David Kessler, grief expert interviews Joan Borysenko, author and scientist.

Hi, everyone. David Kessler. Welcome, welcome. I'll give everyone a few minutes to find your way on. Came on just a moment early. I have a theory. It might be helpful, you finding your way. Hi, Joan. So good to see you.

Hi, David. And hi, everybody who's here today. It's wonderful to be with you.

I'm so glad you could join us, Joan. So let me see if I can find us. We. By the way, if you see me looking down, I'm not multitasking. I just see everyone here on my little phone. It's sort of the easiest way to see us. All right. Welcome, welcome. So folks are going to be coming on. I see them coming in. It's like a little electronic door. I watch people coming in. I'm watching the door. I'm watching the door, everyone, as people are coming in. All right, Diane's here. Anna's here from. From Los Angeles. Welcome. No, she says California, maybe, not Los Angeles. Welcome, everyone. Shirley's here from pa. Jolene's here from Phoenix. Down in your neck of the woods.

Shannon's from Connecticut. Hi, Shannon. Sylvia's here from Milwaukee. Hi, Sylvia. John's from Massachusetts. Good to see you, John. Hi, Sharon. Nice to see you. Midland, Texas. Jennifer's from New Jersey. Daniel's from Wheeling, Illinois. Good to see you. Arcadia's from Louisiana. Hi, Arcadia. Hi, Bill from Georgia. Anna says yes. She's from Los Angeles. Linda's from Culver City. There's a lot of Los Angeles here. Here's Karen from Toronto. I like to say hello to people just because, you know, in our virtual world, it's funny to make this personal as much as possible.

Takes a few minutes for people to find their way on. If this is your first time here, I'm David Kessler. We set this up. I set this up after COVID 19 with the stay at home order. So even though we physically couldn't get together, we could at least virtually connect and hold one another's hands. And I have amazing people like Joan who come on and share their stories with us, which is great, because I don't believe there's one voice in grief. There's many, many experiences. As you see, some folks come on and say hello. If you're new, you can say hello, but you also don't have to. Some people sit in the front of the row, some people sit in the back. Yvonne's here from Melbourne, Australia. Joanne from Delaware. Lori from New Hampshire. Sienna from Iowa. Sandra, New York. Shirley from New York. Karen from pa. Ivy from New York. Lynn is here. Hi, Lynn from New Jersey. Welcome. Well, thank you all for being here. One of the things I always do, a little traditional ritual, is to just take a moment of silence for those who have died, just to honor them, remember them. So if you would join me in that.

Thank you so much.

So I have the pleasure of having Joan Boran Senko here. So Joan is unbelievably accomplished, books author, just amazing icon. And I want to tell you just a story about us meeting.

We were at a conference. It's interesting. Last night, when I was talking with. I think it was last night, two nights ago, with Natalie Wood's daughter, I had talked about R.J. wagner, her father.

How when my nephew Jeffrey was sick with cancer, he was working on a project with rj and whenever I would talk to Jerry, to Jeffrey, about cancer and his experience and who's helping him, he would talk about this amazing, wise woman, Joan Borin Cinco. And he loved her work. So I'm doing this speaking engagement. Might have been in Toronto, actually. Toronto, maybe.

It's a big dinner. All the speakers are there, and Joan's there. And I was just sitting there thinking, oh, my gosh, my nephew would be. He like. I was like, I don't even know why I'm getting to meet her, because my nephew would so love it. And. And so I said to Jonah, as I'm sure a million people do, started telling her, you know, how much she means to them. And I said, my nephew has cancer, and he just loves your work and all that. And I don't know how. I think you said something about, well, let's talk to him. And I was like, what? And she said, well, let's say hello. And literally, I got him on the phone, and he got to talk to you, and it just, oh, my gosh, you are forever in my heart. It melted my heart and melted him. So such a gift. So that's just a tiny glimpse of who you are in the world.

So.

Besides being this amazing teacher, you also happen to be a human being. So I know as a human being, you've dealt with grief and loss in your life. Since we're in a grief group, I wondered if you might tell us about your experience with loss and grief and what that's been like for you this lifetime.

Well, of course, there's been a whole mandala of different experiences. But right now.

What'S been happening for me is I'm going back to memories of grief during the AIDS epidemic. David. During that time, I was running a mind body clinic at one of The Harvard Medical School, teaching hospitals. And one day I got a phone call from a colleague in the department of psychiatry. I was in the department of behavioral medicine, working with Dr. Herbert Benson, who really was the one who introduced meditation to medicine. And he was so interested in meaning, the meaning of our life, the meaning of being alive, the meaning of being ill, the meaning of death, because that's so important and often ignored in the medical system. So we had started a mind body clinic. And one day I get a call from a colleague in the psychiatry department who says, we've got a young man here. He's an inpatient. And he. He said he wants somebody who can help him with peace of mind. He said, there's nobody in the psychiatry department who can do that.

Funny. Which is a funny state, you know, statement in itself.

And he said, you guys meditate maybe, like, you know something about peace of mind. And he said, this young man has the mysterious immunodeficiency disease that we're starting to see in the gay community. And this. I'll call him Sam, which was not his name.

So I went to see Sam, who was so very, very ill. He had pneumocystis pneumonia. He had thrush. He had all of these illnesses.

And.

And he was so frightened. And I remember sitting with him, it was snowing, and there were these big windows overlooking the Boston skyline, and it was so incredibly beautiful to see the snow fall. And we watched it and talked about life. His life, my life, this life, the meaning of life. And we bonded incredibly deeply. Because one of the things I think that can happen when people are ill is there's no time for nonsense. At that point, you realize life is precious. It's so precious, and it's such a difficult time to, like, wake up to the preciousness and know that, you know, there's no cure for what ails you. He was. Sam was a long survivor. That was two years. That was about the longest anybody lived with AIDS back then, because we hadn't even identified the HIV virus. And what. What happened from this is that I started a clinic in Boston under the auspices of the hospital for people with aids. And for the first maybe three or four years, it was. It was men. But then, you know, there were grandmothers or remember a grandmother from New Hampshire? She had contracted the virus through a blood transfusion. Another young woman who had had one sex partner in her whole life, which was her husband, and he had had, just before they married.

One experience with a man. And he'd picked up AIDS and given it to Her. And the amount of grief was overwhelming. And it was an eight week group, David, and it was very rare that you'd get somebody who was well enough to attend all eight groups. So I would visit them in the hospital where my office was. And there was such an extraordinary grief.

Every time one of these beautiful men passed. And such grief in the community, such looking for meaning. What. What's the meaning of a plague that's killing off a whole segment of the population? And part of the tremendous grief, I think, that people felt were in terms of meaning, you know, there were some people out there who felt like, well, it's a punishment from God for being gay. And that's. That was so difficult. Fortunately, I knew a lot of the Boston clergy, and if there was a person feeling that, I would send them to what I called a spiritually optimistic clergy person who believes that God is loving, not punitive. And so it was such a deep time, so much grief. That flashing forward now to the COVID epidemic, I wanted to go back and volunteer to work in the hospital. Just, you know, being with people. I'm not a trained chaplain, but I am a licensed psychologist and I thought it would be wonderful to be able to help. And, you know, I think I was really having flashbacks to the grief of the AIDS epidemic, because grief is like that. Every time you grieve anew, you're thinking back to other losses.

And when I realized there were people dying in the hospital alone who could not see their friends and people in nursing homes who couldn't have company, this. It was so unbearable for me. And, you know, I'm almost 75 years old and have some, you know, I'm in great health, but I do have a few pre existing conditions, like being 75, and I felt like I can't go into a hospital right now and volunteer. And that was so deeply upsetting that when governor Andrew Cuomo in New York was saying he set up a whole cadre of therapists to work for first responders who were so stressed. I can't imagine what it was like to be a physician, a nurse, an orderly, cleaning person, anybody in the hospital setting. And I wanted to be able to work with them. So I volunteered and I got a lovely letter back because I figured it was all virtual anyhow, what difference did it make to live in Santa Fe?

But they ended up, this was the wonderful part, having such a huge response to the call for volunteer licensed therapists to work with first responders that they didn't need me. But that was. I grieved really, for the first couple of months, I grieved my inability to get back on the front lines and help. So, of course, when you said, can you come and do this?

That's what I've been doing to help. Just being on, you know, different places and different webinars. But that's just one. One aspect, of course, of being human and grieving. Because we're in another pandemic situation now.

You know, this is. This pandemic is also. There's a lot in common with the AIDS epidemic that, you know, a virus doesn't know what state you live in, a virus doesn't know your political party, all those things. So it has that in common. It's also people die alone. Different than the AIDS epidemic when people were left alone.

Yes.

These cases, many times, people are wanting to be with their loved ones and cannot be with them. The families are wanting to show up and can't.

Yes.

The interesting thing about meaning, and I think it goes to purpose. Let me just unravel this with you for a moment, because I had a bit of a similar experience. I worked in a hospital system here in Los Angeles for 10 years. And when this happened and I heard, you know, I was on my book tour doing 30 cities, canceled on 21, and I came back here, my immediate response was, I have to get to a hospital. I have to volunteer in a hospital. They're short. You know, look, I could be the guy who's helping the families or in the more. I mean, I just knew that the needs would be so great, there would be something. And so it's interesting, as I began to talk about, I've got to get there.

Friends would go, are you sure? I mean, you have asthma. It's a respiratory illness. Are you really sure you want to? And I was just like, well, I've got to help. And one of the things I often say to people is sometimes when we look inside for purpose.

We don't find it there. And especially if you're in grief, you don't find it. You're feeling empty, but you have to look out. And it's interesting, as I was in this turmoil about I can't help. I was talking to a friend of mine who's a physician who said, david, you're not going to be the one to, like, save people. You might be the one that, like, kills yourself.

Right?

And he said, even I, as a physician, you know, they told me it wasn't a good idea. And so he said to me.

Your expertise is grief. Can't you help There. And I said, oh my gosh, I don't know what to do. I have all these emails from people who their grief group was canceled. And it like dawned on me, oh, that's what's wanted and needed in front of us. In the same way you're responding to the external that I think sometimes when we're looking for the meaning and purpose and we don't, don't find it in us, it is about.

What'S going on outside of us, what's wanted and needed in the world. You know, I know sometimes people feel like life owes me and I'm like, I think you owe life.

That's so true. What a great way to put it. We do. We owe life.

Not mine, actually, that's Viktor Frankl's. So I don't want to, you know, he's the one who talked about, you think you like life owes you, but actually you owe life.

So I want to take credit for that. But it's, it's so true. You know.

I wonder, with your experience in grief and loss.

People aren't able to have the rituals they need. And I know you're so aware of how important rituals are. Could you talk about rituals for a moment?

And yes.

What's it like without this lack of rituals?

I think it's really very, very difficult not to have a ritual. I'm going to tell you about a little ritual we had.

Still going on during this pandemic. I was saying to you, David, before we started that our 10 year old poodle, Milo, died on Memorial Day and he, he had had chronic illness for years of like four different chronic illnesses. It was a miracle that he made. But that of course, does not make grief any easier. And it was fortunate, you know, we could be with him. We were with him right up to, you know, holding him and being with him. And he was very peaceful. And he died during the night. He went out through the dog door. He.

Lay himself down upon the earth under the stars. And that of course made us feel better. But then it was Memorial Day and he needed to be buried. And fortunately we had a couple of people who had worked for us in the past who are like family friends. And they came and dug a grave. And then we asked friends of ours, we had really not seen anybody and neither had they. But they came in masks. They kept their, their distance. And here's the live part of the ritual. And then I'll go to the, the part that's the, that's really private. So we picked Sage and when Milo was put into his grave. All of us, the. The two lovely men who had come to dig the grave, and our friends Sarah and Philip, and my husband Gordon and I, the six of us, everybody knew the dog, and everybody took a handful of sage.

Put it on the grave, and said something about Milo, who was just the most tender, sweet, sweet being. And then, you know, we all put some dirt back into the grave. But when everybody. And then. Then we sat shiva for the dog for a couple of hours. And that was very helpful. And it can be done virtually, too. I mean, we. We were not touching. It could easily have been on zoom. We were masked and six feet apart, probably eight feet apart outside.

And so what I had done before Milo.

Actually I had done after he died was, was to cut some hair from one of his beautiful silky ears and some hair from his beautiful tail and tied a blue ribbon around each. Then I put a beautiful, beautiful dish, kind of earthenware with vines on it, very earthy. And I put a battery operated candle in the middle, the. The hair on either side, and then a bunch of sage. So it was kind of like a little alter to the four directions within a circle. Do you know that that battery operated candle, I lighted it on Memorial Day, and it's still burning brightly. And that will. That will burn there until it's burned out. And my grandchildren were grieving for Milo. My friends were grieving for Milo, and I was able to FaceTime people and tell the story and show them the little ritual altar that we had created for him. And it helped to give people a sense of closure, Particularly. I have a grandson who lives in Costa Rica, and, you know, he had. I told all the grandchildren that when Milo was. Was ill and that we were expecting him to leave his body shortly. And they. They needed to know when and they needed to hear the story, and they needed to know.

You know, everything that they could. And then they needed some symbol of memory and completion. So they have that and they have pictures of that, and they have pictures of my husband and I.

There. And of course, then lots of pictures of Milo. We sent out so many pictures and pictures of him with the grandkids. And that was really helpful. And we can. We certainly, most of us have lots of pictures of the people that we love. Mementos, we have candles, we have. We can always set up kind of a little memorial shrine. And, you know, the very first zoom call that I had, what was not a grieving call, it was a celebration call that it's related to grieving. I'll tell you about that. It was right at the beginning of the lockdown, and a friend of ours was having a birthday, and so his wife got everybody to do a surprise party for him, and half her family is in Israel. And Pa. People are spread all over. And she said, make some sort of a funny party hat. Well, people made very funny hats. And then all of us, there were probably 25 of us, all of us told a story that honored Bruce. And what everyone said at once is, this is just like a memorial service, and Bruce is still alive. Why don't we do this and tell why we so appreciate people before they die? Why do we wait until after? But had it been a memorial service, it would have been beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. So we have to get creative, and it's really possible to do that.

So let me give you some of the pushbacks on this just for the fun of conversation with you. All wonderful ideas. So I'll make a statement then. I have questions for you. One of the things that I've noticed, all that's beautiful. I agree 100%. Here's what has gone wrong in the real world. You had people who knew how to take your ritual seriously.

Yes.

And dedicate themselves to your ritual. I've worked with a few people who had a Zoom memorial, a Zoom funeral.

I think about, for me, when my younger son David died, one of the most meaningful things was when I stood in front of everyone and looked at all those faces, and someone told me how on a Zoom memorial, they looked out, someone's in the La Z boy with a tank top on. Someone else is at work stapling papers.

And since then, I've been telling people, when you put out a call or an invitation for a memorial, you tell people to dress and act accordingly, as they would in a real memorial. Because it is a real memorial.

It is. Absolutely. That's so very, very important, David, because.

Has a casualness like, oh, if I get up, you don't really know, you know. And like. No, I do know if you get up.

Yeah.

The same way, you know, if you're sitting out there at a tank top, you know, looking at your phone, at a real memorial, you kind of stand out. But we think here, maybe it's unnoticeable and you still see it.

Yep, absolutely. That's so very important. I, I, you know, I put myself in that place of. Of that happening, and it made me so sad. So what a. What a wonderful thing. There have to be some ground rules, that's for sure.

So the other thing that I loved about what you said, and here's a little bit of the pushback part, is what do people do when people are trying to do whatever they can tell the story? Here's some things I see go wrong. Someone's telling the story of their loved one dying, and it's so hard to be in a house without their husband of 30 years and their home isolated, and the person they're talking to says, oh, my gosh, yes.

I haven't been to the grocery store. Isn't this horrible?

And there's something about the pandemic that we're all so consumed that we sort of don't know how to fully be there from someone who's really going through horrible grief of a loved one. Not that this isn't grief for all of us being isolated, but there's a whole nother level of grief when you're. Yes, wife or husband of 40 years dies.

It's. It's. It's absolutely unthinkable, you know, and often.

It'S not just the pandemic. I think people are so uncomfortable with grief, David, at least some people, and do not know what to say to someone who is grieving. And it's very hard. It's like, you know, being with someone who's dying.

Sometimes silence is the best way to hold a person. Or just, you know, a simple statement of, I know how much.

You loved whoever it was, and just a look.

And yet people get overcome with, oh, I've got to make the situation better.

Well, exactly.

And there's no better ingredients. There's no.

I have to have the right thing to say, the right poem to send the.

Yeah.

The other thing is. The other thing you mentioned is storytelling is so important.

What do you tell people when their friends are tired of the story?

That's really difficult because the story has to be told over and over again. I think it's part. Part of the process.

But certainly I think what I would tell someone is sometimes it's difficult for some people to listen and don't take it personally.

That's how it is. Your story is precious, and there are people who can hear it and there are people who can't. And of course, it's so hard. We're so vulnerable when we're grieving. It's hard not to take things personally. And yet.

This is simply the truth of it. You're going to get as many different.

Responses coming at you as there are unique human beings.

And clearly I'm a talker, and I can tell you in my own grief, everyone who didn't show up in whatever way. They didn't show up eventually when I saw them or talked to them or called them or confronted them.

About how did they not show up?

Yeah.

When I did that, the one common denominator was all their answers weren't about me.

Yeah.

No one didn't show up because of me. They all showed. Didn't show up because it freaked them out. They felt inadequate. They didn't know what to say. I'm the grief expert. You better say it right. Or it could be, you know, all that stuff. There was just nothing about me. It was their fear, their uncomfortableness, their inadequacies.

Yes.

And it's always that. But just like you said, when you're the vulnerable one in grief, it's hard to be the one to understand that.

Absolutely, absolutely. You the expert. This when, you know, when I heard that your son David had died, I just could not believe.

First of all how incredibly difficult that is to lose a child.

I think it's.

Well, maybe the worst kind of grief. Although all kinds of grief are worst in their own ways.

And then I thought.

David will have so much that he can help other people with because he's been so deeply through it himself. And you know, when you talk about your experience with David, it's so touching because of that. You know, it's like I wanna, I wanna thank his soul for kind of enriching the experiences of everybody who you touch. David.

Well, that's my Finding Meaning, you know, that's, that's the book, the Finding Meaning that I wanted to do in his honor. And it's interesting, you know, you and I have been doing this for a long time. There was a time in our profession where self disclosure would have been frowned on.

Yes. So true.

This self telling. And I, and I remember even when I would talk about my mom dying when I was young and the bombing, blah, blah, blah, there would be the people who were like, it's not appropriate. Talk about evidence based studies and all that.

Right. That really comforts people.

And it has changed that. You know, people feel like if you've done the work and you've done the studies and, and then you've lived it. And I'll tell you, that's one of the things I came out of this with, is that after doing 40 years of grief and then being thrown into the epicenter, I wanted to write every parent, I counseled everyone I counseled a note saying I had forgotten how bad it was.

Yeah.

You know, and I think that's, you know, that's what enriches this, you know, what makes our connection with people so real.

It does, it does. When they realize you're human being as well. And particularly with grief. I mean, the actual pain of it, the physical feeling of it, the constriction of the heart and the throat and there's. It's. It is painful. So difficult, very difficult. And, you know, it's. It's.

I'll tell you a little experience I had after Milo had died, you know, after our friends left, we were sitting together talking about his life, and we grew silent. And I had. It seemed like forever. It was probably lasted for a minute, maybe two minutes of absolute existential terror. The realization everybody dies. We all know this intellectually, but the felt sense of it is different. I know everybody dies, but suddenly I thought, my beloved husband, one of us is going to die before the other, most likely. And.

The pain of that was so horrendous that I could barely, barely hold it. And after a little while.

It morphed enough to give me a little emotional space and to realize, oh, my God, every moment so precious. And that's another thing we all know intellectually, yes, be in the present moment, it's precious. But we're rarely there, you know, in this life. We're busy, we're thinking about other stuff, we're mad at somebody, we're worried about something, we're ruminating. We're moving into the future. And what happened after this time for both of us is.

We'Re paying much more attention to being present to each other.

With a sense. I mean, Gordy came back from the store just yesterday, and he said to me.

I do I love you enough? Do I tell you enough? Am I kind enough?

And he was really thinking deeply about that. And so we're. We're doing things now like taking the extra, you know, God, sometimes it's just a few seconds to be present, to hug, to wait, to listen. With the knowledge life is short. Everything passes. There's plenty of grief to be had. And so now whatever joy we have, whatever love we have really needs, needs to be nurtured. So that's another, I think, lesson of meaning, of grief.

So much. So let's. And let's go into that for a moment. I'm so curious to hear what you say about this. You know.

Some of us are able to realize our loved one's life was precious. And it ended. And.

We still have a life to continue.

To live, to honor them, to remember.

For some, the pain.

The wounds are so great that Living again.

Feels impossible.

Yes.

What are your thoughts on that? For folks?

My thoughts are this is. This is what grief is like, certainly in the beginning. And for many people, that beginning lasts for a long time. And you can't. You can't wish it away.

You know? Let me tell you a story that relates to this.

Deep grief.

When I was a young girl, well, from the age of 8 to 15, I actually went to a camp for Jewish girls. And every August in the Hebrew month of Av, which falls sometime in August, is a day of great grieving. It's the day that the first temple was destroyed in Jerusalem. The second temple was destroyed. It's the day that Ferdinand and Isabella kicked all the Jews out of Spain.

It was the day that Christopher Columbus actually set sail for the New World. And it's a day of grieving. And I learned something then that I've used all my life. So there's a song that is sung on Tisha Baav, and it. Let's see if I can just sing it. The tune of it is such that it kind of. Your voice cracks. You can't help it. And I think that somebody knew that and made that melody so that the grief really comes forward. And it simply means, we sat by the waters of Babylon. We sat and we wept. And that's, you know, sometimes that's it. That's what you can do. So it goes like this.

And it makes me cry. And it's my grieving song.

Whenever somebody I love.

I sit there by my own waters of Babylon and I grieve and I let the grief come. And I think that's an important thing. You can't chase it away. You can be present to it. But in a way, there's something about that song, and it's so ancient, it's thousands of years old, that brings up to me our common humanity. We all will lose loved ones. We all will die. The things that we love will pass away. Whole cultures will pass away. And there's something about that solidarity of common humanity that helps me hold the pain of it. And what I found personally, and I know, David, that this is different for every person, is that it's a process of making meanings and. And coming. Coming to completion. You know, what. What did I learn from that person? Even There are people you grieve. I think there are people who are angels in our life, and there are people that I call sacred enemies. And they were troublesome, and the. The grief over them is troublesome because on the one hand, we love them, are hoped that we could love them. Maybe they didn't love us the way we would like to be loved. And yet we've learned something from all of these relationships. And at least for me, I find that when I can focus on the meaning, it's like somehow or other, over time.

Kind of a different tapestry grows around the event, which, I don't know, makes it feel more whole for me. And then I start remembering the fun things, the good things, more than.

The pain. But it can be such a long time before the pain dissipates. But the good can start to come too. And you know that better than I do. Your own experience is so potent.

That's, you know, that's a magical story. I think about you singing that song, your grief song. And I would encourage people, whatever it is, to think about what is your grief song?

What's your tune around grief? What's your sounds around grief? What connects you to that primal place we all hurt.

So beautiful.

So that's a. That's a lovely, lovely place. Time flies.

Tell me. Folks are going to want to know how to find you, what you're up to. How can we find you? See you know what you're doing.

Well, you have to be able to spell my name. And that's my website. It's J, O, A, N Borisenko. B as in boy, O, R Y S E N ko.com. and you know, come to my website, opt in, and you will get all kinds of wonderful information.

Writings, stories, tools, techniques. And I also have a Facebook page. It's Joan Borisenko, forward slash, community. So people, you know, you go to my website, you'll see what my programs are. And I just want to say to everybody who's on this call, I am so sorry for your loss. This is a really difficult time to lose a loved one or to be ill yourself. And I'm so glad, David, that you're providing this forum for people. What a gift.

Thanks.

Gift me.

Thank you, Joan. I will put your link in so people will find it easy enough. Thank you so much for being here. Stick around a second. And to all of you, thank you for being here. So much is going on in the world. We've got the inner, the outer grief. We've talked about it. There's the pandemic, just like you were saying about the idea. Everything's temporary. Even the world we knew a month ago, six months ago, gone, right? Everything in our world with race relations, and here we are on Juneteenth. So thank you all so much for being here, for your support. I love seeing you all supporting one another. And I will see you very soon. Thank you so much, Joan. Thank you for being here. Bye. Bye.