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Music Hello and welcome back to Big Mood Little Mood. I'm your host, Danny M. Lavery. And with me in the studio this week is Marissa Renee Lee. It called upon grief advocate, entrepreneur, and the bestselling author of Grief is Love, Living with Loss. Marissa, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me today. I'm so glad to have you

here. I didn't necessarily go seeking out grief-related questions because that is almost always,

at least in the background of a lot of the questions that I get asked. But I do think that a lot of our

questions today are going to be very much in your sort of wheelhouse.

So I hope that that is not a problem for you and that you feel prepared to talk about grief again.

I've got you covered.

So thank you.

Fantastic.

And if we ever need like a brief pause, we can stop and ask for, I don't know, 10 ideas about joy quickly, just as a sort of

palate cleanser.

But, you know, grief is the business of life.

All right.

So the subject of our first letter is sort of orphan.

I'm a non-binary person in my mid-30s, and a few years back, my mother finally got divorced.

My father actually divorced her, but still,

from my awful narcissistic father. I've cut contact with him and that's great, but my problem is my

mother. My father was verbally and emotionally abusive to all of us, and my mom enabled him

big time in order to keep the peace. My dad would regularly scream at me

...