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Something shifted is about identity, of the interruption.
About who we become after the life quake hits.
And the stories we tell ourselves when everything changes.
And I think you're gonna like it here.
My name is Shawn, and this is something shifted.
Today's story belongs to Josh. And now I'm a man,
and I'm weeping at the gravesite. It was just like I knew then
that I'm mourning now. That's next. Right after this.
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There are some people in the world who just always seem happy,
and most of them get under my skin, but not Josh.
Josh and I go way back like the start of my radio career,
way back from the day we met. Josh always seemed happy,
you know, like the color yellow or a Labrador puppy.
A twinkle in his eye, a genuine smile on his face.
Which is why we gave him the nickname Kiseki, because he has a face
that always makes us smile back. I think I had a pretty regular
childhood. Pretty happy childhood. Um, I had a lot of friends,
and we lived in a little cul de sac, which meant a lot of time for
play and just fun kid stuff. Turns out Josh is somewhat of a
miracle baby because after his older brother was born,
his mom became very ill. They told my mom that after my
brother she can have no more kids. So my parents were not expecting
to have another child and they were not planning to, you know,
even think about that because doctors were like this could lead to
complications in the next pregnancy. So rather not.
And, um, well, then I arrived, uh, surprisingly, and they decided to
go through with the pregnancy. Everything seemed to go fine.
When people seem happy, genuinely happy.
Not the OT toxic positivity kind of happy, but the quiet,
consistent kind of happy. I guess we assume that they're okay.
I mean, you know that they must have dealt with some stuff,
but you just figure it wasn't that bad because they're happy.
I'd say probably somewhere in my primary school years, uh,
illness came back. Josh's mom had been diagnosed with
lupus, which flared up significantly after her first pregnancy with his
brother lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease where your immune system
gets confused and it starts to attack healthy tissue in your body.
And after his brother was born, his mom was in and out of
hospital for two years. But over time, things got better.
They had Josh and thereafter, a stretch of very healthy years
before his mom's lupus became a real challenge again.
And then it was sort of in and out of hospital.
It affected the kidneys, which meant that she had to be on the Alice's,
I think, at 2 or 3 times a week. So that was something that I
remember quite vividly as a routine, you know, going straight from school
to the hospital, um, you know, basically to hang with my mom
and dad for 2 to 3 hours while she's on the dialysis machines.
And that was like a Thursday afternoon.
And then on Saturday she would be on, uh, almost like the drip.
And that was, uh, something that she did at home.
But other than that, like, it was a pretty happy childhood.
Pretty creative. Um, um, that for me,
felt like my normal. Kids are pretty great like that.
The bad stuff is bad, but the good stuff can be so good
that they just get on with it. Okay, mom's sick,
and she's in another hospital. Um, she bounces back really quickly.
So this is just our regular. This is our normal thing that
happens in our family. Um, not really,
considering that other families don't have this complication.
Josh had found a way to be happy in his normal.
Even though his normal was quite different to that of his friends.
Although his mum was quite sick. Josh was a 12 year old kid,
so his parents didn't discuss all the details and the
implications with him. Even when she was hospitalized,
they did their best to protect him. It was a regular Sunday morning
in March. The house was quiet, so 12 year old
Josh crept out of bed to squeeze in some video gaming before a day full
of church and friends taking care not to wake his sleeping family.
And I remember I was playing WWE SmackDown and and that's when
they phoned. Josh hadn't realized that he was
home alone. He thought everyone else was sleeping
when the ringing interrupted his gaming. Nobody was around.
I was I was at home. Which is when the voice on the other
end said. Your mom's passed away now. And even then it was like a I
didn't know what to make of it. Josh's family, his dad,
his grandmother, his aunt, they were all at the hospital.
They knew that the time had come to say goodbye,
but nobody had told Josh.
12 year old Josh was all alone in that moment and needed to
make sense of something so big, something that didn't fit into
his frame of reference. Because this thing was so routine and
so regularly happening in and out of hospital, to me, it didn't feel weird
that she'd passed away immediately. It felt almost like she's just gonna,
you know. She'll she'll bounce back. That was kind of like the narrative.
Um. Don't worry. You know, it's going to be okay.
Mom's going to be back soon. I guess my programming at that
at that time was, you know, this is normal.
And even afterwards, after everyone had come home and
the mourning process had begun, it still felt like just a regular
day to me. Because it was a Sunday. People came over like they would
on any given Sunday, except in this case, they were
there to mourn the loss of his mom. So although that Sunday was not
normal for 12 year old Josh, there were enough normal things
to hold on to. They just felt like another
normal day. There were obviously moments
when coming back to normal life after having gone through the,
you know, the funeral and all of those arrangements that, okay,
she's not here anymore. Of course, as time moved on,
the absence of his mom became more noticeable and sometimes in
unexpected ways. Especially because she was a
maths teacher and she always used to help me with my homework.
Um, and then I experienced like a, you know, very stark drop in my
grades after she passed because it was natural for her to help
me with my mathematics. So when I wasn't excelling anymore,
it was like, hey, something's wrong now.
That was one of the few moments where it was like, okay,
something's really different now. Josh's mom was the warmth of their
house, the life of the party. Of course, he still had his dad
and his older brother. But our relationships were kind of
still pretty much very pedestrian. Like my dad, my brother and I had
kind of, like, this very formal relationship where it's like,
we don't really go further than, hey, how's the weather?
Um, which I didn't I didn't figure that was weird because
that was just normal. Regardless of how happy you are.
It is normal to cry, to grieve when you lose someone.
But what if you don't? What if you just don't?
What if you dodge the sadness? You slip and slide.
And that slow wrecking ball of grief just swings right by.
You feel like what happened was I just carried on having these normal
days of just filling my day with friends and activities and gaming
and and I think because of that, the impact wasn't like as sudden.
There was the gaming and school. Josh has loads of friends and of
course the gaming. And there were moments when the
grief almost had a chance to break through the normal.
Like when a teacher pulled Josh aside shortly after his mom had
passed away. Took me aside after class and she
was like, Josh, I just wanted to find out if you and your dad are
going for therapy or counseling or whatever. And I was like, no.
She's like, well, do you want that? Because maybe the school can
arrange or recommend somebody. And I was like, no, I'll be good,
you know? Okay, cool. But that was something we never
spoke about. You never spoke about like going
for counseling or therapy. But I actually realized now that
maybe we should have. Maybe they should have taken the
time to talk, to grieve together. But life just kept happening.
My mom died on the 18th of March. My brother's wedding was on the
7th of April, and they had a wedding in Cape Town.
And so this whole thing basically happened on the edge of the brand new
thing that was about to begin for my brother. So very confusing space.
Um, especially for a 12 year old. At the time of his mom's passing.
Josh and his family had been living in Johannesburg,
and his mum died just before Josh moved to high school.
I was about to go to this very prestigious boys school and it was
almost like the the path was mapped for me because it was like, okay,
you're going to go to this school, you're going to go into a
traditional career path. Do something that we couldn't do,
you know, become a lawyer or doctor or something like this.
You know, there's almost like a prescribed path.
Which is when things started to change, even if for a while,
12 year old Josh still felt like it was normal.
First, they relocated from Johannesburg to Frydenberg on
the west coast, which is on the opposite side of the country.
It's like a town that never changes, like a timeless place.
And my parents lived there before I was born.
Today, Josh can identify this move as a way his dad might have
been secretly coping with the loss of his wife by going back
to the place with good memories. Once in Frydenberg, Josh was
enrolled in a co-ed high school. Now, I'm not in this sort of very
patriarchal, masculine world where it's just kill or be killed.
The boys school that I was at. Now I'm suddenly in this very
creative atmosphere. It felt almost like coming to
Cape Town was also this place where the becoming started.
And that is where Josh started becoming a storyteller.
Yeah, so I've been into storytelling in various formats my whole life,
really. I feel like I'm I'm just
completely obsessed with it. Between school and gaming and
friends and gaming. Josh had found his musical talent.
Songs have just been an immediate format for me to explore that,
but I when I looked back on it, like, if I look back at the course of my
life professionally, it's almost like it's all come back down to stories.
That's because stories are part of Josh's heritage.
My parents, interestingly, they are from the small town where the only
thing you could do was tell stories. They are from a sort of like a
pre TV era as well. So it's like the only thing you
can do in this hot, arid place is tell stories.
And um, and so I'm like sitting there in the company of all of
these people and I'm like, okay, actually this is part of my lineage.
You know, this is this is part of my DNA.
Josh's love for storytelling informed his decisions at university,
including signing up at the campus radio station,
which is where we met around 2007. Radio, of course, is a natural
fit for storytellers like us. I mean, this is why I studied
theater and studied acting. It was almost like an instinct
that I had that the things that I really enjoy, the art that I
really enjoy, Is a way for you to explore an imagined world.
He couldn't have been aware of it at the time.
But ever since he was a kid, Josh had been using stories to make
sense of the world around him. I feel like a lot of maybe what was
happening when my mom passed away was me escaping into imaginary places.
I think that escaping into these created worlds has been for me,
has really been almost like a godsend, in the sense that it's
something that I can always turn to when I'm not really sure of
what I'm thinking about. So Josh had music in his fingertips,
stories in his ears, and imaginary worlds in his mind when
he chose this less than clear path. I once asked a lecturer when I
was at at university, why do people study drama?
Because there's so many reasons why you shouldn't.
And the guy answered, so you hear it because you want
to answer the question, Who am I? Why am I? And is that okay?
As a young man, Josh thought he knew the answers to these questions.
Or at least he was confident that he was on his way to knowing them.
Are the youthful naivety of our 20s. Josh was happy.
The yellow or a Labrador? Puppies kind of happy and things
around him as far as he was concerned, were normal.
And then his grandmother died.
Josh was 27 years old when his Oma passed away. She'd lived a full life.
She was 92 years old and her passing wasn't sudden.
This time, Josh knew it was coming. He wasn't out of the loop and he
was older and wiser. So why did his grandmother's passing
disrupt his normal more than his mom's death 15 years earlier.
Why was he overcome by grief this time around?
And why was he waking up crying? I woke up weeping in the middle
of the night, weeping like sore. You know.
Have you ever wept where you feel like it's sore?
You physically feel this is pain. Now it's not like I'm just crying
because I'm feeling a little emotional. This is like deep weeping.
Almost like shout. Crying. You know. Josh was processing old wounds
in his dreams. In this dream, Josh was having a
conversation with his dad. His dad comes from a baby boomer
generation. You know,
the men don't have emotions era. And although Josh had seen his dad
expressed emotion, it would take a long time before that would surface.
Which means conversations about feelings were always just awkward.
So in this dream, I had this conversation with him where I was
like, okay, well, dad, how did you deal with your mom passing away?
Like, how did you ever get over this? And in the dream, he said
something like, well, you know, you just you just accept it and you,
you push it down, you push the emotions and the feelings down.
It was in this very moment that Josh woke up weeping,
as if the wrecking ball of grief had finally struck a water line.
My Oma was buried in the same cemetery as my mom in.
They bought one of these three story graves where the person
who goes first is at the bottom. Then you have the next layer, and
then I guess it's more affordable. And so when we were at the gravesite,
it came up again. It was like, oh my gosh,
I'm reliving something that the first time I hadn't,
I hadn't had an opportunity to grieve or mourn because I was just a kid.
I think kids have a way of tuning out bad because they
don't have the language for it. And now I'm a man and I'm
weeping at the gravesite. And I knew then that I'm
mourning now. It's almost like emotionally,
you don't you don't get to progress further than things that you've
overcome in that emotional place. If you don't deal with that stuff,
then the next time something happens that triggers an event like that,
you return. In a sense, you become a 12 year
old again in that moment. 27 year old Josh met 12 year old
Josh at the side of the very same gravesite.
But this time, 15 years later, Josh didn't dodge the grief.
Instead, he invited it in. At that time, I was freelancing
as an actor and as a musician, and I was basically just sitting
around at home, you know, going for auditions,
typical things that actors do. And whenever a gig comes up,
I'd go in and do the gig. There was no career, basically.
I also came out of a long term relationship and I felt quite alone,
actually. And I think that is actually what
brought it all up, because for the first time in 15 years, I. Was alone.
15 years earlier, the death of his mum had started this
chain of events that led to Josh becoming an artist, a storyteller,
and in time, his own person. While Josh wasn't able to deal with
his mother's passing when he was 12, or in the immediate years thereafter,
it was his almost passing that shook the ground beneath him.
I think that the things that I hadn't dealt with within unlocked.
It was like, okay, we're gonna work with this now,
you know, you need to go there now. Now you have to. It was good.
It was needed. And almost like there was a hard
reset that was happening, you know, like hard reset, like.
Let's begin again. Time to start again.
When Josh was finally ready to face the sadness, to let it all
just be the melodies and the words that he needed to heal found him.
I'd written a song which was almost like my catharsis.
A song about my mom's passing away and what I'd gone through.
If I go down to the piano and I start playing something and some
melody spills out and some words, and if I follow that thing to its
logical conclusion and it becomes a piece of art, then I feel almost
as though I've dealt with it now. And I felt like that song was a
way in which I was able to express something about that
situation without necessarily being confrontational.
The wrecking ball of grief had swung right past 12 year old Josh,
but others in the family didn't have the same experience.
The grief hit them hard immediately. I mean, what happened to my mom?
You can't blame anybody for that. Maybe the way that it was handled
wasn't the most emotionally mature. You know, I guess people were
also just trying to protect me. When I wrote that song about my mom,
I could perform that song to an audience without choking up.
I can do that now without choking up, because it's almost like the
chapter is closed. Looking back over the span of
his life, Josh can say that he's always gravitated towards stories,
but he's been a bit hesitant to don the label of storyteller.
People started saying, I'm a storyteller before I took
on that role. You know, it was like, Josh,
Josh tells great stories, and even in the music realm, it's like,
yeah, he's a great songwriter, but actually he's a great storyteller.
And that was like, okay, you keep people keep saying this. What is it?
Because I've been focusing on chord progressions and melodies and all
of the things that exist inside of a song, but people keep saying,
oh, he's a great storyteller, man. And so I went down this rabbit
hole of exploring. Okay, who am I looking back,
like, what's my lineage? And then why am I here?
Like, what's the purpose? And then is that okay?
Which is a big one. It's like, is it okay to be a
little bit different than to be a little bit weird and quirky?
Josh is now 37 years old and another ten years wiser for having felt the
full extent of his grief, and now he can answer those three questions his
drama lecturer had posed. Who am I? Why am I here? And is it okay?
Josh knows who he is now, and he knows he's still becoming.
I came up with this little theory that maybe I'm a scribe.
You know, if we're going to use. We use archetypal language.
Maybe I am a scribe for this, for this little pocket of time
that we have on in this little corner of this world.
I feel like the becoming process is something that you just never arrive.
You just always you're on the way somewhere.
And through the processing. Josh also knows why his stories
matter. The why always seems to have to
do with helping other people. Like, um. Speaking of service.
What does the world need? If my experience of grief is
something that is meant to move someone to dealing with their
own grief. And I've sort of come through it
and I've overcome that. Who? I've dealt with it.
Then it means that the next person who's going to come across that
story, they'll be better for it. And then is it okay?
Josh is sitting across from me in a studio in Sea Point as we
record this conversation. We've both come a long way since
our carefree days at a campus radio station in Stellenbosch.
We're dads now. Husbands, creative spirits carving
out untraditional career paths. And today, Josh is a little fatigued
and recovering from a head cold, but he still exudes an easy
happiness, a smile that lights up the room with an aura that might
be slightly faint but is still reminiscent of yellow and Labradors.
And then he looks at me and sees through the coat of happiness
that I tend to put on when I sit behind a microphone.
I mean, people look at you and they're like, ah, the radio guy.
Cool, happy radio guy. But actually then you listen to
your first episode and it's like, oh my gosh.
Like, Sean's been going through stuff,
you know? Yeah, I guess I have. We all have. So then is it okay?
Is it okay to be all of this randomness, all of this meandering
and all of this multi-faceted, multidisciplinary stuff?
Is it okay? Yes. It's okay. Today,
Josh is a multimedia storyteller, whether on screen, behind a
microphone or with pen in hand. He lives in Cape Town, raising two
young children with his beautiful wife and the song playing Right Now.
Josh wrote this for his mom. It's called life as a Fleeting Bird,
and you can find it on Spotify. Go on, subscribe to Something
Shifted now and never miss a human centered story.
You can find more episodes and ways to support the podcast at
Something Shifted. And because you've listened all
the way to the end, we want to share how something
shifted soundtrack with you. It's a compilation of songs we've
listened to while making the season, songs that make us feel a little less
lonely and a lot more empowered. The link is in the show notes. Enjoy!
Many thanks to Rew, my executive producer, for
additional writing on this episode. And as always,
thank you for listening by.