EPISODE 2: Grief As Activism With Marva Weigelt
In this heartfelt episode I talk with guest Marissa Baker about her personal experience with loss, grief, and trying to move forward. Marissa, a self described "ray of sunshine," even in the face of the the recent loss of her father, dives deep into the emotions of shame, guilt, and overwhelming feelings following the deaths of her parent. We also touch on the logistical nightmares of funerals and unexpected health issues to the personal battles of acceptance and unanswered questions, this conversation touches on the raw and real aspects of dealing with death while trying to navigate life.
-
[00:00:00]
Sarah: Okay, y'all are in for a treat. is a conversation with my friend Marva. We both lost our moms around the same time, but you'll see that Marva is so well spoken.
She calls herself an Advocate for grief as a form of activism. I mean, what the fuck? She is so deeply compassionate and wise. I can't wait for you to listen to this conversation and sit at her feet as she and I make our way through this grief thing, that she calls a wild beast.
I can't wait for you to listen.
Hi friends, this is your host, master coach and teacher Sarah Yost. You are listening to the About Death podcast, the show about living life on your own terms. Stick around if you want way more of what you want with way less anxiety. [00:01:00]
Hi.
Marva: It's good to be with you. I've been thinking about you so much in these days.
Sarah: Thank you. Thank you. And I, you. So introduce yourself just as much or as little as you'd like. So people listening have an idea of who you are.
Marva: Just in general, like what I, what I'm doing these days kind of thing.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And also give us your name.
Marva: Oh, that's good. That's good. Try to act like you're not being recorded. Hi, I'm Marva. Are you getting that?
Sarah: Be cool. Be cool.
Marva: Let's see, what would I want to say about myself tonight? Because I often have to introduce myself and it changes every single time. I do not have an elevator speech about who I am. And it's always about applying to intuitively what I. Sense might be the way to to be tonight because I am, you know, multi faceted human being and And there are many things I could say about myself, but I think [00:02:00] the thing I'm going to use our grief theme as a Context to introduce myself tonight to say that I consider myself to be a More or less a lifelong student of grief. And if I was to look for a soul purpose that I could trace all the way back to the beginning of life, it would be around grief because I lost my mother when I was three. And and so I learned very early in life that nothing is permanent.
That people can be taken away at any moment. And so that, Vulnerability and fragility of being human has followed me all the days of my life. And, while I wouldn't, obviously at three, informally,
Sarah: That [00:03:00] wasn't the paragraph you said?
Marva: Professor
with the glasses, let's talk about this, you know.
Sarah: What a precocious child.
Marva: Exactly.
Let me, let me get my, but I'm a, a student of grief by, by virtue of sort of a cautionary story of how not to do it because And in the time that this occurred, which was in 1962 given the personality of my remaining caregiver, my father was a very super logical academic sort of a fellow.
The approach was, practical Well, we just need to move on and we need to take care of, of practical matters in life. We're just not going to talk about this again. And one thing I know about myself is I was born to talk about [00:04:00] things, I was born to process, but what I've come to understand about grief in, in early childhood, especially parent loss, is that children do need some kind of, of a model to, to give permission for feeling feelings. And then in the absence of that, it all goes underground. And so my grief went underground for the next 33 years and popped up here and there as anger and despair, suicidal thoughts, addictive behaviors, anything to kind of numb this thing that I had never had permission to work with.
So what I have since learned about grief is that it is just this living entity. It's a wild beast. You cannot tame it. It's unique to each person and that for me to finally [00:05:00] have permission, thanks to some professional help in my later thirties. I started a grief process that had been interrupted at three,
and had to go through it then because grief does not go away. It will wait for you. And if you do not work with it, it will have its way with you in other ways. And so I now am an advocate for grief as a form of activism. Because our culture is very grief phobic, and people are uncomfortable they don't know what to say to us when we've had a loss, and when we're in grief, in fact, they will express their discomfort by saying.
Aren't you over it yet? Or, you know, those kinds of things. And that's one of my vows is that never ever in my life, I don't care how long it's been since you're loss, will I ever say, aren't you over it yet? [00:06:00] Because it's a central shaping influence in my life. And not that I'm trapped anymore. I was trapped in grief when I didn't face it.
But once I turn and face it, then I can begin to co create and collaborate. With the grief and have it inform the way I live. My life force was trapped in my unfelt grief. And it wasn't until I felt, began giving myself permission to feel it, process it, validate it, express it, that my life force came back online.
And I'm like, Oh, I do want to live. I do want to live. So that's the way I will introduce myself primarily as. an experiential expert on grief, an activist advocating for us to be more open and realistic about it, to not pathologize it, no matter how long and [00:07:00] extended it is or how strange or how different from any expected set of steps that we take.
The hell with the steps. Okay. There are no steps. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how's it? Is that enough information about who I am?
Sarah: That's great.
That's a good start. So here's my question. When you're talking about grief, what is that? If I had never heard of that, could you give me a definition?
Marva: Well, I wish I could. You know, I would, I would quickly differentiate between, for example, active mourning in the immediate, yeah. Aftermath of a loss, which is this very physical and all encompassing, deeply emotional kind of thing. And then grief is that manifestation of the loss that comes after, and, and it stays around.
It is sort of the, it's, it's [00:08:00] maybe the best description I've ever experienced is or heard is, is that it's the other side of the coin of love or another face of love. So love is what you have for someone while they're alive. Grief is what you have for them when they're gone. And so it's, it's always going to be proportional.
In some ways, and it's also going to be complicated by the ways in which you didn't get to finish something with somebody or you never got to have, you know, grief can, of course, transcend a death. It's, it's, it's, it's a loss of a job. It's a loss of a relationship. It's The disappointments. So, so the death of a parent, for example, in adulthood might include grief for the fact that that person never was who you really needed them to be.
And now the chances are gone. So it gets complicated by, by many factors.
Sarah: Yeah, thank you [00:09:00] for for articulating that. It's like it's like mourning is there's a there's a mourning which I think most people are pretty comfortable other than your dad are most are fairly comfortable with.
It's okay to cry. Take your time. It's cool. As long as it's clear mourning. And then it sounds like the way that you're describing grief is, you know, it's the, the relationship that you have afterwards. It's the entirety of it. The living without them, the being angry, the maybe getting to know them in a new way.
You know, grief is not, I guess I always thought grief was like when people talk about grief, they were talking about the sadness that you experienced. I didn't, I never appreciated that. The grief is actually the, the name of the relationship that you have forever. And so when people say it never ends, they're not saying that the mourning period never ends.
They're saying that the relationship that is weird in whatever way, maybe difficult, maybe undone, maybe [00:10:00] whatever your, you know, maybe beautiful that you know what they're saying is that relationship with that person never ends. And that, thank you for articulating that because when I was in super active mourning.
I knew that this would never end, but there was a sense of like, Am I going to carry this deep sadness? Like, am I going to carry this melancholy? Is that what that means? Is melancholy going to tinge my life? Like, that doesn't sound great.
Marva: That's a good, a really helpful differentiation there. And, and I think I can bring to the conversation.
A quote I happen to have memorized because I love it so much from Francis Weller, who's one of my favorite writers on the topic of grief, and I grabbed his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, and he is Oh, God,
Sarah: what a beautiful phrase. Isn't that
Marva: a great? Yeah, isn't that great? And and he says [00:11:00] grief is not something to fix or do anything about.
It is a presence. In need of a witness. So just to be present to that presence of yep. Yep.
Sarah: Yeah.
Marva: What touches you about that? I'd love to know.
Sarah: Yeah, it's the it really is the title of this book is perfect. It has I have used words to describe my experience this year. So for context for people listening, I invited you on here because your recent losses. So my mom. You know, officially died on the 14th of August and yours died what was on the 16th.
Yeah, yeah,
Marva: yeah. Mm-Hmm. . Yep. My stepmom.
Sarah: Yeah. And [00:12:00] so what I wanted to talk to you about was just that experience, well, whatever comes up, but that experience of this fresh, fresh grief because,, and now that we've articulated this, it was the experience of mourning because what I was finding was a lot of the resources out there, they weren't relevant.
They probably were relevant, but they weren't interesting to me because well, for one thing, I don't want somebody telling me what's going to happen. I want to figure it out. And for another I think maybe they're referring to grief, not mourning. And I have been trying to make my way through this initial period, which is so weird.
And, you know, like, like the beginning of a new relationship with my mom. And anyway, I just wanted to have a conversation. conversations specifically around this early stage, because that's not what I see modeled. And so, before my mom died, I was I had experienced a my partner and I broke up for about six months and it was awful.
[00:13:00] And it was a, you know, deep soul grief. And some of the words that, that I use, that I have used to describe that time were wild. And so, so, so just to hear that title model my experience or mirror my experience is touching, because it is it's wild.
Marva: It is wild. Yeah, it is a, it is a living entity of, and so totally unique to each individual.
Individual and, and especially, I would just say further to the, to the mourning to the topic of mourning versus grief. I had the very unique experience three women who lost their spouses within a few months of one another and then hit the pandemic and were alone.
And I met with each, each of them individually at the same time. [00:14:00] And the differences And the acuteness of that initial mourning, how they handled it had things to do with the how much, how long an illness had been, where they were accustoming, you know, accommodating themselves to the idea that this person was going to be gone, the age of the spouse you know, and had they had a good long life or did you still have lots of hopes for, for how long you were going to be together The dependency or individuality within the relationship, like how Hard was it to live without them? And then the individual temperament of the three women, they were radically different. And if I took the one who seemed to handle it all the most calmly with the least amount of really [00:15:00] active, obvious mourning if I compared her to the one.
who had the most prolonged acute period of just crippling mournfulness. I would have thought the one that was, I would like, Oh, we're in trouble. She's really over the top, you know, that kind of thing. And luckily, I have enough experience of my own to know, Oh no, you don't compare, you don't they're just as individual as that individual and as the relationship was and the circumstances and one of those was a sudden death that you would, you know, to understand the difference between a shocking loss.
untimely and shocking. So different than You know, a person in their late [00:16:00] eighties who died after a lingering illness, you know?
if you are enjoying this conversation, you will love Cosmic Stew. This is a community designed for smart, neurodivergent minds to manifest the life that you long for. If you have tried to will yourself into getting things done with less than great results and you want to manifest without drama, this community is for you.
Go to CosmicStew. com to get started.
Sarah: I always, it never occurred to me that I might be wrong by the way, ever. I always thought that my mom would have an illness of some length and I would be her caretaker. And I that I anticipated that end of life
experience with her because I've been a part of that numerous times and so has she and we've done it together and I just then thought I would do it for her.
Marva: So there's [00:17:00] perhaps some grief about not getting to do that?
Sarah: No, it's fine.
Marva: Okay.
Sarah: It's way better. This was like, this is way better. I feel like I feel like I feel like she had a perfect death. She gave me the best gift ever. I feel like she was like, Yeah, yeah, we're done with that. You don't have to do that. I just and also I. I don't know. I don't know how human it's probably somewhat human.
But my temperament is that my temperament is that when something is done, I don't fight with it. I'm able to accept it when something is broken. I'm like, okay, if I think I can control it, I'm gonna get pretty neurotic. But if I know I can't, I just don't argue. I don't, I don't make it up. And her death was so obviously like, I mean, you know, this is done.
There's nothing that anybody could have done could do. Like there's zero fantasy I can enter that, that would change this. [00:18:00] And you know, who knows what will happen down the road, but I think that's given me a really deep amount of peace about it.
Marva: That's a beautiful, that's beautiful that you feel that way.
Some people I can easily imagine would not feel that way at all. A
Sarah: number of people who, you know, are some, you know, have talked to me, call it a, you know, a tragedy. It's tragic. And I can't see it that way. My best friend told me, she said, I think maybe, you know, in a year or so, you'll look back and go, Oh, yeah, that was a pretty big deal.
But as I'm in it, it doesn't seem tragic. It seems tidy. It seems easy, almost. I think
Marva: it's interesting what your friend said, And I would not toss that out the window yet. Cause
Sarah: no, I think
Marva: she, she, no, I'm open. You know, I'm like,
Sarah: like, am I sociopathic? Is this shock? Like who knows what my experience [00:19:00] will be?
I'm open to it. But currently I'm like, what? Like it's done. It's not a tragedy. I'm sorry. it's sad..
Marva: That's so good. You know, we don't even have to say where that comes from. It just is how you have framed it. And it's allowing you to get through this time. I will bring in a contrast to that or in some ways, a parallel to that is that my mom's death seemed so normalized and underplayed.
When I was a kid that I thought it just didn't matter. She must not matter very much. And it, and how I felt about her didn't matter very much because we sure never talked about her again. And on we, and nobody seemed to think I should, you know, be so upset. And so many years later when my therapist said I, and I delivered my story dry eyed like a journalist.
And in fact, I even said, I'm not sure this has anything to do with anything, but my mom died when I was three and she about spit out her pee, you know, [00:20:00] You
think this might not have anything to do with anything? Like, you know, your alcohol abuse or your, your, your despair and your, you know, difficulty with relationships and on and on and on.
But so,
Sarah: Hey, real quick, I just want to give you a definition. So we call those, Oh, by the ways, like here's a relevant piece of, or like a piece of information that you may or may not find relevant. We call this. Oh, by the ways.
Marva: Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah. Oh, by the way, my mom died when I was three and I haven't spoken of it since.
Marva: And I dunno that that's matters. I thought I, who do you want me to talk about when you ask questions about my mom, you know?
Sarah: Right.
Marva: And, and after, and I can't remember the exact sequence of when as I was doing this, like deadpan. You know, this was part of our coping mechanism, this like, matter of fact, realistic, pragmatic, this is the bare bones facts, etc.
I, [00:21:00] she looked at me one day with tears in her eyes and she said, Marva, what happened to you was a tragedy and I looked at her and I thought what in the hell is wrong with you? You're a little over sensitive You're a little over reactive Yeah, they're like look at me. I'm the person and I'm not you know, but I have come back to that line So many times as suggesting of a scope and scale that I had not yet grasped.
And I have used that language myself now, but I don't, again, like you, I, I don't want to live in this, I am not living a tragic life. In case that's not evident. I am not living a tragic life. I am living a very joy filled [00:22:00] and, and appreciative kind of life, but that's only because I did my grief work.
Sarah: Okay, here's, here's a question that I, I had from, from earlier. Have you, you always had animals?
Marva: No. No.
Sarah: Is this your first dog ?
Marva: Well, no, but, but. For example, when I was a kid, we weren't allowed to have pets, which was just a real tragedy that I've never had.
Sarah: That's a, now that's a tragedy!
Marva: That's a tragedy! To not have a little, a little confidant and a little co regulator. Because adults are ain't good at that, you know? So I got my first pet when I was 21. I got a dog. And so I've had you know, pets for the last 40 some years.
Sarah: I'm wondering is, before you addressed your grief, when your dogs died, was your grief and your sorrow, was it disproportionate to the situation?
Marva: You know, I don't know that that happened prior to my grief work. Yeah, it must have. I must have [00:23:00] lost a pet. I don't remember. See, I think I did that detachment at work, right. Yeah, I think, you know, so this is one of the things that I can tell you about the way I drank in my 20s and 30s was at a certain point I would get very sad
Maudlin and able to cry and able to feel this You know, but of course it was not a fruitful kind of mourning because I wasn't in, I wasn't conscious in a helpful manner, but yeah, I have a, it was like, it was stuck, you know, it was like a hairball, speaking of pets, I had a, I had a Greek hairball, didn't cough it up until I was 36 or 37, you know,
Sarah: Well, I asked because. I've, I've watched a number of people grieve lot, [00:24:00] like they can grieve their pets and they can't grieve something else. You know, they're, they're able to love and be open in a way. And, and it's clear from my perspective that they're not just grieving their pet. Not, not at all to diminish the, the love and the relationship they have with their pet, but it seems clear from the outside that this isn't just about that.
And I, I've also had that experience when my dog Chuck died. I remember, you know, sobbing about lots of. You know, it had just, it had opened up a room inside of me for some other things that needed a little more attention. And so I just wondered if you'd have anything like that,
Marva: well, I think what you've touched on there is how each loss we experience of whatever kind resonates with, with, with other losses, especially if we haven't really addressed them.
And it's another interesting thing from Frances Weller. From this book, The Wild Edge of Sorrows, he speaks of the great [00:25:00] hall of grief as a place that we can enter through any number of gates. And the death of someone close to us is just one of those gates because we can grieve for the sorrows of the world.
We can grieve for the things we needed but didn't get, you know, so all of these gates through which we can enter. And I think any loss. Whether of by death or by separation or by, you know, you know, losing a home, losing a job, losing your, all of those kinds of things, invite you into the Hall of Grief. And when you are in the great Hall of Grief, So if you stick around for a little while, you're going to bump into the other stuff that you maybe haven't finished yet.
And I will also add in this interesting notation, which you as a, are you still calling yourself an emotions coach? Is that still your,
Sarah: yeah,
Marva: okay. Okay. That you, [00:26:00] that you might appreciate is that I noticed some of what you're talking there of being over empathetic. About certain kinds of things like I would before I did my work, I would over empathize with somebody else's loss.
And it was pretty clear to me in retrospect that, oh, that was way out of proportion because I had not felt my feelings, but their stuff gave me permission briefly to emote. And, and so this undigested grief and sorrow is just, it's, it's a living mass in us. And we have to figure out how to do this work in order to have proportionate measured reactions to, yeah.
Sarah: So tell us about this death and I'm going to close the door. This is, I apologize. I've got kids and a dog shirt, whatever
Marva: you
apologize that you have kids. Please [00:27:00] don't apologize about that.
So in my case the, the person that I lost just a couple days after you lost your mom was my stepmother who came into my life when I was four and a half.
So my mom died when I was three and a half, my dad remarried a year later to the month. And this is a person who I really had a, just a challenging relationship, the, the pretty much the entire
time.
And. So, I tried every trick that I knew as a charming little smart ass, you know, to win her over and to please her, and I never could quite accomplish it.
And so, her death came with that double whammy of relief, and, and that's it. There, [00:28:00] you know, we're not going to, we're not ever going to go any further. That's the end of the road on that. And what a puzzlement I still feel in scratching my head about what went wrong and how could it have gone the way it went.
I feel grief at a relationship that died in the bud, you know, so my grief is not for a person Who was important to me and loving to me and nurturing to me, but for that secondary complexity that comes of having a caregiver who doesn't know how to care, you know, so I have worked so hard on that relationship in therapy and beyond, would have told you I was pretty well settled and [00:29:00] yet It wasn't until after she left the planet that I realized, oh shit, there's this whole other thing.
You know, there's this whole other labor yet to be done and it was one of the interesting things that I did as I knew she was actively dying and she had had a terrible Parkinson's with a Parkinson's related dementia that was really horrific and. hallucinations and paranoias and all kinds of just really awful things is that we all were ready for her to go and wanted to see, you know, help her out.
So I, I did a really interesting process written by a woman named Jane Hart. It's called seven steps for successful life transitions, where you imagine picking that [00:30:00] person up at the bottom step and, and at each step you journal answers to a question or to a focus area and then on the seventh step you hand them over they're not yours to carry anymore.
But you're looking at what went right, what went wrong, what needed to be done. Forgiven, what did you hope for that never happened, you know, that kind of thing. And so I went through that work journaling for several weeks prior to her. Death and thought I've surely covered all the bases.
Sarah: What a good student of processing emotions you are.
Marva: I'm trying to control this by going through
a strategic kind of a process and then the wild edge. Thank you very much. You know, the wild edge pokes up. I'm sleeping in her house. I'm cooking with her [00:31:00] dishes. And I feel this incredibly complicated, unruly mix of emotions, like incredible tenderness for the sadness that her life wasn't any happier than it was.
You know, for, so I mourned for, for her and her impairments and her deep developmental trauma that had so shaped her. And then at the same time, I was grieving for myself to say, how could somebody have not, you know, treated me kindly and nurturingly at, at, at four, you know, so what about you?
I want, I would really like to hear, are you wanting to share about your process?
Sarah: I do, but I have one question,
have you found that What you're experiencing is like some [00:32:00] sort of extension of what you are already familiar with, you know, a flavor that you've already, you know, navigated quite a bit of, and there's just more of, or is this like a new, a new beast?
Marva: This is a new beast. This is, this is a new beast. And, and so an additional nuance of it is that immediately after her. Death, a bunch of things shifted in the family system, and in particular, my relationship with my dad. And I began to see how her influence, her fears, her gatekeeping, her, you know, scapegoating or all those things had functionally interfered.
With, with, with other important relationships in my life. So then you add on, you know, subsidiary grief.
Sarah: More rooms in [00:33:00] the Great hall.
Marva: Oh
my God, what else could there possibly be? So I think that is, I think that is, An important you know, thing to know about, about grief is that if you will let it have its way with you, if you will be unafraid to walk into that great hall and look around with curiosity and not be afraid of, I remember when I was in therapy, I didn't want to start crying because I was afraid I would never stop.
And my therapist said that. It doesn't work that way. It's okay. So once you get that under your belt, like, okay, I won't fall, I will not irreparably fall apart. Or I'll fall apart a good way and I'll fall together again and in a different, you know permutation, but that this really, she had to be [00:34:00] gone before I could see certain things.
And about myself, and about other relationships, and about her, and, and that people within the family speak a little bit differently now. We talk about different topics, and, you know, there's an exploration, an ongoing exploration of who, and this isn't, this is great, who, what's the, what is the world like?
Who am I? Who are you without this person who was? It's central in that family system.
Sarah: Right. And I imagine, your dad is still living?
Marva: Yeah.
Sarah: Yes, I imagine there's a reorganization of your direct relationship with him?
Marva: Major. Just major. But instantaneous. Interesting. It was instant like one of the strangest things I've ever seen, you know, boom.
Yeah.
Sarah: [00:35:00] Interesting. So you
asked about me. So one of the things that, that occurred, I mean, there are so many, so many ways to answer that. But one of the things that occurs to me in this conversation is. One of the things that happened when she died is, or when she, she fell, so she fell on, on Friday, and they took her organs on Wednesday, so we had, you know, a five day wake, essentially, and,
so she fell on Friday, and My partner who was with him. I've been going, I've been going through this breakup was at the hospital on Saturday and we found our way back. And I, at that time, I didn't know, I didn't know what would happen, but, you know, I didn't know if we would be back together or what, but, but him being there resolved tons of issues.
unresolved questions that were the, you know, I had [00:36:00] found a way to, to tolerate living without him. And I had some, some hope in that I could continue to not just tolerate living without him. But, you know, I, I saw that I could live without him and find a way and all of that. And I was, you know, I was just getting a, Maybe a glimpse at that, but there was still a ton of unresolved stuff.
How could this have happened? I don't understand how this happened. How, how, how can I ever trust myself? I thought it was, you know, there were a lot of those kinds of things that, that seeing him just, it made all of it disappear. Like,
wow.
Oh, I wasn't wrong. Oh, it wasn't all a delusion, whether he and I stay together or not.
I was right. Like I was right to trust him to trust me. You know, that relationship was right. And, you know, grappling with what had happened between us was the most painful, much more painful, even than, than being separated from him, you know, just everything I had believed. So, so there's this weird thing where, [00:37:00] where he came back and it was.
It was such a goddamn relief. And I felt this, I felt this deep sorrow for my mom and I got to feel it curled up in his lap while experiencing the deep relief of having those questions go away. The wild edge of those questions go away. And I didn't like mostly didn't feel guilty about that, but it has been something to grapple with because my mom's death.
My mom's death solved some problems for me and I have done my best to hold that and appreciate that while also not telling myself that means I'm glad she's gone. Because it, I'm not glad she's gone and I appreciate what has happened as a result. And so holding all of those, you know, as a little bit of a project.
But just that deep [00:38:00] relief combined with that deep sorrow was a
trip.
Marva: I bet it was. Did you feel that that You, you, you, your receptivity was just busted wide open, like you were so vulnerable in that moment. And, and I And death re prioritizes everything. Everything. I mean, that kind of a crisis throws all the puzzle pieces into the air.
Sarah: Yeah.
We just were like, oh yeah, nevermind. Yeah.
Marva: I love this story.
Sarah: Nevermind.
Marva: I get it. I get it. I do. And I think you kind of, in a way you might just go straight. This is my nomenclature from ego to soul. It's like,
Sarah: nevermind.
Yeah. That doesn't matter. And he said that, he said, Oh yeah, she's family. You know, he's talking, you know, in reference to a conversation I had with his sister.
Oh yeah, she's family. Of course, I'll do whatever I can. And I, and it was like, right. I knew I was [00:39:00] family asshole. Like I knew it.
Yeah. I knew it. Yeah. Whether, you know, at that, at that point, you know, whether we are also partners, we are, you know, we're, we're part of each other's pack. And yeah. My therapist said that, you know, he, he turned me on to this concept that death is like a psychedelic, it's like a psychedelic experience.
Marva: Oh my
gosh, that's fabulous. I agree. Yes.
Sarah: And I, you know, it's like, you know, it's like we had a, you know, a deep shroom experience. It's just like, Oh, okay. Nevermind. Like all of that has gone. And, you know, and so I, I, I imagine that he and I would have found our way back to each other. I imagine it probably would have taken us a few years and it would have been a lot rockier getting back.
And I wonder if all of this is conjecture, but I wonder if we would have ever been able to do it with a really open heart, but doing it the way we did. Yeah. It just, it's like he entered [00:40:00] that psychedelic experience with me and we just reorganized.
Marva: So that was occurring at the hospital. He shows up because here's a crisis,
Sarah: well, so, I was so mad at him. Friday. So she fell Friday and I was so pissed, I told my, I was talking to my dad on the way home and I said, I'm so pissed that he wasn't at the hospital.
And he said, well, does he know? And I said, no. Would you like me to call him? No. I'm just pissed that he's not here to have, for me to have called. It was just, you know, and then Then I assumed that he knew and just wasn't calling me. And so he was, you know, an extra jerk. And then I, I texted his sister and I said, Hey, does, does he know?
And she said, yeah, I just told him about 20 minutes ago. I told him not to reach out to you yet. And, and so then I just texted him immediately. And it was like, okay, well, if you weren't withholding yourself and [00:41:00] okay, and then I, you know, I texted him and we, we talked all day. And then he we had this new kitten.
So Friday when she fell my friend took the kids across the street to get food and Lula found this kitten that crawled out from under the hospital and imprinted himself on her. And so we had this. kitten. And Lula wanted, so Saturday Lula wanted to see, just to come to the hospital and see grandma, but she's afraid to leave the cat because it was so little and nothing was cat proofed or whatever, you know, she just didn't want to leave him.
And so, so Chris brought her to the hospital and babysat the, the cat. And so, and I saw her, you know, for the first time. And then the next day he was with me pretty much constantly.
Marva: It's an interesting and I think fairly well documented, although I don't know how, but that how many babies are conceived at funerals or, you know, on funeral weekends,
because there is just this urge to affirm life and you have [00:42:00] this sense of, oh my gosh, it's fragile, it, how quickly it can be over and, and yeah, Let's, let's really,
Sarah: that's part of it, but
part of it also, there is that, but there's also the you know, you enter a space during good sex, you enter a space of openness and vulnerability and connection that I crave when I'm in crisis.
Marva: That's what I love that. That's beautiful.
Sarah: And I think that might be part of it too.
Marva: I appreciate that. Did you get to talk to your mom or she was?
Sarah: Oh, no, maybe a little conscious or something right at first. And I think that I know the moment that she left.
I think she left before paramedics ever got there.
And
so
Marva: you were with
her.
Sarah: Yeah, I was in conversation with her when she fell, [00:43:00] we were at this house that I rented to be a wholeness healing center. And oh yeah. And wait, this gets so much worse. Wait. So, so after we broke up, you know, six months prior, I realized, okay, so I'm an emotions coach. Literally feeling feelings is my job.
And I didn't have the ability to do it because I didn't have the privacy. I didn't have a rage room. I didn't have a place to beat a pillow. I didn't have some of the themes that would have helped that I wanted. I found myself wanting. And I thought, well, fuck if I don't have it, no one has it. And so I dreamed up this, this concept.
And. Rented this house and, you know, number of miraculous serendipitous things and ended up this house. And we went over there so I could show it to her. And we were he was just opening doors opening cabinets and we were talking and I was on the phone with my [00:44:00] friend who she knew and we were all just, you know, kind of.
Talking shit and just whatever and then she opened the basement door and fell down. That was it.
So so also, you know one of the things that I thought about and this is what is so fucked up to make sense of is if He and I hadn't broken up. She wouldn't have died like literally the thread Now I actually believe that she was probably it was so perfect I think she was done. And she was she was in a very good place.
She was very happy. She was living a great life. But I think on some level, she must have been done for it to have happened so perfectly. And, and I also know that had it not happened there, something, something else would have occurred. But But there is a direct link
between,
Marva: you know, that's one of the interesting aspects in the aftermath of, of an overwhelming experience of trauma is the brain will automatically go [00:45:00] looking for all of that sort of cause and effect in, in the mortal realm.
And I appreciate the fact that you're holding two things at once. You're holding a, if I hadn't done this, this wouldn't have happened and et cetera. Yeah. At the same time, you're holding the. that that souls know when they're done. That souls have, you know, that there's, there's, there's an expiration date and, and you know, we, we are, we are at choice in some.
way for that.. That, that kind of thinking can help you move through. How do you feel about the space now?
Sarah: Oh, I got, I got out of it like right away. They, the the owners of the house let me out of the lease and, you know, that was, that was a easy, clear decision. I did go back I don't know, within a week with maybe within a few days or something to process what I could
but I mean, I, I don't like going, I'm not going to go down that street. Like I'm not, I don't want to see the house. I certainly [00:46:00] don't want to build a, a healing center there.
Marva: So, so there's, you
feel some grief about that.
Sarah: Yeah. And also not also, you know, part of what I'm grappling with was like this I was like geared up to do something.
I had the colors picked. You know, we were ready to go and I'm not doing anything now. I'm not asking myself to, to make any decisions or do any projects. And, you know, I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm not, Very, very reliable. And that, you know, my, I may be in a great mood, but I, you know, who knows?
So I'm not asking myself to do anything that requires much executive functioning, so I don't have any to offer. And so there's also this, like,
just, I was geared up to do it and now I'm not doing it. And so there's this like, okay, so what am I doing? Since I can't do much, what do I do? And some well meaning people are like, well, you don't have to do anything. And I'm like, I mean, I kind of have to do something during the [00:47:00] day, like, literally, like, maybe I don't have to decide on a huge life project, but I kind of need something to occupy myself.
But you know, like, I need something to do something to look forward to something to create and trying to figure out like how to manage that when I can't do anything is also Weird. Is your executive function compromised?
Marva: That's a really a good question. And it causes me to, to pause to think that I was surprised at how absolutely functional I stayed, because I, I showed up at noon on a Wednesday. Flew into to Michigan, grabbed my ukulele and went over to where she was in the, in a facility, care facility, played ukulele for her, said goodbye and she died a few hours later.
So boom, I'm, I just showed up at, at exactly the right time and then had this amazing week with my dad in [00:48:00] which I was hyper functioning because he was flat on his back in bed with, with a hip injury and I was. Managing to go grocery shopping and cooking for him and cleaning the house and, and, and, you know, keeping people informed and writing an obituary and all that.
So, so I think there is this initial period in which a person, you know, even in shock can, you know, March through a lot of details. And then I came back and just did that. Yeah to my work, you know, and I was okay But I'll tell you this interesting thing that just a month ago My neighbor down the hall died, you know,
I've
been worried about her And was reluctant to approach because she sometimes didn't appreciate that.
Turns out she, you know, she died maybe even like as much as a week before anybody noticed [00:49:00] that she was gone. And I have had far more executive function and trauma response to a death in the immediate of someone, you know, In my environment here and been freaked out by the fact that lights keep being on in her apartment and you know and just feeling the depth of like the tragedy of she, they found her the day before her 46th birthday, you know, it just,
That I really struggled with feeling safe I had, you know, a lot of, of, of sort of trauma response stuff that was, you know, For someone I didn't even really know all that well, you know, but there was this proximal relationship and her age and the tragedy of, we don't know for sure how she died, but you know, [00:50:00] whatever the case that was more of a rock that rocked me, rocked me more.
So I've struggled off and on.
Sarah: That strikes me as maybe reminiscent of earlier in our conversation about the pet about how sometimes people will will channel their grief. Not that it's not not relevant, but that it somehow seems disproportionate.
Marva: So having this I can throw in an interesting idea from Parker Palmer, who says that when we that the soul is shy and doesn't want to be.
Approach directly and that it's very helpful if you have what he calls a third thing and a third thing would be like a poem or a book or a work of art or something or piece of music that you can listen to or hear. And when you do, all of a sudden you're allowed to feel somebody opens the door. It's like, how do you feel about your [00:51:00] mother's death?
You know? And you're like, I'm fine. You know? But you read a poem about whatever and you're like. Oh, that poem. So I think I bring that over to your astute observation that a couple of months down the road, a secondary loss, right, discombobulated me more because I was at a different phase of vulnerability.
And I was, it was easier to feel it about this other person than it was about, yeah.
Sarah: I wonder also if, if she reminded you of you, if part of that grief is for a sad 46 year old alone woman who's a little prickly, a little haunty in the afterlife.
Marva: Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. Good. That's good. Good reflecting.
Sarah: God.
Aren't we [00:52:00] weird? Like, isn't the whole thing just weird as hell? Oh, it
Marva: really, it really is. I want to, if I may, I want to get, I want to get a, a Francis quote in here that I think provides some, some really rich some kind of rich Underpinnings for this notion of, of activism around grief.
And I think you, I think you'll appreciate some of the content here. I'm not suggesting that we live a life preoccupied with sorrow. I'm saying that our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us. Our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness. Condemns us to a life shadowed by grief.
Welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. This is the secret to being fully alive. I see this work as soul activism, a form [00:53:00] of deep resistance to the disconnected way in which our society has conditioned us to live. Grief is subversive, undermining our society's quiet agreement that we will behave and be in control of our emotions.
It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small.
Sarah: Thank
you.
Yeah, it's beautiful. It feels complete. Does that feel complete to you?
Marva: Feels complete to me too. That's good. Good time for me.
Sarah: Okay, I'm going
to stop recording.
Thanks for listening to About Death, the podcast about living life on your own terms. Would you help me get our guest stories into the hands of people who need to hear them? One thing you can do is think about who you know who would love this episode. Send it to them or leave a rating and review, especially if it's a good one.
And if you want community and [00:54:00] coaching, Go to CosmicStew. com to get started. See you next time.
ABOUT MARVA:
Marva Weigelt is a self-reinventor who enjoys tinkering under her own hood and supporting others in self-exploration as a practitioner of peer support in Newton, Kansas. She has been exploring her specialty area of grief since age 3.
Timestamps And Topics
00:00 Welcome to a Heartfelt Conversation on Grief
01:08 Introducing Marva: A Lifelong Student of Grief
01:44 Marva's Personal Journey Through Grief
07:22 Understanding Grief: More Than Just Sadness
11:35 The Freshness of Mourning and the Wildness of Grief
16:06 Exploring the Depths of Grief and Its Many Facets
16:29 Personal Reflections on Loss and the Process of Grieving
22:11 The Collective Experience of Grief and Its Varied Dimensions
26:57 Navigating Grief and Complex Family Dynamics
29:45 The Healing Journey: Therapy and Life Transitions
32:14 Exploring the Depths of Grief and Relationship Shifts
35:04 Reconnecting and Reevaluating Relationships in the Wake of Loss
39:14 The Impact of Death on Personal Growth and Relationships
45:33 Reflecting on Grief, Healing, and Moving Forward
52:07 Embracing Grief as a Form of Soul Activism
If you liked this conversation, you’ll love Cosmic Stew. Head over to sarahyost.com to start living your life your way, with way less anxiety, way less effort.