One aspect of grief that rarely gets mentioned is losing someone twice- once in a life-altering circumstance and again when they die. This feeling can arise from a variety of circumstances including substance abuse, mental illness, the personality changes related to a physical illness, or other situation where there is a radical change in a relationship long before someone dies. For people left behind, this can add a complexity in understanding their feelings of grief. Our guest Caraline's older brother Bobby died of mental illness in 2016, 10 years after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. Six months after Bobby's death, Caraline had an epiphany. She realized she never dealt with her feelings of grief surrounding his diagnosis. A realization that would serve as a major turning point in her grief.
After someone dies, we rarely get the chance to talk about how they lived because any conversation about them tends to focus on how they died or on how we are doing in our grief. The lack of opportunity to talk about our people - who they were, what they loved, how they influenced us - is what inspired Aimee Craig to create a new (amazing) podcast called Who Died? Grief Out Loud is guest hosting Aimee's podcast as it builds an audience - which we know won't take long at all! We'll be interspersing Who Died? episodes with our regular content and hope to post one each month. Who Died's first episode is a conversation with Doug Wells whose wife Neeley died in 2015. To learn more about Who Died? check out their site. https://www.whodiedpodcast.