Dear Grief Guide, I Just Want To Feel Normal Again

Hello and welcome to Dear Grief Guide,

A podcast where each week I answer one anonymous letter from a listener feeling lost,

Stuck,

Heartbroken,

Or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

My name is Shelby Forsythia.

I'm a grief coach and author,

And I'm here to help you create a life you love from the life loss forced you to live.

Let's get to today's letter.

Dear Grief Guide,

I'm grappling with the recent loss of my sister,

A mere three weeks ago.

Her end-of-life journey began with a stroke in 2020,

And in the years leading up to her death she was depressed and miserable,

Expressing all the ways that her post-stroke life was a lesser life than the one she was living before.

I saw how the stroke changed everything for her,

And my heart broke.

I got where she was coming from and empathized with her pain.

I did my best to take care of her emotionally,

Physically,

And even spiritually as her memory and ability went downhill.

As she declined,

I had candid conversations with friends about what I can only call the diminishing luster of life.

Although I made big strides in my career and even met and married my wife while taking care of my sister,

The thrill and novelty of life overall seemed to dissipate.

It's like no matter what I accomplished or achieved,

And despite the blessings that came my way,

Nothing felt as good as it did in my life before,

Knowing what it was like to grieve.

Now with my sister's passing,

The weight of this realization has intensified.

The question echoes louder.

For those who have lost a loved one,

Does life ever reclaim its shine?

Or does the pain of grief cast an enduring shadow,

Dulling the brilliance of life forever?

In the wake of my sister's death,

I yearn for a glimpse of normalcy now more than ever.

The desire to feel normal again reverberates through my thoughts like a mantra,

A plea to regain a sense of equilibrium amidst the years of upheaval.

I miss the simplicity and the joy of the years when my biggest challenge was choosing what movie to watch on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

I long for the days when laughter came easily,

Things felt possible,

And life felt less burdened by the weight of loss.

Grief Guide,

Can you tell me if what I'm seeking is even possible?

God,

I just want to feel normal again.

With gratitude,

Longing for normalcy.

Hello there,

Longing.

I see you and I hear your pain.

And I also want to acknowledge too that at the time you wrote this letter,

It has been three weeks since your sister's death.

And this was a death that came with some sort of certainty,

You knew that this was the path that your sister was on,

But that does not make it any easier.

Sometimes people ask,

Is it better,

Which is a word choice in and of itself,

To lose someone suddenly or over time?

And I don't know the answer to that question.

I don't think there is one.

There is grief and heartache and pain for sure and losing someone all of a sudden,

Of being blindsided by the pain of loss.

And there is also magnificent pain,

Enormous pain in watching someone deteriorate and witnessing their depletion and their lessening of their time on this earth over time,

Of watching them become someone you've never known them to be,

And then also watching them die.

So I just want to hold all of that,

Make as much room for all of that as we possibly can before I get to your question.

This question of,

Is it possible to return to normalcy again?

The extraordinarily short answer is no.

There is no returning to life before,

After you've experienced a devastating loss.

Something that I mentioned in one of my books,

Your Grief,

Your Way,

I call the 1% grief rule and essentially what it is,

Is that no matter where you go,

What you do,

What you accomplish,

Who you become in life after loss,

Even if it feels 99% joyful and happy and amazing and overwhelming and exuberant,

There is always at least 1% of that moment in your life that is grief.

You will remember or notice your sister's absence.

You will be thinking of some memory related to her.

You will be recognizing how you've changed as a person in some way that you may have not noticed before.

There's always going to be some fraction,

Some percentage of your life that remembers your loss,

That remembers that it is grieving and it will never be done grieving.

This is not always a bad thing.

It simply is.

It is a fact of living life after loss,

Is that grief never goes away.

But something that might be hopeful to you is that it changes in size.

So for instance,

You may experience a milestone where it is that 99% joy and exuberance and elation and accomplishment and oh my gosh,

I am on top of the world with 1% grief.

You may have other days where it's like it's a 50-50 split.

I am seeing how I am happy.

I am also seeing how I am sad and changed and different and grieving and feeling broken and depleted and different,

Simply different than my life before.

Because here's the thing,

You can never be the person that you were.

You can never have the normalcy you had because that person,

That version of you,

That iteration of your life did not know this level of loss or heartbreak or hardship.

It did not know what it was like.

If it did,

It would have operated differently.

Normal would have meant something different to that person,

To that iteration of your life.

This is something we talk about so often in Life After Loss Academy,

The entire second module of the course.

There's over eight lessons in here and each of them have homework and exercises and things that I walk my students through,

Is about releasing,

Releasing this old normal,

This old person that you used to be,

That used to be concerned with what was the movie we're going to watch on a lazy Sunday afternoon,

Not how to take care of someone who is dying.

How to release the life you thought you were going to live,

How to release the dream of a return to normal.

That is heartbreaking stuff.

This is not just the disappointment of,

They were out of the ingredient I needed at the grocery store.

This is the disappointment of,

I am grieving the entire extent of a life that I very much wanted to live.

The author Brene Brown writes in her book Atlas of the Heart,

The weight of our disappointment is equal to the weight of our expectation.

And to expect something big,

Lifelong,

Means that we will grieve or be disappointed at the weight of big and lifelong.

And let me tell you right now,

It is not petty or childish or immature to grieve the life that you thought you were going to live after a loss.

It is one of the most significant and healing things that you can do for yourself,

Is to say that this is the life that I thought I would live,

And this is the life that I'm actually living.

And really measuring and taking stock and taking inventory of the distance between those two things,

The difference between those two things,

And saying,

I am releasing that dream now.

I am finding ways to live in this reality that I never wanted to be true.

There is immense healing in that,

In grief.

Something that I do want to offer you though,

And we also talk about this in Life After Loss Academy when we talk about how do you live the entire rest of your life with grief,

Because that 1% rule,

Grief never really goes away,

It will always be present in some shape or form,

Is we talk about the return of things like hope and joy and delight and wonder.

Because something that grief changes,

Because grief inherently changes and impacts everything,

There is no way to shut out its tentacles from different areas of your life,

There's no way to quarantine what is precious,

So it's not touched by grief,

Everything gets impacted by grief,

Including hope,

Joy,

Delight,

Wonder,

Normalcy.

Something that we talk about is what it looks like when those things do return.

Because I know you're probably like me,

You have seen people come back to life after loss,

You've seen them smile again,

You've seen them laugh,

You've seen them develop routines and rituals and rhythms in their life and you know that they are fulfilled on some level,

You know that,

I know that.

And if you ask them,

If you sat down and asked them,

Does hope look the same for you right now as it did before your loss,

I can guarantee that the answer is no.

So what I call this,

What I refer to this as when we talk about it in Life After Loss Academy is hope wearing different clothes.

Hope comes back,

Joy comes back,

Delight comes back,

Wonder comes back,

But oh man,

Is it unrecognizable at first.

It comes teetering up the driveway in a wardrobe you have never seen it in before,

Possibly aged,

Possibly roughed up a bit,

Possibly got some holes in the jeans,

Some patches on the elbows,

Maybe hope looks like it just got into a fight.

Or wonder,

Looks like it got tossed around a little in a storm.

Or normalcy glitches,

Just a little bit,

As it walks up the driveway on its way to meet you again.

It is not the same as when it left,

When loss forced it to leave.

And it cannot be the same when it returns to you.

But something that you can offer these things,

Hope,

Joy,

Delight,

Wonder,

Normalcy,

When they return to you is your open arms with an intention or an invitation of saying,

I am willing to get to know you as you are now.

Normalcy,

Hope,

Happiness,

Joy,

Wonder.

You look a little different,

You've grown up a bit.

You look like you've been through some stuff.

But I'm willing to get to know how you feel now,

How you look like now,

How you show up now as it pertains to my life.

So instead of rejecting your new normal,

Or your new version of hope,

Or your new version of wonder,

Because it doesn't look the same as it used to,

Because it's not who you once knew,

Instead I wonder if you could develop a practice of opening your arms to what normal looks like now.

What routine or ritual or rhythm looks like to you now.

Because just like us,

Normalcy doesn't want to be compared to what it used to be before.

Just like us,

It can't go back there.

It can't magically deliver the old version of itself to your doorstep.

It's not hiding anywhere for you to find.

This version of normalcy that is presenting itself to you now,

Battered,

Bruised,

Patches on the elbows,

This is your normal.

It is normalcy with loss in tow.

It is normalcy that lives the 1% grief rule.

And your mission,

Should you choose to accept it,

Is learning all the ways that you can make that okay with you.

And you can make that okay in your spirit.

I know you have it in you.