Grief counselor, psychotherapist, writer, grief advocate & communication expert, Megan Devine {@refugeingrief}, is on for all 4 things today! Megan is dedicated to helping people live through things they never thought they’d have to face. In 2009, she watched her partner, Matt, drown. FIRST THING: Megan shares her experience with grief and how it changed her life & relationships with others! Megan wants people to know it’s okay that you’re not okay and how to best meet grief & loss in a society that doesn’t understand. SECOND THING: Journaling through grief with Megan’s latest book: “How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed.” THIRD THING: Megan debunks the culturally prescribed goal of returning to a normal, “happy” life, replacing it with a far healthier middle path, one that invites us to build a life alongside grief rather than seeking to overcome it. FOURTH THING: Megan shares with us 4 things she is grateful for. She also shared with us that gratitude is a companion to grief...not something you can do to get rid of any grief.
Link to “It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Society that Doesn’t Understand”:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1622039076?ref=exp_radioamy_dp_vv_d
Link to “How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed” (new grief journal):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1683643704?ref=exp_radioamy_dp_vv_d
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Okay, little food for yourself life. Oh it's pretty bay,
it's pretty beautiful thing that for a little moth kicking
(00:30):
with four Okay, So a topic that we cover, especially
in the fifth Thing. If you listen to my bonus episode,
I get a lot of emails about grief. I have
lost both my mom and my dad in the last
seven years, my dad this year, and so anytime you
experience a big loss, I feel like my Four Things
(00:52):
community we have such a connection and then the emails
will flow in and then that's what we end up discussing.
So I'm very I don't know if excited is the
right word because we'll be talking grief, but I do
feel honored to have a grief expert on to break
down some stuff that I know is going to be
very helpful for me and a lot of you listening.
(01:13):
Megan Divine, welcome to Four Things. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Megan's handle on Instagram is Refuge in Grief and also
her website is a Refuge in Grief dot com, so
that is exactly what she has to offer for us,
is a refuge in grief and she's a grief counselor, psychotherapist, writer,
(01:33):
grief advocate and communication expert, so definitely excited to have
you on. And you've got two books that I just
want to encourage people all say them again at the
end because you might hear them now, and then I'll
link them in my Amazon page. But you have a
book called It's Okay that You're Not Okay meeting grief
and loss in a society that doesn't understand, and then
(01:54):
another one, How to Carry What Can't Be Fixed, which
is your new book that's out now. So I personally
we're excited to pick both of these up. In fact,
I think one of my bonus episode podcasts were titled
It's Okay to Not Be Okay when we were discussing grief.
And you have your own grief story, so let's start
off with you sharing what you experienced. And I wanna
(02:18):
piggyback on one thing you said the first that you know,
being excited to talk about grief is a really weird
thing to say, but I think the reality is is that,
just as you said, once we start talking about the
realities of grief, everybody wants to talk about it. Everybody's
got a story, right, So it's I love talking about grief.
(02:38):
Mine and yours and everyone's. And it's a weird thing
to be excited about because it is so deeply personal.
Right at the time that you and I are talking,
I'm in anniversary season of my partner's death. So uh,
Matt drowned on a perfectly ordinary, beautiful summer day in
two thousand nine. And I wasn't a stranger to grief
(03:03):
before that, right like, I think everybody accumulates lost just
as a part of being human. But that sudden, accidental
chasm in the universe introduced me to grief at a
level that I had never known before. And as a psychotherapist,
I was accustomed to grief, right like, I sat with
people who are grieving all the time, grieving so many
(03:23):
different things. But even with that experience, professional experience, personal experience,
I wasn't ready for what opened up in front of
me when Matt died. I think the biggest thing, and
I'm really careful to think to like, not say, like
the biggest thing I learned, because loss is in a
lesson that people need to learn from. We learn in
lots of different ways, but I think maybe the biggest
(03:44):
shock after Matt died was how how terrible people were
how unskilled people were in their support of me. They're
well meaning usual usually they're well meaning support. I mean,
jerks are always going to be jerks, but the things
that people said to me were so shocking. Like the
night of his funeral, more than one person came up
(04:04):
to me and said, you're going to meet somebody new
really fast, and the best thing for you to do
is just get married and move on. At the night
of the man's funeral. Wow, that's not unusual, right. The
more that I do this work, the more that I
listen to people and talk to people, grieving people are
responded to treated so badly by well meaning people because
we simply don't know what to say, and we feel
(04:26):
awkward in the face of people's pain, so we say
sort of the first awkward thing that comes to our minds,
which is usually like at least now you know what
was really important in life, or he died so that
you could become what you most need to be. Like
all of this garbage language, honestly, that we say to
people when they're in pain. And so my experience of
being misunderstood, dismissed, cheered up, judged, frankly, um and shamed
(04:51):
for being affected by the death of my partner added
such a nightmare element to an already impossible situ Waham,
and that made surviving his death so much harder because
I felt like I had to defend my right to
be affected, to be sad, to be destroyed. I was
(05:11):
destroyed that devastation is a normal response to loss. And
until we start talking about devastation as a normal part
of the human experience, I think we're going to consistently
miss each other. Right. What we want is to feel
like we can support and be there for our friends
and feel like we're supported and loved by our friends
in our community. And we can't do that until we
(05:34):
can tell the truth about how hard it is to
be here. And you know you mentioned that the anniversary
it was this time of year that it happened for you,
but in two thousand and nine, and I don't know
about you, but I felt kind of guilty at times,
certain feelings that come up for me around anniversary points,
like my mom was October two thousand and fourteen. That
(05:56):
day I won't ever forget. And maybe it's not even
the anniversary. It could be a birthday, it could be
any given moment where suddenly I'm overwhelmed with this emotion.
But I feel like if I share those feelings because
so much time has passed, that somehow I'm a burden
to the friend or whoever I'm sharing that with. So
sometimes I even just hold back. So have you ever
(06:18):
felt that way? And what do we do with those feelings? Yeah?
That so a few things in their one. I think
our bodies remember, right, You're never going to forget that date.
I think that our bodies remember things even before our
minds do. Sometimes, I know, for a lot of people
in their in their early grief, and early is a
really subjective term, so that can mean anything from five
minutes ago to five years depending on the person. But
(06:41):
you know, some people will say like, I don't I'm
not sure why I feel so weepy today, And then
they'll look at the calendar and they're like, oh, this
is the date that dad went into hospice. Right, So
our bodies hold memories this role, memories that we don't
always remember with our with our conscious minds, although obviously
sometimes we do as well. We we recognize the dates
on the calendar. The other thing that you brought up
(07:03):
was like feeling like I can't talk about that because
I don't want to bum anybody out. And again I
we go back to sort of that that the ways
that we miss each other. There that friends want to
feel like I can support you, I'm here for you.
We want those kinds of deep relationships where we can
lean on each other. And then we're also at the
same time trained in this culture in a lot of
(07:25):
ways to be independent, don't need anybody. It's not cool
to be emotional and ask for help. So we've got
these conflicting narratives, right, talk about mental health, be supportive
of each other, but don't need too much. Over on
the other side, So that reluctance to share something emotional,
even with people you you love and who love you,
(07:46):
that's also really normal because that's the way we've been taught, right.
We don't want to be a burden to others. I
think there's another layer to this though. When you first
started talking, you said, you know, you get a lot
of messages. People want to talk about grief all the time.
When I first started doing this work, a lot of
the big publishing houses would say, like, your work is amazing,
we really need to talk about this stuff, But nobody
wants to talk about grief. Really, Okay, well, no one
(08:10):
wants to talk about grief. If we're going to be
talking about moving on platitudes, forced gratitude, enforced positivity, nobody
wants to talk about grief if you're just going to
try to talk them out of it. When you talk
about grief as something normal and natural and healthy that
deserves care and attention, then everybody wants to talk about it.
(08:30):
So one of the things that happens we learn from experience, right, Like,
that's what human brains do. We experience something, we learned
from it, and we adapt and we do something different
than next time. But if every time you've gone to
somebody and said, I'm really thinking about my mom today
and it's just I just miss them so much, and
they come back with, well, lean on your good memories
(08:50):
of your mom, that's what's gonna you know, make her happy.
That didn't fix your sadness or your longing for her.
It just taught you that you shouldn't talk about it
because somebody's just going to try to cheer you up.
So what is a good response from a friend? Great
responses that sounds really hard? Do you want to tell
me about your mom right today? Sounds like it's really difficult.
Is there anything that would feel really nurturing or comforting
(09:12):
to you right now that I can bring you right?
It is a very simple act to acknowledge somebody's pain
without trying to take it away from them. Not always easy,
but it is a very simple thing to do. And
what about grief comparison, because people can grieve all kinds
of things. Like you said you had experienced grief before
the loss of your partner, but that was something that
(09:32):
took it to another level. But there's grief can it
could be anything. So a lot of people last year
had to grieve the loss of a lot of opportunities
and life experiences and different things that may not be
the same as losing someone here on earth. But like
sometimes our mind will tell us like, oh, well, this
isn't worth talking about because it's not as bad as
(09:54):
what they're going through with this, and so you kind
of just stuff it down inside. So can you speak
to gree comparison? And I don't even know if that's
what it's called. That's where I'm calling it now. I
think that's perfect. So let's let's take this apart. So
the last example that you gave, like, I don't want
to talk about this because other people have it worse.
Diminishing your own experience is something again we're trained to do, right, like, oh,
(10:15):
don't take up too much space, you know, how dare
I be sad about this when I still have a
roof over my head? All losses valid. If we look
back over at the last fifteen or sixteen months of
the pandemic, everyone lost something, whether that was the loss
of daily routine or the loss of your job, or
the loss of a family member or multiple family members.
(10:36):
Everyone lost something. What we don't want to do is
conflate losses, right, like the loss of the job is
the quote unquote same as the loss of your baby,
because we'll come back to that in a second. But
that's always going to be dangerous territory. But honoring all
loss as valid is really human work. Right to look
at somebody and say, like, yeah, it's been really hard
(10:57):
to have your daily life disrupted. What's the what's the
thing you miss the most about the way things used
to be? Right again, simple acknowledgement, Tell me about it.
I see that, I see that that's hard for you do,
you want to tell me more about it. We do
this to ourselves. We do this to each other. At
least you at least I have this. At least it
wasn't that bad, while my life isn't as bad as
this life over here, all of these ways that we
(11:19):
discount ourselves and we don't lie to ourselves very well. Like,
if you try to force yourself to not feel the
way that you feel, those feelings are going to pop
up somewhere else, right, They're going to show up somewhere else.
They're going to show up in depression or anxiety, or
in substance use, or they're just going to show up
in like weird interactions that you have with people because
you're trying to feel grateful and positive when that it's
(11:41):
not what you're feeling. It's a weird thing to say,
but it's not an efficient way to live to pretend
that you don't feel what you feel, because it just
suppresses that feeling and then you act out of it
instead of acknowledging it and letting it be what it is. Right,
So we do that to ourselves internally. The other thing
that we do, though, is we conflate lasses. So grief
comparison is like, um, I remember when Matt first died,
(12:04):
and so many people, so many people would come up
to me and say, I know just how you feel.
I got divorced two years ago and it was the
worst thing ever. And then they would proceed to tell
me all about how they're divorce was a horrible thing
and they know exactly how I'm feeling. Now, a couple
of things here, one right timing, Your divorce is valid,
(12:25):
and you deserve a place to talk about it and
feel heard and respected in the pain that surrounds that.
Using your loss to hijack my current experience is not okay. So, UM,
I talk a lot about grief hijacking. We think that
when somebody says, um, you know, my my partner died
and I'm having a really crappy day, we think our
(12:45):
job is to say I know just how you feel,
and then we demonstrate why we know exactly how that
person feels by going into our own grief story. And again,
it's not that your own grief story isn't valid, it's
that this isn't the time for it. We never want
to say I know just how you feel, because even
if you've experienced the exact same loss. You don't know
how somebody else feels. And usually the net effect of
(13:08):
saying something like that, when we think we're being helpful,
the effect is, oh, I'm never going to mention this
again to you, because now we're talking about you instead
of talking about me. So coming in with either de
valuing your own loss because you feel like it's not
as bad as others, or conflating all losses and saying
I know just how that person feels because I once
(13:28):
had this happen to me, even though it's completely unrelated. Again,
we come back to, like, what's a great response in there,
I'm sorry that happened. Do you want to tell me
about it? Well, but you shouldn't have to respond that
during your own driving because you're in the current state
of grieving and they're bringing up something from two years
ago that they may still rightfully so be grieving, and
I'm wondering. I feel like a lot of people, some
(13:50):
people just might be I don't know, just socially awkward
or not aware. But then I think sometimes and I
know I'm certainly guilty of this in some way, shape
or form. You get we get nervous about it, and
then we end up saying something ridiculous such as that,
And I guess it's not our place, especially in our
time of grief, to maybe say something like, is this
(14:14):
really the best time for you to be telling me
about your divorce from two years ago? Or you just
like hope that somewhere down the line that person gets
the hint that they didn't handle that well. I think
it depends on how close to snapping you are in
any given moment, and also the relationship. Right there's no
one script for that everywhere. And you bring up a
really excellent point, which is it's not the responsibility of
(14:37):
the person in current pain to educate the people around them.
We see that's not only in grief, but in in
systemic racism, right Like, why is it on the black
folks in our communities to educate the white folks in
our communities about why that comment was racist? Right Like?
Why does the person at the center of whatever is
currently happening, Why is it on them to educate the
people around them? Right? So, you're right, like, that's not
(15:00):
that's not fair, And this is why we we have
these conversations publicly, right Like, let's practice better skills let's
practice some self awareness and some communication skills before there's
an emergency when we need them, right, so that we
are less likely to put the burden on the person
at the center of the pain and are more skilled
and more aware and more able to respond skillfully in
(15:20):
that moment rather than hijacking or conflating losses or any
of these things. Now does that always happen? No, very often.
You are in a situation where somebody says something incredibly
rude and you have some choices, then right, you can
smile a nod and say nothing. That's valid. Right. I remember,
I'm specifically thinking about one specific person who every time
(15:43):
I saw them, they went into their divorce story. And
I'm talking like days after Matt died, like fresh wounds here,
and I learned right Like, they're gonna ask me how
I am. I'm going to say anything at all, and
they're going to talk about themselves. Cool. I know what
this interaction is, and I'm is going to remove myself
from it as soon as possible. Getting yourself out of
a situation without saying something is a perfectly good response.
(16:07):
If you feel like saying things, you can say things
like that's not really helpful at this time, but I
appreciate your effort, and then you can change the subject. Yeah,
I feel like they would understand that message loud and clear,
or at least like I would right away. But then again,
if someone is that awkward to say that, then yeah,
it might go right over their head. But again, that's
not on you to worry about, not on you, right,
(16:28):
So you get to make choices about that. You can
call somebody on it and then change the subject. You
can smile and nod and just be like, cool information,
I know what this is going to be like with you.
You can also defer to another time if a friend
says something well meaning but not so awesome. I mean, again,
we're humans, right, We're not usually trained in how do
(16:48):
I talk to my friend whose baby just died and
never say the wrong thing? Like that's not gonna happen.
You're going to say the wrong things sometimes. You know,
your friends and your family and your therapists are going
to say the wrong things and times, So it's okay
to come back after and say, hey, you know, I've
been thinking about this. I couldn't say anything in the moment,
but when I told you that I was feeling really sad,
(17:11):
and you came back with reminding me how talented I am, Like,
I felt like you didn't hear me. Can we talk
about that? Can we talk about how we missed each
other again? That puts a lot of responsibility on the
grieving person, right, Like, I don't want you to have
to educate anybody. I just want you to be in
the pain that you're in. But these are things that
we can practice and skills we can practice. Right. One
(17:32):
of the things that I really like about talking about
grief is you can start practicing these conversations, these communication
skills before life go sideways, so that they're not quite
as weird when life does go sideways. So when you
say practice, like, I'm sure someone would be like, wait, what,
I'm supposed to come up with some grieving type scenario
and do role play or that sounds terrible. Sorry, that
(17:56):
was what came into my head. But I just clarifying.
But I love that that came into your head because
because then, okay, then let's clarify here, because that sounds terrible.
We don't know, no one has to do that. But
here's the thing. We hear statements of pain every single day.
We just don't recognize them this pain. And what that
means is we have opportunities to practice these skills every
(18:16):
single day. So let's give an example here. So maybe
things are reopening in your area and you go to
your favorite coffee shop and there's your barista that you
haven't seen in eighteen months, and you say, how's it going,
and they say, not that great. I didn't sleep very well,
I missed the bus, I was late to work, and
then I spilled a pot of coffee on my foot.
What we normally say is, at least the sun is shining.
(18:37):
I bet you're glad to be back at work, though,
we just missed our daily point of practice, right. All
of those things that person said, those were all statements
of pain. Those are the places we practice. What do
you say in that situation that sounds really difficult? My
pause here is on purpose, because that's all you need
to do is acknowledge that somebody said that that is
(18:58):
your daily practice point. You don't have to make it weird,
you don't have to say more. You just need to
acknowledge that somebody just said out about something and you
heard it, and you heard it, and that's what we
want ultimately in the day is to be heard. Exactly.
You don't need to have your pain fixed for you,
you need to have your pain heard. I need to
I guess I try to maybe think of something that
(19:20):
I can say or do that's going to make it better,
whatever the situation. Maybe, And as you're saying that, I
have different examples that are popping into my head of
times where I've probably tried to come up with a solution.
And then I think of even in my own relationship
with my husband, and you know, stereotyping here, but probably
a lot of if you're in a husband wife relationship,
(19:43):
a lot of times the husbands want to be the fixers,
and then the wives want to be heard. I don't
need you to fix this right now. I just need
you to listen. But the examples that popped into my
head about me happened to be with certain things that
friends might be dealing with that are to me, I'm
just like, gosh, I you know, I don't even know
how they deal with that at all, but I don't
want to bring it up all the times, and then
(20:04):
they're like reminded of it. But then my response is like,
now that I'm hearing you say that has probably not
been the best. Like I think I could simply just
acknowledge like that really sucks right now, and I think
I've started to get better at that, But now I
know of times where I've gone too far. I think
you mean well. I certainly know in my heart I
(20:24):
mean well, But thinking through what you're saying, it's like
I'm missing it. Maybe they're not. I'm trying to think
of how my friend might be receiving it, and they're
probably not feeling very heard because it's like, uh like
on their end, they might be like, I don't really
need you to fix this right now, I just need
you to know that it's like, oh, it's annoying, it's stupid,
it sucks. Yeah, And you know you can ask about that,
right It sounds like you have relationships where you're working
(20:46):
on things and you're you're trying to be present for
each other and share things, and you can come back
and say, I've been thinking about some stuff and I'm wondering.
You know, when you tell me x Y and Z,
my normal response is to do this, and I'm wondering
if that's actually not helping you. Can we talk about that?
My intention is for you to feel heard and supported
and all of these things. And I don't think that's
(21:07):
been the effect of what I'm doing. Can we talk
about it? That is super cool friendship skill right there
to do that. And I think you know. One of
the things you said just a minute ago was you know,
I have good intentions. I really want to I want
to be helpful, I want to make them feel better.
I think we can make so much of this easier
if we realize that it's not your job to make
anybody feel better. Your job is to make them feel
(21:30):
heard and supported. Those are two very different things. There's
a phrase that my friend Kate ken Felt, who has
a relationship educator, tells people to ask, is like, do
you want a solution or do you want to be heard?
Which thing would feel useful right now? And you describe that,
you know in your marriage, right, like my husband wants
to fix things. I want to be heard. And I
don't know that that really belongs to any one gender.
(21:53):
It certainly shows up in gendered relationships a lot. But
I think we see this also just in the way
that we show up to any kind of pain. Right,
You said this yourself, like my friends are having a
hard time, and I want to make it better for them.
I want to fix it for them. That impulse to
fix things for people is not wrong. It's a really
beautiful human impulse to want to remove somebody's suffering for them.
(22:14):
It's just that the ways that we've been taught to
do that aren't working. So just that one question of
do you need a solution for this right now? Or
do you need to vent about it? Do you need
me to hear you right which one would be helpful.
Sometimes you do want a solution. If my computer is
acting out, I don't want to be heard by my
tech person. I wanted to fix it right. But when
I'm having a really intense day, I don't need solutions
(22:38):
for how to cheer up or how to feel better.
I just need to be supported where I am like,
I want that support to come up underneath me so
that I can fall apart in whatever ways I need to. Second.
So when it comes to your book that's out now,
which is how to carry what can't be fixed? Your
(22:58):
latest one, slain the title and why you went with
that and what people are going to find inside one
of my sort of signature lines, I'm doing air quotes here.
But um, some things cannot be fixed, they can only
be carried, right, And that points to these hard realities
that so many of us live with, Like you can't
fix the fact that your partner is dead. You can't
(23:18):
fix the fact that your baby died right before their
due date, right, there's no solution for that. We live
in such a solution oriented culture where everything is a
problem to be solved. The human heart is not a
problem to be solved, right, So we need a different
approach to that. So that line, some things cannot be fixed,
they can only be carried. The question then becomes like, okay,
(23:41):
then what am I supposed to do with this? How
am I supposed to live alongside this chasm in my life?
I think where a lot of grief resources go, especially
before it's okay came out. We're talking about sort of
after the dust has settled and you're not in that early,
torn open space anymore. And remember that early is completely subjective.
(24:03):
So many grief resources talk about rebuilding your life. You
can't talk about rebuilding a structure that just collapsed, right, Like,
that's wrong. Timing not a good thing. So this new journal,
the how to carry what can't be fixed. Journal is
about how do you live alongside something that can never
be repaired. That's such an interesting question when we're no
(24:25):
longer looking at the erasure of grief and instead we're
looking at living alongside it. How do you help yourself
survive what feels unsurvivable? So the tools and the topics
and the exercises and the explorations in the journal are
all about helping you figure out what that road looks
like for you. I don't I don't do very well
(24:46):
with I'm super bossy, but I don't do very well
with prescriptions like you need to do exactly this, so
that now, like everybody's life is different, and what I
want my work to do with people and for people
is to help them find their own not help them
figure out what helps when I'm having this kind of day?
What helps when I'm having this kind of day? And
(25:07):
how do I live this life that I didn't ask
for but is here anyway? And I'm glad you clarified
to we've been saying book, which it is, but it's
a grief journal, and so I think writing is so therapeutic,
putting pen to paper. So with this, it's not just
I mean it's taking through Like, how how is writing
(25:28):
for you played a role or does it in your
daily practice or what would you encourage clients or people
reading your book, because I've had different therapists say, yes,
you need to be spending time writing out everything that
you're feeling. I personally don't feel like I'm a great writer,
and I'll sit down, I'm like, why, I really don't
have anything to say, and then they're kind of like, okay, well,
(25:50):
then write that over and over. I don't feel like
I have anything to say. I don't and then eventually
it may turn into something else, but just that process
of pin to paper. Yeah, So I have a love
hate relationship with writing. I've been a writer all my life.
You know. Those are some of my early memories of
being a kid. Was just narrating the day to myself.
At the end of the day, I think I I
(26:11):
often don't know what I think about things until I
write them out. And when Matt died, I was gosh,
furious isn't even a big enough word, but we'll use furious.
I was furious that I still had words. There are
so many notebooks that I stabbed through and hurled against
the wall because I was so enraged that the notebook
(26:32):
that I was using the morning before he died was
still the same notebook that had pages in it after
he died. Like how dare words exist? And how small
they are? Right? Loss is beyond language. Words are always
going to be too small, and at the same time,
words are what we have. And that goes back to
something that we were talking about earlier with you know,
(26:52):
everything needs to be said, right one of my teachers
used to say, everything needs to be said, but not
necessarily to another human being, Like we need to hear
the truth of our own reality, the truth of our
own experience, whether that is speaking to the page, speaking
to a tree, speaking to another person who can hear
it and validate it, like the the story of your
(27:14):
own life deserves a place to be written or spoken
or shared. So the both of those like here we go,
Like here's how we here? Here's the dichotomy at the
core of everything. I hate language and language saves me
every day. Both things are true. So when we talk
about writing, I'm really careful to say that I don't
(27:36):
encourage people to write because it's going to fix anything,
because it won't. Writing doesn't solve anything, and we write
to tell ourselves the story of who we are right
now in this moment. And sometimes when we do that,
like those exercises that your therapists give you, saying, you know,
if you don't have anything to say, right, I don't
have anything to say until there is something that wants
(27:57):
to be said. There is always something to say. And
a lot of this is um sort of priming that
pump so that you know, like, okay, so if you
never write about anything, you can't expect that the second
that you sit down to write, you're going to have
this like, oh moment of like this great story that
came out or this great insight, Like I mean, that's
(28:18):
kind of rude to the creative process. You got to
like have a relationship there. But we've also got so
many ingrained layers of I don't have anything to say.
I'm not a good writer. I'm not a good writer
is such a big lie anyway, but I'm not a
good writer. I don't really have anything to say. Like
in a way, you have to get all of that
garbage out on the page before you can start telling
(28:40):
yourself the truth. That's why we you know, that's why
we do things like, right, I have nothing to say
for fifteen minutes, and then maybe there'll be something to say,
because we've got to weed through all of those things
that we've absorbed about not being good enough, not knowing
what to write, not you know, I don't have anything
that anybody else would want to read. Who cares? You
(29:00):
are in a dialogue with your own self. That's awesome.
I love that too. And can you say again one
more time where you said your teacher used to say
to you everything needs to be said, not necessarily to
another human being. Yeah, I love that in different ways
on different days. So I talk a lot about companionship
inside grief and having people who can hear you and
validate you. And the reality is is that not everybody
(29:23):
has that grief. Well, I say that grief rearranges your
your phone book. We don't really have phone books anymore,
so grief rearrangees your your contact list. Because we're so
awkward about grief. A lot of people disappear. Friends that
you thought would be able to be there with you
are not there. Sometimes they have their own stuff going
on and they don't have the capacity to be there
with you in the way that they want to be
(29:43):
You said something earlier about like I don't want to
say anything about what my friend is going through because
I don't want to remind them of it. I can
tell you that they don't forget, right, your friend didn't
forget that their daughter died. You bringing it up is
not going to remind them. They are all of these ways.
The grief is incredibly lonely, right, Even if you do
have people around you with the best of intentions, grief
(30:05):
itself is very lonely. And I think when you hear
the message that you just need to be heard and validated,
I think there can be a lot of rage that
shoots out there. But I don't have anyone to talk to.
That doesn't mean you don't need to be heard. And
that's where writing is really useful. Art is really useful
going out and walking in the trees and talking out loud. Right,
(30:27):
everything needs to be shared, not necessarily with another human being.
Keep in mind that this is not to fix anything,
but it is to be in the habit of telling
the truth, if only to the page or to yourself.
(30:53):
I lost my dad in April, so it's been a
few months and I remember even thinking to myself and
still at times he was He had come into my
home but only lived with us for one day, but
was supposed to live here for I don't know, I
saw years. It just was so unexpected. Now he wasn't
like in the best health obviously, was having to come
(31:15):
in and live with me, but we we still had
plenty of time. And then obviously things just drastically took
a turn for the worse, and there was a lot
of other things in my life going on, like this
year has been very difficult, and I have found myself,
especially since my dad died, continuing to say I just
want everything to just can't wait till it's normal again.
(31:37):
And I think that that's probably common for a lot
of people that have experiencing great pain and loss to
just want it to be normal. And then I'm like, well,
I mean I did lose my mom too, and I
mean that's just kind of my new normal. I remember
feeling the same thing, like I just want to get
past all this and things to get back to normal,
(31:57):
but there's always gonna be something. And then it's like, well,
is normal because now every time I walk past the
room that my dad lived in now I think of
him every time, and what was normal was he was
supposed to be living here and now he's not, And
now I want to move but but I'm not. But
I know you refer to something as the middle path,
So can you explain that for us please? Yeah? So
(32:20):
the middle path is the not completely healed and not
rocking in the basement wearing sackcloth forever. Right, So I
want to touch on the piece you said about getting
back to normal. What I hear in that is can
everything stop being relentless? Right? It's less about can we
go back to normal? And more can I find some
(32:40):
equilibrium here? Because I need some? Right, here's this event
that you didn't expect that came in and made life
very jagged, jagged, sharp pokey bits. I really love metaphors,
and there's an image I think of that like grief
is like you got this incredibly heavy backpack hurled at
you and it's full of sharp, pokey objects and you
(33:02):
can't put it down. No one else can carry it
for you. You're stuck with it, and that desire for
normal is like I need to get used to this backpack.
I need to figure out where the sharpest bits are
so that I can adjust to how I carry this
because right now it just sucks and I keep getting
blindsided by that pokey bit on my right shoulder and
(33:22):
then it whips around to my friend and stabs me
in the gut, like a return to normal, I really hear.
And what you're saying is equilibrium? Can I find that? Right?
And the middle path is really this ongoing process of
where is equilibrium for me? How do I live this
life that I have now knowing that I have to
walk past that room or I need to move, which
(33:43):
brings its whole other set of challenges with it. Right
in pop culture and certainly in the medical industry, gosh,
in a whole bunch of places we talk about you know,
grief is a this is very natural and very normal.
But it should be over in six weeks and you
should be back to work and everything should be fine,
and take all your pictures down. Like there's this idea
that if you do everything quote unquote correctly, you're going
(34:04):
to be feeling just fine within six weeks. Um. That's
actually the current medical window is six weeks, which is stupid.
It's actually much shorter in people's minds, right, Like it's
been a week since the funeral. You should be okay
by know but this idea that if you if you
do grief correctly, you will be back to normal and
feeling fine six weeks, maybe six months if it was
(34:26):
a really big loss, but otherwise you should be fine.
And if you're not performing wellness within six weeks or
six months, then you're failing at grief. You're perseverating, You're
letting your person down because they wouldn't want you to
be sad. We have this idea that there are only
those two options in grief. You can be healed, back
to normal, happy, never thinking about the person you know,
(34:50):
only looking forward, or you can be failing. Basically, you
know my image here of like you're sitting in a dark,
damp basement all alone with a blanket over your head,
rocking in a corner, and like that's that's not human reality.
Most people live somewhere between those two extremes and figuring
(35:11):
out who you are now and how you live this
that's the middle path. How am I going to live
with the fact that I need to walk past this
room every day? It is an option to move. You
don't need anybody's permission for that. You can move if
you want to write, Okay, I'm not going to move,
So how am I going to walk past this door
every day? There's no one answer to that. It might
(35:33):
change every day. Right today, I feel like I'm going
to go down a different hallway because that's too much
right now. Maybe the next day you go in and
have a look around. I don't know. But the middle
path is figuring out this thing is here, It's not
going to go away. How do I honor that and
live into the life that remains for me? How do
I carry this, not just the loss, but the love
(35:55):
with me into this life that is here. Now, it's
rude to suggest to somebody that they put this person
behind them because they belong in the past, right, That
is rude. When somebody you love dies, you don't stop
loving them. The relationship doesn't stop. And all of this
messaging that we have in this culture from movie storylines
(36:19):
where like the young widow is so sad until they
find love again and then everything is okay like garbage, garbage.
I hate to use words like the task of grief
because that's too prescriptive, but like the the work here
is finding how you can carry the love that was
here when the person was alive through this life that
(36:42):
is here now. That is the work of grief. It's
not about putting it behind you. It's not about choosing
gratitude and being happy. It is how do I live
this with as much love and integrity and care for
myself and others as I can? And there's no prescription
for that. That makes me think of people that might
be struggling with certain holidays or birthdays, anniversaries, Thanksgiving, Christmas.
(37:09):
How do you lead those grieving through some of those
heavy reminder like those calendar days that are going to
show up multiple times a year. Yeah, so I'm gonna
pick on you just for one second. Okay, you asked
me how do I lead a grieving person through those
difficult holidays? You don't lead them. You let them they do.
They are the experts and what they need even if
(37:31):
they don't know what they need. So a great question
here is, okay, here is let's pick Thanksgiving. So Thanksgiving
is not coming up right now as you we're talking,
but let's pretend so Thanksgiving us coming up, and I
know this is your first Thanksgiving without your dad. How
are you feeling about that holiday? Are there things that
you want to do or not do? That is a
great question. If instead I'm trying to be your friend
(37:52):
and your helper and I'm like, oh crap, this is
their first Thanksgiving without their dad. It's going to be terrible. Um,
I'm going to pull out all the stops and like
make the most amazing Thanksgiving dinner for everybody, and I'm
going to invite the entire family. It's going to be great.
They're going to get through it. I have really good intentions,
don't I. Yes, what if what you really want for
Thanksgiving is to take the weekend to yourself and go
(38:15):
for a hike and reflect and be alone. But I
don't know that because I tried to lead you through
a holiday that I thought was going to be tough
for you, but I didn't ask. You're leading me, yes,
And I'm glad you called me out on that word,
because Yes, everybody's grief process is so different. And even
(38:36):
earlier you said something about how someone might be early
in their grief, but for every single person, and I
just want to reiterate, for everybody, it's so different. Everybody
grieves on a completely different timeline. But I will say
that advice like that you're giving is helping lead me
(38:56):
your your advice is you're leading me to need myself.
And this is the thing, right Like, if we don't
talk about what isn't working, we can't get what we
most want. Right, Like going back to that good intentions
thing is like we love our people. I want to
make the holiday season as gentle as possible for you.
(39:16):
The way to do that is to ask about it.
Invite that person into Like you're the one who has
to live this. I want to know what you feel
like you need. This is sort of my current bandwagon
with the corporate sphere is like when people come back
from let's say you are out of maternity leave, but
your baby died and you're coming back into the workplace,
there's no one specific way that we integrate you back
(39:39):
into your office. Right. Some people want to talk about it,
some people don't want to talk about it. Like, we
need to start getting into the habit of asking each individual, like,
I know you've never had to do this before. You
never had to do Thanksgiving without your dad, You've never
had to come back from maternity to leave without a baby.
Do you know what you might need? Here are some
(40:00):
things that we might be able to do to support
you to any of these sound good to you. We're
letting the person at the center of the experience lead
the experience. It doesn't mean that you're going to know.
You don't you haven't had to do this before. You
don't know what you're gonna need on Thanksgiving. But just
being asked without somebody assuming what you need like that
is awesome. Yeah, I love that, And that's such a
(40:21):
great reminder, you know, even in a yeah, work setting,
a friendship setting, a family setting. I feel like sometimes
where I might be wrong, but I'm thinking a lot
of people because it's popped into me that I sometimes
we're scared to ask even though there's no harm in
(40:42):
it or I don't know, or is it just me?
People are terrified to ask about this, So that that's
totally okay. So here's what happens, right. You see somebody
you care about in pain, you have an impulse to
fix it for them, and then you're like, oh, I
don't want to make this worse, so I don't want
to say the wrong thing. The wrong thing would be terrible.
You would be amazed at how many people have actually
(41:03):
seen someone crossed the street in order to avoid interacting
with them. Like, this is a really common thing that
happens to grieving people. People will cross the street because
they don't know what to say to you, like, we
see you, we see you do that stuff. So that
fear of screwing it up makes a lot of people
not bring things up. And what that does net effect
(41:23):
there is make your friends feel like you don't care. Right,
So we're afraid to mess things up. We're afraid to
say the wrong thing. We feel really awkward because we're
not sure what we're doing. All of that stuff is normal,
and let's just start there. It's okay to say I
have no idea what to say to you, and I
am terrified that I'm going to say a stupid thing.
But I love you and I'm willing to hear if
(41:44):
I said something bad. I just want you to know that, right,
Like how cool is that? That's amazing, very telling the
truth about what is actually happening in the moment, and
we are showing up as the awkward, imperfect people we are.
You can't not be awkward. You are going to say
the wrong thing. You're going to say the wrong thing
because there is no right thing to say. There's skill
(42:07):
and there's less skill. So if we start with I
feel really out of my depth here and I have
no idea what to say with you, but I love
you and I'm here, and if I ever say something stupid,
please whack me. That's great that one works on the
friend or family level, for the for the corporate the
corporate level, it really doesn't. But you know what works
on the corporate level. Actually, um, if there are hr
(42:29):
folks listening to us, what works on the corporate level
is having one point person for the person coming back
and saying, you've never had to do this before. People
aren't sure what they should say to you. Do you
want them to mention it? Would you rather not talk
about it? Some people like to focus just on their
job rather than bringing their their emotional life into the workplace.
Not right, not wrong. Being a point person for somebody
(42:51):
coming back relieves a lot of pressure for people, because
otherwise you're going to get nineteen thousand people coming to
the person's desk asking them how they're doing. Maybe they
want that, you know that. I'd talk about that in
the in the corporate world, but this is also something
that you can do for your grieving person. It's a
really helpful sort of being the project manager, right, being
the contact person. I remember when Not said everybody had questions,
(43:13):
right like what are we doing for the memorial? What's
going on over here? What's going on with the landlord?
Like what's all of these life and death admin things.
I didn't have the capacity to deal with that stuff.
I'm a really good project manager and I make lists
when I'm under stressed, but I didn't need to deal
with that stuff. And so I had an amazing friend
who stepped in and said, all phone calls will go
(43:35):
to me first. I will assign them where they need
to be assigned, and I will talk to you when
there's something that needs your input. Bossy as all get out,
But it worked, right. So having a point person is
really really helpful during grief because what it does is
it relieves the admin burden on the grieving person. And
that's true, like whether you're trying to go back to
(43:55):
work or you know your loss just happened. I mean,
I don't know if you experienced this, but there are
so many details that need to be attended to when
somebody dies, Yes, so many things. So if you've got
a point in person, who can handle a lot of
the annoying details super helpful. You just don't want to
do anything undoable without the person's consent. So I would
(44:20):
be remiss if I didn't say things like this, like
if you if you're going to clean your friend's house, Um,
this is okay. So my mom, My mom cleans under
under stress. H So I had to do this with
her quite a bit soon after Matt died. But you
think you're being helpful when you come in and you
sort of tidy up and you do the laundry. It's
very easy to erase artifacts of the person's life. Let
me explain what I mean. I'm going to use your
(44:41):
example if that's okay. So your dad's in your home, Um,
you expected him to be there for quite some time,
and his coffee cup is sitting on his bedside table,
and then things fall apart and he dies and doesn't
come back, and somebody tries to tidy up for you,
and they remove that coffee cup and they put in
the dishwasher. They just remove evidence that your dad was here.
(45:02):
We can accidentally erase evidence of somebody's existence when we
tied it up. This happens a lot with laundry. Somebody
comes over and they do the laundry for you. But
you just erased a person's smell. Their body just disappeared,
but their smell was still there, and now the smell
is gone. Oh I'm glad you brought all this up
because I've even in some of my bonus episodes where
(45:23):
we've talked about grief, I have, you know, talked about
how after my mom dad, I even I watched my
sister's friends because my mom was in hospice care in
my sister's home, and there was people showing up every
day like a just revolving door of because my sister's
four kids like we had. Because it was hospice, there
was tons of people in and out wanting to see
(45:43):
my mom and say their final goodbyes. And I always
thought it was such a beautiful thing watching her friends.
I didn't live in in Austin at the time, and
that's where we were, so I was in town for it,
and it was such a beautiful thing witnessing all my
sister's friends and neighbors come by and support. So I've
always remember that, and that's something I throw out, is
you know, do laundry if you can clean, if you
(46:06):
can drop off food. But I love that you're adding
that the consideration part into it. Of it is super
helpful to have certain things done, but just make sure
that you don't overstep and take it too far. Yeah, exactly.
So we're talking about two things here. We're talking about
offering tangible support, which is fantastic. Right. The thing we
(46:29):
want to pair that with is getting consent. Right. Consent
is important in so many things. Getting consent. I'm going
to run the dishwasher. Is that okay? There are dishes
still in the sink from before he went to the hospital.
Is it okay if I wash them. I'm gonna do laundry.
Is there anything you want me to not wash? Is
it okay? If I change the sheets? Right? For widowed folks,
(46:50):
shout out to anyone who's widowed out there, This is
perfectly normal. Lots of people sleep on exactly the same
sheets for months at a time. I don't even remember
how long it took me to change the sheet after
Matt died. Things that we think are really weird are
actually perfectly normal. So consent is really important. Just check
with people. This is also where it's good to have
that point person if you can, because I don't want
(47:11):
to inundate you with like, is it okay if I
move this coaster? Is it okay? If I do this?
Is it okay if I do this? Like if there
are fifty people dropping by every day and everybody's asking you,
is it okay to do this? Like that's exhausting. If
you can have a point person, that's great. If you
have somebody who can bring that up to you, Like
a lot of people are showing up wanting to clean
things for you. Are there rooms that should be off limits?
(47:34):
I will let them know. Yeah. And then I think
the phone thing too, or like people having questions, And
I think of how my friend Mary stepped in as
my dad was on life support and we knew we
were going to have to be removing him, and she
knew we had various friends that would want to be
in the know, so she Yeah, she just asked me,
would you like for me to be that person or
(47:54):
I'm going to go ahead and reach out to X
y z z Z. Are you cool with that? And
I said yes, and then yes she took the reins
from there, and that was very helpful because it's also award. Yeah, Hey, Mary.
It's also awkward as the person too. Yeah, I have
to you know, your friends that may know and they
might be worried about you, so you want to update them,
(48:18):
but then like the last thing you want to do
is be on your phone and then like sending an
awkward note of like it is finished. We were we
were kind of joking about that because after we took
my dad off life support, it's like, okay, you just wait,
and then it was like, okay, three minutes later it happened,
and then you're like okay, well yeah, what you so, now,
(48:39):
what how do you like let people know? Okay, he went,
it is finished, Like I don't know. The whole thing
was so awkward, so I didn't end up say I
didn't even update her. But then she was the point person,
so I'm just telling the story so that other people
may take notice. Then I wasn't on social media or anything,
but she happened to follow my brother in law who was,
and later that evening he put up a post about
(49:01):
him and my dad, and she saw that and realized
from that, oh okay, because some people may stay alive
a little bit longer. My dad it was like three minutes,
so but he didn't put up that post for hours
and hours, but she was just waiting in limbo. But
she saw the post and then she took the initiative
from that post to then reach out to our group
of friends. Didn't bother me with it, she just did it.
(49:24):
And Yeah, I thought that that was really cool because
then I didn't have to have any of those awkward
like it happened, you know. Yeah, yeah, those friends are
amazing to shout out before we go, I would love
(49:46):
to hear from you just four things you're grateful for.
We practice gratitude a lot, although we we we acknowledge
like the hard stuff too. It's kind of one of
those things we've had to be really clear about, especially
with a lot of like toxic positivity. And we have
a whole movement that started after my mom passed away
(50:08):
that is all around joy. She wanted to spread joy
to others. First of all, She talked to everybody at
the hospital, even people in the elevator that she didn't know.
She would try to compliment them in some way because
sometimes people would be there alone getting their chemo treatments.
She just wanted to make them feel good. And she
felt like she had support, so she wanted to spread
joy to others, and then she wanted to choose joy
for herself. But what I have to remind people too,
(50:30):
Even though a big movement from that grew on our
our nationally syndicated show, the Bobby Bones Show, it's called
Pimp and Joy, and we have a whole line of clothing.
But like my mom definitely had awful days and we
experienced those, and she never would want to fool people
into thinking it's like, oh yeah, I'm battling cancer, choose joy.
(50:50):
But we also in the on the gratitude front. For
me at least, what I find is, even in some
of my darkest times this year, I still do have
things in my life that I can be thankful for, bigger, small.
So I'd love to hear four things from you that
you're currently thankful for today. I love how you expanded
that because we we so often think that gratitude is
(51:13):
an antidote for pain. If you say you're feeling sad,
somebody's like, well, you need to find something to be
grateful for. As though grief and gratitude cancel each other out,
they don't write. So I think about gratitude as a
companion to whatever. Right. Um, but we're closing up, so
I'm just gonna go with my with four things that
I'm grateful for, Rather than my entire rent on gratitude,
(51:33):
I'm going to start with my friends, the skill with
which they support me and know me. I don't tend
to reach out when I'm having a hard day, and
they know it, so they know when my hard days
are and they're proactive about offering support, which is amazing
because that's a good skill. I am feeling thankful that
the air is clear right now. I have anxiety around
(51:55):
flyer season, so I'm going to be grateful that the
air is currently clear and breathable and beautiful. I am
grateful for my dog, who is the best dog in
the whole world. She's home sleeping right now. She hates
it when I leave, but she's fine. Uh. What else
am I grateful for? I am grateful to be in
the studio. Radio was was a big part of my childhood,
(52:15):
so I'm just really grateful and happy to be sitting
near a soundboard. Oh well, what part of your childhood?
My dad was was general manager of an MPR station
in Buffalo for most of my early childhood. So I
grew up in I don't even gosh, you don't even
remember now, but whatever the Buffalo NPR affiliate is, that
was where I had birthday parties. My birthday coincides with
(52:36):
Fall Pledge drives, so most of my birthday parties were
on air for Fall Pledge Drives. And then in my
teenage years, my dad started buying radio stations and sort
of rehabbing them and getting them popular again. So my
first jobs were cleaning radio station bathrooms and then recording
ads and doing some weather spots when I was a teenager.
(52:56):
So will you have a very soothing, great voice? Thank you. Yeah,
I'm not sure if that's nature or nurture, but yeah,
first loves the audio version of the of It's okay,
I actually get the I get the best fan mail anyway.
But um, A lot of people have said that, you know,
after their partner died, that my voice on that book
(53:19):
is the only other voice in the house. Like what
a powerful thing that is to receive and to hear,
you know that. You know a lot of people are like,
you know, I've been living with my partner and my
husband for forty five years and he died and the
house is so quiet, and now your voice is the
other sound in the house, and that's that's magic. That's awesome.
(53:40):
And again that book is It's Okay that you're not
okay meeting grief and loss in a society that doesn't understand.
And then your latest is the book Slash Journal and
it's how to Carry What Can't Be Fixed. So I'll
be linking both of those in my Amazon page so
they're easy for people to find. And it sounds like
you've got the audible version can be for the first one,
(54:03):
the first one for It's okay, that one is audible,
and the book and print and Journal is currently only
in print. Yeah, okay, well awesome. Well, thank you so
much Megan for your time. Um, I know that this
episode is going to be so helpful for so many
and it was for me for sure. So speaking of
getting mail, like I'm going to get emails about this,
So thank you so much for taking the time. And
(54:27):
I don't know if I'll talk to you ever again soon,
but maybe you'll have to have you on since now
you're you're my first official grief expert that's come on
the show besides a therapist friend that comes on but
she doesn't specialize in grief, so I'm very very thankful
for you. I'm glad to be here.
Okay, little food for yourself life. Oh it's pretty bay,
it's pretty beautiful thing that for a little moth kicking
(00:30):
with four Okay, So a topic that we cover, especially
in the fifth Thing. If you listen to my bonus episode,
I get a lot of emails about grief. I have
lost both my mom and my dad in the last
seven years, my dad this year, and so anytime you
experience a big loss, I feel like my Four Things
(00:52):
community we have such a connection and then the emails
will flow in and then that's what we end up discussing.
So I'm very I don't know if excited is the
right word because we'll be talking grief, but I do
feel honored to have a grief expert on to break
down some stuff that I know is going to be
very helpful for me and a lot of you listening.
(01:13):
Megan Divine, welcome to Four Things. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Megan's handle on Instagram is Refuge in Grief and also
her website is a Refuge in Grief dot com, so
that is exactly what she has to offer for us,
is a refuge in grief and she's a grief counselor, psychotherapist, writer,
(01:33):
grief advocate and communication expert, so definitely excited to have
you on. And you've got two books that I just
want to encourage people all say them again at the
end because you might hear them now, and then I'll
link them in my Amazon page. But you have a
book called It's Okay that You're Not Okay meeting grief
and loss in a society that doesn't understand, and then
(01:54):
another one, How to Carry What Can't Be Fixed, which
is your new book that's out now. So I personally
we're excited to pick both of these up. In fact,
I think one of my bonus episode podcasts were titled
It's Okay to Not Be Okay when we were discussing grief.
And you have your own grief story, so let's start
off with you sharing what you experienced. And I wanna
(02:18):
piggyback on one thing you said the first that you know,
being excited to talk about grief is a really weird
thing to say, but I think the reality is is that,
just as you said, once we start talking about the
realities of grief, everybody wants to talk about it. Everybody's
got a story, right, So it's I love talking about grief.
(02:38):
Mine and yours and everyone's. And it's a weird thing
to be excited about because it is so deeply personal.
Right at the time that you and I are talking,
I'm in anniversary season of my partner's death. So uh,
Matt drowned on a perfectly ordinary, beautiful summer day in
two thousand nine. And I wasn't a stranger to grief
(03:03):
before that, right like, I think everybody accumulates lost just
as a part of being human. But that sudden, accidental
chasm in the universe introduced me to grief at a
level that I had never known before. And as a psychotherapist,
I was accustomed to grief, right like, I sat with
people who are grieving all the time, grieving so many
(03:23):
different things. But even with that experience, professional experience, personal experience,
I wasn't ready for what opened up in front of
me when Matt died. I think the biggest thing, and
I'm really careful to think to like, not say, like
the biggest thing I learned, because loss is in a
lesson that people need to learn from. We learn in
lots of different ways, but I think maybe the biggest
(03:44):
shock after Matt died was how how terrible people were
how unskilled people were in their support of me. They're
well meaning usual usually they're well meaning support. I mean,
jerks are always going to be jerks, but the things
that people said to me were so shocking. Like the
night of his funeral, more than one person came up
(04:04):
to me and said, you're going to meet somebody new
really fast, and the best thing for you to do
is just get married and move on. At the night
of the man's funeral. Wow, that's not unusual, right. The
more that I do this work, the more that I
listen to people and talk to people, grieving people are
responded to treated so badly by well meaning people because
we simply don't know what to say, and we feel
(04:26):
awkward in the face of people's pain, so we say
sort of the first awkward thing that comes to our minds,
which is usually like at least now you know what
was really important in life, or he died so that
you could become what you most need to be. Like
all of this garbage language, honestly, that we say to
people when they're in pain. And so my experience of
being misunderstood, dismissed, cheered up, judged, frankly, um and shamed
(04:51):
for being affected by the death of my partner added
such a nightmare element to an already impossible situ Waham,
and that made surviving his death so much harder because
I felt like I had to defend my right to
be affected, to be sad, to be destroyed. I was
(05:11):
destroyed that devastation is a normal response to loss. And
until we start talking about devastation as a normal part
of the human experience, I think we're going to consistently
miss each other. Right. What we want is to feel
like we can support and be there for our friends
and feel like we're supported and loved by our friends
in our community. And we can't do that until we
(05:34):
can tell the truth about how hard it is to
be here. And you know you mentioned that the anniversary
it was this time of year that it happened for you,
but in two thousand and nine, and I don't know
about you, but I felt kind of guilty at times,
certain feelings that come up for me around anniversary points,
like my mom was October two thousand and fourteen. That
(05:56):
day I won't ever forget. And maybe it's not even
the anniversary. It could be a birthday, it could be
any given moment where suddenly I'm overwhelmed with this emotion.
But I feel like if I share those feelings because
so much time has passed, that somehow I'm a burden
to the friend or whoever I'm sharing that with. So
sometimes I even just hold back. So have you ever
(06:18):
felt that way? And what do we do with those feelings? Yeah?
That so a few things in their one. I think
our bodies remember, right, You're never going to forget that date.
I think that our bodies remember things even before our
minds do. Sometimes, I know, for a lot of people
in their in their early grief, and early is a
really subjective term, so that can mean anything from five
minutes ago to five years depending on the person. But
(06:41):
you know, some people will say like, I don't I'm
not sure why I feel so weepy today, And then
they'll look at the calendar and they're like, oh, this
is the date that dad went into hospice. Right, So
our bodies hold memories this role, memories that we don't
always remember with our with our conscious minds, although obviously
sometimes we do as well. We we recognize the dates
on the calendar. The other thing that you brought up
(07:03):
was like feeling like I can't talk about that because
I don't want to bum anybody out. And again I
we go back to sort of that that the ways
that we miss each other. There that friends want to
feel like I can support you, I'm here for you.
We want those kinds of deep relationships where we can
lean on each other. And then we're also at the
same time trained in this culture in a lot of
(07:25):
ways to be independent, don't need anybody. It's not cool
to be emotional and ask for help. So we've got
these conflicting narratives, right, talk about mental health, be supportive
of each other, but don't need too much. Over on
the other side, So that reluctance to share something emotional,
even with people you you love and who love you,
(07:46):
that's also really normal because that's the way we've been taught, right.
We don't want to be a burden to others. I
think there's another layer to this though. When you first
started talking, you said, you know, you get a lot
of messages. People want to talk about grief all the time.
When I first started doing this work, a lot of
the big publishing houses would say, like, your work is amazing,
we really need to talk about this stuff, But nobody
wants to talk about grief. Really, Okay, well, no one
(08:10):
wants to talk about grief. If we're going to be
talking about moving on platitudes, forced gratitude, enforced positivity, nobody
wants to talk about grief if you're just going to
try to talk them out of it. When you talk
about grief as something normal and natural and healthy that
deserves care and attention, then everybody wants to talk about it.
(08:30):
So one of the things that happens we learn from experience, right, Like,
that's what human brains do. We experience something, we learned
from it, and we adapt and we do something different
than next time. But if every time you've gone to
somebody and said, I'm really thinking about my mom today
and it's just I just miss them so much, and
they come back with, well, lean on your good memories
(08:50):
of your mom, that's what's gonna you know, make her happy.
That didn't fix your sadness or your longing for her.
It just taught you that you shouldn't talk about it
because somebody's just going to try to cheer you up.
So what is a good response from a friend? Great
responses that sounds really hard? Do you want to tell
me about your mom right today? Sounds like it's really difficult.
Is there anything that would feel really nurturing or comforting
(09:12):
to you right now that I can bring you right?
It is a very simple act to acknowledge somebody's pain
without trying to take it away from them. Not always easy,
but it is a very simple thing to do. And
what about grief comparison, because people can grieve all kinds
of things. Like you said you had experienced grief before
the loss of your partner, but that was something that
(09:32):
took it to another level. But there's grief can it
could be anything. So a lot of people last year
had to grieve the loss of a lot of opportunities
and life experiences and different things that may not be
the same as losing someone here on earth. But like
sometimes our mind will tell us like, oh, well, this
isn't worth talking about because it's not as bad as
(09:54):
what they're going through with this, and so you kind
of just stuff it down inside. So can you speak
to gree comparison? And I don't even know if that's
what it's called. That's where I'm calling it now. I
think that's perfect. So let's let's take this apart. So
the last example that you gave, like, I don't want
to talk about this because other people have it worse.
Diminishing your own experience is something again we're trained to do, right, like, oh,
(10:15):
don't take up too much space, you know, how dare
I be sad about this when I still have a
roof over my head? All losses valid. If we look
back over at the last fifteen or sixteen months of
the pandemic, everyone lost something, whether that was the loss
of daily routine or the loss of your job, or
the loss of a family member or multiple family members.
(10:36):
Everyone lost something. What we don't want to do is
conflate losses, right, like the loss of the job is
the quote unquote same as the loss of your baby,
because we'll come back to that in a second. But
that's always going to be dangerous territory. But honoring all
loss as valid is really human work. Right to look
at somebody and say, like, yeah, it's been really hard
(10:57):
to have your daily life disrupted. What's the what's the
thing you miss the most about the way things used
to be? Right again, simple acknowledgement, Tell me about it.
I see that, I see that that's hard for you do,
you want to tell me more about it. We do
this to ourselves. We do this to each other. At
least you at least I have this. At least it
wasn't that bad, while my life isn't as bad as
this life over here, all of these ways that we
(11:19):
discount ourselves and we don't lie to ourselves very well. Like,
if you try to force yourself to not feel the
way that you feel, those feelings are going to pop
up somewhere else, right, They're going to show up somewhere else.
They're going to show up in depression or anxiety, or
in substance use, or they're just going to show up
in like weird interactions that you have with people because
you're trying to feel grateful and positive when that it's
(11:41):
not what you're feeling. It's a weird thing to say,
but it's not an efficient way to live to pretend
that you don't feel what you feel, because it just
suppresses that feeling and then you act out of it
instead of acknowledging it and letting it be what it is. Right,
So we do that to ourselves internally. The other thing
that we do, though, is we conflate lasses. So grief
comparison is like, um, I remember when Matt first died,
(12:04):
and so many people, so many people would come up
to me and say, I know just how you feel.
I got divorced two years ago and it was the
worst thing ever. And then they would proceed to tell
me all about how they're divorce was a horrible thing
and they know exactly how I'm feeling. Now, a couple
of things here, one right timing, Your divorce is valid,
(12:25):
and you deserve a place to talk about it and
feel heard and respected in the pain that surrounds that.
Using your loss to hijack my current experience is not okay. So, UM,
I talk a lot about grief hijacking. We think that
when somebody says, um, you know, my my partner died
and I'm having a really crappy day, we think our
(12:45):
job is to say I know just how you feel,
and then we demonstrate why we know exactly how that
person feels by going into our own grief story. And again,
it's not that your own grief story isn't valid, it's
that this isn't the time for it. We never want
to say I know just how you feel, because even
if you've experienced the exact same loss. You don't know
how somebody else feels. And usually the net effect of
(13:08):
saying something like that, when we think we're being helpful,
the effect is, oh, I'm never going to mention this
again to you, because now we're talking about you instead
of talking about me. So coming in with either de
valuing your own loss because you feel like it's not
as bad as others, or conflating all losses and saying
I know just how that person feels because I once
(13:28):
had this happen to me, even though it's completely unrelated. Again,
we come back to, like, what's a great response in there,
I'm sorry that happened. Do you want to tell me
about it? Well, but you shouldn't have to respond that
during your own driving because you're in the current state
of grieving and they're bringing up something from two years
ago that they may still rightfully so be grieving, and
I'm wondering. I feel like a lot of people, some
(13:50):
people just might be I don't know, just socially awkward
or not aware. But then I think sometimes and I
know I'm certainly guilty of this in some way, shape
or form. You get we get nervous about it, and
then we end up saying something ridiculous such as that,
And I guess it's not our place, especially in our
time of grief, to maybe say something like, is this
(14:14):
really the best time for you to be telling me
about your divorce from two years ago? Or you just
like hope that somewhere down the line that person gets
the hint that they didn't handle that well. I think
it depends on how close to snapping you are in
any given moment, and also the relationship. Right there's no
one script for that everywhere. And you bring up a
really excellent point, which is it's not the responsibility of
(14:37):
the person in current pain to educate the people around them.
We see that's not only in grief, but in in
systemic racism, right Like, why is it on the black
folks in our communities to educate the white folks in
our communities about why that comment was racist? Right Like?
Why does the person at the center of whatever is
currently happening, Why is it on them to educate the
people around them? Right? So, you're right, like, that's not
(15:00):
that's not fair, And this is why we we have
these conversations publicly, right Like, let's practice better skills let's
practice some self awareness and some communication skills before there's
an emergency when we need them, right, so that we
are less likely to put the burden on the person
at the center of the pain and are more skilled
and more aware and more able to respond skillfully in
(15:20):
that moment rather than hijacking or conflating losses or any
of these things. Now does that always happen? No, very often.
You are in a situation where somebody says something incredibly
rude and you have some choices, then right, you can
smile a nod and say nothing. That's valid. Right. I remember,
I'm specifically thinking about one specific person who every time
(15:43):
I saw them, they went into their divorce story. And
I'm talking like days after Matt died, like fresh wounds here,
and I learned right Like, they're gonna ask me how
I am. I'm going to say anything at all, and
they're going to talk about themselves. Cool. I know what
this interaction is, and I'm is going to remove myself
from it as soon as possible. Getting yourself out of
a situation without saying something is a perfectly good response.
(16:07):
If you feel like saying things, you can say things
like that's not really helpful at this time, but I
appreciate your effort, and then you can change the subject. Yeah,
I feel like they would understand that message loud and clear,
or at least like I would right away. But then again,
if someone is that awkward to say that, then yeah,
it might go right over their head. But again, that's
not on you to worry about, not on you, right,
(16:28):
So you get to make choices about that. You can
call somebody on it and then change the subject. You
can smile and nod and just be like, cool information,
I know what this is going to be like with you.
You can also defer to another time if a friend
says something well meaning but not so awesome. I mean, again,
we're humans, right, We're not usually trained in how do
(16:48):
I talk to my friend whose baby just died and
never say the wrong thing? Like that's not gonna happen.
You're going to say the wrong things sometimes. You know,
your friends and your family and your therapists are going
to say the wrong things and times, So it's okay
to come back after and say, hey, you know, I've
been thinking about this. I couldn't say anything in the moment,
but when I told you that I was feeling really sad,
(17:11):
and you came back with reminding me how talented I am, Like,
I felt like you didn't hear me. Can we talk
about that? Can we talk about how we missed each
other again? That puts a lot of responsibility on the
grieving person, right, Like, I don't want you to have
to educate anybody. I just want you to be in
the pain that you're in. But these are things that
we can practice and skills we can practice. Right. One
(17:32):
of the things that I really like about talking about
grief is you can start practicing these conversations, these communication
skills before life go sideways, so that they're not quite
as weird when life does go sideways. So when you
say practice, like, I'm sure someone would be like, wait, what,
I'm supposed to come up with some grieving type scenario
and do role play or that sounds terrible. Sorry, that
(17:56):
was what came into my head. But I just clarifying.
But I love that that came into your head because
because then, okay, then let's clarify here, because that sounds terrible.
We don't know, no one has to do that. But
here's the thing. We hear statements of pain every single day.
We just don't recognize them this pain. And what that
means is we have opportunities to practice these skills every
(18:16):
single day. So let's give an example here. So maybe
things are reopening in your area and you go to
your favorite coffee shop and there's your barista that you
haven't seen in eighteen months, and you say, how's it going,
and they say, not that great. I didn't sleep very well,
I missed the bus, I was late to work, and
then I spilled a pot of coffee on my foot.
What we normally say is, at least the sun is shining.
(18:37):
I bet you're glad to be back at work, though,
we just missed our daily point of practice, right. All
of those things that person said, those were all statements
of pain. Those are the places we practice. What do
you say in that situation that sounds really difficult? My
pause here is on purpose, because that's all you need
to do is acknowledge that somebody said that that is
(18:58):
your daily practice point. You don't have to make it weird,
you don't have to say more. You just need to
acknowledge that somebody just said out about something and you
heard it, and you heard it, and that's what we
want ultimately in the day is to be heard. Exactly.
You don't need to have your pain fixed for you,
you need to have your pain heard. I need to
I guess I try to maybe think of something that
(19:20):
I can say or do that's going to make it better,
whatever the situation. Maybe, And as you're saying that, I
have different examples that are popping into my head of
times where I've probably tried to come up with a solution.
And then I think of even in my own relationship
with my husband, and you know, stereotyping here, but probably
a lot of if you're in a husband wife relationship,
(19:43):
a lot of times the husbands want to be the fixers,
and then the wives want to be heard. I don't
need you to fix this right now. I just need
you to listen. But the examples that popped into my
head about me happened to be with certain things that
friends might be dealing with that are to me, I'm
just like, gosh, I you know, I don't even know
how they deal with that at all, but I don't
want to bring it up all the times, and then
(20:04):
they're like reminded of it. But then my response is like,
now that I'm hearing you say that has probably not
been the best. Like I think I could simply just
acknowledge like that really sucks right now, and I think
I've started to get better at that, But now I
know of times where I've gone too far. I think
you mean well. I certainly know in my heart I
(20:24):
mean well, But thinking through what you're saying, it's like
I'm missing it. Maybe they're not. I'm trying to think
of how my friend might be receiving it, and they're
probably not feeling very heard because it's like, uh like
on their end, they might be like, I don't really
need you to fix this right now, I just need
you to know that it's like, oh, it's annoying, it's stupid,
it sucks. Yeah, And you know you can ask about that,
right It sounds like you have relationships where you're working
(20:46):
on things and you're you're trying to be present for
each other and share things, and you can come back
and say, I've been thinking about some stuff and I'm wondering.
You know, when you tell me x Y and Z,
my normal response is to do this, and I'm wondering
if that's actually not helping you. Can we talk about that?
My intention is for you to feel heard and supported
and all of these things. And I don't think that's
(21:07):
been the effect of what I'm doing. Can we talk
about it? That is super cool friendship skill right there
to do that. And I think you know. One of
the things you said just a minute ago was you know,
I have good intentions. I really want to I want
to be helpful, I want to make them feel better.
I think we can make so much of this easier
if we realize that it's not your job to make
anybody feel better. Your job is to make them feel
(21:30):
heard and supported. Those are two very different things. There's
a phrase that my friend Kate ken Felt, who has
a relationship educator, tells people to ask, is like, do
you want a solution or do you want to be heard?
Which thing would feel useful right now? And you describe that,
you know in your marriage, right, like my husband wants
to fix things. I want to be heard. And I
don't know that that really belongs to any one gender.
(21:53):
It certainly shows up in gendered relationships a lot. But
I think we see this also just in the way
that we show up to any kind of pain. Right,
You said this yourself, like my friends are having a
hard time, and I want to make it better for them.
I want to fix it for them. That impulse to
fix things for people is not wrong. It's a really
beautiful human impulse to want to remove somebody's suffering for them.
(22:14):
It's just that the ways that we've been taught to
do that aren't working. So just that one question of
do you need a solution for this right now? Or
do you need to vent about it? Do you need
me to hear you right which one would be helpful.
Sometimes you do want a solution. If my computer is
acting out, I don't want to be heard by my
tech person. I wanted to fix it right. But when
I'm having a really intense day, I don't need solutions
(22:38):
for how to cheer up or how to feel better.
I just need to be supported where I am like,
I want that support to come up underneath me so
that I can fall apart in whatever ways I need to. Second.
So when it comes to your book that's out now,
which is how to carry what can't be fixed? Your
(22:58):
latest one, slain the title and why you went with
that and what people are going to find inside one
of my sort of signature lines, I'm doing air quotes here.
But um, some things cannot be fixed, they can only
be carried, right, And that points to these hard realities
that so many of us live with, Like you can't
fix the fact that your partner is dead. You can't
(23:18):
fix the fact that your baby died right before their
due date, right, there's no solution for that. We live
in such a solution oriented culture where everything is a
problem to be solved. The human heart is not a
problem to be solved, right, So we need a different
approach to that. So that line, some things cannot be fixed,
they can only be carried. The question then becomes like, okay,
(23:41):
then what am I supposed to do with this? How
am I supposed to live alongside this chasm in my life?
I think where a lot of grief resources go, especially
before it's okay came out. We're talking about sort of
after the dust has settled and you're not in that early,
torn open space anymore. And remember that early is completely subjective.
(24:03):
So many grief resources talk about rebuilding your life. You
can't talk about rebuilding a structure that just collapsed, right, Like,
that's wrong. Timing not a good thing. So this new journal,
the how to carry what can't be fixed. Journal is
about how do you live alongside something that can never
be repaired. That's such an interesting question when we're no
(24:25):
longer looking at the erasure of grief and instead we're
looking at living alongside it. How do you help yourself
survive what feels unsurvivable? So the tools and the topics
and the exercises and the explorations in the journal are
all about helping you figure out what that road looks
like for you. I don't I don't do very well
(24:46):
with I'm super bossy, but I don't do very well
with prescriptions like you need to do exactly this, so
that now, like everybody's life is different, and what I
want my work to do with people and for people
is to help them find their own not help them
figure out what helps when I'm having this kind of day?
What helps when I'm having this kind of day? And
(25:07):
how do I live this life that I didn't ask
for but is here anyway? And I'm glad you clarified
to we've been saying book, which it is, but it's
a grief journal, and so I think writing is so therapeutic,
putting pen to paper. So with this, it's not just
I mean it's taking through Like, how how is writing
(25:28):
for you played a role or does it in your
daily practice or what would you encourage clients or people
reading your book, because I've had different therapists say, yes,
you need to be spending time writing out everything that
you're feeling. I personally don't feel like I'm a great writer,
and I'll sit down, I'm like, why, I really don't
have anything to say, and then they're kind of like, okay, well,
(25:50):
then write that over and over. I don't feel like
I have anything to say. I don't and then eventually
it may turn into something else, but just that process
of pin to paper. Yeah, So I have a love
hate relationship with writing. I've been a writer all my life.
You know. Those are some of my early memories of
being a kid. Was just narrating the day to myself.
At the end of the day, I think I I
(26:11):
often don't know what I think about things until I
write them out. And when Matt died, I was gosh,
furious isn't even a big enough word, but we'll use furious.
I was furious that I still had words. There are
so many notebooks that I stabbed through and hurled against
the wall because I was so enraged that the notebook
(26:32):
that I was using the morning before he died was
still the same notebook that had pages in it after
he died. Like how dare words exist? And how small
they are? Right? Loss is beyond language. Words are always
going to be too small, and at the same time,
words are what we have. And that goes back to
something that we were talking about earlier with you know,
(26:52):
everything needs to be said, right one of my teachers
used to say, everything needs to be said, but not
necessarily to another human being, Like we need to hear
the truth of our own reality, the truth of our
own experience, whether that is speaking to the page, speaking
to a tree, speaking to another person who can hear
it and validate it, like the the story of your
(27:14):
own life deserves a place to be written or spoken
or shared. So the both of those like here we go,
Like here's how we here? Here's the dichotomy at the
core of everything. I hate language and language saves me
every day. Both things are true. So when we talk
about writing, I'm really careful to say that I don't
(27:36):
encourage people to write because it's going to fix anything,
because it won't. Writing doesn't solve anything, and we write
to tell ourselves the story of who we are right
now in this moment. And sometimes when we do that,
like those exercises that your therapists give you, saying, you know,
if you don't have anything to say, right, I don't
have anything to say until there is something that wants
(27:57):
to be said. There is always something to say. And
a lot of this is um sort of priming that
pump so that you know, like, okay, so if you
never write about anything, you can't expect that the second
that you sit down to write, you're going to have
this like, oh moment of like this great story that
came out or this great insight, Like I mean, that's
(28:18):
kind of rude to the creative process. You got to
like have a relationship there. But we've also got so
many ingrained layers of I don't have anything to say.
I'm not a good writer. I'm not a good writer
is such a big lie anyway, but I'm not a
good writer. I don't really have anything to say. Like
in a way, you have to get all of that
garbage out on the page before you can start telling
(28:40):
yourself the truth. That's why we you know, that's why
we do things like, right, I have nothing to say
for fifteen minutes, and then maybe there'll be something to say,
because we've got to weed through all of those things
that we've absorbed about not being good enough, not knowing
what to write, not you know, I don't have anything
that anybody else would want to read. Who cares? You
(29:00):
are in a dialogue with your own self. That's awesome.
I love that too. And can you say again one
more time where you said your teacher used to say
to you everything needs to be said, not necessarily to
another human being. Yeah, I love that in different ways
on different days. So I talk a lot about companionship
inside grief and having people who can hear you and
validate you. And the reality is is that not everybody
(29:23):
has that grief. Well, I say that grief rearranges your
your phone book. We don't really have phone books anymore,
so grief rearrangees your your contact list. Because we're so
awkward about grief. A lot of people disappear. Friends that
you thought would be able to be there with you
are not there. Sometimes they have their own stuff going
on and they don't have the capacity to be there
with you in the way that they want to be
(29:43):
You said something earlier about like I don't want to
say anything about what my friend is going through because
I don't want to remind them of it. I can
tell you that they don't forget, right, your friend didn't
forget that their daughter died. You bringing it up is
not going to remind them. They are all of these ways.
The grief is incredibly lonely, right, Even if you do
have people around you with the best of intentions, grief
(30:05):
itself is very lonely. And I think when you hear
the message that you just need to be heard and validated,
I think there can be a lot of rage that
shoots out there. But I don't have anyone to talk to.
That doesn't mean you don't need to be heard. And
that's where writing is really useful. Art is really useful
going out and walking in the trees and talking out loud. Right,
(30:27):
everything needs to be shared, not necessarily with another human being.
Keep in mind that this is not to fix anything,
but it is to be in the habit of telling
the truth, if only to the page or to yourself.
(30:53):
I lost my dad in April, so it's been a
few months and I remember even thinking to myself and
still at times he was He had come into my
home but only lived with us for one day, but
was supposed to live here for I don't know, I
saw years. It just was so unexpected. Now he wasn't
like in the best health obviously, was having to come
(31:15):
in and live with me, but we we still had
plenty of time. And then obviously things just drastically took
a turn for the worse, and there was a lot
of other things in my life going on, like this
year has been very difficult, and I have found myself,
especially since my dad died, continuing to say I just
want everything to just can't wait till it's normal again.
(31:37):
And I think that that's probably common for a lot
of people that have experiencing great pain and loss to
just want it to be normal. And then I'm like, well,
I mean I did lose my mom too, and I
mean that's just kind of my new normal. I remember
feeling the same thing, like I just want to get
past all this and things to get back to normal,
(31:57):
but there's always gonna be something. And then it's like, well,
is normal because now every time I walk past the
room that my dad lived in now I think of
him every time, and what was normal was he was
supposed to be living here and now he's not, And
now I want to move but but I'm not. But
I know you refer to something as the middle path,
So can you explain that for us please? Yeah? So
(32:20):
the middle path is the not completely healed and not
rocking in the basement wearing sackcloth forever. Right, So I
want to touch on the piece you said about getting
back to normal. What I hear in that is can
everything stop being relentless? Right? It's less about can we
go back to normal? And more can I find some
(32:40):
equilibrium here? Because I need some? Right, here's this event
that you didn't expect that came in and made life
very jagged, jagged, sharp pokey bits. I really love metaphors,
and there's an image I think of that like grief
is like you got this incredibly heavy backpack hurled at
you and it's full of sharp, pokey objects and you
(33:02):
can't put it down. No one else can carry it
for you. You're stuck with it, and that desire for
normal is like I need to get used to this backpack.
I need to figure out where the sharpest bits are
so that I can adjust to how I carry this
because right now it just sucks and I keep getting
blindsided by that pokey bit on my right shoulder and
(33:22):
then it whips around to my friend and stabs me
in the gut, like a return to normal, I really hear.
And what you're saying is equilibrium? Can I find that? Right?
And the middle path is really this ongoing process of
where is equilibrium for me? How do I live this
life that I have now knowing that I have to
walk past that room or I need to move, which
(33:43):
brings its whole other set of challenges with it. Right
in pop culture and certainly in the medical industry, gosh,
in a whole bunch of places we talk about you know,
grief is a this is very natural and very normal.
But it should be over in six weeks and you
should be back to work and everything should be fine,
and take all your pictures down. Like there's this idea
that if you do everything quote unquote correctly, you're going
(34:04):
to be feeling just fine within six weeks. Um. That's
actually the current medical window is six weeks, which is stupid.
It's actually much shorter in people's minds, right, Like it's
been a week since the funeral. You should be okay
by know but this idea that if you if you
do grief correctly, you will be back to normal and
feeling fine six weeks, maybe six months if it was
(34:26):
a really big loss, but otherwise you should be fine.
And if you're not performing wellness within six weeks or
six months, then you're failing at grief. You're perseverating, You're
letting your person down because they wouldn't want you to
be sad. We have this idea that there are only
those two options in grief. You can be healed, back
to normal, happy, never thinking about the person you know,
(34:50):
only looking forward, or you can be failing. Basically, you
know my image here of like you're sitting in a dark,
damp basement all alone with a blanket over your head,
rocking in a corner, and like that's that's not human reality.
Most people live somewhere between those two extremes and figuring
(35:11):
out who you are now and how you live this
that's the middle path. How am I going to live
with the fact that I need to walk past this
room every day? It is an option to move. You
don't need anybody's permission for that. You can move if
you want to write, Okay, I'm not going to move,
So how am I going to walk past this door
every day? There's no one answer to that. It might
(35:33):
change every day. Right today, I feel like I'm going
to go down a different hallway because that's too much
right now. Maybe the next day you go in and
have a look around. I don't know. But the middle
path is figuring out this thing is here, It's not
going to go away. How do I honor that and
live into the life that remains for me? How do
I carry this, not just the loss, but the love
(35:55):
with me into this life that is here. Now, it's
rude to suggest to somebody that they put this person
behind them because they belong in the past, right, That
is rude. When somebody you love dies, you don't stop
loving them. The relationship doesn't stop. And all of this
messaging that we have in this culture from movie storylines
(36:19):
where like the young widow is so sad until they
find love again and then everything is okay like garbage, garbage.
I hate to use words like the task of grief
because that's too prescriptive, but like the the work here
is finding how you can carry the love that was
here when the person was alive through this life that
(36:42):
is here now. That is the work of grief. It's
not about putting it behind you. It's not about choosing
gratitude and being happy. It is how do I live
this with as much love and integrity and care for
myself and others as I can? And there's no prescription
for that. That makes me think of people that might
be struggling with certain holidays or birthdays, anniversaries, Thanksgiving, Christmas.
(37:09):
How do you lead those grieving through some of those
heavy reminder like those calendar days that are going to
show up multiple times a year. Yeah, so I'm gonna
pick on you just for one second. Okay, you asked
me how do I lead a grieving person through those
difficult holidays? You don't lead them. You let them they do.
They are the experts and what they need even if
(37:31):
they don't know what they need. So a great question
here is, okay, here is let's pick Thanksgiving. So Thanksgiving
is not coming up right now as you we're talking,
but let's pretend so Thanksgiving us coming up, and I
know this is your first Thanksgiving without your dad. How
are you feeling about that holiday? Are there things that
you want to do or not do? That is a
great question. If instead I'm trying to be your friend
(37:52):
and your helper and I'm like, oh crap, this is
their first Thanksgiving without their dad. It's going to be terrible. Um,
I'm going to pull out all the stops and like
make the most amazing Thanksgiving dinner for everybody, and I'm
going to invite the entire family. It's going to be great.
They're going to get through it. I have really good intentions,
don't I. Yes, what if what you really want for
Thanksgiving is to take the weekend to yourself and go
(38:15):
for a hike and reflect and be alone. But I
don't know that because I tried to lead you through
a holiday that I thought was going to be tough
for you, but I didn't ask. You're leading me, yes,
And I'm glad you called me out on that word,
because Yes, everybody's grief process is so different. And even
(38:36):
earlier you said something about how someone might be early
in their grief, but for every single person, and I
just want to reiterate, for everybody, it's so different. Everybody
grieves on a completely different timeline. But I will say
that advice like that you're giving is helping lead me
(38:56):
your your advice is you're leading me to need myself.
And this is the thing, right Like, if we don't
talk about what isn't working, we can't get what we
most want. Right, Like going back to that good intentions
thing is like we love our people. I want to
make the holiday season as gentle as possible for you.
(39:16):
The way to do that is to ask about it.
Invite that person into Like you're the one who has
to live this. I want to know what you feel
like you need. This is sort of my current bandwagon
with the corporate sphere is like when people come back
from let's say you are out of maternity leave, but
your baby died and you're coming back into the workplace,
there's no one specific way that we integrate you back
(39:39):
into your office. Right. Some people want to talk about it,
some people don't want to talk about it. Like, we
need to start getting into the habit of asking each individual, like,
I know you've never had to do this before. You
never had to do Thanksgiving without your dad, You've never
had to come back from maternity to leave without a baby.
Do you know what you might need? Here are some
(40:00):
things that we might be able to do to support
you to any of these sound good to you. We're
letting the person at the center of the experience lead
the experience. It doesn't mean that you're going to know.
You don't you haven't had to do this before. You
don't know what you're gonna need on Thanksgiving. But just
being asked without somebody assuming what you need like that
is awesome. Yeah, I love that, And that's such a
(40:21):
great reminder, you know, even in a yeah, work setting,
a friendship setting, a family setting. I feel like sometimes
where I might be wrong, but I'm thinking a lot
of people because it's popped into me that I sometimes
we're scared to ask even though there's no harm in
(40:42):
it or I don't know, or is it just me?
People are terrified to ask about this, So that that's
totally okay. So here's what happens, right. You see somebody
you care about in pain, you have an impulse to
fix it for them, and then you're like, oh, I
don't want to make this worse, so I don't want
to say the wrong thing. The wrong thing would be terrible.
You would be amazed at how many people have actually
(41:03):
seen someone crossed the street in order to avoid interacting
with them. Like, this is a really common thing that
happens to grieving people. People will cross the street because
they don't know what to say to you, like, we
see you, we see you do that stuff. So that
fear of screwing it up makes a lot of people
not bring things up. And what that does net effect
(41:23):
there is make your friends feel like you don't care. Right,
So we're afraid to mess things up. We're afraid to
say the wrong thing. We feel really awkward because we're
not sure what we're doing. All of that stuff is normal,
and let's just start there. It's okay to say I
have no idea what to say to you, and I
am terrified that I'm going to say a stupid thing.
But I love you and I'm willing to hear if
(41:44):
I said something bad. I just want you to know that, right,
Like how cool is that? That's amazing, very telling the
truth about what is actually happening in the moment, and
we are showing up as the awkward, imperfect people we are.
You can't not be awkward. You are going to say
the wrong thing. You're going to say the wrong thing
because there is no right thing to say. There's skill
(42:07):
and there's less skill. So if we start with I
feel really out of my depth here and I have
no idea what to say with you, but I love
you and I'm here, and if I ever say something stupid,
please whack me. That's great that one works on the
friend or family level, for the for the corporate the
corporate level, it really doesn't. But you know what works
on the corporate level. Actually, um, if there are hr
(42:29):
folks listening to us, what works on the corporate level
is having one point person for the person coming back
and saying, you've never had to do this before. People
aren't sure what they should say to you. Do you
want them to mention it? Would you rather not talk
about it? Some people like to focus just on their
job rather than bringing their their emotional life into the workplace.
Not right, not wrong. Being a point person for somebody
(42:51):
coming back relieves a lot of pressure for people, because
otherwise you're going to get nineteen thousand people coming to
the person's desk asking them how they're doing. Maybe they
want that, you know that. I'd talk about that in
the in the corporate world, but this is also something
that you can do for your grieving person. It's a
really helpful sort of being the project manager, right, being
the contact person. I remember when Not said everybody had questions,
(43:13):
right like what are we doing for the memorial? What's
going on over here? What's going on with the landlord?
Like what's all of these life and death admin things.
I didn't have the capacity to deal with that stuff.
I'm a really good project manager and I make lists
when I'm under stressed, but I didn't need to deal
with that stuff. And so I had an amazing friend
who stepped in and said, all phone calls will go
(43:35):
to me first. I will assign them where they need
to be assigned, and I will talk to you when
there's something that needs your input. Bossy as all get out,
But it worked, right. So having a point person is
really really helpful during grief because what it does is
it relieves the admin burden on the grieving person. And
that's true, like whether you're trying to go back to
(43:55):
work or you know your loss just happened. I mean,
I don't know if you experienced this, but there are
so many details that need to be attended to when
somebody dies, Yes, so many things. So if you've got
a point in person, who can handle a lot of
the annoying details super helpful. You just don't want to
do anything undoable without the person's consent. So I would
(44:20):
be remiss if I didn't say things like this, like
if you if you're going to clean your friend's house, Um,
this is okay. So my mom, My mom cleans under
under stress. H So I had to do this with
her quite a bit soon after Matt died. But you
think you're being helpful when you come in and you
sort of tidy up and you do the laundry. It's
very easy to erase artifacts of the person's life. Let
me explain what I mean. I'm going to use your
(44:41):
example if that's okay. So your dad's in your home, Um,
you expected him to be there for quite some time,
and his coffee cup is sitting on his bedside table,
and then things fall apart and he dies and doesn't
come back, and somebody tries to tidy up for you,
and they remove that coffee cup and they put in
the dishwasher. They just remove evidence that your dad was here.
(45:02):
We can accidentally erase evidence of somebody's existence when we
tied it up. This happens a lot with laundry. Somebody
comes over and they do the laundry for you. But
you just erased a person's smell. Their body just disappeared,
but their smell was still there, and now the smell
is gone. Oh I'm glad you brought all this up
because I've even in some of my bonus episodes where
(45:23):
we've talked about grief, I have, you know, talked about
how after my mom dad, I even I watched my
sister's friends because my mom was in hospice care in
my sister's home, and there was people showing up every
day like a just revolving door of because my sister's
four kids like we had. Because it was hospice, there
was tons of people in and out wanting to see
(45:43):
my mom and say their final goodbyes. And I always
thought it was such a beautiful thing watching her friends.
I didn't live in in Austin at the time, and
that's where we were, so I was in town for it,
and it was such a beautiful thing witnessing all my
sister's friends and neighbors come by and support. So I've
always remember that, and that's something I throw out, is
you know, do laundry if you can clean, if you
(46:06):
can drop off food. But I love that you're adding
that the consideration part into it. Of it is super
helpful to have certain things done, but just make sure
that you don't overstep and take it too far. Yeah, exactly.
So we're talking about two things here. We're talking about
offering tangible support, which is fantastic. Right. The thing we
(46:29):
want to pair that with is getting consent. Right. Consent
is important in so many things. Getting consent. I'm going
to run the dishwasher. Is that okay? There are dishes
still in the sink from before he went to the hospital.
Is it okay if I wash them. I'm gonna do laundry.
Is there anything you want me to not wash? Is
it okay? If I change the sheets? Right? For widowed folks,
(46:50):
shout out to anyone who's widowed out there, This is
perfectly normal. Lots of people sleep on exactly the same
sheets for months at a time. I don't even remember
how long it took me to change the sheet after
Matt died. Things that we think are really weird are
actually perfectly normal. So consent is really important. Just check
with people. This is also where it's good to have
that point person if you can, because I don't want
(47:11):
to inundate you with like, is it okay if I
move this coaster? Is it okay? If I do this?
Is it okay if I do this? Like if there
are fifty people dropping by every day and everybody's asking you,
is it okay to do this? Like that's exhausting. If
you can have a point person, that's great. If you
have somebody who can bring that up to you, Like
a lot of people are showing up wanting to clean
things for you. Are there rooms that should be off limits?
(47:34):
I will let them know. Yeah. And then I think
the phone thing too, or like people having questions, And
I think of how my friend Mary stepped in as
my dad was on life support and we knew we
were going to have to be removing him, and she
knew we had various friends that would want to be
in the know, so she Yeah, she just asked me,
would you like for me to be that person or
(47:54):
I'm going to go ahead and reach out to X
y z z Z. Are you cool with that? And
I said yes, and then yes she took the reins
from there, and that was very helpful because it's also award. Yeah, Hey, Mary.
It's also awkward as the person too. Yeah, I have
to you know, your friends that may know and they
might be worried about you, so you want to update them,
(48:18):
but then like the last thing you want to do
is be on your phone and then like sending an
awkward note of like it is finished. We were we
were kind of joking about that because after we took
my dad off life support, it's like, okay, you just wait,
and then it was like, okay, three minutes later it happened,
and then you're like okay, well yeah, what you so, now,
(48:39):
what how do you like let people know? Okay, he went,
it is finished, Like I don't know. The whole thing
was so awkward, so I didn't end up say I
didn't even update her. But then she was the point person,
so I'm just telling the story so that other people
may take notice. Then I wasn't on social media or anything,
but she happened to follow my brother in law who was,
and later that evening he put up a post about
(49:01):
him and my dad, and she saw that and realized
from that, oh okay, because some people may stay alive
a little bit longer. My dad it was like three minutes,
so but he didn't put up that post for hours
and hours, but she was just waiting in limbo. But
she saw the post and then she took the initiative
from that post to then reach out to our group
of friends. Didn't bother me with it, she just did it.
(49:24):
And Yeah, I thought that that was really cool because
then I didn't have to have any of those awkward
like it happened, you know. Yeah, yeah, those friends are
amazing to shout out before we go, I would love
(49:46):
to hear from you just four things you're grateful for.
We practice gratitude a lot, although we we we acknowledge
like the hard stuff too. It's kind of one of
those things we've had to be really clear about, especially
with a lot of like toxic positivity. And we have
a whole movement that started after my mom passed away
(50:08):
that is all around joy. She wanted to spread joy
to others. First of all, She talked to everybody at
the hospital, even people in the elevator that she didn't know.
She would try to compliment them in some way because
sometimes people would be there alone getting their chemo treatments.
She just wanted to make them feel good. And she
felt like she had support, so she wanted to spread
joy to others, and then she wanted to choose joy
for herself. But what I have to remind people too,
(50:30):
Even though a big movement from that grew on our
our nationally syndicated show, the Bobby Bones Show, it's called
Pimp and Joy, and we have a whole line of clothing.
But like my mom definitely had awful days and we
experienced those, and she never would want to fool people
into thinking it's like, oh yeah, I'm battling cancer, choose joy.
(50:50):
But we also in the on the gratitude front. For
me at least, what I find is, even in some
of my darkest times this year, I still do have
things in my life that I can be thankful for, bigger, small.
So I'd love to hear four things from you that
you're currently thankful for today. I love how you expanded
that because we we so often think that gratitude is
(51:13):
an antidote for pain. If you say you're feeling sad,
somebody's like, well, you need to find something to be
grateful for. As though grief and gratitude cancel each other out,
they don't write. So I think about gratitude as a
companion to whatever. Right. Um, but we're closing up, so
I'm just gonna go with my with four things that
I'm grateful for, Rather than my entire rent on gratitude,
(51:33):
I'm going to start with my friends, the skill with
which they support me and know me. I don't tend
to reach out when I'm having a hard day, and
they know it, so they know when my hard days
are and they're proactive about offering support, which is amazing
because that's a good skill. I am feeling thankful that
the air is clear right now. I have anxiety around
(51:55):
flyer season, so I'm going to be grateful that the
air is currently clear and breathable and beautiful. I am
grateful for my dog, who is the best dog in
the whole world. She's home sleeping right now. She hates
it when I leave, but she's fine. Uh. What else
am I grateful for? I am grateful to be in
the studio. Radio was was a big part of my childhood,
(52:15):
so I'm just really grateful and happy to be sitting
near a soundboard. Oh well, what part of your childhood?
My dad was was general manager of an MPR station
in Buffalo for most of my early childhood. So I
grew up in I don't even gosh, you don't even
remember now, but whatever the Buffalo NPR affiliate is, that
was where I had birthday parties. My birthday coincides with
(52:36):
Fall Pledge drives, so most of my birthday parties were
on air for Fall Pledge Drives. And then in my
teenage years, my dad started buying radio stations and sort
of rehabbing them and getting them popular again. So my
first jobs were cleaning radio station bathrooms and then recording
ads and doing some weather spots when I was a teenager.
(52:56):
So will you have a very soothing, great voice? Thank you. Yeah,
I'm not sure if that's nature or nurture, but yeah,
first loves the audio version of the of It's okay,
I actually get the I get the best fan mail anyway.
But um, A lot of people have said that, you know,
after their partner died, that my voice on that book
(53:19):
is the only other voice in the house. Like what
a powerful thing that is to receive and to hear,
you know that. You know a lot of people are like,
you know, I've been living with my partner and my
husband for forty five years and he died and the
house is so quiet, and now your voice is the
other sound in the house, and that's that's magic. That's awesome.
(53:40):
And again that book is It's Okay that you're not
okay meeting grief and loss in a society that doesn't understand.
And then your latest is the book Slash Journal and
it's how to Carry What Can't Be Fixed. So I'll
be linking both of those in my Amazon page so
they're easy for people to find. And it sounds like
you've got the audible version can be for the first one,
(54:03):
the first one for It's okay, that one is audible,
and the book and print and Journal is currently only
in print. Yeah, okay, well awesome. Well, thank you so
much Megan for your time. Um, I know that this
episode is going to be so helpful for so many
and it was for me for sure. So speaking of
getting mail, like I'm going to get emails about this,
So thank you so much for taking the time. And
(54:27):
I don't know if I'll talk to you ever again soon,
but maybe you'll have to have you on since now
you're you're my first official grief expert that's come on
the show besides a therapist friend that comes on but
she doesn't specialize in grief, so I'm very very thankful
for you. I'm glad to be here.
Feeling Things with Amy & Kat News
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Amy Brown
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