This is the transcript for Grief Out Loud Ep. 354 When It's Not Your Fault Falls Flat - Grief & Guilt. Find the audio version here.
SPEAKERS
Jana DeCristofaro (host)
Sawyer (guest)
Jana 00:03
Hey listeners, it's Jana. Welcome back to Grief Out Loud. Today, May 28, is my 24th Dougy Center anniversary. 24 years since I began working at the organization that would start this show back in 2015. I'd love for you to celebrate with me. You could rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you could share an episode with someone else, and/or you can send me an email at griefoutloud@dougy.org and let me know how the show has impacted you. 24 years later, and it's still truly an honor to be able to witness grief in the support groups that I run and the conversations I get to have here on Grief Out Loud, and in reading each of the messages from listeners like you. So, thank you. Just a heads up that today's episode talks about suicide, so listen with care. If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out. You could dial 988 or text hello to 741 741. It seems fitting that this conversation is with someone who attended a group for young adults at Dougy Center. Sawyer and I met back in 2022 not long after their older brother Jason died of suicide, Sawyer is thoughtful and intentional in how they reflect on Jason's life, death, and the ongoing grief. Throughout it all, Sawyer challenges the standard individual-mental-health-struggle narrative that often surrounds suicide, and instead they center the ways that Jason's life and death were shaped by a lack of societal infrastructure, including incarceration, the stigma of reentry, lack of stable housing, and inadequate mental health support. Sawyer has so much to teach all of us, not just about loss, but about the power of having space to reckon with the guilt and regret that can show up when someone dies, and in particular when someone dies by suicide. I have no doubt you're going to learn a lot from listening. Okay, here's our conversation.
Sawyer, thanks for being part of the show.
Sawyer 02:24
Happy to be here.
Jana 02:26
What would you like to share with us about your brother, Jason?
Sawyer 02:30
My brother, Jason, was a lot older than me. He was 16 years older than me. In my mind, he was always part of the world, like I didn't experience the world without him. For a long time, he was like a constant to me, but he was an artist. Sometimes he like played guitar, but mostly he drew, and he was a really incredible illustrator. He really loved cars. He was a funny guy, he was like very weird, he was a strange guy. Yeah, but he was a lot older than me, so there is a lot of stuff I don't really have a sense for about him, but he loved me a lot.
Jana 03:14
Yeah, I think about older siblings, and usually if it's in like within a three or a four-year age difference, there can be a lot of closeness, but also a lot of contention or conflict, especially if folks are like in the same school at the same time, and with that such a big age range. What do you remember about your relationship, like when you were a kid, or when you were in middle school?
Sawyer 03:38
When I was a kid, he was in and out of the house, some. Right by the time I was two or three and starting to actually remember things, he was already 18/19, so sometimes he was living with us, sometimes he wasn't. It could be kind of a complicated thing. Unfortunately, a lot of the memories that I have there are kind of challenging, stressful ones. There was a lot of conflict. So it's a little tricky, like I have a sense that there were ways that things were good, and like I always knew that he loved me a lot, and I always loved him a lot, like he was always super important to me as my big brother, but a lot of kind of the specific memories that I have are not great.
Jana 04:40
Almost having to hold two things at the same time. Like not so much the concept of a relationship, but like the true nature of the relationship between the two of you was loving, and then there were just the tangible experiences of challenges and conflict as well.
What was happening in your life, when Jason died?
Sawyer 05:05
I was in college. I was a senior in college, so I was almost done. College had been kind of challenging for personal reasons, but also because I was a sophomore in 2020 and so the school kind of shut down, and everybody left, and we did a couple semesters of everything being hybrid. And then when I was a senior in 2021 to 2022, obviously COVID was still a really big concern, but there were ways that things were becoming less locked down, more normal for some people, and in that winter break, right in between the semesters, my last year of college was when he died. So right at the end of December 2021.
Jana 06:08
So a really pivotal time in your life, but also coming out of, but still in the midst of a lot of bigger picture tumult too in the world. And what was going on in Jason's life, when he died?
Sawyer 06:23
Well, he had been incarcerated for a long time. You asked kind of what my relationship was with him up to middle school, and when I was in middle school was when he went to prison. And there had been like short interactions with cops before that, but that was most of the time that I was in middle and high school, it was kind of in and out. Which is also part of why my relationship with him, like, I don't have a lot of memories, because unfortunately I just didn't get a lot of that time with him when I was a teenager. So in the year before he died, that previous summer, or maybe the spring before, he was finally out, and it seemed like maybe out in a longer-term way, which was for me very exciting, that we were going to get to spend more time together, that I was an adult, and so I could get to know him that way. The last time that I saw him was July 2021 and then during that whole year he was unhoused and kind of living in the motel voucher system that Vermont has, so I think he was going through some very challenging stuff, looking for work, dealing with stigma and mental health stuff. He dealt with a lot of very challenging mental health and social things throughout his whole life. Things had been bad, and then they kind of were spiraling and getting worse leading up to when he died. And he died by suicide, it's not like things were all good.
Jana 08:26
What, if anything, feels important for this conversation to share around the context of Jason's death?
Sawyer 08:36
I think a lot of the...I think the way a lot of people conceptualize suicide is very much like an individual mental health struggle, and I think a lot of the time, and certainly in Jason's case, it was not, in my opinion, a like isolated, this is just someone who's struggling a lot. It was very much in the context of having dealt with his whole life, just not having the amount of support, sometimes not just support, but like active mistreatment in the school system. In a lot of the contexts that he was in, socially, little to no mental health support, and if it was there, it was not good. And then having been incarcerated and having all these really negative experiences throughout that. And then getting out and not having support and not being able to get a job because of all this stigma that exists. And not having good stable housing that felt safe. And not having money. Like people know after even if the rest of your life is good, if you have a couple days where you don't sleep well and you don't get enough to eat, you feel pretty bad, and then to have that magnified by 1000. So it's really hard for me to see his death as just this individual tragedy where somebody was just dealing with the thing that was solely internal. I think his death was very much situated socially and economically and politically in a way that suicide maybe isn't always recognized to be.
Jana 10:49
Do you have a sense, Sawyer, with that, like a deeper understanding of the societal context and the contributions that are so much more than just an individual's experience-that the individual experience is rooted in those bigger picture contexts...How did that shape your grief?
Sawyer 11:10
I was, and still, still am, but especially for the first year or two, I was really angry, and not so much in the way that happens for a lot of people with suicide, where there's an anger at the person. But I just really felt like the circumstances he had been put in for so much of his life were really unfair. And the way that he was treated was really unfair. And I was very angry and bitter that the system functions the way that it does. Yeah.
Jana 12:00
Was that mirrored by other people in your family, or were you kind of alone in that reaction?
Sawyer 12:08
I don't think I was alone in that. I think that that was shared. I think my sister and my mom were also feeling that. I also felt not just that way about his death, but about the fact that I had been denied all of these years with him. Like not only is it causing me to lose out on any potential future relationship, I also didn't get to know him at all when I was in high school. I didn't see him for years. I just totally missed that-he didn't get to come to my high school graduation, and I was very angry in a general like this, just all feels so unfair kind of existential way. But then also in a very specific frustration with the carceral system and the way that mental health stuff functions, and all of it.
Jana 13:15
You mentioned your high school graduation, and then you were facing another graduation without your brother, and I just wonder if you wanted to share a little bit about what it was like to have him die just before you're heading into the last jaunt of your college career.
Sawyer 13:34
Yeah, he, so he died right at the end of December, on December 28, 2021. I was in Vermont, where I was with my mom, and that's where he lived when it happened. I was there for winter break, and then my plane ticket to go back to Oregon for college was, I think, on like the seventh or the ninth, it was, it was really close, and I didn't end up rescheduling it. I went right back, and it had been maybe a week and a half, and then a week or two after that, I started this last semester of college, and I was writing my thesis, and I was seeing the people around me start to have some relative normalcy, a couple years into COVID. I just didn't get to have it at all. I don't feel like I got to enjoy that last semester, whatever, really, at all, I had been very excited to write my thesis. It was going to be hard, no matter what. That's a hard thing to do. And instead of getting to feel any of those kind of big deal things-that whole semester was just absolutely dominated by the grief. He had been really excited to see me graduate high school, or not high school, high school too, but college. He dropped out of high school fairly early, and he was always so impressed that I did well in school, that I finished high school, that I went to college. He was really excited and really proud of me. And I was.. it was going to be hard to get him out there. It's going to be complicated, but I was really looking forward to having him there and having him see me do that. So that last semester was so, so, so difficult, and the classes I was taking were a class about illness, where we did a whole, like, unit of it on grief, a class about mass incarceration, and then I was writing my thesis, so that was pretty brutal,
Jana 16:07
Not at all activating or bringing anything up in your experience.
Sawyer 16:12
No, definitely not. Yeah, though, honestly, in some ways I think that it ended up being I don't know if, like, for the best is right, but I was going to be thinking and talking and writing about it all the time anyway, like it was the only thing I could really think about, so the fact that I could do that and then also have that be my classwork was helpful in some ways. And one of the classes that I was taking about mass incarceration, the professor was really fantastic and really aligned with how I think about the carceral system, so it was nice to be in a room every week where I knew that the professor and also all the other people around me in the classroom were thinking about and talking about people like Jason as real, full, complicated people. That was actually very meaningful to me, even though sometimes I found the class really activating,
Jana 17:24
But in a sense it was in alignment with what you were already, what was already swirling around for you, and then to have a more nuanced understanding reflected back to you versus maybe what you might encounter if you were talking to a random person about Jason and his life and his death.
Sawyer 17:43
Yeah, and I will say...I feel like the stuff that the Dougy Center puts out, people always want to know, what should I say, what should I say to somebody, which is an impossible question to answer. But I remember emailing this professor just a couple days after Jason died, and I had met her maybe once before, didn't know her well. But I sent her an email to say, “hey, this thing just happened to me. Also, my brother was incarcerated for a long time, so I think I'm going to have some challenges in the class. Just wanted to give you a heads up”. And the email she sent me back started, “Sawyer, this knocked the wind out of me” and I was like, I remember it word for word, because I think of everything anybody said to me, that's the thing that has stuck with me most, and it landed really well, I think, because as a response it clearly came from a very genuine place, but also from a place not just of acknowledging that I was in pain, or like feeling sorry that I was in pain, but in like taking on the physical experience of that pain with me, so I think about that a lot.
Jana 19:16
I have never heard that as like a first line that someone might say. I might have to co-opt and use it moving forward, because I was thinking about it, really it finds this middle ground between not centering myself as the person who's hearing the news, but also that it impacted me, but not in a way that now, like, the attention's on me. Speaking of things people say, were there other experiences you've had when you've shared about Jason or about his death that haven't landed as kindly or as well?
Sawyer 19:55
I actually feel like I've been pretty lucky in that there has been very few-I don't feel like people have said anything super whack to me, except the guy who worked at the funeral home, who said something that this guy said the craziest thing to me and my mom. We had just seen Jason's body. We were at the end of this like absolute nightmare of a day. We went to, I think, officially identify, but also just see his body and after we did that, obviously it's an extremely emotional thing. We come out and the guy who ran the funeral home gave us the bag of his personal effects, and said...it's not funny, but in retrospect, like, I laugh about it every time I talk about it. He was like, “you know, I'm one of the only people that's seen his body, because I prepared him”... He wasn't like embalmed or anything, but just like cleaned him up, got him ready to be seen. “I'm one of the only people who's seen him, and you know, he was really determined. He was really determined, like he tried everywhere he could”, which I think is a crazy thing to say. Yeah,
Jana 21:27
What? How did you and your mom respond to that?
Sawyer 21:30
I don't even think that we did, like we were both just so completely fried from this day of getting all of his things, and we had this really terrible day where we found out on a Wednesday night, state troopers showed up, told us that he had died. Thursday, I do not remember any of. And then Friday...I might have the days of the week off, but there was one day that I fully don't remember. And then that like second day we woke up at 5o'clock in the morning because my cousin, who was staying with us, called and she had gotten in a car crash. She was okay, but we went, and we spent a few hours dealing with that. And then we came home, and then we got a call from the motel where he had been staying, and they said, "Hey, the timing with the people who were supposed to come clean and get his stuff didn't work out, so either you come get his stuff today before the motel room has been cleaned, or all of it goes in the dumpster”. And it's, I mean, two hours away, so we're like, okay, let's go, and we drive down there, and we're dealing with all of his stuff in this motel room, and there's a lot of blood, and then we deal with that, and it's awful, and then we drive up to the funeral home, and we see his body, and have this bizarre interaction.
Jana 23:11
That seems both surreal...Yeah, I don't know, I just imagine being very out of body while all that is happening.
Sawyer 23:20
Yeah, no, it was really, it was really, really bizarre. Is the only thing I can think to say about, like, I wonder what was going through his head. But yeah, overall, actually, I feel like I've been pretty lucky. People have not said anything super weird to me about suicide. Um, yeah.
Jana 23:40
Speaking of that, when you meet new people and you decide to share about Jason and his life and his death, what feels important to you when you have those conversations? Like, what do you lead with, or what do you want to make sure somebody leaves understanding?
Sawyer 24:00
I don't know that I necessarily think about it in those terms when I'm talking to people about it, like I'm not thinking so much about what they're leaving the conversation with, but I am pretty open about the fact that I have a brother who died, and I'm pretty open about the fact that it was a suicide too. I don't feel any shame or judgment around that. If other people around me feel that way about suicide, that's fully their problem. And I don't know if it's just because, like, I have been lucky to not be in a lot of environments where suicide is super heavily stigmatized, or because I had been dealing with my own mental health stuff for so long that I've kind of gotten used to it, but yeah, I don't know that I think that much about what people are leaving the conversation with. I do think a lot about being open about death and grief, and that being normal. Like it's not-it doesn't feel normal to experience, but it is a normal part of being a person. I like, I guess, being able to normalize those conversations, and I hope that people leave with some little amount more openness to talking about death and grief. And I know to some extent that that has been effective, because I have a good friend, we were work friends, and then we started hanging out outside of work a couple months ago. Someone she was very, very close to died also by suicide, and she reached out to me, and even though she has friends she's known a lot longer, knows better, she told me she specifically had reached out to me because she knew that I had this similar experience. So that made me feel pretty good about the fact that I've been so open with it. I don't think anything's ever going to be worth having had Jason die, but if there's anything that is going to feel meaningful, I think it's that. I think it's being able to do that person for other people in my life.
Jana 26:32
Can we talk about guilt? I feel like that's a big topic when it comes to having someone die, and then particularly if somebody dies of suicide. I feel like guilt ends up being in that realm. And what was your experience with guilt early on, and over time?
Sawyer 26:51
Yeah, I think, like a lot, maybe most people who deal with suicide grief, guilt around things that happened in our relationship and ways that I didn't show up, all of it was pretty big for me, and still is in a lot of ways. And I feel like a lot of the messaging around suicide grief, if you are googling around, or you know, whatever, a lot of it is, “it's not your fault, it's not your fault” messaging, which I think is true and good. I think it is important for that to be part of the messaging people are getting, and I think it didn't do that much for me at a certain point. Because I would, I spent a long time feeling like I was going in this circle, either talking to my therapist or just in my head thinking, you know, there are these things that I feel really bad about, and then also holding, you know, some of those things happened when I was like 17/18, into, you know, 21. I was dealing with some very challenging situations with not a lot of knowledge, without all of the tools I was doing truly what I could with what I knew at the time and that is like true and important, and that on its own didn't resolve, still feeling like this immense guilt and pain, and it got very tiring. I just kind of felt like I was on trial with myself all the time, like I was defending myself against this feeling all the time, and that got really tiring. And then maybe a year and a half in, I had this moment one day where I was thinking about that stuff, and just thought, God, I did a bad job sometimes, and then didn't go to defend against that, just like let it ride, because that's true. There are ways that I showed up or didn't show up in our relationship that I really regret. And I think I didn't do them as well as I could have, or wish that I had, and just focusing on, “well, that's not my fault”, doesn't really leave a lot of space for that. And I think that in some ways, you know, one of the big rules at Dougy is like we are not giving unasked for advice or like making judgments of the way that somebody is thinking or feeling about something. And in a very sneaky little way, “it's not your fault” is actually telling someone how they should feel about it. You shouldn't feel guilty about it. So I guess you could parse that out as like regret can be separated from guilt, but can feel pretty similar. So, in some ways, yeah, it's been really useful for me to just acknowledge that there might be things that I like, regret and feel bad about for maybe forever, because I don't get to finish that cycle of rupture and repair. I don't get to take accountability within our relationship and do repair work. Those conflicts are just there forever. Things had gotten really challenging with him in the several months before he died, and he was kind of escalating into this conspiracy theory space. He wasn't always super grounded in reality, and I didn't really know how to deal with that, and I was trying to finish college, and I was like, I can't deal with this right now. Once I finish the semester, then I'll have time, and then I'll get into it with him. And then, of course, didn't...was not able to do that. And then a few months later, realized, like, went in to look at our old texts and realized, like, I had muted his contact, and so you know, realizing that in the last few months before he died, I was like not looking at his texts feels pretty terrible, and that's going to continue to be true, and to kind of try to shut down any thinking on that, with like, well, it's not my fault, it's just not useful to me anymore.
Jana 32:27
You know, Sawyer, I've thought a lot about the distinction between regret and guilt when it comes to grief, but I've never, until this moment, thought about the idea that that push of ‘it's not your fault’, which I think oftentimes people are trying to say, like, the fact that that person died of suicide is not your fault, but that doesn't give you the opportunity to really wrestle with or reckon with the things or decisions we've made in our relationships with other people that maybe we do regret or would want to repair if we had the opportunity to. And it's I just think of it like if you shut the door against the wind, and the wind just keeps blowing and blowing up, you have to work so hard to try to keep that door shut, and you don't let any air flow through, versus if you just let it open, let the door open and open the other window, like the wind can blow through your house, and you can take from that what you need or want in the moment, versus just trying to close against it.
Sawyer 33:22
Yeah.
Jana 33:23
So, yeah, I appreciate I always learn something when I'm talking to you, but there's a new thing that I'm, you know, and again, you mentioned the word nuance a couple times, and I think that is so true when it comes to any type of grief, but also in particular talking about when someone dies of suicide, there's so much nuance there. How about your grief in general, which I know encompasses so many different emotions and physical reactions and spiritual reactions, like all the whole thing of grief. How did that change for you over time?
Sawyer 33:56
I mean, in the first few days and weeks and months, it was very intense and very all of the time, and like it just felt very physical all the time. I remember trying to talk to my thesis advisor and telling her that part of my brain was just not accessible to me for doing any kind of like reading or writing or whatever, like part of my brain was just not there. And that was very challenging and very painful, and that initial intensity went down over time. I would say for the first couple years it still felt very recent. It still felt, feels relatively recent, and it's been, what, four and a half years? And I still occasionally have moments where it's like at its most intense, you know, it's just as intense as it was day one. But they're shorter and fewer and further between, and that has just kind of, they've become less frequent as time has gone on, you know. It went from being like every single minute to every day to it's happening, you know, a few times a month, to now I feel like I think about him every day, but I don't have those, like, really, really intense, like, grief attacks very often anymore. And in some ways that's kind of weird. It's weird to have it be a normal part of my life, because it isn't...It doesn't feel right and normal to have my brother not be here. But also the whole past four and a half years of my life have been this, and so, like, it is normal to how my day-to-day life is. So that's been interesting to navigate. I also think something that I struggle with is because I didn't have a lot of time with him, I kind of ran out of memories to share pretty quickly. That's just not going to change. I'm not, you know, I've told my partner everything there is to tell about him, and had pretty shortly after he died. There's not like I'm going to be doing something one day, and I say, oh man, like this reminds me of this thing that happened with Jason that I haven't... I've thought of all of it. I.. I'm not.. I don't.. I mean, maybe, but I really don't think at this point that I'm going to remember new things, and I don't get to build any new memories. That's very, very hard.
Jana 37:26
It makes me think I talked to someone a couple years ago who was really young when their dad died, and so they had very limited number of memories as well, and they found themselves in this space of having new life experiences and bringing the memory of their dad into that new life experience and imagining like what it would be like if he was here and what he would say and what he would do. Even though I mean they're having to speculate because obviously you know they don't know for sure. And I just wondered if you ever find yourself in those experiences of bringing Jason into something new that you're doing? And I, and I think about that specifically, you know, you went on a road trip a while back, and you had, like, bought a car, and that was a big deal, because Jason was so into cars, and I, I just was thinking about that.
Sawyer 38:19
Yeah, man, how could I start the episode saying what he was like and not say he was a car guy?
Jana 38:25
You did at the beginning,
Sawyer 38:26
Did I? Yeah, like I talked about him being an artist. I don't remember if I talked about him being a car guy, but he, he totally was. He was great at fixing cars. He was always like buying a clunker and working on it, sometimes leaving in the yard. But yeah, he also would draw cars a lot, that was in his art, and we have all these sketchbooks, he drew so many cars, and sometimes he would take his sketchbook, and he would go to car shows, like vintage car shows, and he would sketch people's cars, and they would be like, "Whoa”, and buy the car sketches from him, because they were so good and detailed and unique. But yeah, I went on this road trip, and I drove all the way to Vermont, and went on my own, and it was an incredible experience that was last summer. And I really wanted to feel connected to him in that, and I was really hoping that I would, and I think that I did to some degree, but I was also just so focused on the actual day to day, like it's hard to drive for that many hours a day and to spend that much time alone and be camping and doing all that stuff. And I think that I was so focused on just the actual experience of doing it, that in the moment it didn't necessarily feel so much like I was having this big emotional growth or connection to him, which was a little bit disappointing. But I still, I think he would have thought it was very cool that I did that, and would have been excited to hear about it. I think maybe in retrospect it makes me feel a little bit more connected to him than I did actually at the time. It wasn't like I was driving and like thinking about him being in the passenger seat, like I wanted to, but it's always been very hard for me to try to imagine having a conversation with him, because I don't have that much to build from.
Jana 40:49
It makes me think about how, like, the grief itself is so unpredictable. You know, you mentioned the grief attacks, and how, you know, over time the intensity and the duration and the frequency of them has changed, but oftentimes there's not a lot of patterning to that. They just kind of come when they come, and I also think about that from the perspective of wanting to have these more connecting experiences or profound experiences in our grief, and that we don't have a lot of control over that either. Frustrating and disappointing that can be.
Sawyer 41:17
Yeah.
Jana 41:20
Looking back, Sawyer, or even current day, what would you say has been helpful for you in your grief?
Sawyer 41:30
Well, I'm not just saying this because I'm on the podcast but I went to Dougy Center groups for three and a half years, and starting when I was, what, maybe five months out, and just until this past October. And that kind of peer connection and dedicated space, I knew, okay, like every two weeks I'm going to get to go and just spend an hour and a half where it's really just committed to that. Yeah, having that space, and I think the fact that it was age specific was very useful to me in that so much of the stuff I was dealing with, especially at first, was about having this disconnection from my peers and the way that it messed up my college experience and feeling really pretty bitter about that. So yeah, peer support, I mean, I really do love the Dougy Center model. And then kind of in a similar vein, I went on this backpacking trip with another youth and young adult grief organization, Wild Grief in Washington, and they do these hiking and backpacking trips for children and young adults and families, I think, kind of a same target demographic to Dougy Center, that are totally free, and it's a relatively small group, and the guides are all people who are really skilled at facilitating this stuff, and it's the whole point is just that being outside and peer support are two of the most important things for a lot of people, which was definitely true for me. And actually that kind of moment of clarity that I had that really freed me from a lot of that like intense guilt rumination was the last day of that trip. Just spending a few days in the woods, a couple days just out there, kind of having it all turning over in my brain was what got me to that. After months of just kind of stagnating and feeling like, well, maybe this is just how it feels forever. I would say those are the things I wouldn't say that I feel lucky in any of it, because it's like an inherently pretty terrible thing. But you know, if I'm going to go through this, having had access to the Dougy Center and Wild Grief, and this really skilled, structured peer support was a very big deal for me. Yeah.
Jana 44:29
Yeah, appreciating, like, the peer support element, the being outside element, the consistency of it, you know, makes me think it's like it's your every two week grief workout, you know, you're going to have an opportunity to do, and that folks, especially in the age range that you were in at the time, that 18 to 25, there's so many things happening in people's lives, so many big transitions and milestones that it can be challenging to feel like there is that dedicated time and space for grief, especially when your peers are not always, but usually not in the same place.
Sawyer 45:02
Yeah, I will say the other things that I found helpful, outside of that kind of that professional grief support world, my partner was just so, so wonderful. I think we weren't even...our relationship was in kind of an odd spot, and nonetheless they like completely showed up, and in the first few days, I mean, they were just like on the phone with me for hours and hours every day, because I was in Vermont, and they were out here in Oregon, and then when I got back, they came and just spent a huge amount of time at the apartment, and they were the person in my life who had at least related experiences of having lost people in their life. And then my other roommates, who were two of my closest friends, had not been through anything like that, and didn't you know, necessarily try to fake that they knew what it was like, but they wanted to learn, you know, and I think kind of took cues from my partner, but also just would let me talk about it a lot, and nobody was getting on my case about doing chores, like nobody was. They were taking out the trash when it was my turn. They were giving me a lot, a lot of slack on other ways that I was not, you know, necessarily being a great roommate or a great friend, and the fact that I was not also having to deal with that other stuff was so helpful. So, if people are wondering, like, what can I do, I don't know how to talk to somebody about grief, like maybe you don't have to talk to them about grief, maybe you are doing their laundry.
Jana 47:02
Come take out the trash, that is the summary statement of this conversation that we've had today. Come take out their trash. But you know just recognizing how important is that logistical support and the lack of pressure to be able to perform at a certain level, I think is so valuable for people, whether it's at home with chores or at school with projects or work, or whatever other obligations people have in their lives, and how rare it is to have that space where you don't have to be how you were before, because we won't ever be how we were before, and especially in those first days, weeks, months, and even early years of grief.
Sawyer 47:42
Yeah, my mom, I remember in the first couple days after Jason died, my mom had also, when she was in her early 20s, her brother died, and we talked about that some. But I had this moment where I was just like I don't feel like I'm even the same person, like I don't feel like I'm the same person that I was two days ago, and I was struggling a lot with that. And you know, I said that to her, and I was expecting her to say, like, you're still you, whatever, because I think with a lot of difficult things, it's like people go through hard stuff, but there's still them. So I was kind of expecting that, but no, I was like, I don't even feel like I'm the same person, and she was like, “you're kind of not, you're kind of a different person now”. I think that's very true and was especially meaningful from her having had that kind of analogous experience.
Jana 48:48
That kind of took my breath away a little bit, because it's, it's something most people live into in their grief, but to have someone say that so plainly to you, right at the beginning, that I can imagine there would be some like, whoa, what, no, that's not what I was hoping to hear, and also validation for when that ends up being true.
Sawyer 49:08
Yeah, and it was exactly the right thing for me to hear. I wasn't expecting it, and couldn't have known it was the right thing, but I really appreciated her saying that.
Jana 49:21
Sawyer, I have deep appreciation for you for all that you've shared with me about Jason and about your grief in the years that we've known each other, but especially today for this conversation for the podcast. Thank you for being willing to be so open with me and with our listeners.
Sawyer 49:38
I was ready to close, and it was time, and I also miss coming to Dougy Center, so it's really nice to be on the call and chat and have a dedicated time to talk about it, because I don't, I don't talk that much about it, and I don't actively think that much about it all the time anymore.
Jana 49:59
Well, if you ever want to come back for part two, just let me know. We can have another conversation. So, listeners out there, you know, I thank you each and every single time for being part of our community, for sharing the show with people, for contacting me, and letting me know what the show has meant to you. So, if you'd like to do that, you can email me at griefoutloud@dougy.org that's D O U G Y dot O R G. That's our main website, and that's where you'll find our free downloadable resources, all the information about our local programming, including our groups for young adults. And if you are interested in learning more about how to be supportive to someone else in their grief, we have a series of online classes you can take now that are self-paced, it's our learning management system. So, just head to our website, and you can learn more about those courses there. I'm always excited to share that the podcast is sponsored in part by the Chester Stephan Endowment Fund. Grief Out Loud is a production of Dougy Center, the National Grief Center for Children and Families in Portland, Oregon. Thanks so much for listening. Hope you'll join us again next time.