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Growing Up Without Mom: A Conversation About Teen Grief with Leila Musto

"Losing someone at a young age is very hard. It gets easier to manage. It doesn't hurt less. You just grow as a person and you understand your emotions on different levels... your grief always stays with you, but not always in a bad way.โ€

What happens when two people separated by decades but connected by this specific, terrible thing get to talk? In this very special episode of Grief'd Up, host Rebecca Feinglos connects with Leila, a teenager from Massachusetts who lost her mom, Justine, to cancer when she was just 12 years old. This conversation came through Experience Camps, a national nonprofit that transforms the lives of grieving children through summer camp programs and innovative year-round support. They connected Rebecca with someone who knows what it's like to be the girl with the dead mom, navigating a world that doesn't quite know what to do with you.

Rebecca lost her mother to brain cancer at 13. Leila lost hers to lung cancer at 12. The parallels are striking: both were kept in the dark about their mothers' true prognoses, both were "the baby girl" in their families, and both had to figure out how to be teenagers when everyone around them struggled to know what to say.

As Rebecca and Leila share their stories, the connection is immediate. They talk about the anger of being "protected" from the truth, the weirdness of being the only kid at school with a dead mom, and how grief doesn't look the way people expect it to. Most importantly, they explore how finding someone who truly understands your experience can be transformative. From making TikToks in hospice to picking out urns from catalogs, Leila's story captures the surreal reality of loss at a young age, and the unexpected ways we find to honor the people we've lost. This episode is a powerful reminder that grief is universal, messy, and that even if you think you're alone, there's probably someone out there who understands what you're carrying.

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