003 MU Talks+Guests: grief, loss and so much more with Dr. Jessica Taylor and Rebecca Jones

Oh, yeah. Multox.

Multnomah University talks a new episode, but this time, the heartbeat is a little different. We promised you a while ago, we are going to unpack a very interesting subject of grief and loss. And today we have two special guests that my brother Rob is going to introduce to us, and we're going to just talk about crazy stuff.

Two of our colleagues here at Multnomah University. Jessica Taylor, Dr. Jessica Taylor, and Becca Jones. Can you guys tell us what do you do here at the school?

So I lead the diversity and inclusive development team, and I am the director.

Of counseling and wellness.

That's great. Great to have you guys here. We want to get to know you a little bit. One of your favorite things to do during your time off, Hobby, pastime.

I love listening to audiobooks and being with my kids.

I am a big Blazers fan, so I watch the Blazers go.

Blazers. That's right.

Yeah.

My wife is a Blazers fan. I'm a Bulls fan. And one time the Bulls played the Blazes, and it was not a good house divided.

I saw Jordan live in the 90s.

Did you?

I was going to seminary. I've been dunked in front of me.

Oh, my word.

It's one of the greatest moments.

Not over you, like, no.

And I. So he's walking up, we're sitting in the third row, and he's coming, and I'm like, see all the kids reaching for him? I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna do that. I'm way too cool. I'm 23. And as he came, I magically started reaching.

Like, it just came forth. I couldn't stop yourself.

Oh, man.

Yeah, it was glorious.

Okay, let's get to know our. Our guests a little more. We drifted into talking about basketball. Just talking a little bit about your Smith. So I am very excited to have Dr. Jessica Taylor with us. And for the rest of this podcast, we'll be referred to as Jessica and. And Becca with us. We work together, and I learn on a daily basis from them. And as we are, we're talking about life and things happening. If you've listened to our first podcast, and if not, go there and listen to it, please. But if you listen to it, you know that Rob has experienced significant loss in his life. I've. Diane and I have lost our first baby, and it was just a very difficult season. I come. And this is why I'm excited to talk about grief and loss. And a helicopter crashed.

Eight people.

Was it eight or nine? Nine people. With the. With the pilot were in that. And they. They crashed and died on Sunday morning.

Right.

This, not recently. And that's why we're not reactionary to this. But this sparked a series of reactions.

Right.

I grew up in an ethnic community where we deal with loss very differently, but in many ways I can say unhealthy, which is interesting to say, because I look at the difference between, between America and Eastern Europe with, you know, if somebody loses somebody, you dress in black, people know your mourning, the morning is there, but in the same time, not in a lot of healthy ways to deal with this. So that's why I'm excited to just really launch the conversation into dealing with grief, loss. And then I want us to land. I use this word when we're moving to the second part of our podcast to land our conversation on Kobe and his family. And Kobe Bryant and his family just recently his wife publish the picture is just a very heavy thing. And even the rest of the people why the reaction, how we unpack that. So let's go into it.

Yeah. So I have a question. One of the things I love about working at Multnomah is you're with you. I'm colleagues with some really smart people who have also seen the world in different ways than I have. I'm a. I'm a Canadian, Midwestern Canadian, you know, white, middle age guy. And I understand some things about America, but there's things I don't understand America. In the last week, watching my Facebook explode and social media explode and watching the news explode, and I'm thinking, I don't understand what's going on because I see some of my friends who are grieving like, like, because 150,000 people die a day. I found. I just looked that the other day, two per second. And yet this has, you know, people have stopped. They're kind of like, where were you when Kobe died? What's going on? What am I missing?

How.

Why don't I understand what's going on?

I would say there's a cultural component in terms of, yes, this was a global loss. I think it was felt around the world. But culturally, I think that there's something that happens when a figure, somebody that represents something in certain communities, especially the African American community, what Kobe represented was hope, was hard work, was getting out, was overcoming. And so a lot of our students, a lot of community members, I think that it was that that was able to be touched by death by something so difficult. Also, I think there's this element of celebrity culture where we've kind of dehumanized them like they have money so they don't have problems. And seeing doesn't matter how much money you have, death, again, is still something that touches you. That I think that that kind of shakes your own humanity and your own questioning of, oh, maybe I'm not invisible. And so there's a cultural element for sure, as well as just the element of the deep humanity that I think we feel. And we hopefully come together when those things happen and say, where were you? Because we're having a collective reaction, the shock of we're human together.

And I think a really natural human response is this idea of, like, wanting the world to be just in this way, where if we do all the right things, if we work hard enough or get enough, then we can escape hurt and pain as much as we don't maybe intellectually believe that. I think there's an underpinning still just believing that to be true. And situations like this shake that. Where somebody who had everything and worked really hard and achieved kind of the upper echelon of success and celebrity experienced pain in a way that we want to believe we can somehow be invincible from. If we work hard enough or, you know, achieve enough.

Yeah. And somebody as vital as Kobe, you know, somebody you don't expect, people that are as healthy and as fit, maybe it forces us to confront our own mortality. Absolutely displacing.

Yeah. I mean, he had just retired, and I think, you know, we're picturing this, like, life of him being able to, like, live into that in the future, and that just is gone, you know.

And it is true. I actually saw people from all over the world on my Facebook feed being really affected and actually sharing how much Kobe meant for them. And it's fascinating. So I. We're having a water cooler conversation with Jessica, and it really helped me start unpack a little bit. Why that and how do we deal with that and how do you deal with grief and loss? I liked how you put it. Like, you push it. We push it down. Can you. Can we talk a little bit about that? Can you unpack a little bit about how do we. Why do we do that and what happens when we do that?

I think you touched on it a little bit about, okay, there might be outward signs that we're grieving. We all know on social media, okay, something big happened. So outwardly we know there's grief going on, but we don't have agreed upon norms for what that's supposed to look like, and we actually fight about what that's supposed to look like. You're not supposed to cry or you're cold because you don't care. We don't have really good agreed upon norms for what is grief supposed to look like? Or we believe some myths about it that, you know, if it was your spouse or someone super close to you, you could have maybe a whole year to grieve. But if it's someone that's a celebrity, someone you didn't really know, you get your to be a little bit affected and then move on. And those things actually don't match again with our humanity and our need to process things. And that was one of the things that felt really natural to me was to say, hey, we need to pause because we're actually so numb to the grief that's happening. Because we're seeing it all the time. We're seeing dead bodies on the news and horror stories about what's happening globally. And it's business as usual. We're just right back in class, right back at work, not processing. And so I think what it spurred for me was in my little sphere of influence, how can I just push pause for a moment and say, hey, grief is big and it's messy and it doesn't end at any point. It doesn't end in a year or in five minutes. It's this ongoing thing. And that it's actually really healthy to talk about it and understand that that's part of our humanity and our part of our collective growth is to be able to step into that space that's very uncomfortable. We don't have clear rules for it and just hold space for one another. Be that transformational presence where I just say, I don't have anything to say to you or teach you. I'm just going to be with you and ask you, what is this like?

Yeah, I think there's a woman, Megan Devine, who's an author and she is also a grief counselor, and she says that some things can't be fixed, they can only be carried. And I think that a lot of times in our culture we like to fix things. Even you see media's response to things, they will, shortly after a crisis, they will silver line it. They'll be showing stories of, you know, the resilience of humanity. It's like we want to move on. And so we don't often know how to make space for, for that, for that process or even what that process looks like. And I think like Jessica said, it doesn't look the same for every person.

Yeah, grief is interesting. I always, I mean, I'm not trained in this, but I like when my parents were killed, I always imagined grief like a big pile of rocks that needs to be moved from one spot to the other. And it feels like you're either going to do it now or you're going to do it later. But it's going to happen. Some people stuff it down. Sorry.

Yeah.

But yeah, it is.

And I think sometimes the pile then needs to be moved again. And that can also bring up grief for people. I think the model of the stages of grief, which is pretty common language that people often think of when they think of grief, is really wrong. It gives us this picture that grief is somehow linear and we just move through it in a straight line. And then we get to the end.

Yeah, we're done, and we're done.

And it's often more like standing in the ocean where the waves hit. And sometimes it's low tide, and sometimes it's high tide, and sometimes there's sneaker waves and we don't see it coming. But that to me, is kind of more the picture of what grief looks like.

That's a good metaphor. One thing that's been fascinating to me too, is like, I watched the interview with Shaq. I don't know if you guys saw the interview with Shaq, because I think when the guys played together, when Kobe and Shaq played together, I seem to remember thinking there was a little bit of friction there between the two guys, and one of them had to do.

And.

And yet you watch Shaq, and he is broken. Like, he loves this guy. And there seems to be this something going on where. Where he's been able to forgive or move on. And I don't. I don't completely understand that either. I don't know if. If you guys have thoughts on that.

Actually, I'm going to try something. A very highly technical technological thing here. I'm going to try to actually play a clip from Shaq's like, thing. I'm curious if it's. Actually.

It's already been last couple months. Been really tough. Lost my little sister. Haven't been sleeping. Haven't been doing the normal things I usually do. I work. We laugh, we kid, we joke.

What time did this was interesting? Cause right after that, he goes into saying this was a very sharp pain. He lost a lot and then just disrupted all his life. But then this. And he said, I lost my little brother. So for him, it was so close. He talked to him that morning. Right. And talked to Kobe that morning. But how disruptive this loss was. For him, it changed everything. He doesn't sleep, he doesn't eat. He just. Nothing from what his former life used to be is there anymore. So I don't know if you want to.

I think grief does that disruption. And another piece that makes it really difficult where you might see somebody and say, why such a reaction is that grief is tied. And so when you've had one and another and another, based on how you process it with your metaphor, it's. It's a bunch of pile of rocks, and then a new one comes that remind you about all the other ones. And so it's not just moving through the current loss or the current grief. It brings up all the other griefs that you've ever experienced and how you dealt with it or didn't, and what you've learned for it from it, how you've grown from it, or how you've continued to be kind of halted or stunted or traumatized by it. And it has this compounding effect, which is why I think it's so important that we work through it and understand it as a forever thing, forever reality, that we don't move to acceptance like. Like Becca was saying in this process, and then we're done with it.

Right.

I think what I really, really loved about the worst thing that happened just recently with Kobe's passing and his daughter and the people in that helicopter, is that I've seen images of Kobe that I've never seen before. I've learned things about Kobe that I've never learned before. And I'm thinking, so two things that really came out of this. One is what a poor job we do to actually. We determine what we want to see about these. These celebrities we curate somehow, not like we want to see them somehow seeing him as a father that is too vulnerable. I don't know if you want to care. If you care to address that from a cultural perspective. And another thing that. That kind of brought a realization is that we live in a very. I mean, for me, it's easy to see because I come from Europe originally, and I come to America, and I see how individualistic the society is in America.

Actually.

I don't think there's. I don't know about Canada, but I don't think there's a country more individualistic than America on planet Earth. But this happens, and all of a sudden you realize how connected we really are. You talk to strangers, you have to talk to somebody. Do you know about this? Like, have you heard this? Like, what do you think we're so Connected. You touch on this chord, and all of a sudden we realize that underneath our individualism, there's a connection there. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that kind of the.

First part of what you said. I think that when we're grieving and we're memorializing someone, it's very normal for you to only take the good parts. It's very normal to say, oh, here's all the amazing things. And one of the things I was really thinking through was if he did not die with his daughter, would we focus at all on the fact that he was a father and a husband, other than the fact to say, oh, that's sad, but would all the pictures then be of his professional career? There are all these pieces of his humanity that we didn't know, didn't see, didn't choose to look at because he was an athlete, an entertainer, first for so many people. And so I think that it hit even harder that there was this added dimension to make you think about your children and your spouse and what that would do. And with so many celebrity things, we see a snapshot of the family that's left that's grieving, but that's not the focus. The focus is what did the person produce for us? And it actually makes me very sad to think about how we reduce someone's humanity, their spirit, all of those things, to what they produced for us. And so I think that it was a good thing to be able to see him as more than only one. One label. I think it's also complicated for a lot of people when they recognize people are complex. And so I've been to many, many funerals, and we kind of rewrite history about this person and how they were. Everybody's a saint on the day they. They die, on their funeral. And I'm not making a commentary about Kobe, but just saying we do that, we kind of rewrite and talk about all the good things, but we miss sometimes the total humanity. And I think that was another part of this that was hard, was for people who didn't have great feelings about some of his past. This was really triggering for them to see everybody kind of worship and only talk about the good things. And so that's part of grief as well, is saying, well, here were the pieces that were missing or the pieces where someone was human, and instead of just looking at them as a demigod, looking at them only in the positive light, to look at their whole humanity. And I think there's a time and a place for that. Which is not immediate, which is not to be negative about the dead, But I saw a lot of that on social media, that I thought this is causing more pain. Again, because we do not know how to talk about grief and the both and ness of life, how to hold tension that someone was human and that that still means we can grieve.

Yeah. And I think just in general, our relationship to celebrity, what we do in kind of othering people in this way of putting them in this. I liked what you said, like, the demigod position, even that bringing a conversation of grief to the table, it's like it's a few steps removed from us, and that's how we can approach it. But it. It's really touching, something that's deeply held within all of us, but that's harder to sit with and harder to talk about. So sometimes I think we can exploit these types of situations or these people to represent things for us or for their lives to mean something for us. That's not easy for us to confront in our own situations.

Yeah. I've been one of the, like, reading some of the posts. Some. Some people are pretty superlative in their comments. And sometimes, honestly, I get confused at who I'm supposed to be canceling with the cancel culture and who I'm supposed to be celebrating. And, you know, we had a lot of celebrities and comedians and athletes that have, you know, done some stuff, and there's been accusations, and then suddenly they're. They're bad. And then others were like, no, they're not bad. And I'm. Sometimes I'm confused. Or like, for example, even with the, you know, some. Somebody becomes a Christian and we're all excited, and then somebody else becomes a Christian, we're like, no, no, they're faking it. I'm like, well, how am I supposed to know which one to. What. What's the deal? What's. Is there a rule here? I don't know.

I don't know either. Let me know if you find it.

The zeitgeist spirit of the age.

I. I do want to go back to dealing with grief and loss.

I.

With this podcast, we really didn't want to be reactionary. Somebody that is really famous is passing away and we're recording, but really using it as a great opportunity to unpack and talk. Maybe now that people are paying attention to this, maybe now that they're not, they don't know how to deal with this. I actually saw people really affected. I mean, truly affected. We have student athletes here, right? Affected in ways that we just don't know how deep this goes for them. Maybe this was what got them to become an athlete. Right? The symbol. He was a symbol for them. So there's more that that went away with Kobe than just the star. So I really want to bring the discussion as much as we can to stay as much as we can on that. How do we really deal with grief? So our first. Our first daughter passed away and a year later. I deal with grief very differently than Diane. Very, very differently. I mean, just two worlds apart. I'm flying by myself and I'm in an airplane and I'm watching movies in an airplane because I can't sleep in any. Doesn't matter if it's a 12 hour flight, right? So I'm watching movies and I'm watching this I think is the cheesiest worst movie ever produced by the Rock. Like literally this the one with like earthquake something. It was really, really. It was a bad movie. I was frustrated of how bad that movie was, but I was like, I'm in an airplane, what can I do? And there's a scene there where he is actually going to save his daughter. And. And my first baby was a daughter. Was a baby. It was a baby dog. And I lost it. I mean I lost it to a place where I was. It was. I couldn't control it anymore.

It was.

It was embarrassing. I was hiding from people and like. But I lost it. And I was mad in the same time that I lost it at that movie that I thought was the worst movie. The worst movie ever created by the Rock.

If.

If he hear podcast, I'm pretty sure he listens to Mu talks. But if he hears this, I want you to know that literally the cheapest worst movie. But I was mad in the same time in. In this. In looking for me from the outside.

What.

Where did this come from? This is. It's been a year. I thought at least I could control it. At least it's right. But no, it was a volcano that I couldn't stop. Triggered by the worst imagery ever. And it's there. So if you can help us talk a little bit more about how do you deal with that.

How. What.

What should really be aware of? Is there a way that you can really not stop the volcano but really look at that, the fumes to see if you can. More on that.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's first important to acknowledge. Just like you said, nobody deals with grief the same. And I think it manifests for each of us really differently. And sometimes it can surprise us. I know I had my own experience of grief, and I thought that I would act and react really differently than I did. I thought I would want people around me. I'm like, come, you know, make food with me, like, sit shiva. And I'm like, get away from me. Nobody talk to me. I'm going to sit in my room, you know, by myself, in the dark. And I just think we have to give ourselves some permission to just to be open and curious about how it's affecting us and to listen. Listen to what we need.

That permission word was exactly what I was thinking of. The permission to be honest with what is and what is not and what will never be. And that's, like, terrifying for us again to sit in that, because there's grief in that. And so I think that there needs to be a kindness to ourself and other people and how they're working that out. And understanding it's not linear and understanding, it's compounded by all these other things that we're also physical beings. And so when you see things like, I'm not eating, I'm not sleeping, I'm not. Yeah. Those are all manifestations of grief that then can compound maybe an eruption or an explosion. And maybe for you it's extreme sadness or depression or triggering of something. Maybe for you it's overworking or, you know, you're dealing with it different ways. So I think that permission to deal with it is really important, and we can actually gift that to each other. I was in a conversation actually yesterday with a dear friend of mine and his wife, and he lost his mom last year, and his mom was a friend of mine as well, and we talked for over an hour and a half about her, which feels so culturally weird to speak about the dead. And I'm just telling him, here's all these things I remember about her. We're laughing, you know, we're talking about things that are happening now and what she would have thought about it. And as we left and there were tears, cried. He just said, I love when you talk about my mom. Thank you for talking about her. Because it gives him permission to feel and to cry and to say, I hold space for this. She was important to me and she was important to you. So it wasn't a grief counseling session. It was just a remembrance that she mattered, that our grief is real, that this is what is, and that includes the things that will never be. And that's hard. But that permission to have those conversations is a gift that we can give Each other to speak about what feels unspeakable. It feels pretty unspeakable to talk about your grief or the things you've gone through for most people, because it's vulnerable.

Rob, I do want you to kind of poke around at this, but I want to. I'm curious about something, and maybe you can help. I'm actually going right now for the church at large. I think one of the pain points that we've experienced going through this, and even now. Even now with. I'm connecting this to Kobe, is that the people that didn't know what to say to Diane and I still said something, and it was brutal. I mean, it was brutal. Yeah.

Like, people saying the wrong thing, all the wrong things. Right.

I mean, you know, all the way from the devil did this to you.

Wow.

To just, you know, because he steals and kills and destroys. Right. So great interpretation. They. They need to come to Multnomah, the Bible program.

Wow.

But. But all the way from that. Right. Because they. They felt the need and people don't really know. So the permission is brilliant.

Right.

People thought that we don't want to talk about our loss, but we want to talk about. Like, I wanted them to know the story actually. Like, my baby girl gave me a smile. Like, I just. I want to tell you the story.

Right.

Like, I want you. Like, I was curious to know. And Rob shared with me, like, his parents being killed in a car accident. Right. And it was like, it was a car.

Yeah. We heard lots of dumb stuff, but it's kind of tough because I've also seen it as a youth pastor, and then you see a kid goes through, you know, loses a parent or something terrible happens, and everybody pulls away from them because nobody wants to say the wrong thing. So on one hand, you don't want to say the wrong thing, but you'd also don't want to just pull away and leave the person isolated. So I. I mean, it's pretty tough for the person grieving. But I think if you can just be gracious and realize you're going to hear some dumb comments.

And before we get. Before we get. Because I really want you to kind of arm us with any. Any advice in that direction, you know, that we can have and have with us to be with that next, share that space. Same thing with social media and Kobe.

Right.

The fact that you might disagree and all that allow people to grieve in the way that they agree. It's just because I see comments that are why I. I wish. I wish social media would Be like Wikipedia, that you. You also have the edit button and you can do. Yeah, delete some stuff. So. So do share with us a few thoughts on that.

I think that as a pastor, one of the things that can. Can happen is that people look for you. How. How are you going to respond? And when we give them nothing, they don't have anything, and they say a lot of dumb things. And we all are going to say that. So we just need to know, hey, I might be saying dumb things or the wrong thing, but I want to tell you I love you. I'm here for you. One of the losses that my husband and I walked through was the loss of our child. And we had a funeral, and we've actually lost two children and had two funerals for them. And one of the things we talked about was the fact that nobody knows what to say. Don't say nothing. So we created a common language around it and we just said. And unpacked it through the whole sermon of I have medicine for you, meaning I have whatever it is that you need from me, whatever that might be. And so as people were coming through the receiving line, people would just cry, people would smile, people would say, I love you, but they would just say, I have medicine for you. And we had a common understanding. We all know what that means to Jess and Eric in this time right now. And it was beautiful because it stopped so much of the grasping for why and silver linings and things I didn't need to hear. I have medicine for you. And so if you can find common language with your friends, with your family, and tell them, like, this is what's helpful for me, or this is shared meaning, just say that it sometimes really empowers that we know what that means. That means whatever I need, whatever I need, space, closeness, and that, that can change. And it was medicine for us to know that people loved us.

And I think part of that staying with people in relationship is allowing them to hurt. Some of that is that we need to give them permission for them to hurt and for it to make us uncomfortable, because grief is uncomfortable. This reality of death and loss and. And the fragility of human life is deeply uncomfortable. And we want to run away from it. You know, that's how we're wired as our whole systems. But I think to just lean in and acknowledge and to make space for our friends and our people we're in relationship with, to not be okay, and that, that's okay for a season. And I think when we rush to make things better or stick A band aid on it. Oftentimes we're reflecting to them that they should be better or maybe that we fear they'll never get better, which I think is even scarier, you know, through the grief process. So just giving them that permission to not be okay for a season.

I think there's this aspect too, where you can initiate things that feels really weird in grief because the other person is grieving, but when something reminds you that you initiate. I had a picture that I sent a friend the other day. Her son died, and I had a picture of her son and my husband. And it came up in a memory, and I sent it to her and I just said, you son is so special. I love your son. And it meant something to her to say, you remembered my son. I know I can never forget him, but you remembered him. And it feels weird to step into that because it feels invasive, but it. It's a balm. It's. It's healing. And anytime we can have a remembrance, I think it helps. Again, give permission that something mattered. So at my children's birthday parties, we light a candle in a cupcake for the children that we've lost, and they. They blow it out. So I don't care how uncomfortable it is for everybody who comes to our birthday parties, but you're gonna know we have four children and two are here on Earth. We're remembering that to tell and signal to everybody. This is part of our rhythm is grief, and it's normalized.

I love it when people tell me stories about my parents. Like, my parents were teachers, so they, you know, I hear all kinds of stories, and I just. That I love that.

And.

And people just. And they were. They're worried that they're gonna make you feel. It's like, no, I live. I already feel it for 20 years. Yeah, don't worry. I've cried my tears. Tell me the story.

Yeah.

Ah, well, this is an exciting discussion, even though it was based on something that we really didn't want to have happen in one way or another. But I'm very thankful for your presence here. If you're listening to MU talks, I want to assure you you are going to hear back from Dr. Jessica Taylor and Becca Jones are going to be back with us quite often.

Becca Jones?

Yes, Dr. Becca Jones in. In no time. And we're quite excited, really, to have him.