Transcript of Ask Jay: How Do You Move Forward When You're Grieving?

Today, we're holding space for that weight. Thank you for trusting me with your stories. Let's dive in.

I'm learning to accept that I'll have to keep becoming. I want to build meaningful work, maybe even become self-employed supporting families like ours. But our life is so unpredictable. Sometimes it feels impossible to dream about the future when life can change overnight. So my question to you is: how do you build a meaningful life and a sense of purpose when the ground beneath your feet keeps changing? Thank you so much.

And the fact that even in this time you're thinking about how you can do more meaningful work in the world, how you can add value, how you can have an impact, how you can do things in your community—I mean, it's truly, truly beautiful. Uncertainty is the only certainty in life. And you're experiencing that every single day. As you said, you're either running around between hospitals, you think everything's safe, and then something surprises you again. But what if the meaningful work wasn't what you did after this moment?

But what if the meaningful work is this moment? What if your purpose is exactly what you're doing right now? I think sometimes we like to believe that our purpose is out there, that we'll find it afterwards, that we'll come across it in some way. But in reality, this is what life is asking of you right now. So I want you to take that pressure off. And in reality, you're passing with flying colors, but in your mind, you're judging yourself. You're questioning whether it's meaningful. You're questioning whether you're on the right path.

And so I want to remind you: you are on the right path. What I'd also like to add to you is, because there's so much uncertainty in your life, what you want to do is find one habit that is certain for you. This one habit that you do every day that becomes a foundation for you. It could be having your cup of coffee every single day, whether you're in the hospital, at home, or wherever you are. It could be making sure that you watch one episode of your favorite show, because that's an escape that you really need throughout the day.

I don't want you to wait to feel like you have to build meaningful work. I don't want you to think you have to wait till the future to do something meaningful. You're already doing something meaningful, and this is the path. And I promise you, all the experiences, all the wisdom, all the insight you gain from this moment, it will give you everything you need to build a future purpose. It will give you every skill, every tool, every mindset you need in order to be ready for that when you finally get to it. But you don't need to carry that pressure right now. You're already carrying so much.

You're living in reality which allows for two truths to exist. You're grieving the future that you'd imagined for your son while loving the actual child in front of you. And both are true at the same time. Neither cancels each other out, and neither is more or less important. A meaningful life gets built inside the uncertainty, in the present that you can touch, not after it ends. And I want to leave you with this: what kind of life could you build inside the uncertainty, instead of waiting for it to end first?

We went 3 months without speaking, and I genuinely thought I'd done something wrong. She was always just bad with her phone, you know, responding in batches. But this was different. She reached out finally and said how regretful she was, that she missed me and didn't know why she disappears on me, that I'm a friend she wants in her life. She showed me a notes app of things she wrote down she wished she could tell me. And when I asked her why she hadn't just told me, she didn't really have a good answer. In the short period we were reconnected, she got pregnant and told me, which I was obviously so excited about. I was close with her husband.

I spoke at their wedding, and I could see our families being friends for life. But about a month later, after answering a routine question she had about my job, she stopped responding to me again. It's been 5 months, and I'm starting to look back on our entire friendship differently. I feel like I've exhausted myself trying to have a relationship with her and need to accept that whether it's because she can't or doesn't want to, she's not going to reciprocate. And I've learned that it hurts me too much to keep trying. So I have 2 questions. One, she's due to have a baby really soon, and I have no idea how I'll feel when she gives birth.

But does it make me a bad or petty person if I don't reach out to her to congratulate her? And my second question is, I think I have hope deep down that this is a phase, but how do I let go of that and learn to grieve our friendship with gratitude rather than being completely confused and sad and mad about it?

All of that seems to be causing you to feel unnerved, and that's natural. It also feels like this person has a pattern. And one of my favorite quotes from Maya Angelou is that when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. I find that people can change. People can grow. But when you see patterns like this repeated over months and years, what you're getting is the person saying, "This is who I am." They're not saying it in those words, but they're showing you, "This is who they are.

This is what a relationship with me looks like. And this is how it's going to go." And then we get a choice to decide how close or far we want to stand to that person. Now, I think the challenge we have is we think that the good thing, the right thing to do, is stay close to people no matter how they treat us. If we love someone, we should stay close to them because that's a sign of love. I want to introduce you to an idea that I wrote about in the 8 Rules of Love, my book called Radius of Respect. I believe that when I love someone, I want to stand as close to them or as far away based on me still being able to respect them.

There are people I love in my life that if I spend too much time with them, or if I'm too involved or too engaged or reaching out too much, I actually start to feel bitter. I could even start to feel resentment. And so I realize I've got to step a little further away if I want to continue to love and respect them. Which may mean instead of talking to someone once a week, I only check in once a quarter. It means I only check in once a year. The point is, if I want to love someone, if I want to continue to respect someone, I'm not being disrespectful by disconnecting.

Sometimes the only way to respect and love someone is through distance, because that's the only way we can keep that beautiful vision we had of the relationship, the wonderful memories that you've shared, the amazing experiences that you have had, and not lose them to bitterness, pain, stress, and resentment that naturally comes from engaging too often. I think a lot of friends go through these transitions in their life, especially long-term friendships, where you find out and realize you have to almost set a boundary with someone, or you have to reestablish your new standards of connection.

You do care. And you're allowed to care from a distance. And when it comes to grieving your relationship with gratitude, it comes from standing far enough or close enough from where you can still experience gratitude. You don't want to get so close that you only see their flaws. And you don't want to stand so far that you only see what went right. You want to stand just close enough that you can say, "I'm glad I was there for them. I'm still here for them.

But actually, if I get too close, that's not good for either of us." Sometimes we can try to be so close to someone that we push ourselves away from them or push them away. And sometimes we can be just far enough from where we can learn to respect each other again. Disconnecting and distance can often help us reconnect in the long term with someone we love. Disconnect is not disrespect. I wanted to share with you one of my favorite quotes from an article by Jennifer Senior called It's Your Friends Who Break Your Heart.

There's no vocabulary for the end of a friendship, no rituals to mark its demise. When a romantic relationship ends, you have a story to tell. When a friendship ends, it usually just vanishes into a silent, bewildering vault. The injury of a friend walking away isn't just that you lose them. It's that they leave you holding all the history alone, wondering if any of it meant to them what it meant to you. I hope that helps you.

Sometimes I find that reading about your feelings, understanding and reframing them for yourself, can be a beautiful way of processing how you feel. And I'll end on this: what if you don't have to wish her well just yet? What if you take this time to actually see what you need? What's so interesting is that we don't want to be the bad guy to someone else, but we become the bad guy to ourselves.

We are giving space and context and compassion to someone else. And I feel this time could be.

She was a bad mom. She didn't do better. It's like more than 6 months now, and I didn't have any contact with her. She wants to, I know, but I don't want to. I keep thinking that I feel better without her. My whole body, my life changed rapidly. My question is, how do I grieve a person that is still alive?

And that's like a really harsh awakening. It's a really harsh reality to finally come to the place where you recognize this person isn't going to change. They never were. There's almost like a false hope that we have, especially with our primary carers. When it comes to our parents, you, in the beginning at least, see them as superhuman. You see them as someone who could never do anything wrong. You see them as people that carry your hopes, your dreams, that they should carry your best interests, care about you, put you first.

And then as time goes on, you start to see the truth, that they're fallible, that they're human too, that they have needs and emotions and weaknesses. When you start to see that and you start to recognize that they're limited and that they've let you down and that they've caused you pain, it can be really harsh when you finally accept that. From listening to you, I believe you're not really grieving her. You're grieving the version of her that you wanted to be real.

You're grieving the version of her that you had hoped would be there for you. You're grieving the version of her that you'd imagined could be possible one day. And grieving doesn't mean that you stop having emotions for this person. It's just that you finally are accepting reality for what it is, and you don't need it to be different. So the way you grieve someone who's still alive is you recognize that what you received from them was real, and what you hoped from them wasn't true.

The way you grieve is to accept what you lived and experienced in reality, not what you wished for in imagination. That you recognize that what you got was what they could give, and you didn't live in the dream of their potential. And in order to do that, it's a mixed, messy process. There'll be feelings of regret, of pain, of guilt, of love, of care, of compassion.

And I'd encourage you to feel all of it, allow for all of it to coexist. I think our minds sometimes like to put things in neat boxes and have to choose and take sides. In reality, our emotions are far more variegated and multifaceted, and it's so important that we allow all of them to coexist and co-breathe. On my podcast, I've had several conversations with Dr. Rahmani, and the most recent one was all about going no-contact. And there's a difference between going no-contact because of self-protection versus punishment.

Punishment is when we want the other person to feel bad. Self-protection is when we want to feel safe. I think right now it feels like your body is feeling better because you feel safe, and that's an important thing to protect. There's an incredible book called Ambiguous Loss, which is all about learning to live with unresolved grief. And the author, Pauline Boss, shares this that I wanted to share with you. Ambiguous loss is the most stressful kind of loss because it remains unclear. There's no closure, no official verification that someone is gone.

They are present in mind but absent in reality. To heal from ambiguous loss, you must learn to live with 2 opposing thoughts at once. They are gone, and they are still here. I love them, and I must let go of them. The question I'll leave you with is this: how much are you willing to accept the mom that she was in reality versus the one she was in imagination? This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve.

I am happy to report he woke up and everything's okay. We're a few years removed now from this, and our family is doing better than ever. I guess my question would be, how do you see what that was going to look like, feel what that was going to look like, and still be able to fully enjoy life without being terrified? Because now I love my people so deeply, yet the bubble of immortality popped because we're not.

And now that's just scary. How do you enjoy the good when you know how the bad's going to feel?

You will no longer see the world the same, and that's a good thing. It's okay. You've had a life evolution, a transition that has made you look at the world differently. And I'm wondering if what changed wasn't your capacity for joy. It was your awareness of how precious the people you love really are. So you're looking at it and thinking, gosh, I don't know how to have joy anymore. But it's not your lack of ability to create joy.

It's actually looking at how ephemeral and how transient, but also how precious these relationships truly are. And so I think we have to almost reframe what you're seeing. Yes, you're seeing you have less time with the people you love, but you're realizing how much more precious they are. And I want you to lean into that side to recognize this person is more precious. This person is more amazing. This moment is more special than any other.

When we've reframed that viewpoint from which we're looking at the same situation, it changes where the emphasis is. We still recognize things have an end, but we recognize that they're more important and they matter more. The paradox is that the awareness of loss doesn't have to take away joy. For many people, over time, it becomes the very reason they actually savor ordinary moments more fully. The love that will one day make grief possible is also what makes today's conversations, laughter, and hugs meaningful.

Here's what I want you to remember. Knowing that something will end is what gives it value. If it was going to last forever, it would lose its value. If you thought you had forever with someone, you would take every moment for granted. When you know you only have a few moments with someone, you take them all deeply. And so, yes, it's natural to have a morbid negative view to the amount of time you have left with someone. It's natural for us to fear more than it is for us to find joy.

It's how we're wired. But I think that's the beautiful thing, to actually be so present in the moment that you forget the past and the future. To be so immersed in that person's eyes, their loving glance, the holding of their hands, their embrace, that you forget the past and the future. Because all that really exists is this moment right now. I want to share with you a profound teaching by Thai forest master Ajahn Shah called The Broken Cup.

He taught that by accepting an object will inevitably break, you can appreciate its beauty fully in the present moment without suffering when it is eventually lost. It's called The Glass Is Already Broken. He says, you see this glass. For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it. I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it.

But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over, or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, of course. When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious. See, we can't control the end. We can't control how it happens, when it happens, why it happens. But knowing it's going to happen, we can control what we do now. And it is a choice we have to make every moment, every day, every month, every year.

We can either choose to look at it and think it's already broken, so how can I appreciate it? How can I engage with it? Or we can look at it and say, it's already broken, and therefore let me make the most of it. Let me be truly present. I'll leave you with this. The cost of loving people is grief, and it's worth paying, but not in advance. You're going to experience the pain of losing someone anyway. Just don't pay that price upfront. Thank you for trusting me with your stories. You're carrying a lot, and I hope today reminded you that you don't have to carry it all alone.

Keep those voice memos coming.