Hey, friends, it's me Megan Divine, host of Hereafter with Megan Divine. Season two is coming up soon. It'll be here before you know it. But in the meantime, while you're waiting, I wanted to introduce you to a couple of shows I think you're going to like. You might even get some new favorite podcasts out of it. So give these episodes a listen and stay tuned for the announcement of the launch of season two coming soon. See you soon, friends, Road, Little Food for Yourself Life, ain't Oh, it's pretty Bay, It's pretty beautiful, beautiful, laugh a little more your kicking with four Okay. So a topic that we cover, especially in the Fifth Thing. If you listen to my bonus episode, I get a lot of emails about grief. I have lost both my mom and my dad in the last seven years, my dad this year, and so any time you experience a big loss, I feel like my Four Things community we have such a connection and then the emails will flow in and then that's what we end up discussing. So I'm very I don't know if excited is the right word because we'll be talking grief, but I do feel honored to have a grief expert on to break down some stuff that I know is going to be very helpful for me and a lot of you listening. Megan Divine, Welcome to four Things. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Megan's handle on Instagram is Refuge in Grief and also her website is a Refuge in Grief dot com, so that is exactly what she has to offer for us, is a refuge in grief. And she's a grief counselor, psychotherapist, writer, grief advocate, and communication experts. So definitely excited to have you on. And you've got two books that I just want to encourage people all say them again at the end because you might hear them now, and then I'll link them in my Amazon page. But you have a book called it It's Okay that You're Not okay meeting grief and loss in a society that doesn't understand. And then another one, How to Carry What Can't Be Fixed, which is your new book that's out now. So I personally excited to pick both of these up. In fact, I think one of my bonus episode podcasts were titled It's Okay to Not Be Okay When we were discussing grief, and you have your own grief story, so let's start off with you sharing what you experienced. And I wanna piggyback on one thing you said the first, that you know, being excited to talk about grief is a really weird thing to say. But I think the reality is is that, just as you said, once we start talking about the realities of grief, everybody wants to talk talk about it. Everybody's got a story, right, So it's I love talking about grief mind and yours and everyone's. And it's a weird thing to be excited about because it is so deeply personal. Right at the time that you and I are talking, I'm in anniversary season of my partner's death. So, uh, Matt drowned on a perfectly ordinary, beautiful summer day in two thousand nine. And I wasn't a stranger to grief before that, right, Like I think everybody accumulates lost just as a part of being human. But that sudden, accidental chasm in the universe introduced me to grief at a level that I had never known before. And as a psychotherapist, I was accustomed to grief, right Like I sat with people who are grieving all the time, grieving so many different things. But even with that experience, professional experience, personal experience, I wasn't ready for what opened in front of me when Matt died. I think the biggest thing, and I'm really careful to think to like, not say like the biggest thing I learned, because loss is in a lesson that people need to learn from. We learn in lots of different ways. But I think maybe the biggest shock after Matt died was how how terrible people were, how unskilled people were in their support of me. They're well meaning, usual, usually they're well meaning support I mean, jerks are always going to be jerks, but the things that people said to me were so shocking. Like the night of his funeral, more than one person came up to me and said, you're going to meet somebody new really fast, and the best thing for you to do is just get married and move on. At the night of the man's funeral. Wow, that's not unusual, right. The more that I do this work, the more that I listened to people and talk to people, grieving people are responded to treated so badly by well meaning people because we simply don't know what to say, and we feel awkward in the face of people's pain, so we say sort of the first awkward thing that comes to our minds, which is usually like, at least now you know what was really important in life, or he died so that you could become what you most need to be. Like all of this garbage language, honestly, that we say to people when they're in pain. And so my experience of being misunderstood, dismissed, cheered up, judged, frankly um and shamed for being affected by the death of my partner added such a nightmare element to an already impossible situation, and that made surviving his death so much harder because I felt like I had to defend my right to be affected, to be sad, to be destroyed. I was destroyed that devastation is a normal response to loss, And until we start talking about devastation as a normal part of the human experience, I think we're going to consistently miss each other. Right. What we want is to feel like we can support and be there for our friends and feel like we're supported and loved by our friends in our community. And we can't do that until we can tell the truth about how hard it is to be here. And you know you mentioned that the anniversary it was this time of year that it happened for you, but in two thousand and nine, and I don't know about you, but I felt kind of guilty at times, certain feelings that come up for me around anniversary points, like my mom was October two thousand and fourteen. That day I won't ever forget. And maybe it's not even the anniversary. It could be a birthday. It could be any given moment where suddenly I'm overwhelmed with this emotion. But I feel like if I share those feelings because so much time has passed, that somehow I'm a burden to the friend or whoever I'm sharing that with. So sometimes I even just hold back. So have you ever felt that way? And what do we do with those feelings? Yeah? That so a few things in their one. I think our bodies remember, right, You're never going to forget that date. I think that our bodies remember things even before our minds do. Sometimes, I know for a lot of people in their in their early grief, and early is a really subjective term, so that can mean anything from five minutes ago to five years, depending on the person, but I you know, some people will say like, I'm not sure why I feel so weepy today, and then they'll look at the calendar and they're like, oh, this is the date that dad went into hospice. Right, So our bodies hold memories, this role, memories that we don't always remember with our with our conscious minds, although obviously sometimes we do as well we recognize the dates on the calendar. The other thing that you brought up was like feeling like I can't talk about that because I don't want to bum anybody out. And again I we go back to sort of that that the ways that we miss each other. There that friends want to feel like I can support you, I'm here for you. We want those kinds of deep relationships where we can lean on each other. And then we're also at the same time trained in this culture in a lot of ways to be independent, don't meet anybody. It's not cool to be emotional and ask for help. So we've got these conflicting their ratives, right, talk about mental health, be supportive each other, but don't need too much. Over on the other side, so that reluctance to share something emotional, even with people you you love and who love you. That's also really normal because that's the way we've been taught, right, We don't want to be a burden to others. I think there's another layer to this though. When you first started talking, you said, you know, you get a lot of messages. People want to talk about grief all the time. When I first started doing this work, a lot of the big publishing houses would say, like, your work is amazing, we really need to talk about this stuff, but nobody wants to talk about grief. Really Okay, well, no one wants to talk about grief if we're going to be talking about moving on platitudes, forced gratitude, enforced positivity, nobody wants to talk about grief if you're just going to try to talk them out of it. When you talk about grief is something normal and natural and healthy that deserves care and attention, then everybody wants to talk about it. So one of the things that happens we learn from experience, right, Like that's what human brains do. We experience something, we learned from it, and we adapt and we do something different than next time. But if every time you've gone to somebody and said I'm really thinking about my mom today, and it's just I just missed them so much and they come back with well, lean on your good memories of your mom, that's what's gonna, you know, make her happy. That didn't fix your sadness or your longing for her. It just taught you that you shouldn't talk about it because somebody's just going to try to cheer you up. So what is a good response from a friend? Great responses? That sounds really hard? Do you want to tell me about your mom right today? Sounds like it's really difficult. Is there anything that would feel really nurturing or comforting to you right now that I can bring you right? It is a very simple act to acknowledge somebody's pain without trying to take it away from them. Not always easy, but it is a very simple thing to do. And what about grief comparison, because people can grieve all kinds of things. Like you said, you had experienced grief before the loss of your partner, but that was something that took it to another level. But there's grief can it could be anything. So a lot of people last year had to grieve the loss of a lot of opportunities and life experiences and different things that may not be the same as losing someone here on earth. But like sometimes our mind will tell us like, oh, well, this isn't worth talking about because it's not as bad as what they're going through with this, and so you kind of just stuff it down inside. So can you speak to grief comparison? And I don't even know if that's what it's called. That's what I'm calling it now. I think that's perfect. So let's let's take this apart. So the last example that you gave, like I don't want to talk about this because other people have it worse. Diminishing your own experience is something again we're trained to do, right, like, oh, don't take up too much space, you know, how dare I be sad about this when I still have a roof over my head? All losses valid if we look back over at the last fifteen or sixteen months of the pandemic. Everyone lost something, whether that was the loss of daily routine or the loss of your job, job, or the loss of a family member or multiple family members. Everyone lost something. What we don't want to do is conflate losses, right, Like the loss of the job is the quote unquote same as the loss of your baby, because we'll come back to that in a second. But that's always going to be dangerous territory. But honoring all loss as valid is really human work. Right to look at somebody and say, like, yeah, it's been really hard to have your daily life disrupted. What's the what's the thing you missed the most about the way things used to be? Right? Again, simple acknowledgement. Tell me about it. I see that, I see that that's hard for you. Do you want to tell me more about it? We do this to ourselves. We do this to each other. At least you, at least I have this. At least it wasn't that bad, while my life isn't as bad as this life over here, All of these ways that we discount ourselves and we don't lie to ourselves very well. Like if you try to force yourself to not feel the way that you feel, those feelings are going to pop up somewhere else, right, They're gonna show up somewhere else. They're going to show up in depression or an iety, or in substance use, or they're just going to show up in like weird interactions that you have with people because you're trying to feel grateful and positive when that is not what you're feeling. It's a weird thing to say, but it's not an efficient way to live to pretend that you don't feel what you feel, because it just suppresses that feeling and then you act out of it instead of acknowledging it and letting it be what it is. Right, So we do that to ourselves internally. The other thing that we do, though, is we conflate losses. So grief comparison is like, Um, I remember when Matt first died and so many people, so many people would come up to me and say, I know just how you feel. I got divorced two years ago and it was the worst thing ever. And then they would proceed to tell me all about how they're divorce was a horrible thing, and they know exactly how I'm feeling. Now. A couple of things here, one right timing Your divorce is valid, and you deserve a place to talk about it and feel heard and respected in the pain that surrounds that. Using your loss to hijack my current experience is not okay. So UM, I talk a lot about grief hijacking. We think that when somebody says, um, you know, my my partner died and I'm having a really crappy day. We think our job is to say I know just how you feel, and then we demonstrate why we know exactly how that person feels by going into our own grief story. And again, it's not that your own grief story isn't valid, it's that this isn't the time for it. We never want to say I know just how you feel, because even if you've experienced the exact same loss, you don't know how somebody else feels. And usually the net effect of saying something like that, when we think we're being helpful, the effect is, oh, I'm never going to mention this again to you, because now we're talking about you instead of talking about me. So coming in with either de valuing your own loss because you feel like it's not as bad as others, or conflating all losses and saying I know just how that person feels because I once had this happen to me, even though it's completely unrelated. Again, we come back to you like, what's a great response in there? I'm sorry that happened. Do you want to tell me about it? Well, but you shouldn't have to respond that during your own driving because you're in the current state of grieving and they're bringing up something from two years ago that they may still rightfully so be grieving. And I'm wondering. I feel like a lot of people, some people just might be I don't know, just socially awkward or not aware. But then I think sometimes and I know I'm certainly guilty of this in some way, shape or form. You get we get nervous about it, and then we end up saying something ridiculous such as that, And I guess it's not our place, especially in our time of grief, to maybe say something like this, this this is really the best time for you to be telling me about your divorce from two years ago, or you just like hope that somewhere down the line that person gets the hint that they didn't handle that well. I think it depends on how close to snap and you are in any given moment, and also the relationship. Right there's no one script for that everywhere. And you bring up a really excellent point, which is it's not the responsibility of the person in current pain to educate the people around them. We see this not only in grief, but in in systemic racism, right Like, why is it on the black folks in our communities to educate the white folks in our communities about why that comment was racist? Right? Like? Why does the person at the center of whatever is currently happening, why is it on them to educate the people around them? Right? So, you're right, like, that's not that's not fair, and this is why we have these conversations publicly, Right Like, let's practice better skills. Let's practice some self awareness and communication skills before there's an emergency when we need them, right, so that we are less likely to put the burden on the person at the center of the pain and are more skilled and more aware and more able to respond skillfully in that moment rather than hijacking or conflating losses or any of these things. Now does that always happen? No, very often. You are in a situation where somebody says something incredibly rude and you have some choices, then, right, you can smile a nod and say nothing that's valid. Right. I remember, I'm specifically thinking about one specific person who every time I saw them, they went into their divorce story. And I'm talking like days after Matt died, like fresh wounds here and I learned right Like, they're gonna ask me how I am, I'm going to say anything at all, and they're going to talk about themselves. Cool. I know what this interaction is, and I'm just going to remove myself from it as soon as possible. Getting yourself out of a situation without saying something is a perfectly good response. If you feel like saying things, you can say things like that's not really helpful at this time, but I appreciate your effort, and then you can change the subject. Yeah, I feel like they would understand that message loud and clear, or at least like I would right away. But then again, if someone is that awkward to say that, then yeah, I might go right over their head. But again, that's not on you to worry about, not on you, right, So you you get to make choices about that. You can call somebody on it, and then into the subject, you can smile and nod and just be like, cool, information, I know what this is going to be like with you. You can also defer to another time if a friend says something well meaning but not so awesome. I mean, again, we're humans, right, we're not usually trained in how do I talk to my friend whose baby just died and never say the wrong thing? Like, that's not gonna happen. You're going to say the wrong things sometimes. You know your friends and your family and your therapists are going to say the wrong things sometimes. So it's okay to come back after and say, hey, you know, I've been thinking about this. I couldn't say anything in the moment. But when I told you that I was feeling really sad and you came back with reminding me how talented I am, Like, I felt like you didn't hear me. Can we talk about that? Can we talk about how we missed each other? Again? That puts a lot of responsibility on the grieving person, right, Like, I don't want you to have to educate anybody. I just want you to be in the pain that you're in. But these are things that we can practice and skills we can practice. Right. One of the things that I really like about talking about grief is you can start practicing these conversations, these communication skills before life go sideways, so that they're not quite as weird when life does go sideways. So when you say practice, like I'm sure someone would be like, wait, what I'm supposed to come up with some grieving type scenario and do role play or that sounds terrible. Sorry, that was what came into my head. But I just clarifying. But I love that that came into your head because because then, okay, then let's clarify here, because that sounds terrible. Yes, we don't know, like, no one has to do that. But here's the thing. We hear statements of pain every single day. We just don't recognize them this pain. And what that means is we have opportunities to practice these skills every single day. So let's give an example here. So maybe things are reopening in your area and you go to your favorite coffee shop and there's your barista that you haven't seen in eighteen months, and you say, how's it going, and they say, not that great. I didn't sleep very well, I missed the bus, I was late to where, and then I spilled a pot of coffee on my foot. What we normally say is at least the sun is shining. I bet you're glad to be back at work, though we just missed our daily point of practice, right, All of those things that person said, those were all statements of pain. Those are the places we practice. What do you say in that situation that sounds really difficult. My pause here is on purpose, okay, because that's all you need to do is acknowledge that somebody said that. That is your daily practice point. You don't have to make it weird, you don't have to say more. You just need to acknowledge that somebody just said out about something and you heard it, and you heard it, and that's what we want ultimately in the day, has to be heard exactly. You don't need to have your pain fixed for you, You need to have your pain heard. I need to I guess I try to maybe think of something that I can say or do that's going to make it better, whatever the situation. Maybe, And as you're saying that, I have different examples that are popping into my head of times where I've probably tried to come with a solution. And then I think of even in my own relationship with my husband. And you know, stereotyping here, but probably a lot of if you're in a husband wife relationship, a lot of times the husbands want to be the fixers, and then the wives want to be heard. I don't need you to fix this right now. I just need you to listen. But the examples that popped into my head about me happen to be with certain things that friends might be dealing with that are to me. I'm just like, gosh, I you know, I don't even know how they deal with that at all, but I don't want to bring it up all the times and then they're like reminded of it. But then my response is like, now that I'm hearing you say that has probably not been the best. Like I think I could simply just acknowledge, like that really sucks right now, and I think I've started to get better at that, But now I know of times where I've gone too far. I think you mean well. I certainly know in my heart I mean well, But thinking through what you're saying, it's like I'm missing it. Maybe they're not. I'm trying to think of how my friend might be receiving it, and they're probably not feeling very heard because it's like, uh like on their end, they might be like, I don't really need you to fix this right now, I just need you to know that it's like, oh, it's annoying it's stupid. It sucks. Yeah, and you know you can ask about that, right. It sounds like you have relationships where you're working on things and you're you're trying to be present for each other and share things, and you can come back and say, I've been thinking about some stuff and I'm wondering. You know, when you tell me X, Y and Z, my normal response is to do this, and I'm wondering if that's actually not helping you. Can we talk about that. My intention is for you to feel heard and supported and all of these things, and I don't think that's been the effect of what I'm doing. Can we talk about it? That is super cool friendship skill right there to do that. And I think you know one of the things you said just a minute ago was you know I have good intentions. I really want to I want to be helpful. I want to make them feel better. I think we can make so much of this easier if we realize that it's not your job to make anybody feel better. Your job is to make them feel heard and supported. Those are two are different things. There's a phrase that my friend Kate Kenfield, who's a relationship educator, tells people to ask is like, do you want a solution or do you want to be heard? Which thing would feel useful right now? And you describe that you know in your marriage, right, like my husband wants to fix things. I want to be heard. And I don't know that that really belongs to any one gender. It certainly shows up in gendered relationships a lot, but I think we see this also just in the way that we show up to any kind of pain. Right. You said this yourself, like my friends are having a hard time and I want to make it better for them. I want to fix it for them. That impulse to fix things for people is not wrong. It's a really beautiful human impulse to want to remove somebody's suffering for them. It's just that the ways that we've been taught to do that aren't working. So just that one question of do you need a solution for this right now? Or do you need to vent about it? Do you need me to hear you right? Which one would be helpful? Sometimes you do want a solution. If my computer is acting out, I don't want to be heard by my tech person. I wanted to fix it, right, But when I'm having a really intense day, I don't need solutions for how to cheer up or how to feel better. I just need to be supported where I am, Like, I want that support to come up underneath me so that I can fall apart in whatever ways I need to. Second, So, when it comes to your book that's out now, which is how to Carry What Can't be fixed your latest one, explain the title and why you went with that, and what people are going to find inside one of my sort of signature lines. I'm doing air quotes here. But some things cannot be fixed, they can only be carried, right, And that points to these hard realities that so many of us live with, Like you can't fix the fact that your partner is dead. You can't fix the fact that your baby died right before their due date, right, there's no solution for that. We live in such a solution oriented culture where everything is a problem to be solved. The human heart is not a problem to be solved, right, So we need a different approach to that. So that line some things cannot be fixed, that they can only be carried, The question then becomes like, okay, then what am I supposed to do with us? How am I supposed to live alongside this chasm in my life. I think where a lot of grief resources go, especially before it's okay came out. We're talking about sort of after the dust has settled and you're not in that early, torn open space anymore. And and remember that early is completely subjective. So many grief resources talk about rebuilding your life. You can't talk about rebuilding a structure that just collapsed, right, Like, that's wrong timing, not a good thing. So this new journal, the How to Carry What Can't Be Fixed Journal, is about how do you live alongside something that can never be repaired? That's such an interesting question when we're no long we're looking at the erasure of grief and instead we're looking at living alongside it. How do you help yourself survive what feels unsurvivable. So the tools and the topics and the exercises and the explorations in the journal are all about helping you figure out what that road looks like for you. I don't I don't do very well with I'm super bossy, but I don't do very well with prescriptions like you need to do exactly this. So that now, like everybody's life is different, and what I want my work to do with people and for people is to help them find their own map, help them figure out what helps when I'm having this kind of day? What helps when I'm having this kind of day? And how do I live this life that I didn't ask for but is here anyway? And I'm glad you clarified to we've been saying book, which it is, but it's a grief journal. And so I think writing is so therapeutic putting pen to paper. So with this it's not just I mean, it's taking through like how how is writing for you played a role or does it in your daily practice or what would you encourage clients or people reading your book? Because I've had different therapists say, yes, you need to be spending time writing out everything that you're feeling. I personally don't feel like I'm a great writer. And I'll sit down and like why, I really don't have anything to say, and then they're kind of like, okay, well then write that over and over. I don't feel like I have anything to say. I don't and then eventually it may turn into something else, but just that process of pin to paper. Yeah, So I have a love hate relationship with writing I've been a writer all my life, you know, those are some of my early memories of being a kid. Was just narrating the day to myself. At the end of the day, I think I I often don't know what I think about things until I write them out. And when Matt died, I was gosh, furious isn't even a big enough word, but we'll use furious. I was furious that I still had words. There are so many note books that I stabbed through and hurled against the wall because I was so enraged that the notebook that I was using the morning before he died was still the same notebook that had pages in it after he died. Like how dare words exist? And how small they are? Right? Loss is beyond language. Words are always going to be too small, and at the same time, words are what we have. And that goes back to something that we were talking about earlier with you know, everything needs to be said, right one of my teachers used to say, everything needs to be said, but not necessarily to another human being, Like we need to hear the truth of our own reality, the truth of our own experience, whether that is speaking to the page, speaking to a tree, speaking to another person who can hear it and validate it, like the the story of your own life deserves a place to be written or spoken or shared. So the both of those like here we go, like here's how we here, Here's the dichotomy at the core of every thing. I hate language and language saves me every day. Both things are true. So when we talk about writing, I'm really careful to say that I don't encourage people to write because it's going to fix anything, because it won't. Writing doesn't solve anything. And we right to tell ourselves the story of who we are right now in this moment. And sometimes when we do that, like those exercises that your therapist give you saying, you know, if you don't have anything to say, right, I don't have anything to say until there is something that wants to be said. There is always something to say. And a lot of this is um sort of priming that pump so that you know, like, okay, so if you never write about anything, you can't expect that the second that you sit down to write, you're going to have this like oh moment of like this great story that came out or this great insight, Like I mean, that's kind of rude to the creative process. You get to like have a relationship there, but we've also got so many ingrained years of I don't have anything to say. I'm not a good writer. I'm not a good writer is such a big lie anyway, But I'm not a good writer. I don't really have anything to say. Like in a way, you have to get all of that garbage out on the page before you can start telling yourself the truth. That's why we, you know, that's why we do things like right, I have nothing to say for fifteen minutes, and then maybe there'll be something to say, because we've got to weed through all of those things that we've absorbed about not being good enough, not knowing what to write, not you know, I don't have anything that anybody else would want to read. Who cares? You are in a dialogue with your own self. That's awesome. I love that too. And can you say again one more time where you said your teacher used to say to you everything needs to be said, not necessarily to another human being. Yeah, I love that in different ways on different days. So I talk a lot about companionship inside grief and having people who can hear you and validate you. And the reality is is that not everybody has that grief. Well, I say that grief rearranges your your phone book. We don't really have phone books anymore, so grief re arrange is your your contact list. Because we're so awkward about grief, a lot of people disappear. Friends that you thought would be able to be there with you are not there. Sometimes they have their own stuff going on and they don't have the capacity to be there with you in the way that they want to be. You said something earlier about like I don't want to say anything about what my friend is going through because I don't want to remind them of it. I can tell you that they don't forget, right, your friend didn't forget that their daughter died. You bringing it up is not going to remind them. They are all of these ways that grief is incredibly lonely. Right, even if you do have people around you with the best of intentions, grief itself is very lonely. And I think when you hear the message that you just need to be heard and validated, I think there can be a lot of rage that shoots out there. But I don't have anyone to talk to That doesn't mean you don't need to be heard, and that's where writing is really useful. Art is really useful, going out and walking in the tree and talking out loud. Right, everything needs to be shared, not necessarily with another human being. Keep in mind that this is not to fix anything, but it is to be in the habit of telling the truth, if only to the page or to yourself. I lost my dad in April, so it's been a few months and I remember even thinking to myself and still at times he was He had come into my home but only lived with us for one day, but was supposed to live here for I don't know, I saw years. It just was so unexpected. Now he wasn't like in the best health obviously, was having to come in and live with me, but we we still had plenty of time. And then obviously things just drastically took a turn for the worse, and there was a lot of other things in my life going on, like this year has been very difficult, and I have found myself, especially since my dad died, continuing to say I just want everything to just I can't wait till it's normal again. And I think that that's probably common for a lot of people that have or experiencing great pain and loss to just want it to be normal. And then I'm like, well, I mean I did lose my mom too, and I mean that's just kind of my new normal. I remember feeling the same thing, like I just want to get past all this and things, to get back to normal, but there's always gonna be something. And then it's like, well, what is normal? Because now every time I walk past the room that my dad lived in, now I think of him every time. And what was normal was he was supposed to be living here and now he's not. And now I want to move but but I'm not. But I know you refer to something as the middle path, So can you explain that for us please? Yeah? So the middle path is the not completely healed and not rocking in the basement wearing sackclaw forever. Right. So I want to touch on the piece you said about getting back to normal. What I hear in that is can everything stop being relentless? Right? It's less about can we go back to normal and more can I find some equilibrium here? Because I need some? Right, here's this event that you didn't expect that came in and made life very jagged, jagged, sharp pokey bits. I really love metaphors, and there's an image I think of that like grief is like you got this incredibly heavy backpack hurled at you and it's full of sharp, pokey objects and you can't put it down. No one else can carry it for you. You're stuck with it. And that desire for normal is like I need to get used to this backpack. I need to figure out where the sharpest bits are so that I can adjust to how I carry this, because right now it just sucks and I keep getting blindsided by that pokey bit on my right shoulder and then it whips around to my friend and stabs me in the gut. Like a turn to normal, I really hear. And what you're saying is equilibrium? Can I find that? Right? And the middle path is really this ongoing process of where is equilibrium for me? How do I live this life that I have now knowing that I have to walk past that room or I need to move, which brings its whole other set of challenges with it. Right in pop culture and certainly in the medical industry, gosh, in a whole bunch of places we talk about you know, grief is a this is very natural and very normal, but it should be over in six weeks and you should be back to work and everything should be fine, and take all your pictures down. Like, there's this idea that if you do everything quote unquote correctly, you're going to be feeling just fine within six weeks um. That's actually the current medical window is six week, which is stupid. It's actually much shorter in people's minds, right, Like it's been a week since the funeral. You should be okay by know. But this idea that if you if you do grief correctly, you will be back to normal and feeling fine six weeks, maybe six months if it was a really big loss, but otherwise you should be fine. And if you're not performing wellness within six weeks or six months, then you're failing at grief. You're perseverating, you're letting your person down because they wouldn't want you to be sad. We have this idea that there are only those two options in grief. You can be healed back to normal, happy, never thinking about the person you know, only looking forward, or you can be failing basically, you know my image here of like You're sitting in a dark, damp basement all alone with a blanket over your head, rocking in a corner, and like that's that's not human reality. Most people live somewhere between those two extremes and figuring out who you are now and how you live this. That's the middle path. How am I going to live with the fact that I need to walk past this room every day? It is an option to move. You don't need anybody's permission for that. You can move if you want to, right, Okay, I'm not going to move. So how am I going to walk past this door every day? There's no one answer to that. It might change every day. Right today, I feel like I'm going to go down a different hallway because that's too much right now. Maybe the next day you go in and have a look around. I don't know. But the middle path is figuring out this thing is here, it's not going to go away. How do I honor that and live into the life that remains for me? How do I carry this, not just the loss, but the love with me into this life that is here? Now. It's rude to suggest to somebody that they put this person behind them because they belong in the past, right, That is rude. When somebody you love dies, you don't stop loving them. The relationship doesn't stop. And all of this messaging that we have in this culture from movie storylines where like the young widow is so sad until they find love again and then everything is okay like garbage, garbage. I hate to use words like the task of grief because that's too prescriptive, but like the the work here is finding how you can carry the love that was here when the person was alive through this life that is here now. That is the work of grief. It's not about putting it behind you. It's not about choosing gratitude and being happy. It is how do I live this with as much love and integrity and care for myself and others as I can? And there's no prescription for that. That makes me think of people that might be struggling with certain holidays or birthdays, anniversaries, Thanksgiving, Christmas. How do you lead those grieving through some of those heavy reminder like those calendar days that are going to show up multiple times a year. Yeah, so I'm gonna pick on you just for one second. Okay, you asked me how do I lead a grieving person through those difficult holidays. You don't lead them, You let them lead. They are the experts and what they need, even if they don't know what they need. So a great question here is, okay, here is let's pick Thanksgiving. So Thanksgiving is not coming up right now as we're talking, but let's pretend so Thanksgiving us coming up. And I know this is your first Thanksgiving without your dad. How are you feeling about that holiday? Are there things that you want to do or not do? That is a great question. If instead I'm trying to be your friend and your helper, and I'm like, oh crap, this is their first Thanksgiving without their dad. It's going to be terrible. Um, I'm going to pull out all the stops and like make the most amazing Thanksgiving dinner for everybody, and I'm going to invite the entire family. It's going to be great. They're going to get through it. I have really good intentions, don't I. Yes, what if what you really want for Thanksgiving is to take the weekend to yourself and go for a hike and reflect and be alone. But I don't know that because I tried to lead you through a holiday that I thought was going to be tough for you, but I didn't ask. You're leading me, yes, And I'm glad you called me out on that word, because yes, everybody's grief process is so different. And even earlier you said something about how someone might be early in their grief. But for every single person, and I just want to reiterate, for everybody, it's so different. Everybody grieves on a completely different timeline. But I will say that advice like that you're giving is helping lead me. Your Your advice is you're leading me to lead myself. And this is the thing, right Like, if we don't talk about what isn't working, we can't get what we most want. Right Like, going back to that good intentions thing is like we love our people. I want to make the holiday season as gentle as possible for you. The way to do that is to ask about it, invite that person into like you're the one who has to live this. I want to know what you feel like you need. This is sort of my current bandwagon with the corporate sphere. Is like when people come back from let's say you are out of maternity leave, but your baby died and you're coming back into the workplace. There's no one specific way that we integrate you back into your office. Right. Some people want to talk about it, some people don't want to talk about it. Like, we need to start getting into the habit of asking each individual, like, I know, you've never had to do this before. You never had to do Thanksgiving without your dad, You've never had to come back from maternity to leave without a baby. Do you know what you might need? Here are some things that we might be able to do to support you to any of these sound good to you. We are letting the person at the center of the experience lead the experience. It doesn't mean that you're going to know. You don't you haven't had to do this before. You don't know what you're gonna need on Thanksgiving. But just being asked without somebody assuming what you need like that is awesome. Yeah, I love that, And that's such a great reminder, you know, even in a yeah, work setting, a French upsetting, a family setting. I feel like sometimes where I might be wrong, but I'm thinking a lot of people because it's popped into me that I sometimes we're scared to ask, even though there's no harm in it or I don't know or is it just me? People are terrified to ask about so that that's totally okay. So here's what happens, right. You see somebody you care about in pain, you have an impulse to fix it for them, and then you're like, oh, I don't want to make this worse, so I don't want to say the wrong thing. The wrong thing would be terrible. You would be amazed at how many people have actually seen someone crossed the street in order to avoid interacting with them, Like this is a really common thing that happens to grieving people. People will cross the street because they don't know what to say to you, like we see you, we see you do that stuff. So that fear of screwing it up makes a lot of people not bring things up. And what that does net effect there is make your friends feel like you don't here right. So we're afraid to mess things up, We're afraid to say the wrong thing. We feel really awkward because we're not sure what we're doing. All of that stuff is normal, and let's just start there. It's okay to say I have no idea what to say to you, and I am terrified that I'm going to say a stupid thing, but I love you and I'm willing to hear if I said something bad. I just want you to know that, right, Like, how cool is that? That's amazing, very telling the truth about what is actually happening in the moment, and we are showing up as the awkward, imperfect people we are. You can't not be awkward. You are going to say the wrong thing. You're going to say the wrong thing because there is no right thing to say. There's skill and there's less skill. So if we start with I feel really out of my depth here and I have no idea what to say with you, but I love you and I'm here, and if I ever say something stupid, please whack me. That's great that one works on the friend or family level, for the for the corporate the corporate level, it really does. But you know what works on the corporate level, actually, um, if there are hr folks listening to us, what works on the corporate level is having one point person for the person coming back and saying you've never had to do this before. People aren't sure what they should say to you. Do you want them to mention it? Would you rather not talk about it. Some people like to focus just on their job rather than bringing their their emotional life into the workplace. Not right, not wrong. Being a point person for somebody coming back relieves a lot of pressure for people, because otherwise you're going to get nineteen thousand people coming to the person's desk asking them how they're doing. Maybe they don't want that, you know that. I'd talk about that in the in the corporate world, but this is also something that you can do for your grieving person. It's a really helpful sort of being the project manager, right, being the contact person. I remember when not dead, everybody had questions, right like what are we doing for the memorial? What's going on over here? What's going on with the landlord? Like what's all of these life and death admin things. I didn't have the capacity to deal with that stuff. I'm a really good project manager and I make lists when I'm understressed, but I didn't need to deal with that stuff. And so I had an amazing friend who stepped in and said, all phone calls will go to me first. I will assign them where they need to be assigned, and I will talk to you when there's something that needs your input. Bossy as all get out, but it worked right. So having a point person is really really helpful during grief because what it does is it relieves the admin burden on the grieving person. And that's true, like whether you're trying to go back to work or you know your loss just happened. I mean, I don't know if you experienced this, but there are so many details that need to be attended to when somebody dies. Yes, so many things. So if you've got a point person who can handle a lot of the annoying details, super helpful. You just don't want to do anything undoable without the person's consent. So I would be remiss if I didn't say things like this, like if you if you're going to clean your friend's house, Um, this is okay, so my mom. My mom cleans under under stress. So I had to do this with her quite a bit soon after Matt died. But you think you're being helpful when you come in and you sort of tidy up and you do the laundry. It's very easy to erase artifacts of the person's life. Let me explain what I mean. I'm going to use your example if that's okay. So your dad's in your home. Um, you expected him to be there for quite some time, and his coffee cup is sitting on his bedside table, and then things fall apart and he dies and doesn't come back, and somebody tries to tidy up for you, and they remove that coffee cup and they put in the dishwasher. They just removed evidence that your dad was here. We can accidentally erase evidence of somebody's existence when we tidy up. This happens a lot with laundry. Somebody comes over and they do the laundry for you, but you just erased a person's smell. Their body just disappeared, but their smell was still there, and now the smell is gone. Oh, I'm glad you brought all this up because I've even in some of my Bonus episodes where we've talked about grief, I have, you know, talked about how after my mom did. I even I watched my sister's friends because my mom was in hospice care in my sister's home, and there was people showing up every day like a just revolving door of because my sister's four kids like we had. Because it was hospice, there was tons of people in and out wanting to see my mom and say their final goodbyes. And I always thought it was such a beautiful thing watching her friends. I didn't live in in Austin at the time, and that's where we were, so I was in town for it, and it was such a beautiful thing witnessing all my sister's friends and neighbors come by and support. So I've always remembered that, and that's something I throw out, is you know, do laundry, if you can clean, if you can drop off food. But I love that you're adding that the consideration part into it. Of it is super helpful to have certain things done, but just make sure that you don't overstep and take it too far. Yeah, exactly. So we're talking about two things here. We're talking about offering tangible support, which is fantastic, right. The thing we want to pair that with is getting consent. Right. Consent is important in so many things. Getting consent. I'm going to run the dishwasher. Is that okay? There are dishes still in the sink from before he went to the hospital. Is it okay if I wash them. I'm gonna do laundry. Is there anything you want me to not wash. Is it okay if I change the sheets? Right? For widowed folks, shout out to anyone who's widowed out there, This is perfectly normal. Lots of people sleep on exactly the same sheets for months at a time. I don't even remember how long it took me to change the sheets after Matt died. Things that we think are really weird are actually perfectly normal. So consent is really important. Just check with people. This is also where it's good to have that point person if you can, because I don't want to inundate you with like, is it okay if I move this coaster? Is it okay? If I do this? Is it okay if I do this? Like if there are fifty people dropping by every day and everybody's asking you, is it okay to do this? Like that's exhausting. If you can have a point per son, that's great. If you have somebody who can bring that up to you, Like a lot of people are showing up wanting to clean things for you. Are there rooms that should be off limits? I will let them know. Yeah. And then I think the phone thing too, or like people having questions, and I think of how my friend Mary stepped in as my dad was on life support and we knew we were going to have to be removing him, and she knew we had various friends that would want to be in the know, so she yeah, She just asked me, would you like for me to be that person or I'm going to go ahead and reach out to X y z z Z. Are you cool with that? And I said yes, and then yes. She took the reins from there, and that was very helpful because it's also award. Yeah, hey, Mary, it's also awkward as the person too. Yeah, I have to you know, your friends that may know and they might be worried about you, so you want to update them. But then like the last thing you want to do is be on your phone and then like sending an awkward note of like it is finished. We were we were kind of joking about that because after we took my dad off life sport, it's like, okay, you just wait, and then it was like okay, three minutes later it happened, and then you're like, okay, well yeah, what you so, now, what how do you like let people know? Okay, he went it is finished, Like I don't noticed. The whole thing was so awkward. So I didn't end up say, I didn't even update her, but then she was the point person, so I'm just telling the story so that other people may take notice. Then I wasn't on social media or anything, but she happened to follow my brother in law who was and later that evening he put up a post about him and my dad, and she saw that and realized from that, oh, okay, because some people may stay alive a little bit longer. My dad it was like three minutes so, but he didn't put up that post for hours and hours, but she was just waiting in limbo. But she saw the post and then she took the initiative from that post to then reach out to our group of friends. Didn't bother me with it, she just did it. And yeah, I thought that that was really cool because then I didn't have to have any of those awkward like it happened, you know. Yeah, yeah, those friends are amazing. To shout out before we go, I would love to hear from you, just four things you're grateful for. We practice gratitude a lot, although we we we acknowledge like the hard stuff too. It's kind of one of those things we've had to be really clear about, especially with a lot of like toxic positivity. And we have a whole movement that started after my mom passed away that is all around joy. She wanted to spread joy to others. First of all, she talked to everybody at the hospital, even people in the elevator that she didn't know. She would try to compliment them in some way because sometimes people would be there alone getting their chemo treatments. She just wanted to make them feel good and she felt like she had support, So she wanted to spread joy to others. And then she wanted to choose joy for herself. But what I have to remind people too, Even though a big movement from that grew on our our nationally syndicated show, the Bobby Bones Show. It's called Pimp and Joy, and we have a whole line of clothing. But like my mom definitely had awful days and we experienced those, and she never would want to fool people into thinking it's like, oh, yeah, I'm battling cancer, choose joy. But we also in the on the gratitude front. For me at least, what I find is even in some of my darkest times this year, I still do have things in my life that I can be thankful for, bigger, small, So I'd love to hear four things from you that you're currently thankful for today. I love how you expanded that because we we so often think that gratitude as an antidote for pain. If you say you're feeling sad, somebody's like, well, you need to find something to be grateful for. As though grief and gratitude cancel each other out, they don't write. So I think about gratitude as a companion to whatever. Right. Um, But we're closing up, so I'm just gonna go with my with four things that I'm grateful for, Rather than my entire rent on gratitude, I'm going to start with my friends, the skill with which they support me and know me. I don't tend to reach out when I'm having a hard day, and they know it. So they know when my hard days are and they're proactive about offering support, which is amazing because that's a good skill. I am feeling thankful that the air is clear right now. I have anxiety around flyer season, so I'm going to be grateful that the air is currently clear and breathable and beautiful. I am grateful for my dog, who is the best dog in the whole world. She's home sleeping right now. She hates it when I leave, but she's fine. What else am I grateful for? I am grateful to be in the studio. Radio was was a big part of my childhood, so I'm just really grateful and happy to be sitting near a soundboard. Oh, well, what part of your childhood? My dad was was general manager of an MPR station in Buffalo for most of my early childhood, So I grew up in I don't even quest, you don't even remember now, but whatever the Buffalo NPR affiliate is, that was where I had birthday parties. My birthday coincides with Fall Pledge drives, so most of my birthday parties were on air for Fall Pledge drives. And then in my teenage years, my dad started buying radio stations and sort of rehabbing them and getting them popular again. So my first jobs were cleaning radio station bathrooms and then recording ads and doing some weather spots when I was a teenager. So will you have a very soothing radio voice? Thank you? Yeah. I'm not sure if that's nature or nurture, but yeahst loves the audio version of the of It's okay. I actually get the I get the best fan mail anyway. But um, a lot of people have said that, you know, after their partner died, that my voice on that book is the only other voice in the house. Like what a powerful thing that is to receive. And here you know that, you know, a lot of people are like, you know, I've been living with my partner and my husband for forty five years and he died and the house is so quiet, and now your voice is the other sound in the house. And that's that's magic, that's awesome. And again that book is it's okay that you're not okay meeting grief and loss in a society that doesn't understand. And then your latest is the book slash Journal and it's how to Carry What Can't Be Fixed. So I'll be linking both of those in my Amazon page so they're easy for people to find. And it sounds like you've got the audible version can be for the first one, the first one for It's okay, that one is audible and the book and print and Journal is currently only in print. Yeah, okay, well awesome, Well thank you so much, Megan for your time. Um, I know that this episode is going to be so helpful for so many and it was for me for sure, So speaking of getting mail, like, I'm going to get emails about this, So thank you so much for takeing in the time. And I don't know if I'll talk to you ever again soon, but maybe I'll have to have you on since now you're You're my first official grief expert that's come on the show besides a therapist friend that comes on, but she doesn't specialize in grief. So I'm very very thankful for you. I'm glad to be here.