Some grief is loud. Some of it just quietly tags along behind you for thirty years, waiting for you to turn around.
Rebe Huntman turned around. Nick Gomez stopped running in a different direction entirely. Both episodes this week are about the moment you finally decide to stay.
WEDNESDAY: Rebe Huntman, Episode 247
Rebe lost her mother at 19. The advice was consistent and well-meaning: keep going, make her proud, move forward. She was very good at that advice. Three decades good. She built a dance company, raised a son, lived a full and capable life. But somewhere near 50, she realized she had never really let herself miss her mother. Not honestly. Not out loud.
What followed was a 30-day pilgrimage to Cuba, a country where the dead are not gone, where ancestors sit at the table and no one apologizes for it.
Here are three things from this conversation I keep coming back to.
Listen here: www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/s5e247
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THREE things to think about:
We can be too good at the advice we're given. Rebe was told to move forward and she did, brilliantly, for decades. But being skilled at moving on is not the same as healing. The question is not whether you kept going. It's what you kept carrying while you did.
A different culture can offer the permission your own could not. In Cuba, people didn't say "the spirit of my mother." They said "my mother." That small assumption of presence, that she is still here, still speaking, still at the table, unlocked something Rebe had been waiting 30 years to feel.
Staying with the hard thing is its own skill. Rebe talks about learning that to look away from death, from grief, from the messy, is to miss the mystery entirely. The discomfort of presence is also the doorway into meaning.
TWO things to ask yourself:
What are you moving past right now that might actually need you to stay in it for a while?
Who, living or gone, have you never let yourself fully miss?
ONE thing to try this week:
Place a photograph of someone you've lost somewhere visible. Once a day, say something to them out loud. It doesn't have to be poetic or meaningful. Just speak. Notice what shifts.
SUNDAY: Nicholas Gomez, Episode 248
Nick Gomez grew up fast, largely on his own from age eleven, in a world where what mattered was what people could see. That belief followed him into adulthood, into three relationships, each one ending the same way. But the third time, something changed. He didn't hide it. He sat across from the person he'd hurt and said it out loud. The relationship ended. Something quieter and more solid began.
Nick's episode drops Sunday. Find it at www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com.
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