One of life’s most profound and devastating experiences can be losing a spouse. It’s a journey that can be marked by sorrow and the reshaping of one's identity, but it’s not one you have to go on alone. For today’s conversation, I’m joined by author, veteran journalist, and speaker Leslie Streeter. Leslie is the author of the memoir, “Black Widow: A Sad-Funny Journey Through Grief for People Who Normally Avoid Books with Words Like "Journey" in the Title.” A native of Baltimore, Maryland, she and her work have been featured in The Washington Post, CNN, the Atlantic, and more.
During our conversation today, Leslie and I discuss the shifting stages of grief in the aftermath of losing a spouse, how having a village aided her through the death of her spouse, and what our society gets wrong about helping loved-ones through a grief experience.
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The Therapy for Black Girls Podcast is a weekly conversation with Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed Psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, about all things mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves.
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Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, doctor Joy hard and Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to find a therapist in your area, visit our website at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. While I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional. Hey, y'all, thanks so much for joining me for Session three, p. Fifty two of Therapy for Black Girl's podcast. We'll get right into our conversation after a word from our sponsors.
Hi.
I'm Leslie Gray Streeter and I'm on the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. I'm in session today unpacking my experience as a black widow.
One of life's most profound and devastating experiences can be losing a spouse. It's a journey that can be marked by sorrow and the reshaping of one's identity. But it's not one you have to go alone. For today's episode, I'm joined by author, veteran journalist and speaker Leslie Streeter. Leslie is the author of the memoir Black Widow, a sad, funny journey through grief for people who normally avoid books with words like journey in the title. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, she and her work have been featured in The Water Shington Post, CNN, The Atlantic, and more. During our conversation, Leslie and I discussed the shifting stages of grief in the aftermath of losing a spouse, how having a village aided her through the death of her spouse, and what our society gets wrong about helping loved ones through a grief experience. If something resonates with you while enjoying our conversation, please share with us on social media using the hashtag tpg in session or join us in the sister circle to talk more about the episode. You can join us at community dot therapy for Blackgirls dot com. Here's our conversation. So thank you so much for joining us today, Leslie.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah, I'm excited to chat with you. So I wonder if you could take us to the beginning of your journey as a widow. Can you talk to us a little bit about those initial days after losing your partner.
The initial days were I can't see my face, but it's the face, is what it is. Because it's like anytime any of you who've gone through loss, sudden loss, particularly, it's just you're trying to survive your Bodi's in survival mode. There's a sense of all of the stages of grief all at once that you're in denial, you're in shock here in everything. And I guess it was just knowing that I had no idea what was about to happen in any moment, but also knowing that I had to keep it going, which don't always work in the same way, but they.
Kind of have to.
That survival butting the head against you wanting to just shut down is a constant and as you know, with grief, there is no linear stage. You could be a one, stage one, and then stage seven and then back to three, and then roll around in five and seven all over again, and it can all happen at once, and it's just your body trying to keep you alive while protecting you. And it was really disorienting.
Yeah, yeah, I can't imagine. Can you talk to us about what support was like for you. Who were the people that you were able to lean on in those first couple of days.
I have the most amazing village of people, And I know village at this point has become so used as to become trite, but I had immediately when it happened. One of my best friends and her husband came over and she drove me to the hospital.
And I had a friend.
That friend's husband and my neighbor who I was supposed to go walking with that morning, came over and stayed with my son. I had my aunt, who was a pastor in DC, who prayed with us as we drove to the hospital. I had my husband's cousins who drove in from Fort Lauderdale from that area about an hour or so drive depending on where they were, to say goodbye to him in the hospital, and then took the rest of the day off. It was one of that cousin's birthdays, and he took the day off to be with us. My sister, who was down in about three hours from Baltimore it happened. She woke her husband up and said, grabbing the credit card, I gotta go. My mother was down in five hours, people from work, people just showing up.
Every day.
I would wander out of my room and there'd be a different person in my house that.
I'd go, Oh, that's so nice. Oh it's not a visit, that's right.
Something terrible happened that It was really reassuring in the moments where I felt really discombobulated to know that people were there for me, not just the ones that were physically there, but the ones who were able to talk to me on the phone, the ones who called but didn't stay too long because they knew that it.
It's okay if you don't want to talk, and I go, that's great. It was a lot going on.
Yeah, you know, I've talked with other people who talked about like having a person be in charge of answering questions for other people and like handling some of those logistics of all of those people. Was there somebody who was able to fill that role for you?
My twin sister Lynn, who everything in my life, is that person and I am that person for her, just instinctually for fifty two plus years now assume that role immediately. She was the person that people first of all called because they're like, what's going on. So she was working with other people to say, coordinate who got picked up from the airport, or someone would say what do you want me to handle? And she'd say, can you handle the food that people were bringing? Or can you handle we're talking to the rabbi and Leslie's talking to the rabbi, but can someone else do this? And so she was the team master and all of that. I knew that I could trust her A because she's good at that stuff. B because she knows how to delegate. C Because she's my sister and she wasn't going to drop the ball. It was difficult too, and she went through her own grieving process for my husband because she was very close to him and loved him very much. But at that point it was about me. So she was able to pull it together, just as I have done for other people who have had losses, because at that point, my grief is not the center grief, it's theirs. I say to people all the time when they say my friend lost her husband or someone I know at work, what do I do? And I was like, find out who the coordinator is, don't call them, maybe least something on Facebook.
We're so sorry.
If other people are doing that, but find out who the coordinator is. Find out who that person is, and that person will tell you what they need.
Great suggestion there, So, Leslie, it seems like your experience as a widow is also layered by the fact that your mom was a widow or is a widow. Can you talk a little bit about how she was able to support you in that in anything? That kind of was interesting about that process given her experience as well.
I think we can all help each other, even if we don't have the exact same experiences. But I think those friends of yours who do, and God knows, I don't wish widowhood on anybody. I don't want to have that kind of relationship to people. But my mother did. And she had been planning to move down to Florida from Little Rock with us, not with us, like in an apartment, living by herself down the street. And so when it happened, and that day that she showed up at my house and I said, can you just live with me? And she agreed, and I was like, wait.
What have we done?
There was this a terrible mistake, but it wasn't. It turned out to be amazing. I think that she understood being like I say in my book ground Zero for the grief. She understood because everyone else was hurting when my father died, my sister and I were hurting. Everyone else was hurting. His brother and sister were hurting. But she was the locust of that grief, being his partner and being the every day in the house and being the person who was always around. And I think she understood that's what I would be going through. So she was there to give me as much space or no space, or watch me. She was able to be just the most wise person sometimes by saying nothing.
So yes, I think that.
My mom was the best person. And I said, I'm sorry that she had that experience, which is the best person to help me, because she understood there be times where I wanted so many people. There be times when I wanted to know people. There were times when I wanted to be physically touched. There were times I was just like, ugh, everybody, get away from me. And she's a social worker at a psych nurse, so she also understood clinically about grief and why that was. And she understood, like I said, unfortunately personally, and she I think kept a lot of people out of my face, which I think is also sometimes the person who handles the meal coordination in those days is also the out of your face person, and that's helpful I have too.
MM. One of the feelings you mentioned is feeling discombobulated after the laws, and you know, I think that there are some things that you can expect that you would experience after the laws of your partner. Are there things that came up that you did not expect that you think would be important to highlight?
Anger?
Man, I you know, and that's part of the stages of grief. But your anger at the person who died, which is something you can't do anything about, and as my therapist said, it was futile in a you'll never win that argument way. You're never gonna go back and have them do it. But you're angry at being left alone. You're angry at are there things you could have done. I would never blame my husband for his death, but he was a forty four year old guy who had some health things he did not take care of, and I felt guilty myself. It was angry at me. Could I have done something? He was a grown man. I did what I could, and once again anger at dead people doesn't really go anywhere, but acknowledging that you have that, I didn't expect that. I didn't expect to feel.
Useless, if that makes sense.
I think that because I'm a where's the solution person? What can we do? What are the steps? What's the game plan? Kind of person? There were times where I could make all the plans I want and my body wouldn't let me do it. My body wouldn't let me get up, or I was so tired, or I would walk into a room of people and my body would go panic mode, panic notes, shut down, shut down, and I would go, it's been so nice to see you, and I could like count the steps back to where I was going, because I.
Was like, I got to get out of here. I gotta get out of here.
But I can't flee and run. Can go ah and leave? I mean you could, but I probably did in the first couple of days. Just no one told me that. But I think that the out of control part of it, after being a person who I mean, I was married at thirty eight, almost thirty nine, and to become a parent while I was forty two, and so my life and the design of it and the schedule of it had always been my own. So even giving up that as part of a partnership is a vulnerability when that ends and you're trying to pull all the pieces back to yourself and you.
Don't know what you're doing.
They're also really tired and really sad and really sleepy. And I was unfortunately a little high on bourbon and pie at times too, so that will add to it the whole self medication peace, and you just feel out of control when you're a controlled person like myself type A.
That's really scary too.
Yeah. Yeah, And the anger, I think is an interesting one because I think people often feel a lot of shame. Right. It's like I feel bad for being angry at my deceased partner, right, And like you said, like you really can't go anywhere with it because there's no conversation that you can have, and so it is often one of those very I think difficult emotions for people to be able to navigate.
Absolutely, and also as women, we are taught to be easy about things, and be forgiving about things, and be accepting about things, and to sublimate how we feel if it makes other people feel uncomfortable. There's that scene in Steel Magnolia's where the Sally Field character has lost her daughter and she runs through the whole gamut in the Grave Heart, where she's yelling, I'm so angry, I can hit something, and she's she knows that she's making people uncomfortable, but it's not about them. It's about how she feels at that moment. And it's wonderful to have people who are going to let you be uncomfortable and make them uncomfortable because that's what the moment is about, and the anger and the pain and the just trying to box with God part of it.
And I did that too, not physically, but I.
Would yell why, and I felt like the Sally Field character.
So you've mentioned a couple of times about grief experiences and like whose grief is central and whose grief needs to be tended to right? And I can imagine that's very difficult when you're a mom and have had this loss. So you've lost your partner, but then your son has lost his father. So can you talk a little bit about how you navigated continuing to be a parent and like tending to your grief and your sons at the same time.
It was very difficult with us because my child was a baby, he was two, and so his immediate loss is where's Daddy? Because he doesn't understand death. And I say in my book it took a long time for me to be able to say the word dead. I was like, oh, he's gone. He can't be here, so he at three, thought he was just someplace else.
He't.
You can't make sense of these things, and it's hard to say. It's hard to talk about the things, particularly when you don't know if the person will understand. My nieces and nephews were like ten eleven, thirteen, so their loss of him, they.
Knew him longer than I did.
Like on his side, dealing with their grief was a different grief because they knew him fully as a person. He had been there as far as they knew their entire lives. With my son, it was going back to what is grief, what is loss, and going from there. Now I focus on his grief is of what he doesn't have, because it's very sad he doesn't remember Scott. He was very young, he was not quite too when he died, So his grief is he went through about two years ago. Everyone else has a dad.
I don't have a dad, and.
He misses not just Scott the person, but he misses the place in his life that a father would have had, and that is terrible to do so. And also I am healed in a way that I was not immediately.
After the deaths.
So I am now, I think, through therapy and time and all of those things, able to more properly address those things about what my child is feeling and that loss without including mine got it.
So that did give you a little bit of space. It sounds like so because he was so young, you were able to maybe more attend to your own grief, and now you're able to support him as he's gotten noticed. EXA Yeah, more from our conversation. After the break, he says, it's nice to see you're still with us. What do you think about the conversation so far? Did anything come to mind? Or are you just listening and learning that works too. I want to take a moment to share an affirmation with you, something to add into your wellness kid, or something to pull out when you need a little extra self love and support. Repeat after me, I get to heal on my own timeline one more time, say it with me? I get to heal on my own timeline, use this affirmation when you need it, and remember to take good care. All right, let's get back into our conversation. So you've mentioned therapy a couple of times. I'm curious at what point in your grief journey did you actually start working with a therapist. Was it pretty immediate or did you take some time before and was pretty immediate.
Let's see, he died in July, late July, and I think I was probably in therapy by September, having had therapy for or other things before. I understood how important that was living with my mother at that point, who has been a therapist. I understood the need for it. I understood the need to talk about it in a setting that was not going to emotionally hurt the other person, because, like I said, so many other people had lost around my husband dying. They felt his loss in different ways. And to talk to someone whose job it was to listen he was not emotionally attached in the way that I was, was very important and she was great. It was weird because I at the time wrote for the Palm Beach Post and she was in that community, and several sessions in. I said, did you know who I was when I called you? And she said I did? And I knew why you were calling because I'd seen in the paper that your husband had died, and being a professional, she'd said nothing. I wouldn't have known.
I just at some point I thought I should ask this question. I would just curre.
She did, and the fact that she played it off like she had no idea was great.
Mm hmm. Yeah. And she was really able to hold space just for you and not her perceptions of it or any of that. Yeah, I'm glad that you had that. It sounds like you came from a family, you know, a professional who knew the importance of therapy, and so it sounds like it was a good help for you right there. So what do you think the general public kind of gets wrong about grief and being a widow? Is there something that immediately comes to mind for you?
Yes? And I had mentioned before just in general about grief that people because we're Americans and we put things in tight little boxes, on schedules, on steps, we go ABCD healed, everything is wonderful.
And if you're not, did you do it wrong? Were you really trying?
And like I said, It comes back to the part of us that believes that everyone else's job is to make us feel comfortable and to not be a downer, and to not be the buzzkill that comes into the situation, and to not want to be around people whose experiences might be buzzkilly or what I just made up.
But I think that what we get wrong is.
That we're not helping that doesn't help the person, and to ask weird questions. I know people who've lost animals and then the first thing I say is you're going to get another dog? And most of the time it's like, no, I'm still grieving bandit, I'm still grieving cocoa or whatever. So when you say to a widow, where are you going to get married again? Or don't worry you'll get married again, or never date again, your time is over you or forever without your person, just the weird stuff people say, or when people want to compare it to their divorce or they want to compare it to the loss some other things. I think that we have such a discomfort and talking about hard things and talking about uncomfortable things, that we have this unwritten pact with each other. If you will agree not to make me uncomfortable about it. I'll give lip surface to it. I'll say sorry for your loss. I'll give some weird platitude about God's timing and plans and cycles and all that garbage.
The biggest thing I would say is that doesn't help either.
Trite sayings, assumptions about someone's spirituality. The better place that person might be in the journey they have trod all that garbage. They're with God now. Even though I believe that that wasn't helpful to me because I wanted him to be with me.
I wanted my husband next to me on the couch.
I wanted him in my child's life, driving to my friend's house in Key West for his birthday. I wanted that. I didn't want him to be sitting at God's right hand. God can wait. Is not my thing. And yes, I understand people say things because they want to be helpful, but I would say to people, would that be helpful to you?
And no, no, no it won't.
And I think it's really difficult for people who have not had that kind of a loss, right because there's something that you could think might be helpful, but until you're really in that situation, you don't realize that those kinds of things are not actually helpful. Now, Yeah, so you were already writing. You mentioned that you were writing for the newspaper, and you've now written your book. So the book is called Black Widow, A sad, funny journey through grief for people who normally avoid books with words like journey in the title, which I think is a great, great title. And so I'm curious to hear how writing has been helpful in your grieving journey and in your process to healing.
My therapist asked me early on if I was keeping a grief journal and said, yes, I'm writting a book.
Oh, you were writing a book.
Immediately, immediately it came an outlet, and I'll be very honest, and some people go, oh, no about it. It was an outlet to get it literally out of my brain and off of my check. And also I thought, I'm a widow. Now I might need the money. I might, you know, need to sell a book. I might need the income, any extra thing I get. Because when you were widowed, you're not just missing your partner and the love of your life and your child's other parent. You're missing income, You're missing potential support, both financially and otherwise. So when I was writing a book and people would say, oh, isn't it great Even if you never do anything with it, you accomplish something, I was like, no, I also need to sell this book, and I needed to also get it to other people. I have read so many books about grief or so many articles about grief that were from the perspective of the healed, that were like the ten steps that got me through, or this is how I'm okay, and I was like, am I okay? I am not okay. I don't know what okay looks like. So admitting that I was a mess and that it's messy, and once again that those steps to heal, those stages are not linear and they loop loop loop around, that's what I wanted to write. So as I made that clear in my mind, as I wrote, and as I was in therapy, and as I begin to heal and time begin to go, all that made more sense to me because I could see on the page and I would look back to the first chapter of the book starts with me standing in the graveyard eating chips with my whole family on a golf cart, and I would read after a couple of years. I would reread the whole thing from time to time, and lots of things changed in the book, but that stayed there, and I thought.
I remember that girl.
I remember how lost she felt, and how weird and hungry she felt, and how lost and just untethered she felt. And being able to go back to that and read it and know at different stages I was no longer in that stage was as helpful as people who keep traditional journals because they can go back the stages that they are at.
So it was both.
It was something to help my career, It was something to help other people. It was something to help me and I think ultimately my son, because I think I worked out things in the writing, both in the book and speaking and in writing stories for the newspaper and writing for a publication called Model Laws. It's a website, and just exploring my grief in different ways really helped me talk it out.
It was all therapy mm in the book.
I mean, even starting from the title, clearly there's a humorous approach that you take with the book that I think is very different than on like ten Things that idea to get over this loss, and that it tends to be a little bit more serious. Can you talk a little bit about your approach of using humor? I think naturally it sounds like you're a very humorous person, But can you talk a little bit about your use of humor in the book and maybe people's response to that.
I think that people that really got the book are those type of people like me who do process things through humor. It is bitter, bitter, desperate humor, and some of it is absolutely weird Chuckley thing.
That's funny.
My sister and I were talking this morning. The Emmy's just had a really beautiful immemorial.
Presentation, and she said, guess what song it was?
And it's that song from The Fast and the Furious that I'll tell you all about it when I see you again, which I had banned.
I was like, nobody sing it. I'm gonna find you. And then my.
Husband's cousin, whose birthday he had died on, says, I have a couple songs I want to play him, like no, And he pulls up on his phone and it's that song.
And my sister looks at me and.
I go and she said, because I'm like, I'm disassociating to the whole thing like Wade's world, you know, like not here right now.
It's like and I couldn't kill him because I love my cousin. He's great.
He was there, he was grieving, he was doing it. They were like brothers. And also I'm like, oh, this song and that's funny. It's funny because it's terrible. It's funny though, and I process things like that. I think some people thought it was inappropriate. There was a guy I don't read good Reads reviews because it's not for us, it's for the readers, but some guy wrote she said it was a sad funny journey. I found it neither sad or funny, and I was like, I could say, and I think it's funny, but how could you not think it was sad. That's like people are. That's funny too. Other people's reactions are funny.
I think that's it.
For the most part, I was writing this book for specific people, including people who understand that their reactions might be off as off as what society would term what they would be or how they should be or how they should react, and that there was just a lot of messy there and sometimes that, like I said, it translates itself into being really funny.
Got it? Got it more from our conversation after the break. So one of the other topics that you address, of course, in the book is race, and you know, I'm curious to hear can you talk about how you think being a black woman impacted your experience of grief and how might other black widows have a different experience of grieving than people from other races.
I always say mine, I say this in the book is a black experience and it is not the Black experience because that does not exist. But I think, for instance, those of us really say in the Black Christians say Baptist Church, like I was, our outward grief is funerals or everybody's crying.
Out loud, oh no baby, why way, Lord why.
And lots of walking up and down and people catching the spirit and it's long and whatever.
When my husband went to my father's funeral, he's like, why is this so long?
What's what?
The open casket? What is all this stuff?
Like the oh, Lord, help them to do this, help them? And then hey, would you like some chicken? So it's a different experience. So I think I wrote from the perspective how I had learned to do grief, and I think that there are not as many books, and they certainly are now, but at the time, there were not as many things about that experience we as in within finger parentheses, tends to be a homogeneous experience that is not black. And so when we say this is how we grieve, and you see these movies about funerals, read books about funerals, rey books about grieving, and I'm like, I don't relate to this at all. So I think a lot of people did relate to the outward way that we grieve, which is the talking about it and the crying about it and in some ways over the top things. Although I think every ethnic or religious tradition has food as part of the tradition, it's different. I set shiva with my husband's family when his mother died, and that is a much longer process, but my mother in law's body was in the ground in twenty four hours, so it's a different compartmentalization of it. I think that because there had not been as many mainstream grief writers. Now you've got like Tim Bilocke's book From Scratch, which was a wonderful Netflix movie, and a lot of other people writing about grief in different ways, both widowhood and otherwise. And once again, all of our situations are different, but just even acknowledging it, even acknowledging that we may grieve differently because we are black, or a Christian or Muslim or atheist, in particularly against the backdrop of a different culture or religion. Just acknowledging that's different, and not trying to claim a universal experience or not see ourselves any quote unquote universal experience and say, well, nobody relates to me.
It was important to name those things to me.
Yeah, Yeah, I'm wondering are there other books or movies or things that you've seen that you feel like have also done a really good job of really providing context to all of the things that could be grief. So you mentioned from scratch, Are there other things that have been helpful for you?
I and it was. It's not a great show, but it had some moments. It was originally on BT plus The First Wives Club, the version that they did on TV with Jill Scott. There is a scene in the third season where one of the friends dies and these are like bougie people, so I speak bougie as well.
So the way that there is a.
I'm making a scene or not making a scene, or I'm being passive aggressive in my beautiful hat. That whole thing I related to very much in the way that there's always a friend who's trying to make it right, and always a friend who refuses to be right, and mothers and people with long secrets and stuff and long grudges.
Everyone has that.
But the way in which the bougie black people among us can make that happen felt really familiar.
Yeah, I enjoyed that the whole series, but the third season I thought was done well. Thank you for sharing that. So you mentioned your or other along in your healing journey now and you're able to support your son differently, What do you feel like healing does look like for you right now? And are there things that still come up for you that like trigger this oh immediate sense of like grief and lass even still now.
That's a wonderful question.
I think that part of answering that question is something that you were giving me that a lot of people don't give her the people, which is they compartmentalize grief and go, Okay, you're over it, great, bye, and they don't check back in and they don't come back. So yes, it's been almost nine years, which is so crazy to me because it feels like fifty years in two days. Sometimes it just depending on where I am. I think what healing looks like has also been exacerbated and enhanced by having moved. We were in one house when Scott passed, and then my mother and I and my son moved to a different house several months later because my landlord were selling the house and we weren't going to buy it. And then we lived in another place in West Palm a house he never saw, so that was very poignant to me for four years. And then I'm back in my hometown in Baltimore and a house that he has never seen, And I have to think about sometimes. Would he have liked this house, Maybe not, but he wanted to live right in Baltimore City, probably not. Would he have been mad that my son was not playing football, because I like his brains in his head, he would have had a problem. But also that gives me space to remember that I'm not the same Leslie I was in twenty fifteen, and Scott would not have been the same Scott in twenty twenty four. Then he was in twenty fifteen. So I had a discussion yesterday with some friends about, oh, our husbands, I don't have a husband. Oh, we could all go out and our husbands could hang out. I'm like, wah, wah, you know she's standing alone. So in those moments, I mean, I have whatever moved on. Looks like I have dated since then, no one, super seriously. I have a person that I see currently. I don't know if I'm ever going to get married again. Right now, I don't feel the need to because I'm financially supported by me and I have a son who is where he is. I don't need someone to come back in and be both emotionally.
Responsible for me or my child.
And this is going to sound people are gonna go, oh no, but you read so many things about women who didn't trust people who come in and take their stuff, you know, when they remarry or recouple. And my stuff is my sons. My stuff is not for anybody else but me and my son and anyone that we should decide to give it to. So I'm not in a real hurry to seed that control to anyone. And that's a self protection that's good at first. It seemed like that was just something I was doing because I was healing.
No, not really.
It's also because it's a good way to be when you're now the single parent, the solo parent. Now my mother's not here. She got married almost two years ago. I moved out, so it's just me and the boy. So healing looks like autonomy. Healing looks like being able to do certain things. I used to basically hold my anniversary and the anniversary of my husband's death as like days, and I don't have to do that anymore. It's nice to look at them and say, it would have been a nice time, but I don't feel me to. I don't have to like go away anymore, or like have a sad thing where I have a drink and eat a bunch of popcorn or something. You know.
I don't have to do that anymore. And healing looks like.
A future where I can remember those things but not be struck down in my place where I'm standing because of it.
Was it difficult for you to leave Florida and move to a completely different state.
Oh no, it was not, And that may have been because it happened in twenty twenty, where everything as you know changed. We had been thinking about moving. My book came out in twenty twenty, in March. It came out about a week before Lockdown happened, which unfortunately had a detriment to the sales, and that kind of thing that I had to grieve too. I had agrieve this idea of what that was going to be. I was supposed to go to New York and be on this day show canceled. I was supposed to be in person at book conn and New York canceled. I had a small tour between Miami and New York and Baltimore and New Orleans done, and I got to do some of those things online from a zoom someplace, but it's not the same. So the paper that I worked for had been bought. They started laying people off. We started having furloughs. I thought, Oh, this isn't going to be sustainable, and it was just time to go. My mother was seeing her now husband, who had been her sweetheart at Morgan State University in the sixties. My grandmother, who passed this year. At that point was in her early nineties and my mother really wanted to be close to her. They lived about forty five minutes away from us, and it was just time to go, so starting over. I felt weird about leaving the grave?
Is that weird? And I've bought the place next to him.
I don't know if I'll actually be buried there because I don't live there anymore, So i'd have to have a funeral there fifty years from now, and who's going to go, who's gonna come see it, whatever, So that's a whole thing, and that's guilt. But I felt guilty about leaving him. The morning that we moved, I drove by, I drove brooks By and say goodbye. And I've been back a couple times to Florida to see him, put rocks on the grave per Jewish tradition and just talk to him, how you know, brough us up. But he's everywhere. I don't need to go there to see him. His spirit does not live in that box, it does not live in that that field. So if I need to talk to Scott, I can do it sort of anywhere. I have guilt sometimes about being happy, and I know it's weird for people because I'll go I'm really happy and They'll look like like I'm not supposed to ever be again, and I'm not the happy that I was with him, but it has to be a good happy because.
Otherwise I was forty four years old.
I'm never supposed to be happy for the rest of my life, and so I've let go a lot of the guilt about saying things like I am happy.
So who are you able to have those kinds of conversations with? I guess would be your twin. But are there people in your circle who like allow you to still have those days where you maybe do feel guilt around like, oh, I haven't been to visit or what does this mean I'm never going to get married? Like wh who's able to support you in those kinds of conversations.
So many of my close girlfriends, many of them have lost parents. I've had friends whose partners have not died, but have had serious physical issues or devastating injuries or that kind of thing, so they have their own grief and also making it okay to say to them, you can talk to me about that, we're not comparing. I relate to those as a couple of those friends, and I can say it's okay to be sad about the loss of the life that you thought you were living and yes, you still hear and you've made it a different thing.
But it's okay to grieve that.
It's okay to grieve the thing that you had before, the thing that you thought, because we all are in different ways. And to just listen. I have so many people who will just listen. And one of my best friend's current husbands was widowed and so we've bonded over that and he sees it from a different perspective. When I wrote my book, I had written that first chapter really raw, and then had gone through several rounds of editing and I think we had edited out some of the rawness and I said it to him.
He goes, what is this? No, put it back? Put it back?
And I said to my editor, yeah, okay, so my other widow friends, I had to put it back, so I will and it worked. It worked, and he goes, that was the point of it was that you were like untethered and raw in those first several hours. And that's what I'm going to relate to. That's what other people will relate to, no matter what their journey is. So I am so lucky to have those people to talk to.
So there's somebody who's enjoying our conversation, who has recently become a widow. What kinds of things would you offer to them? Is there something you wish you would have known, or things that you feel like could be helpful.
What I always say to new widowed people is to take it easy on yourself.
And that's harder.
Sometimes it looks if you do not have the support that I have, if you don't have the day to day physical people helping you take care of your kids or driving you around or doing whatever it is those physical things that need to happen, not just the emotional things. And I would say, find one or two people who can do that for you, who will let you just be, who are not gonna let you like drown, but they're gonna know instinctively when to grab you, when to let you alone, like my mother did.
And just to know that.
You don't have to do anything. You don't owe it to anybody. Don't want to be a terror and be like terrible on purpose. But you also don't have to watch your words in ways. You don't have to like start a war. But I said to my sister, stop me from like biting people's heads off. But if I talk about people badly in my room. I'm gonna do that. That's gonna happen. I said something.
She goes leslie.
I go no, no, I get to be sad and mad and hate people irrationally right now.
Don't let me like.
Throw things at them at the funeral. But I'm gonna feel how I feel. And she goes got it and it never happened again. It's like, what are my parameters?
What am I supposed to do?
And find people who will give you space to grieve and who will tell other people let her sleep right now? Who will answer the phone and go, yes, she'll call you back. Who will help you make excuses? People would ask me to do things. They were being very nice. Sometimes I want to go out, sometimes I didn't, and my mother was home with my son, and she would say, if you need to do it, If you don't, just say you're tired, you're busy, make of an excuse, or don't say I just don't want.
To and don't.
I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. So where can we stay connected with you? Where can we get a copy of the book and follow up with your work? What's your website? As well as any social media channels you'd like to share.
Oh my goodness, okay, So you can find me at I need to update at more or Leslie Grace Streater dot com. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram and on Facebook as Leslie Gracetreeter. You can find me at The Baltimore Banner, which is my full time gig where I write a column two days a week. You can find me on my podcast that I do with my town sister, Find Beats and Cheeses.
We are on Spotify and.
Apple and all those other things that you can find us on. And I have new projects and things happening that I can't talk about yet right now. But if you keep up and I'll have to update the website and you follow me on social media pretty soon you will figure out those cool things.
And the book is available where all books are available, where all.
Books are available.
I'm, like I said, it's almost four years old now, which is weird to me because I feel like I've missed two years during the crux of COVID. Although we are still in COVID, we are still in a pandemic, very high rates of it right now, honestly, but you can find it on Amazon, you can find it on all of your online situations. And occasionally I'll walk into a bookstore it'll be there too, and that's fun.
We will be short to include all of that in our show notes. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today, Leslie. I appreciate you.
Thank you.
I'm so glad Leslie was able to join us for this episode. To learn more about her and her work, be sure to visit the show notes at Therapy for Blackgirls dot Com slash Session three point fifty two, and don't forget to text two of your girls right now and tell them to check out the episode. If you're looking for a therapist in your area, visit our therapist directory at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com slash directory. And if you want to continue digging into this topic or just be in community with other sisters, come on over and join us in the Sister Circle. It's our cozy corner of the Internet designed just for black women. You can join us at community dot Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. This episode was produced by Frida Lucas and Ziria Taylor. Editing was done by Dennison Bradford. Thank y'all so much for joining me again this week. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all real soon. Take good care, what