The Truth I Found in the Depths of My Grief
In this episode, Kendra shares what it looked like when grief stripped away every expectation she'd been carrying, and how the space it left behind became the place she heard her own voice for the first time in years.
You'll hear the real story behind the hall pass grief gave her, and the vision board that changed everything four months after she lost her daughter.
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If this episode found you at the right time, here’s a free 10 day Recenter and Reset audio series for you. Five to ten minutes a day, made to help you reconnect with your own inner compass the way she has over the last 12 years.
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Now, I'd love to hear from you.
What did you find underneath all the grief?
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With endless love and appreciation,
Kendra 💜
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[00:00:00]
[00:00:05] Welcome to Truth After Loss. I'm Kindra Merrill, and this is a space that you can explore the truths that grief shows you and the life that you build from it. Because grief doesn't lie. It reveals to us what matters and what never did. So settle in, and let's build a life around that truth
[00:00:29] when we experience loss and grief, many times what I have noticed, and I noticed in my own experience, and I'll share some of that with you in just a minute, is that the grief puts us in a position where it kind of strips away all the noise in our life. And I'll explain what I mean by that in just a minute.
[00:00:49] But what's left is this raw, honest truth about life, about being human, about what it means to live fully. So my story is, if you haven't listened to the first episode, I'll share just a little bit about my story with you. I've had continuous big life changes pretty much all my life, and I think most of us do, but I'll tell you a little bit about mine so you have some context.
[00:01:22] I obviously, not obviously, I-- my parents went through a divorce when I was young. I went through my own divorce. My daughter was stillborn, after 40 weeks and five days, totally normal pregnancy. We were in labor when we lost her, and then six weeks later, my dad passed away of a heart attack very unexpectedly.
[00:01:43] Had not experienced... He had a heart attack two weeks before, and then had another one that took his life. after that, my husband lost his dad. My husband and I went through infertility and another miscarriage and, the idea that we wouldn't have a biological child between the two of us. Ultimately, we did, which is a story for another day.
[00:02:07] My stepdaughter lost her mom. We went through COVID, all the things. My sister-in-law was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was just that kind of one thing after another, and it has been for most of my life, with not a lot of, like, distance between each of these experiences.
[00:02:21] And each one of those events on their own helped me to dismantle different stories a- about what I believed to be true about myself and about the world around me, and about who I wanted to be, how I wanted to show up in this world and how I wanted to live my life
[00:02:41] So the one experience, and you can probably imagine that this would be true, the one experience that was kind of the most, eye-opening for me was the loss of my daughter and subsequently the death of my father, just that very, very intense grief period in my life. What I witnessed during that time were three things. The first being that it seemed to me, at least looking back on it now, it seemed to me that no one really expected a whole lot from me during that timeframe. What I mean by that is, you know, friends weren't shocked if I didn't show up at the baby shower.
[00:03:22] Coworkers weren't shocked if I didn't go to happy hour. Work wasn't surprised when I said, "No, I don't wanna take on that project." All of a sudden, I felt like I had this, like, weight lifted off of me, of the expectations and the obligations that I had put on myself, but the world had put on me
[00:03:44] It was like I had some, weird, like, pass. Some weird get out of jail free... I know that's gonna sound ridiculous, get out of jail free card. get out of anything card. I'm grieving, and so I'm not going. It was... I know this sounds, this may sound kinda strange, but it felt like I had a, a hall pass.
[00:04:05] I could just be like, "No, I'm not gonna go to that thing 'cause I don't really wanna go." Or, "No, I don't wanna engage in that project even though my boss says I should."
[00:04:15] For most of my life, I have felt like I had to justify my nos. Like, when I didn't wanna do something, I felt like I had to be like, "Well, I don't wanna do that because..." or, "Oh my gosh, if I do this, somebody's gonna be disappointed." All of a sudden, people weren't disappointed, they just understood, and I didn't have any guilt about saying no.
[00:04:39] And For the first time, I wasn't expected to be everywhere for everyone, for everything all the time
[00:04:48] And I, I really didn't have the capacity to be everywhere for everyone all the time. And so I didn't have the capacity, and they understood that I didn't have the capacity. And so it was just really easy to say no to a lot of things that I used to say yes to, which was for me this beautiful gift because everything non-essential, this is number two, everything non-essential went away.
[00:05:20] Everything that I-- that wasn't required in my life fell off the the wagon
[00:05:28] And when it did, I started to have more space for myself, more space to go inward, more space to feel my feelings, more space to witness and notice my life as an observer. Like, why would you say yes to those things in the past? What stopped you from saying no if you didn't wanna go? I was able to just do some interesting introspective conversations with myself around why I was doing the things that I was doing before that happened
[00:06:03] And when I started witnessing that, something started to emerge. I call it, identify it as my true self, my inner wisdom, my, inner knowing, my internal voice, my soul, if that aligns for you. something started speaking to me in a way that I had never heard so loudly and so clearly before
[00:06:27] It was a part of me that was never really truly allowed to exist because I was so concerned about saying no to people or disappointing others that I was overriding this voice so often that she had just gotten really, really quiet 'cause I wasn't listening. And in my grief, in the space that it provided me because I had been, because I could say no to anything and nobody cared, it gave me space to then pay attention to and witness and honor and listen to my inner wisdom and my inner voice And, and so in my grief, I found myself.
[00:07:11] And, this may sound a little strange, like I, So like I told you, my daughter was stillborn, and six weeks later my dad died. Four months after that, I found myself, because I had all this space, I found myself having this, like, overwhelming desire to create a vision board. And I'll, you know...
[00:07:34] Four months after losing my daughter, creating a vision board is probably not where everybody else goes. For me, I went there for a couple of reasons. One of them was very much, , I needed to see a picture of a world where my grief didn't hurt so bad. And so that was part of me, , envisioning a future where the grief wasn't so intense.
[00:07:55] What I understand now is for the first time in my life, my true self was speaking loudly and saying, "This is the life I want for you. This is the life I want you to have. This is the life you deserve to have."
[00:08:16] And for the first time in my life, I could feel what I actually wanted. I could... Really, seriously, honestly, for most of my life, I used to-- I say this all the time, and I've said it on social media many times, is I used to be very externally motivated. I would just do whatever other people said I should do.
[00:08:35] and get the, get the master's degree because my boss said it would open doors for the career. go do the tumbling pass because somebody else on my cheer squad in high school did it, and she challenged me to do it. I'm like, "Okay." Or when I sold my house because I was complaining to my trainer that it was just so far away, and I was exhausted, and she looked at me, and she was like, "Well, why don't you just sell your house?"
[00:09:01] And I was like, "What? No way." Two weeks later, it was on the market. Now, some of these I think are divine timing. and some of it was I was just living a life where people would put out an idea, and I'd be like, "Okay, I'll go do that," because that sounds right. I had no internal It's not that I had no internal compass.
[00:09:22] It's that I didn't have a connection to my internal compass. And when I lost my daughter and my dad all in the same season of life, again, like I said, everything stripped away. Nothing that was, , non-essential remained. Only what was essential remained, and in that extra space, I was able to start listening and paying attention to my internal compass in a way that I had not in my entire life
[00:09:55] And what I have learned in a decade of going through, actually let's just make it clear, in a lifetime of going through different types of grief and loss, I've learned that what grief reveals for us shouldn't be stuffed down. It shouldn't be ignored. We have an opportunity to pay attention to what our emotions are showing us about how we're living our lives and how that aligns to our inner truth, our inner wisdom, our inner self, our inner knowing
[00:10:30] Because what we hear and see and witness in the depths of our grief, in that rawness that can feel scary, but it is completely normal as a human being to feel these feelings. What you find in the depths of your grief is the honest truth of being human.
[00:10:56] So if you feel like you're in a place where grief has stripped everything away from you, you have a little bit more space and you're starting to hear some truths, I do have a free 10-day recenter and reset audio option for you that they're just short five to 10-minute audios for 10 days.
[00:11:17] If you wanna listen to them, they're gonna help you reconnect with that internal compass, just like I have over the course of the last 12 years of my life. And just an opportunity for you to reconnect and recenter on what matters most to you.
[00:11:32] So I'll put the link to that in the show notes below. I would highly recommend grabbing it.
[00:11:38] As always, thank you for listening to Truth After Loss. As we leave each other today, I would love to invite you to notice what resonated with you, what kind of sticks, what felt true for you, if anything, and let that guide you gently forward. Not necessarily my words, but what kind of hit you? What struck you?
[00:11:59] What did you notice resonated with you in your body? If you're watching this on YouTube, please subscribe to the show, and if you're listening on your favorite podcast app, follow along so you never miss an episode. Until next time, may you witness what grief has revealed for you and build a life around that truth.
Hi there, I’m Kendra.
I’m a woman forever changed by loss and by the quiet clarity that followed. I walked away from the life I was “supposed” to want and began creating one that felt like home.
Now I work with women who are ready to reclaim their identity, their relational sovereignty, and their soulful leadership. The ones who are done shrinking and ready to start living in their truth.