A Mother’s Legacy: Finding Strength Amidst Grief | A Tribute to Joan Gilhooly

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I'm Matt Gilhooly, and this is the Life Shift, candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever.

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Hey everyone, it is September 1st and it is about noon. And I wanted to come on here and create a bonus episode. And I don't really know what I'm going to talk about specifically, but I do know that this is a pivotal moment to discuss. So on September 1st, 1989, my mom was on a cross country motorcycle trip.

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I guess with a bunch of friends, I guess like a motorcade of some sort. And they were traveling from Massachusetts to Denver and then heading back. And this was the second time they were doing it. She was with her boyfriend and a bunch of other friends. And she was just living this life that was different from everything that she had ever known and... was enjoying it.

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So I think, I was eight years old, so I don't really know. But I do remember before, like earlier in that summer, I was heading down to visit my father in Georgia. And I remember knowing that she was going on this trip again, and for some reason, I was worried and I threw what was maybe a temper tantrum for an eight year old and.

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really asking her not to go and telling her that she shouldn't go. And of course, why would an adult listen to an eight year old? And so I'm sure it was just brushed off as this eight year old just going a little crazy and maybe just not wanting to travel or be away. I was living with my mom always at the time my father had just moved to Georgia. And so I was about to head down to Georgia for a month or two. I don't even remember now.

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And I was gonna visit him and do all the fun things and go to the theme parks and climb mountains and see all the things that I had never really experienced before growing up in Massachusetts. And so I was visiting my dad doing that thing. And on September 1st, and this is confusing to me because I was just thinking about it, I'm 43 now, so thinking about Labor Day, this was Labor Day, 1989, and I believe my dad was at work because...

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The story that I have in my visuals, in my brain, the story is that he was at work. And I was at like a day camp kind of thing. And I remember getting picked up early in the day. And I think it was probably got picked up at like 2.30. I don't know, two o'clock, 2.30. And I got picked up by my dad's boss's wife, who I knew, but it was weird because she wasn't the one that was normally picking me up and...

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taking me home, it was normally my dad after work. So she brought me to the office and kind of walked me in and.

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I don't really remember this too much, but I remember walking by everyone's desks and it being very quiet and people looking. And maybe I'm making this up. I don't even know because why wouldn't my dad be at work on Labor Day? But in any case, I was walking in and I walked into his office and he sat me down and from what he's told me had to say the hardest things he's ever had to say out loud.

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And at 3.15 p.m. on Labor Day, September 1st, 1989, my mother was declared deceased from a single vehicle motorcycle accident. She and her boyfriend had been in Buffalo, New York, and they were just driving along, and I believe there was some kind of rain or some kind of oil slick, and the bike hit the oil slick, and...

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My mom's boyfriend, Mark, he died on the scene. My mom was thrown from the bike, was taken to the hospital, and I believe it was maybe four or five hours later, she died from, you know, her injuries and blood loss and all the things that happened. The reason I know some of those things is because when I was 18 years old, in the middle of this grief journey that took forever to go on, I ordered the autopsy. And I think it was just part of me trying to figure out if life...

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was real and if it really happened. And it's a really interesting journey. But on that moment when my dad sat me down and told me that was my life shift moment, wasn't necessarily when she died, but was when my dad sat me down and had to tell me that. Because again, I live with my mom and my dad lived in another state. And it was just about, school was about to start in Massachusetts. School had already started in Georgia.

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I had to go through the journey back north and identify the things that I wanted to take back and have the funeral and the wake and not really understanding what death was. I think conceptually I understood it, but I didn't really understand too much about that. I certainly didn't know how to grieve. And I don't think that the people around me really knew how to do that either because it was 1989.

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people weren't really talking out loud about that. We were kind of still in this phase of pushing everything back, not talking about things, not processing things. So we went through that whole thing and I went up there and I remember, you know, marking all the things that I wanted to take with me. And I remember the wake and all these people coming up to me and saying nice things. And I remember super awkward moment during the funeral when the priest or the pastor, whoever it was, was speaking.

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I felt this weird compulsion to walk up to the casket and kind of break down in front of everyone. And I look back on that now and I'm like, oh man, that was something. But I guess it was what I needed to do. I remember, I mean, that was the first dead body that I had seen, I didn't understand.

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how they process a body for an open casket funeral, especially after an accident. And so things really stuck in my mind for a long time. And then we moved back to Georgia, or I moved to Georgia and I moved in with my dad. And my dad, you know, he was, my parents were divorced, so he would see me every once in a while, but it wasn't all the time. And I guess we had the practice over the summer. But I went into school.

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And it already started, I was coming in with this Boston accent and a dead mom and just feeling so lost. And I really truly had the best teacher that ever could have existed at that moment in time, Mrs. Jobson. And she just took me under her wing and she made sure that I was safe and that I was cared for and she kind of gave that loving mother figure. But

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I absorbed the feelings of the people around me. And I believe that the people and the adults meant so well with their thoughts, but they also just wanted to see me okay. And they wanted to see me happy. And they wanted to make sure that I was not going to fall apart. And as an eight-year-old, I absorbed that.

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and I realized that it was now my responsibility to make sure that they believed that I was okay. And I also think now looking back and reflecting on that moment, I think back and I'm like, I didn't want anyone else to leave because I knew what that empty feeling felt like. So then I started absorbing this perfectionist tendency, I guess, in which

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I had to be perfect in school, I had to do everything right, I couldn't get in trouble. Because in my eight-year-old brain, I thought if I did get in trouble or if I did do something wrong, my dad might also leave. Because as an eight-year-old, your mom dying is your mom leaving. And it feels like abandonment. And I think I took that on and I held on tight. I say this a lot in a lot of episodes, but I...

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My grief journey was like decades long. I would, you know, in middle school, I remember just eating all of my feelings and then developing like an eating disorder of some sort and then feeling shame from that and then feeling like, oh, abandonment issues, don't do that. So then I remember absorbing like not eating and running into those issues.

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There's a lot of things that I just did that weren't appropriate for a teenager because they were such adult things that I was trying to just push down that grief. And then I took that grief and I kind of started using it as a crutch. And I would blame all the bad things that happened to me or that I did on that moment or anything good that happened. I would...

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say it was because of that, so then I wouldn't be taking ownership on either side of that. And it was just this long, long journey through not really grieving, just like having breakdowns, having depression, having these feelings of like, how do I cope with any moment that exists because I just wasn't properly grieving, and it just seems like such a long period to do, and I often look back at it and think of it as like,

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this decades-long failure of grieving. But I also look at it now as this journey of being able to fully understand how to grieve and how to process how I'm feeling and how to look at those things. So when I was about, maybe early 30s, which seems really funny that it took that long, but.

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I was having a lot of trouble at work because this perfectionism stuff was happening still. And I always absorbed that, you know, the next thing I needed to do was the next best thing. And so that would be I get a job, okay, within a little bit of time I get promoted, okay. And then within a little bit more time I get promoted, just so that I could run back to my family and tell them all these great things that are happening. Look what I'm doing. Don't run away. Even though I was 30 something.

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But I got into this position in which.

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I was doing really great things, I think. I was working with a team of great people that had been shifted around so many times and moved to different departments and just really kind of made feel othered. And I started building this team and was building stuff around, we were in education, so we were teaching the first students that.

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came into every single program and we were really creating like a cohesive group. And there was one individual that was in charge of everything. Wasn't my direct boss, but had the power to erase everything that I had ever worked on in that role. And I often refer to that person as a bulldozer because things would get wrecked without me knowing without talking to me. And I...

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would then also be required to fix those things. And so I was facing this moment in which I was working all day, doing my thing, putting on a smile, going home, going right to bed because I just didn't want to be awake because that just meant that I had to think about those things. And I realized this wasn't healthy and maybe it was time that I seek some assistance in this situation. Because how can I handle this?

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because I think this, out of all things, is going to wreck me because I couldn't be perfect. And so I went to a therapist and we did all our stuff. If you've ever been to therapy, it takes a while to find the right one. It took about five people for me, took people trying medicines, I didn't want that. I wanted to really get through, break through a wall. So I found this woman and we would go through, we would talk about work, we would talk about all these things, and really all stems back and then we get down to my story.

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about losing my mom at such a young age. And she stopped me and she was like, you realize that every decision that you've ever made in your entire life since then was with that scared eight-year-old brain in charge. Everything you did was out of fear that people would leave you, out of fear that you would not be perfect, out of fear that you would lose somebody else, out of fear.

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And it was that moment in which I was like, oh.

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You're right, my entire life has been running from something, not running to anything, just running from that grief, from that fear and trying to just stay ahead of it. And it was really that moment in which the clouds started parting. And I was able to actively start grieving the loss of my mother and how that affected me and the loss of all the things that I didn't get to do in life.

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because of that initial loss, because of me attaching myself to running away from abandonment or loss or fear, and just not grieving, all the things. So there was like a secondary grief period because it had taken so long. But benefit there was that I really felt like I had closed the door on grief of my mom. Of course I still get sad. Of course I...

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still have this deep-seated pain because I don't really know what it's like to have a mother. I don't really remember my mother. It's more of a figment of the memories that I think I have and like some manifestation of those things to remind me that I do have a mother, but I don't remember her. And it really served me well because then when my grandmother got sick and we were facing like her end, I really knew what to do.

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I knew I needed to say the things that needed to be said. I knew I needed to have all the memories with her. I knew I needed to actively grieve. I knew I needed to sit by her bedside until she passed. I knew I needed to watch the last breath. And then I knew what to do afterwards. And I felt really strong with that. I felt really confident in the way that I approached that. And so, you know, I look back on those 20 years of not grieving properly as a lesson.

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as something that I can do to become a better person. And then, if you listen to any of these episodes about a month ago, I lost my puppy Mikey after 14 and a half years or so of just him being my shadow. And I thought I knew grief, but pet loss is something so foreign and something so, dare I say, fascinating now.

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because I just did not handle that one. And I was like, wow, I thought I knew from losing my mom 35 years ago that I could do this. So I guess that's to say that maybe we're all just on this learning journey all along and that all grief is not the same and that relationships are going to dictate how you grieve those particular things. And I say all of this, all of this story to say that the Life Shift podcast has been this healing.

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experience, experiment maybe, this healing journey that I never knew that I needed. And each conversation, I've had over 150 now with different people, each conversation in its own way has helped me, whether that's to vocalize how I'm feeling about a particular situation, whether it's hearing someone's story and finally feeling validated in my own experiences because of...

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their story is very similar or maybe the way they felt was very similar and it helped me heal in that way. I just never knew that I would have the opportunity to talk to so many strangers and hear their stories and listen to their stories and learn from them and heal from them. And so it's a weird thing to think about how 35 years ago today I broke. My life shifted.

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and I broke into a different version of the map that was going to exist normally, I guess. But because of that moment and because of the decades of failing at grief and because of the time when I learned how to grieve and close the door on that, now I get to have these conversations with people about

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the pivotal moments in their lives that has changed everything. So it's like a very weird space to be in, in which something that was so devastating and breaking can eventually decades later turn into something that hopefully is helping other people that are listening, but also is selfishly helping me. So.

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I want to say thank you to all of you that listen. I know many of you listen every single week. I know some of you just listen here and there. All of it means so much. But at the end of the day, I really want to thank the people that are willing to come onto this Strangers podcast, to share their story, to let me ask them whatever question comes to my mind, to have vulnerable moments together so that other people out there aren't like that.

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8, 10, 15, 20, 25-year-old version of Matt, who felt so alone in a circumstance and did not know how to move through anything properly. Hopefully someone like that feels less alone. So with that, I want to dedicate this episode and really, truly this podcast to my mother who passed away on September 1st, 1989.

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at about 3.15 p.m. Eastern Time. She was 32 years old, which now at 43, I think, wow, that's so young, and so much of her life she didn't get to live. So I hope, if you are spiritual, I'm really not, but I hope somewhere out there she is looking down and thinking, wow, you've really done something with this kid, and...

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I'm proud of you. So with that, if you're thinking out there and you're outside walking, maybe you can give a little shout out to my mother today. Thank you for being a part of this journey on the LifeShift podcast. I will keep doing this until I can't do it anymore. So thanks for allowing me to do so. And with that, I will say goodbye until you hear me again in just a couple days.