on your relationship with your parent and how able and capable they are. And, you know, I guess kind of making assessments on what's valuable. It's funny, my mum always says to me, go for it. I think she has this real sense of like, she really wants me to go out and explore the world. She always wants me to try new things. She always wants me to follow whatever path comes my way because I think I'm really lucky to be of a
Starting point is 00:30:30 generation of women that have way more freedom than even my mum's generation did. And so she definitely encourages me to live my life to the fullest. And that is like one aspect of it. It's sort of like making sure we live our lives to kind of honor the fact that our parents gave us this life and then on the flip side obviously also wanting to be there for them and see them as much as possible and there are all those awful statistics that add up like once we've left the family home like how many days and hours and minutes we actually spend with our parents which is why I guess having a phone and having the internet is kind of amazing because you can call your parents all the time. I have really long conversations with my mum on
Starting point is 00:31:09 the phone, which I love having access to. And that's one of the things that I know will be the most painful to lose when that day comes. And I'm just trying to think about, you know, marrying that kind of anxiety of the fact that we are going to lose them with also not letting that kind of debilitate us too much and also feeling grateful for the fact that we still have them because as we've heard from all of those really generous people that wrote in and those voice notes, I guess those of us that have great relationships with our parents and our parents are still around, we are really the lucky ones and every and every day week year that we get extra with them is kind of it's a highlight for those that haven't had that time who haven't seen them grow up haven't seen those milestones they've explored I think that it's it's really tricky I always want to kind of tie these episodes
Starting point is 00:31:57 up in a neat bow and I guess there isn't really an answer but it is one of those things that is really grounding in that when we when we get really caught up in all of these kind of like the minutiae of life all of these stupid things that we allow ourselves to be consumed by and then you talk about a subject like this and it suddenly just snaps you back in a way and it's given me so much pause for thought and it's made me remember about all of the people in my life that I've lost and also all of my friends who have gone through parental loss and it's made me really actually want to start asking questions as well to my parents about their parents it's something that I've started doing more but remembering that when someone dies all of their stories die with them and I remember coming really having that
Starting point is 00:32:40 realization maybe like a decade ago and starting to ask my parents more questions about their parents and stories that maybe only they could tell because I think it is those stories and those memories that are really important and again it's such a British thing to not really talk about family histories and stuff and I remember having that realization and wanting to become nosy about the people in my life because not everyone is forthcoming about telling their stories or learning things and then that's the thing that we get to keep the more that we know about someone the more that we know the things that about their childhood um the more that we're able to the more resources we have for when they're gone to dig into and and remember them
Starting point is 00:33:25 and keep their stories alive and learn from them and so this is such a bittersweet episode and again I know I've said it like 80 times but I'm so grateful for all of you that shared your stories and I hope that in some way it's been comforting I hope that we all now go away with feeling empowered to talk to people in our lives who have lost people, to remember to always keep asking, to remember that whether it's been one week, a year or a decade, that grief never really goes away and that we should always try and keep the memory alive of everyone that's gone and to honour them. Thank you so much for listening. This week, sometimes I think the episodes will be shorter or longer. On this one. I really felt like it wasn't really my place to say too much because it isn't my lived experience.
Starting point is 00:34:09 And so I'm really grateful to have all of your stories to share. And the episodes I'm assuming will be like longer and shorter depending on how much I feel like I have a place to talk about those subjects. But I really hope you enjoyed listening. I'm absolutely loving being in conversation with you. It's such an incredible space that we've got here to talk and to learn from each other I really hope you're enjoying Let's Talk About if you are please do subscribe rate review all of those good things I will put a highlight of all of the messages I received on
Starting point is 00:34:38 my Instagram and I will do a post on my Instagram where if you did miss out on the initial conversation, you're more than welcome to join in now, send me a message or write in the comments of that post and other people might respond to you. And I will see you on Tuesday for us to vote on our subject for next week. Sending you lots of love. Bye. We'll be right back. Exciting live dealer studio, exclusively on FanDuel Casino, where winning is undefeated. 19-plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly.

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