three siblings Podcast: Surviving Loss & Finding Hope

 Every day, we experience a wide range of emotions that flash in our body and mind, and, poof, then they're gone. We laugh.  We cry. We are annoyed. We get angry. We are sad. Most emotions have a life cycle of a few seconds to a few minutes. External stimuli and our inside voice manufacture a cocktail of emotional states that enable us to get through each day...and life.

Then there are those emotions that have staying power. They infect us like a virus and require an emotional inoculation to remove.

Emotions such as love and grief leave indelible marks on us.

And that's what the new three siblings podcast is about. This podcast, which began in early March, enlists listeners as traveling companions with three siblings on their personal mental health journey and the lessons learned from surviving the loss of both parents. Through their story, they openly discuss the impact of depression, suicide, and how they coped with the loss. 

With diverse backgrounds and experiences, each sibling has a unique story to tell. Through their tears, heartache, and laughter, they hope to inspire and provide comfort to those who are struggling. 

This podcast is three siblings, sharing their stories of survival, hope, and love.

Here's their story in brief: In 2016, their mother attempted suicide by leaping from a parking garage and fracturing every limb in her body. Eight months after that, their father suffered a heart attack and died in the hospital. Then in the fall of 2017, their mother committed suicide.

The three siblings are Michele, a producer, singer, and DJ who lives in New York City; Tina, a contemporary artist living in Austin, and Sunny, a business professional working for Google in Austin. 

 Clearly, the siblings have diverse backgrounds and experiences but are connected by their shared experience of surviving the loss of their parents. 

The siblings and family are Asian, bringing another level of complexity to their grief. Despite some long-standing myths, the rate of suicide among Asian Americans is less than half of the national rate.

In the first episode, which runs about 50 minutes, the three siblings explain in detail about their family life, and the death of their father and mother. The siblings, who are not professional podcasters, read from a script in that first episode, and it's obvious but necessary to cover such emotionally charged memories.

In the next three shorter episodes, each sibling recounts the memories of their parents' death and their family life. These episodes bristle with grief, regret, and raw emotion. It's fascinating; each of the siblings has slightly different memories and was privy to family information the others may not have been.

Those three episodes of baring their psyches to listeners reveals larger truths for all of us. to be clear, these episodes are not an airing of sibling grievances. Instead, they are deeply personal remembrances of their parents, their life together as a family, and the affection they all held for one another.

Despite the tidiness of the widely known five stages of grief -- denial, anger bargaining, depression, and acceptance -- the three siblings walk down different paths to cope with their grief. These personal episodes reveal how different each person's journey is when dealing with grief.

Ultimately, however, the three siblings, aren't simply focused on grief but on life-affirming growth.

As Helen Keller once said, "We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world – the company of those who have known suffering."

New episodes are released the first Monday of every month.

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I am instituting a new review ranking system that goes like this:

ONE EAR = only listen if you're trapped at your parents' home while they watch reruns of Pictionary on the Game Show Network.

TWO EARS = If you have some time on a long commute or routine task, try it out to see if the podcast fits you.

THREE EARS = Definitely listen. You're guaranteed to be entertained, informed, or persuaded.

FOUR EARS = A must-listen and EAR WORTHY because of the podcast's sonic excellence and the value you would derive from listening (or watching if it's on YouTube).

three siblings -- FOUR EARS