Motherless Daughters Community Calls held on 4-20-2021

Hello, hello, and welcome to Motherless Daughters Community Call number 3 in April. I'm Hope Edelman. For those of you who are joining us live for the first time, welcome. We are so glad that you're here. We just always want to remind you about self-care. You know, sometimes depending on what's going on with you right now, some strong feelings might come up in the course. of the call, you're always welcome to, you know, turn off the video, walk away, come back, take care of yourself. That's the most important thing. Afterwards, you might want to do some journaling or sit quietly with a cup of tea. And as always, you can reach out to me or Melissa, and we're here for you. Also, let us know in the chat box if you've got any anniversaries, any milestones, any big events that occurred in the past week or that are coming up this week. So we can send some love and some support and some congratulations your way, depending on what is due. Let's just take a look and see what we've got here. Christina said she found videos of her mother on Saturday during Christmas time and heard her voice for the first time in 8 years and bawled her eyes out, but was so happy too. Oh, Christina, that's lovely. You know, my mom died before we had audio on video. And so I don't have the sound of her voice, and I imagine that's the same for a lot of women here. So it's lovely that you got to hear her. Jenna, your mom's 70th birthday is next week.

Yep.

Happy birthday to Jenna's mom. What's your mom's name, Jenna?

Rosalinda.

Rosalinda? That's beautiful. Stacy's mother's birthday is on 4/24. Happy birthday to Stacy's mother on 4/24. Thank you for letting us know about that. Okay, so just a reminder, if you haven't yet signed up and you'd like to join us on the May 8th Day of Remembrance, because we can't gather virtually for the Motherless Daughters Luncheons this year to honor mothers no longer living, we are doing our first international virtual event. There are 26 countries that celebrate Mother's Day on the same day. The day before Mother's Day, May 8th, we are going to gather online for 90 minutes. We already have more than 300 women from 13, 14 countries, because I believe that Austria just joined us. 14 countries joining us, and our goal is at least 500 women from 20 countries if we can get there. We've got women coming from India, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, England, Israel, Chile, everywhere. So we'll drop the— Jenna, could you drop the link in the box when Megan and I are talking and let people know? Also wanted to let you know that the topics for next month, the ones that were chosen by all of you, are up on the calendar at motherlessdaughters.com. So in week 1, as always, we will welcome our new members that join us at the top of the month. In week 2, we'll be talking about self-confidence, which is something that you all— a lot of you expressed interest in talking about. Week 3, we have another special guest. It is Tyler Feder. She's an illustrator and a motherless daughter who wrote the graphic memoir Dancing at the Pity Party, and it is amazing. And week 4, we're going to talk about how to write your story, because so many of you are in the midst of writing your story or want to write your story, which is also something that Megan knows very, very well. So without further ado—

Welcome.

We will just start with our 3 grounding breaths so that we can then welcome Megan into the space that we are all occupying together. So if it's your first time, we do a quick inhale, we hold for 2, we exhale longer than the inhale, we hold for 2, and we do it 2 more times. Okay, let's do that. And we'll drop into the same time and place. Okay, everyone, and welcome. Today we have a very, very special guest. We have Megan Devine. Megan is a therapist who specializes in grief and loss. She's the author of the book, It's Okay That You're Not Okay: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand.

Hi, Megan.

Which you may have heard of. I recommend it almost every day. She has a new book coming in May. How lucky we are to get another book from Meghan, How to Carry What Can't Be Fixed: A Journal for Grief. It's available for preorder right now on Amazon. We will drop that link in the chat box for you too. And Meghan was also a featured expert on the PBS documentary Speaking Grief, which I hope that some of you had time to watch. I rewatched it last night. We sent you the link a couple of times. It's really an incredible 56-minute documentary about the importance of changing the conversation around grief, and Meghan has been at the forefront of that movement for years now. We are so grateful to have her joining us today to talk about cultural attitudes about grief, how we can all do our part in helping to change them, and anything else that comes up in the course of the conversation. So hello, Meghan, and welcome.

Hello.

Hello, hello. Megan, you are a social media whiz with fabulous posts about what is perfectly normal in grief. I see them and I repost them all the time. Can we start with you telling us why this has been one of your big initiatives?

Yeah, we can't talk about Project Perfectly Normal without giving a shout out to Micah, who is the person who puts those posts together.

Yeah.

They're the one who receives all of the messages from viewers and audience and our communities asking sort of those secret questions of, okay, I bet that I'm the only one, but does anybody else do this?

Right?

So the Perfectly Normal campaign really came out of a desire to talk about the realities of grief. because we don't talk about what it's actually like to be a grieving person, most people think they're weird. This is true with any human thing, right? Like, if we don't talk about it, we think we're the only ones. We think we're the only ones who are lonely. We think we are the only ones who check our locks 14 times before we go to bed. Like, we think that we're the only ones only because we don't talk about how normal Human emotion is, right? So the Perfectly Normal campaign is is a really cool way to. For me, it's like it's helping people feel less lonely and feel less weird, right? When you feel really weird, it's almost this: you feel ashamed of your experience, and if you feel ashamed of it, you're not going to share it. And if you don't share it, you don't feel supported in it. And of course, that just snowballs into. awfulness. So I love that campaign, personal side, because I'm so proud of Micah's work on it. And also because of the power of sharing stories and what we've really seen develop just by talking about what's normal.

And this is why we do these calls. We do these calls because women feel so alone with their experience. And it's a place where you can be validated, where you can be normalized, where you can find other women whose story is similar to yours. The larger the community gets, the more the chances are that you'll find someone whose story is eerily similar to yours, and then you don't feel alone.

Yeah.

You know, what is the grief revolution that you asked about? I see hashtag grief revolution a lot.

Yeah.

So about that.

You know, a revolution is when you kick over systems that no longer fit, or perhaps never fit. And to me, the way that we deal with grief, in not just Western culture, but in human culture, the way that we talk about grief is broken. It does damage to both grieving people and people who truly want to be supportive. And so we do need to have a grief revolution. We do need to kick over— oh, I'm going to forget who this came from, but it's a dead white guy, but I'll find it in my brain and I'll post it so we can have it later. But this writer was writing to a female poet and said something like, kick over your tiresome house of cards and begin again. And I feel like that when we talk about what needs to happen in grief in our cultures. We have to kick over those old tired houses of cards, those ways that we set up, the ways that we pathologize grief, the way that we prioritize positivity and happiness, not just currently, but back through human history, right? This need to control the fragility of life. by managing and honestly demonizing grief itself.

Yes.

We have to kick that stuff over in order to build a system that actually honors the human heart, that honors human experience, and that teaches the real skills we need to survive being human and to care for each other well. So we, we need that revolution.

And that's really—

I mean, the #GriefLoveRevolution hashtag Is my shorthand for that whole long ramble about what's wrong, why it needs to be different, and what will happen when we do kick over that tiresome house of cards.

What are some of the broken parts that you'd like to see fixed first? Because I'll tell you what mine are, but I want to hear yours.

Oh boy, prioritizing which ones I want to talk about first. Um, first for me, like top of mind currently, is the medical model. The, the ways that we talk about grief as sort of pop culture individuals really trickles down from the way that the medical world talks about grief. So if your doctor, if your therapist, if they're talking about grief as a problem to be solved, then you as a grieving person are going to think there's something wrong with you. And what trickles down to the rest of the world is sadness is bad. sadness is a problem. Grief is a problem. You need to medicate that. You need to talk to somebody. So for me, top shelf of what needs to change is the way that the medical profession thinks about grief.

Right.

It is one of the things that I really miss in this last pandemic year is those in-person trainings for hospitals and clinicians and medical providers, is talking about, or naming that the things that they've learned about grief are wrong. They're doing damage. They're not helping them meet the goals that maybe they went into medicine to meet, which were to actually serve people.

Yes.

And what we need to do differently. So, tops on my list, dismantle the medical system. Um, I would really love to see a discussion of the realities of grief brought into, um, systemic violence and gun violence, racial violence. I would really— so I'm talking about some really top cultural things here, the medical world, and also the ways that we talk about grief as a social justice issue.

Mm-hmm.

I would really like to see that changed. If you look at things like, you know, mass shooting of the week, what do we do? We stay like, you know, Boston Strong, or whatever city strong. And that, that stay strong narrative, that sort of drive-by support where we like shout a platitude out as we go along our lives, that isn't something that I see talked about very often, that, you know, the ways that we talk about grief as a culture not only do a deep disservice to individual grievers, but as a cultural response to violence and racism and otherism. We're, we're really failing on so many levels. So I would love to see some discussions in the social justice field around grief as a social justice issue. I'm going to leave it at those top 2, because I can ramble about this stuff forever. And I know we have a lot of stuff to get to. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop. I'm gonna cut myself off right there.

I'm wondering, have you ever come across the, the nonprofit called WorldMaker?

No.

It was started by my friend Molly Marty. It was, I think, the National Grief Institute for a while, or National Resilience Institute, I'm sorry. And now they've changed their name to WorldMaker, but they go into communities when there has been a rash of deaths, like a cluster of suicides in a high school or a mass shooting. And they work with the community to help the community come together and grieve as a whole. And then they leave them with tools to keep it going, which I think is so important because—

Yeah.

We don't want just the triage. That, I mean, it's helpful, right?

Right.

This is why I wrote The After Grief, because I'd heard from so many people that if you call a bereavement center and say, I'm having a lot of trouble, you know, I'm about to get married, I'm becoming a parent, my mom died or my dad died, and it's coming up for me, and your loss occurred more than 2 years ago, there are rarely any services available for you. It's that ongoing, you know, lifetime support that's so important. Well, my peeve is the languaging around grief. I'd like to see the languaging stop. And I think you referenced that a bit there, you know, when you said, We need to create a vocabulary that I think is more responsive and more reflective of the actual human experience, not of the medical model, like the pathologizing of it. If I could do away with the term unresolved, I would— ugh, yeah, right? I would— unresolved grief implies that there's some kind of endpoint there that we should all be striving toward, and makes us all feel like we've failed somehow if we haven't.

Right.

So yes, thank you. There's a lot of emotions in grief. I'm amazed still, as I'm sure you are, by how many people still think of grief in terms of 5 stages, including therapists who were trained back in the '70s and the '80s, and, you know, haven't really evolved in the grief theory thinking. But I was really struck when I was rewatching Speaking Grief last night. You were there talking about how anger is often the hidden Emotion in grief. And you also listed others that don't get a lot of attention, like boredom and confusion and memory problems and forgetfulness. And why do you think our culture is so quick to overlook those and to focus mainly on other effects?

Yeah, I, I think part of it is that misinformation campaign, right, that we've inherited from the stages of grief era, that, you know, we've inherited through various iterations of treating grief as a problem to be solved or something to hide away because happiness is the only acceptable emotion. I don't think that we know that confusion, boredom, hopelessness, hopefulness—like the entire range of human emotion—is part of grief. And this is again why it's really important to talk about this stuff, so that we know what to expect, what's normal. I was actually—I was doing an interview this morning, and the folks asked me about the stages of grief, and I was like. Y'all are 26 years old. Where did you learn this? Right? This is what I mean when I talk about the medical model trickles down into the rest of the world. You don't have to have gone to grad school to know what the stages of grief are. They are ubiquitous. They show up in movies.

Completely.

They show up in plotlines. They show up everywhere. And they're really hard to sort of root out. One, because we don't have, we don't have a sort of catchy, sexy thing to replace them with. Because the replacement to treating grief as a, you know, 5 steps and you're done sort of thing is nothing.

Monica just posted, there's actually a medical term, complicated grief, right? Which just begs the flippant question, is anyone's grief simple?

Yeah.

Really, who are we? Do you want to touch on— can we touch on complicated grief for a second?

Absolutely.

Okay. Here's my thing about complicated grief and prolonged grief disorder. They are fundamentally pathology-based. They are another way of saying grief is a problem in need of a solution. There is a lot— there's a lot of complex— there's a lot complicated about the term complicated grief. And it really comes from this desire to solve heartbreak, to solve grief, because It's so uncomfortable, and I can't handle it. So let me fix it, right? I used to be a lot more vocal in my— don't get me wrong, deep, deep, deep hatred of those pathologized ways of looking at being human. The nuance here is that I've actually seen some grieving people claim a diagnosis of complicated grief for themselves, because it's the only way they feel like they can justify their continued experience to the people around them. If you've got friends, family, your neighbor all saying, tick-tock, man, it's been a year and a half since your mom died. You should be over this by now. And if you can say, no, no, no, I don't have normal grief. I have complicated grief disorder. That means that it's okay for me to still feel this bad. This is what we've done.

Yeah.

We have made a system in which people need to claim that they are ill in order to have their grief respected. Right. So I can't in good conscience come after complicated grief directly head-on and say, no, eradicate it from the face of the earth. What we need to do is take that step outside of it and say, what have we created? Or what could we create in order to have a world where everybody's loss and pain is seen as valid, without needing to give themselves a disorder in order to be validated?

Right. And my understanding of complicated grief is that recent research has revealed that most of the people who get diagnosed with complicated grief are already struggling with anxiety or depression, or they're susceptible to it. And that just makes them more susceptible to having complex grief responses. And that, in those cases, professional help can be really useful. But well-trained professional help.

Well-trained professional help. Yes. Our profession is challenging.

Yes, it is. It is. And there aren't enough of you. Or us as coaches. Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah. That's true. Or trauma-informed. We have quite a number of women on this call who have experienced traumatic losses. And there's a movement in children's bereavement saying that any loss during childhood is a traumatic loss, because when you're dependent on someone and your grief is mismanaged, it can be a traumatic experience. And that watching a parent suffer or die or witnessing an accident, of course, is all traumatic. Yeah.

So, um, and again, I think this, this goes to that wider issue, that foundational issue of needing to have conversations that normalize and support grief instead of treating it as a problem to be solved. Because I think if we have to name loss of any kind as traumatic in order to get it adequately supported, we're going to get what we see, which is actually these boundary skirmishes around who, whose loss qualifies as traumatic.

Right?

Whose trauma qualifies as trauma? And this is sort of like a distraction technique in some ways, because the, the point here is that all loss is valid. All— most loss is traumatic for the person experiencing it. Traumatic experience is different than a clinically defined trauma. So we're not going to get into splitting hairs here. But—

Right.

But this is what— this is how I sort of push back at this stuff, that we shouldn't have to name something as trauma, name something as complicated, name something as pathology or outside of the norm in order to get it supported. Right?

Mm-hmm.

There can be this sort of like, well, I can't define my loss as traumatic because my mom died when she was 97. So therefore, my loss, I shouldn't be feeling this way. Do you see how quickly it devolves into my loss is— I don't deserve to be feeling what I'm feeling, or no one will support me for feeling what I'm feeling because it's not as bad as this over here?

Right.

Whether we do that silencing to ourselves or we hear that from the outside world. Yes, there is a lot of work to be done on traumatic loss, on compounded losses that are part of witnessing suffering, witnessing violence, being part of violence, surviving violence. There are so many flavors in here. And all of it is part of that foundation of honoring all experiences of loss and grief as inherently valid and inherently worthy of support and witnessing and kindness.

Yes. And we talk here about how there's no competition in suffering. We have women here who were adults when their moms died. We had women who were very young when their moms died. And it's difficult for different reasons. We don't try to compare and despair that our loss is not as valid as somebody else's, or our loss is more valid than somebody else's. is because you've lost someone that you love. There's no comparison that needs to be had there. We're all suffering in different ways.

Yeah.

One of the reasons that we do these calls also is because I'm a big proponent of the social element of grief. You know, the psychological and the emotional tend to get a lot of attention, the physical a bit. The spiritual usually gets, you know, conflated with religion, which I don't think is really fair, because I think of grief as, or death as an existential experience for the mourners. And I put that in the spiritual category, you know, our changing worldview, you know, our place in the world, the fragility of life. To me, that's all part of the spiritual dimension. But the social element of grief, especially now during COVID when so many people are having to do it alone for safety purposes, and how important it is to have a network or a team of people that are going to hold us gently through the ups and the downs that we're going to experience, especially long after The loss occurs, right? Last week, our topic was secondary losses. So we're primed to hear more about that. And in Speaking Grief, you talked about the distinction, which I think is so important, between losing your person versus losing your people, and how the loss of a social network can be a secondary loss for mourners. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that for our listeners.

Yeah, first, naming that, right, that you lose a lot of friends when someone dies. That's just reality, right? Some people you really thought would stand by you can't deal. Sometimes the minor fault lines in a relationship become big, wide gaping chasms, and you're like, I cannot do this anymore. And sometimes people surprise you, right? I remember after my partner died, there were some people who had been sort of casual acquaintances who really demonstrated some amazing skills in showing up, bearing witness, not giving advice, all of these things. So your social networks will change. That's a given, right? And I— this sounds pessimistic of me, but I would say in my communities, it is the norm that people feel more abandoned by the people in their life than they do feel supported by the people in their life. That's not the case for everybody. And for most people, it's a mixed bag. Disappointment in your social systems, in your family systems, is really, really normal. There, you know, this always makes me think about in some cultures and some traditions, shunning is the highest form of punishment. Right? I can't remember which culture it is or which community is now. Yeah. And I'm not sure if it's their ritual. And if you know, please correct me or affirm what I'm saying. But like, the banishment ritual is where you put the person in the middle, the whole community makes a circle around them. And one One by one, they look the person in the eye and turn their backs to them.

Oof.

Why would banishment be the ultimate punishment? It's because you need your community in order to survive. And if the community turns its back on you, what the fuck are you supposed to do? Right? This is why these conversations about how to be a good friend, how to support people better, how to fix your habit of fixing people. Why unsolicited advice is the scourge of our times. Like, why do we practice more skillful ways of supporting ourselves and supporting each other? Because community is how you survive. This is why we're starting to get some research attention on loneliness as a public health issue, and that predates the pandemic and social isolation and all of these things. Absolutely. The, the ways that loneliness impacts physical health, mental health, all of these things like that is starting to get some really solid documented research behind it. And if you, if you poke into that more, which we know me, I always do, I'm like, whoo, science. Why are we lonely? Why does loneliness happen? Well, we're lonely because we can't tell the truth about our situation. Right? You feel lonely when the truth of your own experience goes unheard. and unresponded to. That was bad English. So epidemics of loneliness and all of the cascading public health issues that come out of that are really conditions of not being able to talk about what hurts. Right? So we come back to grief is the foundation of all things.

Yeah. We talk sometimes about— or I hear clients say often, well, you learn who your friends are. when you go through something like this? And I say, I'm not sure that we learn who our friends are. We learn which friends can show up for us at times of distress. And we learn which ones just can't.

Yeah.

Either because they prioritize their awkwardness over our comfort, or because they just simply don't have the tools or don't know what to do. And, you know, I know you and I are in agreement that it is not a mourner's job to educate others about how to help them, especially when they are in raw, fresh grief. But many of us here on the call years or even decades past a loss. And we find that we actually do need to help people understand that grief isn't something that we get over. And the long-term effects are real. And grief is cyclical, not linear. What are some ways that motherless daughters could open conversations about this, you think, with others who don't understand?

Yeah, that's a great question. I want to touch really quickly on it's not the mourner's job to educate the people around them. This is also something that we see for communities of color or the trans community, where the person at the center of the suffering, it shouldn't be on them to educate the people around them. That would be a perfect world, right? Like if everybody already had the skills and the person at the center of suffering didn't have to do anything. That is not often the case. It doesn't mean you always have to educate the people around you. But just like, sometimes you got to advocate for yourself, even though we wish you didn't need to. So if you are in a place where you are feeling supported, resourced, rooted enough to be able to do some education. I'm a really big fan of the process conversation. And process conversation, that term kind of comes from the therapy world, where you have a conversation about how you have conversations, right? Normally, in a fight, you're fighting about whose turn it is to do blah blah blah. A process conversation is like, can we talk about what we do together when we disagree about something?

Mm-hmm.

So what that might look like in grief is, You know, say you've got a friend who every time you bring up your mom either changes the subject or they say, she wouldn't want you to be sad, right? It somehow dismisses your grief. So what you might do is say something like, can we have a— I have sort of an awkward conversation to bring up, but it feels really important for me to talk about this, right? First, you want to make sure that the person is not like in the middle of making dinner or something. You want to set up the conversation for success. Because you want to get somewhere with this. So you can say, look, here's what I've noticed. I've noticed that each time I bring up my mom, you change the subject. Can we talk about that? Because I really want to feel like we're connecting. And this, this feels weird to me, right? You want to name the awkwardness in the room so that then you can have a conversation about it. It could be that your friend is like, I just don't know what to say. And I get nervous and I panic. Okay, cool. We can work with that. Yeah. If your friend comes back with, yeah, it's weird, you bring up your mom all the time. She died 20 years ago. I don't think you should still be talking about her. That's super good information for you to have in a friend. Right? Okay. So, so what I understand you're saying here is that you feel that, that because my mom died 20 years ago, I should not reference her anymore. Is that accurate? What you're really doing in that situation is you're getting the other person to state out loud what a jerk they are.

Hmm. Sneaky.

No, but seriously, like, what I'm talking about here is you, you want to know what's really— what the mechanism of relationship is there in that moment, right? So that you can more adequately address the situation. If you don't, if you don't say, here's what I've noticed, is that true? I've noticed that when I bring up my mom, you change the subject. Have you noticed that? Or is it? My guess is that you're uncomfortable when I bring up my mom. Is that true? Right. That second part of "Is that true?" is a really great tool because what it does is it it puts the other person less on the defensive because you're not coming in and saying, "When I do this, you do this, and this is what you feel," and and that's just going to make the other person push back. But if you really have want to have a conversation. You name what your experience is. You give your best guess and ask, is that true? Right? The conversation is going to, is going to proceed from there. And you're going to gain information about whether you want to continue this conversation, or if you realize this is actually not, this is not a winnable relational thing that I can get through here. And I need to protect myself and cut my losses or whatever, right? Lots of decisions that can come out of that.

But I love that. I love that suggestion, because it can be used with any kind of conversation. That's really helpful. Like, I noticed that every time I talk about my distress, you try to fix me. Or, I noticed that every time I talk about my distress, you start to use a sentence that starts with, well, at least... this other thing didn't happen, you know. Or, I noticed that you're always telling me about to look forward and keep moving forward, and that invalidates that I feel really bad right now. And so, yeah, that's a wonderful suggestion.

Yeah, and in a way, it's getting somebody to say the second half of the sentence out loud. Right, because if you're, if you're talking about grief and somebody says they wouldn't want you to be sad, or remember the happy times, or look forward to your future, that second half of the sentence that they're not saying out loud is, so stop feeling the way that you're feeling. So stop talking about the way that you're feeling.

Yeah.

And when we have these conversations, we're bringing attention to that invisible second half of the sentence that isn't said out loud, but is definitely heard.

Right.

And so to be able to say, when I bring up my mom and you tell me to think of the happy times, it makes me feel like you're uncomfortable with me being sad right now. Is that true?

Yeah, I think that will be very helpful. Thank you so much.

And we, we draw that actually from sort of classic couples counseling therapy skills, right? Some really good skills in couples counseling that you can borrow for any relationship, right? Just because somebody is a romantically paired couple doesn't mean that they get all the tools for couples counseling. Couples counseling tools work for every relationship.

I'm seeing we're getting some questions in the chat box, so maybe we can move over there and move into the Q&A portion. We have a question here from Alicia which says, Megan, what happens when even though you're receiving genuine support from a community or a person, But it doesn't quite fill the void, sadness, or loneliness that comes with a loss.

Yeah, I love that question. You can be lonely in a room full of the best people, right? When there is one person missing, the whole universe is off, right? And I think this is an important thing to sort of name and realize that even with the best support in the world, even when people say we're right here with you, Your grief is yours alone. Mm-hmm.

Right?

Only you know your relationship with your mom. Only you know what her voice sounded like. Or, you know, all of these little nuances of relationship. And this is actually true within family systems too, right? One person died, but each member of that family lost a different person.

Right.

Because each relationship was different, right? So both things are true at the same time, that companionship is survival, feeling supported and seen and loved by your friend and family circles. And at the same time, knowing that you are actually alone in your grief. You are.

Right. There's a certain element of loneliness that we're just— we are not going to be able to fix for ourselves. We're just gonna—

And I don't think of it as something that needs to be fixed either. It's a reality, right? Like, there is a loneliness inherent in loss. Yeah, it's not good, not bad, not fixable, not— you know, it, it's just a fact. You, right alongside the best support in the world, you are alone inside your grief. It is not true that people can do this with you. They can be there alongside you, but they can't enter the core of that with you.

And, you know, one of the things I appreciate most about your work, Meghan, is that you just tell it to us straight. You know, I remember when I was writing Motherless Daughters, at one point I went to my editor, the inimitable Liz Perley, and I said, Liz, I thought I was going to write this book and tell women how to, like, get over— I was 28.

Yeah.

Get over the death of their moms. And I said, and, you know, basically what they're all telling me is that it never goes away. comes in cycles. I can't tell them that. And she said, of course you can, because that's the reality. You've got to tell people the truth. If that's the truth of how it is, then she said, they'll appreciate that someone is telling it to them straight. And that is exactly what happened. But there weren't a lot of people telling it straight back in the early '90s when that book first came— or the mid-'90s when that book came out.

Yeah.

That was the beginning of a real shift in grief theory. I didn't know it at the time, but in the mid-'90s. And do you feel like we're getting more grief literate with COVID Everyone talks about that. And, you know, I feel like in some respects, yes. And in other respects, absolutely not. We're not making any progress at all.

Well, here, here's what I think. So I, during this last pandemic, 13 or 14 months, I have done a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of interviews. And one of the questions that I almost always get asked is, has this pandemic made us better at grief? And my answer is no, it has not made us better at grief. I don't think that skills have appreciated, appreciably changed, because we haven't talked about what actually needs to change. I think what's happened, specifically within this pandemic experience, and sort of as a longer arc of change, is that people are more aware of the fact that the ways that we deal with grief are not working. I think that over the last year, because everyone has been grieving in some way. It's— I think it's just a fact of human nature that we don't tend to take action on things unless it personally affects us. Not good, not bad. It is just what it is. If you— okay, very, very, very short story. A long time ago, I lived in Central America. I lived in Costa Rica. And I saw firsthand the damage that commercial banana plantations do. And I thought that when I came back to the States, and I told people about what I'd seen, they would make a change. But they're like, no, bananas are 14 cents if you buy them conventionally, we're going to keep buying bananas. You don't make changes about stuff that doesn't affect you personally unless you make a concerted effort to be involved, right? Part of humans. So what's happened over this last year is that more people have had an experience of loss. It became personal to a lot more people.

Mm-hmm.

And now it's like, oh, you know what? Your platitudes don't help me. You know what? Looking on the bright side is not going to solve this. So I think what's changed is not our responses to grief, but our understanding that our habitual responses are not helpful. And I also kind of want to point out here, you know, I remember your voice back in the '90s, Hope. I remember that, like, oh, right, here's this person, like, telling the truth about this. And this is also why I say, like, in any sort of cultural change work, I know that I'm not saying anything new. I'm not saying anything new. I am saying what is true and naming it as true. And I build on the countless of often women before us who have, in different facets of life, spoken what is true and claimed it as true. And we're talking about the women's movement, the LGBTQ movement, the trans movement that's unfolding, anti-racist work, all of these things. Any cultural change happens with someone stating the truth about reality and naming it as true so that more people can say, that's me, right? And we also, when we tell the truth about our own realities and when we name things as true, we give other people permission to claim that truth for themselves, right? Right. A truth on a truth on a truth creates change.

Absolutely. Courtney has put in the chat box, a paragraph here. I'll read it. She says, to me, the challenging part is explaining how grief still impacts you. It is making new friends who don't know about your grief loss and never knew your mom, but then having the grief come up strongly, as it does sometimes, from time to time, and having to relive it again and not knowing how to explain it because it does feel so long ago. Kind of going through that now with a new wave of grief after 9 years of my mom's passing. How do you welcome people into such a big aspect of your identity, even when it's challenging and new for the relationship?

I love that question. It is such a big thing, right? When you have such a defining relationship, and new people sort of enter the story after it, and you have to sometimes make decisions.

Yeah, you have to catch them up.

But you also have to do this decision-making process of, is this person worthy of revealing this core aspect of myself to them at this time? There's a lot of decision-making that goes in there. Whether that decision tree happens quickly or not depends, right? But, but these, you know, and for some people, when they're like, if I decide to not talk about my mom in this moment, is that disrespectful to my mom or to my own grief? Right?

Right.

It really is a question of, like, right timing in yourself. Is this something that I want to bring into the conversation right now? And if not, It's a kindness to myself to not mention it at this time. Right? You're not betraying your mom if you decide not to disclose what's actually going on for you, or your mom's death, or her life, or any of those things in a given moment when there was an opening to do so. Right? You get to have sovereignty and control about what you reveal at certain times. How you do that I don't think there's any one right way to do this. I'm always a big fan of naming the struggle. So that could be like, you know, with a new or relatively new friend who doesn't have that information yet, you can say something like, I'm having a really, a really sad day today. But it's also like, kind of awkward to tell you about it because it's sort of a big thing that you don't know about me yet, right? You can stumble through that, right? Um, I— so I just moved to a new area, a new state, and I'm meeting all of these new people, and they ask me what I do for work. And if I'm gonna answer what I do for work, they're gonna ask me how I got into this field. And then suddenly this person that I just met 5 minutes ago is hearing about how my partner drowned in front of me. That is awkward. That is awkward.

Yeah, it is.

Right. So I feel like you— you not get used to is the wrong phrase. But like, I think that you can, like, I don't know, like be a researcher for your own cues or something where like, the, the sometimes I will very quickly disclose that because I feel like it fits in the conversation. And I I have a sense that this person can roll with it. There are other times that there are warning flags that you do not want to go here, right? And so I won't say something, or I will say it very quickly and move on very quickly so that I've said it, but we're not going to dwell there because this is not what we're doing today. There's no right or wrong way to disclose the information. There is no right or wrong way to disclose or not disclose.

Mm-hmm.

You can also sort of treat it as an experiment.

Right.

So one would be to name the awkward. 2 would be to treat it as an experiment. When I said it this way, it had this effect. How might I do it differently next time to get closer to the response that I want? This is also a really good question to ask yourself, like, what kind of response would I hope for from somebody when I disclose my mom's death or my, my unfolding grief to them in a new relationship? What What would I want from them? Yeah, right. That's a really good question.

This is— this comes up often with my clients who are dating. I don't know at what point to reveal my mom died, especially if she died by a suicide, or if she died by some kind of traumatic loss. Because then the question always is, once you say, well, my mom died when I was 12, or when I was 25, you know, oftentimes people will say, well, God, that must have been hard. What did she die from? But oftentimes they're just— they feel like this is such a big part of their identity that if they don't reveal it at the right time, then it feels like they've been withholding something from someone new in their life. And, you know, when we, when we, you know, sort of peel back some of the layers of that, you know, there's always an assumption that it's going to be like dropping a bomb in the middle of the table and never really the opening the possibility or the opportunity that someone might say, Wow, that's really— I'm really sorry. That's— that must've been really hard for you. Or, yeah, you know, my mom or my dad died when I was young too. I can really understand that. And, you know, we talk about, well, what messages have you gotten? Or what experiences have you gotten over the years to lead you to expect a negative outcome in this conversation? And part of that is the messaging about grief.

Yeah. And that's why it's a great thing to ask yourself, like, what what would be a beautiful response from somebody to me? What would that look like? What would that feel like? What am I afraid will happen? Right? I think especially in intimate relationships, and intimate can be friends or can be partners, to think about what am I afraid they'll say? And this is, I mean, all relationships are bids for connection, right? They all are. And so to be able to say like, at any point, well, let's, let's take this apart. If it sort of feels like Early on, define early for yourself, but early on in a relationship, and you can say like, there's a really big part of myself that I haven't shared with you yet. And I'm really nervous to do it. But I want to let you know that my mom died. I don't really want to talk about all of the details right now. But it, it's gotten to the point where it feels weird that I don't mention that.

We have a population here that often was not allowed to talk about their mother's death. They were prevented from talking about it. And part of the discomfort, you know, about revealing it Whether they're dating or meeting a new friend or new colleagues, is that it's something they haven't talked about in the past. See, I can just rattle it off because it's my work and I talk about it all the time. And like you, you know, it is a bit of a— Yeah, you get used to it. But it's not something that I feel, you know, I've been holding really close to the vest, right? But if, if you haven't talked about it much, you haven't had an opportunity, or you were prohibited from talking about it as a child because it would upset your stepmother or your father or your grandfather, You know, how do you work with clients around that? Or, you know, what suggestions do you have for just normalizing the discussion so that it doesn't feel like you're revealing something that might, you know, be that bomb dropped in the middle of the table?

Yeah, so I think that's a really good point. And I think, one, we want to respect your own timing. Yeah, right. You don't want to force yourself out of the closet, force yourself out of the emotional closet, because that's not going to feel good. Right, you were already told how, when, and where you could talk about something. So don't, don't shove yourself out into a place that, that you don't quite feel ready to enter, right? I think that with people you are developing trust with or developing intimacy with, you can almost have a process conversation about your grief, going back to the sort of conversational style we were talking about earlier, which would be something like, You know, as a kid, I was never allowed to talk about my mom's death. And it was really hard for me. It's made me— it's made it really hard for me to talk about it now, even so many years later. I'm not really ready to, like, dive into the whole thing right now. But I just, I want to name that in our relationship here, that my mom's death had a really big impact on me. And it shows up in a lot of different ways. And it might take some time before I feel comfortable talking about it. Yeah, right. We just want to name the reality of the situation as we're living it. And just naming that truth can diffuse it, right? When we don't acknowledge what's actually happening, it's like you, you either acknowledge it or you manage it, right? This is why if you're really nervous about public speaking, and you get up to the podium, and you just pretend you're not nervous, you are going to screw up. But this is why so many people get up on stage and they say, I'm really nervous. And then they do an amazing job, right? That moment of getting on stage and saying, I'm really nervous. It's telling your own nervous system the truth about what it's experiencing, so that then you can move forward with what you need to do. If you pretend you're not feeling what you're feeling, it is gonna keep plugging you.

Right.

To go into a relationship and say, It's really challenging for me to talk about my mom because it was silenced for so long. And I just want to say that this is up for me and I'm not quite sure how I want to talk about it yet.

Right. And naming it can diffuse the emotional intensity. Yeah. And then we're able to move through it and move on. But, you know, a lot of us here didn't get the tools. We had to manage it rather than name it. Totally. And so that's our, that's our coping strategy and our survival skill. And we need to unlearn that. And you've given some really excellent suggestions about how to slowly start, you know, and carefully do that. Someone here has said, sometimes I have such a pull to tell people about my mother's loss as soon as I meet them, because it seems to encapsulate my identity, or who I am. I'm gradually learning to connect with people in other ways before disclosing such a big part of me. And, you know, also, the further we move from a loss, you know, the more other aspects feel that they define us too. It's not the only part or the most overwhelming part of our identity. I remember an Anna Quindlen column when she wrote for the New York Times, which was one of the first columns I ever read about mother loss, and I carried it around in my wallet for years. But she said for a long time she felt the impulse to say to people, I'll meet you in the lobby at 1 o'clock, I'm the one in the red coat, and my mother died when I was 19, because it felt like such a huge part of her identity. But then she became a writer, And a wife and a mother and a speaker. And she didn't feel the need to use that or to— she didn't feel the need to let people know that that was how she identified in the world.

Yeah, I mean, the phrase that keeps coming to mind is everybody is a tapestry, right? There are all sorts of identities woven into every single person. And just like you have different friends that you do different things with, Right? Like, you have the friend that you talk about cooking shows with, and then you have the friend that you can call at 3 o'clock in the morning. There are people in your life that you disclose more to and people that you disclose less to. There are people you talk about different parts of your life to, and none of those things are wrong. Mm-hmm.

Right?

It really is like, you know, there's— I wish I knew who had come up with the original video description of grief, but like, the way that you— that we sort of clinically or traditionally think about grief is like, it's this size, and over time it gets smaller. And I remember seeing this video 10 or 12 years ago where somebody took like this big ball, and they're like, this doesn't change. What happens is that the container around it gets bigger, right?

Right.

I really love that, that visual metaphor for grief, because it is true, like that central fact of your mom's absence is not going to get smaller. You are going to find new facets of that every single day, because every single day she is not here and she should be, right?

Right.

And you might be swimming around in a different part of a container that day when you meet this person, and it doesn't feel like you want to do this. And the next day you meet a new person, and the very first thing out of your mouth is, my mom's dead, right? I've, I've come to a point where I use it as a sorting mechanism. A sorting metric and a social experiment. Right. And so, you know, again, I'm meeting a whole bunch of people. And if I say something about, you know, having a dead partner, I watch how they respond. Now, I've been, I've been setting up a lot of blind dates for my dog because she misses her friends. And I met somebody the other day because our dogs were playing together. And I— What did— who said something first? I think he said something first about— he introduced himself in like 3 or 4 sentences. After that, he said his dad died 10 years ago, and then just kept going on with this conversation. And of course, I'm like, you're my people. Right? And then we're having this whole conversation, having this whole conversation, and we were talking about how we moved here and buying houses on your own and all of that stuff. And I said, my partner died 12 years ago. And he was like, mm-hmm.

And you just have this one little moment.

Right? Grief recognizes grief. Didn't really need to say anything. But that has already set the tone for our friendship. Right? We already sort of recognized that in each other and bowed to it. And we're very respectful with each other's losses, but also know now that we can talk about it.

Right?

I'm not going to reveal more of his story, not that any of you know him, but not my stories to tell. But I think in some ways, when you disclose the information, you can learn a lot about the arc of a relationship based on somebody's response. And I don't mean whether they do it right or do it wrong. It's more about, did they hear you?

Mm-hmm.

Right?

Yeah. And you know, that's also a great litmus test when you are dating. You know, if somebody just steamrolls right over it and pretends they didn't hear it versus someone who can just sit with you for a moment there and say, wow, that must have been really hard.

Yeah.

If you're dating somebody and you bring up the fact that your mom died and they're like, you don't have any pictures of her, do you, anymore?

Like, that's creepy. Fucking leave. Yeah. No, no, no second date.

That is, that is like no second seconds. Like no second nothing. Waste no more of your life in this situation. because they just told you everything they ever need to tell you about who they are, right? It's okay for somebody to be awkward. It is okay for somebody to say, like, um, what stage of grief do you feel like you're in? That is a product of, of cultural training, misinformation, right? There's a difference between being misinformed and being cruel.

Right. And there's also a difference between being able to sit with you in that moment and saying, well, I know how you feel because my grandfather My father died last year, and then talking for 15 minutes about how they felt when their dad died.

Also telling you everything you need to know.

Yeah, exactly. You know, we have had so many questions in the chat box. I've just been reading from there, but I thought we might take an opportunity if anyone wants to ask a question on video before we break, if anyone has a question they'd like to ask. I do want to let you all know that we are taping this for YouTube, and it only— it's only showing the speaker, As far as I know, but if you do want to ask a question, then it would be on video. So is there anyone who would like to be on video asking a question? Oh, maybe not. Sorry, but it was only fair to tell you all. I don't mind being on video asking a question. Okay.

First of all, Megan, I'm a little starstruck. I'm a fan of your work. I lost my mom last month, so it's very— Oh, I'm sorry. I'm in this transitional phase where, like, my people flocked to me and really showed up for me when my mom was sick and in the hospital and in the early days and weeks after she passed. And I can feel people going back to their lives. And, um, I mean, there's all sorts of emotions that come with that because I don't have a life to go back to. Um, so I'm just curious if you have any tips on like— I just, I feel so needy, like my needs are really big and I'm not even really sure what they are. And my mom filled a lot of them for me and, you know, I'm afraid to ask too much of people. So I'm just curious if you have tips on that transition as people start to kind of trickle out.

Yeah, so first let's just acknowledge that this just happened. This just happened, right? Like, you had however many years you had to be with your mom, and you've never had to do this without her before. That's huge, right? What you're describing is really normal, and that insight too, that they have normal, intact lives to go back to, right? Like, your support team can be amazing, and then the rhythm of their own daily lives calls them back and sort of leaves you with this too much space. And even though you understand it, it doesn't make it hurt any less, right? And I love that you— well, love is maybe not the right word, but I love that you said, you know, my needs are so big, I feel so needy, I don't even know what I need. And I think this is something that especially women feel a lot, right? That having emotional needs is a bad thing. needing the support from the people who care about you is, is asking too much, right? So I just want to reflect that back, that needing support and alliance and understanding is not wrong, right? It's not asking too much. It's being human and asking for what you need. And I think in some ways you might, you might even pick a couple of the close friends or the friends that you can have these conversations with. And you can have a process conversation and name what you just said. Like, you've been so there for me and so supportive. And, you know, I can— whatever, however you want to say, you don't want to use my words, you want to use your words, but like, name what you're feeling, that you were so present and so here. And I am still at the epicenter of this, like, this still just happened. And I know you're going back to your life. Can we talk about some ways That we might figure out a structure for support or, you know, let you be able to go back to your kids, but also like, can we maybe set up a weekly date where we talk about this, right? How can we put some structure in this so that I feel the love that you want to send me and so that you can feel like you're not failing as a friend? I think what very often happens for friends who have been showing up a lot is that they feel guilty. That they're not still showing up, that we have this life to go back to, and I can't keep doing this. So if you can enter into that conversation, you might be able to work towards something that doesn't feel awesome for all of you because your mom's still not here, but that gets closer to you feeling supported and them feeling like a better friend because they're showing up in the ways that maybe they want to, right? That is not always the case. Right? Sometimes people are like, I did my part, I'm moving on. Good information to know. But drawing on your knowledge of your people and your relationships, it is okay to name what's happening, right? You can both acknowledge that they do have a life to go back to, and you know that they have multiple demands, and that you still need them. Can we figure out something that lets us all feel like we love each other really well. Yeah, I wish you didn't have to do that. I wish you had consistent, always support in all the ways you need. And sometimes we do need to have those awkward conversations in order to get those needs met.

Samantha, does that answer your question?

Yes, thank you. That was very helpful.

Good. Thank you. Thank you for coming on video. I'm going to extend the Biggest thank you to the amazing and inimitable Megan Devine for spending this hour with us. I know you're so busy right now. And we really, really appreciate your wisdom and your insights and your incredible work. And I'm going to stop the recording now and just ask if you have any words at the end to say. I'm going to drop all the links to your books in the chat box and to Refuge in Grief website so that people know how to find you. Is there— Anything you'd like to say in closing?

Anything I would like to say in closing? Go forth and be awkward. Really, I mean, that should be my banner. I think just trust yourself, right? There is no wrong way to grieve your mom or anyone else, right? This is a new experience every single day.

Right. Yeah. And whatever you're going through is normal for you. That's right. That's right. Okay. Thank you so much, Megan. We are