Turning Grief Into Your Superpower with Patrick McCarthy

Patrick McCarthy (0:00)

I'm so like weirdly at peace with my mom being dead, because it was really hard for us for a lot of years. The weirdest part of the whole experience of her dying is that like all of the hard, she swept it all away anyway.

Olivia Burnett (0:12)

Yeah.

Patrick McCarthy (0:12)

When we feel it, it's how we heal it. And if you push it all to the side, like it's going to catch up to you.

Olivia Burnett (0:18)

One in 11 children in the United States will lose one of their parents before they're 18, which is about 6.6 million kids.

Patrick McCarthy (0:26)

Yeah.

Olivia Burnett (0:27)

And then by 25, that number more than doubles to roughly 15.9 million young people who will have experienced the death of a parent or a sibling.

Patrick McCarthy (0:36)

Grief like expands the pain you feel, but I think it also expands the amount of love you can feel for sure.

Olivia Burnett (0:42)

We can probably just end on that line. That was like a pretty awesome one.

Wait, are we recording?

Hey, everybody, it's Liv, and welcome back to Twenty Something. This is a conversation that I have been so excited to have. We've done a few episodes on grief because you guys know I'm a grief girlie. Lost my dad a few years ago. And all the episodes that we've done on grief, you guys have responded so well to, and I really appreciate the community that you guys have helped build here on Twenty Something and the support you've shown our guests as well. So Patrick, thank you so much for being in the studio with us today. I really appreciate it.

Patrick McCarthy (1:27)

Yeah, I'm happy to be here.

Olivia Burnett (1:28)

This conversation, like I said, is one that I have been very excited to have. Patrick has an incredible platform where you share the most authentic, raw, real things about grief, but also how to use it for your good and your betterment as well, which I think is cool because I know that oftentimes, sometimes I feel so swallowed in my grief, that it's hard to know or even to see any positive sides of it. And so one thing in this episode that I know I briefly shared with you as well is that we have some questioners from a bunch of the Twenty Something community, things that people are actively going through and navigating with grief. So we'll get into that a little bit later. But I would love to start out just so our listeners and viewers can get to know you a little bit better. Will you share the story of your journey with grief, and then why you started talking about it online?

Patrick McCarthy (2:23)

So I knew grief in a way I think most people do. And my grandparents died when I was young. I had dogs die when I was grown up.

And when my dog died when I was in like, he was like early 20s.

That one hit really deep because I'm an only child, and it was like my sibling basically. It's like unconditional love of a dog, right?

But my mom died in December of 2024, and that is when I met grief like head on. And I was working a corporate job when she died, and I took a couple weeks off to like see family and do her funeral stuff, and then went back to work and kind of tried to make it like everything was normal.

Of course, with like breaking down in front of my kids, my wife, and missing my mom immensely, but it took like a year and some change before I realized that I couldn't like fake it anymore and do something that just felt kind of meaningless to me, which I think a lot of people feel when somebody close dies. It's like a break in the matrix, and you're in a new life. So I met with a friend from my grief group who had like experienced something similar when her parents died, and she asked me a couple of questions that I've shared on my social media with people before, but those questions were, what would someone who loves themself do in this situation? And this was like when I was having like an internal, like thunderstorm of what to do with my life, with work and home and grief and everything. And then the other question she asked was, what's the kindest thing you can do for yourself? And like she asked those questions, immediately it was just like, I shouldn't work anymore. Like I should not be in my job. So it was just really hard to like pretend that things were the same. So after that call with that person, I talked to my wife and I was just like, what do you think about me quitting my job in a month? And she was like, I think that's a great idea. Because she saw it too.