Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Overwhelmed Brain Podcast, helping you navigate the difficulties in your life and relationships. These are my personal opinions. Always seek a professional when you're making choices about your mental health and well being. Well, here I sit, completely unprepared for a reason. I'm not just being lazy. My brother in law died, my sister's husband. And tomorrow morning we are packing up and traveling a thousand miles. My wife and I are traveling a thousand miles up to New Hampshire and attending the funeral on Monday and I'm recording this on Thursday. So it's a lot to take in and family is going through a lot right now. And again I'm sitting here unprepared, not sure what I'm going to talk about. And one of the things actually that came to my mind was dealing with death. I heard the news yesterday. I think I just heard it yesterday. He died yesterday. And just for the record, so I can just record this and put it out there as kind of a personal history. Today is July 16, 2026. Yesterday around 8am, my brother in law Tony died. And it's been very difficult for my sister. She's going to be alone having to deal with that. And so we're just trying to figure everything out. Because he's been a part of our family for almost 30 years. This guy worked at the same job as a pizza man. A pizza man. And he was a good pizza man. I'm laughing because that's what they called him, pizza man. He did that for I think 40 years at the same restaurant. So that's just amazing. I see loyalty in something like that. That doesn't mean he didn't want to quit. He may have, but it just means that he had a stick to itiveness to him. And I also saw that in his relationship with my sister. He had a stick to itiveness, he was committed, he stuck around, he was loyal. And that's what I got from him. And I just think those are amazing qualities. This doesn't mean that you should stay at a job you don't like. He just had a lot of time there and I don't know what his reasons were, but he stayed that long doing what he was doing. Maybe because it was stable and they kept paying him and that's what you do. You just find stability. Maybe I'll talk about stability or maybe I'll talk about death and how to handle death. I don't know. Again, unprepared. I did some crying yesterday. I did some crying today. I called my mom and I hadn't talked to her since he died, and I found out that she was there. She was there to witness that he was actually at home in home hospice, and he had people around him and he died in front of them. And it's so hard. It's so hard. My mom just started crying and she didn't know how to handle it. And she was trying to describe what happened, and she started crying and she couldn't get through it. My mom and I have a great relationship where I said, I'm so sorry you had to see that and go through it. We're going to be there for the funeral on Monday. And then we started talking about other things and kind of got back into a less crying space because I burst out into tears as soon as she did. And she felt better. She laughed. It was nice to hear her laugh. She goes, thank you so much. This is the first time I've laughed. And I'm not saying that you should just be laughing the next day, but sometimes you just can't be in one space the whole time. It's hard to be in one dismal, miserable space the entire time after something devastating. I mean, we do it right, but it's hard to be. Or it's hard to stay there. It's easy to get there, but it's hard to stay there. And I don't mean that it's actually hard because it's easy to stay there. That's our natural inclination to stay unhappy, sad, depressed. I believe it's an inclination to stay in that space, but it's not a balance for your mind, for your heart, for your body, for your system. And I believe that the system, our bodies and our minds and our hearts, it needs balance. All of these need balance. So introducing a laugh doesn't mean you are no longer thinking about some sort of loss. You are just trying to reach a balance, to cope, to get through. And I believe in balance. I believe in leveling the scales, if you want to say it that way, or sitting on the seesaw and having some sort of balancing weight on the other side. And sometimes you'll be at the bottom, sometimes you'll be at the top. And so as I've gone through these last two days with my own personal pain regarding this, especially for my sister and her kids, I mean, everyone is losing something here. But when you've been married to somebody for a long time and there's a lot of love there and you have a lot of healthy dependencies on each other, it's going to be difficult. And she is handling it the best that she can and we are all there to support her. When I found out that there were other members of my family at her house when he died, that was a little bit more comforting than knowing that she was alone. Because I can't imagine going through all that. And of course, your own mortality comes into mind and the length of time you have left with others comes to mind. And when that comes to mind, you think, well, how much time do I have? And am I taking advantage of that time? I remember when. When my dad died. When he died, I hadn't seen him in 10 years. And so my brother calls and says, you know, Dad's in the hospital. And I told myself, yeah, this is it. I got to go see him. I can't let this go. I got to go see him. And so I did. I saw him before he passed and I felt really good getting that closure. We don't always get that. And I don't think it's a good idea to regret not getting it from, you know, from your past. But I do think it's a good idea that if you still have time to take advantage of it as opposed to just letting it slip by. I mean, as we. We've lived in Georgia, she's lived here. My wife has lived here for over 20 years, and I've lived here for over 10 years. And my entire family's in New Hampshire, so is hers. Coincidentally, when we met, we didn't know that each other were from New Hampshire, but it turned out that our families were like a half an hour apart. So we actually kind of traveled in the same circles or similar circles and might have passed each other a few times when we were in high school because she's like a year and a half younger than I am. And it was interesting when we met, like, oh, we knew all the same stuff, all the same geography and history of our area. So that was me. But we've been down here for so long that we haven't spent a lot of time with family. We go up there as often as we can, but we missed last year and now we missed this year. But now all these circumstances are putting us in a position to go up there now. I feel really awful that I didn't get to spend more time with my brother in law. So I'm not going to make this show all about my personal story and, you know, talk about everything that I should have done. And I believe that you do the best you can and you do what you can and you live your Life and you move forward knowing that you will probably miss things, you will probably not have money or time or resources to do certain things, to see certain people. And sometimes it's just there's nothing you can do. You can try, but, you know, life happens. Then sometimes we are limited in the amount of time we have for others, but it's not necessarily something you should blame yourself for. You didn't know. Sometimes you just don't know. You didn't know it was going to happen. And that time I'm talking about loss, and somebody dies, and you just don't know. So I try not to beat myself up that I didn't spend more time with him. And I wish I had. Sometimes that's all you can do. And so I paused the recording and looked up an episode that I created a while back, many years ago, called Adapting to Change and Accepting Death. And I wanted to kind of go through the bullet points of that episode and just kind of share them with you and give myself a good reminder of what I talked about back then. When it comes to facing loss, facing the death of someone close or the loss of someone close, it's usually, you know, death is usually the one that takes people away from us. But sometimes there's other losses, there's other ways we lose people. And it's hard to deal with. It's hard to cope. So I'm going to read some of these and see if they apply, see if they help, see if they help me, see if they help you. This was a while back, so I may have different thoughts about this stuff now, but we'll see. Maybe it's evergreen and universal. The episode was called Adapting to Change and Accepting Death. And I'm just going to read you the. The AI bullet points that I had written up using. I have a specific AI chatbot that has all my episodes in it that I can ask questions about and find out when I talked about what or what episode. And this is what it came up with. It says the main theme about accepting death. Key points are the speaker's experience. I guess it's calling me the speaker. It doesn't know it's me, the speaker's experience, even though it's my chatbot. The speaker's experience with his cat is interesting because this is when my cat Ming died. So I created this episode on accepting death. After he died, the speaker's cat was diagnosed with cancer and died a few days later. He stayed up until 2:30am as the cat was passing. Yes, that was the story I remember that then I talked about the stages of grief after death. Mourning, feeling sad, but also happy that the suffering is over. Somebody said that to me today. I think it was my mom. I think she said, at least he's no longer suffering. Talking about my brother in law, that's so true. At least he's no longer suffering. He was suffering. He had cancer. It was very difficult for him. He had a walker the last few like 10 days ago. I have pictures of him using a walker and he. He'd never needed that before. And the cancer got so bad. I guess you get weak and it's painful and he's definitely not suffering anymore. So that's something good. That's something good. And then there's guilt. Just talking about this a little bit, thinking I should have done something different. This is when I was talking about my cat. I should have gotten a second opinion. I should have taken him in sooner. All the thoughts of regret or we should have done this, we should have done that. That can be. They can feel very guilty. And so I'm going to talk about that in a moment. Guilt is something that I'll talk about right now. Guilt is something that I pay forward positively. That's what I do with guilt. I pay it forward positively. So if I feel bad about something that I did, I feel guilty. Then whatever I did, whatever I did in the past, I'm going to do the opposite of in the future. That helps me pay it forward. What I couldn't pay for, for lack of a better term back then. So if I should have done that back then, guaranteed I'm going to do it next time if there is a next time. Or I'm going to do something like it or I'm going to make up for it 10 times what I didn't do. That's how I pay things forward positively. Like I used to not treat my pets as wonderful little children that require love. When I was in my 20s, I would smack my cat. I mean, I am so embarrassed and ashamed to admit that. I mean, I didn't do it all the time, but if he peed on the floor, I smacked him and it was just wrong. Or I rubbed his nose in it. And one day he came to me. This is this different cat. This is a different cat. Different cat. That was a long time ago and I was a child. I was in my 20s. I was like a child trying to justify my actions, but there was no justification for it. But he did something on the floor and I rubbed his nose in it and I was Just angry. And he came up onto the couch and he kind of slunked down. He just kind of crawled onto my lap as if he didn't want to get hurt. And that moment hit me so hard. I felt so guilty for ever hurting him. That I committed to never doing that ever again to an animal because he just, he looked so scared of me. I hated that feeling. I hated it. And so I did not ever do that again. I'd never hurt an animal like that again. And I just felt so rotten. And that's when I started, or at least that's when I made the rule, made the commitment to my life, that I would treat every single animal like a child, like my own child, and spoil them. That's what I would do. And that's what I did. From that point on, any animal I got in my life, I spoiled them, I treated them wonderfully. My cat, Ming, I traveled to three states and how many different partners? I think three partners, four states, I don't know, five states. I traveled to many states with three different partners over the 20 year lifespan that he lived. And he was my best friend. And that's the kind of relationship that I want to have with an animal. And so I share this humbly and vulnerably sharing that I mistreated my animals in my youth and I was just a child in a 20 year old body. And I feel awful about it. I still feel bad about that. But I took the guilt from that time and I transferred it into treating every animal in my life like my own child, an emotional being. And that changed me. So sometimes we do things that have to change us, and if it didn't happen, then we wouldn't have changed and where would we end up? And so we can go through these difficult times and change in a positive way. So I take the guilt that I felt back then and I transform it into a positive energy into other things. So that's why, that's what I'm talking about when it comes to guilt and thinking that I should have done something different. I should have taken my cat Ming in for a second opinion to find out if the first opinion was correct about his cancer. Because I was in denial and on and on and on. And that's, you know, we don't know what we didn't know. I didn't know then what I know now. And because I didn't know then, I really can't focus on everything I should have done. I just need to transform the energy into what I can do now. And so the next bullet point is expecting them to be here, waking up and looking for them, expecting to see them in their usual spots. I think I'm talking about my cat again, wondering where they are. Where is he? Oh yeah, he's not here. It's a reminder and a realization. Yeah, that's. I think about Tony, my brother in law, thinking that we're going to go up to New Hampshire in a few days. We're going to be there in a few days and he's not going to be there. He's not going to be in our lives. And I know they're already dealing with that. My sister is dealing with that right now. It's going to be strange to face something like that. And that's just something that's part of this change, this part of accepting and adapting to loss. And I've noticed as I grow older that as other people around me get older then sickness and death and all of these things can really start taking place around us. And we're very fortunate to be able to live longer than we used to be able to live in the early 1800s or whatever, 1900s even. And it still feels like it's a very, very short life. Especially when the people around you get older and they start dying off. I don't think we can ever get used to it. We just have to continue coping and adapting and trying to figure out, trying to get to the next step. Next item is full acceptance and understanding. Accepting they're gone and understanding it was bound to happen. That's tough. I mean, accepting they're gone means letting go, but doesn't mean letting them go. I don't think it means letting them go. You know, we're told that you always have the memory, right? It's hard to just think about someone and go, oh, there's the memory. I feel better now. At the same time, I remember when we had a great time together. I remember when the last time we connected and how loving and bonding it was and how it felt great to see this person, see my brother in law and that was the last memory that I have with him. And my heart goes to my sister and how is she going to deal with this? And hopefully when we're up there we can at least. There's nothing you can say to someone. I mean, this is something that I've thought of many times. There's nothing you can say to someone after they lose someone close to them. There's nothing you can say. You can say, may he rest in peace. My condolences. I'M so sorry. All the things that we say because we don't know what else to say because it's still going to be painful after we're not talking to that person in a few minutes or the next day. It's still going to be hard. It's still going to take time. And that's what people need. That's what you need when you lose somebody. Nobody can come up to you and say, hey, it's going to be all right. Even though it will, but you can't hear it. It will be all right eventually. And even now people are listening, saying, well, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's not all right, sometimes it won't be all right. Losing a child, sometimes you'll never feel all right when you lose a child. Sometimes it will stay with you, it will stick around. But this is where balance, the balancing of your system is important. I lost this person in my life and I watched a funny movie and I'm sad that this person is no longer in my life and I got to see my best friend. The balance is important. Sticking in one space for too long, even a happy, happy space for too long will eventually tire you out. It'll bring you back to a neutral place because it'll wear off the harder part. Like, it's harder to stay happy and you know in Jubilee all the time than it is to stay down, because down has a doorway to depression. The doorway to depression seems to be a lot easier than the doorway to elation. The doorway to being sad and just miserable is a lot easier to open, typically than the one that leads to a utopian positive attitude. It's just the way things are. Like our systems are our body, our mind, our heart. It seems that for many people, it's a lot easier to let go and let ourselves get down than it is to let go and be okay. I think being okay is an okay place to be. And then being happy is an even better place to be. But just being okay and comfort and peace and that's a nice neutral place to hang out. And then you can have the levels. I'm happy today. I'm not so happy today. I'm angry today, and then I'm tomorrow I'm laughing and enjoy. That's a great kind of not for everyone, but it's better than just staying down and out. And that door is just, like I said, the door to depression is so easy to open. That's why I never want to do it again. I remember being depressed. It was after my first real Long term relationship. I got into a depression for two years and it was so miserable. I'm not patting myself on the back for some length of time. There are people that have been through it longer than me. There are people that still deal with it. But when I finally exited, when I finally got out of depression, it was a relief to the point where I said, I will never, ever go back there again. I hated that place. It was devoid of feeling, devoid of emotion, and I hated being there. And I was so against it that I promised myself that I would never go there again. And it was interesting. After I started healing from depression, I started getting these little bits of these little pulls back, like they were trying to invade whoever that is, they were trying to suck me back in to depression. And I resisted. I said, no, I'm not going. I'm not going to go there. You're not going to take me there. I'm not going to go there. You are out of my life. And that's what kept me moving, kept me moving forward, is just standing up for myself and saying, no, I'm not going to do it. Because I knew what the feeling was like. And as soon as the feeling started coming on, I shook myself out of it. Good pattern interrupt. And said, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on? No, you're not going there. And I made sure I didn't go there again. And I'm not saying this is a solution for depression, but once you start getting out of it, it's a good reminder. It's a good reminder that if you start feeling yourself getting pulled back into it, just snap yourself out of it. Oh, I can feel it coming. No, no, no, no, we're not going there. So anyway, that's where I was. I know this is kind of a me show today, but I'm hoping it's a you show as well. One of the other things that is in this little bullet list here is to allow yourself to go through all the stages, the stages of grief, like denial, anger, bargaining, you know, like, if I'd only done this, maybe they would still be here. Depression, acceptance is the final stage. And knowing that it's not that simple. And it's not linear. It's not, you know, you take these five steps and you're done. But allowing each and every one of them. If you're angry, damn it, say you're angry. Feel it. Yell into a pillow or yell in your car or whatever. If you have regrets, you'll just have to deal with it. I regret I should have done This. I should have done that, because this is all part of the grieving process. I remember who told me, my wife. I think she said that when somebody loses a spouse, that within the first year of that loss, or a spouse or a partner, whoever, that you should allow the surviving spouse or partner to do and say anything they want for a year. That's the typical timeline. She said they might do some crazy things, but they need to go through their own process. And so I got to remember that. I got to remind myself that this may be her path, my sister's path, that she just does something crazy if she wants to, or she can or needs to, or whatever it is, and just not to talk her out of too much, because if she's feeling it, she just may need to get it out of her system. So if somebody needs to get something out of their system because somebody just died, we may have to just allow it, assuming it's not dangerous. But whatever comes up, that might be what they need to go through. And so there's that. Now the next bullet point is something that I've kind of already talked about, which is transforming guilt into love and attention for those still alive. Yeah, it's very on par, very on track with what I talked about. Paying guilt forward positively, which is transforming the energy of guilt into the opposite of how you were in the past, or amplifying how you were in the past if it's not the opposite. So if you saw the person that you loved several times throughout the year, but not enough because they left, and now you feel bad that you didn't see them enough, you might have to increase that number or move closer. I'm not saying that you have to do any of this. This is just kind of a philosophy, a thought process, like I think about, gee, you know, this is the first of many family members that has died, and there will be more that die. And here I am a thousand miles away, not being able to see them, not being able to travel as much as I want to go see them. And so that really gets me thinking about my priorities. Am I going to continue being this far? Are we going to move closer so we can see them more often? Believe me, it's in both of our minds because, boy, if this is what happens, we miss all this time with somebody and then they're gone and we never get to see him again? That really hits it. That really hits the nerve, the heart of all of it. So that's going through our minds right now. So that's what this is all about transforming guilt into love and attention for those still alive. And that's putting more toward those who are still in your life and doing what you can. Again, sometimes you can't do any of this stuff, but. But when you can, maybe the priority takes place over many, many things that maybe we don't necessarily need to prioritize. So again, my wife and I are considering all these things. Her family's up there too, so we are missing a lot. Pain goes away, but positive memories remain. We talked about that. Cry as much as needed. Don't resist the emotions. Totally, totally. I've already been crying many times and I'm going to cry again and Monday is going to be hard at the funeral and I'm going to cry after that. It's just going to happen. And I think it's so important to allow it to come out. Don't hold back. If it's in there, it's in there. It's just going to happen. So cry as much as you need. And if grief. Okay, so this is something that I talked about. If grief lasts longer than six months to a year, find someone safe to talk to. And that could be therapy. That could be a best friend. But if you're holding it all in, I totally believe in that six months, you're still. There's a difference between feeling bad, feeling sad, feeling lonely, and literally grieving. Grieving is just the constant with you all the time. So six months is a long time to do that. And I'm not saying it's too short. I'm just saying it can last up to a year. If you're continuing to grieve and you haven't found any reprieve from that grieving, there's no balance, then you might be stuck there for a while. And sometimes it helps to have somebody else help you get out. Sometimes you need that help. So there's that one. And now we also have some practical techniques that I've learned, which is dissociation. So when you remember, like if you had a good memory, when you have a good memory, you remember it. If you remember it in first person through your own eyes, so you can experience it. It's an experiential, immersive memory. And if you can do that, if you're visually inclined to do so, you can see outside your own eyes and see the world and see the good memory and feel it. Sometimes we don't have good memories. Sometimes there's somebody in our life that we don't want to remember the bad times. And when you do that. You can have a third person experience. We can see ourselves over there communicating or relating to somebody else in a bad experience. This is just a dissociation technique that allows you to connect or disconnect depending on what you want. I don't know why this is in the episode, but I talked about it for some reason. It must have to do with. Oh, probably if you're still grieving after six months, it's quite possible. I think this is what I talked about then. It's quite possible that you remember everything, all the pain in first person through your own eyes. Seeing what you saw, feeling what you felt. And when you are remembering things through your own eyes, you're more likely to hold onto it and feel it for fully as opposed to. And you can practice this. Seeing yourself over there experiencing maybe the grief. Seeing myself over there experiencing grief over my brother in law, his passing is a lot different than being in my own body and feeling what it's like. This isn't like denying or removing the grief. This is just after a long time that you haven't been able to get past it quite possible that all your memories are in first person. So this is just a practical thing. It may or may not work for you, but it can. Like if you see yourself over there, it's a lot different than being in your body experiencing it. Or how about. And this is like a double dissociation, if I may use that term. You see yourself over there watching yourself on a movie screen. It's another little neat technique. And the movie screen contains the hard parts of your life, the difficult journey, the difficult parts to deal with. So you're watching yourself from another seat in the theater, maybe way in the back, watching a version of yourself, watching a version of yourself on the screen where all the bad stuff is happening. This works well, can work for trauma, can work for old traumas, can work for abuse. I'm not saying you replace therapy and you're all good, but just to practice, just to try seeing yourself over there watching yourself on a screen. It's kind of an interesting little play because sometimes we will remember things totally immersed. And when you do that and there's been a lot of pain and suffering in the memory, then it's like re experiencing it, PTSD all over again, it's happening again and you are trying to deal with it. So this can be a technique that you can try if you need to. And of course it works for happy memories. If you want to really bring in the best feelings you can make sure you're not seeing those in third person and jump right into your body and see through your own eyes, feel what you felt back then, see what you saw back then, hear what you heard and really immerse yourself in the positive memories. So have positive memories in first person and not so positive or very negative memories in third person and it changes. Hopefully it changes the feeling for you. Just trick with memory and stuff. Let's see. I think I only have a couple more here. When you accept death, you actually accept life completely. Wow, there's a deep one right there. That's. Yeah, I don't remember saying that, but I did. I said that when you accept death, you accept life completely. It's like saying, this is life, this is everything that life has to give, and death is a part of that. How does that help me? I'm going to question. I'm going to challenge myself right now. Paul, how does it help me to accept life as it is? This is a part of life. I think it takes away some resistance. Like, to accept life is to know that death is a part of it. If I don't accept that death is a part of it and I'm resisting it, it actually causes more stress. Like, I don't want that person to die. I don't want this, I don't want that. But if I accept, well, this is a part of it. To live this life, to have an opportunity here. Death is a part of that and we will all experience it, if not in the people we love, in ourselves. And so, yeah, that actually helps. I think about that. That actually helps. And right after that, I wrote, accepting every aspect of what life brings makes you more resilient. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I'm hoping this helps me become more resilient. And I think it does because I've had death in my past. My father, my stepfather, recently, which is a mixed bag of feelings. I think my aunt died and other people that weren't as close to me, but the closest people have certainly helped me adjust and become more resilient. So when as family, the closer family dies, it really helps me understand that this is a part of life and resilience is a part of life. And in order to continue doing what we're doing on this planet, on this plane of existence, that there are certain caveats that when we accept that this is all a part of it, that it becomes less stressful, we become more resilient. I wouldn't say more tolerant, but I would certainly say we are able to handle it better. And it still hurts. It's still hard. But knowing and accepting it's a part of life does make it different. I'm not going to say easier, just different. And then what do I have? I think one more healing starts as soon as you let it. The healing can begin as soon as you let it. That might just have to happen after all the stages of grief, but that's also part of the balance. I think when we bring that balance into our thoughts about death, our fears of it, our worries, our concerns about others, that we can also bring in some healing. Just like the loss of somebody in our life. And then we laugh at a joke the next day. It's not that we should feel bad for laughing. We should actually feel good for starting to heal in small ways. So I think I'm gonna leave it there. I feel good about that ending. And I appreciate you letting me tell some personal stuff today, letting me share some of my thoughts and some of my heart regarding this whole thing. Still trying to process it. But I appreciate you being there for me, listening. And thank you, Sam.