In this episode:
Join me as I share a deeply personal journey through grief and family dynamics in this heartfelt episode. Through the lens of my own story, I explore the impact of my oldest sister Sandra’s sudden passing and the intricate relationships among siblings with significant age and cultural differences. Despite these gaps, the bond we share as our mother’s children remains a powerful common thread. Sobriety, though not a cure-all, equips us to face life’s challenges head-on. During my trip to Costa Rica, I balanced mourning with the need to continue our travel plans, allowing myself to feel deeply and openly. This episode highlights the beauty of experiencing multiple emotions simultaneously and underscores the significance of getting better at feeling rather than just feeling better.
Resources:
Six-Week Writing to Heal Starts June 3rd
Transcript:
00:00 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Hey everyone, jessica here, and for today’s episode I wanted to talk a little bit about this Gabor Mate quote. It’s not about feeling better, it’s about getting better at feeling. This quote I came across it fairly recently and it really stood out to me. A content warning for today’s episode I will be talking about loss. So just that heads up. If you don’t want to hear about loss, please tune into another episode next week, but that will be the topic of discussion for today. So at the time of this recording it’s Sunday morning.
00:37
I’m recording on June 2nd, and so about two days ago I left Costa Rica. I had spent the week there. I went there with my partner, his mom and his son, and basically the intention of the trip was to spend a week there and just kind of show them around different parts of the country within the scope of a week. Costa Rica is a tiny country and there’s so much to see there, and you know, having spent much of my childhood there, I feel like you can never have enough time to see all the things right, and so we picked a couple basic destinations to go to to keep it simple for that week. However, this trip started with the sudden and completely shocking death of my oldest sister, sandra. She died on Friday, may 24th, and that’s like probably within an hour of us landing.
01:28
A lot of you have heard of me talk with my sister, sophia, and so I want to clarify, because there’s a sister that I was raised with who is Sophie, and we grew up together. We grew up in Brooklyn and she’s 12 years older than me. She’s the one who I often talk about in terms of my recovery and, you know, the one who pretty much dealt with a lot of my like, wildness and my struggles when I was still drinking. But I actually come from a much larger family of many siblings, because my mom and my dad each had kids when they were in their respective home countries before they came to the United States. So in my mom’s case, my mom has six children. I’m the sixth and Sandra, who passed away, was her first, and so I’m 39 years old, but my oldest sister was actually 66 years old. So you know we had like what like a 27-year age gap, and so my mom had four kids and when she came to the United States, the four kids stayed with my grandmother and other relatives in Costa Rica and my mom came here. She ultimately met my dad and got set up with him and had my sister and then eventually me.
02:37
But just to kind of give you a sense of that, and so you know, with sibling dynamics it’s interesting because you know. So, with sibling dynamics it’s interesting because when you are raised A I mean literally generations apart. Again, she was 66 and I’m 39. There’s the age gap. And then there’s also the big cultural gap because, again, I was born and raised in the US and though I spent a lot of time in Costa Rica as a kid especially, again there’s still big differences.
03:07
However, there is a certain bond between all of us and I think the biggest bond that we have is that we are our mother’s children, you know, and by being our mother’s children, in whatever way, shape or form that it looked like, you know, we have some very common experiences in terms of how our mother treated us, how she raised us, the ways in which she showed love and care, the ways in which she couldn’t show love and care Right, and so we all have that commonality in between our experiences, and I will also say that between all of my sisters, they’re they all. All of us have a growth mindset, really in different ways and shapes, right, of course, but we all have had really intimate and powerful discussions where we recognize the strengths of where we came from as well as the areas of improvement. And so the beauty of my sister my oldest sister is that I got to see how she really nurtured and loved my nieces and nephews who fun fact, they’re older than me, right, but I got to see that and I got to see how beautiful and tight their family was. And she was married to her husband, alan. They had literally been together since they were teenagers, right, and so basically being together for 50 years. They had a been together since they were teenagers, right, and so basically being together for 50 years. Um, they had a beautiful like they were genuinely like, still in love.
04:30
Like I feel like you often hear about these married couples who stayed together for a long time and all they talk about is how, like, well, they basically learned to just tolerate each other. Like no, no, no, no, no. I’m telling you my sister was not tolerating anybody. Like she was head over heels in love with her husband, probably up until her last breath, and like he, one of the hardest things was seeing him and how, how broken he was after losing his literal lifelong partner, right.
04:57
And so, anyway, just to kind of give you a sense of like, what our relationship was as sisters, we, we had a little group chat. You know, for those of you who are either in the U S and have family or friends outside of the U S, you know WhatsApp is like the big texting platform used across the globe outside of the U S. So you know, we had a little WhatsApp chat thread and and, yeah, like we were, we talked every day. That was the thing, like there was almost 30 years between us and thousands of miles in between us, and at the end of the day, that didn’t matter, you know. And so for her to suddenly be gone on Friday, like just after we arrived, that was a huge, huge blow, right.
05:38
And so what happened was my brother-in-law, who is married to my second oldest sister, and they’ve been together since before I was even born, right. He came to pick us up from the airport and that was one of the first things that I asked him. I was like, hey, like como esta Sandra? How’s Sandra? And he told me that she was. She was a little delicate, you know, and so when he said that I felt that familiar feeling and for those of you who have lost people, I don’t know if you know what I’m talking about. Maybe you do, but for me it’s this sinking feeling and any of you who know me have or have heard me kind of like tell my stories in the past.
06:23
When I talk about a sinking feeling, it’s usually like something bad is about to happen and I’ve gotten to the point, at this time in my life I’ve lost enough things, I’ve lost enough people that I know what that feeling is when it’s coming. I remember I felt it when Ian was dying. I felt it when my father was about to die. I felt it when I was about to miscarry. It’s just this little heavy feeling, like right at the bottom of my ridge cage and so like right where my stomach is at, and that that’s my body. Like my body knows before I do that I’m about to lose someone. A hundred percent, you know. Like she knows exactly what’s going on before I do. Except that at this point, going back to that Gabor Mate quote right, it’s not about feeling better, it’s about getting better at feeling instead of going into a panic like, oh no, something’s about to go wrong. It’s more like what I do is I go into a self-talk mode and self-talk Self-talk for me is a coping strategy that works.
07:26
Some people need to do more somatic strategies. Self-talk works great for me when I still have a perception of feeling safe. Typically, you need to do somatic strategies if you need to first establish safety in your body, but because I still felt safe, I was able to immediately perceive, okay, something’s about to go wrong, and so I’m going to tell myself that I can face anything, and that’s the important thing, right, I’ve. I’ve talked about this before and I will continue to talk about this.
07:55
Sobriety does not guarantee us a problem-free life. Sobriety does not guarantee us a happy life. No, it really doesn’t. But what sobriety does guarantee us right is the ability to move through all of the hard things, and so when I sense that a hard thing is coming, I remind myself that I can do the hard things right. I can face absolutely anything, anything. I believe you know there’s someone in the luckiest club who said in sobriety we trust, and that’s kind of how I feel Like I have total faith in my ability to go through the hardest of things because I can stay sober. If I stay sober, I can do it all If I start drinking, nothing’s happening. And so as soon as he told me that she was delicada, I, literally I just started to tell myself I can face anything, I’m going to be okay, right, Like I am safe. Very short, simple sentences that just drive that message home to my body that, like we, we’ve got this right.
09:02
And so we had driven off into, we actually went to the Starbucks farm. Costa Rica has a Starbucks farm. It’s called La Hacienda Alsacia. I’m probably butchering that, but so we went to the Hacienda, which means farm, and it’s a Starbucks farm. They have like a Starbucks there too. And we, you know, we went to like get some coffee. We were going to like walk around, take some pictures. It’s very beautiful up there.
09:24
And that’s when my sister, lorena, the second oldest, reached out and let me know that Sandra had passed away. Again, we had barely been there an hour right. Again, we had barely been there an hour, right. And so again, I reminded myself that I can face the hard things and I let myself just start crying right then and there, right, the younger version of me would have absolutely felt like, oh, I need to run to the bathroom. Oh, I can’t let these people see me like this. I can’t. You know, I can’t be seen in this state, and really that that wasn’t the case this time.
10:05
This time I was not trying to hide the tears. This time I was not trying to make explanations or excuses for like needing to, like apologizing for the sobbing and things like that. There are no apologies to be made. We do that a lot as a society. We apologize for crying, we apologize for being human, when there’s absolutely no need to apologize for these things.
10:21
And so, with that being said, we lost her, we lost her and we obviously, like I, had to completely shift gears in terms of like, oh well, we’re, they were already sick in the hospital. They’re not going to do an autopsy. I feel like in the US they’re going to do an autopsy for everything, in Costa Rica they don’t. And so when you pass away in Costa Rica, if you were already known to be sick, you have about 24 to 48 hours max for the family to take care of the body, why? Because people don’t get I believe it’s called. They don’t get embalmed, and it’s a warm tropical climate, right. So, again for sort of like a public safety, public health sort of thing. It’s always been like that. So, basically, if you die in the morning, at that night there’s a viewing and the next day is like your funeral and your burial, et cetera.
11:28
So, with that being said, we literally we had 24 hours to deal with everything with regard to my sister and her funeral and all the services, and so my partner’s family was great about just taking care of themselves while I was with my family, and after the 24 hours passed, right, it was kind of back to the travel mode. And here’s where, again, this quote really was powerful for me about it’s not about feeling better, it’s about getting better at feeling, because there would have been a time where I would have told the three people I was traveling with, who were not directly impacted by this, like, oh, your trip is over, because I’m going through this, you can’t do the rest of your plans and your itinerary is completely thrown out to the wind. I didn’t do that. I have learned to give myself permission to grieve in whatever way works for me, and so we still continue to travel.
12:37
How did things look different, though? I took a lot of breaks, I took naps if I needed to. If I needed to suddenly cry. I suddenly cried right. There was no such thing as me holding back Like I was totally fine to continue with everything as planned, but I gave myself the permission to outwardly express emotion if I needed to, and for me, with grief. I needed to cry and I was. I was not going to hold back those tears, not one bit.
13:09
I took the opportunities of being in nature and did a lot of grounding opportunities, so I was sticking my feet in the sand, I was sitting in the rain when it rained, I just let myself really feel connected and rooted, and that allowed me to both grieve my sister while traveling through a beautiful country that I call home and showing it to my partner and his family, right, um, one of the things that comes up a lot in sobriety is this idea that two things can be true at once. Right, I can be seeing beautiful sites and I can be grieving, and grief is one of those emotions that, at the end of the day, it sticks with us. It sticks with us when we’re happy and it sticks with us when we’re sad. And we can be going through all sorts of different life transitions years later and grief will still be there. Grief is going to live with us, and so grief is one of those emotions that really allows us to practice. The two things can be true at once, right? So, with that being said, I’m I’m just very grateful that I gave myself that permission because, again, with grief, sometimes we have this sort of image of what it should look like that you should just be in black, that you should be holed up in your home, that you should be doing nothing and that you should be kind of like leaving work and doing all the things.
14:38
And it’s not to say that you can’t do that, right, you can absolutely wear black, you can stay home, you can take off work, you can do all those things. But it’s one thing to should on someone, right, or to should yourself with an expectation, and it’s another thing to do it because it felt right. And so for me, um, the rest of the week was a whirlwind, because there were these really beautiful moments that I shared, right, um, again like sharing, like my family and my culture with my partner and his family, and there were other moments that were really, really hard, and they, they all existed all together. So I would love for you to take a moment, you know, after listening to this and reflect, when you have, in moments like these, right Like, how do you navigate grief with the rest of your everyday life?
15:31
How do you hold space for grief to exist with everything else that you’ve got going on? Because grief is valid, grief is needing to be heard, Grief is needing to be felt right. Our grief, the magnitude of it, is a direct sign of how impactful that relationship was that you no longer have right, or really I wouldn’t even say that you no longer have but of this impactful that relationship was that you no longer have right, or really I wouldn’t even say that you no longer have but of this person that has transitioned. It’s a magnitude of how great that relationship was while they were here on this earth and now that they’re not here, right, that gap is felt and that is the grief that you experience, that’s the grief that I experience. So with that I will let you all go. Just a reminder Monday, june 3rd, which is tomorrow, I’m starting my six-week writing for healing course. I hope that you will consider joining. Thank you again, have a great one and I’ll catch you on the next episode.
Return to Podcast Directory
