Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 240: Why We're All Grieving - and How To Deal With It | David Kessler

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

Most, if not all, of us are experiencing a cocktail of challenging emotions these days - whether in the background or in the foreground of our psyche. Speaking personally, I thought my primary issue was anxiety, but I had a vague sense that maybe it was more than that. Then I read an excellent, widely-circulated article that put a name to at least one aspect of my nameless, miasmatic dread. The article was from the Harvard Business Review, and the headline was, "That Discomfort You're Feeling is Grief." The article featured an interview with a grief expert named David Kessler, who explained that there are many flavors of grief. Some of us are grieving people we've lost, but millions more are grieving a way of life or a sense of security that seems lost - or we're experiencing anticipatory grief about an uncertain future. Not only was it helpful for Kessler to name this phenomenon, but he also had a bunch of excellent thoughts about how to manage it, including the exhortation to find meaning in this mess. In fact, that's the name of his new book: Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. So we invited him on. Here he is: David Kessler. Where to find David Kessler online: Website: https://grief.com/ Social Media: Twitter: @IamDavidKessler / https://twitter.com/iamdavidkessler Instagram: @iamdavidkessler / https://www.instagram.com/iamdavidkessler/ Facebook: David Kessler / https://www.facebook.com/IamDavidKessler/ Books Mentioned: Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief / https://www.amazon.com/Finding-Meaning-Sixth-Stage-Grief/dp/1501192736 On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss / https://www.amazon.com/Grief-Grieving-Finding-Meaning-Through/dp/0743266293 Other Resources Mentioned: David's Online Grief Group / https://www.facebook.com/groups/DavidKessler David's Harvard Business Review Article / https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief Paul Denniston & Grief Yoga / https://griefyoga.com/ Bessel van der Kolk / https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/ Elizabeth Kubler Ross / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_K%C3%BCbler-Ross Elizabeth Kubler Ross Foundation / https://www.ekrfoundation.org/ Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App access for Health Care Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/david-kessler-240 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. For ABC, to baby this is kiki Palmer on amazon music or wherever you get your podcast from abc this is the 10% happier podcast i'm dan heres hey guys most if not all of us are experiencing a cocktail of challenging emotions these days whether in the background or in the foreground of our psyches. Speaking personally, I kind of assumed since this pandemic began that my primary issue was anxiety, but I also had a vague sense that maybe it was more than that. Then I read an excellent, widely circulated article that put a name to at least one aspect of my hitherto nameless, measematic dread.

The article was from the Harvard Business Review and the headline was this, that discomfort you're feeling is grief. A bell went off. The article featured an interview with a grief expert named David Kessler, who explained that there are many flavors of grief. Some of us are grieving people we've lost, but millions more are grieving a loss of a sense of security or a way of life that seems to have vanished overnight. Not only was it helpful for Kessler to name this phenomenon, but he also had a bunch of

excellent thoughts about how to manage it, including the exhortation to find meaning in this mess. In fact, that's the name of his new book, Finding Meaning, the sixth stage of grief. So we invite a Kessler on, and you're about to hear it. One note before we start though, Kessler is extremely busy helping a lot of people during this pandemic. So at one point, you're going to hear us get interrupted by an emergency call. Don't be too surprised by that. That caveat issued, here we go, here is David Kessler. Well, nice to meet you virtually. Good to be with you. So I'm curious about you're just to start briefly with your own personal background. How and why did you become interested in the subject of grief? So, you know, I often feel it is a profession that chooses you. You don't choose it.

When I was 13 years old, I had a mother who I grew up with that was in and out of hospitals and was ill. And when she got very sick, she had to go to the intensive care unit at a hospital a few hours away and At a hotel across the street while she's dying in the intensive care unit where I wasn't allowed to see her because I was 13 and not 14 one of the first mass shootings in the US happened so For me as a 13-year-old within few days, I experience the death of my mother, as well as a mass shooting and seeing police officers and first responders and hotel guests being killed.

And it's one of those things that I think either paralyzes you or turns you into a grief expert. And I'm grateful that you know, it certainly changed the trajectory of my life and I've tried to go on and use that to help people in all different situations What a horrifying scenario you just described just out of I guess maybe morb curiosity, this mass shooting, where was this? This was New Orleans. One of the first mass shootings in the US, it went on for 13 hours. It was really unbelievable for, I mean, unbelievable for everyone, obviously. But, you know, for me as a child, I had been bored in a waiting room of a hospital.

So at first this was like, oh, some interesting actions happening and the fire trucks responded to what they thought at first was a fire and then shooting began. And it's interesting that after that happened, after my father finally got us back to the hospital. happened after my father finally got us back to the hospital and then they killed the active shooter. And it's used by police departments now as lessons in what to do, what not to do, because it was so poorly handled, even the chief of police was killed. So when that happened, after my mother died, I literally was that day on my first plane ride. My father must have told the pilot, the pilot as a nice gesture during the flight, brought

me up, instructed me on how to fly the plane during flight. And you know, for a 13 year old while he was doing a nice gesture in my mind, there had been a mass shooting. My mother is dead. And now I'm going to like maybe, you know, crash a plane with 148 people. So it was a lot for a child's mind. And interestingly enough, people will say to me, I don't get you. You're a grief specialist. You worked in hospitals,

in management. You do mental health. You do aviation disasters. What's all that about? And I say it's about those three days. All those places I was so out of control, I tried to find some control in my life. and now I'm able to help people in these horrific situations. That makes a lot of sense. It's incredibly sad, but it makes a lot of sense. So speaking of difficult times we're in one right now with this pandemic and then the associated economic decline, although I think decline is not, doesn't really capture what's

happening to the economy right now. And there was an excellent interview with you in the Harvard Business Review, which got a lot of people's attention, certainly got my attention. And you talked about the varieties of grief. I hadn't been thinking that what, maybe what I, one of the things I was experiencing, along with anxiety, was a kind of grief. And you talked about some of the various flavors of grief. Can you hold forth on that?

So we often think of grief as the death of a loved one, and that certainly is the worst grief we experience in this lifetime. But we also experience grief when there's a job loss, when a marriage ends, when we move, emptiness, there's many, many different griefs. And of course, what I was seeing that led to that article is so many people were saying, I don't know what's wrong with me. I burst into tears last night or I woke up this morning with this heaviness. And really what they were

describing was grief. And I noticed as I began to say to people, that's griefier feeling and we named it. It made them realize they're not crazy. They could begin to understand what they're feeling. And to help them see that what they were grieving is the world we were literally just in two weeks ago that now is unfortunately gone forever. I mean this is going to pass but that world we all knew is what we're grieving and of course the world's changing so rapidly, not only do we

have that collective grief, but we're dealing with actual grief now of death. So it's a mixture of many griefs at once. I want to talk about the kind of grief that comes with losing a loved one in a moment, but let's let's talk about what I think is probably the more common flavor of grief, notwithstanding the fact that as we record this, we've surpassed 10,000 deaths in this country, but I think probably the more common flavor of grief in the country right now and in the world is the grieving for normalcy. What would you recommend be done about that? What can we do to handle it? Yeah, I think that first thing is the naming of it to understand that is what we're doing. where we can find some control. We have to accept where we are to deal with it.

And I think we have to feel our feelings, whether it's anger or sadness. One of the negative byproducts of the self-help movement is we're the first generation that has feelings on feelings. We're sad, but we think we shouldn't be sad. We're angry, but we don't have a right to be angry, and we're judging and commenting our feelings on our feelings rather than just feeling them.

If we felt the sadness, it will pass through us. If we feel the anger, it will pass through us. But we become a society now of these half-felt emotions that we spend enormous mental energy suppressing. And if we just allowed them, we would cry. We would get angry. And then we'd be able to move into the next feeling. Have you ever heard of the Buddhist parable of the second arrow?

Tell me it please. Okay, so I'll probably mangle it, but it's something the effect of some guys walking through the forest gets hit by an arrow. Obviously that sucks, it hurts, and he immediately launches into a whole inner dialogue of why am I always the guy who gets hit by an arrow? This is going to ruin my dinner plans blah blah blah. And that per the Buddha is the second arrow, which we insert voluntarily. A phrase that's been used by, I believe, the legendary meditation teacher Sylvia Borshti who was recently on this show was, pain is mandatory, suffering is optional. That's what came to mind when you talked about us having feelings about our feelings. Right. And I actually use that phrase a lot in one of the books that I wrote because I always tell people, the pain of the loss, I can't take away. It belongs to you.

I can't take away. It belongs to you. That pain is important. Suffering is what our crazy mind does. You know, our monkey mind, the judgment of our feelings, the judgment of the story. You know, the quote that I love is Annie Lamont who says, my mind is like a bad neighborhood that I never want to go into alone. You know, I joke. I live two blocks from an ATM. There's times it would be safer to walk to the ATM at 3 a.m. than to go into my mind at 3 a.m. Because our mind, you would think in grief whatever the loss is. You would think our mind would be so loving and so compassionate. And yet the reality is, our mind judges us in these moments. You know, our judgmental mind doesn't turn off. Our story-making mind doesn't turn off because it's grief.

You used a phrase in the aforementioned Harvard Business Review interview. Our emotions need motion. Correct. So for example, we need, as we process our feelings, our emotions, what happens is the word people will often use is they've become stuck. And that actually describes it well, because we know that feeling of being stuck emotionally.

So our emotions need to move. You know, I often talk about, we're trying to find our balance after a loss occurs. So we're trying to find our balance again and our remind people, what was it like when you first tried to learn to ride a bike? What did you need? You needed a little nudge.

You needed someone, your dad, your mom, your caregiver to push you forward. If you stood on your bike and just tried to learn, you would fall over. To find balance, we need motion. And so to rebalance ourselves, we need motion. That's why I'm so taken with the work of people who bring the physicalness to this,

because we need the physicalness. Whenever I do retreats, there's a physical component. There's a man I work with Paul Deniston, who does grief yoga, that's so important. There's also, you know, best of vandicole's work. A lot of people who bring the movement to allow our emotions to get out. Would it be safe to say that even if I don't know how to do grief yoga, just doing regular yoga or running outside or taking a walk if I'm not physically

able, would be helpful? Absolutely, absolutely. And I'll tell you with grief yoga, 80-year-olds do it in a chair. And one of the things that Paul has done so brilliantly is he will take the feelings and connect them to our body and how to release the anger, how to release the regrets. So it's really interesting, anyone who wants to know about him, you can find that at griefyoga.com. It's brilliant work that's helped to a lot of people.

I want to explore further this idea of feeling our feelings. It's not something that many people in our culture are taught how to do. This is a podcast where we talk a lot about meditation. I would imagine given what I know about you, you would agree that meditation is a good way to feel your feelings in a way that the feelings don't own you so much. Absolutely. And the idea of the ownership is such an important one because think of what's happening to folks. We are isolating. We have these feelings we suppress in our life daily. Now we're stuck at home with all our feelings bubbling up and we've had no idea how to feel them. So when you talk about,

you know, they are kind of owning us and how do we find some peace with those feelings? So meditations useful, I mean, in my view, where you sit, and I understand from the HBR interview that you've got some background here too, where you sit and you tune into the emotion, but in this interesting way where you're not fighting or feeding it, you're kind of investigating it dare I say journalistically and that allows you to have a different relationship to it. Absolutely and one of the things that I do with people when they're dealing with horrific losses and trauma and post-traumatic stress and all the things that happen is I will talk to them.

People are often stuck in the past. They're witnessing the trauma. They're stuck in the traumatic event that's still occurring. Or they're picturing the horrificness of the future where they're going to remain lonely and remain in pain. So part of my work is to help them come into this moment, which is very much meditative. How can we find the safety of this moment and realize the traumatic event has ended?

And the wreckage of our future may not happen. In this moment, I'm okay. I would imagine another way to feel our feelings would be to connect with other human beings we trust and talk about it, that could include friends or family members or even professionals. But how do we do that in an era of social distancing? I think we have to find virtual ways to connect.

I think we have to find ways to help one another. We have to do FaceTime. We have to do virtual reality. We have to connect this way. You know, one of the things is, I can actually have a pretty full connection with you this way. One of the things is I can actually have a pretty full connection with you this way. I mean, I feel like I'm getting to connect with you. I think we have forgotten how to do it. I've made a joke about those instruments we use to text on. They

actually have phone capabilities. I sort of remind people you can call and talk to someone Yeah, I agree you can call and talk to somebody and I think video is even better but Remembering to do it is incredibly important and using it as an opportunity to Get past small talk. I mean small talk is useful too But if you're experiencing big difficult emotions I in my experience talking about it either with somebody you

trust or with a paid professional is a tremendous way along with meditation, physical movement, all the other things to feel it, metabolize it and be able to grow. And our grief needs to be witnessed. We need to witness each other. We need to have our story witnessed, our pain witnessed. Hey, Dan, hang on. Okay, this is the point where Kessler gets interrupted by that emergency call. Somebody in his community who needs help. We'll talk about this. There's an online grief group that we've had and we've started recently because of that because people don't have nowhere to go. So this is part of what we're dealing with. But we're on it now. So let's talk about this online.

Who started the online grief group? Where could we access it? So one of the things that happened is I literally was on a 30 city book tour when the pandemic hit. I was like on city 21 in Anaheim, the day that Disneyland closed and kids were crying in the lobby. And so when I got back and the tour had to abruptly end like all our lives did, I suddenly was getting emails from people who were saying, I'm in grief and my local group at the hospital, at the my place of worship, at the hospice was canceled, what do I do?

And so when that happened, I thought, I've got to do something. And then I talked to a woman on the phone who, a week earlier, her husband had died after 40 years, and she's sitting alone in the house. And I thought this can't be, so I immediately started an online Facebook group for people who were dealing with grief after a loved one has died. And we had 1,000 people the first day.

And I go in there twice a day, we have live check-ins, and it's a lot of peer-to-peer support. Well, it's incredible that you're doing this work. And it really brings to mind we were talking about paid professionals. I worry. I don't have any evidence to support this, but I do worry that the mental health

needs in this country, grief and otherwise, are going to be so tremendous as this pandemic progresses and even well after it ends. Do we have the mental health infrastructure in this country to meet those needs? No, and we haven't had them for a long time. And I think we're going to see that. You know, one of my biggest groups that I talk to and teach are therapists and we have amazing counselors in this country who are so dedicated. And you know, they're in this situation where if someone's having self-harming thoughts, they have to report it. And then once they report it, you know, we have a system that will put

someone in a hole for 36 hours, the people in our hospitals, tell us those are inadequate, and that they are unable to really address the problems. So no, we're not prepared for this. That's really scary to me. Let's go back to grief because I know from doing a little bit of research on you, you worked closely with the legendary Elizabeth Kubler Ross on the stages of grief, the concept of the stages of grief. Can you walk us through those stages? So Elizabeth Kubler Ross in her groundbreaking book on Death and Dying in 1969, described these experiences that people often go through as they're dying.

And over the years, people were informally, rightly or wrongly, adapting them for grief. And Elizabeth and I had written one book together called Life Lessons. And we had often talked about how these stages are getting misused. So we wrote a book on grief and grieving where we adapted her stages for death to grief. We literally on page one said, to grief, we literally on page one said, they are not a map for grief, they're not linear. Your grief is as unique as your fingerprint. There's no one way to grieve. And unfortunately, still over the years,

they have kind of gotten reduced to five easy steps for grief. And it's interesting once in a while on Facebook or Instagram someone will say, oh you and Elizabeth Kubler Ross are just trying to tidy up and meet Nart grief and get us to follow your rules. And you know I can tell you one of the things is Elizabeth Kubler Ross was a rule breaker. So there's no you know for people who don't know what grief is going to be like. The idea that there's some loose scaffolding that may help them normalize what they're

feeling, the stages are really wonderful for, but they're not the only model, no one right way to grieve. I suspect it goes back to what you said at the outset of this interview that naming our what we're experiencing can reduce our powerlessness, can give us some to hold. Absolutely. And, you know, like I think of how it continues to normalize it. I mean, one of the things I was going through my Facebook feed one day, and I saw, you know, a quote, a meme, a photo, and it said, for every day you smile, you

get another day of life. And for every day you're angry, you lose another day. And I thought, oh, that pisses me off. And I realized how we're such an anti-anger society. And yet it is a natural emotion. And it's a natural emotion in grief. So that's why people go, I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm so angry. I'm like, oh my goodness, it's so common. It's a stage of grief. To normalize it, I mean obviously we want to make sure with our anger we release it in healthy ways and safe ways. We don't want to harm ourselves or harm anyone else or break anything, but we need to get our anger out in a healthy ways. So with the caveat, which is very well taken,

that there's no neat and tidy order for grief, can you go through the stages so that we understand them? Absolutely. There's denial. I cannot believe this is happening. Anger, I'm furious this is happening. Can I stop you as a denial for a second? Because I think we've seen a lot of denial with the grief, the culture, the nationwide, the global grief we've seen in the face of the pandemic. Sure. In fact, I can literally do them around the pandemic. So, let's do them around the pandemic. Denial, I cannot believe this is happening in our modern society. There's no way this is going to be happening to us in our world now. Anger, really, are you serious? I can't go out. I can't do things.

You know, I'm furious about that. Bargaining. Okay, let me get this straight. If I stay home for two weeks, then everything goes back to normal, right? That's the deal. Depression. Wait, this could go on longer.

Are you kidding? This is so sad. And acceptance. All right, this is our new reality. What can I do to make this work? And if people hear that and say, okay, I see myself in those, but I notice that I'm cycling through them. Maybe I hit acceptance for a nanosecond, but then I'm bad at it.

That's exactly how they work. They're not neat and tidy at all. Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after this. Hey, I'm Aresisha and I'm Brooke and we're the hosts of Wunderys Podcast Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance.

But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers. Opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Let's talk about the stage of acceptance because it sounds like acceptance. Well, we may not abide there permanently

as we cycle through. That sounds like a key and kind of powerful stage. It is, you know, when we can find acceptance, and I always tell people, there's not one big acceptance. You know, it's not like, oh, I found it in the top drawer, who knew it was in there. We have a hundred little moments of acceptance, whether it's acceptance in this pandemic,

or it's acceptance when someone dies, we accept little by little, but as we come into acceptance, you're correct, that's where the power lies, that's where we can find what we have control over and let go of what we don't have control over. And freedom is found in reality. You added another stage, which is meaning.

Can you talk about that? Sure. I had been fascinated by Victor Frankl's work. And I was so curious about this concept of how, in a concentration camp, do you appreciate a sunset when everyone's going to die? How do you appreciate bread? How do you see the beauty in that?

How do you see the light in the darkness? And I was very curious about that concept and grief. And I had written a couple of chapters on it to do something with at some point. And then a little over three years ago, my younger son unexpectedly died. And it was as brutal as anything I've ever been through and the most brutal. No matter what I knew is a grief expert. It didn't help. People would say, what's it like for the grief expert to be dealing with that kind of loss? I would say the grief expert isn't dealing with it.

The father who has to bury a child is. I was just thrust back into the epicenter of grief. And as the months went on, my mind would observe, you know, my grief. And it would say, oh, look at you. You're an anger. Look at, you know, and I would see, and almost question like everything I've been teaching all these years, is it really true? And I notice when I got to beginning to have moments of acceptance, I just thought there is no way I can just stop an acceptance. I just can't accept that my son David has gone and leave it there. I needed to find meaning. I needed to find meaning for his life and for mine. And so I began talking to people and interviewing people

about meaning after a spouse had died, a child had died, a parent had died. And meaning doesn't take away the pain, but it becomes a cushion that we deal with to our pain. I want to interrogate that just a little bit because I'm just imagining my son dying. I have one son, he's five. And I wonder whether the attempt to layer meaning on top of it might feel like just an injurious chore that on top of an event that I may choose to view as cruel and unexplainable. Do you see where I'm getting at here? I don't know if I'm articulating this. It does feel cruel. It does feel unexplainable and I'll tell you you can't

arrive at meaning one more one minute before you're ready. You know it's something we can arrive at in our own time and for me I needed meaning to it just couldn't be a senseless death. It just couldn't be one more person who dies in the world. It was too meaningful to me. And so meaning became how I was able to live with it. I do think that one of the surprises

about this new book coming out, is people will walk up to me and go, oh my gosh, I just got the book. I, you know, I can't find the meaning yet. And I'll go, when did your love one die? And they'll go last month. And I got, oh my goodness, there's no meaning yet. It's just pain. I mean, a lot of the book is helping you go through the pain. And then eventually you can interlace that with meaning. But one doesn't take away the other. What kind of meaning did you were you able to find in the wake of the death of your son, for which, by the

way, I'm very sorry. Thank you. I, um, you know, when I finished writing the book, I just sat here at this very computer where I'm sitting, and I just burst into tears. And I just said to myself my prayer and my meaning at that moment was, I hope that this book will help others the way it has helped me. And I, you know, and the meaning kept coming. It was just so, the Kubla Ross family, the Kubla Ross foundation giving me permission

to add a six-stage to her iconic stages was amazing. And I'll tell you, another big piece of meaning for me, Dan, is my son in kindergarten. And you'll experience this if you haven't already. My younger son, they gave out awards to everyone in kindergarten. And my son got voted the most likely to become a helper. And in his life, he did not get to become that helper. In his death, he is helping so many people around the world and his

story and what I learned from his and so many other experiences. They're getting to help and that's an amazing meaning for me. It doesn't take away my pain, it doesn't make his physical death any less. I'm not in any way pouring pink paint on a horrific situation. And I think it also relates to what we're going through. You know, we're going to come out of this. Many of us with post-traumatic stress or post-traumatic growth. And so that's part of what this reality is. That's the meaning. If we can find meaning, meaning is the post-traumatic growth. And it doesn't mean it's worth it. But I want

people to know what we're in is horrible. It is temporary. There is no storm that doesn't end, there is no night that is not followed by a day, and we can grow from this, and it is so tragic people are going to die, and I hope that we find a way to make meaning to honor their lives through this. What do you think it would look like for us to find meaning in this current pandemic? I think it's about finding meaningful moments. You know, there's not just the same way

there's not a big acceptance, there's not a big meaning to be found. So when we talk about how can we find those little meaningful moments that are going to turn into the post-traumatic growth rather than the post-traumatic stress? For example, we're having a meaningful moment right now. You know, this is meaningful that we're getting to connect. I live on a street here in Los Angeles. I knew two of my neighbors kind of by their first names. Everyone on my block is now on a text chain. We say someone's going to the grocery store. Does the elderly man at the end of the block need anything? All of a sudden

that becomes meaningful. Our block became meaningful. I live on a street that like so many families live on with young kids, and you never see them, because they're in the house, they're in play dates. For the first time, I walked down the street with my dog, and I literally see parents in their front lawns playing with their kids.

That's meaningful. So if we can name the grief, name the pain, but also name these meaningful little moments, you know, one of the things is we think our work is to make the pain and the sadness smaller, our grief smaller, but the reality is we have to become bigger. I really hear you on the connections in the community. I see that in my own little world too. I don't want to be polyanna and I'm sure you don't want to be either. But can you imagine ways in which we come out of this situation having grown in abiding

ways? We always have whether it's after the Holocaust, how we've grown the lessons, you know, after 9-11, how we've grown, how we've learned, and I'll tell you, it doesn't mean, oh, it was worth it. Whatever lessons growth we had after 9-11 of the Holocaust, we'd rather not have those lessons, those that growth. But when the pain occurs, we don't want to be a victim of it either. We don't want, you know, whether it's death or a pandemic, I always say, don't give death any more power than it already has. You know, death has the power to take a life. It does not have the power to destroy

our love for someone, our relationship with someone, our life after loss. That's where we can find our power to live a life. You know, in this pandemic, there's no words to describe the heartbreak that I would imagine is going to happen. And afterwards, I want to make sure we live a life that honors everyone who died, that creates a better world in their honor. I mean, I don't pretend to know what we're going to get out of this, whether we're going to learn new things about viruses that are going to help humanity down the road or whether we're going to realize we are a global community or we're going to take care of each other. I mean, I don't know what will happen, what those meanings will be, but I know I want to work

towards those meanings. You're talking about, you've been talking about the kind of grief we're going to see in this pandemic and I've been reading accounts of people having to say goodbye to their loved ones over FaceTime if they're lucky enough to say goodbye at all given that loved ones family members not allowed to be in the hospital with COVID patients. Given how horrifying that is, what kind of special circumstances to the grieving process do you think we're going to have to account for in this situation? Well, there is tragedy on tragedy. My first book, The Needs of the Dying, I talked about the need to not die alone. And here, people are having to die alone and families cannot be with their loved ones.

families cannot be with their loved ones. So, you know, unfortunately, the death shapes the grief. And so, there's so much added pain that you cannot be with your loved one. One of the most profound things is that idea that we can hold their hands at the end of life and that people are not getting to do that. And it is going to complicate the grief later. It is going to be so much harder for people to deal with this. And then on top of it, we have rarely had situations, whether it be 9-11 or the AIDS epidemic, that we were not able to bury or dead, that we were not able to gather, and we're gonna be seeing more and more people who are not gonna be able to have a funeral on Memorial.

That's another thing that will compound it. That's why, you know, it's so important with that online group I have for people in grief or all the other things that are being set up that in our physical disconnection, we can still create community. When that online group I have, I say we are virtually holding each other's hands. You and I have seen that right during our podcast here today.

We're trying to virtually be here. I have a team of people who are trying to help strangers around the world to make sure, as they're dealing with the most isolating experience of life, which is grief. We're also telling them, we witness it, we see you and you're not alone. What's the role of hope in the grieving process?

You know, hope is a really important factor. Many people will say things like, I've lost all hope. And I will tell them that the death of your loved one is physically permanent. That is just the harsh reality. Your loss of hope is temporary. I want to remind people their loss of hope is temporary and it can be found again. So when someone says they are feeling hopeless, I will say, I have hope for you.

I have hope for you. I will hold your hope until you can find it again. That hope is our constant companion in life. Sometimes it's harder to see. Sometimes it's harder to feel, but I believe it's there. And if we can't feel it ourselves, other people can hold it for us. One other factor I want to ask you about related to grieving and related to the pandemic is patience. We've had to deal with it just in the recording of this podcast. We've been interrupted by emergency, by lawn mower,

by a few technical difficulties, and all of us now are having to deal with patients on matters small and large, and large like when are we going to get the testing, when are we going to get out of this shutdown? So can you just free associate on the subject of patients? Very, very hard, very challenging. I think that we have to really sit with our circumstances

and really ask ourselves, what is in my control and what is out of my control? And what can I do within my control and how can I release the things that are not? And I think that's really hard because we have pictures of how things should look like. We want things to move fast, we want them to be smooth, we want to have control.

And this is a world that's out of our control. This has been an excellent interview. Is there anything that I should have asked it, but didn't give you an opportunity to talk about? Well, one thing I just want to say and go back to, and I'm talking now is a bereaved parent. You know, when people are saying their wedding has been canceled or a graduation was canceled and they're in grief about that. We want to compare it and we

want to say to the person whose wedding was canceled, well no one's died, you know, so you're just going to postpone your wedding, and we minimize their grief. And I want to say, you know, as a brief parent, you canceling your wedding and you having grief over that, just not take away from my grief. In fact, I honor these smaller griefs. You know, there's no comparing in grief. Grief is a no-judgment zone. So I think, you know, as we watch our kids' disappointment, we have to validate it. They get to be disappointed.

If someone's canceling their wedding that they've been planning since they were five years old, we have to validate that as a real grief. It doesn't take away from my grief. It doesn't take away from a death. Everyone gets to have their own experience of death. People go, which is the worst grief? And I always go, the worst grief is your grief.

The worst grief is whatever you're going through in the moment. So I want to give people the space to grieve and feel whatever they're feeling because like I mentioned That's where our freedom is in reality that if we can acknowledge what is We can find a way to live through it. We are very very resilient and We will come through this life will go on well said I really appreciate you spending time with us. Thank you.

Of course, and I hope if there's anyone out there who's isolated alone in grief, they go to grief.com, they check out our online grief group. And if you've been through grief and you're doing okay, please consider coming in and being an elder in the group to help so many who are going to be dealing with loss because this is one of those collective times for us to really practice loving one another and caring for one another and supporting one another. Big thanks to David Kessler. Really appreciate him spending time with us given how busy he is. As a reminder, his new book book is called finding meaning the sixth stage of grief Available wherever you get your books One big ask before we close here, you know, we're working extremely hard to create great and meaningful and useful episodes

during this pandemic A way that you can help us is to share them as widely as possible. If there is an episode that's particularly useful to you, if you can share it with a friend or put on social media, that's a great way for us to grow our audience. We want to reach and help as many people as possible. So thank you for that. And before we go, just speaking of all the work we're doing, I want to thank the people who are doing the vast majority of that work and the man leading the charge is Samuel Johns, our producer. Jackson Beerfelt is our editor, Maria Wartell is our production coordinator.

We also get a ton of useful wisdom from our 10% colleagues. Ben Rubin, Jen Poignant, Nate Toby. Also a big thank you to our ABC Connects, Ryan Kessler and Josh Kohan. We'll see you on Wednesday for a fresh episode. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.

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