word-told power when you're grieving and knowing the difference between loss,
bereavement, grief, and mourning.
These four things is not just about being technical.
It's about naming the experience that you're going through right now with
more truth and more compassion for yourself.
Because I'll tell you what grief is already hard and feeling confused about
what's happening makes it even harder and clear language.
When you use it or when you ask other people to use it with you or about
you, create space for understanding, for permission to feel your feelings,
to have your identity shift, to do things out in the world, and for healing.
Hi there, grief growers and welcome back to grief grower.
I am so glad to be here with you as always.
If you have been growing alongside me in my work for a while,
welcome back.
And if you are new to the show, if you have just discovered us today,
welcome.
This is grief grower and my name is Shelby for Scythia.
I am a grief coach.
I'm a two time author soon to be three time author and founder of life after
loss Academy, which is an online course that has helped grievers across the
world stop feeling lost, stuck, broken and alone and start building lives that
they genuinely love from the lives that lost forced them to live.
This of course includes not only death losses because grief is so much more than
death, but also losses like divorce and breakup, major diagnosis, geographic
move and any other loss that changes your life.
Again, if you're new to the show, we believe here that grief is not something to
get over.
Grief is something to grow through and with and alongside it is a part of life.
It is not a detour from life.
And that really matters and that it is possible in life after loss to create
something that feels good to us, inclusive of the loss we faced and
inclusive of all the lessons for lack of better phrasing that loss.
Brings to our door, inclusive of the people we've lost the relationships we've
nurtured and that have fallen away and the decisions that we've made or the
choices we've been forced to make that can never be undone.
There are losses a lot of times that we do not choose and there are losses
sometimes that we do.
There are things that we opt into experiencing when you decide to go to school,
you are saying no to a different career path when you decide to become married,
you are saying no to a single life when you decide to have children,
you are saying no to a life without children.
There are so many things that as you gain, you lose.
And as you move forward, you leave behind so many of them when we think of
grief are things that we don't opt into such as the death of somebody that we
love, a divorce that we did not ask for or instigate a diagnosis that we had
no desire of ever having.
These are things that often when people think of loss, we think of the awful
things that are voice to the upon us that happened to us that occur in the
timeline of our lives.
And there are also losses that that we opt into and here on grief,
grower, this is what I'm intending to say by all of this, we honor all of it.
We honor the fact that you can live a good life,
inclusive of all of these losses.
Whatever that means to you, a lot of people say I want to be at peace.
I want to find happiness or hope again, I want to feel grounded.
I want to have some sort of purpose in the world.
And and I believe that it is possible to build a life that you actually like living
from a devastating loss or collection of losses that you have been forced to
live and loss is not a bad thing.
It's not a moral thing.
It's not something you manifested upon yourself.
It is a thing that happens by sheer nature of being alive.
When you go to sleep at night, you lose another day and and you gain the wisdom
that that day you just lived just brought you it is it is a balancing act.
And it is possible for loss to not be the thing that ruins your life,
but something that is folded in with it.
And for grief to not be the stone that you carry around around your neck.
But a living thing and ever evolving thing that you grow alongside.
And if you're curious about more of that, you can go back to episode two of grief
grower where we talk about what it means to be a grief grower because all of that is
included there.
Today, we're going to be talking about words because words are very important in
grief. I know for me, I have changed a lot of how I talk about grief and loss
based on what grieving people have told me, what I feel for myself in the midst of
grief that goes for everything from saying, there are a better place now where
everything happens for a reason, cliches and the words we use when we talk about
grief to saying things like, this is really hard.
This sucks. This is shit.
I'm so sorry. This is your reality right now.
There are very, very different ways to talk about grief as it is happening to
people. But today, I want to get us back to bare bones of like, let's do foundational
basics, loss, bereavement, grief and mourning.
These four words, they're often used interchangeably,
but there is a difference between those four.
And so if you're not familiar with what they are or you've been using them interchangeably,
which not your fault, a lot of people in society do the same thing, I would love to
help kind of drill down on exactly what they are and why it matters to know the
difference between them because you've often probably heard these things interchange
between each other.
People will say things like, I'm so sorry for your loss or are you still in mourning or
if you took bereavement leave, but they don't really talk about how these things are different
from each other and they are.
Loss, grief, bereavement and mourning each kind of is pointing at a slightly different
thing, a slightly different part of the experience of life after loss and understanding the difference
between them can help you not only make sense of like what you're feeling and where you are
right now, but can also give you the sense that you're navigating your life with a little
bit more clarity and clarity is really, really helpful when you're grieving because it's
something that oftentimes we feel we don't have a lot of.
So let's get into it.
Number one, loss is the thing that happened.
I often refer to the difference between loss and grief as loss is the thing that happened
and grief is everything that comes after we'll get to grief in a second, but loss refers
to whatever the event was, the moment that your life split into this life before and
this is life after.
This can be death and most people when they say life after loss, they're referring to
death, but you can also say it for divorce or the end of a significant relationship.
This can also be romantic or platonic relationships like a friendship loss.
This can be a major diagnosis, whether for you or somebody you love because you can be
changed by other people's diagnoses.
This can be losing a job, losing financial stability, miscarriage, infertility or childlessness
that was not your choice.
This can be moving away from a home or a community or having to leave the country again
whether by choice or by force. This can be a strangement or religious separation or a loss
of purpose or a shift in your identity.
I'm thinking midlife in this for a lot of people or as in the sense of a lot of things where
you experience a difficult event, but you come out of it alive.
There can also be this sense of in that moment, I lost my ideas of safety, of certainty,
of a future that I once imagined.
So I'm thinking as a queer person, I often think of life for people who have been the victims
of a hate crime, but survived.
It can be the death of a time when they thought the world was a safe place or when they thought
they had friends they could trust.
And that is a loss event, even though there is not a death that has taken place.
So loss is the moment that something in your life permanently changed, either suddenly
or over time.
This can be an event that often society will perceive as negative, that requires some kind
of recalibration or readjustment or emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual processing.
In life after a loss academy, this is the course I talk about that I teach on living life
after devastating loss.
We go through the five step grief method.
I often refer to loss as like a one way door.
And once you cross through it, you cannot cross back over it.
Your life before is closed to you permanently.
Once you see you can't unsee, once you know you can't unknow.
And your only choice after devastating loss is to move forward into a world where this
loss is true.
It is now a foundational reality of the life that you're living right now.
And as my mom would probably say, whether you like it or not, this can be incredibly painful.
And recognizing all the ways your house is now built on a foundation of loss in some
ways can be really staggering.
And also something we talk about in life after loss academy is acceptance is not about liking
the thing that happened far from it.
Acceptance in the words of Cheryl Strait is about embracing what's true.
So yes, the foundation of my life in some part is composed of loss, but it's also composed
of truth.
These are things that have happened to me and inform all of my decisions, all of my actions,
all of my choices going forward into the future.
For I am a person who's been impacted by in my own life, mother lost the death of my best
friend to COVID, pet loss, the breakup of an engagement, that influences how I move forward
into my life.
It's something that my self is built upon.
It's not all of it.
I have so much more to me than just the losses I have experienced, which I know is true for
you too.
But and the loss, the things that have happened are part of my almost like structural DNA
makeup, and I see that as a foundational truth for everyone who's experienced any kind
of loss.
Okay, let's move on to grief.
I mentioned grief as losses the thing that happened.
Grief is everything that comes after grief is the emotional mental physical and spiritual
experience of living in the aftermath of loss.
In other words, losses the thing that happened grief is everything that comes after notice.
I did not put a time frame on this grief can include, but certainly is not limited
to here's a list for you, sobbing uncontrollably, lashing out an anger or going numb, feeling
anxious about your own or other people's mortality.
Once you recognize, oh, they died, I'm going to die.
They're going to die.
We're all going to die.
That's a very real experience in life after loss.
You might do things I certainly did like replaying the loss or a person's final days or
analyzing anything you could have done differently, kind of making up new scenarios or revisiting
old scenarios in your mind.
You could certainly be questioning your identity or your place in the world.
If they're not here, if that relationship's not true, if this diagnosis is true, who the
hell am I now?
Grieving identity is a very big part of grief.
You might feel exhausted on every level, especially right now in 2025.
You might have difficulty concentrating or regularly forgetting things, also known as
grief brain, and we're going to do a whole podcast episode on grief brain.
You might have trouble trusting yourself or making decisions.
A lot of people I work with say, yes, I'm grieving the person who died or yes, I'm grieving
this relationship, but I'm also grieving being able to trust myself to know things or to make
decisions for my benefit in the future.
Big deal when you're grieving.
A lot of people say I feel disconnected or resentful of people who do not get it.
So kind of this distance from friend and family groups, especially initially after the
loss is a really big deal.
You might have sudden surges of emotions, months or even years later.
That's why we talk about grief being ongoing and growing through grief for the rest of our
life.
You might kind of in a more positive or fluffy note, notice signs or symbols related to your
loss.
You may find like little hope nuggets scattered around that give you sort of a buoyancy or
a lightness in life after loss.
On that same note, you might shift your perspective on life.
You might get your priorities in a different order after a devastating loss or feel something
like more joy or gratitude or appreciation for your life.
This can be what a lot of people call a positive consequence of grief is like, oh my god,
I realized I was working too much or oh my god, I started telling people I love them more
often.
These can be very positive or affirming consequences, consequences and air quotes that
come after a devastating loss.
And I like to refer to it grief as the whole kit and caboodle of life after loss.
It's the good.
It's the bad.
It's everything in between.
It's the immediate awfulness, the grief brain, the forgetfulness, the reliving their
final moments.
But it's also the long-term coping and remembering and meaning-making and carrying your memories
of a person or an experience for it.
Grief is a thing that you are not doing battle.
If it's not a thing you're trying to get over and then get back to your life, it's a thing
that is accompanying you through life.
It is just as present with you in happy moments as it is in difficult ones.
And in life after loss academy and in my work as a grief coach in an every book I've ever
written, I talk about grief being a long-term relationship and kind of this umbrella.
Under which we include our next two words, bereavement and mourning, we're told power.
When you're grieving and knowing the difference between loss, bereavement, grief and mourning,
these four things, is not just about being technical, it's about naming the experience
that you're going through right now with more truth and more compassion for yourself.
Because I'll tell you what, grief is already hard.
And feeling confused about what's happening makes it even harder.
And clear language when you use it or when you ask other people to use it with you or
about you creates space for understanding, for permission to feel your feelings, to have
your identity shift to do things out in the world.
And for healing, we're told power.
When you're grieving and knowing the difference between loss, bereavement, grief and mourning,
these four things, is not just about being technical, it's about naming the experience
that you're going through right now with more truth and more compassion for yourself.
And so, I'll tell you what, grief is already hard.
And feeling confused about what's happening makes it even harder.
And clear language when you use it or when you ask other people to use it with you or
about you creates space for understanding, for permission to feel your feelings, to have
your identity shift to do things out in the world.
And for healing.
Okay, so number three is bereavement.
And this is the social label for loss, grief, mourning, kind of all of it.
It is kind of also depending on where you live, because I know bereavement is used a lot
more in places like the UK than it is in the United States.
But bereavement is often referred to as the formal state of being deprived of someone or something.
And it is almost frequently used in social, medical or institutional context.
So people will say things like, oh, she's on bereavement leave.
They just joined a bereavement group.
We sent a bereavement card or sympathy card.
And he is a member of the bereaved family.
And so it's kind of used, I want to almost like put my tie in my little shirt collar.
I'm like, it's very official to be bereaved.
Seems like a more formal or logistical way of saying that person is in a state of grief.
That person is in a season of loss.
It is usually exclusively attached to death-related losses, which is kind of a bummer, because you
can be bereaved for literally anything.
But I have seen here and there some people sparingly applying it more broadly to things like divorce
or diagnosis, although that's a little bit more rare right now.
Bereavement as a term is the way that society acknowledges that someone or something significant
has been lost and that the person who has experienced this significant loss is in a season
of disruption.
Something has happened in your life.
You are currently recalibrating.
The downside of the term bereavement though is that it's often bound by time.
The loss is a before and after moment.
Grief is kind of everything that happens in the aftermath of that.
But bereavement, especially when it's used in medical and social and workplace contexts,
is time bound.
The company you work for, might give you three days off as a form of bereavement leave.
People might check in during the funeral and then disappear and consider the time for
quote unquote bereavement support over.
We're no longer sending bereavement cards.
In many ways, bereavement is kind of an unfortunate term and it's one I don't use very often because
it has this implied or built in sort of expiration date.
And I don't love that personally and a lot of people I talk to don't like this either
because we know intimately and intuitively that grief has no expiration date.
And understanding that society uses the term bereavement and how society uses bereavement
can often help explain why a lot of grieving people in the world feel rushed or ignored
or unsupported after this like allotted, unspecified or specified bereavement time is over.
So this again is something I very, very rarely use to describe people who are grieving.
I'd rather say grievers or people who are grieving because that gives us so much more time
to work with and so much less limitations.
Lastly, let's get to number four, which is morning.
Morning for me and for so many other grief professionals defines the outward expression
of grief.
Sounds gestures, rituals or communal practices outside of your body out in the world.
This can look like crying openly by yourself with others.
That is morning.
You can attend a funeral or a celebration of life.
You are physically putting your body in a place to memorialize someone.
You might wear black clothing or memorial jewelry or clothing of a loved one or jewelry
from a loved one.
You might sit Shiva or light a yard tight candle.
You might create an altar art music or a personal ritual of your own to kind of perform
a brief, whether this is public or private.
You can do either one.
And you might speak your person's name at the dinner table, especially when it comes to
death related loss.
A lot of places I've seen define morning as bringing private pain into public spaces.
It is how you demonstrate to the world and sometimes to yourself that something important
has changed or something important has happened.
You have experienced a loss and that you yourself are a different person as a result.
It can feel, I think I used this word just a few seconds ago, but like a performance of grief.
It's, I am performing grief out in public and it doesn't mean your grief is fake.
It is expressing it.
It's moving it through your body.
And many cultures, morning is something that is time bound, but it's also visible to
other people and supported for that reason.
So I mentioned the arts at candle.
So in Judaism, mourners sit Shiva for seven days and they're surrounded by community and
prayer and tradition.
And a lot of places in Latin cultures, de Adela Smertos invites people to create altars
and cook foods and honor their dead people with music and art and rituals.
So these are all examples of public mourning on a large scale.
And it's kind of a let down because in much of Eurocentric cultures and this can be attributed
to globalization and colonialism and a whole host of other factors, a lot of communal
mourning, especially in the United States is minimized or skipped entirely.
It's kind of like you get a funeral and maybe you maybe get a funeral because a lot of
people don't even have public, a few nerves or memorials anymore.
And then you're done.
And this leaves a lot of grieving people feeling stuck between wanting to express their grief.
I want to do something to memorialize this.
I want to metaphorically or literally put a flag in the ground or, or I want to plan
to tree in the soil or I want to put a stone in the earth to memorialize that something has
happened, but culturally and societally, it makes them feel like not only am I not allowed
to do that, but everybody wants me to move on.
No one else is interested in doing this with me.
And my only choice is to carry on without having done this memorializing rituals.
And I kind of want to take a divergent tangent here because one of my favorite resources
for life after loss is called Burnout Completing the Stress Cycle.
This is a book by Amelia and Emily Nagoski, their sisters.
And they talk about how to cope with major stressors on our nervous system.
The best way to do that is to move it through your body to create some sort of physical ritual
or your brain, your body, your spirit.
However you like to see your soul or your relationship to kind of that, which is not on
earth, is to do some sort of physical ritual that can signal to all of yourself, your brain,
your mind, your heart, your soul.
That something has ended or something has happened or something mattered.
And so doing things like lighting a candle or journaling or sharing stories online or
attending a funeral or putting a literal tree or flag or rock in the ground.
Like these are things that are all really important when you're grieving, not for selfish
reasons of I'm going to do this for me.
Although you certainly can.
It's not selfish if it helps you.
Like it's I'm so baffled by people who are like it's so selfish to, you know, film you,
facing doves in honor of your dead baby.
And I'm like, oh my God, people keep memories like this for themselves and do rituals like
this for themselves to allow them to know on every level that something significant has
happened.
And they keep that so they can revisit that over and over again as a tribute to their
person as a tribute to how they've processed their grief as a memory of what it felt like
to be there at that time.
It's something I'm just so passionate about.
I don't like these, I don't like these trolls that say I don't understand what people
are filming themselves crying on the internet.
This is a way of memorializing what is happening for us.
That is a practice of mourning, especially in a culture that often teaches.
I'm talking about white people culture here for a minute that tears are to be oppressed.
Tears are a waste of time.
They're not productive.
And they are a signal that something about you is weak or inefficient or too soft to be
in this world.
I love seeing people's vulnerable examples of mourning online, whether they are, again,
releasing birds or sharing photos or creating altars in their home or making art together
or dancing together or crying in their car.
I just love it.
And I think that mourning as a practice is not valued enough at least here in the United
States.
So I will say if you're looking for a little permission slip in this episode, although
this is not what this episode is about, one of the most healing things you can do for
yourself, especially if you do not have a culture of mourning rituals to to kind of reference
back to, you can certainly hook yourself up with ancestry.com, figure out whence you came
from and figure out maybe what historical ancestors of yours did.
This is something I'm very interested in and pursuing right now of like what rituals do
Scottish people do, do Irish people do, do Germanic people do when they are mourning someone.
I've got all of this somewhere in my ancestry and knowing what ancient people did or even
people who are just living in these places right now due to honor someone who has died can
help you connect to in a way respectfully.
Please do this respectfully with ways that you might like to honor and grieve things that
are happening in your life right now.
And you can DIY your own mourning ritual.
I talked about this in my first book permission to grieve.
There's permission to feel to have feelings, permission to be for your identity to shift
in the aftermath of loss and permission to do and permission to do grief is about taking
grief out into the world and whenever way resonates with you.
You can certainly do big things.
You can found a charity.
You can raise money for a park bench.
You can run a 5k.
You can do all of these things that impact other people, but you can also build an altar
in your home.
You can rearrange your closet.
You can cook a dish on a certain day of the month every single month until you die.
All of these are expressions of mourning because it is taking the manifestation of grief inside
of your body and pushing it out into the world.
Either for yourself or for other people to see it is for eyeballs to be absorbed and it
is for your body and your nervous system to recognize something significant happened
and something significant is still happening and that's okay.
And if you're curious about ways to do this, we talk about how to design rituals almost
every single week in life after loss academy, especially for really big and significant
days like birthdays, anniversaries, death days, first for your year of first, but oftentimes
too when you're crossing into double digits, like when it becomes 10 years or 20 years,
to come up with mourning rituals and milestones to do that.
So I want to close out by talking about why the heck do words matter?
What's the point of this whole episode?
And I think a lot of people, especially in this day and age when so many people are complaining
that there's new words being invented left and right and I can't keep up and blah, blah,
blah.
I hear you and also human beings have been inventing words since the dawn of time.
It's kind of what we do.
So my pity for you only goes so far.
But I think a lot of people when it comes to these four words, it can feel like semantics
or getting too nitty gritty into the details.
But I'll tell you that just like words in every other context, words hold power when you're
grieving and knowing the difference between loss, bereavement, grief, and mourning.
These four things is not just about being technical.
It's about naming the experience that you're going through right now with more truth and
more compassion for yourself.
Because I'll tell you what, grief is already hard and feeling confused about what's happening
makes it even harder and clear language when you use it or when you ask other people
to use it with you or about you create space for understanding, for permission to feel
your feelings, to have your identity shift, to do things out in the world and for healing.
And if you're looking for a place where your grief is met with the same flavor of clarity
and care, what is this?
What's happening?
Let's wrap words around it.
Let's put step-by-step framework to it.
You are always welcome to join us in life after loss academy.
It is a space where everyone in the group speaks grief fluently or is learning the language
of grief.
And we help you walk alongside grief with a community of support and also figure out
how would you like to define your own grief experience, including and beyond these four
words.
And it's really a profound space where we do quite a lot of talking about what it means
to be grieving and quite a lot of wordplay, playing with words to see what fits, to see what
resonates and to see kind of what lands as most true in our souls.
What resonates for one grieving person will not always resonate for another grieving person,
but oftentimes what resonates for one will resonate for many.
And the feeling that we get is, oh yes, I have finally landed on words to describe what
it is that has only to this point been available to me in feelings.
And that is a source of real grounding and real stability and very real comfort when you're
grieving.
That's all for this episode of grief grower.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
If you're looking for grief support beyond this show, you can find free workshops, blog
articles and my signature.
What's your grief support?
Stiaquiz at shall be for SITIA.com/links.
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If grief growers hosted by me, shall be for SITIA with the theme music composed by our dear
Addy Goldstein.
Until next time, I say you, I am so, so proud of you and the work that you're doing in the
world.
And I love you.
Because even through grief, we are growing.
[Music]