Family Flowers Only: Grief Podcaster Kathie Stritch on Finding Community in Loss
“People are wildly uncomfortable with heavy emotions,” Cloonfad native Kathie tells Galway Now. This sits at the heart of everything she has built: an online community through her Instagram account, a hugely popular podcast, Family Flowers Only, and real-life grief retreats that give people permission to speak about something many feel they can’t.
For Kathie, the work began from her personal experience. Her sister was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour, introducing her to what she describes as “a type of grief where you grieve for somebody who’s still alive.” It is known as anticipatory grief, “where you begin to grieve with the knowledge that someday they won’t be here.”
Then came another kind of loss. Following her sister’s diagnosis, her sister’s husband died suddenly in an accident in October 2015, while preparing for his mother’s funeral. “This was a whole different sudden shocking grief, where there was no warning, no goodbye,” Kathie says. Her sister sadly died in February 2017.
From that period, Kathie had seen grief from several angles. “I had been the person supporting someone who was really grieving, like my sister. I was supporting her. I had seen sudden loss, I had seen illness, the long goodbye. Then I was left with grief and worry and all of that afterwards.” There’s no vocabulary for grief, she agrees, which makes the process all the more difficult.
“I think society is not set up to support people who are grieving – there’s no language around it,” she says. “I’m not unusual in my story, everyone is dealing with some type of loss or grief every single day. You might meet those people in the shop or in traffic and you don’t know what anybody is carrying.”
During lockdown in 2020, Kathie decided to set up a community on Instagram as there was no outlet for it. “I just couldn’t believe the response,” she says. “Everyone had something to say.” The messages came quickly, hundreds of them. “I still get flooded with them today.” From there, the podcast, Family Flowers Only, followed organically. “I found that the easiest way to reach people.”
Today listeners from Ireland, the UK and US are among those who tune in weekly. She stresses these conversations are not only for people who have lost someone. “It’s human stories, real life,” Kathie says, among the humour and tears.
“My community and listeners are not exclusively people who have lost or who are grieving. It’s anybody that feels a bit of pity, which is all of us.”
“Everyone is dealing with some type of loss or grief every single day. You might meet those people in the shop or in traffic and you don’t know what anybody is carrying.”
A recurring theme is the fear of saying the wrong thing. Kathie understands it, but challenges that it’s far worse to ignore it. “The general consensus is to say something rather than nothing,” she explains. “It’s so isolating, lonely when nobody acknowledges this reality that people are living with.”
The key, she adds, is also not focusing on how the person died. “It doesn’t matter how they died, it shouldn’t be about how or what happened, it should be about them and your memories.” Listeners and guests include people trying to better support friends, family members and colleagues, as well as people from all walks of life and professionals who encounter grief in their work. “I have people from all sorts of professions, like Gardaí, consultants, nurses. They all tune in,” she says, adding many have said it helps them navigate the topic in everyday life too.
Kathie has created a space where people can listen to others speak honestly about loss in all its forms, as grief, she emphasises, is not always tied to death. “I have spoken to people who have lost their childhood from sexual abuse. I have spoken to people who have lost their access to their children because of their addiction, divorce, family breakdown. There’s grief in all of that.”
Alongside the podcast and online community, Kathie has run grief retreats, including weekends in Delphi and Galway. Bringing people together in person became an important part of the work. “As good and all as it is having a community online, a lot of this is virtual, so I was thinking, how do I get them together in real life, because that’s where the power is.”
“It doesn’t matter how they died, it shouldn’t be about how or what happened, it should be about them and your memories.”
In terms of what comes next for Grief Ireland, she hopes there will be more ways for people to meet in person. Kathie would love to see “nationwide meetings” where every county has “a place you can go and have a cup of tea and sit down with others in real life.”
“There’s a saying that grief is unique as a fingerprint. We all do it in our own way. So let nobody tell you that you should be doing this or you should be doing that. Grief comes with people for the rest of their life,” is her sound advice to anyone on their own path.
The name of the podcast came from the familiar phrase often seen on death notices. Flowers, she says, also hold something gentler and hopeful. “And ironically, the whole podcast is sponsored by a flower company now,” she laughs. But in the end, it all comes back to something simple. “That act of giving flowers, it’s all love, isn’t it?”
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