How to Deal When the Shit Gets Real Podcast · Rietta Boksha

Jason Tuttle: Child Loss and Grieve

·47 min·3 clips

The morning Jason’s son died, less than two hours passed between waking him and the pronouncement.

Rieta opens by asking Jason how he handles things when life gets heavy. Jason answers with the long version of his life. He is a married father of two special-needs kids. He says this year will make 22 years of marriage. Their son came first and their daughter followed in the first five years of the marriage. The two children were born two years apart, almost to the day. He says both of them live with severe neurological delays. That means they function at about seven to nine years old, no matter their actual age. Epilepsy is part of that picture too. He has seen four of the six known seizure types in his own house. Both children are nonverbal. They do say a few very basic words, but communication still takes patience and effort. The conversation then moves toward grief. Jason describes using a group and a writing practice to work through what he was feeling. He wrote raw letters in proper letter writing form and let himself be brutally honest on the page. He did that several times a day for weeks. When he finally asked to share one with the group, the admin welcomed it because men rarely showed up willing to open up about grief. He worried about negative reactions before posting. Instead, he got a flood of positive responses, including one message from a woman who said his words mirrored her own dark feelings exactly. That experience showed him how much people need language for sorrow. It also pushed him toward a uniform, concise way to explain things. The episode closes with the sense that grief can be named more clearly.

As heard by us

A direct, unsparing look at caregiving, grief, and learning how to say the hard part out loud.

Jason Tuttle's conversation stays close to the daily work of caring for two children born with multiple cognitive and physical disabilities, severe neurological delays, and epilepsy.

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Why you'd press play

For when you need a grief story that stays plainspoken and hard to fake.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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