Grief, Anger, and No Unfinished Business: Preparing Your Heart Before It’s Too Late

There’s something I wish someone had told me more clearly before my mother died.

Grief is coming no matter how much you clean up. You can do all the right things. You can say the right words. You can set the right boundaries. You can work hard to become emotionally complete with the person you love while they’re still here. And you should. That’s the work. That’s what we do at No Unfinished Business. But none of that stops the grief.

What it does is change the quality of the grief when it arrives. Because the day they are actually gone is the first day of your new life without them. And that’s when grief shows up in a way you cannot fully prepare for. I knew it was coming. We talked about it. I thought I understood it. I didn’t.

Because grief isn’t intellectual. Grief is the moment you reach out to connect with someone who is no longer there to receive you. You go to make the call. You go to share the thought. You go to tell them something funny, something hard, something important and there is no one on the other end. That’s when the hole in your heart shows up. That’s grief.

And it’s different from anger. It’s different from regret. It’s different from unfinished business.

Grief is heartache. It’s sadness. It’s missing them so deeply that it feels physical. My heart is broken that my mom is gone. I miss her terribly. I miss the sound of her voice. I miss the idea that she’s still somewhere I can reach. That’s grief.

But what I’ve come to understand is that before my mother died, I had spent years confusing grief with anger and unfinished business. Most people do. Anger is the part of you that wishes you could control something. It’s the part of you that wishes you had said something differently, done something differently, shown up differently. It’s the part of you that wants to go back and change the past but can’t. Anger lives in regret, shame, and lack of control.

Unfinished business is different still. It’s what you still have time to address while they’re alive. It’s the truth you haven’t spoken. The boundaries you haven’t set. The conversations you’re avoiding because they’re uncomfortable. It’s the emotional work you can do now so that later, you are not drowning in regret. That’s the work. But even if you do all of that, grief is still coming. I wasn’t prepared for how powerful it would be. I wish I had spent more time understanding that part. Because when she was gone, the anger had mostly subsided. The unfinished business had mostly been handled. What remained was grief pure, clean, painful sadness. And it surprised me.

Part of my anger that surfaced after she died had nothing to do with the last five years. It had to do with something I had buried for decades. Something she did that I never processed.

When I was in my early twenties, right at the peak of my DJ career, a major broadcast company was looking at bringing me to New York. I was on the verge of something I had dreamed about since I was 12 years old being a high-level mix DJ, creating music, traveling, performing. And right at that moment, my mother stole my entire music library and pawned it for money. Either to pay a bill or to buy more drugs. When I confronted her, she didn’t care. She was too far gone.

And what I did in response was quit on myself. I reinvented my career. I did what I knew how to do. I found success in other areas of entertainment. But I left that part of me behind the part that wasn’t finished. I buried it. And for 30 years, I never looked at it.That was unfinished business with myself.

It didn’t come up while I was cleaning things up with her. It surfaced after she died. And when it did, I realized something profound: my anger wasn’t just about her. It was about me. I was angry that I had quit on myself. Angry that I had let that moment redirect my life for three decades. So I did something about it. I put it back. I started DJing again. I started building the thing I had left behind. And the energy behind it is enormous. It’s healing me in a way I didn’t expect. My hometown is now talking with me about bringing this work and this entertainment together into something bigger. That’s me having no unfinished business with myself. And that’s the point.

No Unfinished Business is not about being perfect. Perfection is an illusion. You will not clean up everything. You will not say everything exactly right. You will not handle every moment beautifully. What you can do is your best. You can lean in. You can have the hard conversations. You can tell the truth. You can set the boundaries. You can show up in your values so that when the day comes, you are not buried under regret. You will still grieve.

But your grief will be sadness, not regret. Heartache, not shame. Missing them, not wishing you had been someone else. That’s the difference. The day they die is the first day of your new life. And grief is the first visitor that shows up. If you’ve done this work, grief gets to be grief. It doesn’t get tangled up with anger and unfinished business. And if you haven’t done this work, grief becomes something much heavier. So this is what we prepare people for. Not to avoid grief. But to face it cleanly.

To be able to say, “I did my best. I showed up. I told the truth. I didn’t abandon myself or them.” And then, when the grief comes, you let it be what it is the sadness of loving someone who is no longer here. That’s what I wish I understood more clearly before my mom died. And that’s why No Unfinished Business exists. Because this isn’t just about the person who is dying. It’s about you. It’s about making sure you don’t have unfinished business with them, and you don’t have unfinished business with yourself before your time is up either.