Ep 232 Katie Prentiss | The Slow Goodbye: Mother Loss with Frontotemporal Dementia

 

SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:

This week, I sit down with Katie Prentiss, a filmmaker, actress, and caregiver who transformed her most profound loss into a powerful creative mission. Katie shares her raw and inspiring journey of caring for her mother through frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a challenging form of dementia that impacts personality and communication far differently than traditional memory-loss conditions.

At the age of 62, Katie’s mother, Maggie, passed away from FTD. Through our conversation, we follow Maggie’s transition from caregiver to actress and the filmmaking of her debut film, “Wake Up Maggie,” hoping to raise awareness about dementia and caregiving.

Katie beautifully describes grief as a “slow goodbye.” She shares transformative perspectives, saying that grief doesn’t have to have the final word and that facing fear can become a pathway to clarity and purpose. And, my favorite: the sun is always shining above the clouds, even when we can’t see it.

Katie has had to learn how to embrace life fully, knowing the genetic uncertainty of FTD, following the diagnosis of another family member. But she’s already learned how creative expression is a healing outlet and the importance of viewing midlife as an unraveling.

Key Takeaways:

  • Understanding the unique challenges of frontotemporal dementia.
  • The emotional landscape of caregiving for a parent with a progressive illness.
  • How grief can be a catalyst for personal transformation.
  • The power of creative expression in processing loss.

RESOURCES:

CONNECT WITH KATIE:

Turning Grief into Purpose: Katie Prentiss on Caregiving, Loss, and Creativity

Grief has a way of reshaping our lives, often in ways we never expected. In this episode of Grieving Voices, we had the privilege of speaking with Katie Prentiss, a woman whose journey through loss led her to an entirely new path—one filled with purpose, creativity, and advocacy.

A Caregiver’s Heart

Katie’s story is one of love, resilience, and transformation. When her mother was diagnosed with Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), Katie became her caregiver, navigating the challenges of watching a loved one change in ways she never imagined. As many caregivers can relate, the journey was heartbreaking yet deeply meaningful. It was a season of grief that began long before her mother’s passing—a slow goodbye filled with love, frustration, and moments of bittersweet connection.

The Unexpected Path to Filmmaking

While immersed in caregiving, Katie found solace in creativity. She soon realized that sharing stories—especially those of caregivers—was a powerful way to bring awareness and healing to others. This led her to a surprising new direction: filmmaking.

Her short film, Front Porches, captures the raw and emotional experience of caregiving, giving voice to the silent struggles that so many face. The film has received recognition and praise, serving as a beacon of hope for those feeling unseen in their caregiving journey. Now, with her upcoming project, Wake Up Maggie, Katie continues to use storytelling as a means of shedding light on the complexities of dementia and the deep love that endures through it all.

Finding Purpose Through Grief

Katie’s journey is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Grief, while heavy and painful, can also be a catalyst for change. It can open doors we never anticipated, guiding us toward healing in ways we never imagined.

Through her work, Katie not only honors her mother’s legacy but also creates a space for others to feel understood and validated. Her story is a reminder that even in loss, there is room for new beginnings.

Listen to the Full Episode

If you or someone you know has been touched by dementia or the challenges of caregiving, this episode is a must-listen. Katie’s words will inspire you to find healing in unexpected places and remind you that your grief has a purpose.

🎧 Tune in now to Grieving Voices and hear Katie’s powerful story. Let her journey encourage you to embrace your own path of healing and transformation.

Episode Transcription: 

Victoria: Hello. Hello. Welcome to Grieving Voices. Today, my guest is Katie Prentiss. She is the mother of four who was running a successful photography business when her mother was diagnosed with frontal temporal dementia, and she became her full time caregiver. Seeing firsthand how short life truly can be, Katie embarked on a mid life career pivot into acting, Katie’s second career began on the fast track by landing the first role She auditioned for in a feature film. Since that amazing opportunity, she added writer, director, and producer to her growing creative resume with the creation of her first award winning short film front porches. Acting has been a life changing occupation for Katie, allowing her to dive more deeply into the stories of others with empathy and understanding. Katie was has written a feature length film called Wakeup Meggie, a coming of age film written as a love letter to caregivers raising Dementia Awareness. Wake up Maggie is currently in preproduction and is being created by a female led production team in film crew. Katie has been featured on remember me, second act actors and more. Thank you so much for being my guests today.

Victoria: And thank you for sharing me, sharing an aspect of grief that hasn’t been talked about. I might have had one other guest who spoke on dementia, but not the frontal lobe dementia, which tends to my own understanding just because someone within my community was diagnosed very young in early fifties. Yeah. And so I believe it tends to develop at a younger age. Is that correct?

Katie: That is correct. It is the most common form of dementia under the age of sixty five.

Victoria: And so how old was your mom? Well, first of all, let’s was her name?

Katie: Maggie Maggie Hanson? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. My mom

Victoria: was when she was diagnosed then.

Katie: Yeah. My mom was sixty two when we officially got the diagnosis. The tricky thing with front or temporal dementia, FTD is that it can often take an average of three and a half years to get an accurate diagnosis. So often people are showing symptoms like early signs without the family knowing or without anyone knowing what it is or what’s going on. So I look back and think she definitely have symptoms like in her fifties.
For sure.

Victoria: Can you share what some of those things that were that you noticed as a family?

Katie: Sure. Well, I should say that frontotemporal dementia definitely affects someone’s personality. It’s less of a memory type of dementia, and it’s more of like personality, compulsion control. For my mom, in particular, it was speech, like language. She had primary progressive aphasias that she lost her ability to to communicate. But early on, it was my mom definitely had some shifts in personality, but we we also had a lot of life stuff happened with her. She had a massive car wreck when I was in college. She my parents went through a divorce when right about within those few years. So there was a lot of circumstantial change in her life, and it was easy to rationalize everything we saw as, oh, this is just mom now that she lives alone. Like, no one’s telling her to, like, stop obsessively recycling things. You know? Like, my mom would have just recycling containers stacked up really high. She also, like, was compulsively order like, ordering and clothing online, like, way more than one person could use. She was definitely felt victim to, like, some scams. Like, she signed up for, like, a phone and alarm system in her home. She definitely, like, had some color saying that they wanted to marry her and she fell into this like scam relationship where she sent someone money. But the biggest clue for us was that she started having delusions. And at first, the delusions felt somewhat based in reality, like, very explainable for us. Like, so she said, oh, there is a man and a son in my backyard. And I’m like, well, who? But, you know, in your rational mind, you’re thinking, oh, there’s probably like a child that that got away from their parents or something and they just went in the backyard and then left. But the delusions started getting more extreme and less realistic. So we knew that something was up at that point.

Victoria: And you’re also a mother of four.

Katie: Yeah.

Victoria: So and and I’m I’m also curious if you have siblings because I know you you became her caregiver No. But were your children young? Yeah. That was all that?

Katie: Yeah. It was a journey. So I am the middle child of three. I have an older brother and a younger sister, and they’re both wonderful humans like involved. And my extended my family all lived in Georgia at this point and my personal family was living in Oregon and we still are. When this was going on, again, like, there were signs and things going on with mom that we’d be like, that’s crazy. Like, she got lost going home. That’s that’s wild. Like but then once her delusions or her visions of things that she saw or felt were happening became more crazy. Like, she gave a story about a man and a woman who climbed up onto her roof and dug a hole in her roof. Like, she really believed they were, like, going into her attic through her roof. And it was so sad because I just want, like, it just sounds like she’s scared to live alone. Like, she thinks, like, everyone’s coming to her house. But but anyways, at that point, I talked to my sister and I said, I feel like maybe something’s wrong with her meds or like something’s off. Like, she’s just sharing some crazy stories. And we decided my sister took her to a psychiatrist. To see if there was something some sort of answer they could give us. And the psychiatrist appointment, they basically said, okay, your mom has a delusional disorder. She cannot drive and she cannot live alone. Like starting now. And so we were just like, wait, what? All of us had young kids at this point in our thirties. So my sister being closer in location to my mom. I mean, we were both like, well, she can come with us. It’s great. Like, in a way, it was like, well, mom’s really helpful to have around and, you know, she’s a grandma and, like, she’ll it is kinda nice to have an extra set of adult hands. And so my sister and I kinda joked about, like, I’ll take her. No. I’ll take her. And then she ended up moving in with my sister and her family.
And this was, like, late fall of that year. And my I remember saying to my sister, like, let’s just get through the holidays, like, just have mom for an extended visit through the holidays, and then we can talk about what we wanna do, like, in a more permanent way. But they they settled in with mom. She lived there almost three years with them. If I if I do the math right, I think it was right around three and she was living there her symptoms and and disease was progressing and she was getting more tricky to manage. I wasn’t, you know, in the weeds with them. They were handling so much stuff like, you know, moving her out of her house, selling her house eventually, like, all of those logistics of caring for someone. And then they got to their end of feeling able to maintain her care needs And at that point, I felt like I can’t tolerate having my mom go into a nursing home in Georgia, like across the country from me. So I felt like I wanted her to come live with us and talked with my husband and we made the decision to make we’re out to Oregon. And so mom lived here her last two and a half, almost three years of her life with us. So she lived with us in our home for about less than a year and then we had to put her into a nursing home and then a memory care home to be able to handle her needs because it was so advanced. So it was a journey. It was a long journey of trying to figure out how to care for her well. In those years.

Victoria: I think that’s probably I mean, I I’ve just seen it. Mhmm. And so and working I worked in a nursing home, had a memory care, but it is and it can be a very long disease.

Katie: Yeah.

Victoria: And I think that is probably one of would you say that create one of the aspects of it that creates a lot of complicated feelings

Katie: Absolutely. Absolutely because it’s like you’re mourning your person that’s right in front of you. You know that they’re on their decline and that death is going to come for them through this it’s usually secondary causes through this case, which is super frustrating. But I remember feeling really afraid of how long mom might live with this. Because you just you start to project out and envision the future, and it’s it’s this, like, rapid decline of them losing well, for us, it was all her personality, all her ability to talk. She became, like, The only way I can describe it is like it would be like a severely autistic person where the ability to communicate is just gone and you’re like, know that they’re in there, but you want to be able to reach in and have some sort of semblance of interaction with them, found myself envious of people with Alzheimer’s because I thought, yeah, they’re repeating their story and they don’t remember you, but, like, at least they can talk to you. Like, I felt like I just would have given anything to talk to her. To just, like, hear her say something or tell me the same story or, you know, let’s let’s, you know, have that conversation about who I am not to, like, diminish anyone else’s suffering or pain with that. But it is very complicated. It’s complicated and that you don’t want it to last a really long time. It’s complicated that you feel like you’re grieving them while they’re still there in front of you. I called it the slow goodbye. I know people call it the long goodbye. But yeah, it’s just it’s yeah. It’s just a a difficult walk for sure.

Victoria: How did you explain this to your kids? I mean, because you’re a caregiver to children too Yeah. Managing their emotions. Yeah. And bringing a parent into the home, I imagine has a different impact on your marriage too.
And Absolutely. A lot of layers.

Katie: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, our kids I would say, I’m trying to remember exactly how old they were. I think our oldest was, like, maybe just started middle school and then our youngest was in kindergarten, first grade. I can’t remember.
And I would say for the youngest, it was, like, easy because I found him to be the easiest to bring around mom because he would just hug her and, you know, bop away and then come back and hug her again and just like how children can be so present. And and and what is and not, you know, given to, like, the fear, the imagination of what could be. And then the odor we get, the more we live in those spaces of not being present and you know, constantly fearing the worst and stuff. But my older kids I mean, it’s it’s funny because I think I was in such crisis management mode. I don’t know if I did a very good job of explaining anything to them. But I was trying to do my best to model love and care and acceptance like this is what we do. We take care of family. We love the person in front of us. Even though they’re difficult, but I probably was naive in what I assumed they were absorbing. It’s so easy to assume kids aren’t. Absorbing as much and they always are. They’re so much smarter than we give them credit for. Mister Rogers was so good at that. Right? Like acknowledging that in children. But I remember my kids would have, like, writing assignments and they’d they’d bring them home and it would be, like, a poem and it would be about my mom, about Mimi living with us. And I thought, oh my gosh, wow. They’re so deeply processing. So I think that they I definitely felt my children’s attention and care toward me. Is their mom watching me, like, be in this grief? And we just did our very best to, like, support mom, but also, like, give our family time in nurture. And that was the hardest challenge is, like, doing both, like, having just our family time and not feeling guilty about that. And then also trying to take care of mom. So it was a lot like having her in our home. Her needs were really even in the very beginning of her moving in.
Her needs were probably more advanced in what we could handle and we tried. So what did you learn about grief or know about grief?

Victoria: I mean, because you had experienced your parents’ divorce Mhmm. And But had grief been a topic that was talked about growing up? And how do you feel how how do you feel this experience has changed? How you look at grief now? And how you parent.

Katie: Yeah. I grief. Wow. I don’t know. I definitely had a taste of grief with the divorce for sure that such I remember just feeling like, wow, that really, like, shifted my identity in a way that, like it’s like everything I’ve known myself to be and known myself to be a part of down feels like fragmented. And Even in that, I notice, like, oh, people who have been through it, get it, and know that it’s hard. Whereas grief is so tricky, like, when you haven’t experienced a like grief, it’s harder to enter in with people’s suffering or pain or hold space for that because you just feel like I think, especially, okay, going back to the divorce, I think it’s such commonplace almost and in our culture that people are like, oh, sorry. You know, it’s kinda like, oh, that’s hard. Okay. Sorry. And whereas I was, like, processing this whole, like, identity and how do I deal with all of this stuff? I think the thing with mom I you know, that was the most obviously, it’s the most profound grief I’ve ever been through in my life. I think when I was in it, I felt very isolated from people really understanding what it was like because so like we even talked about earlier in this podcast, I think so many people understand Alzheimer’s or some type of dementia, but I felt so young and so confused by mom’s behaviors in the way she was exhibiting symptoms. I felt misunderstood in a lot of ways I remember, periodically, I would post something on social media and share, like, a couple sentences about losing her as a person and dementia sucks. And then I would find someone whose loved one also had a t d or who were going through something similar and I remember feeling like, wow, why does this feel so helpful even though it changes nothing? It just feels so helpful to know that you’re actually not alone in the exact scenario you’re in. So I learned that in that in those moments, I learned that sharing our story is incredibly powerful and that even though we can feel so isolated and alone, that can really help with with some of those feelings. And then, obviously, with the grief, like, the deeper grief of of her actual death and that loss, I learned so much. I learned that we all experience our grief so differently from each other. And I think the really interesting thing is that even in a sibling group or even when you’re grieving the exact same person that you feel like you know in a very similar or same ish way, you will process it differently. And I notice very early on that sometimes the people you think you’ll be able to have, like, intimacy and grieving with, you might not be able to have that. And I also notice how easy it is to compare your grief to other people, vice versa, and how unhelpful that is. So if someone’s sobbing and you feel like stone cold like dried up, it’s easy for one to think the other is silly or whatever, but it’s not helpful. So that was those lessons were incredibly profound in the early stages of losing mom of, like, oh, we’re all gonna do this differently. It does nothing to compare. It does nothing to serve us to compare or contrast. And, you know, you may not be able to share your grief with people who you think you might be able to share your grief with. The other thing that I realized that I think a lot of people probably know of experience grief is that it shows up when it wants to show up. It’s a non invited guest. I I’m always like, this is now my lifelong companion. Don’t really wanna walk with her, but I will be. And it’s something that I just have to let, like, show up and move through. And and yeah. And just it does change through years, but it’s not that loss is always there. The loss of a person that you love or the loss of a dream that you had or yeah, that loss of future that you expected. It’s just it’s like always gonna be there. So and I’m still learning. I I think the other lesson now I’m like eight years out of losing my mom. And I always I think a lot about how it doesn’t have to end with grief. Like, grief doesn’t get to have the final word. And that’s the other thing I’ve learned. It’s like, yes. The impact is profound. It might stop you in your tracks. You might have to spend a lot of years, like, what I call cocooning. Like, cocoon and heal and contract. And, like, take that comfort and space however you can survive, but know that it doesn’t have to be the final say that, like, the clouds can lift and I always say the sun is always shining above the clouds just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. And that brings me so much comfort just knowing like I might be like walking around and just gray clouds feeling so thick. Like, I’ll never see anything else besides that, but the sun is shining. And if you’ve ever taken a flight, you know what that feels like to fly through the clouds and then it’s glorious.
Right? It’s like the sky is just lit up or you know, maybe you get a sunrise or a sunset in there, see other beautiful things, but like that’s existing all the time on a different plane and is accessible to us, at least in our minds.

Victoria: Beautiful.

Katie: Thank you.

Victoria: What was the thing do you think that helped you the most to create a forward momentum of healing?

Katie: I think for me, losing mom at a young age made me realize the contrast is like, yes, death can happen at any time. We don’t know. Like, we can’t predict our future, that makes me want to, like, live. It doesn’t serve anyone for us to just curl up in a ball and be dead ourselves, you know. And so for me, it’s like, well, okay.
Now I know so profoundly that life is short. And I want to, like, live big. I want to live as big as I can and love as big as I can. And I feel like just that thought alone helps me. Just like I think it’s probably inevitable to compare your life to, like, especially when you lose a parent, when you lose a parent at a certain age, you start thinking like, well, that’s what’s gonna happen to me. You know? So it’s easy for me to be like, oh, sixty two sixty two like in my mind. I only have till sixty two and that is really like not a lot of time. And so even though I don’t wanna believe that or predict that for myself, it comes in, and then I have to say, okay, well, what if it was true? Like, what would you do? And I’m like, let’s go. Let’s go do some things that make me feel alive. And so I actually use that as a barometer a lot. It’s like, what makes me feel really alive? And it’s not comfort food and TV and social media scrolling and all the things I do all the time. I’m not judging any of these things, but those don’t make me feel really live. Those things make me feel more numb. What makes me feel more alive is truly connecting with people, is taking risks, is doing something new, getting out of my comfort zone. So when I say I really want to be alive, I use that as a measure. What makes me feel alive? Oh, like, learning a different style of dance, even though I’m not good at dancing. Like, I just I’m like, that’s so fun. So I try to do those things and I my kids are now at the age where they’re graduating from high school and heading to college, etcetera. And I think, like, that even more so, that’s a different kind of grief. And in of itself, like, identity and family dynamic shift, and and whatnot. But I think about that a lot too. I’m like, okay, they’re going out to have their adventure and I can’t, too. Like, this this is We’re getting some time back in our lives. And so I don’t wanna just waste that away. I wanna I wanna do things that yeah. That feel like yeah. I don’t wanna just settle and, like, move into, like, a comfort zone. I want to move into, like, something new and and have an adventure.

Victoria: And be reminded that you are alive. Right?

Katie: Yes. Exactly. Exactly.

Victoria: I lost my dad. He was forty four. Oh. And so that’s one thing people don’t really talk about, right, is you wait for that year to come around. Like, oh, I’ve made it past. My dad’s age now. Okay. Well, I can cross that off the list, you know. So that’s something people who really don’t talk about. Mhmm. One thing I’m curious too, because I’ve I’ve had this awareness just for myself in the last year or so is that I could never I never had my dad’s birthday on my calendar, but I always had the day he died. Wow. Were you the same? Or I, you know, like, I could never celebrate the day of his birth. Right? Which seems really no. I I I was eight when he passed. So I didn’t have a very long time. Right? But I don’t even remember I think there’s a picture of it was his birthday one time, but Yeah. I just think people don’t really talk about that part of

Katie: Yeah. Dates. I can see as an eight year old in only having experienced him for those years how his death date would be way more profound for you than his birthday. Just thinking about that. Like, I’m thinking, yeah, I can’t imagine as an eight year old processing that. And then every year, like, feeling the impact of that in such a profound way, it doesn’t surprise me that that would be your experience. I think that for me, my mom was like, such a birthday accelerator. And I’m like such a birthday. I it’s like I’m a little spazzy about it. I just love celebrating birthdays.
I tease about having a birthday month, and I’m a little bit of a diva about it, and I love celebrating my kids’ birthdays. I’ve created little monsters with them about birthdays. So I think because of that, it’s easy for me to, like, gravitate towards my mom’s birthday and want to do things for her then. There was a couple a year in there where I was, like, oh, like, her day of death, like, pass without me even noticing. And I was like, oh, weird. Like, I almost felt bad for not thinking about it. But I was like, well, it’s fine. You know, like, that’s Anyway, Yeah. I I do think that it’s something I thought about as far as, like, the catching up with your parents’ age. My dad lost his father when he was twenty one. So my dad was twenty one when his dad died. And he I definitely watched him go, oh, I’m getting to the age. I can’t remember how old his dad was, but he he definitely had that in his mind. And I watched him contemplate that. And then, for me, it was just a really profound reality of, like, oh, okay. Like, oh, no. My mom my mom, you know, started her decline in her fifties. That’s not good. And then she died when she was sixty eight, diagnosed when she was sixty two. So I’m like, that’s not good. But even I don’t know. I just think it’s it’s kind of I don’t know how it feels for you, but, like, I almost feel like watching someone die is a little bit like experiencing a car accident and how that, like, just like imprints on your body, like, imprints in your memory and in your DNA away or something. This is all science based. But, like, I think, like, the way you viscerally feel a car wreck, a car wreck, even when you, like sometimes even just say car wreck, like, we can put ourselves back in that space and time so quickly. I think that watching someone’s decline and death it’s not a shocking, but if you are able if you are able to see someone’s processor decline there’s a knowing that happens that you can’t know any other way.

Victoria: Has it made you paranoid about your own health?

Katie: So Yes. So part of my journey, especially in in my film making career at this point, is to raise awareness around FTD, caregiving, like this whole thing. But one of the things I realized in in the moment when we got mom’s diagnosis of FTD, I just heard dementia. And I I heard dementia and I was like, okay, it’s some type of dementia and it’s in her frontal temporal lobes. So those lobes are like, this part of us and And I kind of I’m I I think that I was in so much crisis that I couldn’t even tolerate researching and finding more information. It felt like it would really stress me out even more. It was more like a survival survival. Since then, lost my mom in twenty sixteen. I made my first film in twenty twenty, which was also about dementia, like those early signs of dementia. And in that process, like, got connected with FTD community and more people in this world and started learning more just in my own journey in healing and stuff. And one of the things I learned was that FTD can be genetic. There can be like a genetic strain, like ALS or Huntington’s or one of those things. So that doesn’t feel really good in a child’s mind of someone with dementia or with FTD. But so one so I realized there’s a genetic component and I still was, like, okay, but I can, like, deny this away. Jeff can make sure, you know, oh, well, mom had the car wreck and all these other things, so it’s probably related to that and not really related to any kind of genetics.
But then a number of years ago, her younger brother got diagnosed with a TD. So that was like a a heart soft for me. And there is testing available, which I could partake in. I don’t know if we have. I don’t know. I haven’t done the research on how that works or what we need to be able to find out. And it is something I want to explore just to even contribute to research. Even if I don’t find out whether I have it or not, it would contribute to the research of FTD, which is important to me. But all of that to say is I’m on this journey. I’m making my first feature film.
It is to raise awareness on caregiving and dementia’s in general, but specifically diagnosis with FTD. And as I’m writing the film, I’m, like, preparing, I just feel like there’s this, like, fear monster over my shoulder, like, you have it. You probably have it. Every time I stumble on my words or, like, you know, my handwriting gets wonky or whatever I think, oh my god. Like, this is early signs.
I can probably have it. So that fear is palpable. Like, it’s in my life. It’s present. It’s attached to the grief. It’s attached to the work that I’m doing currently in my life. I was working and moving through it just feeling like, you know, it’s over there. I’m like, just wanting to shoe it away, like go away, go away. And then and then I stop for a second and I think I’m like, okay, instead of trying to ignore this and act as if it’s not here with me, what if I face it. And so I had this moment where I thought, I need to just turn around and look at in the face. And so for me, that means instead of, like, being afraid of it. Why don’t I just embrace it as if it is? And, you know, fear is just our imagination, and we can use it for our good, and we can use it for our demise. And I I feel like For me, this is how it sounded. Okay. Instead of like always being afraid every time little clubs happen or whatever, I’m gonna say, what if I knew for sure? That I had FTD. What if I knew for sure that I am gonna have this thing, it’s coming, this is the way I’m gonna this is the way my life is gonna end? What would you do? And asking myself that just gives so much clarity because I realize even if I knew I had it, I would have to move into acceptance just like we have to with our grief at some point. Why not do it now? And think about this like if I had FTD, I would live my life as fully as possible. I would love my family, my friends, I would try to say present with them, I would try to pursue the healthiest life that I could. You know, obviously, like, we’re all gonna sit on the couch and eat a bag of chips or whatever, but it’s like I would choose healthy food, I would choose outdoor time, I would choose friend time, being present with people, And the other really point of clarity for me was and I would make this movie. And this movie would be like my contribution. And so asking that question and facing that beer monster dead on was such a moment of clarity for me in that I know I’m doing what I want to be doing with my life. I’m being very intentional. And now this movie is not just a good idea or something really fun and cool that I get to try to do, but it now is my mission. And the greatest part about that is I think one thousand percent I’m going to make this movie and it’s going to impact people in these spaces, no matter what. Like, no matter what. My hope is that it’s gonna just soar to the to outer space with success. And My dream is that it’ll be my first of many movies that I have all these other movies that I get to make. I have some really amazing stories already in my mind that I that I cannot wait to get on paper and then on the camera and etcetera. But no matter what, I’m gonna make this one. And if I got FCD and that was the only movie I got to make, so be it.
Like, this is a great one to choose. And probably, I won’t die that way and something else will happen and I’ll get to make a whole other movies, but it just gave me so much peace just to, like, assume that it was that it was rather than fear that it might be. And that peace allowed me to have clarity with knowing that I’m doing what I wanna be doing with my time. In my life. So that that question is so huge for me of, like, what if I got it? And and answering that straight on was really helpful.

Victoria: It’s a powerful reframe. Mhmm. Then there’s probably a camp of people, like, no. You’re like, manifesting it.

Katie: I know. I know. People are like, don’t say that, but I I think I agree. I I do I do agree, like, that can, like, you know, the way we imagine and spend our time and our energy in our minds thinking is is impactful to our lives, but I also have to be compassionate towards myself and be like, of course, you’re afraid of this. Like, it was the most traumatizing thing you ever been through.
So, like, we can’t we can’t have these fears, have this grief, and then also make ourselves feel terrible for being afraid of it, you know, with the manifestation camp. I mean, I love manifesting things and, like, spending my energy for good, but I also have to be honest about what I’m

Victoria: And who’s the thing about that too? As I was thinking about, and as I said that, the other aspect of it, Elo, is yes, there might be people who think you’re manifesting it, but it’s not like you’re dwelling on the fact that I’m I have this. It’s You’re dwelling on the fact that if this is a possibility, I’m going to take action. So it’s almost like it’s you reverse engineering it and your focus isn’t on the dwelling Yeah. That this is, oh my gosh, this is gonna happen to me and it’s oh my gosh.
If this were true, It’s propelling you to take action. Yeah. Inspired action.

Katie: Right? Thank you.

Victoria: How has it changed? Has this movie changed the Like, do you have support from your family? Has this whole experience brought you closer with your siblings? Yes. Absolutely.
Shifted.

Katie: It’s been phenomenal. So here’s where we are right now at the recording time of this podcast. We have I’ve spent, like, years writing this script. I’ve spent the full last year fundraising and growing support for the film where fiscally sponsored and under a nonprofit. For our filmmaking, which is just such a huge it’s something I’m really thankful and proud of. The support has been phenomenal. And when I start thinking about it, I like it emotional. I have so much gratitude I’m doing something that really scares me. Like, this film feels like a really big deal. It’s it’s a big endeavor to do what I’m trying to do with, like, I’m acting and directing and producing the same. And I know it’s like taking a big old bite out of the film making world. But from the get go, the amount of support in people that have rallied to see this film come to fruition has has truly been phenomenal. And you asked about my siblings. And one of one of the ideas I had in this fundraising journey, and I think of it as more than fundraising. It’s not just getting money for film. It’s also growing an audience and growing a community around this. That really what my hope is is the more people that follow along and join us as we’re creating this thing that then we’ll get to, like, launch screenings and theaters around the country and, like, people will be able to come out and watch. But one of my ideas was what if we what if we did some happy hours and different places that I’ve lived and, like, have people host parties and we can share about the movie and and gather our community. And of course, one of those people was my sister in Georgia, and I was like, hey, what do you think about hosting one of these? And she’s so good at hosting parties. She’s amazing. She’s like, I’m in. Let’s go. Let’s do this. And then my brother has a band that he plays in called holy smokes.
And they do cover music and their band donated their time and we had this big old party and it was just such a meaningful event to join with my brother and sister and feel so supported about us taking this journey and, like, them supporting just the creating of wake up Maggie was just phenomenal. But, you know, it’s so touching. Like, I have people who have donated, like, ten dollars and people who have donated, like, thirty five thousand dollars. So it’s, to me, money is energy and time. And it’s all, like, coming from the same bucket. And so I don’t get super fixated on the money. I really love to fixate on the energy and, like, what what are we growing and what are we building and what are we doing? It’s more of a movement. So I have been absolutely floored by the by the people that come along and say, okay, let’s get this movie made. Like, how can I support you?
What are we gonna do? Let’s go. And I’m just gonna say, like, it’s so many women that have done that for me, and I’m like, women are so powerful. It’s just amazing. It’s not all women, but, like, it’s just Yeah. I think I think this is a film. I call it a coming of middle aged film, which I personally love because we have so many coming of age films of, like, you know, the transition of teenagers and I love that genre, but I feel like there’s a different there’s a different transition, a different like a second puberty of sorts that happen in our midlife, and I think that if we let it affect us, it can change us for so much good and so much of it is centered on grief. So much of it is I think sometimes people in their twenties have gone through midlife because they face something deep and profound. You in their life and it’s like a grief and impacts them to the point where they say, I Okay. I’m going to like have this perspective on life and and what I wanna do and know how I wanna live. That’s what midlife is to me. It’s this unraveling of pretense. And and, like, coming into our own and, like, feeling more solid in in our life and our humanity. And that’s something huge to celebrate. And I think getting to see it on the big screen is gonna be a really profound experience for all of us, and I can’t wait for everyone to see it.

Victoria: Well, I definitely will put the link in the show notes.

Katie: Please Yeah.

Victoria: To your page for people to support your mission and your cause. Thank how would you describe the Katie you were before your mother’s own list and the Katie sitting before me now?

Katie: Yeah. That’s great question. So much of my journey definitely is integral with acting. So I started acting after I lost my mom. And I would say before I lost my mom, I was a heavy people pleaser. Lots of personal denial, lots of ignoring of my own needs, ignoring of myself, body awareness. Like, all that was just, like, not really a part of my life. And then the healing journey along walking parallel and my healing journey with grief and then also deepening acting, I feel like my journey with acting has helped me become more fully human. It’s helped me to acknowledge and deal with like emotions that I often would wanna pretend don’t exist inside me. It’s helped me to connect my mind with my body and my nervous system in a deep way, like, oh, I actually need to notice when I’m like, I can look really calm on the outside. I can tend to be, like, a more people often say, oh, you’re so quiet and soothing. And I’m like, funny. Because, you know you know if you’re feeling like this spending or churning inside

Victoria: like a horse and a horse race.

Katie: Right? It’s just this like, yes, you feel that inside and and I think I think my journey with acting has helped me to say, oh, that that’s happening right now. And like, what can I do to support myself? And what can I do to support my nervous system? And how can I experience what I’m experiencing?
But also like not let it stop me in my tracks. So it’s been so profound. It’s been so profound. I think like coming to acceptance with my mom’s disease, coming to acceptance with my mom’s death, and then moving into a life that I I just want to be so intentional and present and just filled with gratitude. It’s just it’s it’s like, yeah, it does feel like an unraveling. I think, Berné Brown has a quote that I love that she talks about, midlife isn’t a crisis because a crisis is one event. Midlife is more of an unraveling. And I think we think of the word, like, being unraveled as, like, a negative thing, like, someone’s frazzled or something. But but I feel it as, like, peeling back for me, it’s an appealing back of the layers that no longer serve me, the layers that I hid behind and and, you know, coming into my own space and in place in this world and, like, owning who I am without trying to constantly please and put everyone else first and like their opinions first. So I think it’s also been a journey of exposing myself in that way too of, like, people pleasers can often blend in so well. And then, acting and filmmaking is like one of the most public art forms you could possibly choose. And so it does a number on me because I think, oh, no, everyone’s blah blah blah blah blah. And I’m like, no, they’re not. They’re completely preoccupied with themselves, but I think just just doing that type of exposure helps me, like, care less. About my imagination towards what other people might be thinking. So, yeah, so I feel like I am obviously, I think we have these core parts of us that are always true to who we are, but I think What’s happened is for me in this process of losing mom and moving forward with my life is that I’m more raw and more real and less hidden in it.

Victoria: I think we almost get as we allow ourselves to be cracked open and

Katie: Yeah.

Victoria: Expose ourselves and do things out of out of our comfort zones and challenge ourselves. We become more like children. Right? One of women and children and we get back to I think that child, like, essence within us that we stuffed away and put away because it’s not acceptable

Katie: Yeah.

Victoria: To have you and and creative expression is is fufu and it’s for it’s like a luxury. And I what I’ve learned in all of these interviews I’ve done in over four years and my own experience is that when you lean into creative expression, and out of your comfort zone, doing things out of your comfort zone. That’s when you really discover who you were always meant to be, I think.

Katie: Yes. I’d love that. Yeah. It really is coming into a sense of play. And you can’t you can’t play unless you’re, like, really present. Mhmm. And our adult minds love to, like, fixate on the past or the future and not, like, right now. So I love that you’re saying that. Yeah.

Victoria: Well, in using the past as your creative fuel. Right? So it is looking at it. Mhmm. You’re not having to look at it. It’s not a stuffing and a tucking away just like and that’s what we do with our grief, and I think that’s what so many griefers find themselves stuck in mid life is that they haven’t allowed themselves to fully express themselves. Yeah.

Katie: No, I totally get what you’re saying about looking at it. I think that writing Even though I’m writing fiction and I’m writing the script and the story that’s not it’s not my story, but it is so much of my story that it has been a really healing journey of of It’s like exploring the past and what happened, but also in a playful way of storytelling. Yeah.

Victoria: Mhmm. Is there anything else that you would like to share that you didn’t feel you got to?

Katie: That’s a nice question. I feel really good. I I just yeah. I I love what you’re doing in the world and and that you’re helping grivers feel heard and seen and understood. And I think it’s such an important thing for all of us because so often grief hits and we’ve not ever thought about it until we’re in it. I think if I could just leave people with anything. It’s just the imagery of the sun shining above the clouds. Think if if nothing else, if you just close your eyes and know that what you feel isn’t the only truth of existence right now. It’s okay to feel it and it’s and it’s also really helpful to know that there’s, like, light and warmth above that you will access.

Victoria: Beautiful words. Thank you. Where can people reach you if they would like to learn more about you? Wake up Maggie, your work, all of them? Where can they connect with you?

Katie: Thank you. For asking that, I try to make it as easy as possible. All of my social media is Katie Prentiss, so pretty easy to find. My website is kady prentiss dot com. And wake up Maggie is all under wake up Maggie movie.
Wake up maggie movie dot com and on Facebook and Instagram is wake up maggie movie. So we’d love for you to follow along and and be a part of our journey. So try to share it all.

Victoria: Do you have a goal date?

Katie: Yes. We’re filming in February of twenty twenty five. Yeah. Oh, awesome. Yes.
Yes. So we’re right in the middle of working so hard to get everything ready for filming. So we’re in pre production production right now. And then we’ll shoot for about three weeks in February, and then we’ll be in postproduction, which is all the editing and sound and all the all the design work that happens on the backside of of shooting the film. So if I don’t know exactly when we’ll be released, but this is why it’s so good for you to follow us on social media or come to our website.
We even have an email list you can sign up for. And we’ll keep you posted. That way, we really love for people to join us and be a part of it. So then when we do screen in theaters, hopefully we can have everyone come out.

Victoria: I’m just curious. Do you have, like, are you, like, one of those people with numbers. Like, numbers are important. Or do you do you have, like, a specific date? Like, you know, your mom’s birthday maybe

Katie: Oh.

Victoria: Something like that where you plan to even if it’s done, you’re not gonna launch until

Katie: Oh, I love that. I haven’t thought about that with mom. I will say I lost mom. We lost her on February twelfth, twenty sixteen, and we’re shooting in February, which is interesting to me. And then I definitely tossed her birth date.
Into the film as a birth date of one of the characters. Obviously, it’s called Waco Maggi after her, but I haven’t thought about the release date. That would be really special if it was on some sort of special date, but I haven’t thought about that.

Victoria: Okay. I’m just curious.

Katie: Yeah.

Victoria: It’ll be really special. I’m sure. Thank you. Amazing way to honor your mom and her memory. Filming in February.

Katie: So Yeah. Beautiful.

Victoria: How that worked out? Yeah.

Katie: Yes. I agree.

Victoria: Alright. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate you sharing your story and and your mission. And being a part of my mission to talk about grief like we talk about the weather and and it’s, you know, it’s not all doom and gloom. Right?

Katie: Right. Exactly. Yeah. No. Thank you so much for having me.
It’s really no longer to be with you. And all of your listeners and just to be able to share my stories a gift. So thank you.

Victoria: Thank you. And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.

Ep 231 Sujala Shastry | A Cross-Cultural Story of Childhood Loss, Growth, and Finding Your Voice

 

SHOW NOTES SUMMARY: 

In this soul-stirring episode, we explore the profound journey of Sujala Shastry, who lost her mother to a brain tumor at age 11 in India.

Her story illuminates the complex intersection of cultural silence, emotional isolation, and the transformative power of breaking generational patterns around grief.

Key Takeaways:

  • The impact of losing a mother in a joint family system that provided physical but not emotional support.
  • How 20 years of survival mode led to disconnection, anxiety, and lost memories.
  • The awakening that came with motherhood and the desire to heal generational trauma.
  • The cultural dynamics of grief in Indian versus Western society.
  • Finding one’s voice and creating boundaries after decades of people-pleasing.
  • The launch of her podcast “Discovering Journeys” as a platform for authentic connection.

Sujala shares how one can be profoundly lonely even when surrounded by loving family, the importance of emotionally safe spaces in healing childhood loss, and how unprocessed grief affects identity formation and relationships. This episode will inspire the importance of taking steps toward healing sooner rather than later, not as a means to rush, emotionally bypass, or forget. Instead, one must immerse oneself in one’s inner emotional world to truly feel the hurt and pain so that it can be transmuted to live as full of a life as possible.

RESOURCES:


CONNECT WITH SUJALA:

Finding Strength in Grief – Sujala Shastry’s Journey to Healing

Blog Post: Finding Strength in Grief – Sujala Shastry’s Journey to Healing

In a recent episode of Grieving Voices, Sujala Shastry shared her profound journey through grief, healing, and self-discovery. A native of Bangalore, India, now living in France, Sujala’s story began with the unexpected loss of her mother to a brain tumor when she was just eleven years old. That loss, compounded by the absence of emotional support, shaped her early years and set her on a decades-long path of survival, self-reflection, and eventual transformation.

A Childhood Interrupted by Loss

For Sujala, the loss of her mother at such a young age was an earthquake that shifted the foundation of her life. Left to navigate her emotions alone, she felt numb, dissociated, and isolated. The absence of a safe emotional space to process her feelings meant she carried unresolved grief into adulthood, often feeling like an outsider among her peers.

“I needed someone to tell me it was okay to feel sadness, pain, and everything in between,” Sujala said. But without that reassurance, she spent 20 years in survival mode, grappling with anger, sensitivity, and a pervasive sense of being unmoored.

A Turning Point Abroad

Moving to France in her 30s marked the beginning of a significant shift. Away from the distractions of her old life, she found herself with the space to pause and reflect. It was here that she began the arduous process of sitting with her emotions—acknowledging the pain she had buried for so long.

“I had to face the reality of my loss and allow myself to grieve fully,” Sujala explained. This meant confronting the bittersweet truth of not knowing her mother well and mourning the lost memories stolen by time and survival.

The Healing Process

Sujala’s healing journey was not linear, nor was it easy. It was an “onion-like” process, peeling back layers of grief, anger, and loneliness. Along the way, she immersed herself in books, grief communities, and countless resources to understand the effects of unresolved grief on her mental and emotional well-being.

For Sujala, finding others who shared similar experiences was transformative. “For the first time, I realized I wasn’t alone or ‘mad’ for feeling the way I did,” she shared. These connections, combined with a newfound understanding of her emotions and the boundaries she needed to set, became the pillars of her recovery.

The New Sujala

Emerging from her grief, Sujala has transformed into a version of herself she is proud to love. She describes this new chapter as one where she is more confident, self-assured, and unapologetic about protecting her peace.

“The Sujala of today doesn’t tolerate nonsense, sets boundaries, and surrounds herself with meaningful relationships. People who knew me years ago wouldn’t recognize me now—and that’s a good thing.”

Lessons from Sujala’s Journey

Sujala’s story highlights the importance of emotional support, self-reflection, and community in navigating grief. Her journey reminds us that healing often requires sitting with discomfort and facing emotions head-on, even when it feels unbearable.

Her words offer hope to others navigating similar paths:
“You have to go through the tunnel of hardship, but when you come out on the other side, you find a version of yourself you never knew existed.”

Final Thoughts

Grief is a deeply personal journey, but as Sujala’s story shows, it is also a path to rediscovery and growth. By sharing her experience, she provides a beacon of hope for others navigating the complexities of loss.

For anyone struggling to find their way through grief, Sujala’s journey is a testament that healing is possible, and on the other side lies a stronger, more authentic you.

Episode Transcription:

Victoria Volk: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Grieving Voices. Today, my guest is Sujala Shastry. And she is here today to share a story of loss of her mother when she was a child and just recently launched her own podcast called Discovering Journeys. And Thank you so much for being here today. I know it’s been a while since you have applied and I’m excited to have you as a guest and for you to share your story. And so what before we get into that, I just want people to get a little sense of who you are, where you’re from, what do you do, all of that. So welcome.

Sujala Shastry: Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Victoria, for having me on grieving voices. I am Sujala. I’m basically from south of India called the place called Bangla. And I and I’ve been living in France for close to a decade now. So yeah. I have been a engineer before. Then I moved in here as an expat, leading my life, starting a family and Oh. The life goes. Then then I did my masters because I just wanted to come back to again, go back to carrier and everything. But that didn’t pan out very well. So got a job. I lost a job. Then I was like, okay. This is something was not something was not right. So and the idea of podcasting came and after a year of learning things, again, learning things reinventing myself because I know that my voice is going to be out out in the world. So I was very uncomfortable even though I loved the idea of podcast. So it took a while for me to be Okay. Be comfortable with it and to come. So so very happy that I launched my podcast and happy to be on the other side of the as a guest as well. So that’s been my recent one. And the point of if I have to share my start sharing my story, I lost my mom when I was eleven years old. And it it was not something which anybody expects. It just happens. And she was ill. And I lost her to brain tumor. It was really hard time because I didn’t know how to navigate. I think I think my grief journey started with that not knowing what to do. So my initial feelings were just numb. And a dissociation. Maybe maybe I was struggling with accepting the fact that she was no longer there. So yeah. I think I think those were the very initial things. And Unfortunately, it stayed for a very long time with me because I did not understand I was grieving. I was just I just thought I was not coping well. But now and adult me understand how young I was when I was eleven years old. But I did not understand that time, and I think I understand her very well. Why she couldn’t understand she was in a date of shock and so what happens in a grief when you lose a parent or somebody who is so close to you at such an engage is You don’t know how to navigate this one path. Second thing is you don’t understand what’s happening around you. Within you, around you who in life, everything freezes for a while. And for me, without having I had a lot of people around me. They were all great providers. They took care of me. But, emotionally, there was nobody to held my hand and Help me and tell me that it is okay. It is okay to whatever you’re feeling, sadness, pain, heavy, you can name because many grief grief, you can’t define by one statement because everyone experiences, you know, completely separate ways. So I just wanted, I think, somebody to tell me that it’s okay. Whatever you’re feeling, it will go through. And I think I needed that emotional save space. So that is something I struggled with. And, unfortunately, it went for too long for for two decades, I was in a survival mode of not understanding what’s happening to me. Why why am I angry? Why am I so sensitive? Why I am so lost? I couldn’t connect with my friends. I couldn’t connect with their, you know, the lightings because you I was just before the teenager, I lost my mom. So when you shift to a teenager, you try to know about yourself, I never had Ziel for anything. So yeah. That took a very long time. And finally, after moving to France, I think I got time to be with myself and started to heal, wanted to be a bitter mother for my son. And I I think that’s where I started and Then I then I started to understand lot of things about myself. And yeah. Here we are. So just to put it in a nutshell, this was been my this has been my grieving journey so far.

Victoria Volk: What do you think was the turning point? Or was there something specific that helped you turn that page?

Sujala Shastry: I think something was bothering me. It was bothering me something was not okay. Santa, because I couldn’t I felt I was very different from all of my friends, all of the society and everything. So a typical thirty year old or a twenty year old, I never matched that. So people were interested in, you know, ambition, which party to wear, which clothes to wear. You know, the sort of normal things, and seventeen, eighteen year old, or a twenty year old does. But I was never interested in that. So I think I had I had started noticing it because I’m a very sensitive person and I observe and I care a lot for people. So I started to notice it was there. In my back of my mind, I think it was there. But as I had developed high functioning anxiety, I suppressed it. So I was always in the school mode exam exam, then engineering work, that is push, you know, I deviated myself for a very long period of time because it was comfortable. Because I didn’t know that I have I had to look inward, but that that’s something inside was totally so so messed up. And I think coming to France gave me that space. I think at that point, I think I was also, like, around thirty. So it told me that, okay. You know, you’re very sensitive. You understand everybody. I think it’s time to understand yourself a bit. So I didn’t know that it would be next few years would be so painful for me to start the healing process, but yeah. That was a turning point. The pause helped me. Because I did not have anywhere to escape, you see.

Victoria Volk: So what was what was that like? Because you just described, like, you were, like, walking to this into this abyss of healing and you didn’t know how painful it would be. What were the resources or the tools? Or what were you doing during that time to support yourself in your healing?

Sujala Shastry: I think Vesta had to go through the uncomfortable hang of sitting with the emotion. I think that was the most painful part. Because I allowed myself for the first time in my life to, like, you know, hundred percent feel. What I missed about my mother that I that my mother was dead, I had to tell it out loud. Even though it looks very simple to many of them, but to the grievers understand that when you say it out loud, it hits you Mhmm. Every single time. And I had to deal with that emotion and this took time. And I also had to come face to face with the fact that I didn’t know my mother well. I think that hurt me the most while in the initial time because eleven years you’re a kid. You just know very, very basic things.
And because of being in survival mode for twenty years, I have lost memory of her for so many things. There was dissociation, and I have deep sense of loneliness, and a brain fog as well. So and panic attacks at times. So I think I had to it was like an onion, like a big big onion. And I had to open. And the thing was I didn’t know that how many layers were there. Now I can say, fast forward to know I can laugh about it and everything, but Yeah. That thing, I think, that shook me quite a bit. That shook me quite a bit.

Victoria Volk: Reflecting back, do you feel like a lot of those emotions were coming back up when you became a parent?

Sujala Shastry: Oh, definitely. Definitely. Definitely. That is like I know the name of the head. There is no escape. There is absolutely no escape.

Victoria Volk: That was my experience too because I lost my father when I was eight and my mother was emotionally unavailable. And so just similar experience just flipped different roles. But, yeah, it wasn’t having kids. Like, they bring up every single insecurity that you have about yourself and all of your shadows and everything about you that you struggle with. Right? It they they challenge just the core of of who you think you are. Yes. I’m curious because, like, for me, my journey was a lot of my personal development really started was when my youngest started kindergarten. I had so much of my identity wrapped up in my kids. Right?
And that’s when it really started for me. So self health books became huge in my life at that time. Personal development programs, I was taking every personality quiz known to man just to help myself understand myself, figure myself out, fix myself, get my shit together, and and that went on for a good five years. Until I discovered grief recovery, which completely changed my life. So is there anything in specifically for you that changed your life? A program, a person, certain therapy? What was it? Do you think?

Sujala Shastry: I think books books helps a lot. That helped me a lot. And on the Internet, learn learning about joining a grief community. For a very brief period, I joined a community where griefers can just tell how they feel. And for the first time, I felt, oh, I was not really mad. I didn’t have to be mad about myself or feeling something so normal normal in this line. You know? So I was like, okay. Not bad. Okay. I am in okay. This is my community. And even though we don’t know each other, but the sense of loss that gave me comfort, books made me understand. And and learning about, you know, why I became like this and how it is connected to my grief. And because I wasn’t able to navigate it well, I was I I did lot of, you know, developed a lot of consequences part of it. So this helped me in understanding me, and I think That told me that, okay. Now I need to help. Now I have understood myself. I’ve sat with it. Okay. Yes. It’s not good, but I cannot let another twenty years go by. So I think all of these things helped and and also many grieving interviews like this. Help me. So sometimes it used to be overloaded for me as well because I’m on I’m on m path. So I absorb very easily. So so for me, tap to be breaks, So it has to be in at my own timeline, I had to take space, breathe, understand. So some it was, like, it was gradual for sure, but it was all the pounds were moving together. So if it was one month, was understanding a concept of brain fog. I didn’t know what was brain fog, but I had the symptom myself. So that took me understand. And then it just helped me that others also faced it. So that gave me comfort and that gave me some better strength that, you know, I have I, you know, this was a thing. When you don’t have anybody to navigate, you think you’re not strong enough or you’re not you’re not coping well, you’re not good enough. But I did more than my capacity, and I’m so proud of that little girl of mine now, but unfortunately, that time I wasn’t. So I think that this understanding with various groups and moving gradually everything, then I said, okay. Okay. This is my whole mess. This is my understanding. And what can I do? So that is when I started the this one. So everything helped. I think everything helped. There is nothing. One thing which didn’t help me because I took you know, it’s like surviving again. It is like surviving to understand and surviving to come on the other side. So I took every material, like, possibly I can book, paper, interviews, stories, journeys, lectures, YouTube, and tech talks on grief have done everything. There’s nothing I have left page unturned. It’s just that I didn’t come out and speak to people. That’s probably I didn’t do it. Because I never felt emotionally safe to do that because I felt around me people didn’t understand what I was going through, and that happens. So apart from that, I did everything.

Victoria Volk: You had touched on being an empath and I’m too. And so I imagine as a young child, like for me, I needed a lot of sleep. Like, I slept a lot. Was that your experience too?

Sujala Shastry: Nice to cry myself to sleep. Damn.

Victoria Volk: I would hide to cry. I would fall in the under my bed and fall asleep crying because we’re in the linen closet. The kitchen covered. Like, I would hide to cry.

Sujala Shastry: Yeah. I lived in a joint family, so I think the only time I could cry my heart out while I was crying. I mean, while I was before I go to sleep, So that’s one time I cried. I think I’ve cried. I don’t know. It’s almost every day I can say. Maybe maybe the timings of my cry would vary. But, yes, every day it was. Yeah, being an empath is not easy and losing a parent is not easy. And they’re not having emotional support is also not easy. So it is, like, we are already your personality, your situation doesn’t, you know, give you a give you a strong foundation to navigate.

Victoria Volk: What have you learned about energy? Like your personal energy, energy work, energy healing? Has that been a component of your healing as an empath? No.

Sujala Shastry: Oh. I have just learned that I didn’t have a boundary as an impact. And now I have the boundary maybe speak the same language, but in a different terminology maybe. But yes. This has has been my discipline. So I understood why this whole emotional trauma led to people who are like, why I’ve why was it tolerating them? Why was I tolerating their posiness? Why was I tolerating their snappy attitude? You know? But you do. I did. I clearly did. And I am angry at myself that that’s that that my friends group and everything was was not so we haven’t there for me emotionally as well because that is how you attract.

Victoria Volk: Well, and you’re very selfish as a as a young person. Right? Like, you’re just gonna be selfish. It’s all it is all about you. Right? But I think too, when it comes to being an empath. It’s when you were speaking to the idea of tolerating how people are treating you. I think it’s – I think as an empath, we internalize. Well, that What does that say about me? I did something. And we we almost own the response of other people

Sujala Shastry: Yes.

Victoria Volk: Because we immediately think it must be something about us.

Sujala Shastry: Mhmm. We accommodate them, give give our own reason. For me, at this point, I’m like, what was I thinking? But well, that was a part of me, which is no longer there. So

Victoria Volk: which brings a great segue into the Sajala before. Sajala now, what are the key differences do do you feel about you? If people who know you knew you then like, I’m and I imagine that you’ve had a lot of people fall away in your life. Just Oh, yeah. This is brown.

Sujala Shastry: They just automatically just dropped like, a pack of cuts, you go forward and they just drop. So the before Sujala was tolerating, bossiness, snappiness, and, you know, crankiness of others. Was a people pleaser? Was was always available for others? Always. Whether they have been there for me or not, but I will still be there for them. They can just decision I will I’ll be there and they then people could walk over me with their decisions, with their attitude, or they could just use me as a punching bag. You know, and somebody who was so low like, have no confidence, no self esteem. All of this was me. All of this was me. And now, Sujala, I think I have fallen in love with her for the first time in my life. I can’t remember previously as a baby I had loved myself or not because with the brain forgets that itself, that’s also gone. That memory is gone of me. That I think I fall in love with with this version of myself who do not tolerate nonsense, who who is very caring, who is very understanding, but with boundaries. And I can recognize far off that you’re being, you know, all those attitude, the which doesn’t come. You’re just pushed away. So that one and I am confidence wise, I am getting there. I’m getting there. I’m getting there. I’m getting there. But how how much I have come? I’m happy, Pete? No. Yes. And then I now I have meaningful people in my So people who come into my life match my energy and people who don’t who are not in my life. Either they know the old version of Sakella, and not the new version. And another interesting fact is they cannot the new version of Sadhana. They’re like, what? What happened? To her. I’m like, I am no longer the old version. So this is new me, happy me, peaceful me. So, you know, speak or small mindedness is no There’s no space around me for that. If that the gate is closed and you can’t say whatever you want to my face and I’ll be quiet. I’m no longer that girl. So yeah. It’s been quite a journey, but I’m really be proud of myself. And I feel so happy to say to anybody, you know. Because you asked I feel so happy you asked this question because not many understand that it’s like you have really you know, you have to really go through that that whatever. That tunnel of, you know, hardship, that uncomfortableness, that burning sensation, the sleepless nights, the anger and the and the huge amount of crime. So and you come outside of the another tunnel and you find yourself the new you. Is just amazing. So yeah. Anybody who haven’t spoken to me in the last, I don’t know, seven, eight years. If they haven’t connected to me face to face apart from just a bit wish is not considered I don’t consider wishes as connection. It’s just a wish. But if you haven’t connected me as a person, you don’t know me. I sometimes I look I can’t recognize myself.

Victoria Volk: Imagine if we all just went through, like, our Facebook friend list and just eliminated all the people that really don’t know us. How many how many people would we actually have on our friend’s list or

Sujala Shastry: a friend’s head? One hand, two hands lucky. One hand, I think I think it was okay. Yeah. That’s what I did. I I think it was five or five years back. I just deleted myself from all the WhatsApp groups. School engineering, some office groups. Everything everything I was out. Apart from the family one, I have two or three, the family groups apart from that, none of the groups I’m associated with.
I just deleted myself. And guess what? Nobody bothered. May one or two of them asked, oh, what is it? You’ve logged in. I said, I I just didn’t feel good being part of the group, so I removed myself. And that’s it. No more questions asked. Nothing else. And I’m happy with it. I don’t expect them to understand it as well. So Yeah. It is very surprising that out of all the groups you, like, delete yourself from. They were only I can even count. There are only three people who contacted me. There are so many that what happened. And that when I gave this answer, they all they said they they just said, okay. And just left it at that. So yeah. Because sometimes people don’t want to know more about you. That’s what I realized. They’re not as interesting that I as I was there for them, they don’t want to ask me how I am, what is it, and everything. And and the surprising factors in the initial part oh, this is one thing I didn’t mention during this what helped me to change was blogging as well. So I opened one blog web side called Medley Tales and I just started to write letters to my mother. This one and this helped me and I published it on the WhatsApp group, on Instagram, on Facebook, but apart from because for many people, it was a new it was a news. Not many of my friends knew that I had lost my mom. Yeah. So I was in school, like, till the grade ten. In one school, everybody knew because it happened during that time. So anybody who was known after the age of fifteen, I ordered only one or two, three people. That’s it. Not many of them new. And now I wonder why. And then I know, first of all, I wasn’t comfortable. Second, People never gave me that emotional safe space for me to share it with them. And to the ones I shared, were taken aback, were so uncomfortable, and they don’t want to talk. So many of my friends who even though they know the they know that I have lost my mom, they don’t even know why I know how I lost my mom. They don’t ask that question. They’re so uncomfortable. Do you

Victoria Volk: think this brings up a great point? And I actually have a note for myself. Is Do you think that’s and granted, I know in Western society that’s very true, but in Indian culture? Is that, like, what were the beliefs about grief and death and dying that you learned in your culture? And how is that how do you What do you recognize are the differences now being in France and and knowing what you know now, like, what are the cultural things that you have connected the dots with growing up and what you were taught and learned and and

Sujala Shastry: No. That’s a great question. I never thought about that, but I will try answering it. Back there, there’s a support system in India. So since we are all, like, you know, joint family and close knit it, We have a lot of people. They take care of your food, your is your dress ready, or going to school, everything is taken care of, but emotions are not discussed. It’s it’s wrapped. Another carpet shoved it far away because people I think people don’t know how to support a griever. They they know how to be insensitive. They know how to make very easy. I don’t know. Rough. Rough for a rude comment, but they don’t know how to be good. And and during the course of the last five, six years, I have spoken to a lot of people interactions, sometime one off, you know, just for fifteen, twenty minutes, just sharing. What I have felt is I think whole world were just not comfortable to speak about the dead person, especially to the person who are very close to them. It’s closed. I think this has been a very uniform aspect to what to my understanding is. And in India, what I felt was you have a good support system in this in terms of providing taking care of, you don’t have to cook meals. There are people who will do that stuff for you. That is a good part of that, but the emotional part. I think it was I I I don’t say it’s low. It was zero. Let us you know, let’s be honest, it was zero. They will not talk about they nobody spoke about my mother in front of me. Nobody. Oh, we will make her sad. Oh, we will make her. But that’s the whole point. They got it wrong. I felt that only I was keeping my mother and everybody else were moving on. But that’s not true. They were grieving in a different way, but it affected me more because it’s my mother. But not speaking about your person, doesn’t reduce anything, but rather it increases. It increases the heaviness what I had to hold on to for so many years. It was not needed. Yes. We lost a person. All of us did. They were his my mom had both of their parents. My dad I, brothers, such a closed neck, big family, but we all love somebody we love. And I don’t know why we couldn’t speak. And I think that really breaks my heart. It really breaks my heart to say that why you why it’s not that others were in grieving. It’s not that my grandfather was not grieving. She was the only daughter. Among the boys. So she was scared. She was she was loved. But why you couldn’t share it with her own daughter? There is nobody tell me that, oh, your mom used to do this. Yes. I would miss her, but I would also feel I would have felt good that, oh, okay. She was like that. I’m You’re learn you’d be learning about her. Yeah. Exactly. And I suppressed my emotions so much that all the bad and the good memories. Everything is in a box that sometimes, like, out of the bloom, I just get it top. And I’m like, what? From where was this memory from? So I’m still in that process. I don’t have a lot of memory, but it keeps coming up in the most unexpected day all the time. I think that is the most uncomfortable thing because sometimes you’re outside and sometimes my son say something and something just strikes back. I’m like oh, I’m like, okay. That night, I’m like, okay. What was that memory? What was that memory? I’m now I’m curious because now I’m not in a separation mode. Does the opposite. So I’m trying to dig deep and sometimes it is half memory and it hurts me. It hurts me to the cover that I don’t have a complete memory of that at least particular situation. Yeah. Yeah. I I think we deviate I think I deviated what was the question?

Victoria Volk: No. You answered it and actually Okay. You have a lot of pictures.

Sujala Shastry: Yeah. Some. For those for that time, yes. It’s quite a few. No.
It is not now that you can have twenty.

Victoria Volk: No. No. Exactly.

Sujala Shastry: But yeah. I do have I do have the memories I traveled with her. I do have memories of playing board games with her. Yeah. Yeah. I do. Yeah. Slowly. This yeah. It’s there, but I’m happy. It’s there.

Victoria Volk: You mentioned Well, and I was just gonna say too, the art for my podcast is me on an island holding a megaphone. Right? And I think that’s when you were speaking, that’s what I envisioned as, like, as a family. Right? You’re each putting yourselves on these griving islands. But if only you would just talk about it, you could come together on the island and Oh. It’d be your own community. And so has that started to shift and change as you’ve been talking more and going through your process or no?

Sujala Shastry: No. No. Because not everybody is still the is still uncomfortable. They read my blog they get emotional. They say you’ve written it very well, expressed it well. That’s it. So I think it’s difficult for them as well, and I think it’s I think it’s a generation. Right? It’s the whole generation. Just didn’t know what to do with the emotions. And I am glad that we are there is a wave of change in terms of emotions. In the last five, six years. So somehow it coincided with my healing journey and my age as well. But yeah. I think it’s it’s sad, but I feel I think if after hearing on the podcast, maybe if somebody picks up the call and shares some memories about my mom, I think I will I will let you know. I think it is a win. It’s a start. But sleep chances. I don’t have any expectations.

Victoria Volk: But I think the most important thing too is I know the impact my healing has had on my parenting, which in turn has an impact on my my the journey my children will take emotionally. Yes. And that’s why I always say the greatest gift we can give our kids is our own feeling and why it’s so important for us to dust and sweep our own doorstep first before thinking our kids are the problem, our kids have behavioral issues, our kids are have emotional issues, what have you look in the mirror And what is it that you are not looking at that is being projected onto your kids? Or what are they emulating and learning from you? Because we

Sujala Shastry: learned yeah.

Victoria Volk: We learned by the age of three, seventy five percent of how to respond to life. The rest comes by age fifteen, those formative teen years. So and it’s not to say, once they hit fifteen or three or four or five, it’s too late. Mhmm. It’s not it’s not too late. You know, it took me thirty years, three decades to figure my shit out. But, you know, how many times I’ve said to myself, man, I wish I would have discovered grief recovery sooner. I wish I would have, you know, that’s grief too. That’s grief too. Always. And you did touch on job loss. And I don’t want to gloss over that because that’s that’s a loss too. Nobody has to die for us to grieve. Right? And so that was a catapult for you to lean into your creative urge to do your podcast, but I’m sure at the time it was painful.
Yeah? Yes.

Sujala Shastry: You bought a very beautiful thing. They always think I grieve about my mom, but I have so many other points to grieve. I would really like to tell that. I had you I also have to grief about the girl I would be if my mom would be alive. Yep?

Victoria Volk: Yep. What what could have been?

Sujala Shastry: Yeah. What could have been. I agree for that girl. Who could have been and I just changed the trajectory of it because of one death and that’s my closest person. And second one is for all the last years of me being in the survival mode. That’s a grief too. Mhmm. I still grieve it, and it angers me. So, yeah, it’s like twenty years I was alive. Okay? But I lost those many years in coping. Copying the unknown. I don’t I didn’t even I was coping something, but I didn’t even know I was coping. I didn’t understand. So I have to so People talk about always the grief. Your mom won’t be there on your wedding day or when your kid is born. That is a given. But what people don’t understand is all the in between days, you grief, there was this one instant where I think it choked me so much. My son was two years old. He had a very bad year infection. My husband was done with vital flu. I had to take care of everything in the house. At that point, You know, I I still remember. I just screamed in the night saying that why you had to die and make me struggle so much because mentally, physically, it was exhausting for me. Do all the work, keep up everything, and no way to look. And I know one person whom I could have backed on blindly was my mother. And I haven’t had her for twenty eight years. So I have to grieve for that as well, not for the glossy part of, oh, he she will miss my, you know, my son’s birthday. Birth birthdays, you know, parties and everything. That’s a given. That’s a given. Everybody knows that. But they don’t know that that feeling what you have. It’s every day in different ways. And it hits you like like just like a sudden slap pat and you’re like, what? Oh my god. You grieve again that night. So it’s like it is so much and this also makes me feel I have never heard my mom on the phone because I lost her in nineteen ninety seven. The mobile phones were not in our hands yet. And it was only landline. And I and I stayed pretty much with my mom’s who never had a chance to. I was not college or anything. So I’ve never heard my mom’s voice over a phone. I don’t have a call that says, I’m a calling. I don’t have it. I have never experienced that to this one. So I grief. I can’t take a selfie with her. You grieve. So there are so many different ways you grieve. And it’s sometimes the pain brings you to numbness. You stop thinking, you stop missing, you stop feeling, and sometimes your body and your mind can’t take it. Just can’t take it. It goes to that blank state. And I just let like, it’s like a big wave has hit me and I have to just stand there Allow the big wave to pass however long that is because sometimes it’s just that. I think that this part, people who have increased, don’t understand.

Victoria Volk: Or allow themselves to grieve. Yeah. What gives you hope

Sujala Shastry: for your future? It’s just that I allow my son and people around me to be themselves. And in one of my therapy session, I was called the black sheep of the family. Because nobody speaks emotionally in my family, like the way I do. So in at my therapy at one point, I so he asked me, this this this this he’s like, you know what you’re called? I said, I don’t know. You know, the flagship of the family. I’m like, what that was the first time I got even introduced to that word and he explained to me what it is and I was like, oh, okay. So I think I would I’m happy that I had to bear all these things, but I’m happy that I can be an example if not for many at least for my son. And to be who he wants to be, how he wants to be, and I am his emotional safe space no matter what. And I give this to all my closest people, who are my people. And I feel this is my like, personally how I can change. This gives me hope that I am the change in my situation. Secondly is I started this podcast. I lost the job, and I wasn’t ready to relocate because for me family comes first. So I got lot of opportunities to move to Netherlands. Germany, but I can’t I can’t travel back and forth. So I said no to many of the offers and because family comes first to me no matter what. So I already had this idea of starting a podcast, but I thought after working for a while I’ll start, but then I think God redirected me to earlier. So I started it. So the the whole concept of podcast is also to just to listen to other people’s journey. That’s it. Because if nothing, I can be in this world. I just I just want to be I just want for that one hour, the other person feels that somebody listened to me. I think that is all I would like to give it to that person. And in a way, if it reflects to the huge audience, so let it be. I think somewhere we have lost the capability to listen to other people, emotions just because it gives us makes us feel uncomfortable. So that is my little part of and I want to build a community over it, and I have I I can’t even say I have begun. It’s just that I have made up of mind, I’ve just opened the door. So let’s see where it goes.
So These are the things. And thirdly, when I see other people, there are so many podcasts like yourself and like so many people who are there to listen. Like, it’s very warming to me that you asked there was this old versus new nobody had asked me that question. So thank you for that. So it just feels that somewhere as a community we are going, somewhere. Maybe it’s a small, but I always believe a change will be small. It it it takes it takes years to see the see what it what wave can it bring about. So, yeah, that gives me hope. So these are the three different areas I feel it’ll hopefully.

Victoria Volk: And what would you say your grief has taught you?

Sujala Shastry: That it’s so lonely,

Victoria Volk: but it doesn’t have to be.

Sujala Shastry: Yeah. But it was. So whenever whenever whenever somebody says grief, I don’t I think it’s a scar. It’s a trauma. I still carry. So I still feel lonely about it. That is how I feel, but what it has made me learn is you can also cherish people who are dead. In a vein, and you

Victoria Volk: can build your own community.

Sujala Shastry: You can build the community that you need. Yes. So it doesn’t have to be doom and gloom. Grieve. You can’t cherish it. You can share ish a person personality or something they loved or something you share something. You can share ish. That’s what the healing part of the grief has taught me that Yes. It is painful. Nobody says it is easy. It’s not that all but once you cross that path of accepting and feeling the pain, you can cherish the person.

Victoria Volk: What is one of your cherished memories of your mother? Mhmm.

Sujala Shastry: One of my cherished. I think never left me alone. She was always present with me. Like, whether I was doing my schoolwork or playing with her board games, she was always present with me when she was around me. As I said, was in a joint family. I was I lived along with eleven other people in the house. So so which of a little bit time I got with her after school and over the weekends, she used to be completely present with me. And I think this is something I I think I’ll feel her, you know. So that her presence makes me feel so when this I think why now I understand why it was so so painful for me because her presence were so comforting and wow. So yeah. I think playing board games with her was the most I think all the board games, the classic board games I learned from her. And we used to always go for haircuts together. She used to get hers. She used to get mine regularly. Second and third one was I think we used to I used to go with her for everything. Even she has to buy a small thing in the next door, I used to run with her all the time. So I think these are the few moments, I think, which comes to my mind currently. Oh, at the time?

Victoria Volk: I think one of the lessons that you’ve shared without sharing it as a lesson is that you can be completely surrounded by many people who love you and yet still feel completely alone. Yes. And that the one key differentiator that we have to those we are in relationship with is emotional connection. Yes. And had you maybe felt that your grief journey would have maybe taken a different path?

Sujala Shastry: Yes. Definitely. I wouldn’t be stuck in a survival mode for sure. At at least that would have changed. What

Victoria Volk: is all your family still in India?

Sujala Shastry: Yes.

Victoria Volk: Do you see them often? Or

Sujala Shastry: Yearly? I go yearly. Yeah. I break them.

Victoria Volk: You you mentioned you have broke. No.

Sujala Shastry: No. I’m the only kid. I have cousins.

Victoria Volk: Only child.

Sujala Shastry: Okay. Yeah. I’m the only child.

Victoria Volk: See. And that’s another aspect too. It’s, like, one thing I’ve learned in doing my podcast and and just the importance of siblings is that they kind of fill the gaps of your childhood for you, especially if you have an older sibling. And I never really looked at my siblings in that way, but it is. It’s a relationship that is so unique. They’re the people that know you in a way that nobody else does. What is one tip that you would give a hurting heart today?

Sujala Shastry: If somebody gives you the emotional space, don’t be reluctant or or to take it. Please do. Please do take it. You can pay it forward, but please do take it. If somebody is giving. And secondly, if there is nobody, try to be self aware of what you’re feeling and try to find books or online help something which you can do with your own capability. Don’t don’t prolong. It does no good to you. Forget about others. It just doesn’t do good to you.

Victoria Volk: That’s very good advice. Is there anything else you would like to share that you don’t feel you got to?

Sujala Shastry: No. I think I’ve shared so many bits of it. You you have answered I mean, you’ve questioned me so beautifully that I have shared few of the things which I haven’t shared so far with, I don’t know, with many of them. Maybe my husband, I have shared, but not not to anybody else.

Victoria Volk: I feel honored. Thank you so much.

Sujala Shastry: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Victoria Volk: On my podcast, your story. And I feel like even through cultural differences grief is the one thing that unites us all. It doesn’t matter Yes. It doesn’t discriminate and we all grow up learning these unhelpful and almost hurtful ways to cope and and and how to grieve. We do it very poorly. And that’s why my program is called do grief differently. It’s time we do grief differently. And so thank you so much for sharing your insights and what you’ve learned on your path, and for starting your podcast because the more voices that get on the mission that is similar to mine, which is changing the conversation wrong grief, talking about it, like we talk about the weather, the more that do that. The better off our next generations will be.

Sujala Shastry: Yeah. And thank you so much for I never thought I would share so many things that you were so warm and your questions made me think and Doug’s memories out of me. So thanks to you, and thank you for, you know, I really enjoyed speaking with you. And as you say, I strongly believe the how we support the grieber and how we speak about grief needs to change, and there is no doubt about it. And and I’m happy that somewhere you and me are trying to bring about a change in our own little ways. So thank you for giving me this space.

Victoria Volk: You’re welcome. Where can people find you if they wanna connect with you? Unless it’s your podcast.

Sujala Shastry: Yeah. I’m on although I’m on it is called Discovering Journeys. And you can find it on YouTube, on Spotify, on Apple, on Amazon, and then you can connect with me on Instagram, on FB, on LinkedIn. I’m there on pretty much everything. And I will I will give you the I’ll share the links with you.

Victoria Volk: Yes. And I’ll put those in the show notes. So thank

Sujala Shastry: Thank you very much. Thank you.

Victoria Volk: Have a blessed rest of 2024 as we record this. It will be published in 2025. So happy early New Year to you and holidays. I wish you a great end of 2024. And and remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life, much love.

Ep 202 Yvonne Caputo | Five Wishes That Transformed My Father’s End-of-Life, Our Relationship, and My Grief

 

SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:

Dive into the depths of grief, joy, and the paradox of emotions with Yvonne Caputo on Grieving Voices this week. From personal tales to professional insights, learn how attentive listening can transform relationships and provide peace in life’s transitions.

Yvonne reflects on personally challenging life transitions that led her to therapy as she grappled with feelings of loss. Her journey emphasizes not just the grand losses but also those smaller ones that cumulatively shape our lives.

Episode Highlights:

The Paradox of Emotions:
 Yvonne talks about containing paradoxes—how we can experience joy in sorrow, teaching us valuable lessons about mental health and resilience.

Storytelling & Healing: Listen to how conversations with her father about his WWII experiences helped unearth latent PTSD and transformed their relationship by simply offering an attentive ear.

End-of-Life Wishes: Discover why discussing end-of-life preferences is crucial as Caputo recounts honoring her father’s wishes for a peaceful passing versus the traumatic hospital death of her mother without known wishes.

Therapeutic Practices: Learn from Caputo’s approach to providing comfort in therapy—validating experiences without judgment—and its impact on elderly individuals in caregiving settings.

From dealing with personal loss to facilitating meaningful dialogues around mortality, this episode is a testament to the healing power of being heard.

RESOURCES:


CONNECT:

_______

NEED HELP?

  • National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
  • Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7 support via text message. Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a trained Crisis Counselor

If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses.

Exploring Grief and Connection: Yvonne Caputo on Therapeutic Listening

In the latest episode of Grieving Voices, we dive deep into a heartfelt conversation with psychotherapist and author Yvonne Caputo. She shares her profound insights on grief, loss, and the magic woven through truly listening to one another’s stories.

Caputo reflects on personally challenging life transitions that led her to therapy as she grappled with feelings of loss. Her journey emphasizes not just the grand losses but also those smaller ones that cumulatively shape our lives.

🔹 The Paradox of Emotions: Yvonne talks about containing paradoxes—how we can experience joy in sorrow, teaching us valuable lessons about mental health and resilience.

🔸 Storytelling & Healing: Listen to how conversations with her father about his WWII experiences helped unearth latent PTSD and transformed their relationship by simply offering an attentive ear.

🔹 End-of-Life Wishes: Discover why discussing end-of-life preferences is crucial as Caputo recounts honoring her father’s wishes for a peaceful passing versus the traumatic hospital death of her mother without known wishes.

🔸 Therapeutic Practices: Learn from Caputo’s approach to providing comfort in therapy—validating experiences without judgment—and its impact on elderly individuals in caregiving settings.

✨ From dealing with personal loss to facilitating meaningful dialogues around mortality, this episode is a testament to the healing power of being heard. Join us for these powerful narratives that highlight compassion, understanding family dynamics, preparing for end-of-life moments, and embracing active grieving processes for growth and peace. 🕊️

Don’t miss out on this enriching discussion filled with practical advice (like using resources such as 5wishes.org) that might just change your perspective on life’s most difficult challenges!

Episode Transcription:

Victoria Volk: Hey. Hey. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of grieving voices. Unless this is your first time listening, thank you for joining us. And thank you or being here. Today, my guest is Yvonne Caputo. She is a psychotherapist, corporate trainer, consultant, and she has been a teacher and the head of a human resource department in a retirement community. She has a master’s degree in education and clinical psychology. She is the author of Flying With Dad, a daughter, a father, and the hidden gifts and his stories from World War two, and Dine With Dad tough talks for easier endings. Thank you so much for being here. And when I was looking through your laundry list of lost which I think if we all just took stock and wrote down really all of the stuff that we’ve been through, that life is thrown at us, whether from childhood or dog, you know, or first pet dying or having to move once, twice, three, four times, losing friendships in that process as adults, moving and having to change communities. And, you know, it’s I mean, just you become ingrained in where you live. Right? Like, these relationships become ever of your life, the UPS man, the mail man, the your delivery people, you get to know these people. I’m just kinda going off a tangent here, but If we think about how many losses we really have in life, I think we would be kinda shocked. Most of us. I mean, I I’ve I’ve done that, and I was shocked But, you know, I think it’s good from time to time to really take stock of the things that have happened to us that have shaped us. And so, what are the losses that have shaped you? And the work that you’re doing.

Yvonne Caputo: It it’s interesting you started out the way you did because it brought up something. That I sort of forgotten. And that’s that in nineteen eighty nine, I met and married this wonderful man. That’s not a loss, but he had two children from a previous marriage that he was committing to living near. So I, without thinking much about it, knew that I was going to be leaving the city that I loved leaving a job that I loved, leaving friends that I loved, and moving into this unknown world, and then when I got to Southeastern Pennsylvania.
I couldn’t find a teaching physician. So all of those things combined I remember thinking if I’m not okay in two years, with all of these changes and losses, then I’ll go back to therapy. I was in therapy at six months. Because, you know, as you said, leaving a town that I’ve been in for twenty years, leaving a kinds of friends leaving those connections. It was Erie, Pennsylvania, and it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. It has a pen insulin that’s thirteen and a half grams around that I used to ride every day after I would leave my teaching position. So there were lots of losses. Becoming a step parent, becoming a parent for the first time. You know, to a nine and seven year old. So it was it was a mixed bag.
It was one of the best things are ever done. We celebrated our thirty fifth wedding anniversary yesterday. But yes, there were lots of losses. In that celebration.

Victoria Volk: Well, happy anniversary.

Yvonne Caputo: Thank you.

Victoria Volk: Exactly. Like, that’s the perfect example of these things that people generally forget about. Right? Like, we just don’t it it’s like, well, it wasn’t traumatic or you know, we we have this we tend to have this hierarchy or compare. And, you know, I shouldn’t be sad about this. This should be a great time, but yet it’s the both and

Yvonne Caputo: Mhmm. Can

Victoria Volk: be incredibly excited about something but incredibly sad and melancholy and grieving. Two, we can do we can hold both of those things at the same time.

Yvonne Caputo: I use this phrase with my clients. A lot, but I also use it generally in life. Sound mental health is the ability to contain the paradox. You can, you can’t, you will, and you won’t, it isn’t, it isn’t. So sadness and joy can be together in the same bubble. And knowing that I think is extremely soothing, you know, to be able to say, okay, I can be sad about this. And at the same time, I can experience joy the joy that goes with it. But you’re right. That was not something I was taught in grade school, nor was I, you know, taught in high school or college. It was only later in life that I heard that statement from a psychologist and I went, oh, wow. Boy does that say it all? And when I think about it containing the paradox, What’s a good synonym for contained? Mhmm. There really isn’t one. You know, it it it really is what it is. It’s it’s that it’s right there at the same time. Two things. So you’re absolutely right. We can hold joy and we can hold sadness at the same time.

Victoria Volk: You said hold in and I was actually thinking holding, like, just holding both of those emotions, like, contained in holding. But at the same time, it’s, like, it has to go somewhere. Right? The grief has to go somewhere. Even the joy has to go somewhere. Right? Like, we can’t it’s like, you know, if you are so grateful for somebody and you really let’s say, I mean, withholding our pain and our grief can have the same effect of holding our joy and our appreciation and our gratitude for people. Right? Like, there is a suffering that happens in that too. Right? Because I think I don’t know if I’m getting my I’m not getting my point across here. What I’m trying to say, but the energy has to go somewhere. Right? And so either the energy of joy or the energy of sorrow, like containing it does something to our bodies. You know, we can manifest symptoms. And if we don’t speak it or don’t share it or if we do, will it be received the right way? Or will it, you know, we can have these expectations of, if we say something to somebody that’s positive, will they have the response we want? You know what I mean? Like, there’s just that’s getting into, like, really deepen the weeds of relationships and communication and all of that. But I’m not sure I’m get getting my point across here, but Maybe you

Yvonne Caputo: There are two things that I think of when you say that. And that’s for any of us when we’re hearing somebody who is in sorrow or who is in joy. To listen Mhmm. To just listen. And, you know, nod heads or say aha or even tell me more, you know, to invite that person to continue on that path that they’re on because Absolutely. They need to explore it. They need to explain it. They need to have somebody who’s going to who is going to validate it just by listening. The second thing that I think of is this. When my father died, I was with him. And his dying wish was to be taken feet first out of his own home. Which meant he was gonna be on a gurney. And that’s exactly what happened. And when the EMTs put the gurney down behind the ambulance and the ambulance doors were open. And I saw the look on my father’s face. I went Yes. And the EMTs looked at me like I lost every marble I might have had. But what joy was coming out of me was the soft sweet smile on my dad’s face. Because he and I had had intimate talks about death and dying. And I knew exactly what he wanted. And when I saw that the end was coming, being with him at home, the EMT’s working on him, I knew what had to do. I picked up the phone, I called the hospital, I said, you know, so do not resuscitate water on dad’s chart. They’re bringing him in. Please make sure it’s at the emergency room when they come. Now that’s not the first time of his own home. But Grace was with me in that the emergency room doctor called and said, you can stop working on it. So I laid down beside my father. I told him that I loved him. I told him that he was gonna be with my mother, which is part of our conversation. He saw mister. And then I did what we always did in our family, the glue, I said the Lawrence prayer in his ear. And he was gone. So that joy did get expressed And it’s hard for people to understand that I continue to feel that profound sacred joy when I think about my dad’s death because he and I worked so closely on how he wanted it to be.

Victoria Volk: That’s beautiful. You are on the same team. Like, you were his cheerleader, you were his advocate. And I think so many people don’t get that opportunity, first of all, don’t maybe have that safe person that they trust. Maybe, you know, to follow through. Right? When because we’re taught how to acquire things and people people not what to do when we lose them. So what got you to that point to be able to be able to let go and not hold this grip and not let your ego get in the way.

Yvonne Caputo: My entire career from the time I graduated from college, feels like preparation for that journey.

Victoria Volk: You

Yvonne Caputo: know, being the teacher, being the psychotherapist, particularly working in the retirement community. As a member of the executive team, I sat on the ethics committee. And we had a case where a woman with severely tameshia could no longer communicate at all, developed an abscess on her foot, and the doctor in charge said, local bass and antibiotics. The daughter trying to be her mother’s advocate said, no. Mom’s advance directive, the document which gives legal power to somebody to speak if you can’t speak for yourself. Said quality of quality of life. And the daughter didn’t feel like antibiotic, cerebral palsy would equality of life that it was really time to let her mother go. The problem was that the quality that quality of life was recognized in our state. And so the case ended up going to court, a surrogate was provided to allow for the BaaS any antibiotic and then should that not help and an amputation be needed, the god the daughter could step in and say no. I’m sitting here on this case and I’m thinking about my dad and I’m like, whoa. Does he have an advanced directive? What is that? How do I go about getting one of that? One of them. So I did some research. Social workers are very helpful. And I called dad, and I said, I know you have a will, but do you have an advanced directive? What’s that? So I explained it. And he said, oh, no. He said, I never never thought about doing anything like that. And I said, well, okay, Dan. If I find an attorney and I come home, Would you be willing to sit and get it done? And he said, sure. So here I went to the attorney’s office and he made me, his healthcare, his legal, medical power of attorney. And so I felt pretty good about that until one of the vice presidents came back from a leading age conference. And this is conference that does everything about retirement communities. And she had this document called the five wishes. And she was just so excited about what this document did. And I asked her if I could borrow it. She said, sure, return that bar. It laid on my desk for a long time, and my desk was pretty messy. So one Friday night, I decided I needed to clean off my desk so that the housekeeping people would clean it because they wouldn’t touch it. If it was the way I kept it. And I pulled out the five wishes and started to read and I went, oh, by. This takes an advanced directive to places I never dreamed or possible. How comfortable do you want to be? What do you want your children to know? What do you feel best about in your life? And very simply laid out, the questions were all there. If dad if I was gonna do this with dad and dad said, no, I don’t want that. No, I don’t want that. All I had to do is cross a line. And I took the document. I wrote one for myself and I took the document and drove home to see that kind of quaking because my father get angry quickly. So I wasn’t quite sure what I was gonna meet when here I was taking in something that was similar to something he’d already done, but he was in just the right frame of mind. He towing his legs over the hospital bed. That’s where he was again. He was a broken diabetic. Pat in the seat. I sat down in the warmth of him. And we went over the five wishes. Question by question by line. Do you want your organs to be given after you die. That’s one of the questions. Dad said, hell no. He said, I can’t imagine anybody would wanna probably in Rack and Rowan. Do you want what do you want for your funeral? Well, he said my husband was gonna say because he’s got a glorious tender voice. He named exactly what songs he wanted in the funeral. He said, I want you children and grandchildren to do the readings, but you choose. You know what we’ll speak to you. And so on and on, he goes, and I’m writing these kinds of things down. And at the end of getting it done, I just reached for his hand, and once again, it was the Lord’s prayer. And it was one of the most intimate beautiful transcending experiences I’ve ever had in my life. So when the time came, I knew what dad wanted, and I went into automatic pilot. He had trusted me with the advanced directive and he had trusted me and named me on the five wishes. And there was no way in the world that I was not gonna honor. What he asked me to do. So for your audience in grieving voices, for me, do I miss my dad? Oh, absolutely. Would I like to cook one more pot roast dinner for him? Absolutely. Are there questions I have for him about world war two and other things that he did? Absolutely. Can I mail into tears and he’s been gone fourteen years now? Absolutely. But also in there is this profound, sacred joy that will make me just smile. Because of dad’s trust in me, that gift he gave me and the gift I gave him in return.

Victoria Volk: Were you an only child?

Yvonne Caputo: No. I remember

Victoria Volk: how did that work with communicating to the siblings and did they were they all on board with everything as well?

Yvonne Caputo: They were on board. My sister said she probably couldn’t have done it. To backtrack, there’s another story. One of the sorrows that I have, one of the things that I still grieve is my mother’s dementia. She went from being one of the most gifted women I’ve ever known. Intellectually, socially, spiritually. And to see her, not know what she did five minutes ago. It was heartbreaking. So we had some things we needed to do when she had surgery for colon cancer. And my brother and sister and I or a team. And my older brother said, okay, Yvonne, you take care of the psychological piece. You know that. Connie, you take care of some of the medical pieces, and I can take care of these. So we kind of divvied up the the the responsibilities so that when the time came, you know, it was me. It was me that then did what I needed to do. And the result of what that was is they were both pleased. They missed the fact that they weren’t with dad, but they were pleased that he had somebody with him. And that I stepped in and and did what he asked me to do.

Victoria Volk: You think it was the contrast of that experience with your mother that really kind of propelled you to curate a different experience with your dad?

Yvonne Caputo: Absolutely. Absolutely. My mother died in the hospital, in the sterile and god bless hospitals for what they do. I mean, I I wanna say that, but in this sterile atmosphere, and I called her on the phone. We’re six and a half hours apart by driving. And she started screaming. You’ve gone get me out of here. You’ve gone get me out of here. I don’t want to be here. You’ve gone get me out of here. It was so bad. That the nurse came in and took the receiver from her and talked to me and said, I’ll get it quieted down. I’m gonna hang up. That was the last conversation I had with my mother. And when she died, I was so angry. I was angry that she died in the hospital. I was angry that she died without somebody beside her. And you’re right. It propelled me in a way Mhmm. To think about that doing something with that differently. So in this case, grieving can be the voice that you need to hear or the need that you need to respond to. In order to do something that needs to be done?

Victoria Volk: You had kinda touched on. I just kinda wanna back pedal a little bit, and we’re gonna kinda jump around here a little bit, but you had touched on your dad’s anger. And, you know, I’m a veteran too, and so I have a really soft spot for veterans and, I mean, World War two is the greatest generation. Right? What was your experience growing up? With that relationship with anger? And what were you taught about grief growing up?

Yvonne Caputo: The anger was always just below the surface. So I remember it being a teenager asking for thirty five cents so I could go to the Saturday evening high school dance. And my dad just flipped. Gave me the thirty five cents but it was it was painful because he was so angry. That was there a lot. The other part is if I were if I was in tears over something, and I was I’m hypersensitive. I there’s a technical term for it. And if I was in tears, I was told to go into my room until I could get myself settled. There was no warmth through or come here, honey, what what’s the matter? Tell me about. There was none of that. So I didn’t learn what to do with my emotions. Until I went into therapy. And that was me to late twenties when I just looked at my life and said it’s not working. I’m doing the same things over and over again and I’m getting the same results. So I got into therapy where I finally learned what those childhood experiences meant, what they taught me to do, and how I could do things differently. But what changed my relationship with my father was world war two. Because one, evening in two thousand and eight. He and I were on the phone. And we do blood tests and dialysis treatments and doctor and send the people across the street who were giving them in home care, and then we’d stall for anything to talk about. I’m not a sports fan. You know, my brother and sister had sports and dad and they could just go on and on and on about that kind of thing. But wasn’t wasn’t in my backpack, but dad opened up and told me your World War two story, quirky, funny off the wall about of all things losing their third engine which had the hydraulics and making an emergency landing in free Belgium. And I, as a history book, said to my dad, let me get a pencil and paper. I wanna take notes. What the hell do you wanna do that? So how it came about Victoria, I don’t know, but the next phone call I said, tell me more. And the story’s just started rolling. My taking notes, my asking TAM questions, my listening to the stories, changed our relationship deeply. He began to trust me and opened up to me in ways that I never dreamt possible growing up as a kid. I say frequently through dad’s stories, I got the father knows who wanted. He got the daughter, he didn’t know he had. And I was in my sixties when all this happened. So that’s all a part of this, you know, grieving that in my sixties, I learned something about listening. About opportunities to listen. Now, of course, I did that as a therapist and why it didn’t occur to me to do it my own father. I don’t know. But he didn’t. What came out of that for me was the deep understanding of where my dad’s anger came from. It was PTSD. He went into the war because he wanted to fly. That was his main that was it. He wouldn’t have had to have gone. He had a presidential deferment that would have kept him home because he repaired airplanes. He repaired the airplanes that young testing pilots in in dad’s words busted off. So here’s a guy who watched a fly, e ends up in England as a navigator on b24s, watching playing after playing after playing, explode in the sky because it hit flexed or it was tracked by a German jet. And he came home with that. But he told me at some point when we were doing all of this talking, said when I came home, and everybody seemed to be fine. I walked around Meville, my hometown, and saw guys that I knew were that were in the service, and they seemed to be just fine. So I wanted to know what was wrong with me. He had a recurring nightmare that lasted for three years. He had a flashback sixty years after the war, none of which he understood. So part of the closeness that came for Dad and I was when those kinds of things came up in our conversation because of my background, I could explain what they were and why they happened. And that it was a normal thing to experience when you have witnessed such abnormality. So that that talks about the anger and where it came from when I was a child and how dad and I navigated through it. Even to the point where the last phone call he had with me, he had been released from the hospital. I had said, To the social worker, he can go home when he’s ready. Well, he they sent him home, no pain medication. He was an agony. He called me on the phone, and he ripped into me. I’m holding the phone. Out here, you know, while he’s doing it. And I said to him, I said, dad, I said, I told him you could go home, when you are ready. Doesn’t sound like you are ready. Victoria, he apologized. He said, oh, honey, I’m so sorry. I yelled at you. I didn’t mean it. And I replied, dad, you were just venting. It’s okay. So the grace that came with this closeness that I developed with my father is I got an apology. When we talk about grieving, I do miss that relationship. The one that I that dad and I were able to get to before he died. I missed that.

Victoria Volk: I missed that for you. My dad my dad was a Vietnam vet. Oh, what I know now about energy work and grief and all of that, I think he just held it all in. And it killed him, and he died of colon cancer at forty four. And he slept with a knife under the mattress. So coming back to the greater message about this is becoming that safe space to listen and having the patience to listen. I think it takes patience too. Right? Especially in this Western world. Right? We’re just let’s go go go go go. I have an example that perfectly illustrates this. My my I have a daughter that is a waitress. And there was a retired gentleman that had come in and he was asking her questions, like, what are her interests and things like that, and she said she what are her favorite classes in school and she said math and and shop class. He heard shop class and She said for the next twenty minutes, he just shared his life story about woodworking and his love of cabinetry and all of these things. And he tipped her, you know, a small small modest tip, a general, like, ten percent, whatever. Typical tip but he she noticed he was still outside when she was getting off of work. And she comes outside to take off the open flag and he approaches her, and he said, hands are a hundred dollar bill. And he said, this is for your next shop project. And she was so ecstatic. And she told him, she’s I can’t take this. This is too much. She said, no. I wanna give it to you. This is for your next next shot project. And she came home and she was so excited and she shared with me and I was and I said to her, this is exactly what I said to her. I said, you gave him your time. You listened to his stories. That’s what that meant to him, I believe. Mhmm.
You had a shared interest, you were interested in hearing what he had to say, and he was excited to share. He gave him your time. He listened. So I just thought that was a great story to tie into this listening piece and giving people our time.

Yvonne Caputo: Well, that Same kind of listening happened very frequently to me when I was in the retirement community. My office was up on the third floor. And I want as the Human Resource Vice President. I want it by office away from the home of So if an employee wanted to come see me, they could do so, you know, discreetly. Because going to my office was like going to the principal’s office, you know. But my office was on the same wing as a lot of the residents. And I always had an open door, and they would come in and sit down And eventually for some, what was said is this. Yvonne, I just wanna go. I wanna be done. I wasn’t hearing suicidal ideation. I was hearing Well, let me finish by saying okay. My response was okay. Tell me more. My friends are gone. My partner’s gone. I’m in physical pain all the time. I’m not doing the things that I love to do. I’m just ready. And I would ask what’s your base perspective? Because when my mother said that very same thing to me a month before she died, I said the mom talked to God. You and God decide when it’s time. But that kind of listening was what was needed in those moments when the residents came in or when my mom said it. Tell me about it. So and it can be so helpful, particularly with people who are grieving. Tell me about it. What’s it like? And no interruptions and no commentaries And no Well, let me tell you about how I You just let them talk till they can’t till there’s nothing left to say. And that’s what you said earlier about, how do you get rid of it? Mhmm. How do you how do you put it out there? I was asked by Seventh Great Teachers to come and talk to their kids about therapy. And I said, to the teachers. Please have the kids write questions. What do they want to know? So I’m not up there blabbering about what I do. I’m addressing their concerns. I saved the best question for last, and it was I read the question and my story just bounced out of me. It was not anything I planned. I said to and if you can imagine a group of seventh graders. I said, have you ever had a vomit? Have you ever had a stomach that was just churning in ugly? And you try to hold it down and you try to hold it down. But there was a point at which you either got to the bathroom or you got to a waste basket because it was coming whether you wanted it or not. And it was gonna smell ugly and it was gonna taste ugly and it was gonna look gross. And I really went into the effect great film. I said, however, how did it feel once it was all over? And they all responded, it felt better. And I said, that’s what therapy is. Because the the person who asked the question was, if it’s so good for us, has come at heart so much. So it’s again that, you know, when dad told me the nightmare, the recurring nightmare, He was in the b twenty four. It was going down. He needed to get out. There was a place that he had to get through on his hands and knees. And on the sides of this kind of tunnel, little tunnel thing was all stainless steel. Any couldn’t grab onto anything. There was nothing to pull himself through. And he always woke up screaming, and mom would say, what is it like? And dad was out to the home. It’s just a bad dream. It was so bad at touring. He’d done channels in the mattress. Three years of those kinds of nightmares. So when we were talking about it, I explained the normality. Of nightmares given what he witnessed. And Sarcasm was an artful language in my family. So I ended the conversation with dad by just saying, Sorry, Hal. You’re just normal. But I literally could hear his shoulders drop. Knowing that what he had considered to be something wrong with him for all of those years was a normal response. To a traumatic event. And that’s central to my passion, okay, for talking to people particularly about death and dying. Having those conversations with my father were hard, hearing what he had to say was hard, knowing that we were talking about something that was going to happen was hard. But it created it was a part of the whole thing right there that created the closeness that he was he trusted me enough to open up to say, okay, in the end, this is what I want, and this is why I want it. So that’s another passion that I have. Is that My five wishes are done. My children have. My five wishes. We talk about the end for me and what I want and what I don’t want. Now, it’s been a while, so I recognize that I need to go back and do that document again. But I don’t want them to experience what I experienced with my mom. What did she want? How did she want it to be? What would have been better for her? Because it certainly wasn’t a good thing that she was in the hospital all by herself in that sterile atmosphere.

Victoria Volk: Well, in estimate, a different approach too. I mean, once someone has is suffering from dementia, it’s a little bit harder to do this, like, to prepare. Right? Because you don’t know what frame of mind they’re necessarily in. And if it’s an honest depiction of really what they want, maybe, is that accurate or, like Yeah. Like, what is your advice, I guess, for listeners who, well, I guess, take care of it as soon as possible before this before dementia is even a thing. But What would you what would be your advice for that?

Yvonne Caputo: My advice is no matter what the age. No matter what your age is, get the documents, get them done, put them in a safe place. And broach the subject with your children. If it’s an older person, broach the subject with your children, children You ask your parents. You know, when the end comes, mom, what do you want? How would you like it to be? Oh, honey, I I don’t think we should talk about that. Well, I’m gonna plant the seed, mom, because I’m gonna come back and ask you again. At some point because I want to be able to take care of you in the way that you weren’t taken care of. The five wishes w w w dot five wishes dot org, the document itself costs five dollars. You can do it online if you’d like, so you can, you know, use your typing and all that kind of stuff. And that stays for a year and a half. They keep that that for a year and a half. Also, in their store, they have a booklet. How to talk about it? How to bring it up. So they give guidance in that respect. Treat death and dying other than the elephant living room. You know, we we say, don’t we death and taxes? The only thing that we could be sure we’re in death and taxes. We’ll talk about the taxes. But we won’t talk about the death. I was lucky. I know that. It’s not always possible to die in the way that you would like. Because that happens. But if it is possible, yet made the grieving process for me so much easier. So much easier. Because I knew what dad wanted and I acted on what dad wanted and we talked about it, we would be on the phone. After the document was done. And he would just pipe up and say, oh, I want to go. I’d say, okay. Talk to me. Tell me. And then sometimes we would be on the phone and I would say, I haven’t heard you say you want to go. Well, things have been good, you’ve gone. I’ve been feeling pretty good and things gone along pretty well, so I guess I’m not ready now. So that’s the way, you know, that’s how easily it became for us to talk about it. As I said earlier, when I have the back of the heartbeat, you betcha. But equal to wanting him back on a heartbeat is the joy.

Victoria Volk: This is a reminder to me because I I’m a trained end of, like, do a thank you for that resource. I’m gonna actually add it to my website, but I have not asked my mom. And she’s gonna be eighty two. So it’s like, you know when I’m in it? I’m in it. I you know, and I haven’t done anything with that training since I received it. I didn’t know what that was gonna look like. I honestly, I still really don’t. It’s just a tool in my toolbox. And so what you’re talking about is, like, speaking my language. Right? Like, my my dad passed away in the nursing home. I know it’s not probably the way he wanted to go. And I know for sure that’s not how my mom wants to go. So that I do know. She’s made that very clear. But as far as these other things, I haven’t we haven’t had that conversation. And I think I get so wrapped up in my day to day and, like, the work that I do, like, I’m not asking the most important person, what do you want? You know? So this has been a very good reminder for me. To do so. So thank you for that gift today.

Yvonne Caputo: You’re welcome. And to spread it even a little further, My granddaughter was diagnosed in her senior year in high school with leukemia. She’s fine. She’s in her mission. Okay? She’s twenty three now and she’s doing very well. But she was the five wishes were were given to her at seventeen to fill out. And this was chalk in Los Angeles. Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. They say it differently, choppies and Philadelphia. But I thought that that was pretty interesting. That the hospital would give her that document and ask her to complete it. Wow. Seventeen. So it’s made me very aware of dates. And folks that have there’s just some beautiful stories that go with dying with dad. One young person, like, to me, somebody in the forties as young, said, my parents have tried to talk to me about it. And I just said, no. No. It’s not gonna happen right now. We don’t have to worry about that. You know, it’s too soon. And it flipped for her. She said, yeah, we have to talk about it now. And then there was an elderly gentleman who steadfast daughters. My five wishes are done. On my birthday, I wanna do a zoo, and I wanna talk about it. I want you to know what I want. That’s my birthday present. I don’t know anything else. I don’t want any goodies. Just I wanna talk about it. So they got to the part of did you want to be buried or cremated? And he said, I want to be cremated. So the question is, dad, what do you want us to do with your ashes? They said, oh, I don’t care. Do whatever is easy. And that was his persona. You know? Don’t put your side. Well, just do leasing. And he said, just throw a moment of breath. And they said, wait a minute, dad. Wouldn’t you like to have your ashes? Taken to the prairies in Canada where you grew up. In that one room house, He said, well, that’s too much work. Well, wait a minute, dad. What if that’s something we’d like to do? For you? He said, okay, I’ll change that part of my five wishes. Give a take. The most profound was one of the women in my writing school who was acutely ill. Acuteal, years, surgeries, pain, disability. Not doing the job that she loved. And she got the five wishes and filled it out and then sat down and had hard her conversations with her kids and her husband. And I found out that she was going to hospice. She had made the decision no more searches. And what her husband did for us was set up fifteen minute calls on Zoom for her to talk to the women in a writer’s group. It only lasted eight minutes because she was so tired, but she just kept saying, Yvonne, thank you for the five wishes. I can’t tell you what it’s been. My family is in agreement. We’re all talking about the same things. They know I’m ready it’s okay. And it’s because we have to find wishes. What could be better than that?

Victoria Volk: To be able to that self agency, I think, is an organization called Dine with Dignity

Yvonne Caputo: Mhmm.

Victoria Volk: Around Capitol Hill. They’re, you know, pushing legislation across different states. Yeah. I I think it’s a very important topic that hasn’t talked about enough to I don’t think people realize that they have a choice, you know? Like, they have choices. But you’ve had a lot of grief, and I’m I we’re kinda nearing an hour, and I don’t know how you are on time.

Yvonne Caputo: I’m good. But you have

Victoria Volk: a lot of loss in your life that was before your mother, before your father. Would you like to share anything about those experiences and what those taught you?

Yvonne Caputo: I had an uncle. And the cousin who died by suicide. And it taught me to think a great deal about what was so bad. You know, what was what would be so bad that I would no longer want to live. And Are there times like that in everybody’s lives? Of course, there are. However, given what it did to their families, I wouldn’t never do that to my family. I would find a way through the miasma of whatever that bad stuff was. Because I just couldn’t do that to my family. Losing my brother at the age of twenty six in a car accident was one of the most profound grieving experiences I’ve ever had. He and I were very close and we had the same kind of radar in terms of what we wanted and who we wanted to be and how the world got be and all that kind of stuff. And going through the process of grieving his loss, My spirituality was enhanced, a hundred fold. My belief in life. And I’m not gonna say religion because religion isn’t it. It’s spirituality. That what I want from my life is to have made a difference. In whatever way she performed, that that is. I I want to make a difference. And I found that through my brother’s death. The other losses and uncle at the age of fifty two, uncle Mac. When we would see each other. First thing he would do is hold out his arms and expect me to run into them. And then he torn me around and he put me down on the floor. He was the person. He was one of the persons in the family that made me feel special. And he died at the age of fifty two. That was You never know how long. I have I had a great appetite at ninety six. Others who passed away in their late eighties, but you don’t know. He went to sleep one night and he didn’t wake up. You know? So living a life with purpose and trying to remember on a daily basis. What’s important for me to do today? Where do I need to spend my energy? At the end of the day, can I close my eyes and say, yeah, what’s a good day? Or it was a hire date, but that’s okay. So each I think each and every one of them has taught me something. And I was, bless my mother. My mother took me to the library. Well, that’s a little girl. And it was always she would say, what do you wanna read now? And she’d take me to that section, and we would talk about books and she would pull we would pull them out. And even as a little child, I would read about sorrowful things and how sorrowful things impacted the characters in the book. So I knew as a child that it was all it was it wasn’t always rosy and creamy and that kind of stuff. What didn’t happen in childhood was what to do with those feelings. Like I said earlier, that came, you know, when I did therapy. So there has been a learning process in each and every one of those, yes. To make me think about what I want having those documents ready. Right? And closing my eyes the final time and knowing that life was good. It was just good.

Victoria Volk: Was the uncle on your mother or father’s side,

Yvonne Caputo: my mother’s side. The two uncles that I mentioned were both on my mother’s side. And they lived very close to us, you know, so that’s why I had the relationship with them that I did. My uncles on my dad’s side live far away, so we might get to see them once every two years. I didn’t have the same kind of relationship with them.

Victoria Volk: How did you see the dynamic change between your parents when your brother passed? Like, what did that do to the family unit?

Yvonne Caputo: When my father was standing, receiving communion before he took a flight on the mission. He would say, if I come back, it’s God’s will. If I don’t, it’s God’s will. So that was That was how he handled it. My mother never recovered. Never recovered. And she never we were we did the family outing a couple of years. We would rent this big sixty foot houseboat and it had, like, twelve bedrooms in it, and so the whole family would get together and we’d go around the lake in Tennessee. Mom and I were walking in the woods. We could pull up to the shore and anchor, and mom and I were walking in the woods. And she looked around and she said, Oh, Mark would have loved this. Mark being my brother. And then out of her mouth came, oh, Teddy shut up. You should be over this by now. And I said to her, no. Mommy, you can’t. You’re never gonna be over losing a child is something that is with you for your lifetime. But the way she was raised, her generation was. Yeah. You should be over it. Now luckily for mom, she was very much a believer and I think church being able to go to church and have the church. Was reassuring to her, but they handled it very differently. And my father was one who would say, I can’t talk about it. It’s not my way. So I am now thinking that it could have been very helpful for mom to be able to talk about it as much as she needed to talk about it. But she didn’t have anywhere to express it.

Victoria Volk: I’m reading a book right now. The guest is gonna be on my podcast. I’m gonna botch her name, so I’m not even gonna try it. But her first name is Annie, and the book is called Always A sibling. And she talks about the the longest I’d never gave it any thought until I I read sorry, reading this book, but really the relationship with our siblings, if we are blessed to have a sibling, is the longest relationship. If you think about it, because we tend to all live our parents. Even those we marry, we were still in relationship with our siblings first. Like, those are our first and longest relationships. And in the book, she’s just talking about how significant of a loss it really is when you lose a sibling. It’s just very different.
It’s that they’re the people that know you unlike anybody else because they’ve been with you the longest. Anyway, that might be a book you might be interested in reading, but

Yvonne Caputo: Yes. Yes. Because the relationship I had with my brother who died. Was very much like that. We we spoke the same language. We had interest in the very same kinds of things. He was actually Mark called me and said, do you wanna come down to Pittsburgh? We’re gonna go see. It’s a famous nineteen seventies. Gordon, like okay. It came to me. And we did that together, and he was dating my best friend at the time. And then the following day, we went to a huge music store in Pittsburgh, Bullwringers. And he was looking at the coterminous and looking at the so looking at that. And that wasn’t as a fairly material, really interested because I’m not and not musical in the way that work was musical.
And he said, okay. I’m ready to go. All he’s got in his hands It’s this little brown flat envelope. We get in the car. And I said, Mark, what’d you buy? He said dust in the wind. The song by Kansas. All you are is dust in the wind, and your catheter and I are wearing the back seat. What? I think the music is beautiful, but the words are awful. That was the weekend before he died. He died the following Tuesday. So I think that also explains what I said earlier. That that loss, that loss is probably the biggest loss I’ve ever experienced. Ever ever experienced.

Victoria Volk: And yet, it’s not the one that you came on the podcast for.

Yvonne Caputo: You’re right. I didn’t. I feel his presence though, from time to time. It’s like I had this guardian angel. Who’s looking out for me.

Victoria Volk: Was that song played in his funeral?

Yvonne Caputo: No. It wasn’t. But I’ll be doing something. This was more when I be in the car and I have the car turned to a music station. But it would come on and I would feel his presence and it was like this message from beyond. That everything was gonna be fine. That whatever I was experiencing at the time was just normal to life and things would be fine.

Victoria Volk: One of the things that I I share about on my podcast and in conversation with people that you know, I personally had tried hitting a therapy once, my early twenties. And, you know, I’m trained and certified in grief recovery, which is not therapy, but it’s very therapeutic. And it’s not talk therapy. I mean, people talk, of course, but there’s also action. Right?

Yvonne Caputo: Mhmm.

Victoria Volk: So what do you say and I’m curious what you would say to this too. So that’s why I’m asking if people are listening who follow my podcast, they’re probably wanting me to ask this. So I’m gonna ask. What do you say when to the thought that talk therapy alone doesn’t work? Like, you have to take action with it? What are your thoughts around that? Because and this is this ties into actually another question. When you in your when you talk about processing your grief, like, I wanna know what that looked like for you. What did the act of processing your grief look like because I know what it looked like for me and it was using a method that’s evidence based in yada yada, it’s the grief recovery method. That’s the action piece. What did that look like for you? And what what is the action that you feel like people need to take when they’re in talk therapy or maybe not. I don’t know what’s your perspective of that. Howard Bauchner:

Yvonne Caputo: I value talk therapy. But there’s also something about what you do. Mhmm. It’s the doing thing. So if I go back and I think about the doing thing after Mark died, I would have to say that my presence in the classroom with kids changed. That doing for me was being there for my students in a way that had nothing to do with two plus two weeks before or putting a comma in the right place. It was there to be observant. It was there to look for pain. It was there to be a listening Yeah. It was there to give a hug that if I were to I I just knew. That if I were to be present for the kids, being actively present for the kids and my friends, that that would help me to heal. I would be doing something with the angst that I felt. I can give an example. We were sitting in the living room, talking about the wedding. And it just so happens we were looking through my husband’s Foot album of these parents’ marriage. And oddly enough, we were going to be getting married fifteen years to the day. Obvious ramen dad’s wedding. And and and he didn’t he and I didn’t notice. And and we’re kinda talking about this and and I looked and at the top of the stairs, there’s pavement. She’s seven years old and the tears are just dreaming down her face. So I went up, and we went into her room, and we sat on the bed, and I held her nice aggressive ladder. And she said, I’m never gonna know my grandmother. My grandmother’s dead, and I’m never gonna get to know her. And so I said, that is a sad thing. You’re absolutely right. So that’s an action in terms of how I changed. That Seeing someone in pain gives me an opportunity to stop and say, the listening piece. When I was a human resource professional, we had a very dear resident in the memories ring die. And she’s just lovely even in dementia. She was just one of these precious precious things. And I walked onto the unit and I could see one of the eights just trying to hold back the tears. And I would have turned, I said, could you use a hug? Am I just unfolded her ending? She sobbed. So being able to comfort someone in an active kind of way. Has been one of the ways I’ve managed my own grief. My the only, you know, that loss of of of my brother. Because there were times in my life that he didn’t do that for me or I would do that for him.

Victoria Volk: That’s a perspective I didn’t expect. Thank you for sharing.

Yvonne Caputo: You’re welcome. You’re welcome. I’m grateful to Mark. In the oddest of ways, I am grateful for that grief. I am grateful for his loss. Again, what I am back in the heartbeat? Oh, there’s so much I have to tell them. It’s just so much I have to tell them. I want them to meet this family of mine, but I really started to become something through the grief process. Around his dad that I treasure. And I do say that, you know, when I’m working with people in in grieving, you know, here’s where we go in. Boom. We dropped to the bottom. And then come up when you drop, when you drop, when you drop, when you drop, when you drop, and it may be years later, we don’t go down again. And that happened to me in England the other mirror. But if we grieve actively, if we do something with our grief, if we honor the feelings, if we process the feelings, if we do something, then here’s where we came in, here’s where we come out. And I’ve got a diagram of this that I show. That grief is away, if processed correctly, that we can become better people, more true to ourselves.

Victoria Volk: Yeah. It sounds like your your compassion was just cracked open.

Yvonne Caputo: Mhmm.

Victoria Volk: It really does sound like that experience of losing your brother was what just let your compassion flood out and propelled you to give it to others. The love that you couldn’t give to him. Right?

Yvonne Caputo: And I will remember your phrase. That it cracked open because that’s that’s pretty profound in and of itself. Yes, it cracked open.

Victoria Volk: I think for so many of us, for grief loss, you know, it can take us down. And crack us open to where we feel like we’re in a million pieces. But I do think it not that yours I don’t wanna say, like, not that it’s a special person. Right? Not that it How do I wanna say this? I think different people are built. To do something with that. You know, I think a lot of the people that have experienced a lot of grief, a lot of loss or trauma, young in life, throughout life. I think it just builds you differently. You know, I’m yeah. I guess that’s maybe my thought on that. For some people that may not experience a devastating loss until their twenties or thirties or forties later in life, that can be the very thing that just takes them takes them down and they find themselves in just completely lost, not knowing what to do. So what is one thing that you would like to scream to the world?

Yvonne Caputo: I am grateful for the loss of my brother in nineteen seventy eight. Because one of the life lessons that I was given is that If I actively grieve, if I actively work on it, I will get there. And so now if life throws something at me, that’s hard. If I actively work at it, it will get better. And if it doesn’t get better, then It’s time for me a to go talk to somebody or b, sometimes it’s meant for me, ending our relationship. You know, the the process of of greeting Mark and all the listens I learned from that. I hope it’s made me I think it’s made me a better person. And I’ll take that.

Victoria Volk: It’s a beautiful way to end this episode. Thank you for sharing. And Is there anything else that you would like to share that you don’t feel like you got to?

Yvonne Caputo: I think we did well.

Victoria Volk: I think so too. Where can people reach you if they would like to connect with you?

Yvonne Caputo: I don’t have my own website, but they can find me on my published website, which is in in Genium, I n g e n I u m books dot com. My email, if they would like to get in touch with me personally, is fairly simple. Yvonne, y v o n n e, author, a u t h o r, the number four at g mail dot com. Yvonne arthur four at gmail dot com. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. So if people wanna message me through LinkedIn, I’m there too.

Victoria Volk: Thank you so much.

Yvonne Caputo: In your books, please share your books. Okay. The first book is dying with dad. It sees World War two stories, kind of how those stories gave me the father I always wanted, and he got a daughter that he didn’t know he had. And then dying with that is how I grew. There are lots of growth stories in there to be comfortable talking about death and dying. And the tagline for the book is tough talks for easier endings. It’s how I got into having those intimate conversations with my father and what happened because of that.

Victoria Volk: And you can find those on Amazon.

Yvonne Caputo: Oh, everywhere. Yeah. Amazon earns a noble. If you are if you are an independent bookstore, lovered and they don’t have it on their shelves, just go in and ask them to order it for you.

Victoria Volk: Alright. I will put the links for those books and your LinkedIn and probably your email address. In the show notes. And thank you for your time today. I feel like this was a very rich conversation. I’ve I have a to do list for myself in gratitude of this conversation. Yeah. Thank you for sharing the resource. Five wishes dot org. I will also put that in the show notes. Get on that, everybody. Your own advocate? Before it’s too late, and thank you.

Yvonne Caputo: Oh, you’re welcome. It was a pleasure.

Victoria Volk: And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life, much love.

 

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