Episode 10: Caregiving and Grief - When Family Hurts

Full Transcript: English

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Hello, my dear listening friend...

It's already January---2026. And if you've been following Languages of Healing, you've probably noticed... nothing came out over the holidays.

No Christmas episode. No New Year's reflection.

Nothing.

And there's a reason for that.

Some of it, honestly, is quite simple. I've never been one for loud
New Year's celebrations---mostly for the sake of my two cats, who hate fireworks – and for the sake of other sensitive living beings …. but also because I've never really felt anything sacred in how we mark that evening.

Though, of course I do understand the need to celebrate thresholds---seasonal, emotional, symbolic. But for me, time doesn't live in big declarations. It lives in quiet shifts, in smaller rhythms.

Week to week.

Day to day.

Sometimes, moment to moment.

I experience life as a kind of flowing circle, not a straight line with big markers on it. And this Western idea of time---linear, goal-driven, forward-marching---it's always felt wrong in my body -- So no, there was no "New Year's episode." But there was something else.

Something that asked to be lived before it could be spoken.
Something I felt the need to chew on .... Inwardly,

before I found any structure to frame it into words....

2. From the 21st to the 29th of December, I was in Poland.

Back at my parents' flat.

And what happened there---what I felt there---has become this episode.

Or maybe more precisely... this episode is what remains in me after those days...

Christmas Eve is still sacred in Poland.

It's not just a dinner---it's a ritual.

A quiet meal. No meat. A symbolic gesture of fasting, of simplicity.

There's the sharing of the opłatek---a thin white wafer you break and give, with a wish.

It's meant to be a moment of connection. A kind of blessing.

But for many, I think it's just as much a performance. A moment when all the unsaid things in a family rise more or less visibly to the surface... and get swallowed again ……. in the name of peace.

3.

This year, a close friend of mine---someone who lives very close to my parents'---invited me, along with both my mother and my father, to join her family for Christmas Eve.

And I was so deeply moved by this invitation.

I've known her since I was a teenager and I care about her deeply.

She knows my story. She knows about my mother's illness... and even some of the past around my father. And she said, Come. You don't have to pretend. Just come as you are.

And….. I wanted to say yes.

If it had just been my mother and me, I would have said yes.

But I had to say no.

And this episode is, in many ways, about : WHY .

I didn't go because I couldn't sit there beside my father.

Not at that table. Not at that moment. Not while acting like everything's fine.

Because it's not.

Nothing has ever been acknowledged.

Not the violence. Not the chaos. Not the fear. Not the nights. Not the silence that followed the shouting.

Nothing.

4. He's almost 80 now.

He's frail. And in some ways, he does take care of my mother now, at least logistically. They still live together. And from the outside, I suppose it looks like something noble. A man staying by his wife's side in sickness.

But the child in me knows the full story.

And what hurts even more now is that... he doesn't.

He tells people we had a happy childhood.

He's rewritten the past---erased the parts that were violent, chaotic, frightening.

He believes it---or pretends to. I honestly don't know which is worse.

And if I had gone to that dinner, I would've been complicit in that denial.

I would've sat at that table, next to him, smiling politely, while my body shrank and stiffened beside him…

And I couldn't do that. Not to myself. Not to my friend, who meant the invitation so honestly. And not to the truth of everything I carry.

So I stayed home.

Home, meaning... my parents' apartment. Which has never really felt like home.

And those eight days became their own kind of reckoning.

5. Eight days. No private space. No sleep.

My mother's rest is restless now. She snores. She shifts. Earplugs weren't really a solution for me.... And I couldn't sleep properly---not just because of the noise, but because my body remembers. It remembers the years of insomnia, disrupted nights in that same flat... years when sleep was never safe.

That week was heavy.

And one of the hardest parts was this emerging awareness:

That I've already started mourning my mum…
She's alive, yes. But not fully here.

There are days when her mind is more present, and days when it slips further.

And the difference between August---when I saw her last---and December... was visible. Tangible.

And in me, something has started letting go.

It's a strange kind of grief.

One that has no funeral. No ritual. No beginning or end.

But it lives in the body. In small moments. In watching her forget things she once knew. In seeing her eyes go blank. In noticing how hard it is for her to follow a simple task. In observing her struggling with this condition…

And something in me knows... the end is coming.

And here's the part that surprised me:

I want to be there.

I need to be there.

Not out of duty. Not because I should. But because something in me wants to accompany her to that threshold.

To be there for that transition. To hold space. To witness.

Not because death is necessarily beautiful.

But because I feel... reverence for it. Death feels strangely sacred.

And I don't want to miss it.

And right behind that need, there’s the sneaking fear that I might…

6. It was in the middle of all this heaviness -
this ,anticipatory grief,
this eight-day immersion in what's ending - that something unexpected happened.

There was one moment, during that week, that held me together.

I spent two long nights at my friend's place---this same friend who had invited me.

We talked until morning. Nocne Polaków rozmowy---Polish night conversations. When one topic threads into another, when one sentence evokes a new image, one word is an invitation to open a new door ...

You might know that kind of talk. The kind that goes beyond language.

And during one of those nights, she told me about her mother's death.

It happened during lockdown.

She wasn't allowed to be in the room. She never got to say goodbye.

And as she told me this, she broke down. Fully. Tears, shaking, everything.

And I just... held it.

I didn't try to fix. I didn't say anything clever.

I just let her cry. I stayed with her.

And in that moment, I felt something sacred between us.

There is an old Latin phrase:

Cor ad cor loquitur. Heart speaks to heart.

A moment of genuine healing that doesn't need words.

7. We stayed up even later that night, and the conversation turned - as it often does after real tears - not away from them, but even deeper into what they've already touched….:

We talked about how much energy we spend trying to fix things with
the mind.

Psychology, therapy, advice, analysis...

But sometimes, we don't need to fix.

We need to feel.

To stay. To hold. To witness.

And... to let the heart speak.

Because the heart doesn't analyze. But it knows.

And in that moment, her tears weren't a burden.

They were a gift.

A sign of trust. Of presence. Of something being allowed at last.

8. So this is what I wanted to share.

Not a Christmas story.

Not a New Year's message.

I said no to that Christmas dinner. And I'd say no again.

Because I am convinced that honoring what's true means disappointing what's expected.

And maybe that's where real presence begins.

The heart has its own language.

And sometimes the most healing thing , the most honest sign of deeply caring we can do is stop trying to fix.