Grief, Collected with Amy Choi and Rebecca Lehrer

Amy Choi and Rebecca Lehrer are used to exploring complexities. As hosts of the podcast The Mash-up Americans, they cover all sorts of complex intersections of identity and culture. In this episode of Here After, they join me to talk about Mashup Americans’ newest series, Grief, Collected. 

 

In this episode we cover: 

 

• Amy’s brilliant grief avoidance/childbirth analogy & what we need in order to come out of our dark little nests into the light of grief
• The real nuance in whether most people are over the “acute phase” of grief after one year
• Will listening to “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead elicit grief bursts from everyone, or is it just us? 
• Why NOT grieving was the right move for people fleeing wars and political unrest 
• What Amy and Rebecca learned - about grief, about American culture, and about themselves - in producing their show, Grief, Collected (spoiler: they learned a lot!) 
• Why telling the truth about grief - without trying to resolve it - is the best hope we have for the future

 

Content note: mention of pregnancy and childbirth

 

Notable quotes: 

 

“One of those bummers is you can't exercise once, and then you're done exercising. It’s like - it f*cking sucks that you just have to keep doing it. And I think that's the thing with grief - you can't mourn something once and then be like, okay, well, now, I'm done with the grief portion of my life.” - Rebecca Lehrer

 

“NOT grieving is actually a survival strategy.” - Amy Choi

About our guests:

Amy Choi is co-founder and editorial director of The Mash-Up Americans. A Korean-American married to a Colombian-Mexican-American, she is mom to two feisty Korombexican-Americans: in other words, The Future of America. She specializes in getting people to tell stories they never expected to share. 

 

Rebecca Lehrer is the co-founder and CEO of The Mash-Up Americans. She’s spent 18+ years doing strategy, marketing, and audience development in media, arts, and culture. Her work focuses on the shared cultural experiences that bring people together, and re-centering stories on voices you don’t usually hear.

Additional resources

 

Check out the entire Grief, Collected series at griefcollected.com and The Mash-Up Americans at mashupamericans.com

For more on historical responses to loss, and ways to change the entire culture, personally and collectively, check out It’s OK That You’re Not OK wherever you get your books

Get in touch:

 

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Here After with Megan Devine. Tune in, subscribe, leave a review, send in your questions, and share the show with everyone you know. Together, we can make things better, even when they can’t be made right. 

 

Have a question, comment, or a topic you’d like us to cover? call us at [phone] or visit megandevine.co

 

For more information, including clinical training and consulting, visit us at www.Megandevine.co

 

For grief support & education, follow us at @refugeingrief on IG, FB, TW, and @hereafterpod on TT

 

Check out Megan’s best-selling books -

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
That's the definition of the mashup Americans. We are hopeful
and we are optimists. We are not silver linings people,
and we also believe that by dealing with hard things,
something new will flourish from that. Not rose colored glasses.
But like, that's actually the optimism. We're not giving up.

(00:20):
We're like, we're doing the work. Hope. The hope is
a muscle work. This is Here After, and I'm your host,
Megan Divine, author of the best selling book It's Okay
that You're Not Okay. This week on Hereafter, Rebecca Laire
and Amy Choi, hosts of the new podcast Grief Collected,
we're talking about grief and culture and what safety really

(00:43):
looks like. Honestly, it's just really something when a bunch
of grief nerds get together. So don't miss this one, everybody.
All of the good stuff is coming up right after
this first break. Before we get started, one quick note.
While we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in

(01:05):
our time here together, this show is not a substitute
for skilled support with a license mental health provider or
for professional supervision related to your work. Hey friends, So
grief is slowly starting to have a moment in the
Spotlight from Anderson Cooper's show focused on his own grief

(01:27):
to this very show Hereafter, to some amazing television shows
portraying grief in honest and difficult and beautiful ways. I
think it's at least safe to say that grief is
having more airtime than it has in the past, and
obviously I love this. More discussions about real grief from
real people, please. My guests this week are the hosts

(01:50):
of the podcast The mash Up Americans, Rebecca Laire and
Amy Choi. On mash Up Americans, they explore the intersections
of culture and history for hyphen ad Americans. That's their term,
hyphenate Americans, meaning like Korean Americans or Colombian Americans, or
anybody with more than one identity. In the show today
on Hereafter, you're gonna hear Amy refer to mash up people,

(02:13):
and that's what she's referring to. So Amy and Rebecca
recently completed a series for mash Up Americans called Grief Collected.
It's an exploration of American culture's unique relationship to grief.
The show examines how grief moves through our bodies and
our families and our communities and why we need to
feel all of that in order to transform our futures

(02:34):
personally and collectively. Now, of course, all of that stuff,
all of that complexity, all of that is right up
my alley. I love to have conversations with people where
we just nerd out on the science of grief and
humanity and relatedness. So it was really nice to spend
time with these two people. It's also just really nice
to spend time with two people who think and speak

(02:56):
in analogies as much as I do. It's like our
own special language. Now. I do have a couple of
content notes here. Content note number one. Pretty early on
in our discussion, Rebecca quoted some studies that say that
acute grief acute in quotation marks acute grief is or
should be done by the end of the first year. Now,

(03:16):
if you find yourself bristling at that, and honestly I
did too, stick with us. We absolutely get into the
nuances of that and how grief is absolutely not something
that's done and dusted by the end of that magical
one year date. So don't let that throw you. We
stuff a lot into our time together, and I think
you're going to find it's a pretty special conversation, especially

(03:39):
if you've ever wondered why grief is such a taboo subject.
And then one last thing, we get into the topic
of ancestral grief in this episode. If you're not familiar
with that term. Broadly speaking, it means grief that stretches
back through your family line, often grief that was created
by forced migration or enslavement or displacement. Okay, enough out

(04:03):
of me, everybody, let's get to this great conversation with
Amy and Rebecca. We have been having so much fun
in our introduction, but I want to get us rolling
on our conversation today. So Amy and Rebecca, I am
so glad you're here. Welcome to the show. Thank yous. Okay,

(04:27):
So in the introduction, when I was introducing you, I
was saying, how grief is really kind of having a
moment in the spotlight right now, like after being ignored
and not paid attention to for such a long time.
It's like, if there's a unifying theme for the last
several years, it's it's kind of grief, whether we're talking
about it openly or not. That's that's sort of the thing,

(04:49):
and one of the most common questions that I have
had from journalists over the last few years is has
the pandemic made us better at grief? And I think
I surprised them every time, and I say, no, I
don't think the last few years have made us like
better at grief. But I do think it's made people

(05:09):
curious about grief and understand that the things that we
normally say in the face of really difficult life things
like that stuff doesn't work. So one of the taglines
for your show is do we even know how to grief? Which, like,
you know, people after my own heart, So I want to, like,
I want to know what made you start exploring grief

(05:31):
since it's not exactly a topic that most people go
running into with excitement. Rebecca, can we start with you? Wait?
So I just a heard agree. Can't see in the video,
but it was like a lot of nodding from both
of us, and I think we have the same sense
that it's in the air, and maybe the best thing
is that there's an awareness, maybe a new awareness or

(05:54):
an awakening that much of what we're experiencing is grief
and loss and it's not it's death grief death loss,
but it's also loss of futures that we thought, and
lots of other significant losses that we have to grapple with.
And so I think we were realizing early in the

(06:15):
pandemic how first of all, we were also still under
regime that was actively oppressing our people, mash ups, people,
first generation people living on the margins, and so we
were sitting in a significant amount of fear and also
a loss of what we thought the environment that we

(06:38):
lived in was, or even what it could be. So
there was a lot of everyone sitting pretty raw. And
then you're watching, you know, even you know, you're reading
the newspaper and it says this seems quaint now, but
I remember the hundred thousand mark of death from COVID
and turning to Amy and saying, I don't understand how

(07:01):
we aren't marking this other than in a newspaper like
these are all individual humans, our neighbors, people that we
claim to love through this really silly, jingoistic like language
that we've had around us for especially the last several years.

(07:22):
Are are you know, fellow countrymen? And yet we can't
even stop and say their names. And there was something
that it felt like it was all building together and
we were already it has happened quite early, realizing that
we really wanted to understand it more. What are the

(07:43):
different types of grief we're experiencing this and really profound
physical ways, emotional ways, personal griefs, community griefs, and ads.
With everything we do, it starts from our own interests
and our own curiosity. And so I think that was
the gen cysts of this. It was building on the
four five years before that, and a certain kind of

(08:06):
loss and grief that then became acute loss and grief
of our our friends and our neighbors. What I hear
you saying, and that is like, I don't think we
were quite exhausted yet, but the pre exhaustion of the
years leading up to March of sort of had us
primed for what the hell is this? Right? We were

(08:27):
sort of asking those questions, those deeper questions and thinking
about belonging and loss and relatedness and safety and community
and connection. We were all well many of us were
thinking about that, and then here is this big event
that starts to kill people and really undermine our ideas
of community and safety and relatedness and pain and suffering

(08:50):
and all of this stuff. And I love that for
you the answer to that was, let's investigate. I think
that's also we have to turn around and face it.
And that has always been our way, Like our ethos
has always been super optimistic, super hopeful, but the path
to getting there has been to like find your way

(09:11):
through immense challenge. And this is maybe gonna sound like
a wild parallel, but I think of it as like,
like grief is this ever present force in our lives.
It's always it's like sunlight or air or something. And
so I I have two kids, Rebecca All says, two kids.
I gave birth to both my children via C section,

(09:32):
And first of all, the whole journey of learning about
like what happens to your body and how you give
birth and all of these things right, and it's so
much about like what you can kind of face in
your body and like what is real and a crazy
thing to learn about giving birth via c section is
that that babies like well actually shy away from the light.

(09:53):
They don't like the blast of cold air and the
bright hospital lights and all of the things that are
happening in cesarean birth, and so the doctor actually has
to like get the baby and pull it out right.
And I swear this is related to what we were
talking about, but I think that that's actually what we
had to do. For so long. There was this like

(10:15):
ever present force that we knew was there, that like
kind of if you don't ever face the grief in
your life, you're haunted by it. One of the things
that Adrian Murray Brown said to us that that that
really has stayed with me is that if you don't
get an opportunity or if you're unable to process your grief,
your grief becomes your shape. And I think that that's
what happens, Like we can curl away or kind of

(10:37):
shy away from this ever present force. It's always in
our lives. It's like part of the human existence, like
a baby not trying to actually face life. But then
like you got to get out there into the cold
air and into the bright light and into the scary
stuff in order to like actually live. And I really
think that there was a part of us that was like, Okay,
we're surviving right now, and we were lucky enough to

(11:01):
survive through that, like through those critical moments of the pandemic,
and then we were like, but surviving doesn't isn't enough,
Like it was enough for like a year, and then
after a year we were like, Okay, but now this thing,
this will become our shape, This is going to haunt us.
So how do we understand it better and just confront
it and face it because in our souls we knew

(11:23):
that it's not something that like just goes away. It's
not something that unless it is processed and unless you
do kind of allow it to flow through you, that
it ever goes away. It's like one of those another
one of those bumbers. It's like, you know, you can't,
like exercise once and then you're done exercising it like
fucking sucks, Like you just have to keep doing it.
And I think that's the thing with grief is that

(11:43):
you can't like more in something once and then be like, Okay,
well now I'm done with the grief portion of my life.
I want to jump in just for a second because
I can definitely listen to you talk about this forever,
but I want to grab something that you just said,
which was like, we we have to process it so
that we can be part of this life and like
not shy away from things. I love that you ended
that with, like it's not like and like exercise, you

(12:04):
can't just do it once and be over it. I
think we have this idea that if you just like, Okay,
I'm going to process my grief, I'm gonna I'm gonna
work through this stuff, and then I never have to
do it again, right Like, this transactional way of engaging
with that atmosphere of grief, right Like, it's not like
a one and done thing. There's no finish line to

(12:28):
it like that. So it's interesting because I think when
we start talking about that, people are like, all right,
I'll do my stuff and then I'm gonna be okay.
But it sounds like this is more about coming into
relationship with the grief that exists in all of its
many forms, instead of trying to avoid that relationship or
pretend that relationship isn't actually happening. It's exactly that, which

(12:48):
is I think that too, would everyone we spoke to
and you're you're you're a therapist. But I talked so
much shit about Coobler Ross and I think and I'm
not going to get into what her intentions were, and
that I think they were about people dying, not actually
about grieving. So we'll give her that benefit of the
doubt there, but everyone was like, that's not a real thing, right,

(13:11):
And we as Americans particularly tend to grab grab onto
like a path. Right. So, oh, here's the five stages
of grief and then I'm just gonna go them in
order and sort of try to make things fit into
them and then be done. And that was really interesting.
First of all, the man like truly cooler Ross shooting
on was a universal theme of alongside perspective that were

(13:35):
like big picture. The other though related to that, as
I think this was really profound. So it's particularly death
loss and death grief. The acute grieving period is fairly
short actually in the grand scheme of most people's lives,
and it's very it's common to have longer, prolonged grief,

(13:55):
but most people, you know, within a year are living again.
And that's of grieving something acutely. Now that's just to
say that doesn't mean that you're not then grieving for
your whole life in some way. It's just that acute
grief period where that's like the primary focus of your life,
like you're unable to function. And and that was really

(14:18):
interesting to look at, you know, longitudinal studies people saying
this from from their experiences and then you know, but
then the ways that it crops up always surprise you
across your life. I'm literally the other day and I'm
talking about a loss that's thinking about a really profound
loss for me that's twenty three years old. And the

(14:40):
other day a song came on, like I was. We
were driving to San Francisco, and I was like, I'm
gonna play the Grateful Dead. I just think doing the eld,
I'll play music to go into San Francisco with, you know,
And so I play The Grateful Dead and Ripple came
on the song and it's a song that I'm not
even a deadhead, you know, I get it. I kind

(15:00):
of a nostalgic moment for a little Jerry Garcia, but
mostly like the ice Cherry Garcia ice cream. So anyways,
it comes on and I just start weeping, and the
experience was I realized. And I then texted my best friend,
who also experiences profound loss with me twenty three years ago,
and I was like, did we play this at our

(15:22):
friend's funeral memorial? And she was like, yeah, we did,
and it I mean truly, I was so surprised, but
also it felt good. It was intense, but it felt
good to be in connection with that moment with myself
as an eighteen year old with my friend who I'm
still friends with his mother were still in relationship. But

(15:45):
to to get to do that and to remind myself
of the experiences of life. I don't know that that's
just to say it's constant or or I. I just
opened some cards and I found a note I'd written
to my grandma that I hadn't sent and she's dead,
so it was it was about our book club. I
was like, here, I'm sending you this book, and I did.

(16:06):
I had brought her the book. I remember that, but
the note was here and I just started to cry.
It just made me feel alive. The whole point of
this is that there's this sort of cute, acute period
of grief which is pretty finite actually in the grand
scheme of things for most humans, and then there is
this long period of living with all of the griefs

(16:28):
of your life and the ways that you engage with
it that is just the rest of your life. Yeah.
I can hear some of my my listeners being like,
it's not over in a year. You can't let her
say that, and I think, I think this is where
it gets really tricky, because humans really do like these

(16:48):
like start an end dates and here's when it's going
to be over, and like we we apply that most
people are you didn't say this about like most people
are following in a year, Like we weaponize this time window.
And if we say that the acute part of grief
should be over at a year, then our interpersonal tolerance

(17:10):
for it is about four hours, Like you know, like
at the funeral, people are like, no, that that's behind you.
You need to get back out into life. Like all
of the ship that we do, I mean languages is
so tricky because if we say most people are sort
of wrapping up that acute crying so hard you vomit
sort of part of grief at the year point, for me,

(17:35):
that doesn't have enough nuance in it. I love that
you followed that up with this is something that lives
with you forever, like your person is never not dead, right.
I work with a lot of people whose children have died,
and it's like when they're watching their kids classmates maratch
away from high school and go on to college and
get into partnerships and like stuff like your kid is

(17:58):
still dead, and that is still grief. So I love
a lot more nuance in the conversations about how long
grief last because I know that as our human brains
were like, this sucks, and I needed to have an
end date. And if you're if you're watching somebody you
care about be in great pain, you're like, I need

(18:18):
to know that this will be over because this is
really hard to watch, right. That impulse to like make
other people feel better and give them an end date
is really about our own helplessness in the face of
somebody's pain. So I love that you brought in a
lot more nuance in there. And before you said Ripple,
I was going to interrupt and say, did you listen
to Ripple? Because that's that's the song No, And I

(18:41):
think I appreciate that. I think that's exactly. First of all,
we're all human, and I think one of the psychologists
we spoke to was talking about the infinite variability of
being human, so we can call all of these patterns
that we see and and I think that they're helpful
and in realizing that your of many people, and hopefully

(19:02):
that makes you realize you can find community and connection
with other people who have had similar or not similar
experiences but similar reactions or whatever that looks like, to
find community. Because actually that was one of the what
we found in all of our conversations was that like

(19:23):
community and storytelling were two of the fundamental pieces of
what it means to grieve. And that is why part
of why the pandemic has been extra painful is that
you couldn't be with people, and people are what help
you realize, like other people loved somebody that you loved,

(19:43):
and therefore that person is being grieved by many people
and also will live through many people. And if you're
not allowed to be with people, you feel so fucking
alone and and and not human. And I think that
has been in humanity of this period. The loneliness and
the isolation from other people's touch, from other people in

(20:06):
community has been one of the most specific to I
think a pandemic experience. And I think Amy can we
could elaborate this is that one of the parallels for
us was also as first generation Americans or people who
have ancestral grief, there's also a loneliness to that, and
I think that has something that we we tried to

(20:27):
explore in this in this series, we've been talking to
Rebecca Laire and Amy Choi. Let's get back to them.
The episode where you had Lin to tie on where
you're talking about ancestral grief and in generational grief that

(20:49):
for many people it wasn't safe to acknowledge the grief
that existed. So Amy said, not grieving is actually a
survival strategy. Can you talk about that a little about Yeah,
I mean, I think we talk about like the transformative
power of grief, right Like, it's this force, right that,
like it can move mountains and also move psychologies and

(21:13):
bodies and emotions. It's incredibly destabilizing and you have to
be in a safe place in order to let that
all happen. And I think for many people, whether they like,
for example, a first generation immigrant or somebody who is
fleeing a situation or you know, for better for worse,
at least in most of our immediate circles, there is

(21:35):
a sense of, yes, we came to America for opportunity.
And also that's like the choice between starvation or America,
right Like, it's a choice, and there's opportunity, and there's
also a reason why there was no opportunity in this
other place, whether that was fleeing war or the Holocaust,
or you know, there's like a lot of different things happening,

(21:55):
and so when you have to focus on how to
survive and how to just like find food, find a home,
find a way to get your children educated, there's no
way to like allow that destabilizing force of grief into
your life and to honestly process the unbelievable losses that

(22:16):
come with that. And I think you know we, we
meaning like our like mine and Rebecca's generation, are the
great beneficiaries of people who have made incredible lives and
set up opportunity for us here in this country, and
also for me, I would say, been incredibly displaced, like

(22:37):
the the line was broken from us and our home country.
And that was not because of any sort of shame,
It was not because of any sort of of need
for assimilation. It was simply because there was no way
to think about anything in the past, because we had
to be right here, moving forward and surviving in this instant.

(22:59):
And when like my generation got out of that survival mode,
like we had very comfortable lives, what we then miss,
because it's very human to miss it is all of
that you know my grandmother after her husband died, eventually
immigrated to the States and was with my mom and
two of her sisters who were here. She's my only
living grandparents that I knew, But she never talked about

(23:20):
her life in Korea. That was just like not something
that was available to her that was available to us.
My parents didn't go back for decades. They went back
from each of their parents deaths essentially. And what I
see now is like me and my sister and my
cousin's starting to build and repair our own relationships to

(23:45):
Korean culture and to like building relationships with a family
that we have in Korea that our parents kind of
necessarily had to sever in order to just be here
and just make life in America work here. Well, it's
also not you can't even also underestimate there's so much
about technology. That's what I was gonna say, is that
like there just wasn't you would call your grandmother whatever.

(24:08):
Remember the long long distance ring. It was like a
lower longer and you had to buy cards and you
were to talk for two minutes. You would say hello.
Almost on the phone, you need to say hello. You'd
say hello, and then there was okay, love you, and
there was not a long conversation because that was somehow
cost fifty dollars. I don't even really understand how any
of it worked, but it felt like it was at

(24:29):
least two thousand, like in my mind as a job.
I don't understand how we live with long distance charges
and like certain windows for so long and now it's
like we don't even notice that that doesn't exist. Every
time I travel with my phone and I'll have to
do is pay five dollars extra to have the phone
just work wherever I am. But then like you text
me pictures from like Europe or but it's crazy, Like

(24:50):
I remember like going with my parents to a print
shop to like print out a photograph that my dad
took on like a film camera and then we put
it in one of the was blue and red and
white like yes to then like mail it to Korea.
That just thinking about even that as an additional layer

(25:11):
of decontextualization of distance from a thing, there was no
way to I mean, el solve it. Or where my
mom is from was in civil war for the first
part of my life. We couldn't go there. Was my
my family was not there in that period, so I
also didn't go there till I was maybe thirteen or fourteen,

(25:33):
and so I think that's why it took me longer
to realize how foundational it is to who I am,
because it felt it's it's a long journey anyways. I
think part of it is related to this. The long tail,
the long life of grief is the sort of the
ways that it keeps popping up, and sometimes you don't realize.
You know, again in the Adrian re Brown, it's your shape,

(25:55):
but sometimes you don't realize how much part of you
is shaped by the losses that you've experienced, even the
ones that you are so foundational to yourself that you
don't know that they we don't even we couldn't even
name them, like we're just starting to name them. I
feel like we have this idea, especially in Western culture,

(26:17):
that like the hard or difficult things that happen to
you shouldn't actually affect you. You should use them as
fuel to become bigger, stronger, better, faster, which just goes
against what it's like to be human. Right, Everything in
our lives shape us in our current lives, but also
down through the generations. And I love that you bring
that in like, I think we've also sometimes like, oh,

(26:39):
you know, we didn't process grief correctly back in the
fifties and that was bad. And now we've got like
epidemics of alcoholism and suicidality and like all of this stuff.
And I think that there is you know, as with
as with everything human, like that either or binary does
not it does not work. There's a lot more middle

(27:00):
ground in there of like, yeah, so many of us
come from lineages of suffering, right, and however you want
to define that, right, That's that's different for race and
ethnicity and like a lot of things. So however you
want to define that lineage of suffering for yourself. It's
like there were reasons that people didn't turn to face

(27:25):
that and connect inside it. Some of those were very
literally your survival meant that you could not name what happened.
I love that in that in that one episode where
you talk about like it was not safe to say
ouch or to even say that somebody left because that
would have put other people in danger. So there there

(27:46):
are reasons why we haven't been that word metabolizing that
you use a lot right to to talk about how
much it's a very visceral description here about how much
under adjusted grief was by necessity and when you inherit
that like being able to turn around and look at

(28:07):
it and say, there were reasons that this happened, and
here's here's what I want to do with it. When
I received that that hot potato of this is like,
what's what's the relational cure? I guess is sort of
where I go with us because a lot of what
we're talking about is, for various reasons, we aren't allowed
or it's not safe to look at each other and

(28:28):
see each other in the difficult parts of life and
connect inside that and care for each other. So how
do we start shifting that? And the answer, as always
at least for me, is community and telling the truth
and starting to really talk about all the ways that
grief has shaped us right now and back through whatever

(28:51):
history you want to explore. I want to sort of
reflect back something so beautiful that you just said, which
feels so resonant for us, which is it's not judgmental.
I think that's something that's a theme of the work
we're doing or in in in Grief Collected, is we're
really truly asking questions and trying to understand better what

(29:14):
grief is, more broadly, what it is for us, what
it is for intergenerationally, what that looks like, but not
judging the ways that are families dealt with it. It's
just those are just facts in some way that the word.
That's just what it is. And to your point, there
are reasons for that that you don't have to respect them.

(29:36):
You don't. That's not my job to tell you what
to respect, but it's just is. And so I think
for us it's this, the more knowledge we have, the
more capacity that we have to ask questions, or the
more we understand about the questions we might be able
to ask of ourselves kind of and understand like historical
context and our families, then the better our future lives

(30:01):
will be. The better we can do for our children,
and they're still going to be like you, you guys,
look you were not doing in this time. I mean,
we joke about this all the time, like what our
children are like, oh my god, I'm like I'm breaking
this cycle and they're like, no, you don't know, you

(30:22):
broke your part of it. And I think that's I
think I love that grounding too, that like we each
do our own part of it with as much awareness
and kindness and connection as we possibly can, knowing that
that that epic journey will never be complete, and you know, like,
how how can you make sure to the best of

(30:42):
your ability and capacity that what you hand on to
the world is as thoughtful as you can make it be. Yeah,
and I think that, I mean, there's also research that
that shows that the more that you can name that
generational trauma, the more that you can name and place

(31:04):
yourself in historical context, the more you can heal or like,
the less stigma that like we personally associate with it.
A researcher Dr Maria yellow Horse Braveheart, who we were
not able to book on the show, but we became
fascinated with her work because you know, she studied indigenous population.

(31:24):
She's a Lala la Quota. Also, her research shows that
if Native people's could place there trauma kind of essentially
like in a historical context, in a historical timeline, it
decreased levels of stigma, It decreased kind of disregulated behaviors,
It lowered levels of like depression and and suicide and

(31:46):
addiction across the board. Because you the under the power
of understanding that you were not like born out of
thin air, which is very much kind of the American way,
is that you're you're here, and now you're just going
to push forward, like climb that ladder, like make progress
or whatever. We come from a place and at that
place doesn't have to define us, but it helps us

(32:07):
understand who we are and the fact that like then
we're connected to other people and to our ancestors and
to our communities rather than just like individuals that have
to like swim our way through this ocean of madness
all by ourselves. It's like it's actually powerful in a
way that is can be like scientifically studied. And so

(32:27):
I think, you know, that was a lot of what
this project was about for us was stuff that like
we felt we knew, but then being able to research
it and being like, oh my god, real people with
pH d s and longitudinal studies and like yeah, and

(32:51):
this is this is such a big Like I really
think that acknowledgement as kind of the rosetta stone of
of the human condition. Here is like when you are
allowed to tell the truth and be supported in the
truth of your experience current or historicum historical something happens

(33:14):
when you're allowed to know the truth of it. You know,
like if you are becoming aware of your history and
the things that your bloodline or your community line has endured,
it doesn't change the bullshit of it. It doesn't change
the horror of it or the violence of it. Being

(33:35):
allowed to say, yes, this happened, and yes, these are
the effects that I can see make something different. Like
this is why I am fascinated with like truth and
reconciliation committees, right, because there is something about the anti
gas lighting of that right to be able to tell
your nervous system, your olympic system, your generational inheritance, whatever

(33:57):
that looks like, yes, this happened, right, You and I
Just to bring it into something ridiculous, You and I
were talking, we were talking before the break about a
cockroach situation where your previous landlady. You were saying, there,
stick with me here for a second. But like you
are sitting there in your kitchen in the city and
there there are insects in your house, and you call

(34:19):
up the landlady and you say, there are cockroaches. We
need to do this, and she says, no, there aren't,
we never had them, and there is something really fundamental
that gets screwed up when there is something real and
true and happening and somebody who does have the power
to do something about it looks at you and says,
that's not true. And this is true relationally and emotionally,

(34:43):
and it's true for our nervous systems, and it's true
not just in this moment in time, but in all
the moments of time that have come before that when
things hurt. Being able to look at each other and
say you're right, that there is healing, and that not
making everything pretty and a racing pain and not saying

(35:03):
that it doesn't still suck, but there is healing inside
looking at what sucks and saying it sucks. And I
love that that in your show you really looked at
the science behind that, because I think that that can
feel really amorphous and and out there, and it it's
not amorphous and out there. It's in here. It's in
our bodies. It's in the ways that we greet the world.

(35:25):
It is in the ways that we connect with each other,
and that being able to build those communities where you
can say what hurts and be heard and seen in
it like that is what builds the beautiful world to
pass on to the next generations. There's so many layers here. Okay.
First of all, so you're talking about truth and reconciliation.
It applies at such a especially in the United States.

(35:48):
I mean, this is across. We have a conversation in
the series with that Rabbi Dania Rittenberg who wrote this book. Well,
she's written many things, but on repentance and repair, and
there's a lot about it now national repentance, and also
about truth and reconciliation. And that episode was about kind
of this idea of cultural community grief, like what does

(36:08):
it mean to Actually I think it was Desmond Tutu
Rite Wasn't who said, like, or what what? You can't
unknow it? Once you know you can't You might not
do anything with this information knowing what you know was
in the pain and horrors inflicted on black South Africans.
But you can't unknow it now that you've seen it

(36:30):
on national television and everybody has heard it, and you
can no longer feign ignorance. Um, you could be a
fucking asshole, but you can't feign ignorance. There's also there
I think you know what we're struggling with in this
time period. Is this more metaphorical although it doesn't seem
so much loss that we are experiencing in the US.

(36:50):
I think of this idea of how could you even
have truth and reconciliation if we're fighting like critical race
theory or something that's simply more telling historical truth, or
even an acknowledgement that what we know and the facts
we have gathered or our openness to it can change
over time, and there's a fixedness in the way we

(37:12):
think about what being American is or what America is,
which I think ultimately we believe that grieving that will
ultimately open us up to building something more beautiful and better.
But we have to acknowledge that we can't gaslight every
single person who has experienced tremendous amounts of pain at

(37:36):
loss in order to build the country that we then glorify.
It ultimately is not healthy, and we're not metabolizing the grief.
We're not. We're not even when there's like, you know,
you read Isabel Wilkerson's cast and you suddenly realize things
for the first time. It's great to learn for the
first time you're not penalized for not having known it before,

(37:58):
learn it now, and start to grow from there. And
I think that's part of what we're wrestling with in
this In this work, we've been talking to Rebecca Laire
and Amy Choi. Let's get back to them. We work

(38:19):
really really hard to not feel grief. Like as you're
describing that, I'm thinking, like all of the gas lighting
at an individual, community and national level, like all of
the God I've put it out of my brain, but
alternative truth, right, like all of that stuff to me,
now this this you know, acknowledging here, that grief is

(38:39):
always the lens through which I look at the entire world.
But like all of that stuff was a way of saying, nope,
nothing wrong here, nothing to see you here. I'm going
to keep myself safe from feeling anything. And like you,
like other rising other you know, other people going through
challenging times or creating challenging times for other people, Like
for me, everything about you are either working really hard

(39:04):
to pretend that everything is fine and nothing hurts, or
you're allowed to sort of collapse into it and you know,
whatever spools out from that. But like, what is it
that feels so dangerous about acknowledging grief that we have

(39:25):
literally built an entire civilization that denies it. What you
don't have to have like a specific answer for that,
because I think that is one of those major answers
that we spend a lifetime answering. But through this project
and through all of Grief Collected, it's like, do you
know how to answer that question? What do you say

(39:48):
to that? Like? What is so dangerous? I mean, I
think it's like really scary to live fully and to
just like in race or face like the truth of
life head on, and the truth of it is that
grief is a huge part of it, and the grief

(40:09):
is probably like the biggest truthful face. Like Rebecca, I
actually talked a lot as we were as we were
working on this show about whether it was a show
about like facing mortality and actually about fear of death
and fear of our own mortality, or was it about
what grief is? And I think, just like understanding that

(40:30):
life is lost, I don't feel this anymore, but it's
like a tremendously dark idea, and I think that that
is not something that Americans are inclined to do. We
at our point of view, and I think we share
this is that that really tragic horror, like that that

(40:52):
fear of loss of both of ourselves are are like
mortality fears, and then the fear of your losing your
loved ones, which is a million times worse. That we
understand that that comes with great beauty and love and joy,
but they don't exist separately. And I think we really

(41:14):
we just really want to believe that we can have
one without the other. I think that's part of it.
Like my daughter seven, our family, and she in particular
had a horrific loss when she was and she had
just turned five. Her best friend died, her best friend's
mother died very suddenly. It was it was like a
very it was incredibly tragic, and so she has had

(41:36):
to deal with kind of like the void of death
at an incredibly young age. And to this day she'll
still be like and it's very simple and it's completely
in like this incredibly wise seven year olds perspective, but
like if she can't sleep at night, what she says
to me is like I was thinking about death, and

(41:57):
I was like, were you thinking about some but dying?
Because it's something sometimes that like feel like She'll be like,
I I dream that you died, She's like, no, just death.
And I think that that's at the core of a
lot of this is that, particularly as Americans, we don't
ever want to believe that there's not another opportunity around
the corner. And that's why we also, as you said earlier,

(42:18):
have to transform every hard thing into like fuel for
the next thing. But the acceptance that just suffering exists
and that you will have to suffer is something that
I don't. I just don't. We just don't want to. Also,
we like to make everything weakness. I think that's another
thing is that Americans are like, well, you got sick,

(42:41):
you're weak, or you're poor. You're poor, and or you
can't handle somebody dying and going back. You know you're weak.
You couldn't birth children and go back to work after
two weeks you're week. That whole narrative thread about the
storytelling of America. I think that's related in here as well,

(43:06):
which is that allowing you to be a human and
a human this is more Buddhist right, living is suffering.
But if you're allowed to acknowledge that and live in
that truth, then you know you're not weak, You're just
you're just alive. And I think that's the part where

(43:26):
it's it butts against the sort of every structure in
our society is not meant for supporting, whether it's brievemently,
family leave, you know, paternity like you know, maternity, parenting, leave,
all of those things. There's nothing there's there or even
like proper health care to acknowledge that we're human beings

(43:47):
and we get sick and we're human beings, and we die,
and we're human beings and we have children. They're just
it's not set up for that, which is all interconnected
to for us, this idea of inability to con front.
We're not confront that just like feels so that feels
like and aggressive. It's like to just acknowledge and hold

(44:10):
people and love each other. That's like just because any
given day, any person you're interacting with is experiencing something
really hard. And if you start to live and interact
with people that way, like, actually your life is better
because you're more open and more loving. I love where

(44:30):
you're going with this, okay, because I think like this
is also interrelated, right, like we guard against more loss
by trying to pretend that lass doesn't happen, and if
it does happen, will be okay, Right, it's not going
to be that bad. All bounce back, Like all of
the things that we say to somebody with a chronic

(44:52):
illness or grieving a death or you know, any of
these Take a yoga class, you'll be fine. Like this
deep sort of atavistic need to survive and be okay,
And how much does that sort of turn in on
itself when we have built not even just in modern times,
but like way back even before a prerecorded history here,

(45:14):
but like if we don't have communities where it is
okay to feel how horrible it is to lose people
you love, or to lose moodily autonomy or you know
any of these things, like we don't have the infrastructure
to witness and observe that, so it is dangerous to

(45:40):
feel that, And then we just sort of keep like
layering that on like yeah, yeah, yeah, you can have
all of these books and podcasts and bumper stickers that say, like,
feel the fullness of your humanity and let grief and
sadness and pain in. Well, if we go back to
what you were talking about about not grieving as a
survival strategy, like in until we start building a world

(46:01):
where it is okay to fall apart and to have
feelings and to be affected by the losses in our lives,
it will remain unsafe to have them, which means that
we're not getting the world that we want. So like,
to me, the answer here is bravery and connections. To
start having these conversations, to start talking about the things
that hurt, and build what does that silly entrepreneurial thing

(46:24):
like build the plane while you're flying? Right? Like that,
the real safety is in I think this, I think
I'm a quoting a line from my own book, but
like the real safety is in hurting with each other,
not trying to pretend that things don't hurt. Yeah, well,
don't you love when you you're like I love I
was so smart? Um, And I think that like that

(46:45):
that also, like there there cannot be enough like emphasis
on the idea that that we start weighing our like
individual worth on how successfully we navy, Like you're not
supposed like if you were good at this, or if
we went through the five stages of grief, will then
we'd be done? You know that, Like it's incredibly vulnerable

(47:06):
to suffer, and to suffer not in silence I mean,
I even think like everyone's so judgmental. That's the other pace,
and that's I want to bring that just in there
for a second, that idea when you know, we were
saying that just in longitudal studies that the cute grief
period is you know, it's grief is long, and the

(47:26):
cute grief period does is finite even if it's long
or not prescriptive. One of the things that Amy kept
asking was like, what is a healthy expression of grief
and and and because that's what everyone says, a healthy
expression of grief and um and you're like, okay, what
is that? Because also we like to know the answers
we do, but our our work is very long prescriptive,

(47:49):
I think, similar to yours. And I think just trying
to navigate how to not judge somebody when if they
are done early or done early, if they you know,
if they're like or vice versa. If somebody is just
like actually, for me, we have somebody close to us
who is caregiving a sick family member and I had

(48:12):
to has to go do something. I was like, please
take all the time you need, and they said, you
know what, it's actually better for me to work while
I'm doing this because that's something that occupies me in
a healthy way for me, and I'm like, you do
whatever you need to know. I'm just telling you you
have the option. I say that in to point out
that there's just so much a judgment about every individual

(48:33):
person's relationship to it, and we're just so uninterested in that. Yeah,
so judgy. I mean you see this in the in
the widowed community a lot, Like if you start dating again,
people are like, don't you think that's too easy? Was
your marriage not very good? But if you don't start dating,
people are like, what is wrong with you? You need

(48:54):
to get back out into life right, Like I cannot,
you absolutely cannot wait. If you're your sister or your
kid dies, you know, like the drunk driving accident, and
you don't start a foundation to like talk about the
horrors of driving under the influence, then you're not honoring
their memory. But if you do do something like that,

(49:14):
then you're milking it right, like right, and like again,
like for me, that all boils down to God. We
are so uncomfortable with being human, so uncomfortable. It's that
thing of like, Okay, none of these terrible things would
ever happen to me, but if they did, I would
handle a little lot better than that person, so I

(49:36):
would be okay. Like this is a really I'm going
to use atavistic again because it's a great word, but
this like really deep seated need to know that you're
going to be okay, Like that survival instinct and everything
that we're taught is like the only way you survive
is by being unaffected. And it's like what I feel, like,

(49:58):
you know what you're trying to do with greet to
what I've been trying to do for the last fourteen years,
because like no, no, no, no, no, Actually, our survival
is in the dissolution, Like our survival is in the
messiness and being able to look at somebody and say, however,
you need to take care of yourself in this time.
As long as you're you're safe and you're not harming others,
then I want to support that. It might not be

(50:19):
something that I would choose, but I'm not. You. Just
allowing people to be the full expression of themselves is
really a we love to get it right, We love
but there is a real real accuracy in there that

(50:40):
let I keep coming back to, like, you know how
yoga when they say the full expression of the pose, like,
I feel like this emotionally, like the full expression of
the emotional pose. How do we start exploring that and
finding places where we can be that with each other
and that that is really the only safety that we

(51:01):
can reach for it. But also if it's not going away,
which is not, it's just transforming or going or by
acknowledging it or expressing it, and it's going into different
parts of you. And then when it bubbles up because
you've done the work, you know what it is, or
you see it in something, because we as a society

(51:23):
in our dream world that we're working towards, you know
what it is. We see it bubbling up, and we
can we can then support our community through things like that,
through anything, through through loss and grief. That feels healthy again,
back to healthy expressions of grief. That's what feels healthy.
Is the is and I think this is the connectedness.

(51:47):
I think ultimately that as we said, the goal of
all of our work at the Mash of Americans is
about our full expression of our humanity and also about connectedness.
Like we are in this together, and I think I
don't know what the next version I mean, we also
made a fiction rom com last year. So things that

(52:07):
give us joy and life and keep us booy us
like these those are all related. A grief, grief collected
and a rom calm for us. That's that's it. That's living,
you know, And I don't know, just being with people,
like getting to have this conversation and now we know
we are all like our lines are connected and the

(52:27):
ways that we can support each other are now richer
and deeper. And you know, I didn't even have to
ask you what what does hope look like for you?
At least for you, Rebecca, because that, like, to me,
that sounds very hopeful. That this isn't about the cessation
of pain or the transformation of difficult things. It's like,

(52:48):
how fully do I get to be here with other
people being fully here? And sometimes that is a rom
calm at the same time that you were just like
having a moment of crying to a grateful dead song
like that. That the freedom of that, that's it is
a really cool thing. Amy. How about what if if
I ask you the question that I did not ask Rebecca,

(53:11):
but she answered anyway, so in tune with what I
was where I was going but knowing what you know
and what you've explored in grief Collected and just you
know in your life. Rom comms included like what does
hope look like for you right now today? Hope looks
like my belief that we all can transform, that we

(53:35):
can all change. I don't believe that anything is static,
and that is very scary. But I also don't think
that the foundations that we tend to think we'll keep
us safe and static, that we try and keep static,
are are really the things that are truly foundational to
our lives. So I think, you know a lot of

(54:00):
my point of view on grief in particular, which was
very different than Rebecca's, was was really about ancestral and
familial grief and that sense of dislocation and loss. And
I think, you know, a lot of that's what a
lot of like my personal work has been in this
idea that like of changing those relationships and breaking some

(54:24):
of those trauma cycles for my kids, and I like,
I'm doing a really good job, Like I'm really proud
of myself, and I think that that's actually something that
I see in so many people that come to us
that like, I think all a mash up is about transformation.
It's about being like rooted in traditions and knowing who
you are and being able to look forward and create

(54:44):
the future that we want. And I truly believe that
we can. I truly believe in the power of of
imagination and creativity and change. And I think that I
think that we all have it. I think if we
just tap into it, we can all do it. And
that always gives me hope. I love that, like such
a foundational thing here of Like it makes me feel

(55:07):
really hopeful to look at hard things, right because then
you are in relationship with them. And when you are
in relationship and you have your eyes open and your
heart open, you can experiment and you can explore and
you can play, which is a really powerful agent of
healing and connection. Right, That's the fundamental knots seize up.

(55:30):
That's our That's the definition of the mash up Americans.
We are hopeful and we are optimists, but we are
not silver linings people. And we also believe that by
dealing with hard things, something new will flourish from that,
not rose colored glasses. But like that's actually the optimism.
We're not giving up. We're like we're doing the work hope.

(55:53):
The hope is a muscle work. M I love that
there's something new being created. I having these explorations and
having these conversations that we don't know what it is yet.
I think I can. I can slip into my sparty
pants mode of me, like I know what the world
will be like when we embrace all of this and
and I love that that we don't know and we're
creating it and we get to find out. I love this.

(56:16):
I love this friends. Okay, So that is a good
place for us to wrap up our conversation. Obviously, I'm
going to link to everything in the show notes. But
where can people find you? What do you want them
to know? Yes, so you can find the mash Up Americans.
And this series is really the seventh season of our podcast,
so that the mash Up Americans and Grief Collected are

(56:37):
anywhere you listen to podcasts. We also have a beautiful website,
grief Collected dot com, which has not only transcripts and
you can listen, but also white papers which links to
a bunch of different things linked to bookshop. I believe
we have your book in the bookshelf. Bookshop bookshelves, so
we'll make sure that it's there too. But all the

(56:59):
kind of resource is in ways we've been engaging with this,
and we're at mash up American on social media, although
my relationship to social media is complex. But yes, you
can listen wherever to the mash of Americans and Grief Collected,
and you can find grief Collected dot com is where
all of our where the show and all of its
beautiful components live. Excellent, alright, everybody, So remember that you

(57:22):
can get all nine episodes of Grief Collected wherever you
listen to your podcast. And don't sleep on those transcripts
because they're awesome and I spent a lot of time
reading through all of the transcripts of every single show. Okay,
stay tuned, everybody. I'm going to come back with your
questions to carry with you right after this break. Each

(57:49):
week I leave you with some questions to carry with
you until we meet again. Now you know what really
struck me in this conversation this week, Well, one just
how far arranging a conversation about grief can be, with
things looping back in on themselves and some kind of endless.
If this happens, then that happens equation. Ah, but that

(58:11):
question that Amy asked me about magical thinking was really interesting.
We humans do so many things to help ourselves survive,
like say voicemails and have travel rituals. None of that
stuff is wrong, and we're not wrong to have that
magical thinking or those rituals. I just I really like

(58:32):
that conversation about why we do that stuff. I also
really loved that the real hope for the future is
in exploring grief, allowing it, and questioning our inheritance of it.
Also that we can bring more awareness and more kindness
and more curiosity to the world around us and the
world to come after us. What parts of today's conversation

(58:55):
stuck with you. Everybody's going to take something different from
today's show, but I do hope you found something to
hold onto. Hope really is a crowdsourced thing, and as
we heard today, it's really a collective thing. I'd love
to hear how grief and inheritance and connection are unfolding
in your life and what you thought about today's episode.

(59:18):
Check out Refuge in Grief on Instagram and here after
pod on TikTok to see video clips from the show
and leave your thoughts in the comments on those posts.
Be sure to tag us in your conversation starting posts
on your own social media. Use the hashtag here after
pod on all the platforms. We love to see where
this show takes you, and remember to subscribe and leave

(59:40):
a review on Apple Podcasts. Those reviews help more than
you know. If you want to tell us how today's
show felt for you, or you have a request or
a question for upcoming explorations of difficult Things, give us
a call at three to three six four three three
seven six eight and leave a voicemail. If you missed it,
you can find the number in the show notes or

(01:00:02):
visit Megan Divine dot c O. If you'd rather send
an email, you can do that too, right from the website.
Megan Divine dot CEO. We want to hear from you.
I want to hear from you. This show, this world
needs your voice. Together, we can make things better even

(01:00:22):
when they can't be made right. You know how most
people are going to scan through their podcast app looking
for a new thing to listen to. They're going to
see the show description for Hereafter and think, I don't
want to listen to difficult things, even if cool people
are talking about them. Well, here's where you come in
your reviews. Let people know it really isn't all that bad.
In here. We talk about heavy stuff, yes, but it's

(01:00:44):
in the service of making things better for everyone. So
everyone needs to listen. In order to get everyone to listen,
everybody needs to know about the show, So share about
the show in your social networks and leave a review
right there for the show, subscribe to the show, download episodes,
and keep on listening. Want more hereafter. Grief education doesn't

(01:01:09):
just belong to end of life issues. As my dad says,
daily life is full of everyday grief that we don't
call grief. Learning how to talk about all that without
cliches or platitudes or simplistic dismissive statements is an important
skill for everyone, especially if you're in any of the
helping professions. There's an awesome six month intensive training starting

(01:01:31):
in December two two and registration is open right now.
If you are in the helping professions and you want
to get better at serving your grieving clients no matter
what caused that grief. Learn more about that training plus
fine professional resources and my best selling book, It's Okay
that You're not okay at Megan Divine dot c O

(01:01:53):
Hereafter with Megan Divine is written and produced by me
Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown. Co produced by
with Fosio, with logistical and social media support from Micah,
Edited by Houston Tilly, Music provided by Wave Crush, and
today's background noises are provided by Luna barking at a
dog walking by and me fidgeting in my chair because

(01:02:17):
I can't keep still