🎙️Ep. 5 - Mija, Eso También Es Grief: Losing People, Plans, and Parts of Yourself

Jen Lezan
Jul 7
3 min read

Updated: Jul 10

In this deeply personal and healing episode, we explore the many faces of grief through the lens of Latinx and Latina millennial experiences. You can listen to Episode No. 5 here.

From mourning loved ones to grieving lost versions of ourselves, we open up about how our cultural identity, family dynamics, and generational expectations shape the way we process pain and loss. Whether you're navigating fresh grief or carrying ancestral sorrow, this episode holds space for your story.

In This Episode, We Discuss:

🎙️ Grief Beyond the Personal: Collective and Cultural Grief in a World on Fire

Grief isn’t only about losing a loved one. For many Latinas and Latinx millennials, it’s about watching the world burn while being told to carry on with strength and silence. It’s grief in layers—personal, historical, and inherited.

Here are some of the reflections this episode explores:

🇺🇸 ICE Raids & Anti-Immigrant Policies

✊🏽 Protests & Uprisings in the U.S.

🇵🇸 Palestine, Global Liberation, and Shared Struggles

🧬 Why This Grief Feels So Heavy for Us:

We carry our own lived traumas and the historical wounds of our ancestors—enslaved, erased, exiled.
Many of us are first-generation everything, trying to heal in real time while holding our families together.
The world asks us to be strong, not soft—to survive, not feel. But grief needs space. Silence doesn’t save us. Naming grief is a form of resistance.

🖤 What Does Grief Look Like For Us?

Grief for humanity and the current events in the world
Personal stories of loss — from the sudden to the slow and expected.
How grief showed up in unexpected places: body, sleep, parenting, spirituality.
The cultural silence around grieving and how it affects our healing process.

🌺 How Our Latina Identity Shapes Our Grief

Expectations of strength, silence, and being the caretaker.
The influence of faith, ritual, and family dynamics.
Intergenerational grief and how we carry stories not told.

🌧️ Different Types of Grief

Sudden vs. long-term grief — what each teaches us.
Losing a parent, caregiver, or grandparent and the unique heartbreak it brings.
The grief of losing yourself — to trauma, survival mode, or caregiving.
Moms grieving quietly while holding it all together.
Collective grief: mourning for a world in crisis (violence, climate, injustice).

💬 How We Cope

Therapy, journaling, ancestral practices, community circles, and rest.
Making space for joy and grief to coexist.
How language and Spanglish help us process emotions that don’t always translate.

❤️‍🩹 Why We Need to Talk About This More