Anita Rao
A few months ago, I was on a road trip with two of my closest friends. They don't know each other super well and were catching up after many years apart. One thing they both have in common? Losing a beloved parent in their early adulthood.
One of their moms died of cancer when we were in our early 20s. And the other's father died just years ago, very rapidly after a rare bacterial infection. As I listened into their conversation about grief and slowly rebuilding their lives amid such great loss, I was struck by one resounding theme: that death was the biggest thing that had ever happened to them. Embodied listener Felicia agrees.
Felica
Losing a parent early in my adult life made death real for me. Even when I ran, it still found a way to tap me on my shoulder to remind me that it was real.
Anita Rao
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. The most common age to lose a mother or father in the U.S. is when you're 50 to 54 years old. And while that still may sound way too soon, there are tens of millions of Americans who grieve a parent's death long before that. That's an experience familiar to Liz Zorn. She's a model and photographer whose father Frank died when she was 19.
Liz Zorn
He was the light in every room that you walked into. He was a CEO at his job and people would quite literally request to follow him when he was moved to a new project because they loved him so much as a manager, as a boss. He loved to ski and rock climb and all sorts of fun stuff out in the mountains. He was just a personality. He was a character.
Anita Rao
Frank was diagnosed with cancer in October 2018. And at the time, his prognosis was good. So good that Liz's his parents decided to keep his illness a secret, with the plan to tell Liz and her younger brother after her dad's treatment was over, and he was doing better.
Liz Zorn
So around Thanksgiving I started to notice signs of extreme fatigue, which was very unusual in him because he was very fit and active. So I started to have a feeling that something was going on, started prying a little bit more here and there. And it wasn't until December 9th when we were called to have a family meeting, which in my house, we don't do unless something important is happening.
Anita Rao
I can agree.
Liz Zorn
Yes. So he kind of laid everything out, told us what happened. But again, [he] was telling us, you know, that there's really nothing to worry about. So, I mean, I left that conversation obviously feeling very shook up. But at the same time, I don't think I took it as seriously as I would have knowing the outcome ahead of time, if that makes sense.
Anita Rao
No, it totally makes sense. I think we mirror our parents so much in situations like that and look to them for those cues of like, "Is everything okay? How are we reading into this?" And so then you really had just, I mean, only a couple of weeks between then, and then you found out really only 24 hours before he died that things were really not looking good. Take me into those last 24 hours and how you moved through that huge suddenness of learning about his loss.
Liz Zorn
Yeah, so it all happened really fast. We had taken him in to the hospital. I think it was five days before he passed because his doctor had called and said that based off of his last series of medical tests, his kidneys had gone into kidney failure. And even then we brought him in and it was, "He'll be here for a few days, and then we'll get you guys on your way." And Christmas Eve, I would say, was when things really started to look bad. He wasn't responding to the questions you would ask him in ways that would make sense. His breathing became a lot more rigid and intense. And the next morning on Christmas Day, I woke up to my mom going into my brother's room and I could overhear her and she said, like, "You have to get up now, we have to go in. It's not good." I would say we got there around 10 a.m. And around 4:30 is when he was declared deceased. So it was very, very fast.
Anita Rao
I can't imagine going through something that quickly and you're making sense of it in real time. And I know this was your first experience kind of being so up close to someone who was dying. I am curious about how in those first couple of days afterward. Did you have friends or anyone in your life who could relate to what you've been through?
Liz Zorn
My mom had lost her dad when she was, I want to say, in her early 30s. She wasn't as young as me, but she still sort of had an understanding of what feelings we were dealing with, and what emotions may or may not be coming up. So I did turn to her for a lot of that. When it came to my friends and my family, nobody had really gone through the same thing. So I would say for a while I really kind of just almost blacked out. It really didn't sink in for a couple of weeks.
Anita Rao
I know that you were in a romantic relationship when your dad died. Reflecting back, like, how would you tell other folks who are supporting someone in that really immediate situation? How to be supportive and show up for the partner, especially when it's such a fast kind of shocking death?
Liz Zorn
Yeah, no, absolutely. One of the biggest things that I tell people is that you have to listen to what your partner needs specifically, because grief looks so different for every single human being. Some people might want space, some people might need somebody around them close to 24/7. I was in a relationship where what I needed wasn't quite respected. There were nights where I just wanted to be completely alone and just cry and not have to explain anything to anybody. Because explaining can be exhausting, especially if you can't quite grasp what's even happening. And that was taken as a negative thing from my ex at the time. I had been told multiple times that I was always in a bad mood, or I wasn't fun to be around. And that would put this pressure on me to try to grieve faster, when you can't do that. You have to really get it all out and that can take months and years for people. And so I think understanding what they need, but also being patient and realizing that their whole life just flipped upside down. And everything they knew is different now. And you have to just give them that time to rebuild, and figure out, "Okay, what do I do next?"
Anita Rao
I think one of the other things that you have talked about is how some of the times when you thought you were gonna feel most upset were not actually the days that felt hardest.
Liz Zorn
Yeah, and I mean, you know, I can't say whether or not everybody goes through this. But at least for me, I noticed I would kind of hardcore prep for Father's Day, for my birthday, my dad's birthday. You know, any of these days that I knew were going to come up and be maybe especially hard compared to the average day. But then that day might roll around and it didn't bother me as much as maybe I thought it did. But then there's other days where it's a random Tuesday in August, and it has no significant meaning to me in any way. But I will either wake up that day and just feel it. For a while I was triggered when I would go out somewhere in public and I would see, you know, a dad taking their kids out for ice cream or to a baseball game or whatever it was kind of realizing that, like, I don't get that experience anymore and that experience was robbed from me. And that can really trigger a lot of grief. So sometimes I could just be going about my day — any normal day — and one little thing can pop up that just floods me with emotion all over again.
Anita Rao
That unexpected, catches-you-out-of-nowhere, debilitating kind of grief is both universal and so, so specific. And that's why for many young people who are grieving, finding a community that can really relate to what you're going through can be an essential part of the healing process. When my childhood best friend lost her mom to breast cancer when we were in our early 20s, she found a support group of other people living in New York City, in their 20s, who had also lost a parent to cancer. And those many layers of commonality allowed for a sense of ease around her grief. Knowing that there was somewhere where she didn't have to explain herself. When Naomi Edmondson lost her mother figure Evelyn at age 30, she realized quickly that she needed to build that community for herself.
Naomi Edmondson
I'm deeply grateful for the spaces I was able to enter and be in. But as I started to process my grief, and start to try to put language to it, I realized that there were spaces that I were entering — predominantly white spaces — where I felt like I had to explain the culture that I was coming from. Like the language that I use to talk about my grief. And from those spaces, I realized that I wanted a space that had community like my community, where I didn't have to explain so much and I genuinely could just show up and be seen in my grief and have it met and witnessed.
Anita Rao
Naomi is a Brooklyn-based death doula and grief coach who got interested in this work after experiencing two big losses of her own. The group she created is called Black Folks Grieve. It's a virtual intergenerational space she ran for three years. It's currently on hold while she pursues a graduate degree. But she hopes that she can pick it back up again.
Naomi Edmondson
I think one of the primary values of groups like that is that it reminds you that even though grief can be and is so isolating on so many levels, when you zoom out, there are so many other people who are having not maybe the same experience, but such a similar experience to you. And that can be really helpful if you don't necessarily have a community where you feel comfortable expressing yourself, or have community who are checking on you. You kind of get to create that chosen family who you can check in on and get that care from as well. I think the interesting thing about grief, and especially just around our culture of grief, is that sometimes people put grief on a hierarchy. Meaning that if you lose a biological parent your grief is more important than someone who lost someone who maybe wasn't related by blood, but who filled that role for them as well.
From my own personal kind of experience, I — when I lost my grandmother who filled that mother role for me, I did have people tell me, "Well it was your grandparent, she was old, she was going to die anyway. So surely you can't be that upset about it." And I think that is the thing that can make it so hard to heal in grief, when you have people kind of discount what you're going through because maybe they weren't related by blood. Or maybe they were somebody that you chose and who chose you back. It is so important to have community or chosen family or just people that are around you who can recognize where you are in your loss and can recognize the person, or the place, or the thing that you lost as important without your need to justify why your loss is important and matters.
Anita Rao
When you are going through it, the last thing you want to do is explain yourself. And sometimes that can get in the way of getting the real tangible support that you need. One of the best things that I have come across to help mitigate that is a virtual resource called a Personal Emergency/Tough Times Guide. It's essentially a list of questions for you to answer that allows other people to support you in all the very precise ways that you need, and none of the ways that you don't. It was created by a journalist Anne Helen Peterson. And I really think that if all of us filled something like this out, it would mean that our future selves in the midst of grief, loss and hardship would be better taken care of without expending all the emotional energy to get there. I'm going to share the link to this in the show notes and I encourage you all to check it out.
The internet is filled with lots of other grief resources. This is actually how we found out about Liz — she has a YouTube channel. And one year after losing her dad, she posted a video called "What no one tells you about losing a parent."
"What no one tells you about losing a parent."
I wanted to sit down and talk to you guys about something a little bit more personal. I love doing fun vlogs and fun videos. But I think as someone who enjoys doing YouTube, it's important to talk about serious matters as well sometimes. And while this isn't a series...
Anita Rao
There was a lot of really specific stuff in there. But the moment that really stood out to me was Liz's openness about how her dad's death has shaped her feelings about the afterlife. I asked her to share more.
Liz Zorn
When you lose somebody that close to you, you kind of have this feeling of, "I cannot accept the fact that they're just gone." I do personally believe this whether other people believe it or not, but he came through and he was showing signs to at least me and my mom — but mostly me. I do really believe because of this that maybe we don't know exactly what the afterlife is like. And nobody can say 100%, but I do deeply believe that it's not just nothing, and that wherever he is, he's still watching over me and he's still able to every once in a while send me a sign that he knows that I will recognize as him letting me know that, "Okay, it's still okay. And like I'm still here."
Anita Rao
That's really beautiful. And I think speaks to something that is a big worry for a lot of young people who lose a parent before going through a big life milestone, or many big life milestones, like before you graduate from college, or before you get your first big job, or before you get married. Naomi, I'd love to know for you, how you think about preparing for big life milestones that have felt particularly challenging not to have Evelyn there for?
Naomi Edmondson
Yes, I'm actually in the middle of a big life milestone in that I'm starting grad school in the fall and the process of even deciding where I wanted to go, deciding what I wanted to do, was really, really challenging because those are the kinds of things that you want your parent's advice on. And I feel really grateful for the fact that I had my dad to bounce ideas off of and talk to. But it was that feeling of just wanting to call her and being like, "I'm doing this really big thing I want to tell you, and I want you to know that I'm doing this and I want your advice." So for me personally, after she died, I always had an altar. Whether it was just a space where I would light candles and have flowers, I add more pictures of other people in my family who have died as I kind of learn more about my family. But for me, that's the way that I connect to her. I make coffee, I offer water, I change it out regularly. I talk to her, even if it's not at my altar. I have these moments where I just remember she's not physically here but that doesn't mean that I can't just talk to her. So I talk to her while I'm getting ready, I talk to her before I do something that I'm really scared to do. For me, even though it's challenging that she's not physically here, I just constantly remind myself that death is not the end of a relationship. I can still have a relationship with her even though she's not physically present. And that really — that makes me feel so much better.
Anita Rao
Totally. And I think you know, one of the things that happens when you are becoming an adult, and you have parents who are still alive is you get to see and learn new things about them, because you see them as adults when you're an adult. And I know that for my — my partner lost his dad about five years ago, and for him kind of learning new stories about his dad and finding ways to do that really helps fill that void. So he can feel like he's still learning new things about this person that's really important to him. So every year, his family gathers, and we all kind of write about a prompt. And oftentimes, like, his siblings sharing different stories or his mom sharing stories can be a way to kind of feel like you're continuing to learn about that person. Which I think can can feel really healing for folks who don't have the opportunity to talk directly with them. I'm curious about for either of you, if you've had opportunities to learn new things about your parent after they died, and how you've created those spaces. Maybe Liz, I'll go to you first.
Liz Zorn
I mean, we haven't done anything like that, you know, where we sit down and write things out. I would say that my family overall was a little bit avoidant with our grief. And we tend to talk about other things unless we've had like a couple of drinks in a hot tub, and all of a sudden, emotions are coming out. You know, I guess for me, it's not necessarily learning more about him, but rather, sharing the things that he told me because my dad was such a storyteller. I could use the example of my current boyfriend now had never physically met my father but he tells me all the time that he feels like he knows him based off of videos, he's seen pictures, he's seen stories we've told over time. And I think that's really special too. Because it's hard to know that the most important person in your life right now is never going to, like, hear his laugh, is never going to experience the tone in which he told a story which was so charming and so intriguing to everybody around him. It's kind of nice to know that he still comes out through me.
Anita Rao
I love that. Naomi, how does that show up for you? How are you able to learn new things, if you are, about Evelyn?
Naomi Edmondson
I feel like I learned a lot of new things through my dad. Just even, like, we started spending sort of more time together recently, and hearing my dad talk to my partner about my mom and just, like, these casual things that he'll bring up that I just didn't know like, "Oh, she used to be so lucky in the lotto. Like, she was always hitting the numbers." It was, like, really? I had no idea she had, like, the magic touch like that. And even, like, my dad is currently cleaning out the house and, like, donating some of her stuff. And when I go over to help I'll find, like, a random photo album from when she was younger, which is — always catches me off guard because I'm so used to just the way that I remember her being, like, you know, older and just kind of set in her ways. But I occasionally stumble onto these pictures where she was younger growing up in Jamaica, and I'm just so taken aback because you remember your parents are your parents, but also they are whole younger human beings who were also trying to just figure out life. And even going so far as, like, for my birthday, my 33rd birthday, I went to Jamaica where she's from, and I went by myself and I — I felt like I learned a little bit more about her just being in the place that she grew up, like, feeling the heat, seeing the beach, seeing the sand and just having a moment to myself by the water to talk to her. I felt deeply connected to her and I felt like I knew her a little better.
Tiona
One thing that I wish people understood about losing a parent so young and trying to navigate adulthood is just how lost you can feel. The way that I've learned to describe it is that I feel as if I'm just been dropped off in the middle of a place I'm not familiar with, and it's just dark. And I'm just waiting for someone to hand me a map, or for someone to hand me a flashlight, and that person just never comes. And that feeling has not gotten better as I've gotten older. If anything, the older I get, the more and more I wish I had my mom to help me.
Sarah
All the complicated kind of aspects of your relationship with your mother and contending with that. You know, being sad but also, like, "Oh, no one's ever going to tell me that I look fat ever again," which is kind of freeing. And I think you see your parent as you become an adult, after losing them at a young age, you see them as, like, a human.
Dulani
It just completely changes the direction of your life. Up until relatively recently, when I pictured my future and any future plans, she was always there in it. So to be kind of getting to an age where I'm becoming more independent and, you know, making career decisions and just life decisions, you don't have that person there to necessarily give you advice. For me, it's only been a little over a year so it's still fresh. And I'm still figuring out what that new future looks like.
Amy
I'm always thinking about how I can honor her in everything that I do. But I have come to terms that she is with me as I continue to live my life. If there was one thing that I would want people to know about grief is that it will get better. The emptiness that you are left with will never go away. But it just gets easier to live with.
Anita Rao
Many of you all told us that the intense pain of your grief lessened as more time went by. But for writer Jeff Dingler, the timeline of grieving his father has been extra complicated. He recently wrote about his experience for Insider, and described how in many ways, he feels like he lost his dad twice.
Jeff Dingler
When I was 14, my father began a mental decline. And he had a kind of, I describe it as a mental break. He became paranoid, he thought my mother was poisoning him, he thought my siblings and I were starving even though I was quite chunky at the time. I remember one night where he was convinced that we were starving. And I went to our cabinets and I took out all this food, all these chips, all this canned food, all this pasta. And I said, "Look at all this food Dad, like, you really think we're starving?" And he looked at the food, and then he looked me in the eyes, and he said, "Yeah, I do." And I was 13 or 14 at the time. But I knew I was like, "Something's wrong with him."
And I came home from school one day in February and he wasn't there and my mother and my older cousin who's like an older sister to us had taken him to the hospital. He had admitted himself to a psychiatric ward at a local hospital and he spent a month there. When he came out of the hospital, he was a different person. He was medicated, he was very low energy, he just seemed detached from the world. So I think for a lot of people who deal with mental illness, you know, there's sort of two phases of grief, you grieve the person when they change, when they — when this mental illness happens. That's sort of the first stage of grief. And then my father passed away. Twelve years later, when he finally passed, it was almost this sense of relief, and that we had already grieved the person and what was left was — he was kind of a ghost. And my mother had been his caretaker throughout almost all that time until near the end where we had found a patient care facility for him. So yeah, I grieved losing my father, but I was also really confused.
Anita Rao
When your dad was in the assisted living facility in the years before he died, you had the opportunity to ask a few questions to him about your relationship. I'm curious about those and whether you did feel like you got any sense of closure with him or whether those are still really open questions for you.
Jeff Dingler
Yeah, you know, I think one of the ways that I grieve is unfortunately through anger. And this situation, I felt angry at my dad for a long time because I felt like he abandoned us. I was confused as to whether he really cared about us, or if it was the disease that rendered him incapable of caring. And toward the end of his life, I confronted him asking him, you know, "Did you really care?" And he said that he did the best he could. And at the time, I didn't really buy that answer. And I regret that I was not more compassionate because I understand now that — that he did care about us. He wouldn't have gone on those vacations with me, he wouldn't have encouraged me to be a musician, he wouldn't have been sort of the sunny, mellow presence that he was if he didn't care about his family. He wouldn't have provided for us. He did care about us. It's just that's the — that's just the toll that mental illness can take.
Anita Rao
I know that those mixed feelings of relief and regret and wondering about what ifs can take their own toll and can be really challenging. How are you working through that? And how do you consider that part of your grief journey, now that you are, you know, a decade or so out? How is that showing up for you in your life?
Jeff Dingler
It's tough. It's always a big question, what kind of relationship I would have had with him into adulthood? You know, I think how much I really leaned on my mother and asked her for advice. And I know my dad was a very savvy person. I think it's complicated, maybe my relationship to — to me wanting to be a father. I recently had a relationship end that involved a child that I was being called Father to. And that has been a terrible kind of grief. You know, it's made me think about my dad. And when he said, "I did the best I could," and looking back on this relationship, is that what I would say? Do I feel like I've abandoned this child and this person? And it's made me realize your parents are people too. And my dad was a person. I think he did do a great job.
Anita Rao
I know that writing for you has been a way of getting reconnected with some of the memories from your dad, of parts of your life that maybe you haven't spent a lot of time thinking about or remembering these various facets of him and really painting a more full picture of him. I'm curious if there's any particular story or memory that has come up for you, that has been really special to kind of lift back up?
Jeff Dingler
[Laughs] Oh, my gosh, so many. I find out more about my dad from total strangers. I mean, he promoted some big bands in the 70s, including Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers.
Anita Rao
Wow.
Jeff Dingler
He was also a meticulous archivist. He archived all of his contracts and promotional material from that time period. So we have gone through those files and found, you know, just crazy stories. A letter from the Hyatt Hotel in Birmingham, banning the group Lynyrd Skynyrd because they cost $500 of damage in their hotel room. And my dad having to deal with that. You know, this is something we didn't know until we found that letter. In writing this article, you know, you have to dig back into your memory. And I have kind of realized [I have] not a great memory, but when I write, I uncover things. And he was a guitarist and a musician, and I played for him in my early 20s. And he was, you know, quite out of it at that time. And yet, his ear was still good enough to detect a couple of mistakes they made in the song. And he pointed them out immediately, and it was hurtful and cutting, you know, it was like that was all he could hear, were those mistakes. And I thought to myself, "I'll never play for you again." And I thought that I didn't, but I realized in writing this that I'm fairly certain I played for him over the phone, on one occasion, played some guitar for him over the phone. And he said, "Oh, you sound really good, you sound great Jeff." And I had forgotten that. And in writing I remembered. I remembered a piece of him, of who he really was.
Anita Rao
You can read more from Jeff about his relationship with his father and find a piece he wrote about his relationship with his mom by checking out the links in the show notes of this episode. We're also going to add in some resources that we've come across while putting together this episode that may be supportive to you if you're grieving a parent or have a loved one in your life who is. Before we close out I want to say a special thank you to all the listeners who contributed to this episode. Thanks to to Dulani, Sarah, Tiona, Christine, Amy, Trevor and Felicia. Felicia is another person who talks openly about her grief on YouTube. Her dad died when she was 24 and her mom when she was 30. I'm gonna give Felicia the last word.
Felica
I wish more people understood that coping with the reality of loss takes time. Because that person is with us forever. And the weirdest thing will remind me of that, like a smell or sound. And sometimes that moment may bring tears of happiness or it may bring you to tears, because you wish you could just feel that feeling in the physical again. But both of those feelings are okay because grief is just love with nowhere physical to go. So we hold on to it.
Anita Rao
Embodied is a production of North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC, a listener-supported station. If you want to lend your support to this podcast, consider contribution at wunc.org now.
This episode was produced by Paige Perez. Kaia Findlay also produces for our show and Amanda Magnus is our editor. Skylar Chadwick is our intern and Jenni Lawson is our sound engineer. Quilla wrote our theme music.
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Until next time, I'm Anita Rao taking on the taboo with you.