Episode 1: Introduction

Welcome to a place none of us ever wanted to be: grief. I wish you weren’t here. I wish I wasn’t here. But here we are, so we might as well be here together.

This series is just me in my yard, raw and unedited, talking about some of my experience with grief since the death of my daughter, Libby, in July 2018. I cussed a little in the videos, and all I can say about that is: it could have been worse. You’ll hear a lot of birds twittering; it’s the hummingbirds, busy in the honeysuckle. There’s yard noise and neighbor noise and it’s not perfect at all. It’s just my life, as it is, now.

I’m going to talk about the overwhelming complexity of grief, and a bit about the neuroscience that explains why it’s so overwhelming and complex. I’m going to talk about the toxic cultural narratives around grief and loss, including grief shaming. I’m going to talk about post traumatic growth. I’m going to share the best resources I’ve found when it comes to understanding grief and finding our way through. And I’m going to talk about what’s helping me rebuild my life after it was blown to pieces.

For each episode, there’s a short blog like this one, a video that’s under 10 minutes, some journaling questions, and most episodes: a poem.

You’re welcome to use the comments to journal if you’d like. The videos and the journaling questions are really just a jumping off point for any conversation you’d like to have.

Thanks for being here, even though it sucks.

“Traveler, your footprints

are the only road, nothing else.

Traveler, there is no road;

you make your own path as you walk.

As you walk, you make your own road,

and when you look back

you see the path

you will never travel again.

Traveler, there is no road;

only a ship's wake on the sea.”

—Antonio Machado

(translated from Spanish by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney)

Self Compassion by Kristen Neff

The Grieving Brain by Mary O’Connor

It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay by Megan Devine

Resilient Grieving by Lucy Hone

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Episode 2: Overwhelming Complexity

There’s way more to grief than I ever knew. Despite having experienced loss and grief of various kinds, despite being a therapist myself, the experience of traumatic grief was and is overwhelming in its complexity.

What we know about grief is this: my person is gone, and I miss them intensely. I will be sad.

What we may not know about grief includes:

• Physical responses: immune suppression, hormonal imbalances, physical pain

• Cognitive problems like memory impairment, intrusive thoughts

• Loneliness: grief is highly individualized; nobody else has your exact experience

• Facing your own mortality

• Loss of the parts of yourself that existed in relationship only to that person

• Learning how to find your Self in new ways

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Journaling Questions

• What’s your experience with the complexity of grief?

• What aspect of grief is impacting you the most right now?

• What other symptoms or surprises would you add to this list?

Self Compassion by Kristen Neff

The Grieving Brain by Mary O’Connor

It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay by Megan Devine

Resilient Grieving by Lucy Hone

Episode 3: Cultural Messaging

One of the things we run into very early on is cultural messaging around grief. Most of it seems to be saying, “Just feel better as quickly as possible.” And wouldn’t we just love to? But that’s not reality. In fact, “feeling better as quickly as possible” may keep our brains from learning and growing within our new reality.

Our culture is avoidant of death, grief, and grieving. We would all rather avoid it, and we often do that by trying to control the experience of grief. We use thought stopping cliches to help us bypass the emotions we’d rather not be feeling.

The first funeral I ever attended in my life, I was about 8 or 9 and I remember hearing the adults say that the young widow was so strong and full of faith because she didn’t break down and cry at the service. Looking back, I think she was probably numb, like I was at my daughter’s funeral. But we fit into a narrative of spiritual bypassing, that made us and everyone else comfortable at the time. Over the long term, it doesn’t work. It just keeps you stuck.

Examples of spiritual and emotional bypassing:

• Everything happens for a reason

• They’re in a better place

• You’ll see them in heaven

• Just be grateful for the time you had

• God’s ways are higher than our ways

Along with bypassing, some people will turn to straight-up grief shaming. They will need us to perform our grief in a way that suits them, and if we don’t do it the way they want, they will let us know. This is a them problem, not an us problem.

Here’s my first swear of the series: Hallmark is bullshit. People usually don’t develop better emotional skill under the stress of grief and loss.

Some people are going to be too overwhelmed by their own lives to have the capacity to cope with what’s happening in ours. Some people are going to double down on whatever narrative keeps them feeling safe. Some people are going to be able to enter into the hellscape with you, and some won’t.

One of the best protections against PTSD is connection, and we may be tempted to sacrifice our authentic experience in order to be close to people who love us but can’t enter into our experience. Sometimes we lose other relationships alongide our primary loss.

This is truly our own road to make, and we may have to simply release others to their own road as well.

The good news is, there are avenues for authentic support. Megan Devine has online support groups that are worth checking out. There are likely others as well, but I’m hesitant to recommend anything I haven’t vetted thoroughly myself, because people mean well but they are not always as helpful as they believe themselves to be.

“I’ve discovered...that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.” Anne Lamott

Journaling Questions

• What messaging have you received regarding your grief?

• What do you wish you could say in return?

• What do you wish people knew about grief?

• Who is supporting you right now?

Self Compassion by Kristen Neff

The Grieving Brain by Mary O’Connor

It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay by Megan Devine

Resilient Grieving by Lucy Hone

Episode 4: Rebuilding the Mothership

Much of my grief survival consists of listening to what my physical body needs.

Connection has been important too: connection to my people is obvious. We always said as a family that “whatever happens, we will get through it together,” and never has this been more true.

But connection to my Self has been critical, and creating a connection to the beauty of nature has nurtured me in surprising ways.

The experience of beauty in nature creates a sense that there is something outside of me, big enough to hold the enormous grief that I’m carrying. The beauty of nature is easily accessible, effortless, and always available. I don’t have to do anything. It’s just there, being beautiful. I need to allow myself to be in it as much as possible.

The word that has come to me is “congruence.” By listening to my body, by leaning into what feels deeply good and supportive, effortless and available, my life becomes more and more aligned with who I really am.

It’s one of the weird gifts of grief, this clarifying of what feels good and what doesn’t feel good. I have to invest my limited energy into what truly works for me. I just keep taking one small step into goodness at a time, and eventually a congruent, meaningful life of my own emerges, in answer to that early panicky question “Who am I? Where am I?”

“Give your grief to the earth; receive the balm of beauty.” Lama Rod Owen

“One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice --

 though the whole house

 began to tremble

 and you felt the old tug

 at your ankles.

 "Mend my life!"

 each voice cried.

 But you didn't stop.

 You knew what you had to do,

 though the wind pried

 with its stiff fingers

 at the very foundations,

 though their melancholy

 was terrible.

 It was already late

 enough, and a wild night,

 and the road full of fallen

 branches and stones.

 But little by little,

 as you left their voice behind,

 the stars began to burn

 through the sheets of clouds,

 and there was a new voice

 which you slowly

 recognized as your own,

 that kept you company

 as you strode deeper and deeper

 into the world,

 determined to do

 the only thing you could do --

 determined to save

 the only life that you could save.”

—Mary Oliver, The Journey

Journaling Questions

• ·What feels good to your body right now?

• ·Where do you find goodness, support?

• ·What’s blocking you from pursuing what’s good for you?

• ·If you could do anything in the world for yourself right now, what would it be?

Self Compassion by Kristen Neff

The Grieving Brain by Mary O’Connor

It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay by Megan Devine

Resilient Grieving by Lucy Hone

Episode 5: Neuroscience and Self Compassion

Any grieving person who’s left a full shopping cart in the grocery store and fled, any grieving person who pulls out of the driveway and can’t remember how to get to the grocery store at all, has asked the question: what the hell is wrong with my brain?

Any grieving person who still experiences the unreality of their loved one’s absence, years later, or who keeps forgetting they won’t answer texts anymore, or who gets tackled by overwhelming pain on some random day, wonders what the hell is wrong with my brain?

The answer is: nothing. Nothing is wrong with our brains, no matter how crazy it all feels. In 2003, Dr, Mary Francis O’Connor performed the first neuroimaging of grieving brains. She just recently published The Grieving Brain in 2022. And what she’s found is that when we lose someone to whom we had a close attachment, that impacts thousands and thousands of neural pathways in our brain that need to re-learn a new reality. That takes time. Lots of time.

Hopefully, the more we understand about the natural process of grieving, the more self compassion we will have for ourselves in that process.

“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” Jon Kabat-Zinn

Self compassion is absolutely foundational to riding the waves of grief. Rather than responding to our grief process with frustration or judgment, we treat ourselves like we would treat a very dear friend, and see ourselves as humans enduring a common but terrible human experience.

Author Megan Devine reminds us that “it’s okay that you’re not okay,” and resilience researcher Lucy Hone confirms my experience that living into a bigger, more beautiful life gives us the capacity to carry the grief.

Journaling Questions

• What seems to be happening with your neural pathways right now?

• What neurological complexities are you dealing with, alongside the grief? Neurodivergence, past trauma?

• What is the kindest thing you can do for yourself right now?

• ·How can you treat yourself as your very own best friend?

Self Compassion by Kristen Neff

The Grieving Brain by Mary O’Connor

It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay by Megan Devine

Resilient Grieving by Lucy Hone

Episode 6: Post traumatic growth

The phrase “post traumatic growth” immediately feels dangerous to me. It’s way too easy for us to fall into toxic positivity and emotional bypassing, which are the deadly enemies of actual growth.

Post traumatic growth is going to mean facing reality and all of its discomfort. The only way through it is through, which many days feels impossible.

But then I think about seeds, and how they are made to grow. Under the right conditions, they will just grow. For me, some of the right conditions are beauty and nature and connection and reality, holding the pain and the peace together. When I allow myself to be there, growth happens.

A seed won’t grow if it’s under a rock, and sometimes we need to move obstacles to our own growth.

With grief comes clarity about what is right for us, and what is not. Allow the right, and release what’s not right. Slowly, with understanding and self compassion, we move toward congruence and the reclamation of our Self.

We often think of how to make meaning after a terrible loss. People do such wonderful things in honor of lost loved ones: foundations, charities, discovering a life’s work. Those can be wonderful paths of post traumatic growth.

I’ve just found that, for myself, most days I can wake up and breathe until lunch time, and then I need a nap. But through love and care and self compassion, that’s okay. This life I’m discovering is beautiful and congruent for me. More than any time in my life, I feel that I am myself. And that is meaning enough for me, for now. I don’t have to make any more work for myself to conform with anybody else’s idea of meaning.

I wear a necklace that says, “She is light,” gifted to me by a friend just after Libby’s death. And it’s about Libby, because she was full of light. But it’s also about me, finding my own light again.

And so, we end with Mary Oliver, When I am Amont the Trees.

“When I am among the trees,

especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,

they give off such hints of gladness.

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

“I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

“Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out, ‘Stay awhile.’

The light flows from their branches.

“And they call again, ‘It's simple,’ they say,

‘and you too have come

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine.’”

Journaling Questions

• Where’s your seed right now? Needing to stay buried? Ready to sprout?

• Does anything need to be removed to create more favorable conditions for growth?

• Do you need more rest, rain, sunlight?

• What feels congruent and good and right to you, right now?

Self Compassion by Kristen Neff

The Grieving Brain by Mary O’Connor

It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay by Megan Devine

Resilient Grieving by Lucy Hone