As we approach Mother’s Day, today’s episode is a heartfelt tribute to the unseen journeys of grief, healing, and connection. Our special guest, Jasmine Burch, offers a powerful perspective that’s often left unspoken—the experience of losing a parent as a child. At just 21 years old, Jasmine has turned her personal pain into wisdom, using journaling, community, and open conversation to navigate grief and find her voice. In this deeply moving conversation, she shares how she went from bottling up her feelings to building a supportive space—first online, and now through the Widowhood community. Whether you’ve experienced loss or love someone who has, this episode will open your heart and give you the words you’ve been longing to hear. Let’s step into the Widowhood with Jasmine.

I am sharing my experience of loving the same man for 32 years, a mother to two adult children, a retired military officer, a breast cancer survivor, and my connections with others. 

Anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should reach out to a suicide hotline or local emergency number in their country: Psychology Today Suicide Hotlines and Prevention Resources Around the World.

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A Journey Of Healing Through Motherless Mother’s Days With Jasmine Burch

Our guest Jazzy is a special guest for this episode close to Mother’s Day. You are going to learn a lot from this young lady. She is going to share the perspective from a child losing a parent, and provide helpful tips that you long to hear. Let’s get into this conversation now.

Jazzy, welcome to the Widowhood. When you hear, “Welcome to the Widowhood,” if I could see the ticker tape going across your forehead, what were your first thoughts?

My first thoughts originally, because I have before and then now, being more immersed into it, when I first heard about it, I thought widowhood was just for people who have lost spouses. For a while there I was like, “I don’t know if I fit into this.” After being a part of it more and being part of conversations, I think it’s important for everyone in their grief. I haven’t been married, I haven’t lost a spouse, but everyone has grieved someone and to be able to talk about it with other people is a really cool experience because sometimes you don’t have anyone to relate to that. It’s a very big difference from when I first heard about it until now.

Okay. Thank you. That means it goes in line with what our intention was. I’m from Chicago, so hood to me means more family and that connection. When my husband passed and I became a widow, my children lost a parent, their brothers lost a sibling, the nieces and nephew lost an uncle. Even though the widow or widower may be the focus of the conversation, everybody else is involved in that. When we do come together and share our different versions of loss from that same person, I don’t know. Tell me what it creates for you when you hear different people talk about that.

The Importance Of Community In Grief

I think finding a community when you are grieving is super important because with grief itself it’s super easy to get caught in the super dark place and it’s really hard to get yourself out of it. If you have people who relate, even if it’s not the exact same way as you, if you have people you can talk to and who can understand things in a different perspective than you, it can really be super eye-opening. It also helps you within yourself because you’re like, “I don’t feel so alone in this. I don’t feel I have to bottle it up so that I don’t bug other people with it,” or at least that’s how it is for me.

No, you make a common statement. How did you go from not being bottled up and feeling you were bothering people to start talking about the person you love and who is the person you love and what is their name?

The person I love is my mom. Her name is Dawn. I never talked about my grief. It wasn’t ever something that I thought I could talk about because the adults in my life were never able to be at a place where they could talk about it. We could say her name in passing, we could talk about certain things here or there, but the general topic of her and grief in general just was off the table completely.

It wasn’t until I came on tiktok and I found other people that I connected to that I felt super comfortable around. In being in those lives, I got connected to you and I didn’t realize how many people were currently grieving people they’ve lost. While it’s not in the same sense of like they lost a parent, most of the time, a lot of it was I finally have people that if I feel the need to say something because it’s been bugging me because it’s been on my chest at the top of my head.

I don’t have to feel the need to shove it back down because now I have people I can talk to. I have people that you know won’t shut me down every single time I say I feel sad or I don’t know how to describe how I’m feeling. It’s a nice feeling to know I don’t have to go to my journals every two seconds to talk about it. I can talk to other people.

You said a lot there. How old were you when your mother Dawn left this world?

I was 8 going on 9 because she passed the month before my 9th birthday.

I have so much I want to ask you but let me slow down a little bit. Going back to being able to connect and community, how has that impact your grief?

It feels a big weight has been lifted off of my shoulders and the more that I’m in these conversations and around people that I can talk about it with, the weight gets lighter and lighter. For the longest time, it was so heavy and it was something that I desperately wanted to understand to talk about it with other people to get a deeper understanding of it but I never could.

Having a community of people to talk to about it with, I’m like, “Okay, I don’t have to deal with this alone.” I may be in some senses feel super alone with it in my real life, but I know that when it comes to support and love and community, there are people I can go to, which I never really had until I was nineteen.

You say real life. Do you only connect with these people on social media or do you connect with them outside of social media? What does that mean?

When I say real life, I’m talking about people that I see on a day-to-day basis. There’s no one in my immediate family with my friends, maybe a couple. Other than that, it’s not something we truly decide to talk about just because it’s so heavy for us individually that sometimes, when you talk about it together, it feels even heavier. When I say real life, most of these people I did meet online and so if I’m going through it and with the people in my real life, physical life, I guess, I can get on my phone and I can message or call anyone. I can get on a live and that’s when I can truly talk about things in a sense.

Thank you for sharing that. Oftentimes, people feel like, “If I talk about it, I’m going to make it worse. If I talk about it, then it’s going to be present. If I talk about it, I’m afraid that I’ll never be able to pull myself up from my sadness.” When you hear statements that, what does that look for you?

That’s how I thought for the longest time, that if I acknowledged it, if I talked about it, sometimes, even I even think thought about it, it’s there, it’s not going away. I can’t ignore it anymore and it’s going to weigh me down. After pushing it down for so long and refusing to talk about it, actually talking about it helped a lot because you’re no longer bottling it up. You’re allowing yourself to feel your feelings and figure out what those feelings are and how it’s affecting you.

Your mental is very connected to your physical. If you’re not taking care of yourself mentally, your physical is going to follow that and you’re going to suffer more physical things because your mental is struggling and vice versa. After bottling it up, talking about it helped a lot and I get the fear of that but also at the same time, if you never face it and you never talk about it, then you’re never going to be able to heal per se.

Very wise words from she who is 21. You spoke earlier about journaling. When I think of someone your age, I think of more of a diary, but you used the term journal, do those mean the same thing to you? If not, how do they differ?

It used to mean the same thing when I first started journaling because when I did it, I was 8, 9, 10 years old. I didn’t know what journaling per se was. Everyone just had these diaries that they wrote in. For a while, I thought journaling and diaries were the exact same thing. Now that I journal a whole lot more than I used to and it’s become an everyday part of my schedule, I guess you would say, for me, a diary is like you’ll put a little entry here or there.

You’ll talk about how you’re feeling and maybe you’ll reflect on it later. Journaling in itself could mean literally anything. It could be a jump journal, it could be writing quotes down that motivate you. It could be daily affirmations. There’s so much that can go into journaling that saying journaling and diaries are the same thing. They are not. I don’t know how to explain it.

The Power Of Journaling & Its Therapeutic Role

No. You talk about journaling, there’s different options. Can you expand more on that? When you say journaling, can you show me maybe one of your journals or what that looks? You talked about journaling for a while.

You just made me so excited to talk about journaling. I have a whole section of my little bookshelf dedicated for my journals and the way I do journaling, I have a very different purpose for basically every single journal I have. This journal, I’ve had it since I was, I want to say eight. It went with me for dance trips. It was with me for everything. I don’t write in it often. It’s one that I use every so often and it’s just things that I deem super important.

This was when I was trying parts of my high school experience, important parts of my college experience and now it’s where I put my favorite grief poems I guess you would say. I have other ones where certain ones are just daily affirmations, certain ones are just for quotes I found. I do have a junk journal. I can’t figure out where that is at the moment.

What is a junk journal? I don’t know what’s a junk journal.

A junk journal is basically you take things from your everyday life say a fortune from a fortune cookie or a receipt or a picture that you took at a fair. It could even be a napkin or a wrapper or something and you just tape them to a page and it turns into a collage and it’s a reflection of that day or that week. It doesn’t even have to be writing. It is literally just little mementos from the day or week or whatever to reflect back on and say like, “I remember this day.” It’s simultaneously therapeutic but also really good to look back on to say, “I didn’t feel writing this day but I decided to do this,” and that was my alternative.

You have just explained the journaling is just not one particular book that you’re writing in. That can be across different books for different subjects and different events in life. You’ve been journaling since eight. If you were to guess how many journals you’ve used, how many would it be?

There’s stuff it in a box right here that are used.

Can we see them? Sometimes the aesthetics of the journal is also part of the process.

This is one of my poetry journals. It’s completely filled. I keep it in here because it’s one of my more full ones, I guess you would say. This one’s another filled poetry journal and I learned later on how to make it more organized. I have a little cheat sheet at the front.

A table of contents right there.

I can honestly say this journal was from one of the worst times I think I’ve ever had in my life. I wrote in it a lot for my mental back then, but it’s one I keep but I never open for memory’s sake. I don’t want to remember how I felt, but I’m glad that younger me or me at the time felt it was important to write it here.

These ones are just like little journals that I filled up and I ran out of pages and this was supposed to be a travel journal. I don’t know. I used it for another purpose. If I were to say how many I’ve completed since I was 8, I want to say well over 40. A lot of them got lost or they were thrown away or something when we were cleaning. I want to say well over 40.

Grief As A Process Of Love

Thank you for sharing that in. If someone were to say what does grief mean to you, how would you respond to that?

I’m a psych student. I have the technical term but then I also have the emotional term. For me, honestly, grief is the process of understanding the love you have for the person that’s gone is that you love them but there’s no place for that love to go because it’s stuck within you because they’re no longer physically here.

You go through the five stages of grief and you feel all the feelings and however that process looks for you. At the end of the day, grief isn’t a bad thing, it’s just something everyone deals with in some form or fashion. For a lot of people, that’s with people that were important to them. For me, that’s my mom and I’m forever going to grieve her. At the end of the day I know that my grief for her is just my love that I have for her that I can’t physically tell her because she’s no longer physically here.

Your mother Dawn leaving at such a young age, how has that formed your life or been a part of your daily experience that you feel other people with parents are not experiencing?

For a lot of my childhood, I felt very left out of a lot of things. It wasn’t even events or physical things per se. It was just the emotional experiences a lot of people had. Yeah, I lost my mom, but I also didn’t have my dad. People were having these little shopping dates with their parents or even comes to the holidays and they were with their family but my family never really felt complete after she died. It was I want to experience these things but I know I can never experience these things.

The Impact Of Losing A Parent On Identity

I think that also when you’re young and it’s your most informative years, it is such a big time in your life to figure out your identity for yourself and figure out who you are. If you lose one of those key parental figures, finding your identity for yourself is extremely difficult because questions you’re supposed to ask them, things they’re supposed to know that they’re supposed to help you with, they’re not there anymore. For me, I had to either run to someone else or figure it out on my own. A lot of my most informative years was literally just trying to figure out who I am because I didn’t have those stepping stones to figure that out, if that makes sense.

It makes a lot of sense. How have you been navigating that? You went into high school, TMI, started your menstrual, started dating, now 21, your parents are not there. If someone were to bump into you on the street, “She seems she’s a fine, healthy, well-developed girl.” What are the things that people don’t know about your struggle and how you’ve been trying to fill that gap?

I think a big thing, especially since I turned 21, is this overwhelming feeling of like there is a lot of things that I really don’t know and the one person I want to ask isn’t here to help me with this. I know for prom specifically, that was a day I had looked forward to for forever, but I looked forward to it with my mom. Going to prom and graduating but not being able to experience that with her, I was like, “This is supposed to be an amazing night.”

By all means it is an amazing night, but there is something missing here and I know exactly what it is but if I try to explain that to other people, they simply won’t understand. I feel for a lot of the biggest milestones in my life, as exciting as they were, as big as they were, whatever feelings I was feeling, overall, there was a feeling of emptiness at some point too because the person I wanted to experience that with, the person I wanted to help guide me through that wasn’t there for that.

Thank you for expressing that. For the adults in your life that are not talking, what would you want them to share and how would that change your life if they were more open to communicating about Dawn?

Since I didn’t really get to know her when she was alive because it was such a complicated experience and my family’s stayed complicated since then, but back then it was way more complicated. I wasn’t exactly living with them so I didn’t really get to know her as well. I think the biggest question I’ve wanted to ask the adults in my life is what was she growing up? What was she going into her adult years? What was she before things got bad?

What was your her your experience with her? What was your relationship with her? Were you close with her? What are things that you might know about her that I probably never will? There’s been some more conversations recently because I know a while ago when we talked, there were no conversations whatsoever. Those were completely off the table. There’s been some conversations recently and I’ve gotten to know a little more, but it’s only to what they’re okay with talking about. I’m always left with a lot of questions but I’m still forever thankful for what pieces of information I do get told because I get to know a little piece of her that I didn’t get to know before.

How does it feel getting to know a more pieces of Dawn?

It’s simultaneously super great because I love to know more about her. I love to get to know the type of person she was and how she affected the people around her. Also, it makes me really sad in the same breath because I never get to experience that and I so wish I could. I think a lot of my grief is just longing for the mom that I never got, that I never had, but I wish I did. That sums that up.

No, thank you. Being sad, is that something you’ve grown accustomed to? Do you still fight it off? How do you deal with being sad?

It used to be a very overwhelming feeling 99% of the time and it made it really difficult when I was already going through other things because it felt my grief overshadowed everything. Now there’s some days where I’ll have really bad days and some of it is due to my grief and I’m like, “Today is a really bad grief day. Let’s figure out what to do with this.” Whereas most of the time, it really just hits me around the holidays and really big events like Mother’s Day or her anniversary or her birthday, which also falls into the holiday season. It used to be super overwhelming and now I can pinpoint when it’s going to happen and I’m like, “Maybe I can prepare myself just a little bit.”

Anticipatory Grief & The Impact Of Overthinking

When you talk about the times and that it’s happening in preparation, what does preparation look for grieving, and if I hear you correctly, is that anticipatory grief, the idea getting close to something .for someone who has no concept of that, how would you explain that to them?

I know for me and in a lot of conversations, a lot of people have said they understood and they agreed with this is that when it comes to big events, especially that are related to the person that you are grieving, a lot of times, it isn’t the date itself that you’re anticipating, it’s the feeling that you’re is going to hit you. For me, it more hits me the weeks leading up to it because the only thing that’s going through my brain is, “This date’s coming up. I know that I’m going to feel this and it’s going to hit me really hard.”

The more I anticipate it, the more I think about it, the more I let it weigh on me, it almost feels the less it hurts. I don’t even know the right word to say for that, but it almost feels the day itself doesn’t hurt as bad as the anticipating of the day. All you’re thinking about leading up to it is the feeling and what you’re going to do and how you’re going to deal with it and how it’s affecting everyone else who also is dealing with this day. It’s the less you think about it, which is really hard to think not do because when you overthink, it’s hard to not overthink. If the more you think about it the more it hurts. That’s how it feels leading up to those days, if that makes sense.

Internal Grief & Coping Mechanisms

It does. How is your grief expressed or what does that look outwardly? If I caught you with a secret camera that no one could see and you were having your most difficult grief moment, what would that look for you?

I learned very early into the grieving process and even before that that I am very closed off when it comes to my grief. With a lot of my emotions, you’ll probably be able to read it on my face, but chances are I will not verbalize it. I deal with it internally more so than anything else. I’ll turn to journaling, I’ll turn to waiting until I’m alone to let myself feel the feelings.

I’ve gotten better at that, to being more open to speaking about it. If you were to catch me on a normal day where my grief is really heavy, chances are I am masking it as best I humanly can so that nobody else catches on that it is as bad as a day as it is so that nobody else puts a wrench in their day to see how I’m doing. I want them to continue what they’re doing and I will deal with it but just in the safety of my own safe space.

If in that safety of that safe space on the feelings, what does that look like?

I shut out the entire world. I will not talk to anyone else. I’ll put on a comfort show, a comfort movie. I’ll dive into journaling or reading a book and I will let myself be by myself so that any outward opinions, whatever they could be thinking, it’s just me. Whatever my brain wants to think at that moment, wherever it wants to go, I let it because I’d rather let myself feel it than try to put into words for another person when I don’t even know how to do that for myself.

That is a lot. If someone was with you, being present is enough. Trying to fix it and talk. Do you find people stumbling on how to support you?

Usually, when I know that I’m already having a bad day, it sounds such a weird thing to really verbalize, but I only open up to a very select few people when it does come to days like that. The people I do, my best friend or certain people that I know I can call, they’ll make the space to listen without putting in their own opinions.

There are certain people that know me well enough and know how I react to things that they’ll sit there with me and they’ll open the floor for me to say whatever I need to or to cry it out or be angry about it or whatever I’m feeling in that moment. When I finally feel I got it out a little bit, then they’re like, “Are you okay?” I’m like, “We’re good now.”

Thank you for sharing that. You are 21. I am 59. Do you see a difference in my age group dealing with grief versus your own and can you ex share about that?

Even just growing up in my house there is a gap in and of itself who my uncle who’s in his 40s and then my grandparents who are in their 70s and 80s. I’ve learned not only from in my own household but also with other people I’ve met, the way we were raised in expressing our feelings and talking about things and the way things are talked about is so vastly different.

Sometimes, the way you approach a conversation has to be different depending on who you’re talking to because let’s say I talked to my grandma, I’m like, “I cannot start this conversation the way I would with one of my friends because that’s just going to end not pretty.” I have to approach it in a way that I know she’s going to understand like, “Jazzy wants to talk about this and if I’m feeling up to it, I’ll talk to her about it.”

Say someone that I meet on tiktok and maybe I don’t know them as well but I know that they are older than me, I will figure out a way to approach that in a way that I know is not only respectful but also makes sense to where both of us are at mentally while also still being at very different places, if that makes sense.

The Journey To Psychology & Writing

What drove you to the field of psychology?

I want to say it was either my junior or senior year of high school and I needed another credit and I couldn’t figure out what I needed to do. I just needed another credit for the semester. My counselor said, “You should take a psychology class.” I said, “Okay, I’ll see how it goes.” One psychology class was all it took for me to say, “This is pretty cool. I think I like this.”

Senior year, I took another psychology class both semesters and that was when my teacher had said like, “I think you would be good majoring in this in college.” I was like, “Yeah, I’ve been debating it,” because at the time, I was torn between a Sports Medicine major and then Psychology. I realized I didn’t math enough for the Sports Medicine major. I ended with psychology because not only is it something that intrigues me, but also, I can use my writing in the field and it makes sense with how my brain works too. . It helps me understand other people.

You talked about the poetry and the writing. Do you have any plans for those?

I have been working up to writing a book for my poetry. I have so many at this point that I have to categorize it into what I would want each book to be about because I’m not going to stuff a bunch of like, “This is grief and what is going on here,” and so many different themes. I know for the first book I write, I want it to be based off of grief and all the poems I’ve written about grief.

A lot of those do involve talking about my mom. The more I’ve written, the more I’ve realized I can take my own personal experiences, as well as what I’ve heard other people talk about. Instead of just making it specifically for me, I can make the writing experience more inclusive for everyone else to understand. That’s been super fun to explore. I’m definitely working on writing a poetry book and I have a bunch of ideas for that.

Relating Poetry To Grief & Widows

Thank you. Speaking of making your poetry relatable to other people, I know that this episode is coming out very close to Mother’s Day, but tell them about something that you’re doing for widowhood in June.

Miss Tina asked me to write a poem for a butterfly releasing that’s happening in June. I wrote it. I am making tweaks to it, but I’m really excited that I was not only asked to write a poem for an event, an actual event, but also that I get to share my writing with other people that I know will be able to relate to it in some form or fashion because grief is so universal.

It is. Being close to Mother’s Day when your episode will release, how does it feel having this conversation knowing that it’ll be released then?

It feels really good. I think that’s part of why I was so quick to say yes to doing it because me and my best friend were just talking about how her and her mom invited me go to a concert or something on Mother’s Day. They knew I needed the distraction because of how South my brain goes on that day. To know people were already thinking of where my mental is going to be at on the day, but also being asked to have this conversation around the same time as everything else I have going on in my brain because I have been stuck with finals and I’ve been in school brain for so long. It feels good to get out of the school brain I have going on and to talk about something real that’s important to me and that I know will be important to other people.

Thank you. Speaking of other people, and I’m going to ask specifically to people that are younger without a parent. Mother’s Day coming up and knowing that Father’s Day is around the corner, what are some things that you found that were helpful for you if no one invited you to participate in something and you had to manage this on your own?

For the longest time, I dreaded Mother’s Day. I dreaded Father’s Day. I dreaded both of those days like no other because I knew I was going to feel alone and I was going to feel left out. Those were going out to lunch or whatever plans other people had with their parents I wasn’t going to be able to experience. A thing I realized, and it took a long time for me to realize, is that while some people do get those experiences, even if they do have parents that are still actively alive and still here, they don’t get those experiences with their parents either.

While they may not understand where you’re at in grief itself, there are people out there that understand what it’s to go through these big events, to go through these holidays without a parent there, without having to understand exactly what you’re feeling. While you may feel alone in it, you are far from alone. Even if there are is no one else your age that fully understands it, there are always people out there that understand it in some form or fashion and you are not entirely alone in that.

Not being alone seems to be very important.

The Importance Of Building A Supportive Community

Building a community, even if it’s 3 or 4 people, is super important because when you’re stuck grieving, it’s so easy to get stuck in that rut of feeling so alone. The more you feel alone, the more likely you are to not reach out to other people because you don’t think anyone’s going to understand or you don’t think anyone’s going to care. Finding people who understand and who care and who want to be that support for you is super important because they help you out of that hole, but they also help you find other things that you want to experience in life and other things that you might not have been open to before.

There are some people that may think, “It’s been thirteen years, your mother’s not here. You can simply find some other women to fill the space.” What would you say to that type of mentality?

I’ve met people with that type of mentality. I got myself stuck in some not great situations with that mentality. What I can honestly say is like, yes, no matter how much time has passed, whatever that person is to you, that meaning, that love, that respect is never going away. You can always find other people that you may relate to in that sense. They may give you that same sense of comfort or that same sense of love or that same sense of safety, but at the end of the day, that person that you love can never be replaced.

Thinking like that is more destructive than anything else because thinking you can just replace someone because they passed away is saying that this passion that you had for the longest time, this thing that you loved for the longest time, I can just easily replace that because it’s no longer here. That’s not how that works. It’s destructive more than anything else.

Jazzy, thank you for saying yes to this conversation. Were there things that you wanted to talk about that I didn’t cover? I know we didn’t have a list. It was going to be an open conversation.

I didn’t get to speak on this when I was doing the live last time, but I know a big thing that I wanted to talk about was like, yes, I have the child’s perspective but obviously, within the grief community, there’s a lot of parents who lost their spouse and they don’t know how to help their kids. I wanted to speak to that just a little bit because I do understand the opposite side of that, I guess.

No, go right ahead. That’s why I asked you because I wanted to make sure we covered different things. Thank you.

Obviously, I’ll never fully understand it the way everyone else does if you have lost a spouse. What I can say is, even though I know it’s you’re stuck in your own grief and that is a big loss on your end because you don’t have your spouse anymore and you have to take care of your kids, I think a big thing is just listening to them and being open to having conversations.

Even if in your grief itself, you may not feel ready for that, the longer you hold back from talking about it, the more detriment it does to the kids. They then feel they can open up to you or they can’t talk about it or they aren’t allowed to feel it. There’s some people I’ve met that like, they’ve done a really good job with it where they’re like, “I may not be in the best place mentally right now, but my kids need that.”

The Importance Of Listening To Children In Grief

I’m not saying anyone’s done a bad job with it. Everyone grieves in their own ways. I think the biggest thing is listening to your kids and allowing them to feel it however they feel it because as a family unit, you’re all experiencing a really big loss. I feel a lot of the time, in grief, the child’s grief goes to the back burner. That’s exactly how I felt for the longest time.

The adults were so wrapped up in whatever was going on in their heads, in their minds that whatever I wanted to talk about, whatever I wanted to feel, whatever I wanted to understand better, I never got the opportunity to do that because they felt it wasn’t as important because you’re younger or you’re not going to understand. Holding that space for them is super important because it makes it very difficult for them understanding later on. It took me two years to understand that my mom was no longer here. That is how that went.

Being dismissive because the person is a child, they have a loss and needing to find the language on how to support their loss, answer the questions and give them the support that they need to.

Obviously, when you are talking to a child in any conversation, you have to change your vocabulary and you have to change your tone and how you’re delivering it. I know a big thing that didn’t help me was being told, “Your mom’s no longer here,” because I was like, “What does that mean? No longer in this house? Where is she?” You have to change your vocabulary and your tone and how you’re delivering it, but also making it clear like, “This person that you love that is the center of your universe is no longer here,” but explain that in a way that will make sense to them, I guess. I don’t know how to explain it.

No, you make a good point. There’s a lot of different language behind it, but not to tell a child that they were sick and then they died because a child is going to get sick with a cold, they’re going to get sick with just little things. They’re going to think, “If I get sick, then that means I’m going to die. That’s going to equal.” It may require a lot of research to understand that your parent, and if you go, “They’re asleep forever,” then I’m not going to want to go to sleep because that means that I’m not going to wake up.

Being very gentle to find that language that this body has a beginning and an end and when that body has ended its cycle here in this world, and then the soul is gone, to explain that to a child, depending on your faith, depending on your background and all the other different cultural things in your particular household, to bring that down to a child’s level is critical to their process living in life and going forward with the reality that we have a beginning in the end. That is an excellent point. I’m sorry I didn’t think of that before. Thank you.

The Need For Grief Therapy For Children

I think another big thing that I never experienced because every adult in my life snatched it away from me as fast as humanly possible. Grief therapy. Especially when you’re really young and experiencing a loss, grief therapy is beyond important. Still to this day, I get upset that I never got to have grief therapy when she passed because I feel it would’ve helped my understanding with it and my accepting of the situation.

I said it took me two years to understand that not only is she gone, but I never get to see her again. It took even longer to process like what am I supposed to do now? Who’s supposed to help me become the person that I’ve wanted growing up because she’s no longer here. I still beat myself up for the fact that I didn’t vouch for myself harder when I was a child to have grief therapy or even any of those resources because it is so helpful.you see it all the time with a lot of people who are grieving and I just think it’s super important. Since they are a child, if they can’t advocate for themselves, you advocate for them because that is a very big factor.

If you were able with everything you’ve learned and all the knowledge you have to talk to Jazzy the day after your mom passed, what would you tell her?

At the time, I was so confused, but I was also really sad because I didn’t have a grasp on anything going on. I just knew everyone around me is sad and I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m just here. I feel like I would want to tell her it’s going to be okay. You aren’t going to feel this lost or lonely or scared forever. You’re going to come to a time and a place where you understand, where you’ve accepted some part of it within yourself and that you’re going to grow from it as a person. You’re going to have the understanding of what grief is and how it affects not only you, but also the people around you. Also, how it shaped who I am now. She hasn’t experienced that yet, but she’s going to and that’s super important to understand.

Thank you. I’ve asked you a lot of questions. Do you have any questions of me?

I feel I always have a bunch of questions to ask you, but when I get asked all the questions go poof.

You can’t say I didn’t try.

You did.

I’m going to say something to our audience and then I would you to close out this conversation with any final words, anything you want to share or anything that. Also, where people can reach you if they’re trying to connect with someone that they feel they can resonate with you. I want to thank you for being here. I know that we are coming close to Mother’s Day and that’s why I asked Jazzy to have this conversation. You are not alone. We are on this journey with you. I am sorry for the person that you’ve lost, but I’m glad that you found us and I look forward to seeing you next time.

Ways you can reach me are on my TikTok, which is @Jazzy_Skyr 13. My socials are connected through there and all that. I just wanted to tell everyone reading that I know grief is difficult. I know that it losing someone can greatly affect every aspect of your life. I just wanted to let you know that you’re not alone. That you have a community of people around you, whether you know it or not. If you ever need someone to talk to when you are struggling or in need and your grief is just too heavy to deal with yourself, there are people to reach out to and you are not going to be stuck in that place forever.

Thank you so much.

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I want to say thank you for every episode that you have listened to, every episode you have shared and the comments that you have made. I am so honored to be able to share and support you. I am inviting you to help celebrate my birthday. For the month of May, your celebration is the donation of $5 in the month of May. Five and five. See what we’re doing there?

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