grief is not something you get over, okay?
Person dies, you grieve, and then you move on.
Grief is something you move through,
and it's for the rest of your life.
(gentle music)
- Hi there, grief growers.
I am so grateful to be here with you as always.
If you've been growing alongside me
in my work for a while, welcome back.
And if you are new to me and my work, hello.
My name is Shelby Frisitia.
I am a grief coach, three time author,
and the founder of Life After Loss Academy,
where I've helped dozens of grieving people
stop feeling lost, stuck, broken, and alone,
and start building lives that they genuinely love
from the lives that loss force them to live.
This includes not only death-related losses,
but also losses like divorce and breakup,
major diagnosis, and every other type of loss
that changes your life.
Here on grief grower, we believe that grief
is not something we get over.
It is something that we grow with and alongside,
and that when we stop treating grief like a problem
to be solved and start treating it like an invitation
to live more deeply, we can create meaningful lives
that are rich with the memories we carry,
the struggles that we faced, and the preciousness
of what it means to be right here and right now.
Today on the show, I'm bringing you my conversation
with Gordon Brewer.
Together, we talked about caregiving
as a form of surrender, especially for men
who are often expected to fix things in our society.
How grief can change your relationship to God and religion?
And what to do if you're sitting in the pain
or uncertainty of a life that you never would have asked for?
Here is Gordon's bio.
Gordon Brewer is the person behind the practice
of therapy podcast and a licensed marital
and family therapist.
He has 20 plus years in the mental wellness
and grief recovery fields.
He is the owner of a small group practice
in Kingsport, Tennessee.
Gordon is also a widowed person and knows firsthand
the impact of grief on people's lives.
Let's get to our conversation.
Grief growers, I am so delighted today
to introduce you to Gordon Brewer,
who is the host of the Practice of Therapy Podcast.
Gordon, tell us more about your lost story,
your relationship to grief, and how you got here.
Wow, that's a great question.
And I'll try to shorten it as best I can.
But one of the things about me before I became a therapist
was I worked in the funeral industry.
I was a funeral director and also an embalmer.
I worked in that for almost 20 years.
And then went back to graduate school,
got my degree in counseling just mainly
because I wanted to do more to help people.
I felt like just walking people through a funeral
is helpful, but I wanted to do more in depth
and learn how to do therapy.
And I had majored in psychology and college.
And then fast forward to 2010, my wife was diagnosed
with breast cancer.
And so went through all the ups and downs of that over 13 years.
It metastasized your brain.
And then she passed away in 2023.
And so going through that with my daughter as well,
which my wife was first diagnosed with cancer.
She, my daughter was just going into high school.
And it was also when I was making a transition
from working in a nonprofit sector
for an organization that worked with that risk children
and youth, I went into private practice at that time.
So, but also as we had talked about previously Shelby,
it was one of the things that during my tenure
in the funeral business is I really got interested
in grief, grief therapy, and just helping people with grief.
And it was really at a time period
where the whole phenomenon of people really acknowledging
grief and how we handle grief was coming
more into the forefront.
I think it's interesting how grief has been
kind of under the surface the whole time.
And then going through my own grief with my wife's death
and being a caregiver and the ups and downs of that.
And then I do supervision with some therapists
that are working towards licensure.
So I just love talking about grief and working with grief.
That sounds kind of like an oxymoron,
but I really am passionate about it.
I love that.
Well, and here it's not a weird thing to say,
but like if you go out in the world and say,
I love talking about grief, people look at you like,
you have two heads.
But here it's absolutely not a strange thing to say.
I think the first place I want to go is my brain went back
to 2010 and the moment of your wife's diagnosis.
And I think a lot of people who are listening
to this podcast care givers have been care givers
as a part of their grief experience,
but especially from a spouse or a loved one's perspective,
I think in our society, we say in marriage
and like in sickness and in health and all these treatments,
we make to each other.
And at the moment of her diagnosis,
was there a conversation between the two of you
of what is this about to be?
Who are we about to become?
Or was it, well, we're getting on the rollercoaster
and we'll see what happens,
which is also a very valid point to take in and as parents.
How did you fold your daughter into the conversation
of the experience of what was happening?
So kind of take us through if you could
from the moment of diagnosis and then like,
how was there any idea of what the next 13 years
would become with each other?
- Well, I think what we all do when we're faced
with a potentially terminal illness,
the type of breast cancer that she was diagnosed with
was had like a five year life expectancy,
I did the recent, you know, looked it up.
The doctors didn't tell us that.
And so I just kind of took it on myself to kind of find,
okay, what are we up against here?
And I think, you know, even though I'm a grief expert,
so to speak, when you're going through it yourself,
it's a totally different animal.
You just get into, as I like to call it, just go mode.
You just, you go through the different things
and say, okay, we're going to figure this out.
And my wife and I talked about that some.
I think to some degree, she was a little bit
in denial about what was happening to her,
which I get.
Most people in kind of the grief world know about
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross when she was kind of the first person
to really talk about stages of grief,
which when they interviewed Elizabeth later on,
she said she wished she hadn't put it in stages
because grief is not one, two, three, a linear thing.
It's a mixture of things.
And so, but she had written it about people,
really written it about people who were being diagnosed
with a potentially terminal illness.
- Yes. - Of course,
of course at the time when she was diagnosed,
we were giving a good bit of hope in that.
Okay, we're going to be able to do these things
and she had a double mastectomy to kind of,
okay, we're going to nip it in the butt.
Her cancer was at a stage three, I think, whatever.
But you kind of mentally prepare for the worst, I think.
When you get the news, you think, okay,
what do I need to do?
And that might be more of a male perspective on grief
and there's something I need to do,
something I need to do to fix this,
I need to conquer this, I need to protect this,
I need to whatever.
And what happens, I think, is that I think a lot of,
for me, and especially they might feel like they have failed
at something because they haven't been able to protect
their loved one from this or their spouse from this.
And so, yeah.
And so, that's part of the phenomenon there.
But then, you go through the initial treatment,
the surgery, and then she had radiation,
she had chemo, then radiation treatment,
and they're thinking, okay, we're all good, she's clear.
The last scans didn't show any more cancer.
And then you go back, and so you're living
from scan to scan, essentially.
And then it seemed like every two years,
she'd go for her scan, and there'd be a hotspot
that would show up, and so they'd go in and take care of that.
She had another, she had to have another surgery
for, you know, removing some lip nodes
that they discovered that had, were cancerous,
and so they removed those, and then more radiation,
radiation treatment.
And then, at her work, she started complaining about,
not being able to see things peripherally.
She was having trouble with her peripheral vision.
And she actually went to her eye doctor and optometrists,
and he said, well, I don't know what it is,
it's probably nothing, and, you know,
just kind of minimized it.
Well, that was the first signs of her brain tumor.
And so, it had my testecised to her brain,
and then she was at work, and it just, she totally blanked out,
and passed out, and they had to call ambulance,
and I was struggling to get there
and figure out what was going on.
And basically, the doctors at the time were kind of well,
we're not going to treat her, they were treating her like,
oh, well, this is going to be terminal,
so we're not going to take her kind of thing,
was what I read between the lines.
But fortunately, her doctor advocated for her,
and got her to King's Fort, and we were very fortunate
that it happened to be when she got there.
There was also a neurosurgeon that was there,
friends of the oncologist,
and they got her into surgery within two days.
And so, of course, at that point,
you're thinking, okay, brain tumor, this is it.
You get yourself prepared mentally,
and you think, okay, how am I going to do this?
Get my daughter prepared, she had just started college.
So, I mean, I was communicating with her,
and she tried to figure out, do I need to come home?
All this kind of stuff, and you just go into this zone,
okay, I'm going to go through the motions here,
and do all the things to make this work.
And so, then fast forward,
she, after they did the surgery,
fortunately, it was on the surface of her brain,
and they were able to get to it easily,
and their work, they didn't seem like it had spread
into the brain anywhere, it was kind of encapsulated.
But at the time, they said, okay,
we want to do whole brain radiation
to make sure we got everything.
And they kind of told us, well, these are things
that can happen with that.
And on hindsight, I think we probably both would have said,
no, let's not do that.
But essentially what it does is it literally zaps your brain,
and so her brain began to atrophile, get smaller.
And so it created dementia, and just a slow deterioration
of her brain over time.
And then dealing with the other hot spots
in the last two or three years,
she was wheelchair bound, had to have caregivers in the home.
And I think when you're in the middle of that,
as a caregiver, you don't really, at least for me,
I didn't realize how bad it really was.
I mean, just how much I was taking on,
and really trying to navigate all that.
And then there's, that we could spend a whole episode
just talking about how it changed my relationship with her.
When you go from being a spouse to being a caregiver,
it's like they're no longer your spouse.
It's like you're taking care of a parent,
or a grandparent, or a child, or something.
And so there was probably a lot,
in addition to the anticipatory grief,
in other words, expecting the worst,
and kind of going through the grieving process ahead of time,
there's also that detachment of,
okay, I'm a caregiver mode now.
I no longer have a spouse, I have someone I'm caring for.
It's interesting how, you know, as a therapist,
I get a lot of people that are going through the same thing,
which I love working with people like that.
But I know even in my own therapy, that was a big thing
that I had to deal with, as the guilt feelings of,
well, I no longer feel the same way about her.
I no longer feel any sort of romantic feelings,
or any of that sort of thing.
And, you know, come to find out, you know,
that's pretty typical for people that are in a long-term
caregiving situation with a spouse,
and that all of that changes.
One of the things about me is I'm also a clergy person
in the Episcopal Church, and so,
the whole existential crisis of okay,
why is God letting this happen?
Well, of course, I don't want to go down another rabbit track.
I don't think that's how God works, but dealing with all of that,
it's still something, still process, you know,
here two and a half years later after her death.
- I just wrote down, 'cause my whole,
one of my intentions in having you on the show
was talking about caregiving, and then also talking about
grieving as a man in our society,
where like a mood, it's not okay to show emotion,
or you need to be strong for your family,
or all these stories that we tell our men and our boys
when grief enters the room.
And I wrote down, caregiving seems to be a practice
of continual surrender, and then I wrote down as a man.
And to your point earlier about caregiving
is often a situation where you are unable to fix,
or unable to protect, or unable to save the day
for lack of better phrasing.
And you must continually be surrendering to uncertainty,
more news, changing of the roles,
changing of the structure of your relationship,
even changing of how you see yourself.
Can you talk about what it's like,
or what it was like and what it is like,
to be at that intersection of I am a man who is caregiving,
and what it's like kind of from a societal perspective,
but what it's like from a personal perspective too.
- Yeah, yeah.
There's so much that you juggle,
because I was still running my therapy practice.
I was still seeing clients and doing my best
to be present for them, which I feel like I did pretty well,
but I think as much as anything,
what I've learned from all of this is the necessity
of learning how to draw on supports.
And I think that's one of the things that,
to kind of pat myself on the back,
as I allowed myself to do,
I gave myself permission to use supports.
And also, being a therapist is making sure
I'm doing my own therapy.
And so I think that helped that went a long way
in just working with my therapist at the time,
just with all the internal feelings
and all the, you know, that there.
But I think as much as anything, men want to fix,
we want to divide and conquer and get through the problem
and get this over with,
and let's move on to the next thing.
And so I think for my own experience,
I felt a lot of that.
I just, you know, there were times
I just want this to be over.
I just, you know, just want, I just want to be done with this.
This is just, I feel like my whole life is on hold.
You know, I'm taking care of my life that's got the mentions.
You know, just all of those things.
You know, it's like I was,
I almost felt like I was being, you know,
forced into something I didn't want to do.
- Yeah, well, yeah, it sounds like a lot like grief.
- Yeah, right.
- Forced into a life you didn't want to live.
- Yeah.
- Right, right, right.
- Absolutely.
- And so, yeah, and so being,
being getting to a place where you accept it,
you know, reminding myself to do, you know,
as cliche as it sounds, take a day at a time
and just focus on the now, rather than, you know,
and there, when I'm doing therapy with people is that,
a lot of times we can get either preoccupied with the past,
I wish I would have, I wish I'd did.
And that kind of takes people into this place of depression
and, you know, self-loathing and all that kind of stuff.
The opposite of that is going to a place of what if,
you know, how could this be anticipating things,
creating a lot of anxiety for ourself.
And neither one of those places we have control of.
All we have control of is the present.
And so, really learning how to,
instead of just reacting to things,
learning how to respond to things
and reminding myself of that.
Now, it got ugly.
I'll tell you, I know all the book stuff,
but I lost my temper, I got frustrated.
You know, you know, there was a lot of anger there,
a lot of resentment, all of those kinds of things
that again are, I think, a normal part of anticipatory grief,
especially, and just, you know, the anxiety around that,
how, what's my life going to be like?
Am I going to be alone forever?
But I'm the same time, just to position that to,
okay, I'm ready to start a new life.
I'm ready to move on from this kind of thing,
which part of the anticipatory grieving process
kind of gets you to that point.
And fast forward to when she did die, it was, in many ways,
not a traumatic in the sense that we had hospice involved,
but, you know, people that have been around people
that are dying, they can get to a point where they're doing
what is referred to as agonial breathing, where they can,
- Oh, sure.
- Yeah, and so that's when it's important
to have a hospice involved and being able to take advantage
of the medications to kind of keep their body well.
I was afraid of over-medicating in her,
and I didn't give her enough.
And so she was struggling to breathe,
and that was just traumatic.
And so that's something I still work through,
I'm still working through, it was just that,
the whole traumatic part of that.
It's not the same kind of trauma as like the big T trauma,
but it's still, you know, traumatic to watch that happen.
And then, you know, just seeing her in a way kind of
felt like she was suffering,
even though hospice reassured me that she wasn't,
but, yeah, all the little pieces of all of it,
it will take me a lifetime to process all of that.
Grief is not something you get over, okay?
Person dies, you grieve, and then you move on.
Grief is something you move through,
and it's for the rest of your life.
And so being able to accept that,
and just allowing yourself to have those moments
where you just fall apart, and ride the wave,
as I like to say, and, yeah, then you make it through it.
- Yeah, and we talk a lot in my online course
in community called Life After a Loss Academy
about grief as a lifetime companion,
and not as an obstacle or a boulder or a dictator,
or something that's, you know, ruining your life first,
and then you see a reason or that you need to get over.
It's something that moves into the house and never leaves.
- You're lying. - And it can look different
across time, and you engage with it differently over time,
and with different losses and more experience,
and different tools, and different stages of your life,
but it never really goes away.
And so I see that echoed in your experience.
Something that keeps coming to me as you're speaking
about being a counselor, being in therapy,
even having been a funeral director,
and you're like, even then, like this was still hard.
And I didn't expect to go here today,
but there's an assumption that people in the grief space,
or who talk about grief regularly,
are good at grief, I'm putting air quotes around this,
but I often tell them it's like,
it's not that we're good at grief,
or that we're better at grief, we just know more.
We just have tools, we just have language for it.
It doesn't make us suffer less.
So can you say more, not just about being a man,
and not just being about a caregiving spouse,
but can you say more about grieving as a grief professional
in terms of did people think you needed support,
and offer support, or did people think you knew everything,
and just left you to your own devices?
Like what was the perception of like,
oh, will you do this for your job?
So this must be on some level, easier for you,
I think is a cultural assumption we have
about people who are professionals
who are also grieving at the same time.
Well, I think it's as I mentioned, drawing on support,
and that doesn't mean everybody's supporting.
You know, you have your inner circle of friends
and family that you can talk to about it.
The greatest thing anybody can do
in helping somebody with grief is just to listen.
I like to say God gave us two years in one mouth for a reason,
for a reason, or our job is just to listen
and to hear and acknowledge.
And so I had, fortunately, I had those people in my life.
And being an expert, as you mentioned,
doesn't take the pain away,
and it's not that it diminishes the pain,
but I think what it does do, as you mentioned,
is give me a language,
and also help me to be mindful, okay,
this is what's happening to me right now.
Grief lives under the surface,
and it always lives under the surface.
A good example of this, I went to a music festival this past week
in Moral Fest, and in Western North Carolina,
and Wilkes, Wilkes Burn, North Carolina,
and one of my favorite groups that I got to hear
was called the Kruger Brothers.
And they have a song called Carolina in the Fall.
And that song always reminds me of my wife,
and it always brings back all kinds of memories for me.
Of living and carrying North Carolina,
and just the fall time, which is my favorite time of year.
And every time I have heard them sing that live,
I just start weeping.
And it's just, one of those things that just moves me,
and it's kind of like, oh, this is great.
And I think that's something that's,
I think important to really learn how to do,
is when those waves of grief come,
is allowing them to come,
and recognizing that this is just like a release.
And it's just like after that, it's kind of like,
oh, wow, I didn't realize I needed that so much.
- How do you, I love this example,
because I just went to a concert yesterday here in Chicago
about one of my favorite composers for film,
doing some of his favorite,
some of his favorite scores,
and my best friend who died in 2022 from COVID,
they played at the concert, the score of one of her favorite
movies that we watched together.
And I didn't expect them to play the whole thing,
and the melody that they did was about 10, 15 minutes long,
it was a symphony, they did everything.
And as each song came, I forgot what it sounded like
in my memory, I kept trying to bring it to the front,
and it wouldn't come.
And then as soon as the first few notes started playing,
I was like, I see the whole scene, I see the whole movie,
I see us paint our nails on Sunday afternoon,
watching this movie together, and I was weeping
in the nose bleed section of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
And I love this permission to,
that you give yourself to cry, to show motion,
and to ride the grief wave,
and to let the release come out.
And I wonder for people that you're working
with a therapeutic practice,
how do you teach someone to do that?
Because I think, for me, I know it's something
that has come with practice and continued exposure
to the world, like the world will show you,
stimuli that make you cry.
Some people I think have the gift of being able
to stuff it down, and choose,
am I gonna lean into the tears now or not?
And other people are just like, it's here, so I'm crying.
But I wonder how in your practice,
and how even you've taught yourself,
you've managed to teach others how to give themselves
permission to grieve in a way,
whether through tears or through something else,
crying's not for everybody.
But how do you teach people,
and how have you taught yourself
to give yourself permission to grieve,
or is that something you always knew how to do?
- Fortunately, I grew up in a family
where my dad was a pastor, and so that was something,
you know, people's funerals and that kind of thing.
And of course, you know, working in the funeral business
for the years that I did, you know,
was around that all the time.
And so in many ways, maybe I'm in the unique privilege
of just seeing grieving as being normal, you know,
and it's something that I became accustomed to.
And I think, you know, that's, I think that's been part of it.
I think the other part of it is just in my own life's experience,
is when I'm allowed myself to do that,
it's like it, I wouldn't say it comes into a relief,
but it's a release in a way,
because I think we stuff, we learn how to bury our emotions.
And I think, as I mentioned before,
grief lives under the surface.
And I think a lot of times it will poke its head out,
and it'll do it by surprise.
And here's a good example of this.
I can't tell you how many times
when I was working in the funeral business,
people would come to a funeral,
and it might be in a coinence or something like that,
and they would find themselves
during the funeral just uncontrollably sobbing, you know.
At a funeral of somebody they barely knew,
or somebody they had just a peripheral connection to,
and invariably they would, you know, apologize,
and they'd say, I don't know why this is happening.
I don't really know them, and I'd usually say,
okay, who have you lost in your life
that you haven't let yourself grief already,
or haven't given yourself permission to grieve?
And so it's like when the stress of life,
I like the image of, you know, if you take out T-catel,
and you put it on the stove and plug it up
and turn the heat up, guess what, it's gonna explode.
But if you allow yourself to take the stopper out,
and just allow the steam to come off,
and the pressure to come off,
that's maybe a healthier way to allow ourselves to grieve.
And there's no perfect way to grieve.
I mean, there's, everybody, as I like to say,
everybody has to grieve in their own way,
in their own time, you find your path,
but I think being able to, again,
give yourself permission to find those people in your life,
that will just listen, and that won't try to fix it for you,
or say all the stupid stuff that people say
when people are grieving,
to try to justify it, or give it some kind of meaning,
or whatever, sometimes grief is just meaning us.
I mean, there's just no meaning to it at all.
It just hurts, and it sucks, and it's, that's a bastard.
I mean, it really is, and just being able to accept that,
that you're gonna move through it,
and that you're not alone.
- Yeah, I wanna get into that for sure.
The stupid things that people say,
kind of lit this up in my brain,
but also something you said earlier about,
let me see, I can form a succinct question around this,
but I know that you have a Christian faith,
and one of the questions that you were asking
during your wife's diagnosis,
and your caregiving experience for her,
is like, why this, why me?
And one of the stupid things that people say
is God never gives you more than you can handle,
which I think is a bunch of BS.
I think he gives you more than you can handle, and then some.
But I also don't think that grief or loss
is some sort of divine testing,
or punishment, or things like that, but I wonder,
for people who are listening who have faith,
or have lost faith, or for whom faith
is a part of their grief experience,
how has your faith and relationship to God changed?
With everything that you have learned,
and know about grief?
- I think for me, personally,
and this is part of my own theology and faith is,
is that I don't think God is like this puppet master
up there pulling the strings to orchestrate what happens
in the world, to teach people lessons,
to do all these things behind the scenes, so to speak.
I just don't think God operates that way,
but I do think that God understands,
I think what has held me in it is the sense of not being alone,
and that I'm understood, and that I'm validated in some way.
And as I like to say, just like grief,
using this as Christian vernacular,
the Holy Spirit will catch you by surprise,
and that you have this,
this welling up of emotion within yourself,
I can't prove to anybody the existence of God,
or prove that that comes from God,
or whatever, that's just the language I've assigned to it,
but that brings meaning to me and brings comfort.
And so I think whatever path people are on
with their religion, I think,
first of all, God is big enough to handle our questions of doubt,
and I think God prefers doubters personally.
(laughing)
- I love that.
- I think for me to have a certainty about it
is missing the point, and so there's a lot of uncertainty.
God is in the midst of the uncertainty and the unknowing,
and I don't think that God does anything
out of some grand scheme or plan,
and I know there'll be probably a lot of people
that don't agree with me on that,
but I think we do more harm when we try to minimize
the pain that people have to God.
That just sets us up for thinking of God as this dictator
in space that controls what we do here on life.
No, God gave us a free will, and so we deal with that.
- Yeah, I, long time listeners of my work will know
that when my mom died, my experience of God
or my belief of who God was also died,
of like if you're good enough, if things will happen,
if you pray hard enough, good things will happen,
and if you're bad enough, bad things will happen,
kind of the rewarder and the punisher of God.
And so I love this notion of like God
is in the uncertainty, God is in the unknown,
and you know what else is in those places is grief.
And I, this is entirely selfish,
but I resonate so much more with a God who gets grief
than a God who creates loss as a form of punishment,
or divine judgment of things that we were doing.
I would much rather be held in or believe in a world
where God gets what it's like to suffer,
and lives in those spaces also.
I did not think we would be here today, but I absolutely love that.
(laughing)
- I love it.
- Yeah.
- I wonder, you haven't shared your wife's name with us,
so I'd love to know kind of as you wrap up,
some of your favorite things about her,
and ways that you continue to remember her,
carry her forward beside that song,
Caroline in the fall,
other ways that she shows up for you still today,
as a symbol of grief being nothing
that comes along with us right?
- And they're so kind to ask,
and I think that's an important thing,
is to be able to name the people,
and ask people, what was their name?
Tell me about her, him, or whatever.
Her name, she had a unique name.
Her proper name was Mary,
but ever since she was little,
she was referred to as sister.
And so everybody knew her as sister.
And so that's what I called her,
all of her friends called her that,
and somebody asked me one time,
"Well, who is this sister brewer?"
And somebody made a joke,
"Well, she's a nun that makes beer in the church."
You know, kind of that.
(laughing)
So, but yeah, that was her name,
and before she got sick,
she was a very pergarious, outgoing, fun-loving person.
She was a lot of fun to be around.
Everybody that knew her
or was close to her just loved being around her.
And so it was sad to see that fade away
and for her to change in that way,
and really in many ways become really kind of bitter
towards the end,
but a lot of it was due to her own confusion
about what was going on around her with a dementia.
And she had gone through a lot of loss.
She had lost her brother to suicide when she was in college.
Her dad died shortly after we got married.
And then when her mom died,
she found her dead in her mom's kitchen.
She was taking care of her mom.
And so I know that she went through a lot of her
and pain herself.
And so that was her, you know.
It seems like she was a person who knew a great amount
of loss herself.
And so you were grieving and caregiving
for someone who is grieving
and potentially caregiving for herself
as a grieving person as well.
Right.
I know we talked about this.
I don't know when each of our podcasts are gonna air,
but grief growers, you can go hear me on practice
if they are P probably by the time this airs.
Yeah.
But we talked about in many seasons of our life,
we are griefers and supporters all at the same time.
And sometimes we are supporters of ourselves
and we are griefers ourselves.
And so it sounds like you two were both sort of,
in that cyclical nature,
sometimes we're griefers and supporters to each other,
but sometimes we are griefers and supporters of ourselves
as we are grieving and supporting each other.
Yeah.
I wonder what are some other ways
that you carry her forward today,
or maybe you notice or see her out in the world?
Like how does your relationship continue?
Yeah, I think as much as anything through my daughter
because we continue to talk about her and say,
oh, I did a sister thing today,
or I'll tell my daughter all the time
when I see her do something, I'll say,
you're just your mom.
What's been great is that having an adult daughter
and being able to have that life together
afterwards.
Sister is rolling in her grave because we did this,
but my daughter and I went and got the same tattoo together.
We'll see.
Yeah, let's see.
Where is it there?
Let's see, let me turn my hand.
So we've got a tattoo of a great blue heron,
which to her has a lot of camp significance in that,
whenever they would see a great blue heron fly
over the water at camp,
they would, the kids would say,
that's the Holy Spirit coming to visit us.
And so that's what it has become to represent for us.
And every time we see a great blue heron,
we text each other and say, I just saw a heron.
And what it has come to mean for us is that
a great blue heron will show up when we need it most.
And so when we feel, you know,
it might be going through a hard time
or a rough day or whatever, a blue heron will show up.
And so, yeah, and so, yeah, that was something we did.
Not necessarily to honor my wife and her mom,
but to really to honor ourselves
and what we've been through with her as much as I knew.
Yeah, that's a beautiful way to phrase that is
in the same way that funerals are for the living.
A lot of people like to say,
I'm like tattoos are for the living too.
Or memorials or rituals or anything
that you do to carry your grief forward.
Like, that's for you.
It can be in remembrance of someone or something
or a relationship that was lost,
but can also and mostly pardon me,
but should be for how you need to continue living
in a world where they are no longer here.
And so whatever ritual you invent, whatever tattoo you get,
I also have a grief tattoo of a few of them,
whatever memorials you do, whatever actions you take,
I, this is a whole other conversation,
but I don't like when people say they wouldn't want you to
or they would want you to.
I'm like, no, no, you do have to live your life for yourself
and do your grief memorials for yourself.
And always, if it resonates with you with the intention
or with the inspiration of their presence behind it,
I love that.
I love the memorial tattoos.
And the future we'll do a whole opposite
on the memorial tattoos and be so, so fun.
- Gordon, as we sign off for the day,
I wonder from your perspective as a therapist,
as a grieving spouse, as a caregiver,
a lot of people listening are just in the uncertainty
right now, in the unknown of grief.
What is one message or sign off
that you could offer people who feel right now,
like I'm in the middle of something
that I don't even fully know or understand
and I can't see a way out there in that place in grief.
- I feel like you could uniquely speak to that.
- First of all, this sounds just kind of dismissive.
You just got to accept it.
But there is something about acceptance of,
okay, this is where I am right now,
but also reminding yourself that this is a season
and you will have many seasons of life
and that we will move, you will move through this.
And again, to know that you're not alone in this.
I mean, even for people listening to this podcast,
they probably are getting a sense of,
"Oh, I'm not the only one."
And so it's just really important to reach out
to those that you know can be of support to you.
There's no perfect way to grieve.
It's messy, it's sad, it's terrible,
but at the same time, grieving can be liberating
to some degree and that there's a release to it
that you can allow it to happen.
And it's again, something you move through.
And I think the more you can educate yourself on
just what it, like listening to this podcast,
is educating yourself on what it means to grieve
or what it's like to grieve.
And I think having a language for it
is an important piece as well.
One of the other things too is,
which I have, particularly through my wife's illness
and I started journaling and having that as an outlet.
And nobody has, nobody reads my journals, it's just for me,
but it's something that I do every morning to just say,
"Okay, this is what I'm experiencing right now."
And just having a way to take what you're experiencing
internally and put it out in front of you.
And I think by doing that, to some degree,
you can get a different perspective on it
by allowing yourself to do that.
Alan, Dr. Alan Wolfelt, one of my favorite quotes of his,
is he says, "Greef shared equals grief diminished."
And so I think there's a lot of truth to that.
And being able to find those people
that you can share your grief with,
not expecting them to fix it or take the pain away,
but you, I think that's the way you make it through all of this.
Yeah, that's a beautiful thing to leave on.
And yes, grief growers, anything that helps you feel seen
or less alone in your grief.
If you don't have the energy, the time, capacity, space
to bring your grief to another person right now in this season,
we talk about those prepositional phrases right now,
even listening to other people's stories of grief
and recognizing, like, oh, there are others in this universe.
There are others in my orbit who also know what it is to grieve
and know what this means can be supremely helpful.
Gordon, thank you so much for coming on "Greef Grower" today
and for speaking with us and sharing your grief with us.
Yes, thank you so much.
This has been a great experience.
That's all for this episode of "Greef Grower."
Thank you so very much for joining me and Gordon today.
If you're looking for grief support beyond this show,
you can find free workshops, blog articles, and my new,
what's your grief supporter's strength quiz
at shallpeforsitia.com/links.
And if you'd like to get support for me
for your unique laws experience, join us in life
after-loss academy, my online course in community.
As a student, I'll walk you through my five step grief framework
for rebuilding after-loss, and you can get live coaching
for me every single week to answer your questions.
Replays are always available if you can to 10 live.
It's just $33 a month to join or $22 a month
if you're a marginalized or financially stressed griver,
and you can cancel your membership at any time.
You can find a link to Gordon's work
and his podcast, "The Practice of Therapy"
in the show notes for this episode.
If this podcast felt validating, comforting,
educational, or otherwise helpful to you,
please subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts
or Spotify.
Grief growers hosted by me shall be for-loss,
with theme music composed by Addy Goldstein.
Until next time, grief growers, I say 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]