and grief growers don't leave grief behind.
They don't force themselves
or give into society's pressure to leave grief back there,
but makes space for grief in their lives
every single day, both on the milestones
and in the day today.
They don't see grief in other words,
as like a divergence or an obstacle from normal life.
Grief is a part of normal life.
It's a path, a part of the path that they're already on.
(soft music)
- Hi there, grief growers,
and welcome back to this inaugural episode
of grief grower, this podcast that has been
on my heart for quite some time.
As always, I am so honored to be here, sharing space with you.
If you've been growing alongside me in my work for a while,
welcome back.
If you are new to me in my work, hello,
and welcome again to the first episode of Dear Grief Guide.
My name is Shelby Frisidia, I'm a grief coach,
author and founder of Life After Lost Academy
who has helped thousands of grieving people
stop feeling stuck in grief
and build bives that they genuinely love
from the lives lost force them to live.
On this show, we believe that grief is not something
to get over, it is something to grow with and alongside,
and that by treating grief,
less like a problem to be solved
and more like an invitation to live more deeply,
we can build rich, meaningful lives
that not only honor the losses that we've been through,
but also help us get a bigger picture
and a bigger appreciation of what it means
to live and to be alive right here and right now.
Today on the show, we're gonna be talking about
what the heck does it mean to be a grief grower?
This is the name of the podcast,
this is what I call members of my community,
but there's not any sort of dictionary definition
for what it means to be a grief grower.
This is a term that I invented many, many years ago,
many moons ago, when I started doing grief work back in 2016,
just sort of out of default, intuitive habit,
I started calling my community of people
that I was talking to and with and growing alongside,
grief growers and the very first Facebook group
that I created that was a community of griefers
called the grief growers garden
and apparently alliteration is my thing.
And we came together to talk about what it was
to be grieving people, but also what it was to choose
to see grief as something to grow through
instead of something to get over.
So let's dive into what it means to be a person
who is growing through grief,
what it means to be a grief grower.
And here's the deal, for the most part,
society treats grief like an inconvenience.
For most of our lives, we are met with after a loss,
this pressure to move on or find closure or let it go.
And people around us say things like,
"Well, they wouldn't want you to be sad
or you have to be strong and keep going."
And even workplaces, while they grant you three
meager days to cope with your loss,
there's this sort of like pretending that we're all doing,
that grief is this time limited thing
and that it can end or go away at some point.
And then people, friends, family, coworkers, neighbors,
sometimes even people who've never met us before
are frustrated or surprised or even start drifting away
when we continue to grieve past their expectations
of how long we're allowed to grieve.
And as grievers, this is like mind-boggling of like,
how are you not understanding that this is a thing
that keeps going?
And to the people around us, I imagine that we are mind-boggling
of like, how are you still here?
How are you still hung up on this?
How is this still such a problem for you?
How is this such a thing that is impacting your life?
But we as grieving people know, yeah,
this is one of the hardest and worst things
to ever happen to me.
Of course, it has an impact.
I often tell people in my after-loss academy
and just in general, especially when I'm guessing
on other people's podcasts,
I would be surprised if loss didn't have an impact on your life.
Like for people to look at you and expect you to return
to normal or get back to business as usual,
as if you didn't just experience one of the most devastating
things to roll through your life, that's just baffling to me.
I'm always surprised when people say,
well, I want to go back to normal.
I'm like, it's as if you're expecting the worst thing
that ever happened to you to not have an impact on your life.
I would be genuinely surprised if loss did not have an impact
on your life.
And I'm talking death of a loved one.
I'm also talking about death of a less than loved one.
I'm also talking about divorce, break up,
major diagnosis, cross-country move, job loss, pet loss,
miscarriage abortion.
I'm talking about all the things that influence our life.
I mean, I could the list keep going on and on.
Geographic move, financial loss, having to relocate,
whether it's your choice or not, living through a war
or some other sort of political strife,
having land that you love be taken over,
whether again, by your choice or not by your choice.
There are so, so, so many things that we grieve
and I would be surprised if they did not have an impact on you.
But again, I'm kind of losing myself,
but I want to get back to this notion of people and society
gives us this timeline for how long we're allowed to grieve
or how long grief is supposed to last.
So to me, there's no surprise that there's
a lot of grieving people, including myself
in the early days of my mother's death
that feel lost and alone and abandoned and left behind
and broken.
And something that I try to relay so hard in my work
and the reason I'm starting this podcast,
hi, welcome to episode one, we're all here together,
is that I believe that there is another way to approach
the concept of moving forward in life after loss.
And it's everything this show is about.
It's what if instead of having to get over your grief,
you allow yourself to grow with it.
And this sentence that singular belief is at the core
of what it means to be a grief grower.
Somebody who's committed to growing through grief.
Grief goers are people who don't see grief
as a problem to be solved or a wound
that you can put a bandaid on,
but something that's a lifelong companion
and grief goers don't leave grief behind.
They don't force themselves or give into society's pressure
to leave grief back there,
but makes space for grief in their lives every single day,
both on the milestones and in the day today.
They don't see grief in other words as like a divergence
or an obstacle from normal life.
Grief is a part of normal life.
It's a path, a part of the path that they're already on.
And more than that, grief is not something
that's wrong with them.
It's not a bug in their programming
or something that needs to be taken out, examined,
dealt with, medicated, treated, solved, fixed,
any insert word of your choice here.
It is something that is a part of them in belongs
to them and part of growing with grief
involves weaving grief in and honoring
grief's presence in every moment of their lives.
So if you've ever felt this pressure to hurry up
and forget your grief, but your heart is like,
that doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense to let go of this
or leave this back there
or put this somewhere else other than right here right now,
then you might be a grief grower.
So today on the show, I want to run through three traits
of what it means to be a grief grower.
Okay, number one, a grief grower believes
that growth is happening even when progress feels
slow or inconsistent or non-existent
in the aftermath of loss.
Because society does this thing
where it treats grief as like a period of stuckness
or again, like a retreat or a detour from normal life.
And then this pressure to like,
well, pull your car back on the road,
gotta keep going.
This pressure is really big,
especially in a world like ours
that's so rooted in capitalism that prioritizes this constant
like visible up into the right progress growth at all times.
But grief growers know that grief is not being stuck
or having taken a detour or this stagnancy,
you're not parked in your car on the side of the road.
And grief is certainly not doing nothing.
Grief is doing a whole heck of a lot.
And a grief grower is somebody who is willing to believe
even in small bits, even hesitantly at first,
that something is still happening.
Growth is still happening even in the darkness
and the hardness of grief.
This growth might be invisible, it might be slow,
it might feel like it's impossible for growth
to be happening on some days.
And yet with so many grieving people that I've met deep down,
there's this like trust,
almost like a weird, warped, divine faith
that even if they don't understand how or where or why,
grief is taking them somewhere.
There is something happening with grief
and there's this sort of belief,
even in the presence of suffering and despair
that one day I'm gonna be able to look back on this
and recognize that things were shifting
and I was adapting even if I can't see it right now.
Even though that I would have identified
as the worst season of my grief,
grief growers inherently believe this.
And I see this through so many other spaces I work in as well.
In my online course in community life after loss academy,
we often talk about tracking progress in grief,
not as societies up into the right, constant improvement,
but as how our shifting needs and focuses
and priorities change over time,
because that is a kind of growth too,
to kind of be dabbling in one thing for a little bit
and then be exploring one thing in another season.
So perhaps in one season of your grief,
you're trying to figure out how to sleep through the night.
That's the biggest, most number one priority
you've got on your plate right now.
Whereas in another season of your life,
you might be doing the really hard and gritty work
of renegotiating your relationships with people
in work at home, at school, in your love life.
You might be trying to figure out where grief belongs
in relationship to other people.
That is another sort of project.
And so you can be growing not necessarily in one thing
in one way, but in multiple things
in multiple ways all the time.
And the growth might be slow, the growth might be weird,
the growth might be non-linear,
but grief growers know the growth is happening.
Okay, number two, grief growers see grief
as a long-term relationship instead of as a short-term problem.
So so many times people are taught that grief
has an expiration date,
whether it's a year after a death or six months
for a pet loss or one month for something medical
or diagnosis that happens to you,
but grief growers reject this idea
because I gotta tell ya,
and so many grieving people will tell you
that there's no such thing as like popping out
of bed one morning and declaring, all right,
I'm done with grief, done grieving now.
I am finished thinking about grief being a person
who is grieving, I am done with that task.
There's no such thing as checking grief off your list.
Grief growers understand that grief is here for the long haul.
Not as an enemy or dictator like this force
that's over your shoulder all the time
and trying to tell you how your life should go,
but more kind of to the side of you as a lifelong companion,
I've often described grief as a roommate of sorts
that has this like notable influence on how you live.
You may have not longed this roommate to move in,
but this roommate is here for the rest of your life,
regardless, but treating grief like a long-term relationship,
it doesn't mean you're signing up to be sad forever.
It's just acknowledging the presence of that grief roommate
and that your relationship will have been flow over time
and just like having a human roommate,
there will be joyful milestones
and there'll be hard milestones.
There's getting through the day today
and then getting through when one of you is gone
or one of you is traveling
or one of you has a big thing that's due.
It's very much letting grief be a living entity
that's in your life.
And students that I work with in life after loss academy
have told me once they shifted their energy
from fighting grief being against grief
and using their energy to push it away
to collaborating with grief, bringing it alongside.
They suddenly have so much more energy to work with.
There is a great fatigue and exhaustion.
There's a big amount of energy
that it takes to push grief down and away
versus to allow grief to be something
that is in collaboration with you
or cooperation with you
or united in moving forward with you.
It takes a heck of a lot more energy
to resist grief to push it down and away
than it does to sit beside it, to ask it questions,
to create intentional practices in your life
where grief is allowed and welcome to show up.
A practice I've seen in grief growers
and something that we enjoy doing together
is making room for grief instead of trying to banish it
or put that away or leave that back there
or put that up on the shelf
and then I go live my normal life.
Instead of forcing grief to be somewhere
other than they are, they let themselves be
in the same room as grief.
They let grief be in the same room as them.
They coexist with it, they honor it,
they weave it into the life that they're already living.
They know that grief is going to appear in their present.
It's already here and it's gonna keep being here.
So why not dedicate space and energy
to being alongside it?
Grief Grower's understand that grief
is a long-term relationship and not a short-term problem.
Grief's in it for the long haul.
Okay, number three.
A Grief Grower understands that the work of grief
is never finished and that's okay.
In fact, that's how it's supposed to be.
Again, kind of like number two, we know grief growers know
that grief isn't something to fix.
It's not a disease that can be cured with a pill
or a math problem that has this like final certain solution.
There's a right answer and everything else is a wrong answer.
Grief is this lifelong process that changes
and grows with us.
Many people believe that over time grief gets smaller
like it shrinks in the amount of pain or sorrow
or sadness or influence.
It has over time grief's not all bad all the time.
But a lot of people describe grief as like the waves come
and then the waves lessen or they happen less frequently
and that's not a framework that I necessarily agree with.
Grief growers know and I know from my own experience
having lost my mom, my best friend, a broken engagement,
saying goodbye to my cat last year.
Grief growers know that grief stays the same size.
Throughout their life, it's not a thing that shrinks.
It's that we are people, our lives.
We expand around it.
We grow to encompass that grief and then some.
We are getting bigger all the time.
We are growing all the time.
And this idea is not mine.
It's not original to me.
It's perfectly visualized in Lois Tonkin's model
of growing around grief.
She created this in 1996 and she originally developed
this like visual, this illustration.
After talking to a grieving mother who described
her own grief experience like this,
she said, "At first grief was everything.
It filled all the space in my life.
But over time my grief started to grow around it.
My world got bigger even though the grief was still there."
And I've seen this diagrammed in so many spaces
and so many places online.
You can hop onto any major grief account on Instagram
and see this visualization.
She showed an experience or a reality
of gradually expanding circles where grief is like this
dot in the middle and the grief doesn't get any smaller.
It's that the larger circle you, your life,
grows around the grief.
And so the dot of grief stays the same size as you go
but your life expands around the grief.
And this is why especially in the early days of loss,
it can feel like grief is so intense
because for the most part grief is all there is.
Your life is consumed by rightly so
through no fault or problem or default
or defect of your own.
Grief is the thing you're focusing on.
And then gradually as living with grief
becomes not necessarily more comfortable
but maybe more predictable or maybe more familiar
which is something we also talk about in life
after loss academy.
You may never be able to predict grief
but it can become more familiar to you.
You start to kind of do what society would say
is get back to normal life but be able to ride the waves
of grief a little bit better.
To be in cohabitation with it to do things like go to work,
go to school, cook for yourself, clean yourself,
interact with friends, family and loved ones.
And your life is growing around the grief.
You are having new experiences, you're traveling
to new places and life grows around grief.
You have new experiences, you build new relationships
potentially and you might even experience the return
of things like happiness, hope and joy.
Grief itself again does not get smaller.
It stays the same exact size but because you were continuing
to live life around it, it's like this giant boulder
in the center of a garden.
It continues to exist but the size of the garden
and the plants that grow there and the seasons
that are happening, those all change.
And this is what it means to grow around and through
and with grief and so much of the going back
to my boulder metaphor, the cornerstone
of what we're up to here on grief grower.
And I am just so excited to have you here
as a listener on the podcast.
I will say some days in your grief will feel just as intense
as they did in the beginning because that grief
is still taken up a honking amount of room in your life.
That big boulder does not go away.
And there are so many authors, writers,
podcasters, researchers that say, yep, grief doesn't go away.
Grief, again, world number two grief is with us
for the long haul, it's a long-term relationship.
But other days, especially as your life grows around grief
as that circle of your life and you get bigger
as you expand to grow around and encompass that grief,
it can feel softer.
You might have a day where you're spending most of your time
on the outskirts of that garden,
tending to other plants, interacting with other elements
of your life and who you are in the world.
Your interactions with grief are not only softened
by time and distance being literally away
from that rock and having practice being away
from that rock in the middle of your life,
but also the time you've spent tending to your grief
and taking care of it, planting things around it,
learning the role it plays as a major cornerstone
and character for lack of better phrasing
in the cast of your life, in the world of your own grief garden.
There will be days when that rock is the biggest
and most obnoxious thing that you can see.
There will be sorrow, there will be heartache,
but there are also days that bring sunshine and laughter
and joy and not to get too cheesy,
but I'm thinking like rainbows and unicorns,
there will be days when yes, the grief is present
'cause it's always a part of the garden,
but it's not the center of your focus
and that is a huge, huge life changer
when it comes to how you see and interact with grief
because society would tell you,
"All right, how do we excavate the boulder?"
And that's not possible.
That's not a real way to coexist with grief.
Oftentimes what happens when society demands that of us
is that we try and lift this heavy thing
and relocate it somewhere else.
And even if we succeed, we know it's there
and it's presence for lack of better phrasing,
almost haunts us.
We are reminded of it.
It keeps popping up, it keeps getting in the way
in ways that we often wish it didn't.
And so by allowing it to exist in the garden of our lives,
day to day where we are already living,
where we are already existing,
it is such a big difference again,
and energy of from fighting, resisting,
pushing away ignoring grief,
to allowing grief to be a part of the life
that we are already in the process of building.
I'm not saying you have to be okay with your loss.
I'm not saying you have to enjoy the fact
that grief is there.
I'm not even saying you have to appreciate
or be grateful for it.
Do not mistake me here.
What I am saying is that grief growers recognize
that it's normal to have the presence of grief
and to coexist with the presence of grief
and grow around it for the rest of their lives
and not only that it's normal and okay,
but that's exactly how it's supposed to be.
This is exactly how grief is supposed to work.
You do not have to force grief away or move on
and leave loss in the past or leave it back there
or coordinate off from every other element of your life.
Instead, you can notice all the ways
that you are expanding and growing around it,
allowing grief to be this significant part
of the greater fuller and richer story of your life.
I wanna close out by asking you,
are you a grief grower?
Is this an identity that you would assign to yourself?
And I would suspect the answer is yes.
If one, you believe, even if you can't see it right now,
that you are making progress in the depths
or the darkness of loss,
that there is something happening here,
even if you can't explain why,
even if that just feels like faith,
believing without seeing. (laughs)
If you believe that you're making progress,
even in the depths of loss, you might be a grief grower.
Two, if you understand that grief is with you
for the long haul, that this thing is not gonna go away,
and it probably isn't supposed to,
then you might be a grief grower.
And then finally, if you know that it is possible
to build a beautiful life around loss,
even if you can't see how right now,
or why that would be possible for you,
then you're probably already a grief grower.
And I need you to know, as more episodes
of this podcast come out,
as we grow this garden of grief together,
I am not gonna tell you gotta let things go.
This is not the space for that,
regardless of what society or the media
or your friends and family tell you.
You do not have to meet any single person
or any large forces expectations for how you grief.
You get the autonomy and the power
to carry grief with you in a way that makes sense
for your loss,
in a way that makes space for your loss,
as well as everything else that makes up
the grand ever evolving garden of your own life.
You get to decide what goes there,
you get to decide what stays there,
and for how long and how you want to honor
the things that cannot be moved or uprooted.
And as we close this out here,
I wanna say if this episode resonated with you,
please subscribe.
This is the place where we're gonna be doing all of that.
I am so, so honored to have you here
for this first episode of "Greef Grower"
and for all of our episodes to come.
With that, I will say if there is anybody
you wanna see me in conversation with,
if you know there is somebody in your circle,
a grief expert, an author, a researcher,
a spiritual teacher, a poet, a body worker,
if there is someone in your circle
that you look up to who believes these things,
who you suspect is a grief grower,
please reach out to me,
she'll be at shallbeforsethea.com
and recommend them as a guest for the show.
I'm always looking for new guests and people to speak to
about what it means to grow through and with grief,
not just in the early months,
but in the years and decades following a loss
and not just for death, but for divorce, breakup, diagnosis,
pet loss, miscarriage, pregnancy loss, job loss,
financial loss, every other loss that we experience
in our lives and just the grief of being alive
in this year of our Lord 2025.
There's a lot to talk about.
There's so many ways that we grieve
and there's so many ways that we can honor our grief
and grow with it instead of trying to,
as society continues to tell us or demand of us
to push it down to stuff it away,
to get over it, to let go, to find closure
and to move on already.
It is simply not a sustainable way to live.
And I am just so grateful to share space and time
with you each week.
This is the place where we're gonna grow
through grief together.
That's all for this episode of "Greef Grower."
Thank you so much for joining me today.
If you're looking for grief support beyond the show,
you can access free workshops, blog articles,
and my signature, "What's Your Grief Support" style quiz
at shellbeforsethea.com/links
and you can find that in the show notes.
If this show felt validating, comforting, educational
or otherwise helpful to you as you move through grief,
please subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts,
Spotify or wherever you listen,
and be sure to share "Greef Grower" with a friend
because you never know what someone you love is going through.
A huge thank you to the grief growers community
for supporting the show on Patreon.
If you'd like to join them and help me keep this show free
from ads for mattresses and meal delivery kits
and everything else you can advertise for
because grief is hard enough without commercials,
please head to patreon.com/shellbeforsethea.
As a Patreon supporter, you get to help me choose new topics
and guests for the show and you're the first to get
behind the scenes access to all of my upcoming projects.
"Greef Grower" is hosted by yours truly.
Shellbe Forsethea with theme music by Addy Goldstein.
Until next time, grief growers, I see you.
I am 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]