Episode Summary
A significant loss can come in many shapes and sizes and has the power to change us at a fundamental level. That rebirthing we go through after a big loss is so important and can also be so painful. Two questions that can often come to mind are: “How long will this take?” and “Can I make it through?”
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→ Irisanya Moon: https://www.irisanyamoon.com
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Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.
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Full Transcript
Moon: I think death has always been a really great, so to speak force in my life, it has been the thing that has pushed me forward to do things that I might not have done. Or taught me that I can get through really hard things.
A significant loss can come in many shapes and sizes and has the power to change us at a fundamental level. That rebirthing we go through after a big loss is so important and can also be so painful. Two questions that can often come to mind are: “How long will this take?” and “Can I make it through?” This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions.
The journey of losing someone or something important can have such a step-by-step quality, moment to moment, one foot in front of the other. Just keep going. Does this sound familiar? Does your body resonate with these feelings? [SIGHS] Yeah. Today we’re going to talk about grief and loss and explore what one woman’s journey has looked like. Our guest is Irisanya Moon, who, if you’re a regular listener to Shame Piñata, you will remember from last month, when she joined us for a conversation about discomfort as ally.
I think it’s worth saying before we begin that every loss can have two time aspects. A feeling of not being okay in this moment and a fear of never being okay again. I believe these are separate and yet both legitimate feelings to have. And it’s the latter that can, in my experience, be the real kicker. So please join us for this conversation today, where we look at the bigger picture of making sense of loss over time. Here’s my first question to Irisanya.
Thomas: Do you remember what's the first time you became aware of the concept of something being a rite of passage?
Moon: Yeah, I was in my last year of college and I was friends with this one man named Jim. And we had dated a while ago and all of that… we sort of fell out of contact, and I got a message from my best friend, because we were all still friends, that he was in the hospital. And he's 22. He had, like, a really bad sore throat and then suddenly within a week he died.
Thomas: Wow.
Moon: And to have someone that felt so young, and was so young at that point, to have them die so quickly without any warning, really altered me and I think the moment that I recognized that was a rite of passage was… When you go to funerals of 20 year olds, it is horrifying. It's shocking to the system. It is everybody that they went to high school with. It is everybody that was on, like, the football team with this one… this person. Particularly, it is football players crying. It is all of that. And for me, it was the recognition that this can happen at any time and that my life is important now, as much as it is, you know, looking back on it. And it actually thrust me into a couple of decisions that were very important for my life at that stage. If he hadn't died, I wouldn't have decided to go in a certain direction with some of my relationships, or to go in some of the directions that I did with writing. So it sort of thrust me into that. And I think that that was one of my many rites of passage, slash initiations, slash like really just altering events.
Thomas: So that moment landed for you as a rite of passage because of the ceremony, or because it was a surprise, or it was such a big change in his life journey…
Moon: I think it was all of those things. I don't think that there's ever just one thing. I think that firstly, the dramatic impact of that moment, and the… Throughout the week, there was a slow progression of like, “Everything's okay. No, it's not. It is. It’s not.” And that was back in the day of pagers. So we all used to get like, paged on this and there was also a moment at one point where, you know, like, “Do you want to go see him?” And I didn't. I could not. I… that I was, whatever I was 20 something maybe I was a couple years younger than him. I couldn't do it. The idea of seeing somebody was just too much for me at that moment. So it was the process, and then also that ceremony and that being at the wake. Because I don't… I know that we went to church, but I can't remember that as well. But the wake it was just, you know, people everywhere and watching people figure out how to deal with this in this moment was instrumental and then everything that happened after that was part of it too. And to this day, it still, it still impacts me in some ways. His… the anniversary of that was actually about a week ago when we're recording this, and it's been like 24 years since then.
Thomas: So that was your first experience of death?
Moon: Now it's not the first experience of death. That was the first one that was really the most impactful. I… My grandparents died when I was younger, but I didn't have a close relationship with them. And while it was definitely something I can still remember, I can still remember seeing, you know, because they had open caskets and everything. And that was, you know, as a child that is strange and, but not upsetting. It just felt like, “Okay, that's grandma or whoever”. It just didn't upset me. But somebody that I knew and I knew really well, I had dated, you know, my first kiss… You know, all of the things… was just more real than it has been than my family had been. I never saw them, I hung out with this guy, and, you know, back in the day, smoked cigarettes and drove around the Midwest and played pool halls and all that stuff. And so, like, it was a little different and it was, it was the idea that somebody my age, I could go through that too. And, you know, people who are “old” when I was younger. (Now I feel really bad ever saying that!) You know, like, that was different. That's so far away. So that's not really a thing. That's what happens to people, you know, who have gray hair like me now. So yeah, I think that it's… I mean, there's plenty of deaths that I've been through that have been really instrumental. But that was the first one and I was.. it impacted me so much. I actually got pulled over because I was driving I guess radically after… I got pulled over and like, late at night after all of the food and everything. And had to tell and I was telling the police officer what happened and then he was like, “Okay, you can go.”
Thomas: Wow.
That was a huge rite of passage for Irisanya. Her first experience of someone her age passing away. Someone young. Someone who was not supposed to die. Death can be difficult to make sense of at any age, but especially when the person we lose was someone so dear to us, and someone so young.
After growing up and experiencing more loss and particularly speaking with a friend who had also gone through a lot of loss, Irisanya got to a point where she felt like she had a kind of formula of how loss worked for her. She said it’s not a perfect recipe but it’s been consistent for her. Now, keep in mind that there’s no universal formula for how to grieve and there’s absolutely no way to grieve incorrectly, but that said, it’s interesting to hear what other people notice about how grief shows up in their life.
Thomas: Cool. So if I came to you, and I said that, I don't know what to do. What would you… what might you tell me?
Moon: I would say… the first thing I would say is like how long has it been since this has all happened? Because what I think I know is that it takes years. The first year is the year of shock. Absolute shock, nothing makes sense anymore. To a certain extent, if you're not feeling all the things and you're not sort of grieving actively, that makes sense. Because it's just a shock. You're just going through the motions. Going through the day by day. Figuring out what life looks like without a person or a situation or whatever. And this goes not just death. And then the second year is when it hits. And at least again, not a perfect formula, but I know for me the second year was always like I felt everything because now I knew what was going to come. I knew about the anniversaries. I knew about people saying things that were ill-timed and I knew that I was gonna have another year of remembering how bad our culture is at grief and handling that and holding that. And then the third year, it just gets easier. It starts to make sense, it starts to get integrated. It's not that the pain goes away, but you kind of understand that it's there. And that it's… why it's there, and how it might show up. And for some reason, that third year for me usually is like, “Oh, okay.” And, “Alright, I have to figure out how to build a life around this,” if I haven't already. But that's kind of the formula and it really has worked with most of my things. So I'm curious if other folks decide to look back and go, “Is that true? Did that actually happen?” It also was really helpful for me, because it defined time. I could go like, okay, because some of the one of the things I hate as a Sagittarius or just as me, is that I don't mind going through stuff. Can you tell me how long? Because that would be great. You know, is this going to hurt forever? So by having sort of a container, it does also go like, “Okay, I can get through this next month. Year.” Yeah, I mean, it's worked with deaths, and my divorce and all of that it’s been really consistent with. So hopefully, that helps somebody. It helped me tremendously.
Thomas: But I have to say, that's not super comforting for me in this moment, because I'm about to enter the second year of my mom being gone in a couple weeks. And I feel like the first year there were moments where I was just like, “I'm not feeling anything, and I think that's normal. But I feel like I should be doing something right now besides not feeling anything.” And it's making me think about some teachings I've been getting lately about digesting, you know, having time to digest transition, because it sounds like that's what the formula is. It's like, “Oh, my God, something happened”. And then, “Owe!” once I can feel it, right? And then it's like, “Okay, yeah, I've somehow, in the background, started to make a little sense of this. And it's not so weird now.” if that's even possible, right?
Moon: Right. I know. Right? I think that… yeah. I mean, blessings on the second year. I will not, I won't say that it was horrible the whole time. I would say that… I would say that… you know, it's… I think I was… I think I was ready to feel more. I think that that's probably what's true, for me at least, is that by the second year, I had worn down my defenses and my sort of like, “I can hold this together, and I can make it through the first anniversary of blah, blah, blah.” And by the second year, like, “I have to do this again”. And it's the realization of, “I'm gonna have to do this every year.” And it's a lot.
Thomas: Yeah.
Moon: But the third, I mean, it does happen eventually. And I think, you know, I think many of us if not all of us understand that on some level that it will eventually, sort of lessen. And just as like, the seasons change, the moon changes, all of that, everything changes and moves. So. Care for yourself wildly. Care for yourself in all the ways I developed quite a cupcake addiction for a minute, and I think that that was helpful for a minute. It was good. And then, mmm… Maybe we need to find something else. I thought my mom would be proud. She probably was. “Good job.”
Thomas: Proud that you're eating cupcakes are proud that you decided to stop?
Moon: Proud that I… probably both. She was a big fan of you know, indulge yourself. You work too hard. And also like, okay, reel it in! I think she would have said, I want you to grieve for an appropriate amount of time. But not forever.
Thomas: Yeah, totally.
[MUSIC]
Thomas: Well, to change gears slightly, I was curious. A question I sit with a lot. And I was wondering what you would think is, what do you think of the role of the witness? What's the role of the witness?
Moon: I think, first of all, it's a very important role that I want to say that first and foremost, I think that it is powerful to have someone else sit with you and not flinch. To have someone that can sit with you and not try to talk you through it, or try to say it's going to be okay. I think it's important to have someone just be there. Because that offers safety and it offers not comfort, necessarily, it does offer safety. And it offers the opportunity to know that you're not alone in this. And for me, that is the most important thing of any of this grief work and any actually any work, that you're not alone in the things you face. It's going to feel like it. But calling it a witness… it's also not something you necessarily need another person for like a human, like you can call in a whole bunch of different witnesses. And you can also be your own witness. But it's also like it is like sort of hopeful that you find someone that's outside of you. But it can also be a deity. It could be a tree, it could be whatever you want, right? Tell the tree what's going on and just be there. And allow yourself to be held in that. And I want to, like something that's just really bringing me in this moment is that… get the right witness. Because it really is important to have somebody who doesn't tell you what to do, doesn’t make a judgment, doesn't even I would hope not say anything, but just like just be there and sit with it until until. Because it might not feel better. But at least it won't feel invisible anymore.
Thomas: And that I think is where people who are witnessing or even just with us in our lives can have a hard time as if it doesn't feel better. If they feel like their role is to help us get through a hard whatever. And then that will mean that at the end of our five minutes or half an hour together, that we're smiling and we're ready to move on. And, and that's, you know, so not always… And sometimes I've found in situations I had to sort of pretend that everything was good to like, get somebody to feel like it. So that's not the ideal.
Moon: Not ideal. No, I mean, again, it's that discomfort, right? Yeah, like I… There's this one poem, the, the invitation by Oriah mountain dreamer and one of the lines goes something to the effect of like, “I want to know if you can sit with my pain and yours without trying to rush into fix it or save me save it…”, something like that. And yeah, I want to know if you could just sit with mine and sit with yours and just be here. There's nothing actually to fix. This is just something that's happened. I mean, I've never been sad forever. I haven’t, at least so far. And I've never been happy forever. It'll move.
It was at this point in our conversation that I realized that sitting with discomfort is profoundly anti-capitalist. Because at least American society is based on: Buy this, feel better. Buy that, feel better. Get this treatment, look better. Find a partner, feel better. It's all about happiness.
Moon: It’s all about seeking comfort… seeking… Comfort that it is temporary. And easy to be bought again.
Thomas: Right. Good point. Yes.
Moon: Here's the next thing. And here's the next thing because it does feel like it helps. And I'm not gonna say that I haven’t indulged in a little, you know, retail therapy to feel better sometimes. Sure. Refer to my cupcake therapy.
Thomas: I love that. Well Happy Mother's Day to you.
Moon: Yeah. Happy Mother's Day to you, too. What a day, right? Yeah, I spent… I went to the beach this morning because they usually do that on Mother's Day. And, you know, kind of talked with her for a little bit. And then… this is this is a funny story. So I got back to my car and my car wouldn’t start.
Thomas: Oh, wow.
Moon: And I was like, “Oh, no!. And of course, it's Mother's Day. So it took like a good hour and a half for somebody to get to me, to like, help me with my car. And after I hung up with them, I was texting a friend. I was like, “Gosh, I can't believe this is happening.” And I was like, “Oh no, I didn't invoke my dead mother in that phone call!” Because usually I would say something like, “Well, you know, my mom died. Can't you just… I'm really upset, can’t you like bring somebody?” She would have been great with that. She would have been fantastic with that. She's… I mean, you know, for everything that parents may put us through. I'm like, that is the least they can do. And that's what I texted my friend and said, and they were like, “Oh, totally!” because they lost their mom a few years ago too. And then I realized, I sort of took a breath and was like, “Oh, I'm in a different stage of grief.” Because it's not the first thing I thought of.
Thomas: I thought you were gonna say you invoked your mom and your car started.
Moon: I mean, that would have been a cooler story. But if… that would have been a real witchy story. But alas. Alas, I did not. I would have been sweet.
Thomas: Standing there with the red and the black cables. “Okay mom - ready! Do your thing!”
Moon: If my mom was there, she would be like, “Why don't you know how to use these?” “That's why we have AAA, mom!” Right now… So it was a fun moment… I was like I'm definitely going to bring that to this.
Thomas: Thank you, yeah.
I hope that, wherever you are on your journey after a significant loss, that you are finding ways to take care of yourself. Whether that is cupcakes or anything else that really makes you feel loved. It’s important that you know you’re not alone on your journey. So many people are making their way through loss today. And also, your loss and your experience of this particular loss is as unique as you are. So find your people, reach out if you need help, and, in the words of Irisanya, care for yourself wildly!
Irisanya Moon is an author, Witch, priestess, teacher, and initiate in the Reclaiming tradition. She is passionate about the idea that life is and we are a love spell, a dance of desire and connection, a moving in and out of the heart, always returning to love. Irisanya cultivates spaces of radical acceptance to foster trust and liberation to remind people they are not alone.
Our music is by Terry Hughes. Find us on IG and Twitter at shamepinata. Reach us through our website, shamepinata.com. And subscribe to the show on your favorite player. Also be sure to check out our second show, Daily Magic for Peace, supporting you as you support Ukraine. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.