The Wellness Scoop - Loss, Grief, Gratitude and Presence

Episode Date: May 7, 2019

Loss and grief are two of the rawest, most profound emotions that strip you back to the very core of what it is to be human, and today we look at how you turn that darkness into a world of heightened gratitude, bringing more meaning to everything that has come before. After losing their Mum, Matt and his sister, Jess, talk the depths of loneliness, supporting those around you, accepting the painful reality of where you are and the desperate need for a change in the way we address such a shared experience, as well as the absolutely indispensable power of presence, gratitude and resilience throughout. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi everyone and welcome to season three of the Delicious Yellow podcast with me, Matthew Mills, and my wife and business partner, Ella Mills. Hi everyone. We're really, really really really happy to be back thank you for having us and we start each season with a really personal episode. This season we wanted to go a little bit deeper into that. We so have valued and appreciated every single piece of feedback that you've given us over the last two seasons and one of the points that just kept coming up was how much what Matt said

about his learnings from the loss of his mum have up was how much what Matt said about his learnings from the loss of his mum have resonated and how much you've taken from it. We're going to be approaching this in a very unprescriptive way. We want it to be a very human, real conversation, not something based on stats and studies because loss and grief are two of the most human emotions and two of the only things that unite every single one of us on this planet yet they're a topic that we often shy away from so we're going to be getting deep into this today indeed we are and we have a very special guest who is my lovely sister who is not just my lovely sister but she's also one of the most emotionally intelligent and eloquent people i know i think really to start is one of the things that i experienced most when when mum was really ill

and then when mum passed away was that death for a lot of people feels something that's that's an awkward thing or something that people don't really like to talk about and going through the experience myself with mum was one of the things that struck me was just what an incredibly human experience it is and you feel emotions that really strip you back to what feels like your absolute rawest form. And I know from lots of our listeners when we were asking about questions for some of these episodes that people shared their different experiences of what they're going through with loss, whether that's a difficult divorce, a difficult breakup, a miscarriage, or the loss of a loved one a family member so again we

want to come at this from something which we hope will give inspiration and some sense of shared collective feeling for every single person no matter what it is that you're dealing with in your life that involves that semblance of grief so i think we should just start with maybe just giving mine and jess's just personal accounts suggest you should just start with maybe just giving mine and Jess's just personal accounts so Jess do you want to start with your experience yeah so for me I I realize now retrospectively that my grieving process for mum started as soon as she was diagnosed it's a very common thing actually that I've read a lot about since where you enter into a state of what's called ambiguous loss so you're going through all the stages of bereavement and grief but while the person is still

there and that in itself is such a complex painful disorientating space to find yourself and when I look back at this time I see both cycles and huge spikes in the kind of anguish of grief but I also see huge moments of resilience as well and I suppose there's something fortifying in that and I think when you first go through an experience like this you are cast off into a landscape that feels utterly disorientating and there's no levers to hold on to. The very common thing is that you go through this and people can retreat into quite a solitary, isolated space. And it is the one experience which connects you to most people you know, actually,

and it isn't the thing that should make you feel, leave you feeling the most isolated the most alone at that time in your life there should be a sense of kind of profound connection at that point but unfortunately and i think it's a lot to do with the way that we experience or don't choose to talk about death in our culture that when people go through these things they retreat into their own lives and and their process is something that is experienced in a very solitary very isolated way and you know what I've realized through starting to talk about these things is that actually there's profound connection and there's a profound kind of collective experience that can create a real sense of comfort at possibly one of the most painful times of your life. And I really hope that for people listening to this,

there's that sense of, you know, through our words, that they are being understood and that we hear them. As Jess alluded to, our experience with losing our mum was we had a year period in between where mum was diagnosed with her illness. I made a kind of subconscious decision not to google throughout the whole experience to try and understand what was happening I tried to be led by what the professionals we were talking to and what the experts and I think that that is one thing that really really helped is because when you launch into a deep search of something you really know nothing about or an illness or when

you just hit google you start to get and see some pretty scary things that probably would knock you more than is needed in a moment where you're already hugely hugely off balance and so mum had a successful operation where the tumor was taken out but with the type of cancer she had which is very aggressive even though you move remove the tumor there's out but with the type of cancer she had which is very aggressive even though you move remove the tumor there's still lots of cancer cells that are left over and in September of 2017 mum had another scan and it was that the tumor had regrown and that to me was really the point that I knew that this wasn't going to be something that we were going to be able to be and my first ever girlfriend first ever love of my life was was killed in an accident when I was 16 and it was a completely

different experience because it was just a completely freak accident where suddenly one Sunday night when I thought everything was okay and she'd be coming back a few days later I got a call from her parents to say that she had been killed in an accident. And that was an utterly different type of experience with mom. But what was relatable was that experience where there was a definiteness in it. When I found out about that from hearing that she had passed away to when the tumor had come back in in september after that scan it immediately to me that felt like the moment when even though mum you know she she hadn't passed by that point i couldn't see a way a way out of it then and it's just crazy the physical manifestations you have of these things and i talked about this last series but i was literally walking down the street one day to go

and get lunch and suddenly i couldn't stand up and the world was spinning I was rushed to hospital and I had this this physical experience I guess of just being completely out of control because of the stress and the grief I was feeling and after that Ella and I went away for a few days and really tried to to regroup and we had one particularly really meaningful conversation where I completely acknowledged and started to begin to accept what was happening and I really tried to shift however difficult this was that I was going to completely be a human being and I was going to grieve deeply I wasn't going to shy away from it I was going to talk to anyone who wanted to talk to me about it but I was also going to try and balance the amount I grieved with the amount of time I spent just either writing things or saying things or talking things or thinking things that I was

just incredibly grateful for with mum and that balance I think of complete kind of acknowledgement and living with a huge sense of reality whilst at the same time understanding that life is going on and I am actually insanely lucky were two things that really really helped me in those initial phases and you know mum's illness really started to deteriorate after Christmas and in new year of 2018 my parents lived in the country and we'd be up there every weekend and every weekend we would get in the car and I would basically just stop crying as soon as we got in the car to drive back to London because it was so tangible to see the deterioration that that mum was going through and another thing that we then started doing which was you know Sunday

nights were always rough because I just wanted to be with mom. I didn't want to be really going back to London to do things. However much I loved work and however much purpose I felt in my life, I really just wanted to have and treasure every minute I could with her. We started doing this little routine that, again, I think is something that I would definitely recommend to anyone going through some of this. We're just having a routine each week where you just do something really really nice so we started going to our favorite Japanese restaurant every Sunday night and we literally did not miss a week up until mum passed away in May and it was just our moment just to step out to do something really really nice to reflect also just have a bit of time the two of us but when you're going through these

really horrendous moments where you feel kind of captive within the situation that you're in and you feel like there's no way out taking yourself out of that and doing something that's objectively really really nice was something that definitely helped me jess what were the things that you learned to use as either coping mechanisms or or tools that you used you know you're one of the most resilient people i know as was mum mum was incredibly incredibly resilient i think she she passed that on to us but what were some of the other tools that you picked up in those first few days after i mean again just to put this into context, you know, literally an hour before mum was rushed to hospital from having these two major seizures, I'd been on FaceTime with her and my daughter Ottie, just having one of our daily chats about everything Ottie related,

what she had done, what she hadn't done and how miraculous every single one of those things were. Ottie's Jess's little daughter. My daughter, who at the time was only 10 weeks old and mum said to me it was one of the last conversations we had before she had these seizures that she had just never felt better she had never felt we were speaking about her birthday coming up her 70th birthday and she said god if this is what 69 looks like then I think it's pretty fabulous and she felt amazing and then bang out of nowhere she had these two major seizures and within two days we were told from the initial MRI it looked like a high-grade

glioma which is one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer you can have but when mum was first admitted to hospital we had a space of about five or six hours where we really didn't know if she was going to make it and initially they thought she had had a huge stroke the very fact that she recovered from that and regained consciousness and then was starting to make kind of coherent noises again within the first eight hours felt i mean your relative framework for what is suddenly positive shifts so dramatically in those moments and if someone had said to me 10 hours before you know would you have considered the fact that your mum can now say yes or no and blink her one eye as a positive I would have been absolutely baffled by how that could ever just but actually in in the framework we were suddenly facing which is that you know we were told she might not even make it through the night

suddenly that was that was everything you know and I think in those first few days going from the absolutely kind of catatonic shock initially of thinking that we had had lost her in that moment to suddenly realizing that she was she was recovering and that we hadn had lost her in that moment to suddenly realising that she was recovering and that we hadn't lost her. Even in those few hours, you are taught the most incredible lesson in the power of just being present and how really projecting forward

into any kind of future scenario of anything is purely speculative. And I remember feeling so profoundly after those those couple of days just that my god and it sounds like a cliche but it's true just the preciousness of each moment and those first 48 hours where we went from I mean I can't describe to you what it felt like to get that call I felt like I had mainline electricity coursing through my veins. And I did do for many days after that. But to then suddenly this glimmer of hope that she was going to make it, you know, just in that process, I suppose, resilience starts to kick in.

The resilience comes, as you say, as well from presence. And when you start to break something down into what feels like a manageable chunk, if presence is just feeling and managing and looking as far out as just what you're doing today, that to me also built huge resilience. And I made... Did you feel it required quite a lot of self-discipline to kind of continuously anchor yourself in that yeah it did and i think that at times like this when the emotional part of your brain is so charged and overworking by being able to move something into the rational part of your brain to try and do that it did take discipline but it was something that provided a level of focus that i think really helped but i think with presence being able to say you know it's like with any illnesses you really you never know exactly how long they're going to be the doctors

will give you some statistics on on what's normal but we would start doing lots of different treatments with mum that provided hope that maybe she would live beyond the year life expectancy typically that someone with her illness has and when I got to the point of look I don't know if I have six months or two years or ten years or two weeks left with mum but what I do know is that I have today and I'm going to make today the absolute best I can with something that built an enormous amount of resilience the next part I talked a bit about gratitude before and the kind of stage two of gratitude for me was when mum passed away and she passed away in mine, my sister's and my dad's arms in her bed at home. And when something like that happens, and it was the most profound experience that I've had in my life, and realize how finite life is and that mum was there

with us and then she was no longer there with us and it shows you that life starts and then it stops on earth and where mum is now on earth is in the depth of mine and jess's hearts and the people that she touched and that she helped and supported along her way but it also takes you into a place of ultimate gratitude and i think also sharpens a focus in life that we are here for a limited amount of time to absolutely make the most of it because you never know when anything's going to happen to you just like we didn't know when mum was going to get ill you never know when a nasty accident's going to happen so that sense of presence every day and valuing each day and just being grateful for each day was something that were the two biggest lessons I took out of it but they're lessons for life exactly and they are lessons for life and what it also triggered in me was something

where I didn't want to rush my grieving process to try and feel like i could come out the other side i thought it was really important for me to live through it and live and breathe it and be completely frank and honest with myself about that but what it also did was create a level of focus where i really really knew i wanted to get out the other side of it too because i knew that life wasn't going to go on forever and I could just you know just keep on grieving and that would all be fine I wanted my life to be much better than just feeling grief and loss and so that was something that that helped enable me to I think internally build the tools to allow me to get to that other side as well and I really do believe that it's been a fundamental shift in my life in feeling every day a much greater sense of presence that what I know I

have is today and that I'm going to be grateful for it I never and this is something that I hope you know people listening can take comfort in is that something I never ever could have anticipated is strangely the gifts that grief can give you too and that it's not just a black space of of darkness and and heartbreak and yearning and missing it's it's more a kind of incredible sort of kaleidoscope of different supercharged colors and for me personally and I know from speaking to other people too that this feels like part of the collective kind of human experience of grief is that it just supercharges everything so you when you feel happy you feel intensely happy when you feel sad you feel absolutely beside yourself and when it's like living in this quite extraordinary hyper real technicolor for me

and i think you start to feel these these real human emotions on an even deeper level you do and it relates back to that lesson of being present it's like nothing is wasted on you you know just the simplicity of a beautiful moment in the sunshine drinking your coffee on your garden step in the morning yeah whether or you know having a really amazing evening with your partner or then the really difficult times too you know they they are supercharged too but it almost elevates all of that consciousness into the most kind of hyper real technicolor state of course you know within that you feel pain and heartbreak and a yearning that for me was completely beyond my emotional vocabulary you know and i i feel it wasn't until i i went through this experience that

i started to understand the language of it and it is in a way an expansion of consciousness when you go through something like this and you can't possibly really describe it unless you've been through it because it's like with childbirth you know you can explain it but nothing can teach it to you like like the living experience of it and it's a huge multi-faceted kind of living breathing ever-changing entity in my life and um but it creates an enormous sense of growth as a person i think as well i think that's something that anyone grieving should really really hold on to is that you will come out if you are able to create these tools within yourself which anyone is capable of doing you will come out of another side and you will be a much more well-rounded more sophisticated more resilient bigger kind of human being in that and i think that that is

something that should give anyone i think just the fact that you're being delivered from day to day beyond the immediate kind of catatonic aftermath of something like that feels a bit miraculous like whoa okay so i haven't just yeah fallen over and you know ceased to exist myself because one of the world is my worst nightmares has come true and that is the point at which i think you can start to objectively marvel at this thing which is resilience which is that you don't fall over you do get up in the morning and you know the days do deliver you from one moment to the next and it's time is a big part of resilience and it's the kind of merciful healer really and it's the thing that even when you think you are stuck in absolute

you know imprisoned by your grief you must always know that whether you know it or not time is kind of mercifully miraculously delivering you from moment to moment where you will burst out of that blackness and it's like i always imagine it like being on a train in a in a dark tunnel and if you look out the window it just it's like it's black black black the whole time and you wouldn't necessarily know you're moving but actually every single moment you're looking in that blackness you're second closer to bursting out into the sun into the sunlight again and then suddenly bang and you're there the sun comes back and maybe it doesn't last for for that long but it does maybe you go back into another tunnel and you come out again exactly and what you realize

is actually the with grief but as with everything it's it's everything is impermanent so the moments where you feel the ground disappears beneath you and you just collapse into a you know state of your own heartbreak or sadness or missing just missing this person so much that feeling will pass too and you will be delivered from that that feeling into another feeling and you will resurface and it's just remembering that this state of grief isn't an end destination it's it's not a fixed end point i think the point is that human emotion is incredibly fleeting like the best moments of your life only last a certain amount of time as well it's like the impermanence of everything. Exactly. You know, everyone's grieving and process is so different. But I'm still surprised by the rawness of my grief.

And I think I've been disorientated by the enormity and the scale of it and how difficult it's been to orientate myself in my new life without mum and I for this talk of resilience like my god you know I've I've had to work on a daily basis really to to keep my head above water really and I think it's interesting hearing what your kind of timeline was of mum's illness and that I think that September scan which is it was three months after mum was diagnosed it was basically she had another scan and it was clear that there was progression i think your process of acceptance started then and i think i was so terrified to accept the inevitability of what was happening that i went into dealing with in a completely different way which was like the whole kind of treatment focus stuff and so I think coming out the other side of it you were much further into the kind of the evolution of your grief when mum did pass

away than than I was I think I think the way you put it is is so right grief is this person that you do keep after having a relationship with forever and sometimes they feel like they're within you and sometimes it feels like it's a million miles away and ella and i we were down in italy over easter and it was good friday and we went into this beautiful church and i went in there to light a candle for mom and to say a prayer and i um i was just in absolute pieces it felt like every single bit of the rawest grief you know I would speak to mum a couple of times a day and one of the first times I'd call her each day was after I would I typically get to the office pretty early and then I would go out and grab a coffee and I'd always call her on the way from office to go grab a coffee and not being able to call mum then it

was just like the most empty feeling because I was suddenly back in my normal but not able to do my normal thing with her and that was a moment of really feeling her absence but i and the trigger points are so often the most un seemingly unremarkable things but it still feels as raw as the rawest times that objectively you look at and would feel like the most raw like the moment when mum passed away or something and i was in this church on over eastern i just couldn't do it i was just in absolute i was in bits but then the following day i was okay and it just it does just go to show how it's totally non-linear and that's and that's the thing and in those moments when you suddenly feel you're being thrown down back into the kind of pits of the ocean with it again you know you just have to

kind of hold on tight and just know that you know you will be delivered from that moment and you will resurface and i think that is something that i've learned and i wish it's something that someone had actually told me because when you're when you're going through it you can't ever imagine not feeling as awful as you do and i think knowing from someone that's been through it that actually you know the the moments pass would have been of great comfort yeah for me so as part of this episode we really wanted to put as i think you all know community sits at the absolute heart of Delicious Yellow. And just like in this episode, in every episode we do, we really want it to be guided by the people who participate

in this amazing community that we have at Delicious Yellow. So we had quite a few questions through. Yeah, so I'm just going to pick out some of the questions that came up kind of time and time again. And one of the questions which I think a lot of readers and listeners have struggled to grapple with is this sense of guilt that can sometimes exist around loss and how you find a way to allow yourself to be happy and to take those moments of enjoyment without feeling a guilt that you're able to do that? It's a really important question, this. And I honestly think that anyone who's been through a really life-changing, profound loss

will know that you have to really work for your happiness. You know, you really have to work for it. And the moments that it returns to you, you just bask in it. You really do. Anyone that really understands loss understands the depths of where it takes you will say the moment the sun shines you just get out there and you bask in every single moment of it because it doesn't always last forever that also comes for you know some people i know the kind of issue of guilt is and again this is through other

conversations I've had particularly in relation to people losing a partner you know someone losing a partner and then finding a new relationship after that and all of the kind of incredibly ambivalent feelings you can have including of course guilt around that and again I would just say you know anybody that could possibly judge your your process of moving forward and your ability to find happiness post the biggest loss of your life, quite frankly, doesn't understand the first thing about it. it because if you have been through it my god you know that you will just absolutely deserve every single moment that that sunshine shines for you and if you find somebody that you feel you can build a happy future with beyond that loss then that is and it's possibly the only good thing that could come from yeah yeah the most terrible thing that's happened in your life. So I think it's different if you lose a parent or someone in a bloodline, actually.

I think the issue of guilt probably plays out in a different way. It's important to talk about grief with enough kind of broad language to create a sense of inclusiveness and collective experience that can frame something that feels universal and that people can universally identify with at the same time as always remembering the kind of singular uniqueness of people's grief and of every situation and of every situation so and the fact that everyone does just have these completely different starting points you you know. Exactly. If you haven't had a great relationship with a family member and they die and you feel guilt because you didn't get to say the things you wanted to say.

Definitely. You know, that I'm sure is an absolutely, what feels like a completely impossible. to navigate is if somebody dies who they have very unresolved stuff with i think that is when it's really really really difficult not ever having a sense of resolve we can only use the experience that has been personal to us but even in a situation like that however desperate it must feel i would still believe that being able to go back to a place of presence and gratitude on a daily basis is probably the best way of doing it even through the 10 bad options that you have in in a really bad situation like that one of the other questions that came up a lot for people was and I know we've kind of slightly touched on it is that feeling that you're very alone in this I think often as you said Jess because the this area is a bit taboo and I know

like with math you know friends and people close to us would call me or ask me how you were doing but they were kind of almost nervous to ask you for fear of saying something wrong or triggering something and as a result I think sometimes you can feel on your own and like people aren't engaged but actually there's a kind of sense of fear around that engagement which I found really eye-opening and I know I learned a lot from and one of the questions that people had is how do you help someone who's grieving you know people whose close friends family colleagues are going through a difficult time in terms of what people did to support you was there anything that you feel really made a difference I think my advice to someone who is maybe not the person who's

experiencing the loss but someone who is a friend or you know a family member of someone who was going through a huge bereavement is the best thing that you can do is to try and meet the person where they are and you can do this I think in quite an instant way you know if you see them and you can it's absolutely clear on that day that they're not doing great then you open it up and you and I think I was just asking the question how are you today is really helpful because you don't need to know how you are you how you feel changes moment to moment it's like how are you today and just allow them that person to offer as much or as little as is completely authentically there for them and it may be they say you know what i'm actually feeling strangely okay today and i just woke up and i just felt a bit lighter or or they may say you know what i just feel absolutely devastated and and then allow them to lead the

conversation but i think the worst thing to do is just pretend it's not happening, because that is the thing that drives the person who is in the state of grief into this kind of archipelago where they feel completely out of reach. And for the person going through the bereavement, you end up feeling like this strange observer on life that's going on around you that you are just completely wholly uninvolved in. And it's a very weird disorientating feeling so so my answer to that question would just be to to ask them how they are today and then let them lead it and if they're feeling okay and they don't want to talk about it you'll know respect that yeah and if they do then you can just be there with open arms glass of wine big hug whatever's needed i know when i wanted to get a better understanding of how to help math, there were a few books that people recommended.

And Sheryl Sandberg's book, Option B, that she wrote after her husband very suddenly passed away, I found incredibly helpful. And there's an amazing bit. The reason that she did it was that she felt so isolated and so alone. And she ended up drafting a Facebook post because she felt that people kept walking past her and ignoring her,

but actually they didn't know what to say, so they said nothing at all. And she shared everything she felt, the emotions that she was going through on this Facebook post and posted it. And she said from that moment forward, it was almost like she'd given everyone around her permission to talk about it and to open up the conversation and she said it completely changed her grieving process because

it suddenly felt open and collective and shared and people weren't any longer scared it's something that everyone has everyone unfortunately is going to lose someone who's really who they love or is really close to them and everyone is going to die one day that is we all share that because a few people asked the question on the other side which was that they felt people around them weren't supporting them and potentially it is just maybe you have to take the first step in opening up the conversation even though that seems a little bit unfair but it has to be a much much much more open conversation i think the only the only other thing I'd add to that which I think is something that I know I was incredibly touched by after mum died as well which is the best support is typically not when in the moment that the big thing happens when anyone can send

a text message or call it's at the moment when suddenly everything's quiet and checking back in with family was an amazing lesson for me and it was the continuity past just when you know anyone can be present in the kind of in the high impact moment but it's actually once all that settles um it's the people that are there for the long haul exactly who are the ones who are still there really really checking in with you and they're typically the people you end up being closest to yeah and then just one final question that came up a lot have you found that because i think this this seems very common for people is stopping yourself from living in fear as you've said you know this happened out of nowhere and you couldn't see it coming as with your experience earlier in your life with your first girlfriend is that you know the world can change within an instant and always be

different ever more from that moment onwards and how have you stopped yourself from living with that kind of fear and anxiety because I think sometimes that can plague people that they've lost one person that they love that much and how do you stop yourself from being terrified that that will happen to the next again it just comes back to this sense of presence and gratitude I think and if you are able just to take yourself to a place of being in the moment with which you are and making the best of that and whether it's you know great times with friends whether it's working and doing something that you love finding that place of real presence and a stillness within that and then always trying to take yourself and remind yourself and create routines within yourself to celebrate things that you're really really grateful for i think are two

things that can get rid of that can help alleviate fear anyway so just to wrap up the episode um from this season we're going to start closing each episode with five sort of almost, excuse the cheesy pun here, but food for thoughts. Takeaways for the listeners of kind of five sort of practical things that they could potentially implement into their lives, whether that's some semblance of affirmation or daily practice or book or tool five things for me i think one presence as i've said two gratitude i think if you're going through a really rough time rip yourself out of bed or rip yourself off the sofa and go do at least one really really nice thing each week put it in the diary and make sure that you stick to it have something outside of the grief that you're feeling that you are passionate about and gets you out of bed.

I know work for me at the time was really, really, really important because it provided a level of purpose and continuity in my life that got me out of the moment. So whether it's a hobby, whether it's a task that you want to complete, or whether it's work or whatever it is for you, have something that enables you to... Yeah it comes back to purpose and and just just have something that allows you to step outside of that of that cell that you feel like you're in and then five it is and can feel a very solitary thing but find that person or those people who will be really really consistent with you.

And sometimes you're going to need to explicitly tell them, look, I'm going through a really crummy time here, or this is going to happen. And I'm asking you explicitly, can you help me? Typically, people will say yes, and you can kind of hold them to account on that too. And don't feel like you have to do this alone and if you are that person helping that person create huge consistency and it is your responsibility to be there for that person consistently and I think allocating that person finding that person creating that person whatever it is but having someone who is there to check in with you it only needs to be once or twice a week even or just someone who's going to pick up the phone when you call

and you know that they're going to answer, they're going to talk through things with you, I think is another really important thing to have. I think I remember speaking to Andy McCann, this amazing sports psychologist from a whole other world, but I remember having an interesting conversation with him a few years ago actually, just about how he gives people tools for kind of resilience and coping with high stress or grief or loss and he said something about which

I've thought about a lot actually is about trying to visually compartmentalize how you feel and it may be weeks months years that you feel like this but the loss of this person it colors everything it's literally like the sky it covers every single is the filter that you experience every single part of your waking day through but actually you are more than just the loss of that person you know you are you in multiple different multi-dimensional aspects and you are the mother or you are the friend or you're the husband or you're the you know you're you're so many different things and just to try and give yourself conscious time to find gratitude and appreciation for every single one of the things that you are that define you that isn't just this profound

loss in your life to help kind of retain the sense of yourself at a time when you feel your whole being is being defined by this by this other thing and it's and it's something that i've tried to do even just in the last couple of weeks i think i've started to make progress with that where it's moved from being the thing that has defined and coloured everything to suddenly feeling like new colours are opening up. And, you know, going back to our original comments about resilience, I suppose that's part of that. That's part of that too. from my perspective just trying to you know as I know there's a lot of people trying to be there for people that they love I think if you've never been through a greater loss as the person who's going through it which I certainly hadn't I think the more that you can immerse yourself in it the

more that you can read the more that you can talk to people about their experience to try and understand in some capacity what the person you love might be going through I found that incredibly helpful as I said the two books that I found incredibly insightful were option b which is Cheryl Sandberg's book and a beautiful book called when breath becomes air which is written by a neurosurgeon who passes away and then you know I realized that there was actually nothing that I could say and that there was actually nothing in particular that I could do. But what I could do was just show that I would always be there and that that would be completely and utterly unfaltering and unchanging throughout

every single day of this and that this was the number one priority and I made it the number one priority. Everything else in my life went on the back burner. And so, so grateful for doing that because I think it did bring us closer rather than pushing us apart. I definitely agree. So thank you all so much for listening. And Jess, thank you for being the most special, brilliant guest for the first episode. We are going to be back every tuesday um for the next 12 weeks with season three of the delicious yellow podcast if you have enjoyed it please do share it with

anyone you think might also enjoy it rating it and reviewing it makes all the difference to us so we would so appreciate that and next week we're going to be back and we're going to be talking about something quite different we're going to be talking about something quite different. We're going to be talking about body neutrality, intuitive eating, finding a sense of peace with your relationship with food and a lot more on building self-esteem. So hopefully we will see you next Tuesday. Thanks guys. Bye. You're a podcast listener and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more.

That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com.