Good Grief Episode Four: Catharsis

Blake Kasemeier
Sep 3, 2018 · 10 min read

At the beginning of 2018 I lost my mom to a very brief but brutal fight with lung cancer, she was 57, and no one (no one) saw it coming.

I began journaling my personal experience with grief, and eventually turned those journals into a podcast. The following is a transcript of my fourth episode. I hope this is helpful to you, because it truly has been for me.

From what I’ve learned, this process can be excruciatingly painful alone, but I think if we take the time to share our stories and lend our ears we can walk away with some Good Grief.

This week’s theme? Catharsis.

At my mom’s memorial there was this table covered in pictures of her and while this in and of itself is not uncommon, the quality of the photos certainly was.

A contact sheet I found hidden away after my mom passed. She was probably in her early 20s when these were taken.

My mom was excruciatingly beautiful her entire life and she’d been in the photo industry for 35 years. Though the vast majority of her career was on the business side of the lens, she, like many women of her generation, got involved in photography from being in front of the camera — so not only was she objectively good looking, but she was constantly around incredibly talented photographers.

Up until the day she passed, she easily looked 10 years younger than she was — but not in that sad way that many women her age do as they frantically attempt to duck time’s cruel reach, she didn’t have that unsettling absent botoxed sheen — she was just sort of ageless.

As I stood there scanning over this shotgun blast of nostalgia, I realized that it was much easier to determine what year it was by how I had aged, rather than her. One photo stood out though, maybe it’s because it was an 8.5 x 11 image that happened to feature me shirtless with about ⅓ of the tattoos I now have covering my torso, but I think it’s because the photo showed something about how my mom and I connected.

It was from the top of Griffith Park, my mom sitting on a stone park bench in yoga pants, sunglasses on her head looking out over Hollywood, me slightly underweight with a shaved head — I’d been struggling to come back from an ugly eating disorder when the photo was taken and I’d cut off all of my brittle hair in an attempt to be the Delilah to anorexia’s Samson — trying to remove all traces of the disease’s hold on me.

We’d go on this hike a lot back then and as we covered the 1000-foot climb after mom got off work, I’d do my best to show my my that I was stable — me feeling comfortable enough to take my shirt off in public was actually a big step back then. We had the same expression on our faces looking out in the same direction.

My step dad, who had taken the picture was standing next to me at the memorial, so I pointed to it, and asked if he remembered that day, and he said, “You two are were doing your endorphin rush thing, I don’t get it, you know I don’t, but you guys — that was your drug of choice.”

He was right, my mom and I shared a deep love for training — not just working out, but training, striving to be better, pushing past where you were the day before, (don’t worry, this isn’t about to turn into a pitch for my fat-loss app or skinny mushroom tea)

For mom it was yoga, and with every practice she sought to get better. In the days when we used to hike in the park, we had this saying “Fuck you, I’m not my job.” The idea was that as long as we got out and broke a sweat, we were investing in our own value, we were saying that, even though our bosses may not know think so, we were worth more than the sum of corporate productivity. For both of us, training was an objective and indisputable metric for intrinsic worth and accomplishment. For us workouts were a conversations that we have with our own body — it is a therapy session with yourself.

It’s part of why her stay in the hospital was so frustrating. Being intubated and heavily medicated, she struggled to communicate over the noise of her treatment, but maybe the bigger blow was that she couldn’t connect with herself the way she did when she moved.


Catharsis is the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions — often fear, pity, shame, hurt. Catharsis is the basis for Freudian psychoanalysis — that by revisiting some repressed trauma you can alleviate the hold it has on you and relieve your pain.

On paper, catharsis and grief make a lot of sense together — In the Kubler Ross stages of grief, perhaps the most widely accepted documentation of the grieving process — Anger is the third stage after shock and denial — and it’s not uncommon to have irrational resentful feeling towards doctors or family members or the anyone who appears to be happy, or just the world — and expressing this anger through some sort of catharsis: crying, hitting a pillow, recording a podcast or fighting a bear — can really just make you feel better….Sometimes.

See there have been studies done that, with men in particular there is a 50% chance that exercising their rage or pain or grief will actually amplify whatever feeling they are trying to alleviate- it’s literally like pouring gas on a fire for some people, and there are plenty of cathartic activities that are super unhealthy like cutting or bulimia, these behaviors activate the sympathetic nervous system, thereby releasing a rush of pain-masking chemicals in the body, that ultimately make you feel superhuman.

These are, of course the extremes, for most of us — my mom and I included — exercise is an incredibly positive form of catharsis. Earlier when I mentioned that exercise is like a therapy session with your body, I wasn’t just being hyperbolic or poetic — In a study performed at Duke University, researchers found that exercise alone outperformed medications and placebos as an antidepressant.

This isn’t just the result of a spike in self esteem because your gym selfie over indexes in likes on Instagram — this is actually, a chemical process that your brain has adopted to help you survive.

While you’re exercising your brain chemistry actually changes — blood flow increases, and the brain releases endorphins and a dose of serotonin. Serotonin, if you don’t know is your brain’s natural feel good juice, it’s chemical released when people take ecstasy and MDMA, in fact most prescription antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and Lexapro are in a category called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs for short), that essentially, slow down your brain’s reuptake of Serotonin — when you workout, you are literally self medicating.


Royce Gracie from UFC 1

I’ve been training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu off and on for 5 years (with a few big gaps in there due to a catastrophic injury or two). For those of you who do not know, Jiu Jitsu is a grappling martial art popularized by the dominance of the Gracie family in the early days of the UFC. At the time, the sport of MMA was seen as little more than human cock fighting in a cage and the champions of the sport resembled roided-out bar bouncers far more than professional athletes — Enter Royce Gracie, who at 6’1” and 175 lbs was an unlikely contender. He dominated the tournaments, submitting opponents twice his size with grace and ease and, most importantly, with Jiu Jitsu.

Something you should know about people who train jiu jitsu — they typically love to talk about training jiu jitsu, so I’ll do my best to keep this section brief, but no promises.

Unlike many popular martial arts, almost every time you take jiu jitsu class you engage in live, full-contact sparring — rolling as it’s known. There are no katas or forms, you simply drill the techniques you are learning with a partner under the guidance of an instructor. Belt promotions are not based on your ability to memorize a sequence of punches and kicks against an imaginary attacker, rather how well you are able to learn and apply techniques against a knowledgeable opponent while rolling.

The sport is a huge part of my life, I typically train 5–6 times a week and compete several times throughout the year. When my mom was in the ICU she even wrote me a message telling me it was ok if I needed to leave the hospital for a bit to go train. She knew it was the medicine I needed, because it was the medicine she herself craved — part of the bond we shared.

Days after she passed and I returned home, I went to the gym — I had let my professor and his wife know what was happening, and they had been very generous with their support. As I walked into the academy, every one of my training partners offered their condolences — thanks to the hyper-mediated existence we now live in, everyone had seen what had happened on facebook or instagram, which created a bizarre but, welcome sense of comfort knowing that I wouldn’t have to repeat the words “My mom just died,” to everyone I ran into (more on that in future episodes).

My first day back, my professor called me out to spar with him — a pretty common occurrence for us. The round timer sounded, we slapped hands and as we began a very lopsided human chess match, my mind let go of the trauma — if only for a moment — and became completely consumed with the exchange, with surviving, with the perfect counter attack, with the sound of my own labored breath over my mouthpiece. When the round ended, I sat there in that space for a while, on my knees, my mind still tumbling in the current of chokes and sweeps — I felt my professor’s hand on my shoulder and heard him say, “This is a good place for your pain.”

A month later I placed second in a local tournament, beating out a ten-man bracket of guys who were 8–10 pounds bigger than me — Pictures of myself on the podium look a little like I’m competing in my big brother’s weight class next to my fellow competitors, I’ve always been a smaller middleweight, but with everything going on, I had leaned out even more than normal. As I walked out to the parking lot, everything began to slow down, the shock wore off and became incredibly sad, knowing that I could not share this “Fuck you, I’m not my Job” moment with the one person who really understood why, as a grown ass man, I still felt compelled to throw myself into these wars.


One thing that I struggle with about my mom’s final days was that she was completely cogent — there wasn’t a gradual decline, we turned a corner and she fell off a fucking cliff. She was just as much a part of the decision making in those days as we were — filling out her own will, listing the people she wanted to fly in for her final visits, and ultimately, the choice to remove her breathing and feeding tubes — to shut down the machines that were keeping her alive — the decision to let go — that was her’s. It was perfectly my mom, she assessed her options and ultimately decided that she wasn’t going to live beholden to life support and the patience of hospital staff — this last decision was the ultimate “Fuck you, I’m not my job” moment — it was, in many ways an act of rebellion.

The weeks we’d grappled with doctors and specialists, keeping track of every medication and treatment option and lab test and biopsy report because none of the doctors would talk to each other, no one would project manage my mom’s treatment, it was all so frustrating that in a way her decision to go was a rejection of what they could offer her after they’d let her go this far.

My mom had one wish that we could not fulfill, and to this day, I feel pretty guilty about it, even though I am quite sure it would have killed her. She wanted to go outside one last time, to feel the sun on her skin and the wind in her hair the way we had on our hikes in Griffith Park all those years ago.

This has been episode four of Good Grief, thank you so much for listening. I just want to mention that while the strategies for coping with grief that I talk about in this podcast have worked for me, I am not a trained professional — just a guy with a liberal arts degree who spends a lot of time on the internet. If you or someone you know is going through a hard time, please do not hesitate to seek the help of a doctor or clinician.

If you have any questions, comments, feedback or you just want to talk, feel free to reach out on twitter or Instagram @blakeoftoday or just shoot me an email at blakeoftoday@gmail.com.

I’ll leave you with this line from one of my mom’s favorite Leonard Cohen songs, Chelsea Hotel:

“And clenching your fist for the ones like usWho are oppressed by the figures of beauty You fixed yourself, you said, ‘Well never mind, We are ugly but we have the music’”


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