Grief, Ancestors & Cuba: Finding Your Mother Again

Maybe you know this feeling. Someone died and you kept going, because that was what you were supposed to do. You stayed busy, you stayed capable, and somewhere along the way you convinced yourself that you had handled it.Rebe Huntman lost her mother to cancer at 19. The grief counselors told her to move forward. So she did, with discipline and determination and a full, successful life. But 30 years later, on the edge of turning 50, she realized she had never actually let herself miss her. Not really.This episode follows Rebe's pilgrimage to Cuba, a country where the dead are not gone, where ancestors are spoken to daily and the veil between worlds is treated as thin and navigable. What she found there, in the dances, in the drumming, in the quiet workroom of a spiritist in El Cobre, was not magic for its own sake. It was permission. Permission to stop moving past her grief and start staying in it.What You'll Hear:How Rebe mastered the art of moving forward and the cost it quietly carriedThe moment in Cuba when her understanding of death, grief, and ancestry completely shiftedWhat it felt like to reimagine the hospital room scene she had been carrying for 30 yearsHow a country with a different relationship to death gave her a new way to love her motherThe small, daily rituals she brought home from Cuba and what they have meant for her healingWhy showing up fully as yourself can become a quiet gift to everyone around youGuest Bio:Rebe Huntman is a writer, former Latin dancer, and choreographer who has spent her career at the intersection of movement, storytelling, and spirit. She spent decades running a professional dance company and teaching college and high school before turning her full attention to writing. She splits her time between Delaware, Ohio and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Her debut memoir, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic and Miracle, was published in 2025 and chronicles her transformative pilgrimage to Cuba in search of her mother and herself. Find her at rebehuntman.com and on Instagram @rebehuntman.Listen and follow: www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/followSubscribe to the newsletter: https://thelifeshiftpodcast.beehiiv.com/grief after mother's death, ancestral healing, Afro-Cuban spirituality, pilgrimage and transformation, learning to talk to the dead, disenfranchised grief, mother loss, life after 50 identity, Santeria and healing, memoir of magic and grief