I've got a very special episode to share with you today, and it's part of a series we're releasing called Something to Normalize. One of the reasons I've always loved the Wolf Parable is because it normalizes being human and having difficult emotions. These podcast episodes feature my partner Ginny, talking with her friend and previous guest of the show, Brandy Lust.
In these unguarded conversations, they'll be sharing their lives and perspectives as women, alongside insights from experts, researchers, and writers on topics that are hard to talk about. We tend to keep these things to ourselves, though, and when we do, it can breed a sense of being the only one, feelings of shame, or evidence we're somehow doing life wrong.
Brandy and Ginny hope that by giving voice to experiences, feelings, and thoughts we often keep to ourselves, we can create a community with less shame and a deeper sense of belonging. I am so happy to share their voices with you. I think you'll find these episodes a wonderfully nourishing and supportive addition to the regular scheduled When you feed podcast episodes, you are used to hearing here and now I'm proud to present to you Something to Normalize.
Welcome friends, and welcome friend Hey, Brandy, Hi Jenny, Welcome everybody to our conversation here on our podcast Something to Normalize. Today, we're going to be normalizing the experience and landscape of grief. And it's a weighty topic, right and a universal one, and we're going to be walking this road together. So I feel like when we kind of carry the burden of grief together, it doesn't feel quite as heavy as
when we're alone. So hopefully this conversation will allow us to just wade into these waters with one another and come out of it feeling some sense of healing and not aloneness and a little bit wiser.
What do you think that sounds beautiful? You want to tell folks who you are? Jenny?
Yes, Yes, great idea. Brandy, Yes, So I'm Jinny Gay and I am a certified mindfulness and meditation teacher, and I help people become more aware of and work skillfully in navigating our relationship with thoughts and emotions and experiences so that we can feel less stress and less struggle and more freedom, more joy, more ease with life.
And I'm Brandy and I help organizations to build cultures that support well being.
Yeah, so, today, like I said, we're going to be exploring the topic and experience of grief, right, so specifically grief over the loss of a loved one. I mean, I specify that because we can have grief over the loss of really anything, be it a person or a pet, a relationship, a dream we had that will no longer happen. I mean, you know, anything that we lose can cause us to have some grief. So we might venture out
into that, into the other terrain of grief. But I think you and I have had personal experience with grief of a loss of a loved one, right, So we thought we would start there and just kind of share a bit about our own experiences so we have some context, right of like where we're coming from.
Yeah, And I know your grief experience is much more recent than mine, and so I'm happy to start the conversation and talk about how that was for me. And then I want to give you lots of space. I know that place can be tender so a way that feels supportive for you. So I can talk about the most profound experience that I have of grief in my own life is certainly losing my grandma, who was a mentor to me in my spiritual life as I was growing up.
She was a new agent. So she would give me like.
All of these different books that I should be reading and just really talked to me always like I was an adult and like my opinions mattered to her, And we had a special relationship because I was her first grandchild. I was a girl, and she, you know, just really wanted to have that bond, and so I was also named after her. My middle name is Rose. She passed away eight years ago, and it was after having had
cancer for over a decade. But the actual death process, once it began and ernest lasted probably about six or seven months. And so it was that time in my life where I was navigating a lot of personally tumultuous things at the same time. And I've definitely talked about that on the podcast previously, But I was trying to balance out a lot of difficult things that were happening in my life while also really really wanting to be
present with her. And I still feel tremendously honored that I was able to be.
Kind of a partner in her death process.
So I once a week would go and spend the night at her house instead of going home, and we would just set up late into the night, and she would retell her life to me and sometimes share things with me that she hadn't really shared on exactly that way before, and so I was really honored to have
held that experience for her. And what I remember about that time in regards to grief is that she was feeling very alone in her death process because it wasn't something that people wanted to talk about with her, and so I was the safe space where she could really flesh out how it felt to be dying and knowing that she was going to die, and other people around her actually weren't as comfortable with that as she was.
And I remember one really important conversation for me.
Because it's always been something that's sort of lodged in my heart, is like, if that's the one thing that I did in the world, I would feel satisfied with that.
And it was just the conversation.
We were talking about this the idea of dying and people not really feeling comfortable with it, and she said, you're like a lifeboat, and I feel like you're just saving me and everything that she has given me in life. Just the fact that I could exchange in that moment like some small thing was really profound.
Her death process was not pretty.
I know that you know, Jenny, because you've sat with someone in the actual dying process. And at the same time, I really felt this.
Energy from her.
This I almost see it as like a glowing yellow light. That's how I perceive it even in my mind now.
That just made me.
Feel comfortable to some extent with what she was going through. And what I want to say about grief is that that light that I felt and experienced actually stayed with
me after she died. And so I still don't really have words to explain exactly what happened, but I remember when she took her last breath, it was like I just like sort of gasped almost I was sitting on the bed with her and had my hands on her body when she took her last breath, and it just it shook me in this way where I remember yelling, like sort of crying out from grief, but then also just this like gasping for air sort of feeling that I had in the moment, and then just this knowing
it was like she had left her body and now she was everywhere.
That's what it felt like.
I was really honored to have walked with her, not just in her death experience, but also planning what would happen after she passed away. And so I was the organizer of her celebration of life. And she was an artist. She'd written poetry, so we had little booklets of her poetry, and we had some of her paintings around the room.
And people really showed up for her in mass, and it was very beautiful, and a lot of people because they were so close with her, the folks that she'd chosen to participate in the ceremony, they really struggled to even just get language out. Even the person who was supposed to sort of manage the ceremony had some trouble
with that. And I just remember feeling so strong that day because I knew that I needed to get up and sort of claim this light that I was feeling, and that I felt like it had left me with just this gift that I didn't know how it was going to go out into the world, but I knew that it was important for me to stand up and be strong and sort of say like she was a person who brought love into the world, and I want to do that too. I want to continue to walk
along that path. And so that grief experience of feeling her presence it's poignant because I both felt her everywhere and she was completely gone. So the dichotomy between those two things sometimes meant that I would just be driving in the car and then completely lose it, you know. I had, I would say, a lot of moments that were really challenging in that way where grief really overtook me. And then I also had a lot of moments where
I felt her presence so clearly. I'm specifically remembering pulling over my car, I'm looking up at the sky.
It was this beautiful morning.
Sky and all of these colors, and it just looked like there was a path of clouds leading down to earth and feeling like, yeah, she's up there, and I don't know what that means, you know, up there around here wherever. But those two things are really what I remember. Both the sharpness the poignancy of wow, I cannot believe that she's not here, combined with this just sense that she's everywhere and so I'll pause there. This happened eight years ago, so I've had a lot of transitions in
my grief process since then. But I'd love to hear some of your experience with grief and why this topic is so important to you.
Well, I would love to share that. Can I ask you a question first about your story?
Yeah? Of course?
So do you still feel that light? Do you still feel that her presence as everywhere? And also she's gone, and or has that really evolved since her death up until now? For you, I do still feel her presence.
I think it's dissipated to the extent that it's not it's not as visible for me twenty four hours a day like it was immediately after she passed away. But actually, in preparation for even just this conversation, I sort of sat down and interfaced with her a little bit. I guess you could say I was going to talk about this later.
But a few months ago I had entered into this.
Training program and made really great friends with someone who was in the program who happened to be a real believer and practitioner of taro, which my grandma did tarot readings for people.
And when we cleared out her house.
I picked up a decka for tarot cars, and they're these beautiful, like very nineteen seventies style tarot cards that just smell like an old book and they're just incredible. And my friend had said, you have to use those, like She'll talk to you through these tarot cards. And so it's become something that I do to stay connected to her. I just pull them out and sort of say, okay, you know, and sometimes I have something specific that I'm thinking about, and sometimes I just want to kind of
get a feel for where I am. But I really get a sense of her when I'm doing that, just that the power of that ritual. So I definitely still feel her presence, and I do still feel the loss. And it's incredible how at certain moments it overtakes me and it's like it happened yesterday.
Yeah, Yeah, it is, isn't it? And it sneaks up when you sometimes it's a dodgy thing that seems to have an agenda in a timeline sort of of its own. Yeah, I mean, do you feel like you're grief the pain and the feeling of grief over the loss of her, You know, how has that changed? Like how would you describe it today compared with how it was in the early months after she passed.
Yeah, I mean, I think I'd like to bring in another voice here, because in preparation for this conversation, I did do a little bit of research, and one of the things that I found to be a good description of kind of how I experienced it is the difference between grief and grieving. And grief is the poignant emotion of loss. It's that overwhelming feeling that just sort of
hits us like a wave, takes our breath away. And then grieving is actually a learning process, and that learning process is how we begin to understand what life looks like without that person, what are our new habits, what are our new ways of being? And that learning impacts the way that we experience grief. And so over time, understanding, the cognitive understanding, and the new habits and all of those things actually decrease the experience of grief, or if
not decrease the poignancy. We have much more of a sense of our own capabilities to move through the world without that person, and so they interact with one another.
I want to mention too, these ideas that I'm describing are from Mary Francis O'Connor, who wrote a book called The Grieving Brain, and I read a little bit about this in an interview that she did with NPR, And that's a good analogy for my own experience because I have learned to navigate the world without her present in it, and I still feel that poignancy, but I also feel strong in my own capabilities, if that makes sense.
Yeah, it makes total sense. It makes total sense. I really connect with a lot of what you said there. Yeah, well, thank thank you for diving into that weighty but also beautiful territory. I'll share a little bit about my story, which you alluded to, is more recent. So I lost my mom October fourteenth of twenty twenty two, which, at the time we're recording this was just about three or so months ago. But it was not a sudden and
unexpected loss. It was a loss that was a long time coming and happened little by little because she had Alzheimer's disease and she was diagnosed about seven years ago, and looking back, loved ones that have this disease can sort of probably relate to this. I feel like it started even earlier than that. I'm starting to see things that made sense in a certain light at the time
makes sense in a different light now. So I feel like the grieving process for me really kind of started with that diagnosis because what I knew was a couple of things. I knew she was dying and it would take a long time, and I knew that she was not the same mother as the mother I had known for most of my life. And so that diagnosis landed on me with such a wave of disorienting sadness and
felt really overwhelming and bewildering and unbelievable. And the grief I felt it was a weight that even if I wasn't actively crying, I felt present, really present sort of all the time, and it made it hard to do life with any coherence and focus. I can remember having moments of realization, like I was sitting in a traffic
light by her house. Eric and I were her primary caretakers, so we were there two weeks of every month with her in her house, and we arranged all the care that she ended up having, so we were very involved, I'm grateful to say. And I was by her house in the car and it just hit me like I never got to say goodbye to the mother I always knew, like when was the point that she clicked out? You know, I mean, of course it was little by little, but like there must have been a tipping point, and like
when was that? How long ago was that? And I was so sad that I didn't get to tell that mom, thank you and I love you and I'm so you know that kind of thing. And then as the disease progressed and we hit different points of like where she would lose different capabilities, that loss would be present again. And it was as if, you know, I would just be met with the experience of losing her in a
very present way. My grief would be very accessible and present to me over the experience of losing her, so like you know, when she started to not be able to like speak very well or intelligibly, Like I can remember sitting in the car with Eric. We were driving home because she had entered into this delirium and it was so acute that she was going to the hospital. Her caregiver was taking there. So Eric and I were headed there from Ohio, and I remember talking to her
and saying, like, we're coming. I could not understand a word she was saying back to me, and it was just so scary because I was like, oh my gosh, is this how she talks now? Like this was seven years of moments like this, And I feel like what that equated to for me was losing her little by little and grieving that little by little along the way, as opposed to it being a one time loss at
her death. And in ways, I'm really grateful for that because it's almost like she t traded her own death for me, you know, which I know is not the truth, but like that's what it ended up being, is that I didn't lose her all at once. I lost her little by little, and it made it, I think, maybe more bearable in some ways and more agonizing in others, because it was a seven year experience as opposed to ripping the band aid off of one big loss. So it's not like there's ever really a pleasant way to
go about this. But in hindsight, it had its benefits, but then it also had its, like particular agonies. I also think I early on really was struck by how not only was I sad, but I had a really difficult time being with her grief or even projecting onto her what I thought she might be going through as
it relates to this diagnosis in her own death. And that was actually a really helpful realization because it helped ME begin to distinguish between my grief over her death and then the grief that I anticipate she might be having versus like her actual experience. They were all one big ball for me of yarn that was like initially really impossible to untangle and therefore kind of really difficult to navigate. You know, it is felled, messy and big, and I think in a lot of ways it illuminated
how kind of enmeshed we were. That's kind of when I began to really feel my way into drawing some helpful boundaries around what was mine and what I could process and feel in a healing way, and that I couldn't grieve for her. She would be walking down a road I couldn't walk with her, and I really wanted to do it all for her because she was cognitively
so limited already. But what actually ended up being was that what I saw for her anyway, is that that also helped her not necessarily feel the full weight of that diagnosis, because she didn't quite understand the full implications, I don't think, and you know, I could let go a little bit of feeling like I could do any of it for her. So there was just a lot there,
and over time that evolved in various ways. Actually, in hindsight, the first four years were the hardest for me because she was the most present and I could interact with her, and that meant things like, you know, she couldn't understand that I had gone to the grocery and bought her food, so like, she constantly felt like there was no food in the house and I constantly was having to reassure
her there was. But that was impossible. She never I mean, even if I showed it to her on the counter, she would say, well, I just went and got that, and you know, the caregivers are going to eat that, and I'll have no food by dinner time. It was an impossible thing to comfort her, right, So then I had to sort of learn how to be with the grief of not even being able to make it better for her in any way, you know, so much to it. But then when she died, I'm so grateful that I
was able to be with her. It took her a week to go through the dying process, and I was able to be with her that whole week. It felt really sacred, and I was able to be with her the moment she took her last breath, kind of like what you said, I had my hand on her chest, telling her I loved her, and that felt like such a gift to be able to see it through to the literal very end. And immediately she looked different to me after she died. It was like she was not
her anymore. And almost immediately it was like she wasn't bound by her body anymore. I almost felt closer to her than I had felt in the last seven years, because all of a sudden she was released from the disease, and like it was almost communion with her again. I felt her in me, like I could feel her presence in and with me very closely up until her funeral really, which had to be some time after. I mean, I would ask a question like help me, or what do
you think about this? And it was as if I could get an immediate answer, and it was really clear to me that like it was from her. And then after the funeral, I felt like it wasn't as close, like she wasn't in me. Anymore, she had gone somewhere else. But what I've come to know and realize is that
the connection with her still lives inside of me. Right I don't know where she is, but I do know that I can connect with her and the memory of her in a present moment way inside of me, and I can actually nurture that, and that feels like connection with her. I certainly had had some acute grief after her death. It's almost like since I was able to be present with the grief through the seven years of her slow death, I don't feel like right now I have a lot of residual grief to deal with over
that stuff. I can be very present with what's here right now, and so it feels different than I thought it would feel in that way, not quite as incapacitating as I thought it might feel to have her die. So yeah, I mean, that's my story as it stands today. Over her loss. I miss her so much and it completely boggles my mind that I don't know if I'll ever see her again in any way, shape or form, because I just don't know what happens after death. It's
staggering to me and I can't even comprehend that. Yeah, but the memory of her that I've connected with is the mother she was to me when I was a little girl, which are the happiest memories of her I have, really and so I love connecting back to that and remembering that. So yeah, I'll pause for that for a minute. Thank you for listening, Brandy. You're such a good listener.
It's nice to hear all of that story together.
I mean, you know, we've talked in bits and pieces about things, but this has been a really present experience throughout our friendship, so let's just good to hear all of that.
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I did have a question that I wanted to ask about described how the grief process has been different since she passed away. And we've talked a little bit about this before. What's been really different than what you thought? It sounds like the fact that some of that acute grief has already been experienced, that's part of it.
Are there other things that are different than what you thought? Yeah?
Yeah, I'm so grateful you asked that question. You know, one of my biggest fears my entire life up until now was losing my mom. I honestly did not know how I was going to do life like it was this big, scary, awful thing that I was terrified of for my whole life. And I think some of that comes from, like my mom lost her mom when I was just one one and a half years old from
lung cancer. The trauma of that was something I don't have a verbal memory of, but it left this imprint on me, I think, And then throughout life she would talk about how permanent death is in this life and how like time is the most precious thing we have, it's so limited you know, we just need to cherish our time together, you know, we won't always have one another. And standing on this side of her death, now, what I think she meant was just realizing the preciousness of life,
because you know, it just is so finite. But what it felt like to me was like always feeling like I wasn't spending enough time with her and that I would always regret it later, like I just couldn't see myself past her death. The anticipation of it felt like this was going to be something that is questionable if I would ever really recover from. And what it's turned
out to be is something that I can navigate. It's not to say that I don't feel deeply sad, and it's not to say that I don't feel like or I haven't had moments of feeling like my north star has like gone out, and it feels like I don't know how to be in the world without my mom in the world. She's my touchstone, you know. I mean,
it's certainly disorienting, and it's deeply sad. All of those things are absolutely true, and I'm okay, I am so grateful because coincidentally, or that's not the right word, but like, at the same time as she was dying, I was really developing and learning skills on how to be with my own uncomfortable emotions or unpleasant emotions, And so I feel like I've upskilled in a lot of ways on
how to be with this really difficult thing. So I don't want to say it did not feel as bad as I anticipated, but in some ways it did not feel as like ruinous to me as.
I thought it would feel.
But I will say that the gift of normalizing has been so abundant in the process of grief for me, learning about grief, talking about grief, talking to other people about grief, reading about grief, having language and understanding around the very universal experience of grief has been so liberating.
So I'm really excited that we're able to devote a whole episode, and it looks like it's going to be a longer episode to this topic because some of the weightiest emotional territory can be the source of some of our most painful isolation and sources of shame and also sources of suffering, you know, both inside of ourselves and
also communally, you know, as a culture. And so you know, maybe now's a good time to kind of dive into what we've learned, right, and what might be helpful to share about this experience of grief that we all inevitably at some point will go through. Right.
Yeah, Well, what you just said just about how isolating grief can be, I think that is so true for so many people, especially when the losses that we're experiencing, there aren't words to describe our relationships. So when you're talking about the loss of a parent, I think people are more likely to understand how profound that is.
That's our psychological foundation.
You know, a parent is our psychological foundation, because that's where befom attachment, and that's how we learn how safe the world is and all of these things. And losing a grandparent. So many people have different relationships with grandparents, and I know some people for whom that has been a loss of a major relationship, and then some people
for whom that's less of a loss. But I wanted to also talk about the flip side of the coin, which is grief as kind of a thing that connects us to the world more deeply.
Genny, you've experienced.
Living with grief recently, and I know you've done a lot of research and thinking about this. I'm curious what you found that either was it helpful or didn't end up feeling truthful to your experience or even truthful to many folks experience in the process of grieving.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, So I feel like, luckily, when I engaged with some reading on the topic of grief so that it would support me and help me kind of name and language some things I might be experiencing, what I found was really helpful and clarifying. And so I think where I encountered maybe some you know, so to speak, myths, was like going into my experience with grief as opposed to when I went to like learn something about it.
And I also just want to pause before I answer and say, like, I think that grief can feel and be a very individual experience, even though it's a universal human experience, right, So, like the loss of a child can probably feel very different than the loss of a parent, or you know, the loss of a friend probably feels very different than the loss of a spouse or life partner.
So I just want to hold space for whatever your listener, your experience is, to really honor that and to also name that we certainly won't capture every nuance of grief in this conversation, and that that not be evidence that you're somehow doing it wrong or that we're invalidating types of grief just because we're not naming them. I'm not able to speak to the loss of a child because I've not experienced that, but I honor that as like a really heavy burden, and.
Even you just saying that Jenny as a parent, just right.
Oh So I just want to kind of leave a lot of room for everybody's experience to be exactly as it is and to be exactly okay in that way. But there are some broad brush things that I think are maybe myths that I had about grief that have turned out to like not only not be helpful, but not really be the case. So the first is this idea of the five stages of grief. So Elizabeth Coopler Ross actually is the one that came up with what originally was intended to be the five stages of death,
not the five stages of grief. So it was the five stages one might go through when encountering and approaching one's own death that got culturally twisted in to the five stages of grief or loss. And I think we can see why in hindsight, because you know, grief is this very big, intimidating, scary, unpleasant, overwhelming kind of wall
of awful weightiness. And what better to have than like a roadmap and like a step by step Well, get through step one, and then you're in step two, and get through step two, and then you go to step three, and then at the end of step five you are done and dusted with grief. Right. Unfortunately, that's just not really the way it works. It's not so linear, and
it certainly is not so finite. So I think a more useful bereavement theory, at least that I came across, was by a man named Jay William Warden, and he talks about not four steps, but a bit of a framework around maybe how we might move through the time of when the loss occurs to a more integrated whole way of then moving forward in life, which is, you know, accepting the reality of the loss because it's really hard to accept that right at first oftentimes, and then the
process of working through the pain of grief, right that that needs to be felt, to be worked through and to be metabolized for us to really reap the actual gifts that that can potentially yield for us, and then to adjust to an environment when the deceased is missing. So how do I do life without my mom?
Right?
And that's a process. And then to find an enduring connection with the deceased while embarking on a new life right. So this helps us to move forward with attachment rather than trying to find detachment from our lost loved ones. So I really felt like that, though not a linear process, either might be maybe a more useful framework to think about some experiences we might have with relating to loss. But I think the biggest myth that I have come
to personally realize is just not the case. Is this idea that like there is a place or a time in which we're going to arrive at this like once and for all peace, healing completion, Like grief is a process. Like I took the month of December off after my mom died to sort of like check in and see, like, Okay,
what else is here that needs to come up? Let's have you come up, Let's feel you, let's heal with you, and then like let's kind of move on, you know, and what I discovered is like, that's just not as it turns out, how it works, right. And I say that with a smile on my face, because in hindsight it's like, well, of course that's not how it works.
But like I'm learning here as I go, and what I think is more true to my experiences is like, we're going to continue, right to encounter grief and encounter this loss for a long time, if not a lifetime, right, it's a long and a winding road. And that's not a sign that we're doing grief wrong or that we didn't feel our feelings when the loss happened. I mean,
it's just the way it is. Like I also will say that I'll hear people say like you'll never get over it, right, like you'll never get over this loss, You'll always carry this grief with you. And while I think there is absolute truth in that, the way I interpreted that was that I'll always feel this way about this loss, the grief will always feel this intense or
this heavy. And I think what I'm experiencing and I've experienced over the last you know, seven years, is that the loss and the grief over the loss is in me and with me. It just doesn't always feel the same as it does or at any point in time as it ever has, you know, certainly not at it's worse. Like I've heard, of course, time heals all things, but I think it's more specifically like time plus action heals.
So like time plus connecting with others in a safe way, in a supported way over this grief to be able to really process and tell our stories, you know, time plus learning how to be with the difficult pain of grief so that we can feel it without becoming completely overwhelmed or traumatized by it, you know, in a way
that feels in a repeated way traumatic. And the last thing I'll say here is like maybe a more helpful way to think about like this you'll never get over it kind of idea is because I think it could be really overwhelming to think, like at my most grief stricken, that I'm always going to feel this way, Like to me, that feels terrifying. And there's this metaphor I came across called the ball in the box, and I thought I
was really helpful. So like picture this is a box with a ball in it and also a pain button, right, so in the beginning of grief, Like the ball is huge, Like you can't move the box without the ball hitting the pain button. Right, it rattles around on its own and it just hits the button all over and over and over, and you just you can't control it. It just keeps hurting. And then over time the ball slowly
gets smaller. Right, it hits the button less and less, but when it does, it still hurts, and you know it can hurt just as much. It's better because though you can function day to day more easily. Yeah, right, But like the downside is the ball is going to randomly hit the pain button and often when you least expect it. Right, yeah, but the ball never really goes away. It just might hit less and less and you have more time to recover between hits, unlike when the ball was still enormous.
That really resonates with me.
I think that the pain of grief can be as poignant, and it's for me personally less frequent. It can surprise me and come on in moments that I wouldn't expect, and then I also have a contact now for understanding that that moment will pass and that I'll be okay. The other thing that I wanted to just name in regards to this idea of what we're told about grief or just myths around grief, is that sometimes grief can include positive experiences, or at the very least, experiences that
aren't just about how much we miss that person. I think that a lot of people have complicated relationships with others, and sometimes there can be feelings where we don't feel comfortable talking about related to having feelings of maybe relief, especially if we've sat with someone who's been suffering for a long time, or even feelings of freedom that that death process has kind of ended and now we can
begin to move into another phase. And I think that there's this myth that if we have any of those feelings that we didn't really love that person, we didn't really care about that person.
Yes, I'm so glad you named that. Yep exactly. That we make our intensity or frequency or experience of grief or lack thereof mean something about our relationship with them, Yeah, exactly.
The other thing that I struggle with is when people say things to the person who's grieving, which is like, you know, your loved one wouldn't want you to be sad, right, Like as if somehow you're letting them down by feeling sad about the loss of them, and that the way forward is to like put that behind you and be happy. And I think it comes from a person that probably just it's hard to see someone you care about deeply sad, right, But what I've discovered in my experience is that, oh
absolutely feel sad. The most maladaptive thing we can do is to like avoid our sadness. I mean, I think to enter into our sadness with support and some skill around it, like is really helpful, and avoidance is just going to make the experience of grief more painful and more protracted. That engagement with like the acute pain of grief and the struggle to emerge from it, Right, they're necessary ingredients to be positively changed by loss. If you love greatly, you're going to grieve greatly.
Yeah, And I would say that sometimes our bodies are quite intelligent, and if that grief isn't available for us moment to moment, if we're not feeling the way that we think grief is supposed to feel, sometimes that's our bodi's way of protecting us from something that we're not ready yet, especially when it comes to issues of complicated grief when maybe they are extranuating circumstances that don't make it easy to engage to the depths of what our
true experiences. And I think that this is especially true related to a lot of the losses that people might have experienced with COVID, especially in the context of the fact that many folks weren't able to be with our loved.
Ones during the time of death.
I actually lost three family members over the course of COVID, and for two of them there might have been actenuating circumstances related to they'd had COVID within the last month
and then passed away. And something that I I read was that this experience of not being present with the loved one and the death process, and then not being able to sometimes engage in some of those rituals around death that can be so important for us, actually makes it much harder for our brains to understand that the
loss has even occurred. And so I know for myself personally, I have some numbness around some of those deaths, like I wasn't able to be in that process as I would have in normal times, and so I just also want a name that a lot of folks might be experiencing grief differently, especially at this particular time that we're in in history, and I think that that's important too.
So important. Oh my gosh, I'm so glad you mentioned that. Yeah, I've found through the experience of losing my mom, like I would put pressure on myself to feel sad, and if I didn't feel sad, I was like, what does this mean? Does this mean I didn't lover really like I thought I did? Like, maybe I'm just so calloused and hard that like I could just detach from that experience of grief. I just made it mean again that like I was doing something Wronger it meant something like was wrong.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean I think that goes back to just letting the experience be whatever it's going to be. And if that's pain and grief, allowing it to be, if that's numbness, if that's a feeling of disbelief, like allowing that to be right, allowing things to be as they are, Yeah, is sort of that path to healing.
Even if that feeling is relief, even if that feeling is, you know, some sense of freedom, whatever the feeling is, that's just part of this. I think what we're sort of talking around is that grief is so complex and that in a lot of ways, it's tied into almost every emotion, including love. So I think that that's a way that we can talk about this. It's a little bit of everything, right, It's.
A little bit of everything, yes, and sometimes a lot of a lot of things. I mean, I will tell you I'm so glad you mentioned relief. I mean when my mom passed the moment she passed in the morning after, the predominant feeling I had was relief. And I was so relieved that she wasn't suffering anymore, and that I wasn't suffering over her suffering anymore, and that all the burden of caring for her, that that was gone. It felt liberating. And you're right to feel that, is okay,
and like to name that right is okay. I'm really grateful I was able to sort of allow myself to do that in that morning after. It's like, yes, it feels like freedom.
Yeah.
And you know, the sense that I got when my grandma passed away was I'm still here. I think we were both profoundly involved in the death process of another person.
And there is this. It's actually called something and I can't remember, like a secondary death experience or something like that.
I can't remember exactly the term, but essentially it's the process of sort of partnering with someone who is going through something and having that level of empathy and experience as you say, they are walking alone. That's one thing that death made was made very clear to me through the process, is that this is something she had to go through on her own.
And you named that. But when you walked so closely with someone, it feels like your world. And then when that experience does come to a close, I was sort of left with this sort of gasp like, oh my god, I'm still here. Yes, I'm alive, you know, like feeling my body like I'm alive. And then it kind of began this.
This is going to sound a little bit strange, but like a second life experience for me, you know, Richard Rohre talks about the following upward experience. It felt like my second half of life started. And I see that as a profound gift that she left with me.
I share that experience. I'm so happy you name that. I too, Like I usually said a word as an intention for the year instead of resolutions, and this year it's live. That's my word because of what occurred to me is like, oh, it's not over for me yet. Oh my gosh, I don't know how much time I have left, but like I want to push past my fears and be brave and not you know, regret things that I didn't do because I let fear keep me small.
Like I just had this sense of like the Okay, let's push ourselves to live life and not passively take it for granted.
Right.
Yeah. And you know the other interesting thing I experienced what you're making me think of now, is I had this feeling when my mom was gone was like, all of a sudden, it was like, you know how like when you're a kid. I did a lot of sneaking out when I was a teenager, like so much sneaking.
Out too, and your jan I don't know how I'm alive today, Like how I how did I not?
Oh good?
So much sneaking out. But it was that thrill of like your parents don't know, like your parents don't know where to be found and you're free. They're not around, And I had this also brilliant expect experience of like, oh my gosh, she's not on this earth anymore, have anything to say about anything I do, Like, there's a real freedom there. I just was caught off guard by that.
Yeah. Yeah, Actually there's a quote that I'd love to share with you.
And I'm feeling or wondering if maybe this is leading us into a second episode where maybe in our second episode we talk about some of the things that are really helpful for us in regards to this grieving process and some of the strategies and the tools that have really supported us to be where we are, And I think this could be a great lead into that conversation. So this is a quote from Mirabi Star in the book God of Love, and Mirabi is a spiritual teacher.
She's actually a teacher.
Who identifies as interspiritual, and so basically what that means is that she feels a deep reverence for all spiritual traditions and feels a draw and a calling to engage within each of those faith traditions. And so her spirituality encompasses kind of a variety of different faith experiences, you know, including Buddhism, including Judaism, Muslim faith tradition, and a variety of others, but it's the practices.
That she feels really drawn toward.
And she has some very rich teachings about grief because she experienced that absolutely devastating grief of a loss of a child that we've a few times just alluded to in this podcast. And I just want to say to any of our listeners who have experienced that poignant grief that I really can't imagine moving through it. I think it's just one of the hardest that folks can possibly experience because it feels like a tragedy. It's something that
no parent should ever go through. And so Mirabi lost her daughter at age sixteen in an accident, and she writes about grief in this really just profound way, and I just want to read this passage from her. She says, your senses become heightened. Everything becomes almost unbearably beautiful, the rain on the tin roof a columbine, pushing through the crack in the walkway, a slice of buttered toast. Your world has come undone, and you have never felt so alive.
You do not dare to speak this madness to anyone. They have not yet discovered what you have. That grief is proportionate to love and exponentially enlarges the capacity of our souls, making enough room for it.
All. You did not ask for this gift. Who would choose to walk around without skin on her heart permeable to the suffering of every passing creature, Yet, if pressed, you would have to admit that it's worth it. As a sensitive person.
This gets to the root of something that is the most true about grief for me, which is that life being a human is about where these two things meet. It is about where love, this capacity to feel so much connection and presence with the people around us and meets this knowledge that this is all impermanent. And Buddhists describe this as anietzsche right, the arising and passing away, and that arising and passing.
Away can do two things.
It can either make us numb out because it is too much to know, or it can bring us to this point of a liveness that is just profound because it enlarges our capacity to be present with the experience of love, while also holding this sense that this is not going to last forever, that this love that we feel is going to at some point cause us unbearable pain. And I think that that truth is what grief allows us to touch into you if we can really be with it.
So beautifully said Absolutely, amen. I think that's a wonderful place to pause. And let's call this part one of our Grief Conversation, and in part two, we're going to dive into some of the important truths we've discovered about grief, some of the really useful, helpful ways we've learned to sort of navigate this terrain for ourselves, and the things that have come in research that we've found helpful and supportive.
So I hope you'll come back listeners for part two, and thank you so much for being with us in this heartfelt point conversation.
Thank you listeners for being in this space with us. I know my heart right now is just burning with just that sense of connection that we feel when we open our hearts to the space of where loss and love meet one another. And if folks in this community right now are experiencing grief, I just like to take a moment to recognize that you're not alone in the process.
Right now, I'm holding my hand over my heart and I hope that you can feel that sense of being connected to another person who's also experienced loss.
Both Jenny and I are holding that space.
All right till next time.
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