Dear Grief Guide, I Don't Recognize Myself Anymore

A man mourning the death of his wife yearns to be the person he used to be while also struggling with who loss is forcing him to become. I read his anonymous letter and then offered him practical tools and compassionate wisdom for growing through grief.

Dear Grief Guide is a weekly advice podcast where I answer anonymous letters from people feeling lost, stuck, or overwhelmed amid grief.

Music © Adi Goldstein, Used with Permission

Trigger Warning: This practice may include references to death, dying, and the departed.

Transcript

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,

It's been three months since my wife passed,

And every time I look in the mirror,

I don't recognize the person staring back at me.

The loss of her has shattered my sense of self,

Leaving me dazed and disoriented.

I don't know how to navigate life without my wife by my side,

And the thought of building a future without her feels impossible.

I feel like an entirely new person,

But not in a good way.

It's as if I've woken up with amnesia,

But the only person I've forgotten is myself.

I still have the same interests and hobbies,

Or at least I think I do,

But everything feels different now.

I'm filled with this inexplicable desire to become someone else,

Someone shiny and new,

As if shedding my old identity will somehow make the pain of her absence more bearable.

But in the process of trying to reinvent myself,

I've become hypercritical of every aspect of who I am.

I scrutinize my appearance,

Finding flaws in things as trivial as my hair or my body.

It's as if I'm trying to fill the void of her absence with self-loathing and dissatisfaction,

Hoping that if I can't be who I used to be,

Then maybe I can at least be someone else entirely.

But no matter how much I try to become that new,

Upgraded version of myself,

I still feel like an empty shell,

Hollowed out by grief.

I wish so badly that I could just return to the person I used to be.

I knew that man,

His hopes,

Dreams,

Wants,

Preferences,

And routines.

But this new guy?

He feels like an unwelcome stranger,

An alien who's taken up residence inside my body and my home.

Please help me find a way to deal with this.

Sincerely,

Man in the Mirror Hello there,

Man in the Mirror.

If you haven't already put words to it,

What you are grieving is not only the death of your wife,

But the death of yourself as you knew him.

The death of your former identity,

The person that you used to be,

The things that you hoped for and dreamed for and wanted,

The things that you were building towards,

And the self that you knew.

This is one of the most unspoken and profound forms of grief,

One of the biggest secondary losses that so many grieving people face that's just not talked about as much as it should be.

Because when someone we love dies,

Not only do they die,

But the person that we were with them and to them and for them,

And sometimes even because of them,

Goes missing too.

And a lot of times that version of ourselves feels irretrievable,

Like we can't go back into the past and put that person back together because in order for them to exist,

The person we love so much,

The person we lost,

Needs to still be alive.

And they can't.

In addition to being robbed of someone we deeply love or to whom we were deeply attached,

We are also robbed of this very core,

Very central,

Very vital sense of self.

It is a huge and enormous part of grief and your letter points directly towards it.

I want to offer you a visualization that I often email to people when they're interested in working with me,

And that is the visualization of life after loss being like a giant dressing room.

And how I frame this in my brain is that loss strips us naked.

Everything we knew before,

Every identity,

Every identifier,

Every article of clothing that felt like us in some way is taken away by the storm of grief and we are plunked down in this department store of life after loss,

In this dressing room of grief that we didn't ask to be in,

And we certainly don't want to be in,

But somehow we can't escape.

And our mission there is,

Alright,

Figure out who you are now in life after loss.

And there's a temptation,

And I hear it in your letter,

To just pick a new outfit already and go out there and be somebody new.

And I sense by this reaction you have to self-criticize or to kind of pick apart your appearance that something in you doesn't want to go there,

Doesn't want to be an entirely new shiny version of yourself,

Because some part of that would mean forgetting,

It would feel inauthentic,

It's not entirely true to who you are and what you want to be right now.

But I hear you,

It can feel so much easier to just pick out a new outfit already and become someone new.

Let grief make you somebody who takes cruises in Florida every year,

You were never that person before and yeah,

I guess you're that person now.

Or somebody who cuts their hair into a bob and you've never done that before,

Or maybe you grow your hair out.

I remember my father grew his hair out after my mother died and not many people liked it.

But it was his divine dressing room of grief to try that on for himself and live in it for a little while.

So I hear you that it can feel so much easier or so much smoother to just decide on an identity already and then go out there and try to be that person.

But I think that something inside of you says,

Hey,

That's not who we are,

That's not entirely true,

That's not 100% aligned because this picking apart response is some sort of reaction to these clothes aren't comfortable,

These identities aren't comfortable,

What you're trying to wear,

Who you're going out in the world and trying to become,

It is forced.

It is forced out of this desire for I just want to be done with this process already and I hear you.

And simultaneously in this dressing room,

I hear in your letter this intense longing to go back.

Please beam me up,

Just take me back from whence I came,

To my life before,

To the clothes I was wearing,

To the identities I knew,

And to my wife.

I knew who that man was.

I knew what he wanted,

I knew where he was going,

I knew who he was in relationship and proximity to other people,

I understood that person.

And I desperately want to go back there.

The author Brene Brown talks about in grief there are three major emotions.

There is loss,

Something I believe to be precious or important is now gone.

There is longing,

I am yearning to be made whole.

And there is feeling lost,

The three L's,

I don't know how to reorient to the world when the world looks like this.

And I see you man in the mirror,

In this big old full-length mirror,

In the dressing room of grief,

Feeling the loss of your wife,

Something precious is now gone and cannot be returned to you.

Longing,

I want to feel whole,

Whether that's feeling like myself again or feeling like this new person,

I'm not sure yet,

But I want to feel whole and understood and comprehensible and aligned with who I am.

And I see you also feeling lost,

I do not know where to go from here,

I need a way to deal with this,

I need a path forward.

And all of these are perfectly natural and normal experiences in the aftermath of loss.

Each of us in our own dressing rooms of grief in life after loss are feeling these exact same things.

So what do you do with them?

How do you begin to move forward?

How do you deal with this when you are stretched between or you are the object in between these two worlds of I want to go back to who I was and I also want to become someone new.

And I think in grief,

This is one of our great challenges and the hardest part and the thing I know you don't want to hear,

Man in the mirror,

Is it's going to take time.

And I say time,

Not because time in and of itself is healing,

People are like time heals all and I'm like,

No,

I don't subscribe to that magazine.

It's what you do in that time that matters.

But I wonder if I could shift your perspective from being robbed of one identity and leaping into another to treating this whole experience in the dressing room as one great cosmic experiment.

I want you to,

And I teach this in my online course,

Life After Loss Academy,

So if you want to go step by step,

Like nitty gritty through this,

I would love to guide you there.

I want you to make a list of some clothes that you were wearing before.

So maybe you were a creative person,

Or maybe you were a trustworthy person,

Or maybe you were a caregiver for your wife,

Or maybe you loved math and science.

I'm not sure what's true for you,

But maybe a list of things that was true for you before and look at that list and just see if any of that is still true.

Are you still creative?

Do you still love math and science?

Is there a TV show or a movie or an artist that continues to resonate with you even now in your grief?

Down to the bare bones,

Is your eye color still the same?

Do you still drive the same car?

Are you at the same address?

What remains?

What clothes,

However small,

Could be the size of a pinkie ring,

Are you still wearing?

In what ways are you not entirely naked in this dressing room of grief?

What are the few things that even loss did not take from you?

Many people I work with mention things like creativity,

Like faith,

Like a love of being outside.

For me,

Mine is always,

I hate olives.

Even grief couldn't make me love olives.

I hated olives before my mother died,

And I'm going to hate them till the day I die.

No one can make me like an olive.

Grief can never change my taste buds.

And for as small as that is,

My goodness,

That little tattoo on my wrist of I will always hate olives.

Grief could not take that from me,

So I was still wearing that in my own dressing room of life after loss.

And then I encourage you,

In all of your vulnerability,

In all of your what is left-ness,

To wander out into this giant department store of life after loss.

What else is there to try on?

Who else could you be here?

Not to rush and pick out a matching set to become this new fancy guy already.

To hurry up,

Go to checkout,

Get your clothes,

Put them on and get it over with.

But to see what actually feels good on your body.

What feels aligned with who you are right now.

What feels even,

You don't even have to commit to it for an entire future,

Maybe just in this season.

At the time I'm recording this,

It's April in Chicago,

So windbreaker still applies.

You may not wear a windbreaker forever,

Metaphorically.

But maybe for this season,

There are clothes,

There are identities,

There are personalities that could feel true.

One that is automatically applicable is griever.

And this is not a bad or negative identity to have,

It is simply true.

You are a man who will forever love,

Miss and remember his wife.

And whatever article of clothing,

Whatever foundational piece that aligns with most for you,

Maybe it's a pair of socks,

Maybe it's a wristwatch,

That you can put on right now and wear and know with certainty that it is true and aligned.

Other things,

Parasailing,

Trying yoga,

Reading tarot cards,

Becoming a person who gets up at 6am every morning and walks to the beach.

Are you that guy?

Unsure.

Jury's out.

Try on those articles of clothing.

Experiment in this life after loss and see what fits now.

This is the antidote to feeling lost.

This is how you reorient to the world again.

You treat it like a giant cosmic scavenger hunt,

One you never wanted to be on.

In my first book,

Permission to Grieve,

I refer to it as an involuntary scavenger hunt of grief.

You didn't want to be on it,

You don't want to be doing it,

And yet it's what you must do in order to reorient again.

But something that's wonderful about this is that it eases the ache of longing because you are slowly piecing together ways to make yourself feel whole in life after loss.

And in trying on these new clothes and in choosing which ones to wear,

Perhaps permanently,

You find ways to also honor the loss you faced and you feel.

This will not happen overnight and I know that's the part you don't want to hear.

And also know that there are so many of us here with you in our own dressing rooms of grief trying on who are we now,

What are we now,

What do we want now in life after loss and just dial turning,

Knob turning,

Experimenting to see what fits now,

To see what feels good,

To see what's comfortable,

To see what's surprising.

Oh my god,

Maybe you look good in purple.

Who knew?

It was never true in life before loss.

It may very well be true now.

And I guarantee you if you look around,

Man in the mirror,

There are others in your life who are experimenting and trying on new identities,

New personalities in life after loss.

I am one of them.

I will always be one of them.

The community in Life After Loss Academy will be in that group as well,

But I bet there are people in your personal life too and people in the public eye who are also reorienting to the world again after loss in their own sort of dressing rooms.

Suffice it to say you are not alone here.

Your aches and your pains and your longings are entirely valid.

What you want is not crazy.

You just want to be through this already?

I totally hear you.

I just want to be done with this dang shopping trip.

Get me out of this dressing room.

I hear you.

And also know that the time that you spend here,

You will learn so much about who you are now and what you want and who grief is asking you to become.

And who knows,

You might even hear some responses from grief of what it wants from you,

Of what feels comfortable for it to wear and to be your companion in the long term.

And all the ways,

All the metaphorical pieces of clothing that you can put on to remember your wife so that she is carried forward alongside you because this new version of you will be a marriage of sorts.

Of the person you were in the past,

The person you were with your wife,

And the person you are becoming in the future.

The man who remembers.

The man who carries forward.

The man who continues on.

I have faith in you.