Hi, welcome to Radio Headspace.
I'm Dora, and I'm so glad that you're here.
Over the last few years, I've been sitting with a kind of grief.
I didn't really have the language for at first.
It's the anticipatory grief of watching my mom get older,
especially after I moved away from home to pursue my career.
Now, I know logically that this is just part of life.
Everyone ages and everyone changes.
But the thing about aging is that it often happens so subtly that you don't really notice it until you do.
especially when it's happening to the people that you love.
For me, that moment came when my mom first came to visit me in L.A.,
not longer after I'd moved to the States.
I remember being so excited to see her, counting down the days,
imagining our time together, thinking about the things and places I wanted to show her.
And then I saw her, and something in me sunk.
I remember listening to a podcast on grief,
and the expert had described grief as a behavioral response.
How our sense of time, space, and closeness becomes disoriented when we lose someone.
Their absence in our lives creates this deep sense of longing and yearning,
a reaching for what used to be.