Hilling Through Grief With Lisa Keefauver

Ilyse and Lindsay sit down with grief activist, author, and podcast host Lisa Keefauver to talk about her journey through grief and her book, "Grief is a Sneaky Bitch: An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss." They dive in to the lack of grief support in western culture and what we ACTUALLY need when processing grief, of course touching in to the joys and whimsies.

Lisa Keefauver, MSW is a Grief Activist who transformed her personal and professional experiences with loss into a mission to reimagine grief. As host of a top-rated grief podcast, TEDx and keynote speaker, adjunct professor, and author of Grief is a Sneaky Bitch: An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss, she is expanding our collective story of grief.

You can find Lisa Keefauver at https://lisakeefauver.com/

Visit https://www.thehillingjourney.com/ to learn more.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
We are licensed therapists, but
we probably aren't your therapists.
While we may share helpful information about mental
health, it is best to form your individual

(00:20):
care plan with your own mental health professional
if we are your therapists, hi!
While this podcast shares nuggets of wisdom about mental
health, we are sharing many pieces of who we
are outside of the therapy room and doing a
lot of yapping about nonsense, our own healing work,
and some about sex and dating.
If you feel listening to this podcast may
interfere with your work in therapy, please refrain

(00:42):
from doing so. While we're on the subject,
any notes from our dating lives have been changed
to protect the privacy of our partners and ourselves.
Thanks for listening.
Welcome to the Hilling Journey Podcast.
I'm Ilyse Kennedy.
And I'm Lindsay Camp.
This is a podcast where two therapist besties
talk about their hilling journeys and interview
those on their hilling journeys and hillers who

(01:03):
have helped along the way.
Today we have Lisa Keefauver, LMSW.
She's a grief activist who transformed her
personal and professional experiences with loss into
a mission to reimagine grief.
As host of a top rated grief podcast, TEDx
and keynote speaker, adjunct professor and author of "Grief

is A Sneaky Bitch (01:23):
An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss,"
she is expanding our collective story of grief and
as two intense grievers, we are so excited to
have you on the show today.
Oh my gosh, I am so thrilled to be here
with the two of you and Ilyse in particular.
It's fun to be on this side of the mic
since we've gotten to be in conversation when you were

(01:46):
a guest on my podcast a few years ago.
Yes, I am so excited to have
you as our first real guest.
Plus to be the inaugural guest.
Welcome, welcome. I'm feeling good.
Thank you Lindsay for inviting me. Me? Yeah.
I want to start by talking about your book,
which is so needed and I'm so excited about.

(02:08):
I think when we're searching for books about grief,
there are not a lot of books that provide
while the uncensored take, as you say, but also
a bit of lightness with it.
And in our own processes of grief, I

(02:29):
think we've found that lightness has been so
important in the midst of all the heaviness.
Can you just talk to us first
about how the book came to be?
Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with you about having this sort
of countervailing forces of sort of the lightness or joy or

(02:50):
humor or delight, not as an escape or a bypass to
grief, but as a way to buoy us or as like
in a way a bomb to the weight of grief.
And you know, as cliche as it sounds, of course,
this book, this guide, this companion guide for Grievers is
the book that I wish I would have had right
when my husband died when I was just 40.

(03:11):
So which is usually the case for
many writers, but one of the--
So I had been noodling on it for a long time
in my own grief, in my work supporting individual Grievers, my
work as a social worker and as a host of a
podcast where I get to read hundreds of books.
Of course I read a lot of great

(03:32):
mostly grief memoirs, but also some grief guides.
And my intentionality around the book was kind of multi
layered again coming from my own lived experience, but also
the feedback that I was getting from people about what
was working like you were just saying, like what's working
for you and what wasn't working for you.
So a couple of themes maybe if I can share

(03:53):
about what I was thinking about with the book.
One of them was I can't write
a book that's not authentically me.
And I inherently love a judicious use of cussing.
First of all, I love metaphor and poetry.
That has been the way lyrics, that's been the way.
I believe it's sort of that third
thing or it's truth told a slant, right.

(04:15):
So how do you get in?
So I knew the book was going to be sort of chock
full of that and humor, pop culture references as well because that's
kind of who I am and because I think we can't
And I wrote it or structured it with all
of those things in mind really bite sized chapters.
There's a lot of chapters, but they're

(04:36):
all written very short with big headers
with subheadings because grief brain is real.
We might talk about that today, but there's a
real cognitive impact on our, on our lives.
There's a spiritual, cognitive,
physical, emotional, relational impact.
That's what grief has.
And a lot of the books that I
had read while having a lot of great

(04:56):
information, they were written very long form.
There was a lot of technicality to it though
I do bring in some science of course to
the book, but it was just sort of heavy.
I mean I literally couldn't read a book
for over a year after my husband died.
And I'm a voracious reader, you know, so I knew
the book needed to be doseable, it needed to be
bite sized, it needed to have humor and poetry.

(05:19):
A judicious as one reviewer said use of cussing.
And I think maybe, I hope you experience this and
maybe your listeners will experience this when they read the
book or they can even listen to me narrate it
because I recorded the audiobook as well.
Is I also wanted to write it as your wise
best friend because I think one of the things we

(05:41):
need most deeply is to feel, feel seen and held.
I've had a sustained meditation on holding
space and bearing witness my whole life,
practically definitely my whole career.
And though therapists like yourselves are amazing and I offer
individual grief support too, we can lose sight of the
methodology and the science and the professionalism from what the

(06:04):
griever really needs, which is to just be met exactly
where they are, which might be messy, which WILL be
messy and rageful and resentful.
I mean, I admit in this book it's not
a memoir, but I sprinkle in my stories.
Like I remember being so pissed at happy looking
couples in the grocery store and swearing in my

(06:25):
mind, not out loud to other people.
And I wanted that theme or that
feeling to come through the book.
If you're picking this up and you don't have somebody
in your life who knows how to hold space and
to be with you, to sit in the suck with
you, I wanted this book to feel like that.
So that's a little bit of the history of the book.
Well, a lot of bit of the history of the book, but

(06:45):
those were some of the themes I kept at the forefront of
my mind every time I sat down to add to the book
as to be what it came out, to be so needed.
I'm thinking about how as therapists Ilyse, I
remember you sharing with me that after my mom
passed you did one, maybe multiple sessions with

(07:07):
your therapist about how to support me.
Even as therapist, it's grief and
loss is such a hard topic.
I was pulling in the word that I got
from your TED Talk, which is grief illiterate.
That we don't even as therapists.
It's so fucking hard to. Yeah.
To be witness to grief, to show up for folks grieving.

(07:29):
It's a lot. It's a lot.
I mean, I don't know how you what your experience was
in your own training, but in my master's in social work
program, there was no course on grief and loss.
Which is insane because if you're working with
humans, you're working with grief and loss, period.
Whether you work and which I ended
up working in foster care and adoption.
Hello, Grief and loss.
I worked in crisis intervention and family Services.

(07:51):
Hello, grief and loss.
And so I think that was one of the things that
initially pushed me to do this work in general was when
I was called back to work two weeks, by the way,
after my husband died as clinical director, I recognized that even
amongst my field, we've gotten it so wrong.
We have misunderstood what grief actually is.

(08:14):
The who, what, where, when, and why, which is
sort of what I talked about in my TED
talk, but also like how it impacts us.
And we've used the sort of pathology lens to
assume that we have to come in as helpers,
whether you're the friend or you're the therapist, as

(08:36):
fixers, that there's a problem that needs fixing.
And that's why so many of us freeze in a
way when somebody we love or care about is going
through some profound grief because we make the false.
Our first false step is that we make the assumption
that they have a problem that we need to fix.

(08:58):
And that's part of that.
Grief literacy works is like, first and foremost,
grief is a normal response to all kinds
of losses, not just death loss.
It comes in many forms.
Most primary losses have a myriad of secondary losses.
And our job is actually to come alongside someone there in
their suffering and to be with them in it, which is

(09:22):
profoundly difficult for all of us, the three of us, because
we were trained with this mentality that it is our job
to go into the room and fix the people.
And secondly, because most of us haven't learned
how to sit with our own grief.
And if you don't know how to sit
with your own grief, it's going to be
exponentially more challenging, if not impossible, to come

(09:46):
alongside and sit with somebody in theirs.
That's so huge.
And for both of us going through like these past two
years of really being in our own grief, I think it's
allowed us to be with clients in a completely new way.
Like grief and loss shouldn't even be a specialty.

(10:09):
Like it shouldn't be a DSM diagnosis.
It's a factor of life, and
we're all going to experience it.
We all have experienced it, even if
it hasn't been major death loss. Yeah.
And I think there's something so important, which is why
I love that you call yourself a grief activist.

(10:33):
There's something so important about embracing that for
all of us in order to support clients.
Because even if you think about in the dsm,
complex grief is grief that goes past a year.
There's no timeline on how you're grieving. Yes.
I don't know If I'm going to get into
my deep, deep feelings about the recent diagnostics, and

(10:57):
thankfully, because I don't practice I practice sort
of outside the sort of scope of licensure now,
so I have a little more freedom.
It's not my job to diagnose people.
But I think to your point, the minute each of
us can start to shift and recognize the messy lifetime

(11:17):
experience of grief, then actually we can find more grace
and compassion, both self and compassion, for others to be
with them for their grief so that they can metabolize
it in a way so that they don't get stuck.
I do agree that each of us can get stuck in
our grief, but it's rarely because of our own individual doing.
It's because of this broader cultural story that

(11:38):
says neat is, you know, grief is linear.
It goes into these five stages, which is false.
You move through it and then you are done, and voila.
And that any experience of talking about your
person later on or having a grief wave
or having new feelings is problematic.
So, yes, we want to be on the lookout for each
of us, our friends, ourselves, in places when we feel stuck,

(12:02):
but never to point the finger at the griever themselves.
This is not the pathology of the griever.
This is this,
you know, I was trained in,
like, sort of postmodern narrative therapy.
That was my background.
And we can never understand the person outside
of the context of our broader culture.
And to me, my work as a grief activist

(12:23):
is to reduce the unnecessary suffering we're experiencing.
Grief, which mostly comes from the stories
we tell ourselves and one another about
what grief should or shouldn't look like.
That's why I call myself a should detective.
I invite my clients to be should detectives.
But I think that's the crux, as I joke
sometimes at the top of my own show, and

(12:43):
I've said this when I've given talks before, my
favorite party opening line is, hi, My name's Lisa,
100% of us are going to die, and we're all going
to experience grief and loss multiple times in our lives.
Nice to meet you.
And then I joke, I really am fun at a party,
but I actually think, and I don't think I imagine I'm
preaching to the choir here a little bit, is that the

(13:04):
people that I know who have turned towards their losses, all
of whom have had support in some way, shape or form,
by the way, not necessarily therapy, but friends, community, church, synagogue,
whatever, you know, are the kinds of people who have the
capacity to dwell in delight and wonder and humor and amazement

(13:26):
more than most.
So I think we make this mistake that we want
to choose our emotions a la carte and we don't
really want to deal with the hard ones.
And we're going to be able to
just walk around in the world, you
know, being our joyous, delightful, fun selves.
And I have never met a human being in my 53 years
here on the planet and in my work of someone who could

(13:46):
be that, who hadn't not just gone through a hard thing, but
actually turned towards the hard thing and sat with it.
Does that ring true for the two of you or.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I wonder what has the embracing of grief

(14:07):
looked like at different points in your life?
Maybe even how it looked prior to your
husband's passing, post your husband's passing, in this
period of your cancer diagnosis and your remission.
And what has the embracing of the aliveness
within the grief looked like for you?

(14:29):
Yeah, it's definitely changed and morphed over time.
And I think that's true for all of us both
as we live through the experiences of profound loss and
then hopefully learn from the experiences of profound loss.
I call those another fucking growth opportunity.
So mine has certainly changed.
And when I look back at the versions of myself
that really didn't get to attend to losses in grief,

(14:51):
in a way, I mean, really, Eric, my husband Eric
dying was the first profound death loss that I'd experienced.
I'd lost a pet, young and grandparents
I wasn't that particularly close to, but
that was my first profound death loss.
But it was not my first loss, as I shared with you.
I survived a rape, an assault when I was
15, and my loss of safety and security and

(15:15):
sense of the world was really profound.
And that was not attended to by the people in my life.
I certainly did not attend to the grief and loss of
that, nor very well to the trauma because this was sort
of free, really trauma informed care, being in the world.
So I would say my early way
of attending to grief was not.
And I think for many of the listeners

(15:37):
when they think about their early losses or
their childhood, this probably sounds familiar to you.
It's like you heard the message, like, just focus
on the positive and look forward and buck up
and pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
I think my first sort of step into really
understanding what it meant to attend to my grief
was frankly, because I had a seven year old

(15:59):
daughter at the time when my husband died who
had already experienced profound loss as an adopted child.
And I recognized I really needed
to learn and do something differently.
So for us, that looked like, you
know, support groups, that looked like therapy.
Although even looking back, that therapist
was not particularly grief informed.
I think it looked like being extraordinarily vulnerable

(16:23):
with friends who would, you know, ask if
I was okay, and I would say no. Right.
It took friends showing me what real grief support looked
like, which was coming over to my house and sitting
on the floor with me and letting me cry and
not saying a word, you know, and then realizing that
actually that felt better than the busyness of other grief

(16:45):
support that other people tried to offer me, like, let's
just hurry up and get busy in the world.
So I think that's what it looked like a
few years later when a friend died and I
was with a friend when he died.
I think I had,
each time, each loss has presented a new level,
like a new starting point, in a way.
And I think that place.

(17:08):
That was around the time where I really leaned
in to mindfulness practices, which is probably my number one
resource tool to leaning into my aliveness while I--
which means both holding space for the joy of
the world and leaning into the pain and the
sorrow and the rage of the world.

(17:28):
So I think that was one of the sort of
shifts in perspective of how I attended to my grief.
That's one thing.
So a mindfulness practice, which for me
looks like morning mantras, it looks like
traditional meditations, it looks like beauty walks.
I absolutely have started, maybe 10, 12 years ago, a
practice of taking beauty walks in the world, which is
really a mindfulness practice of seeking what's beauty, not as

(17:50):
a toxic positivity, escape to the pain of my world,
but as a way to be a balm to the
weight of the world.
And then all of that, as you alluded to,
came to a real test in the winter of
2023, when after a year of misdiagnosis, which is
the same thing that happened to my late husband,
I found out I had triple positive breast cancer.

(18:15):
And not that I think of myself as,
like, being better at grief each time because
each new loss will lay us low.
Yeah, right.
Like we will be laid low.
It's not like you get good at it.
And although I felt pressure because there I
was a grief activist, I had a podcast.
I was 10 days shy of turning this book
manuscript into my publisher when I got diagnosed.

(18:36):
So there was a moment where I thought, shit,
I better know how to do this right.
I think especially those of us who
are clinicians feel a lot of pressure.
I mean, I was the clinical director
of a nonprofit when Eric died.
And I thought, like, I gotta do this right?
And I think after the one second that
I had that thought when I got diagnosed,
my second thought was, nope, I don't.

(18:59):
I've never been here before.
I've never had this before.
This cracked open
so much trauma from Eric's misdiagnosis and all
the medical trauma that we went through.
And this added layer of my grief, I think was the
decision to deeply lean into asking for and receiving help.
That was my first critical, I think, thing that has

(19:22):
buoyed me the most in all of the grief and
secondary losses that have come through navigating cancer, which seems
like, duh, of course, you know, but, well, listeners, I
just want to put this out to you.
How many of you are good at
asking for and then receiving help willingly?

(19:42):
I'm going to guess
everybody's going, ooh, maybe not me.
And I think the reason it was so helpful, not just
because the help was helpful, but it made me get really
clear on what would help me or not so that I
could communicate that, which is a first step.
But I think actually the best benefit of allowing me to sit

(20:04):
and be with my grief by asking people to help me is
it gave me a window into the moral beauty of others.
And when you are laid low, especially again, because
so much of me attending to the grief of
the loss of half my breast and my sense
of safety and my survivalship and all the
things that I worried about was the medical trauma

(20:28):
and my rage at the continued, yet again misdiagnosis.
And it could have been really easy for me to
sink into the darkness that the world is a horrible
place and all doctors and people in the medical procession
are horrible people and people, you know what I mean?
Like, I could have really gone there.
And it's not that I didn't have rage
at the particular doctors, and I gave myself

(20:50):
permission to do that for sure.
But I knew I needed to see the beauty.
I needed to see the moral beauty of others.
I had podcast fans I'd never met knitting me caps
and sending them to me to cover my bald head.
And I had just moved to California, so
I had acquaintances I barely knew driving me
to chemotherapy because I had such horrible reactions.
They had to intravenously hook me up with Benadryl on

(21:14):
top of the chemo drugs, which, let me just tell
you, intravenous Benadryl will knock your shit out.
You know, I had friends fly who didn't
really have the money fly across the country
to come take me to Chemo, you know.
So I think that was one of the key places that I

(21:35):
started in my grief this time, which was in the both
and I'm going to give myself permission
to be devastated and sorrowful and rageful
and frightened and disoriented and untethered.
And I'm going to double

(21:56):
down on my mindfulness practice.
I'm going to lean into the help of others
to be present to the moral beauty of others. Right.
I'm going to gather in community.
I made myself walk to the local yoga
studio, which is an outdoor studio here.
Sometimes just laid in Shavasana because
that's all I could do.
And bald and swollen from all
the drugs and no eyebrows.
I mean, like, I looked like an interesting person.

(22:19):
But I knew that to gather in sacred community was also.
Even if we didn't talk about.
Nobody talked to me about my
cancer, my grief or whatever.
Although often they did.
Yeah. Just it.
This cancer experience felt like the culmination of all the
little tools and pieces I've learned in each other, loss

(22:41):
that I faced or the losses that I've witnessed as
somebody who supports people in their grief.
And it was another fucking growth opportunity.
It was a chance to sort of put them all into practice.
And I want to say, in case you're
worried that I'm like walked through my cancer
journey all sunshine and butterflies and roses.
I was swearing, I was devastated.

(23:03):
I was scared out of my mind because I
live alone in the middle of the night.
You know, like what happens when the.
Some of the side effects really took hold.
The chemo brain makes a grief brain look like nothing.
And there were days where I just
literally stared at the wall for hours.
But even that felt like the most important thing I

(23:27):
could do for myself because the inner narrator came up
on like productivity and capitalism and you know.
Cause I'm a self entrepreneur, so
I'm like, if I'm not working.
And even the voice that shifted that said,
you get to just be a human being.
I gave a talk recently where I said this.
This was a reminder for me that

(23:48):
we are human beings, not human doings. Yeah.
And so I hope that was a helpful journey to think
about the different ways that I allowed myself to grieve.
But even in this, doing this work, I
still find the inner narrator of shoulds.
I shouldn't still be talking about this.
I should be better at that.
I should be moving on in a different, you

(24:10):
know, like I still have to combat that.
That is a--
that is a daily practice.
It's a way I see the world.
Yeah, because of those structures that
you named, like capitalism and everything. Like, we're
Yeah, we're in a
We're in a
In a whole system that isn't
making space for our grief.
Absolutely not. None of us.

(24:32):
I mean, and we're all in those systems.
We're in the capitalism, maybe in our
religious affiliation system, in our family systems.
You know, there's all kinds of ways.
And that also doesn't just affect how we
struggle to attend to our own grief.
It's the explanation for why other people struggle to show up
and support us because they've been, you know, pardon my, whatever,

(24:56):
drinking the same Kool Aid as we have about what grief
is or isn't or is allowed to be.
You used a term in a video that I found of you.
Creeper.. that the video was...creeper--
finding videos of you.
The phrasing was employing agency.

(25:17):
And you used a sentence around that to
quote you the agency you demonstrated that has
allowed you to have more moments of ease.
And that as a--
as an early bedtime girl, as somebody who found that
I need hours and hours of just sitting outside by
myself, that really validated what I've known to be true.

(25:40):
That, like, slowing down, taking up intentional space, saying
no to things, employing your agencies is such a--
such a smoother path through, like, such
a bumpy and hard and tragic experience.
So I just really thank you for that language.

(26:00):
Well, and it's countercultural.
There's nothing about our culture that tells you
to slow down and do less and pause.
But you all know this as trauma experts, right?
When these things happen to us, which is
what happens when we experience a loss, even,
by the way, if we choose--
If we chose to leave the marriage or if we choose
loss, it's still this profound loss that happens to us.

(26:21):
And one of the reasons we feel so overwhelmed
is that we feel disconnected from our agency.
And while we can't do anything about the loss, we
can't, for instance, bring our dead back to life.
The best first place to start, close in, as David
Whyte, the poet David Whiye, always talks about so beautifully,

(26:42):
is to start with what you can do. And.
And to me, the goal is not to feel better. You know, I--
My TED talk is like, why knowing more
about grief can help it suck less.
Because I think in the beginning, your only
goal is, like, for it to suck less.
And agency to find moments of ease or less suckiness

(27:02):
or gentleness or however you want to claim it.
is a reminder to your embodied self. Oh, I--
I have capacity and that--
You got to start there.
I think that's where you got to start.
And it gives us a little bit
of control in an experience where we're. Yeah.
Everything is so out of our control.

(27:23):
Exactly. Exactly.
And that's.
And this goes for any kind of loss, transition,
shift in our life where you feel overwhelmed.
I don't know what to do.
I don't know where to start. And you know, you can.
We all have been there.
We spin and then we get busy quickly doing.
We get really.
And I mean, I'm a trauma survivor, so
hypervigilance is like my skill set.

(27:44):
Hypervigilance and dissociation. Right.
So I think it takes a real musculature to slow down.
But part of slowing down gives you the space to
get back into that regulated nervous system so that you
can think a little more clearly from that place of
ease, maybe or that place of respite.
What might be the next best thing, not the

(28:05):
final thing, but like the next best thing. Yeah.
Another thing that we found in our grieving years
is maybe turning towards some alternative forms of healing
or what we would call some unhinged experiences.

(28:27):
Ooh, tell me more.
Well, some of what we've turned to now, we've
consulted many mediums to talk to the other side.
We've had some wonderful sessions where we've
actually gotten to be with Lindsay's mom.
We've consulted many tarot readers.

(28:49):
Flown across the world for a grief retreat.
Flown across the world to see Taylor Swift.
Feels like a good use of. Yeah. Yes.
Alternative supports.
Maybe some mushroom journeys.
Self led.
What have been some of your more unhinged
things that you might have done in your
different periods of moving through grief?

(29:12):
I love that.
I wish I had some salacious story,
by the way, which I don't.
Although I've definitely had a lot of guests
on my show over the years, including actually
one of my upcoming episodes is with Susan
Grau, who's a really well known medium.
I'm excited, excited to bring
that conversation to bear.
You know, I think. I wish.
I really do wish I had some--

(29:33):
I think my most unhinged
are really those unplugged moments.
Like it's--
which is a really countercultural.
I went back to Jackson Hole, which is
where my late husband and I got married
on my own and literally unplugged from everybody.
Snow still on the ground and just wandered around with
his ashes, sprinkling them into the lake and into the

(29:54):
snow melt into wherever I could maybe much to the
chagrin of people in my life who may be worried.
I've done the same with his ashes
because we both are scuba divers.
So I've, I've brought him to the bottom of many parts
of the Pacific Ocean over the years with me and left

(30:14):
a little bit of him everywhere as a memorial sort of
practice as, as a communing with him practice because he loved
it so much and it was a thing that we loved
together that's maybe as sort of quote unquote, unhinged again.
I think, you know, 2019, I quit my job and
created a company called Reimagining Grief to speak, write,
podcasts, do everything all about grief.

(30:36):
And I think if you had asked anybody in my life,
100% of them, well, maybe 99%, my, my bestie soul sister
Autumn was all for it, but everybody else was--thought I
was very unhinged and that it represented a stuck, a sign
that I was stuck in my grief.
And I really listened to my inner knowing

(30:56):
that like I can't have had all this
personal and professional experience of loss.
I can't have been a public speaker for
so much of the different work I've done,
been trained as a narrative therapist.
So really thought carefully about the words we use
and culture and not do it, but I will.
And so it's professionally been an interesting journey, but it's
also been what's really held me accountable to my own

(31:17):
grief journey too, by being out in the world.
You better believe every time you hear me say something
on a podcast or I say it to you in
your, in our individual client sessions, or I say it
to you in the grief retreats I'm running, you better
believe I also am like, Lisa, did you hear that?
Good advice. Right? Right.
So I think that's probably the most unhinged, though
I don't, I say that sort of cheekily because

(31:40):
I don't really think it's unhinged, but to the
world it seemed like a really--
I think everybody thought it was going
to take me in a backwards direction.
And I think being a learner in this work and
a teacher in this work these last five years has
moved my grief and metabolized my grief and allowed me

(32:01):
to walk through this latest season of grief with so
much more grace and so much more self compassion than
I ever would have if I had not taken that
crazy leap to create a company again.
Remember listeners, this is 2019,
so this is pre pandemic. You know, you--
I was hard pressed to get anybody to

(32:22):
talk to me about grief in the beginning.
Now I have to turn so many people away. Yeah.
When I heard you speak about carrying your husband's
ashes with you, for me, that sounds so beautiful.
And I don't consider it unhinged.
And I think we laugh a lot at the
ways that we grieve to create some lightness with

(32:45):
it, but really, it's what we were talking about
before, where it's turning towards your agency.
Like, you know, who better to get
you through a divorce than Taylor Swift? Right? Hello.
Yeah.
And communing with a medium is one of the
only ways Lindsay can get in touch with her

(33:07):
mom and actually receive messages after she passes.
And so there are things that can seem silly to
outsiders but have been so important in our grieving processes.
Absolutely.
You know, one thing you just sharing that reminded me
I wanted to say that I've been thinking about a

(33:28):
lot lately, and maybe I'm going to be writing about
this, I'm not sure in the near future is, you
know, trying these things, the mushrooms, the, you know, and
we're not here advocating for, against whatever Taylor Swift, the
grief retreats, the mediums, whatever.
You know, grieving is learning, period.

(33:51):
And grief is a creative act.
And by the way, so is living.
We just live in a culture that thinks that there's a
formula and there's a right way and a wrong way and
you just had to find your path and you move through.
But living and grieving are
both about learning and creating.

(34:11):
And so for--
If you're listening for whatever path you're finding, to
figure out what works for you, to help you
metabolize, to accompany your sorrow, really, which is what
we're doing, we aren't her grief, but to accompany
our grief, to metabolize our grief so that we
can move forward with it, takes a tremendous amount
of courage and creativity.

(34:33):
So you're going to try things and it's going
to help, and then you're going to try some
other things, and it's not going to help.
And you're going to reach into your toolkit from the
past, the last hard thing you had, and try it.
And this time it worked.
And the next time you reach in
the toolkit, it doesn't serve you anymore.
And the whole gig, as it were, is to loosen

(34:54):
your grip on the yes, no binary, both and like,
and to be with the both and is to just
be in deep curiosity, deep creativity, deep exploration and deep
learning, which I don't take for granted, can be.
Feel horrifyingly scary for most of us.
We like certainty.
We like familiarity.

(35:14):
You know, this as trauma therapists, right.
Unfamiliarity is like a, you know,
trigger for most of us.
So I say that this is the musculature or the practice
that we have to build as we move through grief is
to lean into trying these unhinged practices, which is really just
to say, getting comfortable with being curious and the not knowing

(35:35):
and to be able to say, I don't know, but I'm
going to use this little agency I have to try.
And then I'm going to evaluate. Did that help?
Did that hurt? Was it neutral?
Okay, good information.
And then next.
And then next.
That's it.
I wrote a whole book on grief,
and there's a lot of guiding practices.
Each chapter, I guide you through different practices.

(35:57):
I try to bust the myths.
And I really have heard from the, you know,
thousands and thousands of people who have bought it
that it's been a profoundly impactful tool.
It's a companion guide.
And still you, Lindsay, You, Ilyse, Every single person
listening is going to have to find your own way.
You don't have to do it alone, nor should you.

(36:18):
There are great resources out there,
this podcast being one of them.
I hope mine as well.
My book, so many other books I'm
happy to share the references for.
But in the end, it's your creative journey.
That's it.
That's all you got, is just finding
your way that works best for you.
And the quicker, I think we can each claim

(36:39):
that for ourselves and find comfort in that, the
more ease, to Lindsay's point, we're going to find.
Something that you said earlier that keeps coming
back to me that I wanted to.
To just speak to real quick, is that you.
You were commenting on, like, how it feels when
people are trying to hurry us through our grief

(37:02):
and that it's a problem to fix.
And I just want to say this for the listeners that.
That maybe are inclined to want to fix it or don't
know what to say or want to say the right thing,
that the urgency to fix because there isn't a problem to

(37:25):
be fixed can be internalized by the griever.
And they can feel like they're the problem or
the way that they're doing it is the problem.
And so I love both that, that acknowledgment of that
and this piece of the internal work of the.
Of employing your agency to.
To counter that constantly

(37:47):
It's so frustrating how counter all of this is, how
counterculture it is, how counter it is to even our,
like, when I'm thinking about your work and
having to go back two weeks later and
we're talking about grief and our healing journeys.
It's a full time fucking job.
It's a full time job. Yes.
And then we have our other shit on top of it.

(38:08):
So I mean that's literally one of the chapters in my
book is like, welcome to your other full time job.
That's the title of one of the chapters.
I believe it, I think, you know, I hear.
I, I don't know if this is true,
Lindsay and I, I can imagine you had people
or currently have people, some people showing up and
trying to rush you through your own grief. Right.
Is that I want a name I recognize for the

(38:31):
most part it comes from quote unquote, a good place.
It doesn't come most often from ill intention.
It comes from all of us being
raised in a very grief illiterate culture.
And to your point, I think what's really important is
that whether you say it in your words or not
with those expressions, as my chapter title is called the
Stupid Shit People Say like any sentence

(38:56):
that starts with at least or the, you know, everything
happens for a reason or it's just your energy of
like, hey, let's pick up the house or let's do
you know, does send an unspoken implicit signal to the
griever that there's in theory some way to do it
right and the way that you're doing it is wrong.

(39:20):
And that causes so much unnecessary suffering.
And that might already be a thought
that person has because they too have
been raised in this grief illiterate culture.
So you mirroring that to them is
just like confirmation of like, oh yeah.
And so I think I always say to,
I mean, my grief support motto is show up,
shut up and listen and keep showing up.
That's the motto.

(39:41):
But my invitation to people always is before you
walk in the door, before you pick up the
phone, before you send the text, however you're going
to show up for this person.
Pause.
Use your agency to pause.
Take a few deep breaths, relax your body.
Remind yourself that your only job is to show this
person that they are not alone in their grief and

(40:04):
that you are willing to walk alongside them or frankly,
sit down, sit your ass down on the floor next
to them because they can't even move.
And that subtle shift that you can
choose to make for yourself changes everything.
When I look back, and I'd love to hear some of
your stories, when I look back on the different ways people
showed up, yes, it was helpful that people Because I had

(40:27):
to sell the house I was living in.
I couldn't afford it anymore after my husband
died that they came, helped me pack up
the boxes and mowed the lawn.
Yes, Practical support. Helpful. Love it. Amazing.
But on the arc of it, when I look back on
the ways, the most meaningful ways people helped me, it was
the friend who came over to just keep me company on

(40:49):
the couch and watch trash tv and we didn't even talk
because I had once told her, one of the most achy
parts of being a widow is just the sheer loneliness of,
especially at night, just the sheer loneliness of lack of companionship.
Like that was the most helpful thing.

(41:09):
Nobody would think that, right?
But that is so helpful.
And I think we have to trust ourselves and trust
in the grievers in our lives that when we've felt
that sufficiently, when we've been seen and held and met
and acknowledged in the suckiness of it all and the
shittiness of it all, we will find our way to

(41:31):
take that next step to get dressed, to shower, right.
To get back to work, to start being
more playful or engaged with our kids, whatever.
The thing is, we can't bypass that first part.
And we have to trust ourselves and the
grievers in our lives that they will get

(41:53):
there, but they have to start here.
And unfortunately, we love a good bypass.
You know, we love a little top 10
list, five ways to skip over all,
you know, we love to, as I say often,
we love to order our emotions a la carte. I will just.
Thank you.
Pass on the sorrow and the depression and the grief and
the rage, and I will take a heaping scoop of joy

(42:15):
and delight and amazement, and that just isn't possible.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the joy piece
and that kind of the counter to the sorrow and the--
Yeah.
--the aliveness that is so important in all of this?
Yeah, I--
This is kind of the themes of talks I'm

(42:36):
giving a lot more and more these days.
And it's just sort of my own, from my
own lived experience from working with other people.
And just sort of what's interesting to me, I want to.
Before I say it, I just want to do
like a little caveat, which is if you're listening
to this and you are fresh into your loss,
you know, somebody you love just died, you were
just divorced, you were diagnosed with an ill.

(42:56):
You know, something is happening.
Gosh forbid, you're in LA right now as
we record this with the, with the wildfires.
You can skip over this part.
You know, this is, this could read as toxic positivity.
And I, and I don't necessarily--
Now, if you find laughter in the midst of
it or you find a little moment of joy,
then listen to me say, that's okay, that's helpful.

(43:17):
That's beautiful. That's normal.
That's necessary, necessary.
But if you're like joy, no way that's okay.
If somebody had come to me a week or two after Eric
died, but when I laughed out loud for the first time after
he died a few months later, listening to Jon Stewart back in
the day when, well, I guess he is again,

(43:38):
But back in the day when Jon Stewart was the
host of the Daily Show, I remember immediately feeling guilty.
I wish somebody would have told me that you
can feel joy in the midst of your grief.
And actually that to feel joy in the midst of your grief
is again, as I've said, a balm to the weight, you know,
is a way to buoy you in for the weight of grief.
So that being said, I've really worked.

(44:00):
I wrote about this in the book and I
do this work with individuals and I practice.
Everything I've ever written is because your
girl has practiced it and practices it
herself, is to be a joy detective.
We have this as human beings, we have this
capacity, as you all know, to heighten-- capacity to

(44:22):
be on the lookout for what goes wrong, right?
That's kept us surviving as a species thus far.
So we have muscles that are really
good, reflexive of seeing what's wrong, what's
going bad, what could go bad.
Those of us who've experienced trauma,
we're extra good at that.
And I'm being slightly sarcastic there,

(44:43):
right, with our hypervigilance.
So I really understood that to carry the weight
of your grief, to bear the unbearable, as Dr.
Joann Caccitore says in her exquisite book, means
we have to practice the skills of what
I call a joy detective, right?
We have to lean into the intentional mindfulness practices

(45:04):
that seek joy in our day to day lives.
And I often, I want you
listening to exchange the word joy.
If that feels too much, too far.
Does delight feel doable?
Does amazement or awe?
That's why I said that thing
that you watched on the video.
Maybe ease is as far as you can get.

(45:27):
That's okay too. So it's a real.
But it's a musculature because we don't have that.
And that's the muscle that has
atrophied for, for most of us.
Plus adulting, you know, just sort of takes away
from our, you know, When's the last time you
just skipped down the sidewalk for no reason? Right.
You know what I mean?
Or had a dance party in your house.
Now, that's how I do my joy detecting.

(45:49):
I have dance parties by myself
almost every day in my house.
That's the one way I find it.
That's ours, too. Yeah. Okay.
I gotta come back and visit Austin. For sure.
Yeah, we can have a big old dance party. Definitely.
So I think that's the trick again. It's not--
you could use it in a moment where
you've been lingering in a place of hardship.
And you can tell that you need.

(46:10):
You're kind of in a stuck place and you need
to sort of fake it till you make it and
sort of put yourself in the way of beauty.
That's what my beauty walks are for.
Or you put on your favorite dance jam.
Of course, there's all the somatic reasons why those
things help, too, which I'm not even touching on.
But I think it's also just a reminder
that there is this beauty in the world.
There is this joy in the world.

(46:30):
And that's what gives us the inertia, the agency,
the capacity to move and to carry the weight.
Because grief doesn't get smaller.
We just get better at carrying it.
And our lives grow around it.
And to--
to choose to move forward in this life means we have
to put ourselves in the way of beauty or joy.

(46:50):
You know, I use this expression in
this talk that I gave at the end.
Well, recently called centering aliveness in
a world full of loss.
And one of the things that I said.
And I don't just say it again, I practice it in my
life, I say it to my clients all the time, is.
It's the both
and, we have to turn to our sorrow.
And if we don't allow delight to dazzle

(47:11):
our senses, if amazement doesn't make us breathless
from time to time, then we've lost twice.
I always think about this scene in
the Sex and the City movie.
And this is one that I would bring up with Lindsay a
lot when I was deep in the midst of my grief.
When she was deep in the midst of her grief.
But after Carrie ends up not marrying Big

(47:35):
because he leaves her at the altar.
And they all go with her on the honeymoon.
And Charlotte gets diarrhea from drinking the water
and Carrie starts laughing hysterically.
And they say, like, oh, you're
finally out of your Mexicoma.
And so I--

(47:55):
I would always say, like, oh, are
you moving out of your Mexicoma?
Like, if Lindsay would Make a little joke or if
there would just be something contrasted within the grief
because I think something that's really interesting that
happens when you're really deep in grief is
that you also experience these moments of feeling

(48:19):
joy in a new way, like a more
intense joy or a more intense aliveness.
And sometimes that drops you deeper into
the grief because it feels like we're
not supposed to experience that.
But I think it's a really beautiful piece of the grief
and it's also a really beautiful piece of connecting to the

(48:42):
love that we have for that person that we lost or
that thing that we lost, whatever we're moving through.
Absolutely, yes.
And the contrast can be
I think that was a really good point you made,
that sometimes that joy can, you know, especially early on,
your early experiences of it can kind of help you
ride the wave back into the depths.
Because the contrast feels so much.

(49:04):
Two things, you know, when you're talking about,
I'm going to date myself and say it's
so old and I wish I could remember
the movie, but Sally Fields is the mom and maybe Julia Roberts, Steel Magnolia, Steel Magnolias.
And she's at the funeral, you know, because her
young daughter has just died and she's screaming and
she says, and she, you know, and she's devastated

(49:24):
and your heart is just breaking for this mother.
And then she just says like she
wants to have somebody punch
And you know, she said, I just want to.
I'm so angry, I just want
to punch somebody in the face.
And one of the other characters puts
forward the old grumpy lady and says,
punch her, punch her, you'll feel better.
And everybody breaks into laughter.
Like we can only be present to the intensity of these,

(49:47):
you know, of anger, of sorrow and rage, to so much.
And we need that release valve.
And so because we're not practiced at it, so
many of us try to shut it away.
But as I said, then we numb ourselves off.
I had a guest on my show whose 18 year
old son died after unknowingly ingesting a lethal substance.

(50:09):
And she said to me on the show a
few years ago that she used to think before
her son's death that the most important continuum in
life was moving from sadness to happiness.
But what she learned when the worst
thing happened to her was that we're
meant to move from numbness to aliveness.

(50:30):
And that's really stuck with me ever since because it's
really a way to frame what I've been doing myself,
what I've been talking with people about is it's not.
Which I think can get the myth out there.
It's not being with your sadness all the time and
being with your anger and not allowing yourself to live.
It's the opposite.

(50:51):
It's being present to all of it.
It's all magical and horrible and beautiful
and wonderful and devastating and miraculous.
But we only get one pass, and we
don't know how long we have at it.
So the skills that we can build to be present
to all of it, including laughing your ass off or

(51:11):
referencing are you out of your Mexicoma now?
Is just that.
It's those little quick reminders to like, okay, I
can give myself permission, or I'm giving you permission
to come back into the aliveness that we're experiencing
as we're sort of wrapping up.
I also just want to acknowledge, I know you've

(51:33):
named your book as a companion for grievers, but
I think it's so important for people who are
the companions to read it too.
I think there are not a lot of how to
guides on how to support somebody who's in grief.
And so when I read your book, I was thinking

(51:57):
how much, like, I want to use it to support
the Grievers in my life, not just for myself.
So, yes, it's also really important for that as well.
Well, thank you.
I definitely kept that in mind.
I definitely had, like, an appendix that was
really a letter to the grief supporters.
But to your point, when we learn how

(52:19):
to understand what our own grief is, we're
better at showing up for other people.
So whether you're picking this up because it was
sparked by some profound loss you're experiencing or sparked
by somebody you love, the information is all relevant.
Right.
It's all the same because it's either giving.
It's probably both.
It's giving you a glimpse into your own grief, even

(52:40):
if that grief is long ago and unattended to.
And it's definitely giving you it to inside insight into
this person that you're trying to show up for.
And now all of a sudden, you're learning why
going places and seeing people is exhausting and why
they keep saying no to things and why they're
forgetting things and they have grief brain and why
they're having different moods and yeah, I.
I did intentionally try to write it so that

(53:03):
we could just be all more grief illiterate and
better at showing up for one another.
Because that's the whole game, right?
That's the ball game, is how do
we show up for one another?
Linds, did you have a Marry, Fuck, Kill idea?
Because I have. I have one.
If you didn't gather anything, I didn't. You go for it.

(53:23):
Okay, so ending on a marry, fuck,
kill, Lisa.
Scuba diving? Yeah.
Yoga, and trash television?
Okay.

(53:44):
I mean, scuba diving is the heart of.
It's the most meditative practices.
So I think I'd have. I think.
I think I'd marry scuba and yoga.
And I hate to say it, but
kill trash tv, that's tougher to hear.
Yeah, I know, I know.

(54:05):
I was like, I'm speaking to the wrong
audience when I say kill trash tv.
I mean, only because I had
to make the choice, believe you. Sure. I have.
I have Netflixed my way through,
you know, many hours, days, weeks.
But yeah, I think I gotta Marry, Marry, Scuba

(54:25):
and fuck yoga for all the reasons you can imagine.
The meditative quality, the somatics, the movement.
Yeah.
The community, the beauty, the awe, the wonder. It's.
It's all the things that lift
me out of the darkest places.
We'll let you keep it then. Yeah.
Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
Thank you so much for joining us today.

(54:46):
I know our listeners are going to want more
of you, so where can we get more?
Lisa Kefauver, oh, so kind.
Well, thank you both for having me.
And I feel especially honored to be
the first guest on the show.
And I just loved this conversation and I
love that you are bringing your own lived
experiences to be of service to other people.

(55:07):
So thank you so much.
So my podcast, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch.
You can listen to wherever you're listening to
this show and also available now on YouTube.
And my book, "Grief is a Sneaky Bitch:
An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss," you can get.
I love supporting your local bookstores, so go
to your local bookstore, but if you need
to do it online, you can get it

(55:28):
at bookshop.org or Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
Our friends in the UK can now get it there.
And coming May 2025, if you would prefer it in
Spanish, it will be available in Spanish as well.
And if you want to work with me as an individual,
show up for a retreat, invite me to come speak.
Reach out to me at lisakeefauver.com I am on

(55:49):
social media @LisakeefauverMSW everywhere.
But to be honest, I'm really looking
to connect with people more directly.
So head to my website and drop me a note.
Lisa, thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Lisa.
This was really lovely.
You all are so much fun.
I hope this was helpful to your
audience and a good experience for you.
Yeah, amazing.

(56:09):
All right, have a rest of your day, everybody.
Thank you so much for joining us.
If you liked what you heard, please subscribe and
consider leaving a review if you have already.
Thank you.
You can find us on all socials @thehillingjourney
You can find us online at
www.thehillingjourney.com, and you can shoot us
an email at [e-mail] Talk soon.