Navigating Life's Sudden Changes: From Grief to Growth

Charlotte continues last week’s conversation about grief, focusing on pivotal moments when life splits into “before” and “after,” and shares her experience of losing her mum to renal cancer: diagnosis in 1994, death in December 1996 when Charlotte was 27, and the disorienting, overlapping emotions and nervous-system overwhelm that followed. 

She describes denial as protection, how familiar places felt unfamiliar, and how she became the emotional caretaker at the funeral, supporting family while suppressing her own feelings. In rapid succession she and Neil took in her younger brother, learned they were unexpectedly pregnant two days after her mum died, married three months later, and she faced a new nursing role; nine months later, after the birth of their daughter, she experienced postnatal depression. 

Charlotte emphasises that grief isn’t linear, people often need presence rather than solutions, and she uses pickleball to illustrate how one moment can change everything, redefining strength as feeling, receiving support, and allowing transformation over time.

00:00 Welcome Back and Why This Matters

01:06 When Life Changes Overnight

02:49 Mum’s Diagnosis and Denial

05:02 Grief in the Body

07:29 Being Strong for Everyone

09:58 Pregnancy Amid Loss

11:25 What Help Really Looks Like

14:09 Postnatal Depression After Grief

17:16 Grief Isn’t Linear

18:45 Pickleball and Sudden Pivots

21:53 Choosing How We Respond

23:33 Redefining Strength and Healing

26:14 You’re Not Broken Closing

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Music: Purple Planet Music
Thanks to Purple Planet Music for Pickleball & Partnership Intro and Outro music Purple Planet Music is a collection of music written and performed by Chris Martyn and Geoff Harvey. 

Transcript

Charlotte J 0:00

Hello, it's Charlotte here, and welcome back to Pickleball and Partnership. Last week's episode about grief and losing my mum resonated with so many of you, and I am so grateful to have received messages from people sharing stories about their parents, about their partners, siblings, dear friends that they've lost. And what struck me most was how many people said, "I thought I was the only one who felt like this." And that's the thing about grief, trauma, and major life change. We often think we are handling it badly when really we are simply human. We feel so separate, and yet when we start talking about vulnerable things that have happened to us, vulnerable feelings that we have, we find out that actually a lot more people feel the same way. So today's episode feels like a continuation of that conversation, but perhaps from a different angle, because this episode is about those moments in life where everything changes overnight. The moments where there is a very clear before the thing that happened and after the thing that happened. So whatever it was, maybe for you it was a diagnosis like my mum had in 1994. Maybe it was a death like my mum passed in 1996. Maybe it was a divorce, a betrayal, a job loss, becoming a parent, a move like we moved from one country to another. We moved from England to Canada in the year 2000. Or maybe it was simply waking up one day and realizing that your old life no longer fits who you're becoming. Sometimes life pivots in an instant, and the strange thing is that life around us does not pause while we try to catch our breath. So today I want to share a deeply personal chapter of my own life and what I understand now, nearly 30 years later, about overwhelm, identity, grief, resilience, and what happens when your nervous system is asked to carry more than it knows how to hold. Okay, let's dive in. So I was 27 years old when my Mum died. She had been diagnosed with renal cancer in September of 1994, and interestingly, Neil and I had only just met a few months prior to that in June of the same year. So while I was discovering this new relationship, falling in love, and beginning this exciting new chapter of my life, another chapter was quietly beginning to close, although I didn't realize it at the time. My Mum, she had surgery to remove her affected kidney, and then followed that with radiation treatment afterwards, which made her so, so terribly sick. And yet even living through that with her, I never truly believed she would die. Even saying that now feels strange, but I think many people will understand this, that some part of me held onto the belief that she was going to recover, that she was invincible, she was immortal, that life would somehow return to normal, and that this terrible thing that was happening, but not really happening. And I think back to that denial, and I thought of it as a weakness, and now I look at it as actually maybe it was more like protection because the reality felt too enormous for my nervous system to absorb all at once. And so it did the only thing it knew how to do, and that was to protect me, and the way that my nervous system protected me was by saying, "No, this is not gonna happen. She's going to recover. She's my Mum. She's always going to be there for me." And then one day, the reality arrives anyway, and suddenly everything changes. I remember when my Mum died, I remember feeling a flood of different emotions all at once, and where one emotion began and ended, I couldn't tell. They all overlapped each other. So it was actually impossible to distinguish one from another. But definitely inside that sea, that flood, was overwhelm, panic, this huge void of emptiness, disbelief Fear Yes, huge emptiness. And I remember walking through familiar places that suddenly felt so unfamiliar. A simple walk to the post office down the road, a route that I had taken countless times, suddenly felt strange and, actually frightening and very unfamiliar. The buildings were the same, the streets were the same, the world around me looked the same, but inside my internal world, I was no longer the same. And nobody prepares you for that part. Nobody tells you that grief changes the way the world feels inside your body. Because grief is not just emotional, it's neurological, it's physiological, and it affects the nervous system because your brain is literally trying to process the absence of someone woven deeply into your sense of safety, your sense of identity and love. My Mum, for me, was my safe place. The thought of her, her hug, the sound of her voice was, for me, so synonymous with safety and home that all of a sudden, when that was taken away from me, it challenged every part of my being. So of course things felt disorientating. Of course I felt overwhelmed. And of course there is nothing wrong with you if you feel that way. You're grieving. At my Mum's funeral, I remember looking around at my relatives and realizing something almost immediately, that I was going to need to support other people. I was not going to be able to connect with how I was truly feeling because what felt very important for me, what took center stage, was that I needed to show up and be strong for other people. And I remember seeing my grandmother, grieving the loss of her daughter. I remember seeing my brothers grieving the loss of Mum. My dad just fall apart in front of me. And somewhere inside myself, I unconsciously decided I need to hold it together. And I think many women do this. Women I have spoken to who have lost someone very close to them feel this same way. We become the emotional caretakers. We override our own feelings in order to stabilize everyone around us. My, younger brother, he was still living with my dad but my dad, in his own grief, which I really didn't understand at the time, simply wasn't able to be the parent, that any of us needed, but certainly not the parent that my younger brother needed. And so Neil and I asked Chris to move in with us, and almost overnight I became a grieving daughter, I became an emotional support system for those around me, I became a caregiver, I became a future mum myself because we'd just found out that we were expecting our first. I also became a wife because three months after my mum passed away, Neil and I got married, and I was navigating the prospect of starting a new nursing position. Life did not pause. That phrase keeps coming to me. Life did not pause. It just kept moving around me, and I was expected to move with it. So yes, two days after my mum passed away on the 28th of December, two days later on the 30th, Neil and I discovered that we were pregnant with our first baby, completely unexpectedly. And honestly, it felt surreal because how can life contain that much sorrow and that much possibility both at the same time? How can one moment hold grief in its rawest form and another hold new life? Looking back now and at the time, I did feel like this was a gift from my mum And at the same time, it was emotionally overwhelming. Oh my gosh, I was carrying such enormous grief, I couldn't even begin to understand it. I was carrying grief, and I was also carrying a child. And this is something I understand much more deeply now through my knowledge around the nervous system and nervous system healing, because the body can only process so much at once. Sometimes we think we're failing when we're not, when really our nervous system is overloaded. So one of the things I understand now is how much pressure there is in our culture to cope well, to stay strong, to keep functioning, to keep producing, to keep smiling, keep going. And believe you me, I tried all those things, but underneath, I was terrified. I was terrified of my own emotions. I did not understand grief. I didn't understand why I wanted people to leave me alone. I remember a colleague repeatedly calling me at home. This was before cell phones. We had a landline with caller display, and every time the phone rang, it felt literally like a knife slicing through my nervous system. Not because she was doing anything wrong. She wasn't. She was trying to care. She was reaching out to me. But I didn't know what to say, and I knew deep down that nothing she could say, there was not one word that could make this any better. There was nothing that anybody could say to me that would take my pain away or ease my pain in any way. And so I pushed people away. I hid. And for years, I carried with me the thought that, my reaction meant that I had handled grief badly Now I understand something different. Sometimes overwhelmed people do not need solutions. What I realize now in that moment was that I felt so overwhelmed, what I didn't need was a solution. What I needed was presence. What I truly needed was someone to sit beside me, to put the kettle on, to hold me, to sit and just be with me and allow me to feel all of those feelings, to feel everything without trying to fix any of it. No advice, no meaningful good intentions. "Oh, your Mum would be so proud of you." Like, oh, I would literally recoil when someone would say that to me. No, "Oh, everything happens for a reason. Focus on the baby. Look at what you have to look forward to." I didn't need any of that. I needed love. I needed presence. And so it's not surprising nine months later when our first baby, our little Ellie, was born, that I experienced postnatal depression. Honestly, looking back, it makes complete sense. My nervous system had never fully processed everything that had been happening to me. I had become a mother while grieving my own Mum, and there's something profoundly disorientating about that, wanting my Mum more than ever. Oh my gosh, I cannot even begin to explain to you, how I so needed my Mum even more than I thought was possible with this tiny infant lying in my arms, so desperate for my Mum to tell me, "It's okay. You've got this. You know what you're doing." And I had all these questions all of a sudden, all these questions about how my Mum felt when she first became a Mum, and all the questions I had, all the curiosity about what I was like as a baby that I had never thought to ask before. And so here I was in this time in my life where I so, so needed my Mum even more than I ever could have imagined before and realizing, no, she's not there and of course Neil was amazing, and he did the best he could, but he was navigating something very new for him as well. And I think if you would ask him, he would say he was not prepared either, and he certainly wasn't prepared to navigate his new wife losing her mum, and him becoming a father at the same time, and then me experiencing postnatal depression He found himself in a place of unfamiliarity also, and he was having his own challenges navigating that. I know that no one was failing me intentionally. I simply think grief is something many people do not know how to sit with, because grief makes people uncomfortable. Grief is not something to rush through, because grief makes people uncomfortable. Grief makes people want the other person to rush through it as quickly as they can to achieve what's the other side of the grief, normal life again, if ever that were possible, which now of course it's not. It's just life looks very different on the other side of losing someone close to you. But grief is not something to rush through. It's something to honor. And I know many people know the stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, but one of the biggest misunderstandings is believing that these stages are linear. That was what I believed too. I thought, "Oh, well, first of all comes denial, and then once we come out the other side of denial, we won't deny ever again, and then we'll feel angry, and then we'll get angry at God, and then we'll stop being angry, and we'll start bargaining with God. And then we'll stop bargaining, and then we'll hit this depression, and for however long that is. Once we come out the other side of depression, then we'll accept everything, and then everything will be okay." But that's not how it works. You do not complete in its wholeness and then move on to the next. You move in and out of them, sometimes within the same hour, sometimes within the same moment. One moment I found myself laughing, and the next moment I felt myself falling apart in a, in a pool of tears. And even now, almost 30 years later, isn't it crazy? But it's true. There are moments where part of me still expects my mum to walk through the door. I don't know whether that is denial. I think that's pure unconditional love. Now, you know I'm going to bring pickleball into this somehow, because honestly, the pickleball court mirrors life for me constantly. Sometimes in pickleball, one unexpected shot changes the entire rally. It changes the entire game. Perhaps you lose your rhythm, you panic, you scramble, you stop trusting yourself, or you stop trusting your partner, and you become reactive instead of responsive. And life does that too. Maybe it's one phone call, one diagnosis, one moment. I remember the moment my dad called me, and Mum and dad had actually gone on holiday. They were supposed to be in Greece enjoying a beautiful two-week relaxing holiday on one of the tiny islands. And I was at home. I was in the house that I shared with other nurses and other medical professionals, and I got the phone call from my dad, and I thought, "Well, this is odd because why is my dad phoning me? They're supposed to be in Greece." And he told me that they had come home early and that Mum wasn't well, and that she was seeing a specialist, and they didn't know what was happening. And I remember pacing, and I don't think I had ever paced before, but my body took over, and I found myself pacing up and down the room. It was as though I had this overwhelming energy suddenly well up inside my body, and it had to escape somehow. And maybe the escape could have been a scream or tears or Punching a pillow maybe. But no, in that moment, my release of energy was pacing. And I remember at the time thinking, "Gosh, I feel so weird doing this because this doesn't feel familiar to it," but my body knew what it needed to do. And I paced up and down, unsure of my next move, until I was able to calm my nervous system, my prefrontal cortex came back online, and I was able to think logically and rationally again. But so fascinating to me that that animal instinct took over, and we see animals doing this in the wild too, pacing. And so of course, once my logical, rational thinking came back online, I thought, "Okay, pack a bag, grab my keys, jump in the car, and go. Go to the hospital where my Mum was." But it's so interesting, isn't it, that just that one phone call, that one moment, suddenly everything changes. And we don't control what comes to us. We don't control what happens in the environment around us. But what we do control, what we do choose, is how we meet that. And that doesn't need to be perfectly, doesn't need to be immediately, but gradually, breath by breath, point by point on the pickleball court, moment by moment. And sometimes, in fact, I would say most times, the greatest growth happens not in the winning, but in learning how to stay present when life doesn't go the way you hoped. Oh my gosh, and that was us at the pickleball tournament last weekend. I was not playing the way I normally do. I was not playing- the way I wanted to play, and my mind took over, my ego took over, and suddenly it was all about, "Oh my gosh, I have to do better. I have to do better. I can't let my partner down. What will Neil think? What will my opponents think?" And I really had to stop and breathe and touch my paddle, connect back to where I was, what I was doing, outside with friends, having fun in the sunshine, and staying present in that moment. And you know what? In that moment, I grew, and Neil and I grew together, too. At 27, I thought strength meant holding everything together. Now I understand something very different. Real strength is, allowing yourself to feel, to feel all the feelings, to soften, to grieve, to receive support, and to stop pretending you're okay when you're not. Let me say that again, because if this is where you are right now, please stop pretending you're okay when you're not. You are not helping yourself, and you are not giving those around you the opportunity to show up and to support you. And perhaps most importantly, recognize that the moments that completely undo us are often the moments that begin transforming us Although it doesn't feel like it at the time, I get that. At the time, it felt like my life was falling apart. Looking back now, I can also see it was the beginning of my true awakening, the beginning of questioning who I was, how I coped with things, what I believed, why I abandoned my own emotions, and how deeply our nervous systems shape our lives. And that didn't happen quickly. It didn't happen overnight. I would say it took me years. But eventually, all of that led me towards this work, towards healing, towards coaching, towards holding space for other people, towards understanding patterns, identity, and emotional regulation in such a deeper way. And don't get me wrong, I would never have chosen that pain. If I had a choice, oh my gosh, of course, I would want my mum to be here now, to have been here every step of the way, to have had a relationship with my children, for my children to have had such a beautiful relationship with my mum. That would have been most incredible. I would never have chosen that pain, but I can now see that transformation in me was quietly unfolding. If you are in a season where life feels unfamiliar, where everything feels like it's too much, where you're carrying responsibilities that you actually just don't feel ready for, please hear this. You are not broken. You are not failing. Your nervous system may simply be overwhelmed by the weight of being human, by the weight of this human experience, and healing is not about returning to who you were before that moment. It's not about life going back to normal. You will never go back to where you were before that pivotal moment because healing is about becoming someone new evolved, expanded. Because the moment that everything changes may also be the moment that you begin becoming who you were always meant to be. Thank you for being here with me today. I really appreciate you showing up and sharing this journey with me. And if this episode resonated with you, I would love to hear from you. I'm really enjoying your messages, so please reach out. And if you know someone navigating grief or transition or overwhelm or any kind of season of massive change, please share this episode with them. So until next time, keep showing up, keep breathing, keep feeling, and keep listening to the whispers within you. You are all doing beautifully