The One You Feed - How to Navigate Grief: Our Stories of Love and Loss (Part 1) with Ginny Gay & Brandi Lust

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

In this special two-part episode of Something to Normalize, Ginny and Brandi each share their stories of losing someone central to their lives and the grief that followed. Grief can be a complex, unpredictable, overwhelming, and isolating experience. And there are so many misconceptions about what it “should” be like. What’s worse than grieving the loss of someone you love and then feeling isolated or wondering if the way you’re grieving is somehow wrong? In this episode, Ginny and Brandi explain how there’s no wrong way to grieve. We can accept our experience, and find a bridge of connection so that we’re not alone in navigating this universal, human experience.  In This Episode, Ginny & Brandi Discuss: What it means to say that grieving is a non-linear process What grief can look like when the relationship was complicated  How to offer compassionate support to grieving loved ones through active listening and empathy The wide range of emotions that are possible during the grieving process Myths and misconceptions about grief, including the “stages of grief”  The intrinsic bond between grief, love, and impermanence To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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, Brandi 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 Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome friends and welcome friend. Hey, Brandy.

Hi, Jenny. Welcome everybody to our conversation here on our podcast, Something to Normalize. Today, we're going to be normalizing the experience and landscape of grief. And it's a weighty topic, right? And a universal one. And we're going to be walking this road together. So I feel like when we kind of carry the burden of grief together, it doesn't feel quite as heavy as when we're alone. So hopefully this conversation will allow us to just wade into these waters with one another and come out of it feeling some sense of healing and not aloneness and a little bit wiser. What do you think? That sounds beautiful. You want to tell folks who you are, Jenny?

Beautiful. You want to tell folks who you are, Jenny? Yes. Great idea, Brandy. Yes. So I'm Jenny Gay, and I am a certified mindfulness and meditation teacher. And I help people become more aware of and work skillfully in navigating our relationship with thoughts and emotions and experiences so that we can feel less stress and less struggle and more freedom, more joy, more ease with life. And I'm Brandy and I help organizations to build cultures that support well-being. Yeah. So today, like I said, we're going to be exploring the topic and experience of grief, right? So specifically grief over the loss of a loved one. I mean, I specify that because we can have grief over the loss of really anything, be it a person or a pet, a relationship, a dream we had that will no longer

happen. I mean, you know, anything that we lose can cause us to have some grief. So we might venture out into that into the other terrain of grief. But I think you and I have had personal experience with grief of a loss of a loved one, right? So we thought we would start there and just kind of share a bit about our own experiences. So we have some context, right of like where we're coming from. Yeah. And I know your grief experience is much more recent than mine. And so I'm happy to start the conversation and talk about how that was for me. And then I want to give you lots of space. I know that place can be tender. So a way that feels supportive for you. So I can talk about the most profound experience that I have of grief in my own life is certainly losing my grandma, who was a mentor to me in my spiritual life. As I was growing up,

she was new age. And so she would give me like all of these different books that I should be reading and just really talk to me always like I was an adult and like my opinions mattered to her. And we had a special relationship because I was her first grandchild. I was a girl and she, you know, just really wanted to have that bond. And so I was also named after her. My middle name is Rose. She passed away eight years ago and it was after having had cancer for over a decade, but the actual death process, once it began in earnest, lasted probably about six or seven months. And so it was that time in my life where I was navigating a lot of personally tumultuous things at the same time. And I've definitely talked about that on the podcast previously.

But I was trying to balance out a lot of difficult things that were happening in my life while also really, really wanting to be present with her. really, really wanting to be present with her. And I still feel tremendously honored that I was able to be kind of a partner in her death process. So I once a week would go and spend the night at her house instead of going home. And we would just set up late into the night and she would retell her life to me and sometimes share things with me that she hadn't really shared in exactly that way before. And so I was really honored to have held that experience for her. And what I remember about that time in regards to grief is that she was feeling very alone in her death process because it wasn't something that people wanted to talk about with her. And so I was the safe space where she could really flesh out how it felt to be dying and knowing that she was going to die and other people around her actually weren't

as comfortable with that as she was. And I remember one really important conversation for me, because it's always been something that's sort of lodged in my heart as like, if that's the one thing that I did in the world, I would feel satisfied with that. And it was just the conversation we were talking about this, the idea of dying and people not really feeling comfortable with it. And she said, you're like a lifeboat. And I feel like you're just saving me and everything that she has given me in life. Just the fact that I could exchange in that moment, like some small thing was really profound. Her death process was not pretty. I know that, you know, Jenny, because you've sat with someone in the actual dying process.

with someone in the actual dying process. And at the same time, I really felt this energy from her, just this, I almost see it as like a glowing yellow light. That's how I perceive it even in my mind now that just made me feel comfortable to some extent with what she was going through. And what I want to say about grief is that that light that I felt and experienced actually stayed with me after she died. And so I still don't really have words to explain exactly what happened. But I remember when she took her last breath, it was like, I just like sort of gasped almost. I was sitting on the bed with her and had my hands on her body when she took her last breath. And it just, it shook me in this way where I remember yelling, like sort of crying out from grief, but then also just this like gasping for air sort

of feeling that I had in the moment. And then just this knowing it was like she had left her body and now she was everywhere. That's what it felt like. I was really honored to have walked with her, not just in her death experience, but also planning what would happen after she passed away. And so I was the organizer of her celebration of life. And she was an artist. She'd written poetry. So we had little booklets of her poetry and we had some of her paintings around the room and people really showed up for her in mass and it was very beautiful. And a lot of people, because they were so close with her, the folks that she'd chosen to participate in the ceremony, they really struggled to even just get language out. Even the person who was supposed to sort of manage the ceremony, had some trouble with that. And I just remember feeling so

strong that day because I knew that I needed to get up and sort of claim this light that I was feeling and that I felt like it had left me with just this gift that I didn't know how it was going to go out into the world. But I knew that it was important for me to stand up and be strong and sort of say, like, she was a person who brought love into the world. And I want to do that too. I want to continue to walk along that path. And so that grief experience of feeling her presence, it's poignant because I both felt her everywhere and she was completely gone. So the dichotomy between those two things sometimes meant that I would just be driving in the car and then completely lose it. I had, I would say a lot of moments that were really challenging in that way where grief really

overtook me. And then I also had a lot of moments where I felt her presence so clearly. I'm specifically remembering pulling over my car and looking up at the sky. It was this beautiful morning sky and all of these colors. And it just looked like there was a path of clouds leading down to earth and feeling like, yeah, she's up there. up there. And I don't know what that means, you know, up there, around here, wherever, but those two things are really what I remember, both the sharpness, the poignancy of, wow, I cannot believe that she's not here combined with this just sense that she's everywhere. And so I'll pause there. This happened eight years ago. So I've had a lot of transitions in my grief process since then. But I'd love to hear some of your experience with grief and why this topic is so important to you. So do you still feel that light? Do you still feel that her presence as everywhere and also she's gone and or has that really evolved since her death up until now for you? I do still feel her presence. I think it's dissipated to the extent that it's not as visible for me 24 hours a day like it was immediately after she passed away. But actually in preparation for even just this conversation, I sort of sat down and

interfaced with her a little bit, I guess you could say. I was going to talk about this later, but a few months ago, I had entered into this training program and made really great friends with someone who was in the program who happened to be a real believer and practitioner of tarot, which my grandma did tarot readings for people. And when we cleared out her house, I picked up a deck of her tarot cards and they're these beautiful, like very 1970s style tarot cards that just smell like an old book. And they're just incredible. And my friend had said, you have to use those. Like she'll talk to you through these tarot cards. And so it's become something that I do to stay connected to her. I just pull them out and sort of say, okay, you know, and sometimes I have something specific

that I'm thinking about. And sometimes I just want to kind of get a feel for where I am, but I really get a sense of her when I'm doing that, just that the power of that ritual. So I definitely still feel her presence and I do still feel the loss. And it's incredible how at certain moments it overtakes me and it's like it happened yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. It is, isn't it? And it sneaks up on you sometimes. It's a dodgy thing that seems to have an agenda and a timeline sort of of its own. Yeah. I mean, do you feel like your grief, the pain and the feeling of grief over the loss of her, you know, how has that changed? Like how, how would you describe it today compared with how it was in the early months after she passed?

Yeah. I mean, I think I'd like to bring in another voice here because in preparation for this conversation, I did do a little bit of research. And one of the things that I found to be a good description of kind of how I experienced it is the difference between grief and grieving. And grief is the poignant emotion of loss. It's that overwhelming feeling that just sort of hits us like a wave, takes our breath away. And then grieving is actually a learning process. And that learning process is how we begin to understand what life looks like without that person. What are our new habits? What are our new ways of being?

that person? What are our new habits? What are our new ways of being? And that learning impacts the way that we experience grief. And so over time, understanding the cognitive understanding and the new habits and all of those things actually decrease the experience of grief, or if not decrease the poignancy, we have much more of a sense of our own capabilities to move through the world without that person. And so they interact with one another. I want to mention too, these ideas that I'm describing are from Mary Frances O'Connor, who wrote a book called The Grieving Brain. And I read a little bit about this in an interview that she did with NPR. And that's a good analogy for my own experience because I have learned to navigate the world without her present in it. And I still feel that poignancy, but I also

feel strong in my own capabilities, if that makes sense. Yeah, it makes total sense. It makes total sense. I really connect with a lot of what you said there. Yeah. Well, thank you for diving into that weighty, but also beautiful territory. I'll share a little bit about my story, which you alluded to as more recent. So I lost my mom October 14th of 2022, which at the time we're recording this was just about three or so months ago. But it was not a sudden and unexpected loss. It was a loss that was a long time coming and happened little by little because she

had Alzheimer's disease. And she was diagnosed about seven years ago. And looking back, loved ones that have this disease can sort of probably relate to this. I feel like it started even earlier than that. I'm starting to see things that made sense in a certain light at the time make sense in a different light now. So I feel like the grieving process for me really kind of started with that diagnosis because what I knew was a couple of things. I knew she was dying and it would take a long time. And I knew that she was

not the same mother as the mother I had known for most of my life. And so that diagnosis landed on me with such a wave of disorienting sadness and felt really overwhelming and bewildering and unbelievable. And the grief I felt, it was a weight that even if I wasn't actively crying, I felt present, really present sort of all the time. And it made it hard to do life with any coherence and focus. I can remember having moments of realization, like I was sitting in a traffic light by her house. Eric and I were her primary caretakers. So we were there two weeks of every month with her in her house and we arranged all the care that she ended up having. So we were very involved. I'm grateful to say. And I was by her house in the car and it just hit me like I never got to say goodbye to the mother I always knew. clicked out. I mean, of course it was little by little, but there must've been a tipping point. And when was that? How long ago was that? And I was so sad that I didn't get to tell that mom,

thank you. And I love you. And I'm so, that kind of thing. And then as the disease progressed and we hit different points of like where she would lose different capabilities, that loss would be present again. And it was as if, you know, I would just be met with the experience of losing her in a very present way. My grief would be very accessible and present to me over the experience of losing her. So like, you know, when she started to not be able to like speak very well or intelligibly, Like I can remember sitting in the car with Eric. We were driving home because she had entered into this delirium and it was so acute that she was going to the hospital. Her caregiver was taking there. So Eric and I were headed there

from Ohio. And I remember talking to her and saying like, we're coming. I could not understand a word she was saying back to me. And it was just so scary because I was like, we're coming. I could not understand a word she was saying back to me. And it was just so scary because I was like, oh my gosh, is this how she talks now? Like this was seven years of moments like this. And I feel like what that equated to for me was losing her little by little and grieving that little by little along the way, as opposed to it being a one-time loss at her death. And in ways, I'm really grateful for that because it's almost like she titrated her own death for me, you know, which I know is not the truth, but like that's what it ended up being is that I didn't lose her

all at once. I lost her little by little and it made it, I think, maybe more bearable in some ways and more agonizing in others because it was a seven-year experience as opposed to ripping the Band-Aid off of one big loss. So it's not like there's ever really a pleasant way to go about this. But in hindsight, it had its benefits, but then it also had its particular agonies. I also think I, early on, particular agonies. I also think I early on really was struck by how not only was I sad, but I had a really difficult time being with her grief or even projecting onto her what I thought she might be going through as it relates to this diagnosis and her own death. And that was actually a really helpful realization because it helped me begin to distinguish between my grief over her death and then the grief that I anticipate she might be having versus like her actual experience. They were all one big ball for me of yarn that was like initially really

impossible to untangle and therefore kind of really difficult to navigate. You know, it just felt messy and big. And I think in a lot of ways, it illuminated how kind of enmeshed we were. That's kind of when I began to really feel my way into drawing some helpful boundaries around what was mine and what I could process and feel in a healing way. And that I couldn't grieve for her. She would be walking down a road I couldn't walk with her. And I really wanted to do it all for her because she was cognitively so limited already. But what actually ended up being was

that what I saw for her anyway, is that that also helped her not necessarily feel the full weight of that diagnosis because she didn't quite understand the full implications, I don't think. And, you know, I could let go a little bit of feeling like I could do any of it for her. So there was just a lot there. And over time, that evolved in various ways. Actually, in hindsight, the first four years were the hardest for me because she was the most present and I could interact with her. And that meant things like, you know, she couldn't understand that I had gone to the grocery and bought her food. So like she constantly felt like there was no food in the house. And I constantly was having to reassure her there was, but that was impossible. She never, I mean, even

if I showed it to her on the counter, she would say, well, I just went and got that. And you know, the caregivers are going to eat that and I'll have no food by dinnertime. It was an impossible thing to comfort her. Right. So then I had to sort of learn how to be with the grief of not even being able to make it better for her in any way, you know? So there's just so much to it. But then when she died, I'm so grateful that I was able to be with her. It took her a week to go through the dying process. And I was able to be with her that whole week. It felt really sacred. And I was able to be with her the moment she took her last breath, kind of like what you said, I had my hand on her chest telling her I loved her. And that felt like such a gift to be able to see it through to the literal very end.

And immediately she looked different to me after she died. It was like she was not her anymore. Immediately, she looked different to me after she died. It was like she was not her anymore. And almost immediately, it was like she wasn't bound by her body anymore. I almost felt closer to her than I had felt in the last seven years because all of a sudden, she was released from the disease. And it was almost communion with her again. I felt her in me. I could feel her presence in and with me very closely up until her funeral, really,

which had to be sometime after. I mean, I would ask a question like, help me or what do you think about this? And it was as if I could get an immediate answer. And it was really clear to me that like it was from her. And then after the funeral, I felt like it wasn't as close. Like she wasn't in me anymore. She had gone somewhere else. But what I've come to know and realize is that the connection with her still lives inside of me,

right? I don't know where she is, but I do know that I can connect with her and the memory of her in a present moment way and it's inside of me. And I can actually nurture that. And that feels like connection with her. I certainly had some acute grief after her death. It's almost like since I was able to be present with the grief through the seven years of her slow death, I don't feel like right now I have a lot of residual grief to deal with over that stuff. I can be very present with what's here right now. And so it feels different than I thought it would feel in that way. Not quite as incapacitating as I thought it might feel to have her die. So yeah, I mean, that's my story as it stands today over

her loss. I miss her so much. And it completely boggles my mind that I don't know if I'll ever see her again in any way, shape, or form because I just don't know what happens after death. It's staggering to me and I can't even comprehend that. But the memory of her that I've connected with is the mother she was to me when I was a little girl, which are the happiest memories of her I have, really. And so I love connecting back to that and remembering that. So yeah, I'll pause for that for a minute. Thank you for listening, Brandy. You're such a good listener.

It's nice to hear all of that story together. I mean, you know, we've talked in bits and pieces about things, but this has been a really present experience throughout our friendship. So it's just good to hear all of that. I've started sending a couple of text messages after each podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations to apply the wisdom to your life. It's free and listeners have told me that these texts really help to pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important.

When you get a text from me during your day-to-day life, it's one more thing that helps you further bridge that gap between what you know and what you do. Positive messages when you need them. From me to you. So if you'd like to hear from me a few times a week via text, go to oneufeed.net slash text and sign up for free. 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. Bryan 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. I did have a question that I wanted to ask about. You described how the grief process has been different since she passed away. And we've talked a little bit about this before. What's been really different than what you thought? It sounds like the fact that some of that acute grief has already been experienced. That's part of it. Are there other things that

are different than what you thought? Yeah. Yeah. I'm so grateful you asked that question. One of my biggest fears my entire life up until now was losing my mom. I honestly did not know how I was going to do life. Like it was this big, scary, awful thing that I was terrified of for my whole life. And I think some of that comes from like my mom lost her mom when I was just one, one and a half years old from lung cancer. The trauma of that was something I don't have a verbal memory of, but it left this imprint on me, I think. And then throughout life, she would talk about how permanent death is in this life and how like time is the most precious thing we have. It's so limited. You know, we just need to cherish our time together. We won't always have one another.

And standing on this side of her death now, what I think she meant was just realizing the preciousness of life because it just is so finite. But what it felt like to me was always feeling like I wasn't spending enough time with her and that I would always regret it later. I just couldn't see myself past her death. The anticipation of it felt like this was going to be something that it was questionable if I would ever really recover from. And what it's turned out to be is something that I can navigate. It's not to say that I don't feel deeply sad.

And it's not to say that I don't feel deeply sad. And it's not to say that I don't feel like or I haven't had moments of feeling like my North Star has like gone out. And it feels like I don't know how to be in the world without my mom in the world. She's my touchstone. You know, I mean, it's certainly disorienting and deeply sad. All of those things are absolutely true. And I'm okay. I am so grateful because coincidentally, or that's not the right word, but like at the same time as she was dying, I was really developing and learning skills on how to be with my own uncomfortable emotions or unpleasant emotions. And so I feel like I've upskilled in a lot of ways on how to be with this really difficult thing. So I don't want

to say it did not feel as bad as I anticipated, but in some ways it did not feel as like ruinous to me as I thought it would feel. But I will say that the gift of normalizing has been so abundant in the process of grief. Like for me, learning about grief, talking about grief, talking to other people about grief, reading about grief, talking to other people about grief, reading about grief, having language and understanding around the very universal experience of grief has been so liberating. So I'm really excited that we're able to devote a whole episode, and it looks like it's going to be a longer episode, to this topic because some of the weightiest emotional territory can be the source of some of our most painful isolation and sources

of shame and also sources of suffering, you know, both inside of ourselves and also communally, you know, as a culture. And so, you know, maybe now's a good time to kind of dive into what we've learned, right? And what might be helpful to share about this experience of grief that we all inevitably at some point will go through, right? Yeah. Well, what you just said, just about how isolating grief can be, I think that is so true for so many people, especially when the losses that we're experiencing, there aren't words to describe a relationship. So when you're talking about the loss of a parent, I think people are more likely to understand how profound that is. That's our psychological foundation. A parent is our psychological foundation because that's where we form attachment and that's how we learn how safe the world is and all of these things.

And losing a grandparent, so many people have different relationships with grandparents. And I know some people for whom that has been a loss of a major relationship and then some people for whom that's less of a loss. But I wanted to also talk about the flip side of the coin, which is grief as kind of a thing that connects us to the world more deeply. thing that connects us to the world more deeply. Ginny, you've experienced living with grief recently, and I know you've done a lot of research and thinking about this. I'm curious what you found that either wasn't helpful or didn't end up feeling truthful to your experience or even truthful to many folks' experience in the process of grieving. or even truthful to many folks experience in the process of grieving. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I feel like luckily when I engaged with some reading on the topic of grief so that it would support me and help me kind of name and language some things I might be experiencing,

what I found was really helpful and clarifying. And so I think where I encountered maybe some, you know, so to speak, myths was like going into my experience with grief as opposed to when I went to like learn something about it. And I also just want to pause before I answer and say, like, I think that grief can feel and be a very individual experience, even though it's a universal human experience. Right. experience, even though it's a universal human experience, right? So like the loss of a child can probably feel very different than the loss of a parent or, you know, the loss of a friend probably feels very different than the loss of a spouse or life partner. So I just want to hold space for whatever your listener, your experience is to really honor that and to also name that we certainly won't capture

every nuance of grief in this conversation and that that not be evidence that you're somehow doing it wrong or that we're invalidating types of grief just because we're not naming them. I'm not able to speak to the loss of a child because I've not experienced that, to speak to the loss of a child because I've not experienced that. But I honor that as like a really heavy burden. And even you just saying that, Jenny, as a parent, just right. So I just want to kind of leave a lot of room for everybody's experience to be exactly as it is and to be exactly okay in that way. But there are some broad brush things that I think are maybe myths that I had about grief that have turned out to like, not only not be helpful, but not really be the case. So the first is this idea of the five stages of grief. So Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

actually is the one that came up with what originally was intended to be the five stages of death, not the five stages of grief. So it was the five stages one might go through when encountering and approaching one's own death. That got culturally twisted into the five stages of grief or loss. And I think we can see why in hindsight, because grief is this very big, intimidating, scary, unpleasant, overwhelming kind of ball of awful weightiness. And what better to have than like a roadmap and like a step-by-step? Well, get through step one and then you're in step two and get through step two and then

you go to step three and then at the end of step five, you are done and dusted with grief, right? Unfortunately, that's just not really the way it works. It's not so linear, and it certainly is not so finite. So I think a more useful bereavement theory, at least that I came across was by a man named J. William Worden. And he talks about not four steps, but a bit of a framework around maybe how we might move through the time of when the loss occurs to a more integrated whole way of then moving forward in life, which is accepting the reality of the loss, because it's really hard to accept that right at first oftentimes. And then the process of working through the pain of grief, right? That that needs to be felt to be worked through and to be metabolized for us to really reap the actual gifts that that can potentially yield for us.

the actual gifts that that can potentially yield for us. And then to adjust to an environment when the deceased is missing. So how do I do life without my mom, right? And that's a process. And then to find an enduring connection with the deceased while embarking on a new life, right? This helps us to move forward with attachment rather than trying to find detachment from our lost loved ones. So I really felt like that, though not a linear process either, might be maybe a more useful framework to think about some experiences we might have with relating to

loss. But I think the biggest myth that I have come to personally realize is just not the case, is this idea that there isn't a place or a time in which we're going to arrive at this like once and for all peace, healing, completion, like grief is a process. Like I took the month of December off after my mom died to sort of like check in and see like, okay, what else is here that needs to come up? Let's have you come up. Let's feel you. Let's heal with you. And then like, let's kind of move on, you know? And what I discovered is like, that's just not as it turns out how it works. Right. And I say that with a smile on my face, because in hindsight, it's like, well, of course, that's not how it works. But like, I'm learning here as I go. And what I think is more true to my experiences is like, we're going to continue, right, to

encounter grief and encounter this loss for a long time, if not a lifetime, right? It's a long and a winding road. And that's not a sign that we're doing grief wrong or that we didn't feel our feelings when the loss happened. I mean, it's just the way it is. I also will say that I'll hear people say like, you'll never get over it, right? Like you'll never get over this loss. You'll always carry this grief with you.

And while I think there is absolute truth in that, the way I interpreted that was that I'll always feel this way about this loss. The grief will always feel this intense or this heavy. And I think what I'm experiencing, and I've experienced over the last, you know, seven years is that the loss and the grief over the loss is in me and with me. It just doesn't always feel the same as it does or at any point in time as it ever has, you know, certainly not at its worst. Like I've heard, of course, time heals all things, but I think it's more specifically like time plus action heals. So like time plus connecting with others in a safe

way, in a supported way over this grief to be able to really process and tell our stories, you know, time plus learning how to be with the difficult pain of grief so that we can feel it without becoming completely overwhelmed or traumatized by it, you know, in a way that feels in a repeated Learning how to be with the difficult pain of grief so that we can feel it without becoming completely overwhelmed or traumatized by it, you know, in a way that feels in a repeated way traumatic. And the last thing I'll say here is like maybe a more helpful way to think about like this you'll never get over it kind of idea is because I think it could be really overwhelming to think like at my most grief stricken that I'm always going to feel this way.

Like to me, that feels terrifying. And there was this metaphor I came across called the ball in the box. And I thought it was really helpful. So like picture this, it's a box with a ball in it and also a pain button, right? So in the beginning of grief, like the ball is huge. Like you can't move the box

without the ball hitting the pain button, right? It rattles around on its own and it just hits the button all over and over and over. And you just, you can't control it. It just keeps hurting. And then over time, the ball slowly gets smaller, right? It hits the button less and less. But when it does, it still hurts. And it, you know, it can hurt just as much.

It's better because though you can function day to day more easily. Yeah. Right? But like the downside is the ball is going to randomly hit the pain button and often when you least expect it. Right. Yeah. But the ball never really goes away. It just might hit less and less and you have more time to recover between hits. Unlike when the ball was still enormous. That really resonates with me. I think that the pain of grief can be as poignant and it's for me personally, less frequent. It can surprise me and come on in moments that I wouldn't expect. And then I

also have a contact now for understanding that that moment will pass and that I'll be okay. The other thing that I wanted to just name in regards to this idea of what we're told about grief or just myths around grief is that sometimes grief can include positive experiences or at the very least experiences that aren't just about how much we miss that person. I think that a lot of people have complicated relationships with others, and sometimes there can be feelings where we don't feel comfortable talking about related to having feelings of maybe relief, especially if we've sat with someone who's been suffering for a long time, or even feelings of freedom that that death process has kind of ended and now we can begin to move into another phase. And I think that there's this myth that if we have any of those feelings that we didn't really love that person, we didn't really care about that person. Yes. I'm so glad you named that. Yep. Exactly. That we make our intensity or frequency or

experience of grief or lack thereof means something about our relationship with them. Yeah, exactly. 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.

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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. The other thing that I struggle with is when people say things to the person who's grieving, which is like, you know, your loved one wouldn't want you to be sad. like, you know, your loved one wouldn't want you to be sad, right? Like as if somehow you're letting them down by feeling sad about the loss of them and that the way forward is to like put that behind you and be happy. And I think it comes from a person that probably just, it's hard to see someone you care about

deeply sad, right? But what I've discovered in my experience is that, oh, absolutely feel sad. The most maladaptive thing we can do is to avoid our sadness. I mean, I think to enter into our sadness with support and some skill around it is really helpful. And avoidance is just going to make the experience of grief more painful and more protracted. That engagement with like the acute pain of grief and the struggle to emerge from it, right? They're necessary ingredients to be positively changed by loss.

If you love greatly, you're going to grieve greatly. Yeah. And I would say that sometimes our bodies are quite intelligent. And if that grief isn't available for us moment to moment, if we're not feeling the way that we think grief is supposed to feel, sometimes that's our body's way of protecting us from something that we're not ready yet, especially when it comes to issues of complicated grief, when maybe there are extenuating circumstances that don't make it easy to engage to the depths of what are true experiences. And I think that this is especially true related to

a lot of the losses that people might have experienced with COVID, especially in the context of the fact that many folks weren't able to be with their loved ones during the time of death. I actually lost three family members over the course of COVID. And for two of them, there might have been extenuating circumstances related to they'd had COVID within the last month and then passed away. And something that I read was that this experience of not being present with a loved one and the death process, and then not being able to sometimes engage in some of those rituals around death that can be so important for us actually makes it much harder for our brains to understand that the loss has even occurred. And so I know for myself personally, I have some numbness around some of those deaths.

Like I wasn't able to be in that process as I would have in normal times. And so I just also want to name that a lot of folks might be experiencing grief differently, especially at this particular time that we're in, in history. And I think that that's important too. So important. Oh my gosh. I'm so glad you mentioned that. Yeah. I've found through the experience of losing my mom, like I would put pressure on myself to feel sad. And if I didn't

feel sad, I was like, what does this mean? Does this mean I didn't love her really? Like I thought I did. Like maybe I'm just so calloused and hard that like I could just detach from that experience of grief. I just made it mean again, that like I was doing something wrong or it meant something like was wrong. Yeah. You're right. I mean, I think that goes back to just letting the experience be whatever it's going to be. And if that's pain and grief, allowing it to be.

If that's numbness, if that's a feeling of disbelief, like allowing that to be, right? Allowing things to be as they are is sort of that path to healing. Even if that feeling is relief, even if that feeling is some sense of freedom, whatever the feeling is, that's just part of this. I think what we're sort of talking around is that grief is so complex and that in a lot of ways, it's tied into almost every emotion, including love. So I think that that's a way that we can talk about this. It's a little bit of everything, right? It's a little bit of everything. Yes. And sometimes a lot of a lot of things. I mean,

I will tell you, I'm so glad you mentioned relief. I mean, when my mom passed, the moment she passed in the morning after the predominant feeling I had was relief. And I was so relieved that she wasn't suffering anymore and that I wasn't suffering over her suffering anymore. And that all the burden of caring for her, that that was gone. It felt liberating. And you're right. To feel that is okay. And like to name that, right, is okay. I'm really grateful I was able to sort of allow myself to do that in that morning after. It's like, yes, it feels like freedom. Yeah. And, you know, the sense that I got when my grandma passed away was I'm still here. I think we were both profoundly involved in the death process of another person. And there is this, it's actually

called something, and I can't remember, like a secondary death experience or something like that. I can't remember exactly the term, but essentially it's the process of sort of partnering with someone who is going through something and having that level of empathy and experience. As you said, they are walking alone. That's one thing that death made was made very clear to me through the process is that this is something she had to go through on her own and you named that. But when you walk so closely with someone, it feels like your world. And then when that experience does come to a close, I was sort of left with this sort of gasp, like, oh my God, I'm still here. Yes.

I'm alive, you know, like feeling my body, like I'm alive. And then it kind of began this, this is going to sound a little bit strange, but like a second life experience for me, you know, Richard Rohr talks about the falling upward experience. It felt like my second half of life started. And I see that as a profound gift that she left with me. I share that experience. I'm so happy you named that. I too, like I usually said a word as an intention for the year instead of resolutions. And this year it's live.

Like that's my word because of what occurred to me is like, oh, it's not over for me yet. Oh my gosh. I don't know how much time I have left, but like, I want to push past my fears and be brave and not, you know, regret things that I didn't do because I let fear keep me small. I just had this sense of like the, okay, let's push ourselves to live life and not passively take it for granted. Right? Yeah.

And you know, the other interesting thing I experienced, which you're making me think of now is I had this feeling when my mom was gone was like, all of a sudden, it was like, you know how like, when you're a kid, I did a lot of sneaking out when I was a teenager, like so much. And I don't know how I'm alive today. Like, how did I not? Oh, my goodness. So much sneaking out. But it was that thrill of like, your parents don't know. Like, your parents are nowhere to be found.

And you're free. They're not around. And I had this also really unexpected experience of like, oh, my gosh. She's not on this earth anymore to have anything to say about anything I do. Like, there's a real freedom there. I just was caught off guard by that. Yeah. Yeah. Actually there's a quote that I'd love to share with you and I'm feeling or wondering if maybe this is leading us into a second episode where maybe in our second episode, we talk about some of the things that were really helpful for us in regards to this

grieving process and some of the strategies and the tools that have really supported us to be where we are. And I think this could be a great lead-in to that conversation. So this is a quote from Mirabai Starr in the book, God of Love. And Mirabai is a spiritual teacher. She's actually a teacher who identifies as interspiritual. And so basically what that means is that she feels a deep reverence for all spiritual traditions and feels a draw and a calling to engage within each of those faith traditions. And so her spirituality encompasses kind of a variety of different faith experiences, you know, including Buddhism, including Judaism, Muslim faith tradition, and a variety of others. But it's the practices that she feels really drawn toward.

about grief because she experienced that absolutely devastating grief of a loss of a child that we've a few times just alluded to in this podcast. And I just want to say to any of our listeners who have experienced that poignant grief that I really can't imagine moving through it. I think it's just one of the hardest that folks can possibly experience because it feels like a tragedy. It's something that no parent should ever go through. And so Mirabai lost her daughter at age 16 in an accident. And she writes about grief in this really just profound way. And I just want to read this passage from her. She says, your senses become heightened. Everything becomes almost unbearably beautiful. The rain on the tin roof, a columbine pushing through the crack in the walkway, a slice of buttered toast. Your world has come undone and you have never felt so alive.

You do not dare to speak this madness to anyone. They have not yet discovered what you have, that grief is proportionate to love and exponentially enlarges the capacity of our souls, making enough room for it all. You did not ask for this gift. Who would choose to walk around without skin on her heart, permeable to the suffering of every passing creature? Yet if pressed, you would have to admit that it's worth it. Yet if pressed, you would have to admit that it's worth it. As a sensitive person, this gets to the root of something that is the most true about grief for me,

which is that life, being a human, is about where these two things meet. It is about where love, this capacity to feel so much connection and presence with the people around us meets this knowledge that this is all impermanent. And Buddhists describe this as anicca, right? The arising and passing away and that arising and passing away can do two things. It can either make us numb out because it is too much to know, or it can bring us to this point of aliveness that is just profound because it enlarges our capacity to be present with the experience of love while also holding this sense that this is not going to last forever, that this love that we feel is going to at some point cause us unbearable pain. And I think that that truth is what grief allows us to touch into if we can really be

with it. So beautifully said. Absolutely. Amen. I think that's a wonderful place to pause and let's call this part one of our grief conversation. And in part two, we're going to dive into some of the important truths we've discovered about grief, some of the really useful, helpful ways we've learned to sort of navigate this terrain for ourselves and the things that have come up in research that we've found helpful and supportive.

So I hope you'll come back, listeners, for part two. And thank you so much for being with us in this heartfelt, poignant conversation. And thank you, listeners, for being in this space with us. conversation. Thank you listeners for being in this space with us. I know my heart right now is just burning with just that sense of connection that we feel when we open our hearts to the space of where loss and love meet one another. And if folks in this community right now are experiencing grief, I just like to take a moment to recognize that you're not alone in the process. Right now I'm holding my hand over my heart and I hope that you can feel that sense of being connected to another person who's also experienced loss. Both Jenny and I are holding

that space. All right. Until next time. Thanks everyone. 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. 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 Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.