Dear Grief Guide, I'm Afraid Of Forgetting My Person

A listener is terrified that the passage of time will make them forget their aunt and cousin who died suddenly. I read their anonymous letter and then offered them practical tools and compassionate wisdom for growing through their grief.

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

Music © Adi Goldstein, Used with Permission

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 nine weeks since my cousin and aunt were taken from this earth.

I still can't say they died.

The words dead,

Death,

And killed make me sick to my stomach.

I loved them dearly,

And I still can't believe they're gone.

Today in therapy,

I expressed how everything feels wrong,

Like I'm living in an awful episode of Black Mirror where something insidious is lurking below the pretty picture of normal reality I see around me.

My therapist suggested I start to grow a life around my grief,

Asking me to consider that it might be possible to build something that feels right in the midst of everything feeling wrong.

But the thing is,

I'm terrified.

Terrified that stepping back into the world and doing things like hanging out with friends at places my cousin and aunt and I used to go,

Or even forming new connections,

Will make me lose the small details,

The quirks,

Mannerisms,

And precious moments I want to hold onto so desperately.

I don't want to forget the way my cousin lit up when she heard Beyonce on the radio,

Or the sloping curve of my aunt's beautiful cursive.

I don't want to forget their signature mac and cheese surprise,

Or their shared love of colorful scrunchies.

I am so,

So afraid of forgetting them.

I understand I can't wallow in isolation forever,

But engaging with the world feels overwhelming without the two of them here with me.

I feel like I have to choose between my past with them,

And my future without them.

As if by moving on,

I'm signing a contract where each day my memory of them grows fainter and fainter,

Until my brain is too full of the new to remember the old.

Have you ever had this fear,

Grief guide?

How did you navigate it?

I'm desperately seeking a way to preserve my memories while still moving forward.

I'm open to your advice.

Clinging to my memories.

Hello there,

Clinging.

I see you in your fear,

And your pain,

And just the terror of losing more than you have already lost.

There is the physical loss of losing their bodies and their voices,

And making eye contact with them across the room,

And being able to stand in pictures with them.

There is all of that that you lose.

But there is also the mental,

The emotional,

The spiritual,

The connections that you shared,

All the memories that you have with your aunt and with your cousin,

That you are almost anticipatorily grieving.

You are anticipating in moving forward,

In whatever way makes sense to you,

I will begin to lose the things that feel so close,

And so precious,

And so accessible right now.

I get that.

I read that so clearly in every word of your letter.

And here's the hard truth.

There are many hard truths and grief,

And this is one of them.

You cannot stop the passage of time.

And with time passing,

Often comes some measure of forgetting.

In living further away,

Day by day,

From the time when you knew them alive,

There are things that you do forget.

My mom died 10 years ago,

This past December.

And there are things about her that are faint for me now.

It's hard for me to remember what her laugh sounded like.

I hear my laugh and I know it's close.

But is it the same as hers?

I don't remember.

And there is a deep sense of mourning and soul distress for me in that.

I don't remember what her voicemail sounded like on our home phone.

I don't remember the exact year that she cut her hair.

And I don't remember how she held her pen when she wrote her own version of sloping cursive just like your aunt.

There are things that have faded for me,

And there is grief in that.

And I do not want to discount that fear that you have that the passage of time will mean some sort of fading and forgetting.

And I want to offer you two things in response to your letter.

While they are fresh in your mind,

I want you to write down everything you remember about your cousin and your aunt.

Whether you buy a journal for each of them and fill the pages,

Whether you have one place where you keep all of your memories of them,

Like a Google Drive or a Dropbox or a folder on your phone of photographs or videos or voice memos,

Anything that you shared together.

It can feel a lot like hoarding jewels like a greedy dragon when you're grieving.

But you know the preciousness of keeping all of these things so close to your heart.

When my very best friend Tammy died in 2022,

One of the first things our friend group did was create a Google Photos Drive where everyone dropped every photograph and every video they had of her from the time she was a kid to up to a month before she died.

And I still have this folder on my phone and I still visit it on a very regular basis.

And it is something that brings me so much joy because seeing not just the photos I took of her,

But the pictures that other people took of her,

Prompt these memories and these moments of,

Oh,

That was her favorite bracelet that she got from a friend,

Or that was when she traveled to this state to see her sister,

Or there are just so many things that come forward through just remembering pictures,

Not to mention the things I've written about her or the bottle of perfume that I asked if I could take out of her bathroom so I can still smell what it was like to hug her.

There are so many things that you can keep close to you and I encourage you to do so.

This is something I will not ask you to release.

In fact,

I will tell you to do the opposite.

Hold on to everything you possibly have access to of theirs that feels appropriate and soul-fulfilling to do so.

This is not a permission slip to leave the house unchanged or to hoard objects in a way that hinders your life.

That is an aspect that sometimes appears in grief when people are afraid to release anything at all.

Keep what feels really reminiscent of them and what you have access to.

Write down these memories,

Record these memories somewhere where you can have access to them indeterminately,

And let those places be your treasure troves that you can visit whenever you want.

These safe places that are like these jewelry boxes or these treasure chests for your memories of them.

As a bonus,

I would encourage you to ask the people around you,

People who also knew your cousin and your aunt to contribute their own memories,

Objects,

Stories.

Do they have jewelry?

Do they have photos?

Do they have voice memos?

Do they have articles of clothing?

Do they have stories that you've never heard before?

I encourage you to maybe make this a personal project of yours.

You're on a mission or you can declare yourself,

I am the family record keeper of memories of cousin A and aunt B.

I am the person who is gathering all of this,

So if you want a place for it,

Send it to me.

I am thrilled to hold onto it for you.

And almost as if you are curating a museum of their memories.

It's a beautiful way to craft a collection of things that will now,

And in the future,

Be impossible to forget because you have so much of them all in one place,

All at the same time.

The second thing I'll say,

And this is the other thing I want to offer you in response to your letter,

Is that in moving forward,

You will have new connections.

You will have new experiences.

You will have new events that you attend or milestones that you hit where they are not present because they cannot be,

Because they are gone.

And I encourage you in whatever way makes sense to you to invite them to show up.

Whether that's through signs and symbols like seeing a cardinal or for me and my mom finding pennies on the ground or inviting people who knew them to attend these things with you or sharing them and their memories through stories or inviting new people in your life to look through these metaphorical or literal jewel boxes or treasure chests with you when you feel safe enough to share these memories.

Invite them to show up in the newness that you are moving into by force because you must.

Because time marches on and you can't stop it.

And it's so frustrating and it's so hard and you are not caught in this trap of leaving the past in the past and having the future be the future.

One of the most beautiful things you can do in grief and one of the few things you have control and power over is how your past gets brought into the future with you.

And you can insist with every cell in your body that your aunt and your cousin are coming with you.

Whether you wear a specific color in memory of them or a piece of jewelry or you say a prayer to them every morning or do a meditation in their honor or do a project or run a marathon in their honor and then you make new connections that way.

There are so many different ways to honor people that you love and to carry them with you in spirit,

In emotion,

In mind,

In body,

Into the present,

Into all of these new interactions that your therapist is advising you to go off of.

There's a beautiful illustration that I love by the artist Jar of Salt and it's a bookshelf and it says something like grief day one and it's one giant black book on a very empty bookshelf.

And the next panel of the comic strip is something like grief day 642.

It's a random number but it is clear that time has passed.

And this black book on the shelf has not moved but surrounding it are dozens of other new books that are placed around this black book of grief.

The grief is not disappearing,

The grief is not stuck in the past,

The grief is present on this shelf in the future.

All of these memories you're creating,

All these experiences you're having,

All of the milestones you're passing,

All of the new connections that you're forming,

They are things that will slot into place around your grief,

Around your cousin and your aunt and their importance to you and your life.

You can frame pictures of them and put them in your house.

You can wear their aprons every time you cook macaroni and cheese surprise.

You can share stories of them or write stories about them every time you choose to write in cursive.

You can wear colorful scrunchies on special days.

You can carry them forward because that book of grief,

That one that sits in the middle of the shelf is your frame of reference,

Is a sort of foundation for everything you will build on top of in your life after loss.

I invite you mentally,

Emotionally,

Spiritually,

Whatever you need to do,

Perhaps even physically,

Safely,

To set fire to this contract that says you must leave the past in the past and the future can only be the future where they are not here.

You do not have to live in a world where your memories grow fainter and fainter day by day and where the new crowds out the old.

The old comes along for the journey.

The old informs the new.

In fact,

The old,

As you phrase it,

Is a foundation for everything that comes after loss.

It is the bedrock now on which you stand.

It is one of the things you know to be true,

Is you have a deep love of your cousin and your aunt.

They are no longer here and you are living and must live in a world without them physically present.

What will you do now?

I see your fear.

I hear your terror about moving forward and even,

Oh God,

I want to close with this,

Even in writing this letter,

You are sharing them in the future.

You are allowing your grief to come with you.

You are asking important questions about how they come along because you do not want to forget.

It is not a clinging to memories.

It is an honoring of what was because what was matters more than anything as you step into what is becoming.

I have faith in you.