Podcast 71: Grief, Love, and Living Double: A Conversation with Charlotte Starfire

Grief is everywhere. We just don’t talk about it.

In this episode, we sit down with Charlotte Starfire to explore what it means to live after loss—especially the kind of loss no one prepares you for.

What actually helps someone in grief?
 It’s simpler than most people think.

“The best thing you can do is let someone talk about the person they love.”

Simple. Difficult. Essential.

Listen to Podcast 71.

#GriefSupport #GriefAwareness #LossAndHealing #ChildLoss #MentalHealthMatters #AddictionRecovery #HealingJourney #SpiritualHealing #CommunityCare #PodcastLife #TwoCronesAndAMicrophone #GriefWork #EndOfLife #EmotionalHealing #HoldSpace

Transcript

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Betty:
Hey everybody, this is our 71st podcast, and we are so happy to be introducing you to one of our favorite people. That would be Charlotte, otherwise known as Starfire. Sally and I have known Charlotte, oh my God, we were trying to figure out where we all met each other, but it’s been at least 30 years now. Charlotte is a very accomplished woman, and we are so proud to have her on Two Crones and a Microphone so that you can meet her also. I am Betty.

Sally:
I’m Sally.

Charlotte:
Hi, y’all. I’m Charlotte.

Betty:
There you go. So Charlotte, we asked you to come on to talk about what is closest to your heart at this moment. Now, I know you’ve done a plethora of things in your life, been successful at them all, which is why this is going to be the first podcast. We’ll do at least one other one, so that you can help direct people. You know, that’s the purpose of the podcast, right? To help people, as I always say, get through the muddy waters of our time. And I think the example that you will show them today will help them to navigate. What do you think, Sally?

Sally:
I think that’s great. And each of us met each other through Ocean Fast Wolf, so we share that common thread. But Charlotte has done so many other things besides that that are amazing. It’s truly an honor to know her and to have her be here with us today. We actually asked her to introduce herself because it was hard to pull a thread of what we would say about her and where we would start. Other than, I remember talking to her about the fact that I think I really got to know her staying at her house when she was sponsoring an Ocean workshop, Grief Transformed Through the Heart of the Warrior, which really, for these times, is an amazing topic, I would say. Ocean gave us many tools to help navigate grief and loss and to do it with the heart of the warrior. So I know that Charlotte may touch on some of that now because she has really continued to work with those energies and to turn it into something really quite beautiful for people. So thank you for joining us, Charlotte.

Charlotte:
Yeah, I guess I would say if there’s one thread of my life, grief has been a part of it from the beginning. Oshana’s teachings definitely paved the way for the journey in a lot of ways.

I mean, I had a big corporate job, traveled all over the world, whatever. I also grew up, you know, my father was a university professor and he helped to start an organization called Partners for the Americas. So when I was little, we spent a lot of time in Latin America. Portuguese is kind of my second language, Spanish my third. I remember the first trip to Latin America. I was like nine years old, and I remember seeing the poverty in Lima, and people were living in cardboard boxes. And I said, “My life is here to serve. I am here to offer compassion and serve.”

Of course, when I was in fourth grade, I announced that I was going to be the first female president in the United States, and that didn’t happen. But I’ve explored a lot of ways to serve. Let’s just put it that way.

But my path right now, after losing my son in 2023 to fentanyl poisoning and addiction, I joined a club that nobody wants to join. Nobody wants to join. And in the English language, we don’t even have a word for a grieving parent. Children who lose their parents are orphans. Women who lose their husbands are widows. Husbands who lose their wives are widowers. But in the English language, there is no word for a grieving parent. So that just says how much we as a culture cannot even grapple with it. We don’t even want to think about it. We don’t want to imagine it. We just want to pretend it’s never going to happen to us.

And so when it does, it can be a very lonely journey. So my work at this time is working with mothers who have lost their children either to addiction, substance use disorder, fentanyl poisoning, or suicide. Because there’s just so much—years of suffering before the death—with those kinds of mental health disorders that really are compounded at the time of death. Being witnessed and held lovingly by others who have gone through the experience is really profound. So that’s the work that I’m really focused on at this point.

But I will say, I was thinking about Ocean today, and I was just thinking about how we all met through Ocean, and I had forgotten about that grief workshop. Now, of course, I want to refresh my memory. But I know that I’ve carried teachings that I got from her. I just didn’t remember exactly where I got them.

The whole context of being a mother, regardless of whether your child dies before you, it is a process of grief. Because from the time they leave the womb—there’s nobody wants to talk about it—I mean, there’s incredible joy the day they’re born, but there’s also an incredible kind of sense of loss. Because here this living being was inside your body, you know what I mean? And then the physical disruption that happens for the baby when they hit this planet, and they have to take their first breath—it’s a shocking, traumatic experience in a lot of ways.

So from the very beginning, we’re learning. Then you have to let them fall on their face when they’re learning to walk, and you have to watch them cry. And then, you know, my son used to say to me, he’d say, “Mom, I’m really worried about you when I go off to college because they don’t have rooms next to our dorm room for the moms. So you’re going to have a big adjustment.” So it’s a process of letting go all the way around.

And then, I guess where I was going with that is that one of the things that I remember fondly was that both my son and my mother sat with Osha along with me. My son adored Ocean. Oh my gosh. When she would come to Florida and she was going to stay at our house, she would stay in his room, and he would get so excited about getting his room ready for Ocean. It was incredible how much he loved her.

And then my mother also just adored Oceana. My mother experienced the croning ceremony with Osha. I remember when my mom was doing that ceremony and you build this willow arch, and then you put symbols of things you’re letting go, right? My mom hangs up her apron. She was like, “I’m done cooking.” It was so cute. Then I did my croning ceremony with Ocean as well. So, a lot of journeys of letting go and learning to initiate myself and ourselves through these deep changes is a lot of what I got from Osha.

Betty:
That’s true. She gave us tools that aren’t always prevalent in our society nowadays. It seems like we’ve let go of those transition periods, and we’ve talked about that a bit in the podcasts before, that there are not a lot of transition ceremonies for kids that hit puberty or however this is.

It’s interesting because when our sons were born, there is a ceremony for letting go of them. I hadn’t really thought about it until you said they come out and it’s a joy, but it’s a sadness because you can’t protect them anymore. They’re not yours to protect anymore. You have to give them up. But there is a ceremony that Osha gave us where you dedicate them to Mother Earth and Father Sky and recognize that you are just there to guide them and that they now literally belong to the world and no longer to you.

So it’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that for quite a lot of years until you said those milestones where you have to keep on letting go and letting go. And you’re right, the club you’re talking about is not one that I personally want to join.

Charlotte:
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But unfortunately, in 2023, the year my son died, approximately 250,000 people under the age of 45 died. And the vast majority of those were from drug-related or mental health-related deaths. So if you take 250,000 people that died under the age of 45, that equates to almost 500,000 parents just that one year. But we don’t talk about it.

It’s like, you know, I don’t go in the grocery store and when the checkout counter lady says, “How you doing today?” I’m not sharing, “Well, today’s the anniversary of my son’s death and I’m having a hard day,” right? You just don’t talk about it. People don’t know about it. And if you do talk about it, people don’t know what to say, and they kind of freeze up. Relationships change.

There are some people that have shown me they don’t have the capacity to sit with me in grief. And I’m not judging. I just know that I need people in my life who can sit with me in grief. Not that I’m in the depths every day, but I want to talk about my son. I want to remember my son, not just his death, but his life.

So it’s interesting how we navigate a different path. If you lose a child, my experience is that there’s your life up to that day, and then there’s the life after that day. And it’s just the most dramatic initiation, at least that I’ve experienced in my life.

But the other thing is, we all die and we all lose people. Since 2021 in the US, 13 million people have died. So that’s just a few years. Thirteen million people. So that means how many brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children, wives, husbands have been affected by those 13 million deaths? You can’t tell me that we’re not all walking around with grief. We just don’t talk about it. And when we don’t talk about it, it gets kind of stuck.

Betty:
It gets very stuck. I think Americans in particular don’t talk about grief. We’re not very good at expressing our grief, right? That’s also a cultural thing. I saw a lot of that when I worked in the critical care units. But in my own family, we’ve had quite a few people die, and it’s something that, particularly when my husband died, I noticed all of a sudden people didn’t know how to relate to me any longer, or they were afraid to talk to me afterwards because they didn’t know how I was going to respond.

We were a very close couple. We were very active in the community. I did step back from a lot of things to pull myself together. But yeah, it changes. It changes a lot. And losing a child is absolutely devastating. I can’t even imagine it. But I think in general, expressing grief is a very difficult thing for most people. Most people.

Charlotte:
Yeah. I think cultures that are, you know, pre-patriarchy, if I can say that, that are more earth-oriented, seem to have practices because the earth teaches us about loss and death. The leaves fall off the tree every fall, and then it turns into a stinky kind of fertilizer thing that then the worms crawl around in and the snails show up in, and the next thing you know it becomes really nice fertile soil. But us city folks, sometimes we just don’t even want to get our fingernails dirty with the soil, right? So we don’t interact with life on that sort of primal level the way we used to.

I think my dad was of Spanish descent, and they were definitely more open. My dad used to talk about his grandmother showing up. We went to the family home that my great-great-grandfather built. It’s still there in San Luis, Colorado, and it had been turned into an Airbnb. We had a family reunion a bunch of years ago, and that’s where we were staying. The lady that owned the place apparently didn’t know that it was our family lineage home.

So anyway, we get there and she says, “Oh, and by the way, there’s a ghost that some people say they see in this house. It often appears.” My dad was unloading the suitcases and not paying total attention. Then he hears her say this. He stops. He goes, “Oh, which room?” And she said, “Oh, upstairs on the right.” He goes, “Oh yeah, that was my grandfather.” And then he continued carrying the suitcases like it was no big deal.

But I think that makes sense to me because it’s even a step further about not wanting to talk about grief. In Western culture, we hesitate to talk about death. We all act like we’re going to live forever and everybody around us is going to live forever. And heaven forbid we consider thinking about death and how we might want to die ourselves, and what we would do if the people around us died. Had we thought about that? Had we planned for that in any way?

I’m always amazed at the number of people who are in their 70s and have never considered writing a will or thought about what they’re going to do with their things, whether they do or don’t have children, or do or don’t have spouses. Nobody’s talking about it. That has always been a mystery to me. Call me a morbid person, but that’s something I’ve always been kind of aware of. My philosophical basis has a huge existential thread where you look at those things and you pay attention to them and you think about how you want to live your life and what you’re going to do when you or someone around you dies.

I do think it’s really challenging that people don’t know what to say, and I’m going to ask you, and I know that you’ll be willing to answer, because it’s difficult for people to just say, “I am really sorry that happened, and I’m here to listen to you.” But I want to say, what would you have liked, or would you still like, people to do to support you? So maybe this is a way that we can share with our viewers. Have you thought about these things yourself? And here are some things you can say or that you can do that would be helpful to family members or friends if they have someone die.

Charlotte:
Yeah. One of the things that I hear from the mothers the most, and I noticed myself too—my son passed away three years ago this week, and I’m leaving on Sunday back to where he was in treatment and where he died. I’m going to stop there, and then I’m going to go on down to where I released his ashes at a spiritual community that we were both involved in.

But I’m stopping where he was in treatment because the thing that nourishes me the most is being with other people that remember him with love and fondness. The first year, I went down there to pick up his ashes, and it had only been a week since he had crossed. They did this little ad hoc memorial at the park where my son had a job, and like 40, 50 young people in recovery came. I didn’t know them. I couldn’t say much, but I so enjoyed hearing them remember my son because they consistently said the same things, which was that he was one of the most spiritual, wise beings that they’d ever met, that he had a really raucous sense of humor, and that he loved garlic. And it was just fun to hear that.

I shared with them that one of my spiritual teachers had shared something with me years ago, which was when someone young dies that you love, you have the opportunity to take a vow, and that vow is to live double for them.

And one of the young men that was my son’s best friend in recovery—a real shy guy, doesn’t talk—came up to me after that and said, “I’m living double for your son.” And every year I go down through that town, and no matter what he is doing, he tells his boss he has to have the day off. He comes, and six or eight of them, sometimes 20 of them, will show up to gather with me and remember Brett.

That is the best thing you can do for somebody, is allow them to share their memories. I have some friends that, if I call them, they also know grief. These particular friends—I have this one, she will always, if I call, she goes, “How you doing, Charlotte? How’s Brett?” She’ll always say Brett. She wants to always acknowledge that he’s with me every minute, and that she remembers him, even though she had never met him.

So I think the more we can create that space by asking questions about our loved ones, by sharing memories if we have them, by asking the griever, “Tell me something that you just remember so fondly about your loved one,” that’s the best thing I think you can do.

Because so often they’ll say, “What can I do?” Well, especially in early grief, I got no clue what you can do. I can’t even brush my teeth. So now you want me to give you the to-do list of how to take care of me? No.

I will say, somebody sent me a gift, and I still to this day don’t know who it was because it came, I guess, from Amazon or something, but it didn’t have a card in it, or if it did, I lost it or whatever. But it was a blanket, this really soft little blanket, and it had a little poem about grief and loss and love or something. I mean, I just held myself in that blanket for months. So that’s a really beautiful thing.

Betty:
It is. And what a lovely idea, actually. I know a lot of people will wear the clothing of someone, like their husband or their father or whoever that is, will wear the clothing to keep somebody close. That’s lovely.

So I guess the wisdom practice would be: remember, all you have to do is be there, and don’t be afraid to ask someone. If you’ve never met the person, it doesn’t matter, because the person who’s grieving has met the person.

Charlotte:
Yeah. Right.

Betty:
You know, I do think there’s this thing—well, we don’t want to make people cry, so we can’t really ask them to talk about it because when we mention their name, or we say, “Oh, I remember when...,” they start crying, and so I don’t want them to cry, so therefore I can’t ask. People do this crazy back and forth thing, I think, when they’re thinking about grief and what do I say, what do I not say, so I’m not going to say anything because I don’t want to make the person cry.

And tears, as you know, are filled with all kinds of great endorphins, and they’re actually good for us to shed, and people forget that. They think tears are bad, when actually tears are not bad, right? But you guys know that, right? You guys know that, right?

Charlotte:
Yeah. I think creating a safe space where someone can cry is an extremely generous gift. It is extremely generous.

Betty:
Osha always said tears are a bath for the soul.

Sally:
And I believe that to be true. And I think what people don’t realize is that when you’re grieving, you could be doing something as simple as washing the dishes and all of a sudden you’re bawling your eyes out. It just hits you. Even today, I have that problem where something will happen, I remember one of the people who have crossed—usually it’s Larry, my husband—and all of a sudden I well up, and I’m like, oh my goodness, this wave of sadness.

But on the other hand, in my culture, as our listeners know because I’ve said it about a thousand times, I’m Irish, and one thing about the Irish: we don’t let our dead rest. They’re always around. We’re always talking to them, calling their name, having their things present. At home I have a little altar set up for them. That gives me comfort because they’re here. They’re all here.

Betty:
Interesting point, right? Because we think about having ancestor altars, but maybe we don’t necessarily think about having an altar for our children who have crossed, or even for a spouse or a partner who has crossed, right? We could do it for our ancestors, but there is that whole sort of thing like, “Did you see? They’ve got all that weird stuff around from their dead whoever.”

But we need to give ourselves permission to do that, like to have an altar for your son, right? So I have many altars for my son.

Charlotte:
Let me just say, I’m guessing you have one.

Betty:
Yeah, I got them right here. I got them in the other—I got them all over the place.

Charlotte:
When I do a grief retreat with mothers who have lost kids, one of the things we do is we create a shared altar with pictures of all of our kids. We start each day with prayer and maybe a chant and an invocation. We call out their names and we let them know we love them because, honestly, especially with death by suicide or by overdose, sometimes people, depending on their religious background, can have a belief that maybe their child is kind of stuck or not in heaven or whatever that stuff is. I don’t carry any of that kind of belief system.

But I can tell you that I have seen, every time, 100 percent of the time, a mother will show up for the retreat hunched over, eyes dull, skin dull, so sad they almost can’t even talk to you. And by the end of the week, through this altar work that we do, they are singing and dancing, and they know their kids are in the light and are blessing them. And it is incredible. It is incredible.

Betty:
So talk a little bit more about the workshop. If somebody has a child—or I don’t know if it’s even open to family members or friends other than children—tell us about the retreats that you do.

Charlotte:
Actually, glad you brought it up. Well, I have one scheduled the end of May, and it’s specifically just for moms who lost kids to substance use disorder or suicide, because there’s hidden shame and guilt as the mother of a child who has died through one of those ways. If your child dies from cancer, you don’t generally feel responsible for the death. You might feel like you haven’t done the right treatment or something, but there’s just some underlying stuff with the mental health disorders that I think—we create a safety by having folks like that.

So it’s the end of May. It’s up in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. It’s at a beautiful retreat center. It’s five days, from the 27th of May to June 1st. We do different rituals. We do yoga. We do a sound bath. We’re hoping to do a butterfly release this year. We do meditation. We do art and journaling experiences. We walk a labyrinth. The place is beautiful.

The particular location there is a lichen forest. They call it big rocks with lichen on it, and they’ve dated the lichen at over 1,000 years.

Betty:
Wow.

Charlotte:
And the Cherokee have used this particular piece of land for ceremony for thousands of years. The retreat center was built before they knew that, but then the Cherokee found out about it. So now the Cherokee come usually in November and do ceremony there and stuff. So anyway, it’s a really beautiful, beautiful, beautiful place. So it’s very nourishing.

Betty:
So for those of you who are wanting to know more, you’re going to check out our website and look under Charlotte, and she’s going to give us all that information so that we can post it for you, so that you can have access to it.

Charlotte:
Yeah. And the website is twocronesandamicrophone.com.

Betty:
And it’s Two Crones and a Microphone.

Charlotte:
And I have a Substack platform that I use. I write a lot, and my son and I write together, let me put it that way. Anyway, I’ve started using the Substack as my website. So you just go to Substack and look up Charlotte Starfire, and you can find my stuff.

Betty:
Thanks, Charlotte, because I think we might have listeners who want this information.

Sally:
Absolutely, and want to reach out to you.

Charlotte:
Yeah. And I am also raising money. The retreat centers are not-for-profit, so they’ve set up a separate fund just for my workshop if people want to donate to help offset the costs for the moms to come. Because last year, I had people from as far away as Texas and Delaware and Pennsylvania coming in, and I’ve got some people wanting to come in from Oregon. The costs add up. So we can help offset some of that too.

Betty:
Good. Good. That’s awesome. Well, I think it’s time for us to wrap up, but we are going to be doing another podcast with you. Don’t know when that’s going to happen, but hopefully relatively soon so we can continue on with this. I know we have just touched the tip of the iceberg here. I’m really aware of that.

Charlotte:
Well, I’m working on a book, actually.

Betty:
Ah, yes.

Charlotte:
And it’s on the chakras in grief, and it’s a deck, you know. So anyway, it’s going to be a tool that people can use because I feel like we all want to connect with our loved ones. And if we can learn to kind of balance our own energy system and establish resonance, then we can connect so much easier, and we can be freer of some of the old wound baggage that we’re carrying.

So this deck will help folks with that. Anyway, I’m in the throes of working on that right now, and I’ll be teaching workshops on that and stuff too. So I’ll keep you guys posted.

Betty:
Great. Great. Yeah, I think that would be awesome. And for our listeners, we talked about the possibility of having Charlotte actually demonstrate that on a podcast that goes up on YouTube so that people can link into that when you’re ready to do that. That would be awesome.

Charlotte:
Cool. Awesome.

Betty:
Well, I think this is going to be one of our longer podcasts, but my God, it was well worth it. We have really gotten a lot of information. And Charlotte, thank you so much for sharing your experience with us. Really. I mean, this is perfect, and perfect for the muddy waters of our time.

So I am going to sign off on my end. Sally, any last words? Charlotte?

Charlotte:
Well, no. I’m just grateful because, again, it gave me an opportunity to talk about my beloved son, and so I’m always happy to do that. Thank you.

Betty:
Good. Excellent. So we would honor Brett’s life, and you for having a heart that is open enough to talk about it, to lead the way for people who are struggling to talk about their grief, particularly about the loss of a child.

And again, I know that you really are reaching out to those people who are struggling with grief and responsibility and all of the other myriad feelings that come with losing a child through substance use or suicide. And it’s a topic that not many of us want to talk about. So I really honor you for being that warrior woman that Oshana taught us all to be.

And so, for Brett, for Osha, and for you, Charlotte, Kaydeeshday.

All / Closing:
Thank you. And remember, all is beauty. Walking beauty. Thank you.