#192 - Katie Lee

In this episode of The 10 Ninety Podcast, Mason sits down with Katie Lee, a St. George native and one of six siblings — five girls, one boy. That boy was her brother Brandon. Brandon was 46 when he died from COVID in 2021. He was sarcastic, hilarious, and hard to love in all the best ways. He watched Maids in a hospital bed, made smashed potatoes from TikTok recipes, and had a one-liner for everything. He also spent years battling addiction, almost died of an overdose the year before, and spent his last year feeling more like himself than he had in a long time. Katie talks about what it was actually like to watch someone die in a COVID ICU — making life-and-death decisions over the phone, sneaking into the hospital when it wasn't her day, feeding her brother food he couldn't cut himself. She talks about grief that didn't look like grief, the guilt that came with relief, and why she didn't cry for a long time and why that's okay. She also gets into trauma therapy, scheduling grief like an appointment, dark humor as a coping tool, and why talking about it — even four years later — still does something for her that nothing else does. This one wanders a little and earns every minute of it. "What we talk about, we can begin to control. What we don't talk about continues to control us."