Losing a child is the hardest thing a parent can go through. It’s pain you can never prepare for. When your life revolves around helping others deal with their challenges, it can add another level of pressure to an already unimaginable situation. For famed life coach Iyanla Vanzant—in addition to grief—the death of her daughter Nisa in July had her unexpectedly feeling like a “fraud.”
“The deceptive intelligence of the ego always wants you to think that you’re not enough, not good enough, not worthy,” Vanzant told Tamron Hall. “And for me, who spends all of my life teaching other people, helping other people, fixing other people—when something happens in my life, the first thing that ego says to me is, ‘You’re a fake, you’re a fraud. You can save other people, but you can’t save your child.’”
She explained how losing her daughter Gemmia 20 years ago provided her with a road map to deal with her roller coaster of emotions.
“When I lost Nisa, I knew how to do it because I had already buried Gemmia,” she said. “See, when I buried Gemmia, I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know how to be a woman burying a child. So when I lost Nisa—it’s been 115 days—I knew how to do it. That’s grace. I knew how much to do. I knew who to call. I knew not to try to do everything by myself.”
Whether they’re the best of friends or fight constantly, mothers and daughters always have a complicated relationship. The Fix My Life star described how “All children bring to life the subconscious issues of the parent.” But she went on to explain how it’s different with daughters.
“When you give birth to a daughter, she’s bringing to life those things that you hold inside that you may not even know that are there and she’s gonna show ‘em to you in how she shows up in the world,” she said. “So Nisa showed me who I was and many ways that I didn’t.”
While she’s still grieving, and likely will always be grieving, Iyanla used her signature fiery spirit to proclaim that she’s not broken.
“I survived that, and I’ll survive this,” Vanzant said. “There’s a saying in the Caribbean: The bigger the monkey, the bigger the stick they beat him with. So I have a big life. I have a big place in the world. I have a big assignment.”
And according to Vanzant, that assignment is “to facilitate the evolution of human consciousness, one mind, one heart, one life, one spirit at a time.”
If there’s one thing we’ve learned through the trauma of these last few years, it’s the importance of not hiding our pain and letting others help us through it. Iyanla showing her vulnerability through an unimaginable loss lets her audience know she understands them and is really listening.