Choosing Joy After Loss: Continuing Bonds in Grief (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: You had a conversation with Grant about how this was your biggest anxiety, that something would happen to him.

[00:00:06] Speaker 2: He asked me what my biggest fear was, and so I told him, you know, my biggest fear is that you're going to die. And six weeks later, like, my biggest fear came true, and I don't know, I'm like here on the other side, and now it's like, okay, what do you do now that your biggest fear actually happened? Like, I'm still standing. I was afraid it would be the end of things, but I don't think it is. I feel his love, and I feel like we still have this relationship. Like, it didn't, my biggest fear didn't necessarily come true. It came true in one way, but not in another, if that makes sense.

[00:00:50] Speaker 1: Yeah, it does. You feel him. It's one of the things that I never understood until recently, when somebody on this podcast said it to me, is that you can still have a relationship with somebody who has died.

[00:01:07] Speaker 2: I know it's like this weird gift, right, that you didn't expect. I do feel his presence, and I do feel like the conversation has continued, because he was a writer, and just recently, I was coming across his notes for a speech that he had to give his senior year, and it was on his top three values, and those words, they are what's teaching me in my grief. His first value was about joy, and his notes say, quote, life is really unfair. In fact, a lot of the time, it's unfair, and there's not a single thing you can do to change it. So the only thing that you can change is your perspective, so why not choose joy? I honestly, like, I just hear him telling me that, like, Mom, like, you can't change this, but you can change your perspective, and you can choose joy. And so I feel him, like, urging me onward all the time.