12 Years After Losing My Daughter, My Body Was Still Holding Grief
If you've been told grief has an ending, that one day you'll "get over it" or "move through it," this episode is for you.
I'm Kendra Merrill. Twelve years after my daughter Adeline was stillborn, I still carry that loss. Not in the same way I did on day one, but it resides.
In this first episode of Truth After Loss, I'm sharing the three cultural messages about grief that felt misaligned in my experience. I’ll also share a story of a hike, a hip that wouldn't stop hurting, and a moment on my living room floor that showed me exactly where my grief had been hiding for over a decade.
Press play and let's explore the truths grief reveals, and design your life after loss.
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Now, I'd love to hear from you. Which of these hit closest to home for you? The idea that grief doesn't end, or the truth that it can live in your body long after the loss? Remember, share as much detail as feels right to you. So many people come here looking for insight and comfort, and your story may be exactly what someone else needs to read today. Please share your thoughts directly in the comments below. Links to other posts, videos, or pages will be removed.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for adding your voice and your story to this community. You make this one of the most honest and supportive spaces on the internet.
With endless love and gratitude,
Kendra 💜
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[00:00:00] 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
[00:00:23] This is the first episode of Truth After Loss podcast, and I'm so grateful to be here with you today. Because this is the first episode, I do wanna just spend a couple of minutes kind of setting the stage for what I hope this podcast will, um, evolve into. The first is that a lot of this conversation, we obviously are going to talk about grief, so if that's triggering for you, and you're really in deep, and it's close to your heart, maybe this is something for you to listen to later number two, it'll also include a lot of stories about my own experience going through the loss of my daughter who was stillborn.
[00:01:04] Um, and I'll share a lot of that story as we go a-along in this podcast, and then subsequent losses that my family and I experienced over really a decade, and what has emerged from all of those experiences, which is a lot of truth. , And the third thing is that I hope this will be a very casual conversation, but a conversation, a two-way street. Please add your thoughts and comments into wherever you're listening because I want to co-create this with you, and I want to provide information thoughts and episodes based on what you need and what you want.
[00:01:46] So those are the three things before we get into our topic today, which is the idea that we carry this grief through our entire lives. I think many times, and I'll just jump right in here,
[00:02:01] I think many times we don't wanna accept that grief is going to be with us for the rest of our lives because that can feel, especially if you're in the early stages, it can feel almost overwhelming. I will say grief does not stay with you in the exact same way over time, but I do believe grief does not leave us ever in our lifetime.
[00:02:25] We grieve what we've lost for our entire lives.
[00:02:30] So here's what I've learned about loss over my lifetime, and I feel like I need to explain to you, like, what I mean when I say loss over my lifetime because I feel like I've had a lot. But everyone's experience with loss is different, and so this is in no way, shape, or form comparing my loss to yours.
[00:02:49] - Just for context, I've been through, obviously, um, the loss of, the stillbirth of my daughter, so I mentioned that earlier. , I was 40 weeks and five days pregnant. I was in labor when we lost her, no indication that there was anything wrong with the pregnancy, so very shocking to my husband and I.
[00:03:07] And then subsequently, I lost my dad six weeks later to a heart attack unexpectedly. So that was a very intense grief period in my life. But over the course of my life, my parents have gone through a divorce. I've obviously lost grandparents. That's a natural progression of being human. , I've also gone through my own divorce, , when I was younger.
[00:03:29] And then I lost my daughter, I lost my dad, and subsequently, my family went through, , the loss of my husband's dad and then the loss of my stepdaughter's mom and lots of other things. Job loss, both my husband and me. So I've, I've been through quite a bit. So here's what I, here's what I want to share with you. Three things. Some of the cultural messages that I felt like were not super helpful or, um, let's say, accurate.
[00:04:00] So the first one is this. The cultural message around the idea that we are supposed to go on a healing journey or heal our grief or move through it or get to the other side or get over it ultimately what lies underneath those messages is this idea that you will arrive at a day or a time or a place or a destination where you're no longer grieving.
[00:04:27] And while I completely understand that you are going to experience grief differently over time, the intensity changes, but I do not believe that our grief ever goes away. So like I said, that can feel a little overwhelming because the idea that we carry our grief forever feels a little scary to us humans, mostly because we haven't been taught to feel our feelings.
[00:05:02] We haven't been taught that feelings are totally natural and normal. We've been taught to avoid our feelings. We've been taught to
[00:05:11] push them down, push them away, stay distracted so we don't have to feel the emotion
[00:05:17] But I don't believe our grief was ever really meant to go away. What if the point was never how do we get through it, but more how do we learn to carry it?
[00:05:30] , So that's the first cultural message that I heard that I felt like was just inaccurate. This idea that underneath all of these messages that I heard, there was this one underlying theme of someday you'll get over it. Someday it, it will be gone. And the truth is, someday it feels less intense and you're not moving through waves as quickly, um, but it's always still there.
[00:05:55] It always resides.
[00:05:56] So that leads me really nicely into number two, which is grief is always unfolding. If you've ever read the book, um, The Body Keeps the Score, that book describes really, really well how our emotions are stored in our body. And that what I've already told you, we already know that we as humans, at least in the Western culture, are taught that feelings are scary and that we should avoid them and that we shouldn't feel them and that they are not necessarily something we should pay attention to.
[00:06:32] And because of all of that, we have a lot of feelings that are stored in our body. And if we're not processing our grief as we're moving through our lives, that can all get stored up, and then it shows up in how we interact or, , how we behave, how we are in relationships. So you may find that grief unfolds over your lifetime because you may witness a decade later how your grief is impacting how you're behaving in your relationships.
[00:07:04] And that's what I mean when I say it's unfolding all the time, is the unfolding is happening because you begin to witness how your grief is impacting the way you behave and how you show up in the world.
[00:07:19] So I'll give you an example of that I went on a hike recently, actually. So like I said, it's been twen- 12 years since I lost my daughter, and we've been through a lot in my family. But we went on a hike that was pretty stren- strenuous at Yosemite National Park recently, and I came home, , let's just say in a lot of pain, and in my hip and my abdomen area, which is all obviously
[00:07:46] that's where my e- reproductive organs live. And I spent - three or four days, I guess, , just in a lot of immense pain. And finally, after having a couple of conversations with some important people in my life, I turned to the floor, literally, and got in a restorative yoga pose. It was just a child's pose, but it was, you know, all the props, all the things, all the supportive things that I needed, and my head hit the pillow, and I just bawled.
[00:08:17] And to me, that was an ex- a perfect example of how the body was holding on to some emotion. I don't even know what it was, I, I do, but I don't. Like
[00:08:31] I know there was something in there about me feeling safe, feeling supported , or maybe lack of feeling safe or feeling supportive, and somehow or another that was stored in my body and in my hips and in my muscles in that area. And here I am 12 years later, and until that moment, I was in intense pain.
[00:08:56] And after that moment, I found the support I needed from a, , from a health perspective, and I feel fine now. And would I have probably felt fine eventually, physically? Maybe. Would it have transitioned as quickly as it did? Hmm, maybe not, because there was so much stored in there. So that's what I mean when I say grief is always unfolding and that we carry it with us all forever because it shows up in our bodies even if it's not, like, visible in our every day
[00:09:35] the third thing that I will say felt somewhat inaccurate or accurate is feeling your feelings is the way forward. I've already mentioned this before, that,, culturally, we're not taught that it's okay to feel our feelings.
[00:09:51] , We're taught that our feelings are bad or painful, or that we should ignore them, or stuff them down, or not express them, or whatever the case may be. You get what I'm saying. The idea that our emotions and our feelings are not something that we should pay attention to, that's the cultural message.
[00:10:14] And I am telling you that especially with grief, but with all emotions, you know, feeling our feelings is the way forward. If we are able to take a moment to allow ourselves to grieve, and even 10 years later, even 12 years later when I got on that mat and I allowed myself to take a moment to pause and to feel all of that, that is our way forward When we feel our feelings, , it helps them move through us so that they don't then get stored in the body and then impact how we behave and how we show up in the world
[00:10:54] And when we sit with our grief, when we sit with our feelings, this is where, this is the whole kind of crux of the truth after loss, the foundation of what I'm trying to share with the world. This idea that if we can sit with our feelings
[00:11:11] The wisdom that we learn from our feelings
[00:11:14] is profound, can be profound. We learn, we go to the depths of the pain, and when we go there, we meet ourselves. We meet our, i- if you believe in, we meet our creator, we meet our, uh, the purest, l- most loving energy that there is. We meet, you know, collective consciousness. Whatever it is that you believe in, you can meet it there in the depths of your grief.
[00:11:53] And when we are allowed to, and when we are encouraged to, and supported in feeling that depth, we can find things that we didn't know were possible. So I didn't choose to be a mother of a stillborn child. I did not choose that for myself. It is my reality, and I accept it as my reality, and I have a choice on how I want to carry my grief moving forward and I choose to express my grief and feel my feelings
[00:12:32] And explore them because within them I have found so much truth and so much... And as we go along, I'll explain more and more what I mean by that when I say I've, you know, found some truths. As we go along this podcast, I will share more and more about what truths I've actually found in my grief.
[00:12:54] Some of them are, hmm, one, one of the good ones is that my worth and value is all wrapped up in having a child. When I lost her, we, my husband and I went through, , infertility. We went through, , I went through a surgery. We had... And I came to a point where I might not have a biological child, and I had to, like, in my grief, wrap my mind around the idea that I wouldn't have a child biologically and what that meant for me as a woman and my value in this world.
[00:13:27] And I'll talk more about it later, but that's just kind of an example of what I mean when I say, if you feel your feelings and you allow yourself to go deep into your grief, you will find truths. It will reveal to you what matters and what doesn't and what never did, and you can build your life around that truth
[00:14:00] Adeline, who is my daughter, her name is Adeline.
[00:14:03] She taught me that the world is not black and white, and that you can grieve your loss and live
[00:14:12] A beautiful, aligned, fulfilling, and meaningful life. And that's what I want for you
[00:14:21] 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?
[00:14:42] 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.