Living With Loss: My Firsthand Experience

Nina Walsh hosts a podcast called Living with Love, where she discusses childhood grief. She shares facts about childhood grief, including that 5 million US children will experience the death of a parent or sibling by age 18. She also talks about the impact of COVID-19 on grief, with many people losing family members. Grief can have various effects, including developmental disruptions, substance abuse, mental health changes, and poverty. Nina shares her personal experience with grief, including the deaths of multiple family members and the impact it had on her mental health. She emphasizes the importance of taking grief day by day and finding ways to honor loved ones. Good morning, my name is Nina Walsh and thank you for joining me today for my first episode of my podcast called Living with Love, where I will talk about all these griefs, mainly childhood griefs. Well today, childhood griefs. So first, I'll start off giving you some facts about childhood griefs. Over 5 million U.S. children will experience the death of a parent or sibling by the time they are 18. One in five U.S. children are grieving the death of someone close to them. And these facts are from Experience Kansas, which is a group that helps with childhood griefs. The need to talk about grief. 54% of people struggle to find grief resources. 57% of those who lost a parent during childhood reported support from family members waning within three months, although it took an average of six years to move forward. Because we have been dealing with COVID and it has been killing people, killing a lot of people, we have dealt with more grief than ever as a nation. COVID has taken many family members from children, adults even, who have never dealt with grief have had to deal with grief because they have lost so many of their family members due to COVID. And here are some facts about COVID-19 and grief. For every 100,000 Americans who died from COVID-19, between 125,000 and 150,000 young people ages 10 to 29 will be impacted. Ages 10 to 29, these are people, grandparents, uncles, aunties, some even parents, who are losing at young ages. Some of these kids, the whole support system. Even 29, you're not a kid, but you still look towards your elders for guidance. COVID-19 related deaths of relatives who represent key sources of social support can fundamentally alter youth economic security and in turn, the success and timing of their transition to adulthood. Being in college, I've had a lot of friends who have lost a lot of people due to COVID. In my job, I know one of my coworkers, he has lost a lot of his family members due to COVID and grief is debilitating. Grief makes you lose your energy. Some people, everyone handles their grief in different ways and some people don't handle theirs as well as others. Some people show theirs more on the surface than others and some people just box it in and ignore it. Neither are good ways to cope, but no one can tell you just how to grieve and what's the correct way. Everyone has to go about it their own way. Potential impacts of childhood bereavement. Childhood grief is associated with developmental disruptions, including relationships, academic and career functioning. Substance abuse, mental health changes, including depression and suicide and poverty. Considering the fact that if you lose your support system, if you are young and you lose your mother, your father, the people that support you, they're gone and you have to find another source of support. Sometimes the sources of support are not as plentiful as others in these situations and it causes them to fall into a hole or fall into a pattern of failure and fall into depression or poverty because they do not have the support that they once had. Death has an intergenerational impact. Among adults who lost a parent when they were growing up, 39% said that when they became a parent, they missed having the guidance of the parent who died. 80% said the experience was the hardest thing they ever had to face. Okay, so I'm done with the facts. Right now, I would like to give you a first-hand experience of grief that I have dealt with. I am 24 years old and in my 24 years of life, I have experienced 6 of my family members dying. Well, 5, actually. I'm sorry. It was 5. The first one was when I experienced my first family member dying when I was about 7 or 8 years old. It was my cousin and he was murdered. And 2 years later, I had another cousin that was murdered. And I was so young that I did not understand what it meant at the time, but those life-altering situations changed my life. Life-altering, clearly I said it. So, that changed my life because we moved after those murders occurred because they happened near our family home. The biggest experience with grief was my mother passing away. Before my mother, it was my grandfather and I don't mean to sound insensitive, but it is expected when you become of a certain age that you are going to pass on. It is expected that if you are older and you are sicker that you will not live as long as others. So, my grandfather passing away was not really a surprise, but that didn't mean that it didn't hurt. My mother got sick in 2010. She had cancer, brain cancer and lung cancer and eventually it just spread to her whole body. She got diagnosed with stage 4. She lived for 3 years with stage 4 terminal cancer and the doctors were very surprised that it was very impressive that she lived for that long. After she was diagnosed, she immediately started radiation. I, as 10 years old, did not know that when my mother told us that she had terminal cancer that terminal cancer meant that it was probably going to kill her. She always tried to convince us and tell us that she was going to get through it. She always told us not to worry, not to worry about her. It was hard not to worry about her because I literally watched her just wilt away before my eyes. I have always thought of my mother as a flower and I literally just saw her lose all her life. It's about the cancer stuff that I got hurt month by month. It was very hard to deal with. My mother probably was the closest person to me ever. I did have a good relationship with my dad but not like the one that I had with my mom. After my mom, my cousin, my younger cousin, she went missing when she was 17 in Virginia. She was missing for about a week and a half before they found her body in a park about two miles from her house. She was murdered by her boyfriend. That was very hard to deal with. My mother was extremely hard to deal with but my cousin, another cousin, being murdered was even worse. That happened when I was 18 and I'm of the age where I understand how these things work now. This is like a page from a book that I read or a movie scene because I love watching crime shows and I always see the women in the abusive relationships and they never end well and I never thought that it could get so close to home until it happened to my cousin. Her name was Jolie Moussa. She had a twin. She was a twin. She was 17. Grief is in and out. People try to tell you that you'll get over it. Grief is not something that you get over. It's something that you learn to live with. Since I was 13, I've been in therapy for the passing of my mother because I did not react well to it. I fought a lot. I was angry at everyone and I took all my anger out on everyone around me who did not appease what I wanted. I didn't see the good that everyone was trying to do for me because I was so focused on the negative. I feel like when my mother died, I did let my personality die with her and that's something that people make the mistake of doing. When their loved ones die, they want to go with them. They want to just cry. It's okay to cry. It's okay to cry, but you just have to think about it. You're not crying for that person. You're crying for selfish reasons. You are sad, but you're crying because you can't do things with them. They're not in any pain anymore. They aren't suffering. They're having the time of their lives. My advice on dealing with grief would be to just take it day by day and to do things to honor your loved ones. Don't rush yourself. Don't rush yourself with things. Don't try to get over them because you will never get over them. Write down your feelings. Talk to people about how you feel. Do not keep your feelings bottled up. Even if you don't feel like you can talk to anyone about it, write them down. Time for a balloon and send them up to the sky and give your writing a letter to your loved ones that passed away. It's always a way to get through something. Not to say that it won't be hard because anything worth having is hard. Peace of mind, for example. Mental health, even. Another hard time experience. After my mother died, my personality completely changed. I went from being the book smart, the book nerd. I just used to read books all the time. I used to be so focused on my grades in school. But after my mother died and I transferred school, I was not the same person anymore because the pain changed me. I let the pain change my focus and steer me away from the path that I knew that I was destined to be on. Even being in college, I came to college to get away from home, to get away from being known as the girl whose mom died when she was 14. When I'm away in college, no one knows me. That's not my identifier because I don't have to divulge that information to anyone unless I get close to them and I want to tell them. But I came to college to get away from the memories of my mother. And they followed me because I did not deal with my feelings. My feelings of guilt or my feelings of sadness. I did not deal with them. I just boxed them in. And when I was 19, I had a nervous breakdown and I got sent to a mental facility. That was a whole different experience. That was something that... That was something that I would not wish on my worst enemy because that experience was terrible, but it was eye-opening. It was eye-opening, but it was terrible. While I was in there, after they had talked to me for about 30 minutes, they diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder and clinical depression. Clinical depression means that you will always be depressed. Just like my mother's cancer, it was going to kill her. They were diagnosing me that I will always be depressed. That kind of made me feel even more down about myself because it's like, how can you say this about me? And you've only talked to me for 10 minutes. Doctors. I don't feel like the therapy helped me. I don't feel like the doctors helped me. I feel like once you lose someone, you do have to go back and reinvent yourself without that person, especially if they were a vital part of your life. And that's exactly what I had to do. No diagnosis could help me. The diagnosis, all the diagnosis was for was so that they could get their money off of me. They could put me on pills and antidepressants. But I didn't take any of those. Well, they force you to take them while you're in there. But once I was let go, and I had to stay there for 10 days, but once I was let go, I did not take them because they did not make me feel like myself. I felt like a zombie and I just felt like it was another way of clouding my emotions so that I could not deal with them. Bottling your emotions is the worst thing that you can do. Because I didn't talk to anybody about how I was feeling, about my grief, it followed me into my adulthood. And I have noticed that I do have problems saving money. I do have problems lashing out at people. I do have problems controlling things. I have abandonment issues because a lot of my family members have died and I have just let it sit on me. Thank you for listening to my podcast. I hope that me telling you about my experiences can help someone just to know that you're not alone. Because I've done anything that you can think of. I tried to commit suicide when I was 15. So anytime that you feel alone or anytime that you think you just have the worst life, someone is going through the same thing that you're going through. It's just all about how you work through it. How you choose to work through it is the determining factor. Thank you.