Unlocking Us with Brené Brown · Vox Media Podcast Network

Grief, Laughter, and Sisterhood: Losing Our Mom and Holding On to Each Other

October 23, 2024·51 min·4 clips

Brené describes watching her mother's dementia as 'a slow erasing of the only other person alive who held a set of memories and meaning about the world.'

1. Unlocking Us host Brené Brown records with her sisters Ashley and Barrett about the grief, laughter, and sisterhood that followed their mother's death on Christmas Day 2023. 2. Brené is the eldest and identifies as an Enneagram Type 1; Ashley is a therapist who also studied shame and vulnerability; Barrett is the youngest and describes herself as a peacemaker who has done work not to be one. 3. The episode's core question is how three different people — with different birth orders, personalities, and histories with the same mother — can grieve the same loss differently and still hold each other through it. 4. Their mother entered the hospital in November 2019 for what was expected to be routine surgery on a blocked intestine; it became a 12-hour surgery involving trauma surgeons, and she never returned home, going from hospital to rehab to assisted living to memory care. 5. Barrett describes experiencing four distinct losses: the diagnosis, leaving the family home, packing up the house, and watching the physical decline — each requiring a different grief process. 6. The sisters describe their mother contracting COVID and being hospitalized, with the family forced to take turns at her bedside; Barrett later contracted COVID while providing home care after their mother's discharge. 7. Music from the 1940s and 1950s — Que Sera Sera, Chantilly Lace, The Big Bopper — reliably triggered recognition and singing responses in their mother even as her dementia advanced, which Brené attributes to neurologist Oliver Sacks's observation that 'music needs no mediation, it pierces the heart directly.' 8. The sisters describe a giant poster they made for their mother's memory care room listing rules she needed reminding of every day: 'this is where you live, you don't owe anyone any money,' and later, that her husband could not take her on foot walks. 9. Brené describes the specific texture of her grief: watching a 'slow erasing of the only other person alive who held memories' of people and events her younger sisters were too young to remember — including their grandparents and early neighbors. 10. Ashley and Barrett describe finding sweet moments even in the hard visits, while Brené says she left crying every time, a difference they trace to the fact that Brené is eight years older and holds memories of the family that her sisters simply don't have. 11. The sisters discuss the unspeakable physical realities of dementia caregiving — managing incontinence, bodily accidents — as an honest but rarely acknowledged dimension of the experience. 12. Brené describes a period when she had a brutal confrontation with her mother triggered by the dementia-stage where the patient is losing bodily control but still retains enough awareness to feel humiliated; she did not visit for a month. 13. The sisters normalize what Brené calls 'month-long tap-outs': periods when one sister told the others she simply could not go back, and the others covered without judgment. 14. Brené's husband Steve is described as a critical fourth caregiver who stepped in when all three sisters were simultaneously at their limit. 15. The episode addresses the financial dimension: their mother had not adequately saved, and the sisters were writing care checks monthly without insurance coverage — during the same period COVID eliminated 75% of Brené's event revenue for 12 months. 16. Brené offers a direct, practical recommendation for dementia caregiving families: most never access the palliative care and hospice resources available through Medicare, which provided their mother with home oxygen, a weekly nurse, a social worker, and a specialized bed — ending repeated traumatic ambulance calls. 17. The episode is structured as a three-way sisterly conversation, frequently interrupted, affectionately argumentative, and self-interrupting, with tangents about Enneagram types, birth order, and debates about what 'sentimental' actually means. 18. Tone oscillates quickly between laughter and grief — including a running joke about whether Barrett is or isn't sentimental after she describes getting a text about wearing their mother's jewelry to her birthday dinner as something she wanted erased from her memory. 19. Best for people currently navigating or recently completing the caregiving journey with a parent experiencing dementia. 20. Listeners looking for structured grief frameworks or clinical advice rather than personal family storytelling may not connect with the format.

As heard by us

Three sisters, one absent mother, and grief that gets through by laughing.

Grief sits differently when the people carrying it are also making each other laugh. Brene Brown's sisters Barrett and Ashley join her to talk through their mother's decline -- the assisted living, the COVID chaos, the financial pressure.

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Three sisters talk about losing their mom, and somehow keep finding each other funny.

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