On Purpose with Jay Shetty - Ask Jay: How Do You Move Forward When You're Grieving?

Episode Date: October 21, 2026

Jay takes four listener calls exploring the different ways we experience grief, from caring for a child with chronic illness and losing a close friendship to mourning a parent who's still alive and fearing the loss of someone you love. He shares practical ways to navigate uncertainty, make peace with relationships that have changed, let go of guilt, and stay present with the people you love instead of living in fear of losing them. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty Instagram Teen Accounts: Built-in protections for teens. Learn More. At https://chase.com/sapphirereserve TRIGGER WARNING: Some of the content in this episode contains sensitive conversations covering suicide. Viewer discretion is advised. If you or someone you know is struggling, please call or text 988 (US & Canada), or call 116 123 (UK). JAY'S DAILY WISDOM DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX Join 900,000+ readers discovering how small daily shifts create big life change with my free newsletter. Subscribe here: https://news.jayshetty.me/subscribe Check out our Apple subscription to unlock bonus content of On Purpose! https://lnk.to/JayShettyPodcast What I Discuss: 00:00 Introduction 01:04 Finding Purpose Amidst Uncertainty 07:02 Navigating Inconsistent Friendships 09:30 The Radius Of Respect 15:40 How Do You Grieve Someone Who Is Still Alive? 16:47 Understanding Ambiguous Loss 21:48 Coping With Anticipatory Loss 23:37 Learning to Appreciate What You Have Before It's Gone Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It is a tragedy and one we see playing out in front of us every day. Carrie is now streaming on Prime Video. This episode is brought to you by Apple Watch. If you're like me constantly trying to better understand your body, you should check out the new Apple Watch series 12. The Vital's app puts your key daytime and overnight health metrics right on your wrist, including HRV, which is heart rate variability, a signal of how your body's handling stress and bouncing back from it.

And it's now backed by the most accurate heart rate sensing and a wearable, so you can trust what it's telling you. Visit Apple.com forward slash Apple Watch Series 12 to learn more. iPhone 11 or later required, the Vital's app is for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. Heart rate accuracy based on Apple conducted study, August 2026, visit Apple.com forward slash HR accuracy. Hey, it's Jay. I don't know what your day's been like, but I was just thinking about you for a minute. And I hope you're being a little patient with yourself because you deserve it.

And yeah, I'll talk to you soon. This series is designed for the moments that require more than just a message on a screen. Every episode, you send in your voice notes detailing the situations that feel like too much to type and I listen to each one so we can find a way forward together. Today, we're opening up a conversation about grief. We often look for a finish line, hoping that. that the pain will finally end or that we will reach a point where we're no longer sad. But grief is not a destination.

It's a weight that we carry often while trying to experience joy, guilt and love all at the same time. Today, we're holding space for that weight. Thank you for trusting me with your stories. Let's dive in. Hi Jay. Four years ago, everything changed when my son was diagnosed with a cardi Gratier syndrome. A rare life-shortening genetic condition. In one moment, the future I had imagined disappeared.

Since then, I've learned that grief and joy can exist at the same time. My son has taught me a depth of love I never knew was possible. But living with a progressive condition means that just when I feel like I've found solid ground again, life changes. Recently, he developed epilepsy, and suddenly all the fears I thought I had worked through came rushing back. I'm learning to accept that I'll have to keep becoming. to build meaningful work, maybe even become self-employed supporting families like ours. But our life is so unpredictable. Sometimes it feels impossible to dream about the future when life can change overnight.

So my question to you is, how do you build a meaningful life and a sense of purpose when the ground beneath your feet keeps changing? Thank you so much. First of all, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge how brave, how resilient, how courageous, and how incredible you are. I mean, hearing from you has actually made me realize how humbled I feel, just hearing about how you've navigated one of the most difficult times in your life, how you're approaching these challenges. So I hope you take a moment to give yourself some grace, give yourself some compassion, show yourself some love because it's unbelievable,

your mindset. And the fact that even in this time, you're thinking about how you can do more meaningful work in the world, how you can add value, how you can have an impact, how you can do things in your community, I mean, it's truly, truly beautiful. Uncertainty is the only certainty in life.

And you're experiencing that every single day. As you said, you're either running around between hospitals, you think everything's safe and then something surprises you again. But what if the meaningful work wasn't what you did after this moment? But what if the meaningful work is this moment? What if your purpose is exactly what you're doing right now? I think sometimes we like to believe that our purpose is out there, that will find it afterwards, that will come across it in some way.

But in reality, this is what life is asking of you right now. so I want you to take that pressure off. And in reality, you're passing with flying colors, but in your mind, you're judging yourself. You're questioning whether it's meaningful. You're questioning whether you're on the right path. And so I want to remind you you are on the right path. What I'd also like to add to you is,

because there's so much uncertainty in your life, what you want to do is find one habit that is certain for you. This one habit that you do every day that becomes a foundation for you. you. It could be having your cup of coffee every single day, whether you're in the hospital at home or wherever you are. It could be making sure that you watch one episode of your favorite show, because that's an escape that you really need throughout the day. It could be jumping on the phone with a friend or a family member not to help them, but to be held yourself. It's doing

something for yourself every day that requires a little bit of time, not too much effort, and so that you feel you have a certainty and a pattern and a rhythm in all of the uncertainty around you. If there can be one habit every day that you can control that you can focus on, it will give you a sense of certainty and stability and a core foundation in an otherwise rocky day. I don't want you to wait to feel like you have to build meaningful work. I don't want you to think you have to wait till the future to do something meaningful. you're already doing something meaningful and this is the path

and I promise you all the experiences all the wisdom all the insight you gain from this moment it will give you everything you need to build a future purpose it will give you every skill every tool every mindset you need in order to be ready for that when you finally get to it

but you don't need to carry that pressure right now you're already carrying so much you're living in reality which allows for two truths to exist you're grieving the future that you'd imagined for your son while loving the actual child in front of you and both are true at the same time neither cancels each other out and neither is more or less important

a meaningful life gets built inside the uncertainty in the present that you can touch not after it ends and I want to leave you with this what kind of life could you build inside the uncertainty instead of waiting for it to end first. Instagram teen accounts come with automatic protections that limit who can contact teens, the content they can see,

and the time they spend on the app. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at Instagram.com forward slash teen accounts. Hi, Jay. I have a friend, or I guess we're not really friends anymore,

but she was my best friend from college. from our late teen years into our early 30s, and there was probably a time where I would have said that this friend got me more than anyone else. She's dealt with a lot of issues in her life, with family and mental health and hasn't always been able to show up for me in the way that I need,

which has led to a cycle of not knowing whether to walk away from my own self-protection or stay and be there for her despite getting hurt when I do. Last year, I kept reaching out, asking why she wasn't in my life anymore, and she just stopped responding. We went three months without speaking,

and I genuinely thought I'd done something wrong. She was always just bad with her phone, you know, responding in batches, but this was different. She reached out finally and said how regretful she was, that she missed me and didn't know why she disappears on me, that I'm a friend she wants in her life. She showed me a notes app of things she wrote down. She wished she could tell me. When I asked her why she hadn't just told me, she didn't really have a good answer. In the short period we were reconnected, she got pregnant and told me, which I was obviously so

excited about. I was close with her husband. I spoke at their wedding and I could see our families being friends for life. But about a month later, after answering a routine question she had about my job, she stopped responding to me again. It's been five months. And I'm starting to look back on our entire friendship differently. I feel like I've exhausted myself trying to have a relationship with her

and need to accept that whether it's because she can't or doesn't want to, she's not going to reciprocate. And I've learned that it hurts me too much to keep trying. So I have two questions. One, she's due to have a baby really soon and I have no idea how I'll feel when she gives birth. But does it make me a bad or petty person if I don't reach out to her to congratulate her? And my second question is, I think I have hope deep down that this is a phase. But how do I let go of that and learn to grieve our friendship with gratitude rather than being

completely confused and sad and mad about it? Hey, thank you so much for your question. What I'm hearing is, is that you've spent a lot of time investing in, preserving this friendship, trying to understand what's going on and what's happening. And what's changed now isn't that you don't have feelings for your friend, but in your awakening and realization that maybe this relationship doesn't meet you where you are. You don't want inconsistent connection. You don't want someone who makes you feel like you don't know where you stand.

You don't want the irregularity of messaging and being in contact. All of that seems to be causing you to feel unnerved. And that's natural. It also feels like this person has a pattern. And one of my favorite quotes from Maya Angelou is that when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. I find that people can change, people can grow. But when you see patterns like this repeated over months and years,

what you're getting is the person saying, this is who I am. They're not saying it in those words, but they're showing you this is who they are, this is what a relationship with me looks like. and this is how it's going to go. And then we get a choice to decide how close or far we want to stand to that person. Now, I think the challenge we have is we think that the good thing, the right thing to do,

is stay close to people no matter how they treat us. If we love someone, we should stay close to them because that's a sign of love. I want to introduce you to an idea that I wrote about in The Eight Rules of Love, my book called Radius of Respect. I believe that when I love someone, I want to stand as close to them or as far away based on me still being able to respect them.

There are people I love in my life that if I spend too much time with them or if I'm too involved or too engaged or reaching out too much, I actually start to feel bitter. I could even start to feel resentment. And so I realize I've got to step a little further away if I want to continue to love and respect them, which may mean instead of talking to someone once a week, I only check in once a quarter.

It means I only check in once a year. The point is if I want to love someone, if I want to continue to respect someone, I'm not being disrespectful by disconnecting. Sometimes the only way to respect and love someone is through distance, because that's the only way we can keep that beautiful vision we had of the relationship, the wonderful memories that you've shared, the amazing experiences that you have had, and not lose them to bitterness, pain, stress, and resentment that naturally comes from engaging too often. I think a lot of friends go through these transitions in their life, especially long-term friendships. Well, you find it to realize you have to almost set a boundary with someone, or you have to re-establish your new standards of connection. Maybe you had a friend that you spoke to every single day, and now you realize that's not the case.

And that's hard because you look petty. You look like the bad guy. You look like the bad person who's the one pulling away, and you don't want to look that way. But in reality, the closer you get to that person, the more you don't like them, the you engage with them, the more you actually feel bad feelings towards them. So does it make you petty or a bad person to not want to reach out? No, because you've been available, you've been around, you do care, and you're allowed to care from a distance. And when it comes to grieving your

relationship with gratitude, it comes from standing far enough or close enough from where you can still experience gratitude. You don't want to get so close that you only see their floors, and you don't want to stand so far that you only see what went right. You want to stand just close enough that you can say, I'm glad I was there for them, I'm still here for them,

but actually if I get too close, that's not good for either of us. Sometimes we can try to be so close to someone that we push ourselves away from them or push them away, and sometimes we can be just far enough from where we can learn to respect each other again. disconnecting and distance can often help us reconnect in the long term with someone we love. Disconnect is not disrespect.

I wanted to share with you one of my favorite quotes from an article by Jennifer Senior called It's Your Friends Who Break Your Heart. There's no vocabulary for the end of a friendship. No rituals to mark its demise. When a romantic relationship ends, you have a story to tell. When a friendship ends, it usually just will. vanishes into a silent, bewildering vault. The injury of a friend walking away isn't just that you lose them.

It's that they leave you holding all the history alone, wondering if any of it meant to them what it meant to you. I hope that helps you. Sometimes I find that reading about your feelings, understanding and reframing them for yourself can be a beautiful way of processing how you feel. And I'll end on this. What if you don't have to wish her well just yet? What if you take this time to actually see what you need? What's so interesting is that we don't want to be the bad guy to someone

else, but we become the bad guy to ourselves. We are giving space and context and compassion to someone else. And I feel this time could be... online and get the same low no-frills prices delivered. Get your first year of PC Express Pass for just $2.50 a month. Learn more at no-frills.ca. The new Subaru Cross-Trek hybrid

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Concern about your gambling or that is someone close to you. Call 1866-531-2600 to visit connectsonterio.ca. To give that to yourself. Hello. I'm sitting here on the floor of the bathroom and think about my mother and I assume my brother. They both are humans that I have to grieve. One is alive and the other one is dead. More than a decade ago, my brother unaligned to himself, he gave up the fight with life, and it was because of our mother, because the way she raised us.

And after that, we all crashed. She was a bad mom. She didn't knew better. It's like more than six months now. And I didn't have any contact with her. She wants to, I know. But I don't want to. I keep thinking that I feel better without her. My whole body, my life changed rapidly. My question is, how do I grieve a person that is still alive? First of all, I'm so sorry for your loss. You've experienced two profound losses. You've got the death of your brother and the loss of the mother you needed but didn't have.

And I can tell that for you those stories have also intertwined. And I can imagine how hard that is. I want to start off by saying that I'm wondering whether part of your grief isn't about losing your mother now, but about finally accepting that she may never become the mother you've been waiting for. And that's like a really harsh awakening. It's a really harsh reality to finally come to the place where you recognize, this person isn't going to change. They never were.

There's almost like a false hope that we have, especially with our primary carers. When it comes to our parents, you, in the beginning at least, see them as superhuman. You see them as someone who could never do anything wrong. You see them as people that carry your hopes, your dreams, that they should carry your best interests,

care about you, put you first. And then as time goes on, you start to see the truth, that they're fallible, that they're human too, that they have needs and emotions and weaknesses. When you start to see that and you start to recognize that they're limited and that they've let you down and that they've caused you pain,

can be really harsh when you finally accept that. From listening to you, I believe you're not really grieving her, you're grieving the version of her that you wanted to be real. You're grieving the version of her that you had hoped would be there for you. You're grieving the version of her that you'd imagined could be possible one day. And grieving doesn't mean that you stop having emotions for this person. It's just that you finally are accepting reality for what it is and you don't need it to be different. So the way you grieve someone who's still alive is you recognize that what you received from them was real

and what you hoped from them wasn't true. The way you grieve is to accept what you lived and experienced in reality, not what you wished for in imagination, that you recognize that what you got was what they could give and you didn't live in the dream of their potential. And in order to do that, it's a mixed messy process. there will be feelings of regret, of pain, of guilt, of love, of care, of compassion,

and I'd encourage you to feel all of it, allow for all of it to coexist. I think our minds sometimes like to put things in neat boxes and have to choose and take sides. And reality, our emotions are far more variegated and multifaceted, and it's so important that we allow all of them to coexist and co-breathe. On my podcast, I've had several conversations with Dr. Romney, and the most recent one was all about going no contact. And there's a difference between going no contact because of self-protection versus punishment. Punishment is when we want the other person to feel bad. Self-protection is when we want to feel safe. I think right now it feels like your body is feeling better because you

feel safe, and that's an important thing to protect. There's an incredible book. called Ambiguous Loss, which is all about learning to live with unresolved grief. And the author Pauline Boss shares this that I wanted to share with you. Ambiguous loss is the most stressful kind of loss because it remains unclear. There's no closure, no official verification that someone is gone. They are present in mind, but absent in reality. To heal from ambiguous loss, you must learn to live with two opposing thoughts at wants. They are gone and they are still here. I love them and I must let go of them. The question I'll

leave you with is this. How much are you willing to accept the mom that she was in reality versus the one she was in imagination? This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is the chance to step outside our routine. Travel as a way of slowing us down and shifting our perspective And with the Chase Sapphire Reserve card Every journey becomes even more rewarding Earn four times the points on flights and hotels book direct Enjoy access to award-winning airport lounges

Three times the points on dining and reserve exclusive tables Learn more at chase.com forward slash sapphire reserve Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank N-A member FDIC subject to credit approval terms apply During COVID, my dad was admitted to the hospital. It was a few weeks. He ended up in an induced coma. We were being told he might not live.

In some backstory, my dad is one of my absolute best friends, a core person. And I have never had anyone die in my life yet. I still have all my grandparents. I have my immediate family, my aunts and uncles, cousins. Like, this would be the first death and a hard death. So I kind of saw a glimpse into and felt a glimpse of what warning a core person would be like. I am happy to report. He woke up and everything's okay. We're a few years removed now from this and our family is doing better than ever. I guess my question would be, how do you see what that was going to look like, feel what that was going to look like, and still be able to fully enjoy life without being

terrified because now I love my people so deeply, yet the bubble of immortality popped because we're not. And now that's just scary. How do you enjoy the good when you know how the bad's going to feel? Thank you so much for your question. I want to start by just acknowledging what happened during COVID. And even though your dad survived, which I'm really happy to hear, it sounds like you experienced the kind of anticipatory grief, right? For weeks you were living with the possibility that your best friend might die. And that's a real human experience and it makes sense that it changed how you see the world. So first of all, I want you to think about everything I say through that lens.

You went through a life experience that has altered how you see the world. You will no longer see the world the same. and that's a good thing. It's okay. You've had a life evolution, a transition that has made you look at the world differently. And I'm wondering if what changed wasn't your capacity for joy, it was your awareness of how precious the people you love really are. So you're looking at it and thinking, gosh, I don't know how to have joy anymore. But it's not your lack of ability to create joy. It's actually looking at how, ephemeral and how transient, but also how precious these relationships truly are. And so I think we have to almost reframe what you're seeing. Yes, you're seeing you have less time with the people you love, but you're realizing how much more precious they are. And I want you to lean into that side to recognize this person is more precious. This person is more amazing. This moment is more special than any other. When we've reframed that viewpoint from which we're looking at the same situation,

it changes where the emphasis is. We still recognize things have an end, but we recognize that they're more important and they matter more. The paradox is that the awareness of loss doesn't have to take away joy. For many people over time, it becomes the very reason they actually savour ordinary moments more fully. The love that will one day make grief possible is also what makes today's conversations, laughter and hugs meaningful. Here's what I want you to remember.

Knowing that something will end is what gives it value. If it was going to last forever, it would lose its value. If you thought you had forever with someone, you would take every moment for granted. when you know you only have a few moments with someone, you take them all deeply. And so, yes, it's natural to have a morbid, negative view

to the amount of time you have left with someone. It's natural for us to fear more than it is for us to find joy. It's how we're wired. But I think that's the beautiful thing to actually be so present in the moment that you forget the past and the future. To be so immersed in that person's eyes, their loving glance, the holding of their hands, their embrace, that you forget the past and the future. Because all that really exists is this moment right now.

I want to share with you a profound teaching by Thai forest master, Ajan Shah, called the Broken Cup. He taught that by accepting an object will inevitably break, you can appreciate its beauty fully in the present moment without. suffering when it is eventually lost. It's called the glass is already broken. He says, you see this glass? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it. I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over, or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, of course.

When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious. See, we can't control the end. We can't control how it happens, when it happens, why it happens. But knowing it's going to happen, we can control what we do now. And it is a choice we have to make every moment, every day, every month, every year. We can either choose to look at it and think it's already broken, so how can I appreciate it, how can I engage with it? Or we can look at it and say it's already broken and therefore let me make the most of it.

Let me be truly present. I'll leave you with this. The cost of loving people is grief and it's worth paying but not in advance. You're going to experience the pain of losing someone anyway. Just don't pay that price up front. Thank you for trust me with your stories. you're carrying a lot and I hope today reminded you that you don't have to carry it all alone. Keep those voice members coming.

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