The One You Feed - How to Navigate Grief: Myths, Truths, and Practical Advice (Part 2)

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

After the loss of someone we love, we’re inevitably faced with the question, “How do I live with this grief?” In this episode of “Something to Normalize,” Ginny and Brandi offer some answers to this question. Through research and personal experiences with grief, they share strategies, powerful bits of wisdom, and practical tools they’ve discovered. They also discuss how they’ve applied these tools in their own lives, and what was most helpful in their process. This is the second in a two-part series on grieving. Click here to listen to part 1.  In This Episode, Ginny & Brandi Discuss: How grief is more than just the loss of a person; it is also the loss of our identity as it relates to that person  What opportunities grief offers us— like forming a new relationship with the memories of a loved one How rituals can have an important role in helping us process our grief Ways to navigate the ever-changing nature of grief To learn more, click here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We all know that good habits are ways that we bring what we value into the world, and we each have our own list of what matters to us. Maybe you want to feel more energetic, improve your relationships, have a tidier home, cook more instead of eating out four nights a week. Whatever habit you want to build, it's entirely possible to make it happen. But if you feel under-equipped and overwhelmed to make real sustainable change, you are not alone. And that's why I've made my free masterclass open to everyone and available to watch anytime now. It's called Habits That Stick, How to Be Remarkably Consistent No Matter What Goal You Set. You can grab it at oneufeed.net

slash masterclass. Again, it's free and you can watch it whenever it works for you. Go to oneufeed.net slash masterclass. 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 regularly scheduled One You Feed podcast episodes you are used to hearing here. And now, I'm proud to present to you something to normalize. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Welcome everybody. And hello, Brandy. Hello. Good morning. Good morning. We are picking up with part two of our episode talking about and normalizing the experiences related to grief. So if you have not listened to part one, the previous episode, we really hope you'll go back and do so because this episode, part two, doesn't necessarily stand alone. It's really connected to what we shared in the previous episode in part one.

But I get ahead of us. I get ahead of myself and us here. Let's just real quick go back and say who we are. So I'm Ginny Gay. I'm a certified mindfulness and meditation teacher who helps people become more aware of and work skillfully with their thoughts, their emotions and experiences so they feel less stress and struggle and more freedom, more joy, and more ease. And I am Brandi Lust, and I'm a speaker and consultant who helps organizations create safe spaces for people to share their truth so that they can create change. And welcome, everyone. Hello, podcast friends. Yes. Hello, podcast friends. So we left off last time exploring the realm of like some of the myths we've encountered

about grief and things that we've maybe heard that our personal experiences didn't necessarily align with or fit or match up with. And so we thought we would start part two of this episode with what some of the important truths are that we've discovered in our research, in our reading about grief. You want to start off, Brandy? I'd love to. And I'm actually going to return to an article that I referenced in the last episode by Mary Frances O'Connor. And she wrote the book, The Grieving Brain. and she wrote the book, The Grieving Brain. And so in an interview with NPR, she talks about how grief is not just about the person that we've lost. It's also about how our identity is tied

in with that person. And so when we are losing someone, we are also losing our identity that is connected to them, whether we're a brother or a mother or a sister or a friend or a caretaker, a life partner. So that loss that we're experiencing is a loss of the person and it's a loss of who we are to some extent. And that's part of the grieving process. So I'm just going to pause and see how that lands for you, Jenny. Yeah. I've never heard it said exactly that way. And it really lands for me because as I reflect on the loss of my mother, it's so helpful to also name the loss of being her daughter. Because what I found in my experience is, and when I started just thinking about this

and naming this within myself, I almost felt like shy about saying it. But I don't think there's anything to be shy about here, which is like, I miss the love that my mother gave to me as her daughter. I miss the way she loved me. I missed having an adoring mother who was interested in everything you did. And I missed the way she loved me. I missed having an adoring mother who was interested in everything you did. And I missed the way she loved me. I missed that sort of deep and unconditional love that I was so fortunate to have with her. And so, yeah, I think I was grieving the loss of her, the loss of our relationship, and also the loss of being the daughter of my mother. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How did that impact you when you read it? Well, it impacted me in two ways. One, I resonate with your description of this because my grandma saw me in this light that I don't think anyone else ever has in my life. I'll just tell a quick story. I was in college and I had planned to meet her at a real estate office to have a meeting. But the night before I had gone out on campus and spent the night at a party and came to the meeting wearing this huge oversized like purple t-shirt that had this like weird graphic design on it that was from this house that I'd stayed in. And I was wearing like windbreaker pants and hadn't showered. And her response to me showing up to this meeting like this was,

even in whatever you're wearing, you are so dignified. I love it. And I think that for whatever reason, she just saw so much beauty and light and strengthened my presence that I've never really felt in another way since. So that resonates with me really strongly. But I also had this experience of the inverse of this, which is that when someone dies, we also occupy a new identity. And that was really important to my own grief story. And I'd like to share another quote with you. So there's a beautiful book called When Death Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. When Death Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. The book is about a surgeon who finds out that he has, I believe it's like an inoperable tumor and he's going to die. And so the main thrust of

this is he has a certain amount of time that he knows that he has in this world. And with that time, he writes this book, this memoir that becomes When Breath Becomes Air. And it's a beautiful memoir, but what I have always held in my quote book, in my journal, where I keep all of my quotes that I love so much from books is actually not something that he wrote in the book. It's something that his widow wrote in the epilogue to talk about her experience of losing him. And she said, I expected to feel only empty, heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude

alongside terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it. Paul is gone and I miss him dearly every moment, but I somehow feel I am still taking part in the life we created together. For me, this quote is about the shifting identity of moving from having a life partner who is in this world to still living in the space of loving that person and embodying the identity of, in our culture, we would say a widow, a person who has lost that partner. And in that new role, the loss informs who you become there's a new identity that emerges out of that and I have my own story of this and why that feels really important to me yeah but I'd also like to hear how you feel about that I'm just having all these like light bulb moments connecting some of the research I've done which is first with my own experience of losing my mom and really having a deep sense that the relationship with her still exists. It's just

inside of me now, as opposed to like outside of me and with her, because the relationship I'm having is with her memory, the memory of who she is, right? There's a relational experience that we have with memory. There's a social worker named Michael White who, in his work, believed that his clients needed, as he says, opportunities to develop new relationships with their deceased loved ones. In other words, I love this. This connects with something you said just a minute ago, which is, this is a quote again about his work. He began by asking gentle questions of these clients to help them transform their past relationships with the deceased into new relationships in the present. Questions like, if you were seeing yourself through your loved one's eyes right now, what would they appreciate

about you? Which makes me think about what you said about your grandmother and how she just saw and you such like dig baby, right? Like there's a way to call that into the present moment with reflections and questions like that. Oh, yeah. I know. And he says, so memory is something we can actually bring forward. And then we're bringing the person forward. We're not saying goodbye. We're actually saying hello again in the context of a different kind of experience. And so there is that deep grief, right? That great love or extraordinary love creates extraordinary grief over that loss. That in a very real way exists alongside this ability to shift into a different way of being with them and their memory, which is very alive. And I just love that idea. Me too. You can probably tell from all of my noises

I'm making. So I'm doing the thing that I do when something is like resonating. Literally, I'm like sort of rocking a little bit and like holding my heart because it just lands, like it just lands in this place where I'm thinking about this moment in my life. lands in this place where I'm thinking about this moment in my life. And I have wanted to reach out to her so many times and felt frustrated by the lack of her presence. And when you said the question was something around, what would your loved one see and admire about you right now? And you brought up that human dignity idea, I felt that strength. I felt that sense of like, yes, that is what she would see in me. Yes. And it allowed me to receive that love from her. So I've had a moment with what you just said. It was so helpful for me too. His language

is so good. He talks about integrating their lost relationships into their current lives or turning someone's absence into a new kind of presence, right? Instead of relinquishing ties to people who have passed, finding new ways to stay connected. Yeah. I want to say that that idea of finding new ways to stay connected, but also like continuing to walk alongside a lost loved one in your life feels very, very pertinent to my grief experience with my grandma in two ways. One is the longing to still feel her physical presence.

And the other is when I do and how much that informs my life. I want to share that everything that I have done since she has passed away has felt connected deeply to the legacy that I inherited from her. This legacy that is really about having a voice, having a sense of our own human dignity and beauty. Like those are the things that really come to mind for me. When she passed away at the celebration of life, which is what she wanted us to call it, someone in the group of folks who attended came up to me and said, your grandma was one of the most self-assertive women

I've ever met in my life. Really? Oh, I love that. Yes. Yes. And so there's this legacy of truth telling. There's this legacy of... Which is you. I mean, that is you. She is alive in you in that way. It's interesting though, because how she framed it and how I thought of it for so long was about love. Her language was around, and it's deeply embedded in her spiritual journey and her belief in the divine. And there was a moment in her death process when she said to me, I feel at peace. And that was a struggle for her.

Had she done what she needed to do in this world to know it was okay to go? And she said, I feel at peace because I realized that my purpose here in the world was to let God's love shine through me. And that gave her a sense of, I've done what I need to do. If I'm doing that, I've done what I need to do. And it was an ongoing action. And I think that's so much of what brought that peace for her. I've done what I need to do. And it was an ongoing action. And I think that's so much of what brought that peace for her. I've been in a transition where I felt that sense, that like glowy, lovey sense disappearing. What I'm realizing literally in this conversation is that what's left that connects me to her is the human dignity and the compassionate

action that comes from that place of respecting that we, all of us, every single person, regardless of the body that we occupy, deserve to have a space that is just for us. And that that's the transition that I'm in right now. All of this to say, our identities shift and change if we keep a relationship to that person and allow them to inform our lives. They have a legacy for us that we can continue to follow. And that is incredibly powerful for me because, yes, there is a loss of identity and there

is a new identity that can be born from that. And there are some ways that I want to talk about that researchers specifically related to the psychology and the practice of grieving have identified that we can use certain tools to help to initiate that process of moving through the experience of honoring what we've lost. And then, you know, also acknowledging the transformation that we're in and who we're becoming in the midst of that loss. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Can I say something real quick about what you're talking about this exact point? One of the books that I read that really helped me was called The Aftergrief by Hope Edelman. And one of the things she says in the book about this idea is that the details of the loss might be fixed, right? But what those facts have meant to me, she says, at different

moments in my life, that part is constantly evolving. So like the fact that we are continuing to grow and change and evolve, therefore our relationship to that person and what that person has meant to us over the arc of their life and the relationship we've had, that's continuing to evolve, right? Even though they might have passed. And I just hear you saying like that there's a very real living thing inside of us with the way we are in relationship to that person and the loss of that person because we continue to live and grow and mature. Yeah. Two things I want to say. One, I love this idea of after grief because it reminds me of the word afterbirth, which is.

Oh, yeah. That it's what comes out of a woman's body after you have a baby. I believe they call that an afterbirth. And for me, the death experience of my grandma, because I was so present in that, it felt like a birth. That's the closest thing I can describe it to because I've both had a child and been with someone in the death process and it felt the same. There was a child and been with someone in the death process and it felt the same. There was a laboring that leads up to that final moment. And so that is really a beautiful, like I think life-giving image for me. And the other thing that I wanted to ask you, Jenny, is how does this all land for you personally? Because you are much earlier in the grief process than I am. And so this journey, I have more inflection points

and I'm speaking from pretty far down the road. Like, what is this like for you in this moment so much sooner after the death of your mom? In the way that I am in relationship to her inside of me? Is that what you mean? I'm just going to sit with that for a second. I think a couple of things. I read a quote that really hit for me, which the quote is from someone named Merit Malloy. And the quote is, love doesn't die, people do. And I'm starting to see that the

love that was the thing that connected me and my mom is still alive inside of me and in my heart. And she's still my reference point for so many things in life. It's just that that is now something I reference inside of me, right? Versus a person outside of me. I think that for me, what I'm able to maybe carry forward some of the progress she made in her life in some important ways, in the ways that we're alike, right? We had a lot of things in common, but we also struggled with a lot of things that kept us from connecting in a lot of ways. But for example, she was very well-spoken and she was very articulate and very wise. And she would use that gift in a one-on-one very small setting, but she was very shy about doing that in any kind of larger setting. And I feel like there was so much value in what she would offer people that it would have been incredible if she would have

sort of let herself be bold and speak out in a larger way. And so I feel like that connection that she and I have in, I guess, those strengths about, you know, just verbal communication and the ability to speak some truth, I'm encouraging myself to sort of move past my fear, my insecurities, my sense of being small and sort of diminutive and allowing myself to speak up in a larger way. It just feels like a generational continuation. And I feel very connected to her in moments when I do that. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does tom cruise really do his own stunts his stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne

knight welcome to really no really sir bless you all hello newman and you never know when howie mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, really. And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. you get your podcasts. I think it's so interesting. This is from trauma research, but we actually carry, I think it's something like two generations past us in our bodies. So our mother's mother, and there is something about even when that person is gone,

we are still doing the work that that person left us with. And for so many women, I think that what we're saying is similar. For a lot of women, this is the work, right? One of the things that my grandma grappled with when she was passing away was the fact that she stayed the last 17 years of her life in a relationship with someone who engaged in constant infidelity. And she was really mad, not at him, but at herself because she didn't honor her sense of what she deserved. And in so many ways, she was so self-assertive, incredibly strong, had a powerful voice and in her closest relationships, particularly with romantic partners, that was a place that she really struggled, you know? And so in my own life, I think that patterns of intimate relationships and partnerships, intimate relationships and partnerships, that's an area where I've struggled. And we continue to carry those journeys with us wherever we are, which is why I think it's so detrimental that we do not have more tools in regards to moving through the grief process.

And I think so much of that is because we're such a self-denying. I don't know if that was a Freudian slip. I was going to say self-denying. We are such a death-denying culture that we just want to get past it. I became really fascinated with the role of ritual in my life during the grieving process. And I wrote a lot about it at that time. And there are some rituals that I can talk about. But I also found this really incredible article called Ritual and Therapy for Prolonged Grief in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry. And what was great about this, I love literature reviews. And I know this is the nerdiest thing to say,

but literature reviews are this great place where people take everything that's been learned up to that point, they try to, and they try to condense like all of that research into one place. And so there are these really rich pockets of information where you can just gain so much so quickly. And so this is a literature review of like the study of prolonged grief and therapy, but it's not just about that. When I read it,

I was like, this is just grief. Like grief does not have to be prolonged, which in psychiatry, they consider prolonged grief to be grief that is not being processed, quote unquote, correctly. And I think that, first of all, that's a misnomer. Any way we're grieving is fine. But second of all, even in quote unquote normal grief, we still need tools because we have been using tools since the beginning of time. And one of the major tools that we've used is ritual. So I was going to talk a little bit about what they say ritual is. And they say, for the sake of clarity in this study, we define rituals and therapeutic interventions as sensory, attentive, and intentional acts that are performed in a structured, imaginative, or aesthetic way

and make use of symbols, symbolic language, and symbolic action. That is a freaking mouthful, first of all. So how I understand this is that rituals engage our senses and our attention, and they are intentional. So they engage our senses, our attention and they are intentional. So they engage our senses, our attention, and they're intentional. So that intentionality part is about we have a frame for the experience before we go in. We have a purpose for engaging in this particular experience that we're having. And when I hear these words of like structure, aesthetic, experience that we're having. And when I hear these words of like structure, aesthetic, imaginative, I conceptualize that as we have a container for our experiences and we pay attention to that container. And so examples of this might be, you know, burning incense in churches and having that

aesthetic sense of that quality or lighting a candle. They're visible, they're tangible, or lighting a candle. They're visible. They're tangible. They are imaginative in that they go beyond what we're seeing to represent something else, which goes into this last part. They aren't literal, but they are real to the person that is enacting them. They are real to the person that is enacting them. And I have a lot more that I can say about this idea. I want to pause and see how that lands for you. Yeah. I came upon some really useful information about ritual too. And again, this comes from Hope Edelman's book, The Aftergrief, but she says, well, first of all, she quotes a woman named Suki Miller by saying ritual is the antidote to helplessness. And I think in the face

of loss, often that's a feeling that can come up. And so ritual kind of helps us regain some agency and connection and healing, I think, therefore, or strength. But anyway, Hope says, ritual serves to honor the contents of our hearts, both the love and pain. They serve the function of connection maintenance, helping us feel closer to our loved one who has died. Emotional expression revives a sense of control, helps us feel meaning, and underpins communicable structures. Sorry, underpins. That's a mouthful. Yeah, I was gonna say. I'm like, what's that mean? It underpins communal structures within which we are better able to cope with our losses. So, you know, it really tracks. I mean, she even talks about something called micro rituals,

which are purposeful means of evoking our beloved one's presence in our day to day lives. So I recently did this because my birthday was not too long ago. And my mom had this ritual she did to reconnect to the memory of her parents or the love that they had for her. Every year on her birthday, she would buy herself a birthday present from them. It would be something that she knew that they would love to have given her. There was just a tiny bit of money that they left her, the only child. And so like she kind of reserved that over the course of her lifetime for like this purpose. So she would do that with those funds. And so this was my first birthday after my mom passed. And so I went to a jewelry store in

Atlanta that we both loved and that she bought me a few special pieces from. And I bought a pair of earrings, actually the ones I'm wearing right now. I don't know if you can see them, but they're just these sweet little earrings that the minute I put them on, I was like, she would have looked at me and been like, those are gorgeous and they look great on you. And she would have loved it. And I loved them. And it was such a connection point to her. So I bought them for myself from her.

And wearing them feels like that kind of connection back to that love, but in a present moment way. I'll wrap up that whole thing by saying rituals can be group-oriented communal ways of processing this kind of grief and connecting with this love and finding healing. And I think they can also be very personal ways to connect with our loved ones in a small way, day-to-day or to mark events, you know? Yes. What about you? I think that's beautiful what you just shared, first of all, because when you told the story,

I imagined your mom with you. That's how I saw it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It felt like that. I felt like she was with me. It really did. Yes, yes. I mean, I had a number of them, especially right after she passed away. They became really, really important to me. It really did. Yes. Yes. I mean, I had a number of them, especially right after she passed

away. They became really, really important to me. One of the things is that, like I said, she left me with a love for beauty. And one of the things she would do when we were out driving around like the countryside is she would stop the car and we would get out and we would pick flowers. side is she would stop the car and we would get out and we would pick flowers. And she had this beautiful garden at home as well. She had a Four Seasons room and it was surrounded by this garden. So in her daily life, she would go out, pick flowers, create these little arrangements, and then set them on the table in this Four Seasons room. And she was one of those people who took a lot of joy in those simple tasks, the curation of things that felt special. This is random, but I'm just thinking about it. She also used cloth napkins and like I have cloth napkins and, you know,

those sorts of things. And so especially right after she died, when I would have family events or have people over or, you know, just when I wanted to do something for myself, I would go out in my garden and trim flowers and spend a lot of time, you know, just pulling off the leaves that would be in the water so that they would last longer and trimming them to a certain length and making these beautiful vases of flowers. And there was one particular time that I really remember where my whole family was coming over for dinner and my mom had arrived early and she and my son and I went out and all picked flowers together and made this vase that was at the center of our family table for that event. So that's one of the things that comes to mind, which I did that with intentionality, which is one of the things that they talk about with ritual, of course, is having that intention. But there have also been times in my life when I really set aside like a chunk of time and dedicated that specifically to a ritual that was dedicated to her in that grief process. And so in the rituals

where I set aside a chunk of time specifically dedicated to moving through the process of going from a person who had lost someone to the new identity of a person who was internalizing that experience with them and bringing it with me. I did this project with a friend where we bought sky lanterns. And if you've never seen a sky lantern, they're like these huge paper, I say huge, they're like three to four feet. They're big. And you light a little candle and the heat from the candle actually inflates these balloons that are made out of paper and they float into the air. And in that process, we did one that was for letting go of things that we needed to release. And another that was for welcoming in what we wanted to bring with us. And this goes into this article, again,

the literature review, they interviewed 10 psychotherapists about the use of ritual to help in prolonged grief and the therapeutic process. And there are three different purposes that they give to these. And one are rituals to honor the deceased loved one and keep that symbolic bond, which you and I both talked about some of those that we have. And second is a ritual to let go of traumatic experience. And so that process of creating the balloon to let go of the things that we need to let go of to be able to heal. And then the third are rituals of self-transformation. And so that's that process of who am I now as I hold this grief and this truth. And so I think with that process of releasing those sky lanterns, there was both the letting

go of the experiences that need to be let go of, but then there was also this self-transformation. Who am I becoming? What am I taking with me from the experience of not just having this person, but also the experience of losing this person? What has that done to change who I am? Yeah, I think something you said there just continue to come back to, which is like, we don't just get over loss and then we move on independent of the loss, that it's like something in our past that we are past and not still connected to, right? It's not in the rear view mirror. And we're not doing it wrong. We're not doing grief wrong.

If it still feels very integrated and alive inside of us. I think what you're touching on is this idea of marking a transition in the way we relate to that loss and that person. And for me, it was just so powerful to realize that the name of the book, The After Grief, I mean, she kind of talks about this thing as like, you know, there's loss and then grief is something that happens after loss. And then there's this long arc of grief. And she also named that there's a difference between sort of like traumatic grief that's resulting from traumatic loss of someone we love, like a terrible car

crash and one minute they're here and the next minute they're unexpectedly gone, right? Versus what I experienced with my mom, which was she was ill and declining for six or seven years. So the grief can feel very different and is very different in those two things. But maybe I'm rambling, but that was just something that I feel like it's just not something we get over and move on. It's not something that if we are grieving well or being healthy, that that's how it's happened for us, right? And we're not clinging unhelpfully to our loved ones by holding them close inside of us in a very alive way. Yeah. I had a professor when I was in seminary, which I was in for a year.

And he talked about the death of his mother in such a beautiful way. I remember his face when he said this, because the word that I want to use is like beatific. Is that a word? It's like he had this like glowing look to him that was just, it was joy. And he was talking about how he couldn't believe how present his mother felt since her death. And I also want to pause and just say, that is not the experience with every death that I have had in my life. It's not. And so if someone's listening to us and they're like,

this does not resonate with me. I do not feel the presence of this person. They feel entirely absent. I think it's really important to recognize the spaces that people might be in. Sometimes someone dies and we're talking about grief, which is loss that is stemming from love, but there's also experiences of people dying and that is not part of the experience. Yeah, that's really good to name. Exactly. I'm so glad you brought that up. Kind of goes back to the point we touched on in the previous episode, which was we're speaking from our experiences and the research we've done and we've been able to glean. And we can in no way speak to everyone's experience and every kind of loss and the impact that all of that can have.

And that whatever your experience is, there's room for that, that it's okay. It is your experience to inhabit and to explore and to navigate through, whether that's feeling a real connection or feeling a real disconnection, right? Yeah. And I think too, we are framing this conversation for both of us around what I would describe as like landmark losses in our lives. Like these are the people who were our closest people. And so it is specifically that type of grief that we're really naming here and how landmark losses can shape us in ways that are not just sad, but to use the language of this article I've been referring to, self-transforming.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I want to just sort of pivot a little bit, but this is connected, which is, you know, I think one of the ways we find some healing and also meaning and forward motion in our lives again after a loss is through storytelling about that loss. So storytelling can simply mean maybe you're journaling about it. Maybe you're sort of reflecting on it. Maybe you're talking to someone about your experience. Maybe you're talking to a group of people. It doesn't have to take one form, but it's about the meaning we make related to things that have happened or the way we're relating to them in the current moment, right? So I found this specifically helpful even while my mom was still alive, but as she was

losing different functions that she had once had. And it was just so sad to me to see. For example, so she, at the end of her life, needed everything done for her. Like she could not do anything. She was basically sort of just a body that needed to be cared for. She wasn't, she had no, she could not feed herself. She could not, you know, bathe herself. She could not toilet herself. She could not walk around, roll over in the bed so that she didn't get bed sores. Like she needed absolutely everything done

for her. And so for a really long time, seeing that and reflecting on that was a source of only heartbreak for me, like only sadness with no redemptive qualities to it. It was just heartache. And not to say that that's wrong or bad, but what that evolved to be in me, and I don't even know exactly where this came from, but it just occurred to me one day that, so my mom was a person who throughout her life did everything for everybody else except herself, right? Maybe to a fault, like probably definitely to a fault. But she was a helper and she was incredible when it comes to doing for other people. And I realized at this moment that I could view the exact same circumstances from the lens of that she was now being paid back in spades for the seeds she had planted her whole life.

Right? Like all of a sudden she was getting all of that care back. The people were now doing everything for her after she has spent a life doing everything for other people. So the facts in that story were the same, but the meaning was different in so many ways. And so therefore the impact it had on me was really different. we have an opportunity to look at what has happened in the meaning we make and not only say, like, is that true? Because like, who knows, right? Who knows what's true or not? But is it useful might be a more helpful question. Is it useful towards whatever I'm orienting around in my life? Am I orienting around healing and strength? Am I orienting around really sitting in the loss and the pain of that?

You know, whatever that is, does it make sense? Is it useful? Right? And I think that's really empowering, at least to me. Yeah. Yeah. What I'm hearing there and other language that I've heard described is the concept of cognitive reframing. And so cognitive reframing is really just the idea that we can view the same experience in multiple lenses. And it's actually a tool that's really helpful in transforming something that could be post-traumatic stress into post-traumatic growth. Ah, exactly.

In that process, it is really important as well to not bypass the experience itself or try to push ourselves or someone else into that space too quickly, because part of grief is the loss. And so I love how you said, whatever we're doing, we might be sitting really intentionally just with that experience of loss. And that may not be the time that we're going to cognitively reframe this experience. And it can be part of the healing process when we are ready to look at how we want to shift the narrative for ourselves to something new. So it's a beautiful yes and, I think, with that tool. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That is a really important point I want to sort of double click on for a second, which is with grief, you know, and we can probably broaden this to sort of all emotions on for a second, which is with grief, you know, and we can probably broaden this to sort of all emotions and specifically unpleasant or painful emotions, that there is no way around, right? The only way is through. Now, how we move through it can look lots of ways and can take on various types of like needing and having support with you as you go

through, going through one baby step at a time. I mean, it's not to just forge through solo and traumatize ourselves again through those experiences. But you're right. I mean, to sit and stay in the pain of grief is essential for our ability to heal, metabolize, integrate in a way that supports our life over the long, hopefully long arc of it, right? So I think this is where my mindfulness practice, I was so grateful for my practice in this way, which is I had been practicing for years in big and small ways, practicing feeling, staying with in a healing way, really difficult and painful emotions. And so I began to know how to do that and also began to trust that I could do that. Because the more we practice and become

skillful with staying with emotions that we think may overcome us, the more we trust our ability to fully inhabit them. Yes. I'll say one last thing about that, which I think is really important for me is specifically with my mom and the memory of her, is that at this point in the process, I very often to connect with the love of her and the love I feel from her and have always felt from her, I have to go through the pain of missing her. So I have to be able to be brave enough to re-engage with her memory, which is going to conjure up feelings of pain and loss in order to connect to healing and love with and for my mom, if that makes any sense.

To me, it makes perfect sense. I think you and I share a passion for the really important work of being with difficult feelings. The nuance I would add to this process that's been really helpful for me in all difficult feelings to kind of broaden this out a little bit is the skill of self-compassion while sitting with difficult emotions. That has been really a profound shift in my own mindfulness practice. I found that there is a part of me that can be in really deep emotional pain or have a lot of fear or, you know, even shame and all of these other difficult to experience feelings. And there can be another part that actually arises right alongside that and can offer compassion to the part that is struggling. Yes. This gets into something in regards to this place that we're in of looking at different tools that we can use to help ourselves in the grief process. And I think what we've been talking about are some of these transitional practices that

engage our senses in different ways. And now we've brought in this piece of mindfulness, which for me brings up the concept of the imaginal. And the concept of the imaginal is that we have within us this space through which our inner world can be as rich as our outer world. And my reason for bringing this up is because I think that, And my reason for bringing this up is because I think that, you know, in addition to having, for example, a ritual that we're engaging in the world or using mindfulness practice specifically with that difficult emotion, we can also engage like the imaginal realm of our inner worlds and use that to facilitate a therapeutic inner experience where we conjure that person, where we conjure their love, we conjure their presence, we conjure the things that we admire most about them so that we can be in that space where we're still cultivating that relationship. And for me, that has been one of the more important parts of my journey with grief. You know, before my grandma passed away, I don't know, I think I talked about this in the last episode, but I'll just bring this back just

in case. My grandma was new age and she had lots of ideas about the spiritual world. And she was very, very open to talking with me about those ideas, which I'm grateful for now. And we had differences in this way. We had similarities in this way, but now I'm just incredibly grateful that she brought alive the spiritual sense of the world to me. So in this context, again, we were out on a drive in the country and she knew she was dying. And very matter-of-factly, she just said to me, but don't worry, I'm going to come and visit you in your dreams. And she said this to me because her grandma had said it to her when she died. So my grandma, when she was being raised by her parents, experienced a disconnect with them as parents, but felt profoundly connected to her grandma. And she lost her at a really young age.

And when she experienced that loss, she felt really alone with it. when she experienced that loss, she felt really alone with it. And what happened in her inner world is that that representation of her grandma continued to just be really alive. And it was a very private experience for her. But her saying this to me was her way of saying, like, I'm not just going to be there in some abstract way. Like, I will be there. And so I've experienced that in my dreams. I have experienced that in mindfulness practices where her presence becomes just so strong that it's transformative. I have no idea how things work in the world. What happens after you die? I have no idea about any of that. I am agnostic about all of that. I can say with an assuredness that I have felt her, a very distinct

sense of her presence inside of my being, inside of my body for whatever that is worth. Oh, it's worth so much. It's worth so much. I'm so glad you're saying all this. It made me think of a conversation I had with my mom not long after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. So her cognition was severely compromised at that point. But she was still able to connect, converse, you know, hold conversation, make sense, that kind of thing. We were sitting down. We were talking about her death, which this only happened like once or twice. This is not a common thing. So the fact

that we were talking about it was something that marked this moment in time for me. But what she said was, she said, no, when I die, don't go looking for me in like seances and like mediums. She's like, I'm not out there. You know, I did that with my parents and like, just that's not where I'll be. So don't even go look there. She goes, you'll find me in moments of kindness. She said, you'll find me like, and this was kind of a random example to give, but she was like, if you see, you know, a little boy lose his, his kickball and like the playground and someone goes and gets it and brings it back to him in a kind way, like that's where I am. I'm in that kindness. And it was such a profound moment from a woman who had profound cognitive decline.

I was like, okay, I'm taking this in right now. I'm not sure fully what it means long term for me, but like I know that there is meaning here. And I think what my mom was saying is that like, again, love is how we were connected in life and love is how we will continue to be connected afterwards. continue to be connected afterwards. And that a tendency to avoid the pain of grief cuts me off from the connection of love with her. That like, it is only by feeling my pain that I can find access to that love that we had. I don't know. I just wanted to share that. It brought up for me that important point. And I will say that this whole conversation is actually really healing for me because of the way we're able to like share our stories. This idea of we grieve through story, but even more so through story expressed. Right. So I'm just really grateful to be able to even talk about it on this level with you. Yeah. I am going to be very honest right now and say that I am a little

bit freaked out that I'm saying some of the things that I'm saying publicly. I have never really shared those experiences of how strongly I felt my grandma and I'm nervous about how that's going to be received. I think there's a lot of different ideas in the world about what reality is and a lot of influence of materialism and sort of like what you see is what you get. And I know that in saying these things, I'm stepping out of that. Yeah. And I have nervousness. And so I want to name that because bringing those things alive in this conversation,

I hope normalizes those experiences for other people who have them. I don't think that my experiences are the only experiences there are. I know that they're not. And for folks who can relate to some of that, I hope it's helpful to hear that given voice. And also podcast friends, I'm asking you to hold this tenderly for me because it's not easy always to bring some of the inner world stuff into the outer world. That's how I'm feeling at the end of this conversation. I feel some of that too because these experiences, these feelings, and the ways we connect with the people that have passed that we love, it all feels very sacred for me. It all feels very tender because where there's pain, it all feels very sacred for me. It all feels very

tender because where there's pain, it's sort of a tender place. It's also for me pretty new. And it's a risk to express your story, to like share your story with the big wide world. Because I also think there's that genuine hope and desire and intention that you and I share, which is that by sharing our experience and researching things to name experiences in a greater sense that we are able to sort of create space for everybody to have their own experience. And I just hope the sharing of mine doesn't come across as limiting, that it comes across as encouragement and permission for everyone to have theirs and to be able to speak it wherever they want to. And yes, to ask for grace

if I have spoken in a way that's at all creating isolation or at all speaking out of a blind spot of my own. Yes. I love that you're saying this. And I actually would love to invite the two of us to do something here together that I have had done for me at the end of every silent retreat that I have attended. At all of these retreats, the teachers come together at the end and they say to us in a very sincere way, I apologize for any missed mark, for any harm that has been done unintentionally through these teachings, through this experience. blindspots, anything that we're missing in this conversation of this incredibly unifying experience of grief that all of us have, but it's so deeply personal. I think us naming that we're touching into our own fear, we're touching into our own insecurities, our own pain, our own grief. Other folks might have been touching into that too, and maybe something didn't land. And so I want to apologize for that if that is the case and know that my intention is from that heartfelt space.

Oh, I love it. Yes, absolutely. I also apologize for any injury that has been caused, even anything that I could have named that I missed. Yeah. That would have helped someone else's experience feel seen. So yeah, I'm so glad you said that. I was just going to say, I think that the world would be better if we just walked around with that intention. Like, you know, I don't want to do harm and I know I will, you know, I don't,

I want to say all the right things and I know I won't. And so I think in this, the tender space of grief, it feels supportive for me to name that for our community, for our podcast friends who are just getting to know us and learning along with us. Well, I love that. And in lieu of our typical closing question, which we were going to ask at the end of each episode, which is what is alive for you right now? I was actually hoping we could orient around like a slightly different or a very different closing question right now, if you're up for it. Yeah. Which is, what do you miss most about your grandmother today? What about her do you miss most today? What I miss most about her today is her laughter. She also carried herself with just a sense of human dignity the human indignities. So she was always farting. And she never apologized. And she was always laughing about it.

Hilarious. So in this moment, when you asked me that question, that's what came up for me. Oh, I love it. So how about you? What are you missing most about your mom today? Oh, okay. So if I sit with that question, what I miss most is like being able to just sort of collapse into the soft cushion of her love.

Yeah, just her love for me. That's what I miss. I miss being able to connect with that to go to that. She had so much love in her heart. And she loved her daughters more than anything. So yeah, I'm missing that. I'm missing her love. And I'm missing her wisdom. She was so wise. There's a little context. So my dad has a construction company and my mom worked that construction company with my dad. So there's a guy there that is in like the leadership of the company that my mom had a real connection with. He was much younger than her. And so it was almost

like she was kind of a mother and he was kind of a son type dynamic there. And so she was often like giving advice and things. He told me recently that he has a drawer full of notes that either my mom wrote him or like things she said that he wanted to remember that he wrote down. And he's like, I just have a whole drawer of it. And like, I pull those things out still, you know, to connect with her wisdom. He's like, I told her once, like the things you say are either like life-changing wisdom or they are like the craziest thing I've ever heard in my life. Oh, my God. I think that your mom and my grandma might have been soul sisters because that resonates for me. Yes.

Yes, yes, yes. Totally. So I miss that. I miss that. Oh. I miss that. Oh. I love it. Well, my friend and our friends, this has been such a wonderful, wonderful hour together. Thank you for your generous attention and your presence.

Thank you, friends. We hope to see you again soon. Yeah, we'll see you next time. All right. Bye. Bye. Sharing and learning about human experiences is what we love. You've heard some of ours.

Now we'd like to hear some of yours. is what we love. You've heard some of ours. Now we'd like to hear some of yours. Head to oneufeed.net slash normalize to get in touch with us with comments, experiences of your own, or really anything you'd like to share. You'll also find all things related to Something to Normalize right there on the page for you. Most of all, thank you so much for spending your time with us today. Until next time. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden. And together our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to

reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.