Don't speak ill of the dead is bullshit.
And I think we should be talking about why.
This is one of my all time least favorite phrases
that people lob at grievers.
And it has this expectation of once somebody dies,
they become a saint.
And you can never say anything bad about them again.
It basically is society telling you
or your friends and family telling you.
Your pain is less important than preserving the image
of someone who's no longer here.
(gentle music)
- Hey there, grief growers.
And welcome back to the grief grower podcast.
I am so honored to be sitting here with you today.
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 for Sethya, I am a grief coach.
Two time very soon to be three time author
and the founder of life after loss academy.
And for many years, I have had the honor
of helping grieving people stop feeling lost,
stuck, broken and alone,
and start helping them build lives
that they genuinely love from the lives
that lost force them to live.
This includes not only death related losses,
which we're going to be talking about
at great length on the show today,
but also losses like divorce and break up,
major diagnosis and every other big life transition
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 grief
more like an invitation to live more deeply,
we create the most meaningful lives we possibly can
that are rich with the memories that we carry
and the struggles that we faced
and the precious knowledge of what it is to be alive on earth
right here and right now.
And all of the weight and the lightness that that implies.
Before we get into the meat of the episode today,
because this is a really good one I have for you,
I want to get two event announcements out of the way,
as I've mentioned in past episodes of grief grower,
the grief test book fair is coming up.
It is next week on Friday, November 21st.
It is just like your childhood book fair only satir.
So if you've ever attended a scholastic book fair
here in the United States,
I don't know if they're around the world,
but here in the United States, I had them for sure
during elementary and middle school.
It is just like that, but exclusively focused on grief books.
You will be meeting me and more than 40 other grief authors live
at the Lux Hotel in Los Angeles for a one-of-a-kind gathering
that is devoted to grief literacy, grief books,
community, food and connection.
You will enjoy a day of conversations and panels,
one of which I am leading, immersive experiences,
and you will come away with the very best souvenir
of all something called a sad sack,
which is a tote bag full of all the things
that you received that day.
Featured authors besides me include Rachel Cargill,
Rebecca Sofer, who has been here on grief grower,
David Kessler, Hope Edelman, and Jennifer Pasteloff.
You can join us for the VIP brunch from 10 to 11.30
and the book fair takes place from 12 to four.
And when you sign up through the link in my show note,
shelpyforsithia.com/events,
you can use the code griefbf for 15% off tickets
before they sell out to my knowledge.
They are still available, so snag them while you can.
And all ticket proceeds benefit
in an organization called Our House, which is a grief support
center that provides services all across Los Angeles.
The next thing that's coming up is almost immediately after,
about two weeks after in the first week of December,
on December 4th, in Toledo, Ohio, Ohio,
for the very first time ever, I am coming your way
to teach a workshop with an organization
called Good Grief Northwest called Staying Connected
to a loved one who has died.
And this is all about how do I do the holidays
and grief together?
So if you are a parent or a caregiver to children
or a family who has lost a loved one,
and you were like, how do we keep holiday traditions alive?
How do we remember someone we love who has died
through the marimen and the pardon me,
but insanity of the joyful holiday season?
How do we do grief with all of that in tow?
So in a 60 minute interactive workshop,
I am going to teach you how to use the five senses,
which is something kids, teens, folks of all ages can apply
to remember and honor a loved one who has died
through things like music or food or movies or sense and more.
Together in the workshop, we will explore simple
and meaningful ways to weave sense-based traditions
into your holidays and beyond.
These are things you can use for birthdays,
death anniversaries, graduations and more,
and will help you create lasting connections
for your entire family.
You will learn in this workshop how to use your five senses
to call forward positive memories of loved ones,
how to involve kids and teens and other family members
in creating these traditions.
So you're not like using all your precious energy
to spearhead the thing yourself.
What to do when painful sense memories kind of overshadow
the happy ones and what to do when everybody wants
something different from the holiday season.
And once again, you can sign up for this workshop.
Tickets are still available, they're 10 bucks a piece
at shallbeforcithia.com/events.
That event does have a capacity.
So please sign up sooner rather than later
if you're interested in attending,
and I look forward to seeing you there.
Okay.
Today's topic is one I am so lit to talk about
because it is something that I think a lot of
society at large, not necessarily grief professionals,
but society at large would find scandalous or controversial.
And it is the phrase, don't speak ill of the dead,
is bullshit.
And I think we should be talking about why.
This is one of my all time least favorite phrases
that people lob at grievers.
And it has this expectation of once somebody dies,
they become saint, and you can never say anything bad
about them again.
And that is actually really harmful to grieving people
who are trying to process not only what they love
and miss about a person, but maybe things that were hurtful
or they wish had gone differently.
And to be able to speak the whole truth of what happened
is so, so important when you're grieving.
But when somebody dies, our society,
I'm mostly talking about the United States
and other Eurocentric societies like the UK
and so on, other colonized societies,
they encourage us to default to polite euphemisms.
They passed away.
They went to sleep, they're in heaven now,
or glowing tributes, if they were devoted this,
or loving that, or caring whatever,
and carefully filtered memories.
When somebody dies, we are often pressured
to soften sharp edges, to rewrite somebody's entire history
and to strip away complexity and nuance and pain,
frankly, in the name of respect.
I'm doing air quotes for those who are watching
on YouTube around respect.
But for many grieving people, myself included,
especially anyone who is mourning someone who was abusive
or absent or estranged or toxic,
this societal norm can feel like a form of emotional gaslighting.
The phrase, don't speak ill of the dead,
or set another way never speak ill of the dead.
That's more of a declarative, is everywhere.
It gets tossed around at funerals and in family conversations
and even in therapy rooms and grief support circles.
And while it might seem on its face,
like a call for dignity or decorum,
of like rise above, take the high road,
it often serves a darker purpose.
The effect is that it silences people
who are still living, survivors,
it protects abusers and people who have harmed others,
and it erases hurt from the story of your grief,
and pain can be a very real part of the story of your grief.
And finally, it makes mourning and bereavement and grief
harder than they already are because half of it
is being relegated or more than half,
is being relegated to the shadows.
You are being asked to suppress it for dignity, for who?
For who?
And before we get any further on this episode,
I have to say I am not an expert on abuse or trauma.
I am simply a grief coach who works at people
navigating all kinds of loss,
including losses of relationships that were difficult
or damaging or complicated in some way.
What I can speak to and what I'm going to speak to
in this episode is not necessarily the effects
of abuse or trauma, because that is not my area of expertise.
But I can speak to this.
Grief, I know for sure, is not always tidy
or peaceful or rooted in love.
Sometimes grief is all tangled up with rage
or betrayal or trauma or even relief.
We talked about this in the episode
where we talked about grief is not just love
with nowhere to go.
That phrase is so simplistic and is also one
of my least favorites.
And I think that when we make room for the entirety
of grief, all the complexity of grief,
then we get to grieve more fully.
We get to tell the whole truth about it.
We get to heal even more deeply.
Then we would have if we were only allowed one tiny micron
of only the positive or only the good memories
or only the happy things or only when you can say something nice.
So I want to get into where did this phrase
don't speak ill of the dead come from?
And in my research, I found that this quote
dates back to ancient Greece.
And you'll have to forgive my pronunciation here.
I took some Latin in high school.
We'll see how well I do.
The phrase is "Day more to ease, nilnisi, bonum."
And it translates to "of the dead say nothing but good."
And originally this was meant to discourage gossip
after somebody died.
And it was kind of like a last right
of social protection in Greek times.
That's as much as I could find.
But in modern times, this year of our Lord 2025,
this phrase has morphed into something insidious.
It is not about preventing gossip necessarily
or preserving the dignity of the person who died.
It is now often used to silence real,
lived experiences of harm and pain.
So let's transition into why never speak ill of the dead
is hurtful to grieving people.
If you are someone who is harmed by a person who died,
this societal rule don't speak ill of the dead
reinforces a damaging idea.
It basically is society telling you
or your friends and family telling you,
or whoever's mouth that's coming out of telling you.
Your pain is less important than preserving
the image of someone who's no longer here.
And here's how that plays out in real life with real gravers.
One, survivors feel gaslit by people
who insist the dead person, quote, "did their best"
or met well.
Two, a strange family or friends are gilded
into attending funerals and pretending
that they're grieving someone who abused or abandoned them.
Three, mourners and toxic relationships
struggle to process mixed emotions, grief and rage,
loss and relief, because there is no socially acceptable space
to talk about the all of it.
And four, people in communities of faith
or cultural communities with very strict sense of beliefs
are pressured to forgive or minimize
or spiritually bypass their loss
in the name of keeping the peace in the family
or in the culture, or remaining in good standing with God.
But I want to say this very clearly,
grief does not become more sacred by lying about the dead.
It becomes more sacred and more truthful
by honoring the reality of your relationship with that person,
your life with that person,
even when that reality is uncomfortable.
And I have to say too, I think,
I'm using some heavy and weighty language in this episode.
I'm talking about abusers and toxic people
and our assistant and violence.
But even if you're dead person,
even if the person who died was not someone
you would refer to as an abuser or toxic person.
There are things they probably said or did
or didn't say or didn't do that hurt you.
You are allowed to speak those truths out loud
just as much as someone who was forced to endure
years of terror or violence under their influence
or in that relationship.
To give you an example, for instance,
I publicly share a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot
that my mom died without accepting
my identity as a queer person.
Many of our last conversations,
the last two years of her life,
I did not know they were the last two years of her life,
but the last two years of her life were fights
about whether or not I was going to be in heaven
with my family or in hell
because I was bisexual and my mom literally
could not cope with that.
And while I have slowly and painfully
and through a lot of different mediums
found my own path to forgiving my mom
regarding her words and her actions,
talking about her dying with unfinished business,
with things unsaid between us and this sense
that when she died, I was not loved all the way
for all of me has helped me process and cope
with the grief that she died.
And clients and students that I've worked with
inside life after a loss academy share similar stories
about friends or family or loved ones
who said or did hurtful things when they were alive.
And I often say if we live long enough,
it is inevitable that we will be hurt by others
and hurt others whether we intend to or not.
And when it comes to grief, it is really normal.
It's okay to mourn a lack of resolution
or a failure to understand one another
or physical or emotional distance
or simply the sense that some part of them
could not see or hear some part of you.
Telling the truth about the ways in which we were hurt
by someone who died can help us not only grieve
the parts of them that we love and miss,
but also the parts of them that were imperfect
or destructive or simply absent from our lives
or our relationship with them.
This is kind of the fun part of the episode
where I want to get into what sparked the idea
for talking about this.
And these are three real obituaries.
These are not AI generated.
These are real obituaries that were printed in newspapers
that dared to speak ill of the dead.
And these started coming around,
I'd say like 2013 to today,
where people, friends and family of those who have died,
published obituaries about them
that some people called scathing or upsetting or brutal,
because they were honest about the person's life,
they were not kind.
And so I want to read three of these for you to just
share some examples of what it is like
for people who are alive to tell the full truth
to tell their version, their life and reality
with someone in their life they were related to
or friends or family with who died.
And see if this gives you sort of any permission
to be more open or be more transparent
about a loss that you have faced,
especially if it's with a person who was less than kind to you.
The first one I'm gonna read aloud is from Kathleen Demlao
who was born in 1938 and died in 2018.
This was first published in the Redwood Falls Gazette.
And at first Kathleen's obituaries sounded like a standard notice,
but about halfway through the obituary red quote,
she abandoned her children Gina and Jay
who were then raised by her parents.
She passed away on May 31, 2018 and will now face judgment.
She will not be missed by Gina and Jay
and they understand that this world is a better place without her.
This is very simply said, it's like she abandoned her children,
she will now face judgment, she will not be missed
and the world is a better place.
And these four sentences, these statements shocked people
who read this newspaper, but for many survivors of toxic
or estranged parent relationships,
reading this obituary was like, oh, like a breath of fresh air.
Someone finally told the truth about a person
who was less than loving in life.
I will say I found these obituary online,
but it was removed from the newspaper's website
just a week after it was published
because many readers of the paper argued that it quote went too far.
But my hunch is that these readers believed in the myth
of don't speak ill of the dead or another similar phrase of,
if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all,
which is another way of silencing people
who have been harmed and abused.
The second one, this one's a little bit longer
is for Leslie Ray Sharping, who was born in 1942 and died in 2017.
And this was originally published
on the Carns' funeral home website and read.
Leslie Ray, pop by Sharping, was born in Galveston,
on November 20, 1942 and passed away January 30, 2017,
which was 29 years longer than expected
and much longer than he deserved.
At a young age, Leslie quickly became a model example
of bad parenting combined with mental illness
and a complete commitment to drinking drugs,
womanizing and being generally offensive.
Leslie enlisted to serve in the Navy,
but not so much in a brave and patriotic way,
but more as a part of a plea deal
to escape sentencing on criminal charges.
Leslie's hobbies included being abusive to his family,
expediting trips to heaven for the beloved family pets
and fishing, which he was less skilled with
than the previously mentioned.
Leslie's life served no other obvious purpose.
He did not contribute to society or service community
and he possessed no redeeming qualities
besides quick-witted sarcasm,
which was amusing only during his sober days.
With Leslie's passing, he will be missed only
for what he never did, being a loving husband, father,
and good friend.
Leslie's passing proves that evil does in fact die
and hopefully marks the time of healing and safety for all.
This is a brutal one.
This is a recounting of a person's life
who seemed to be kind in no way at all
and the obituary's writer who was Leslie's daughter
explained that she wanted to reclaim truth
and dignity for everyone surviving
the aftermath of his life here on Earth,
even if it meant tarnishing the memory of him.
And she told a CNN affiliate at KTRK in a statement,
quote, "I am happy for those that simply do not understand.
This means you had good parents,
please treasure what you have."
So she's like, very similar to a lot of grieving people
saying things like be grateful you don't understand,
be grateful you do not get this level of pain,
be grateful you did not have a father like this
is her response to people saying,
"That's too harsh, or that's too brutal."
She's like, "Yeah, be grateful you don't know.
I had to live through the brutalness
and the harshness of it to put some words in her mouth."
But yeah, absolutely, I can totally see how this was something
that she felt compelled to write after his death.
The last one I'm gonna read is a person with a very long name,
Linda Lernel-Smith Harvey Column Heart Stull,
who was born in 1951 and died in 2023.
And I read that the reason that all four of her married names
were included was because she was married four times
all two men who were hurtful or hateful to her daughter
who published this obituary of Linda Lernel.
This was first published in the three Rivers Commercial News
and Gail Heckman, who was Linda's estranged daughter,
published this obituary.
Gail knew her to be through her own reality of experience,
a liar on an emotional, physical, and financial level,
and Gail had gone no contact with her mom in 1999.
She found out from a family friend that her mom died in 2023
and she wrote an obituary that included these snippets.
I'm not including the whole thing
'cause it is quite a graphic description of her childhood
and the violence that she endured
at the hands of her mother and her husband's.
But this is something that I feel okay sharing
on this podcast.
As an example of, don't speak ill of the dead,
let's turn that on its head.
Quote, as a mother, Lernel was violent, hateful, and cruel.
She was physically mentally, verbally,
and financially abused.
Gail.
In March of 2023, Gail unexpectedly found out
who her biological father was through a popular online DNA
service.
After years of deception from Lernel regarding who Gail's father
was, Gail and her family are navigating the waters
of getting to another paternal biological family.
This is it.
Lernel will never be the mother and grandmother
that she could have chosen to be with her family.
That door is closed forever with her death.
This is what Gail and her family grieve
who their mother and grandmother could have been.
Lernel will not be missed by Gail or her family.
They all understand the world is a much better place
without her.
And just like Kathleen Demlos obituary,
Linda Lernel-Smith Harvey-Column-Heart
Stulls obituary was removed by the newspaper
after it received complaints from readers
and other family members.
And almost immediately, a non-inflammatory, sanitized
version, just including her birthday and death dates.
And when she was married, replaced this scathing
obituary that was submitted by her daughter.
Jordan Wilcox, who is an assistant publisher
of Wilcox newspapers that originally
published the first obituary, told the Detroit news,
which is to be fair, a conservative libertarian newspaper
as far as I could tell from a Google search,
was sharply criticized for removing the first obituary,
with many people claiming that the papers publishers and editors
were, quote, "abuse apologists."
And I inclined to agree.
I have to say that beyond newspapers and obituary's other media
and recent years have also opened up discussions
about it being OK or normalized or validating
to speak ill of the dead.
I, for example, vividly remember reading Cheryl Straits'
essay called Baby Bird, which is a deer sugar's column
that was published in the Rumpus in 2010,
content warning there for graphic childhood sexual assault.
And there's also a more recent book written
in the past few years that I know some of you
are probably thinking about right now
by the Nickelodeon Child Stargian at McCurdy titled,
"I'm glad my mom died."
Each of these and so, so many more media and resources
has served as cathartic outlets for survivors
of abuse and trauma and violence to see themselves
in the lives of others and to feel permission in their own way,
whether publicly or privately, to speak ill of their own dead.
And the way I see it, these individuals' comments
on the lives of those who've died
were not written to be meaninglessly cruel.
These people are not doing this for no reason.
They were written or broadcast or put into essays
or put into audiobooks because healing often requires honesty,
especially for those who have been denied honesty in life.
And with each new scathing, quote unquote, obituary
or tell all memoir about a person who was less than loving
in life, a doorway to grieving more fully
and more transparently for all of us is opened.
And I want to drill down on this statement
that telling the truth does not make you cruel
because speaking ill of the dead is not about vengeance
for some people it is, but for most people,
it's not about vengeance or revenge.
It is about reclaiming narrative power,
the power of your story when your lived experience
or your voice or your story was denied or diminished.
You are not mean for telling the truth.
You are not disrespectful or a bad child
or a bad family member for naming very real harm.
And you are not a monster for having mixed
or messy feelings about someone who died.
And I have to say that many grieving people that I've spoken with
that have been clients and students
or whose stories I've read online or in books
or listen to on podcasts, they say things like,
I did not begin to truly grieve until I felt permission
to tell the whole story about who this person was to me,
what they did to and with me,
and what the finality of their death means
because that is a whole new plot twist
in the story of your relationship to them.
And some of the most agonizing grief that I have witnessed
has come from people grieving someone they had
a complicated or a painful relationship with.
So these are like little or big,
you could feel them as big, permission slips
that I want you to know if this applies to you right now.
If you are grieving someone who is estranged from you,
who abused you, or you simply had a complicated relationship with.
Number one, you are allowed to feel relieved
and grieving at the same time.
You can be so glad that they're dead
and also heartbroken that things will not ever be different.
That is a closed door for all of the joy
and all of the pain that that implies.
Number two, you do not owe them the dead person,
a pretty deaf or rewritten history of their life.
Now I often joke, I'm like,
if you want to be remembered well, you should have behaved better.
Like, I don't know what else to tell you.
If you want to be remembered fondly,
you should have been a person who it was easy to remember fondly.
Number three, you are not obligated to protect their image
if they did not protect you, your heart, your mind, your body,
or your spirit.
Number four, you get to grieve the parent, partner friend,
sibling, insert relationship here
that you needed in the moment, in your life
and not just the one you were had.
Said another way, you will not only grieve
for the person they were in life,
you will grieve for who they could have been
or who they were supposed to be for you.
I see this so much with parent loss especially
or with loss related to violence or addiction
if they could have been a different person,
they could have made different choices they could or have
or should have been a different influence in my life.
And they weren't.
And that is worth grieving just as much
as the truth of the life that they lived.
And none of these permission slips,
these little four bullet points
are about you being mean again, for the sake of being mean
and not just doing it for no reason.
These permission slips are about allowing you to feel free
to feel the entirety of your grief even the parts
and especially the parts that are less than lovely
or less than pretty according to other people's eyeballs.
They are about expanding your definition of grief
so that there is room for all of you,
everything from if you had any happy memories
all the way to the devastating truths
of what you lived with this person who died.
As we get to the end of this episode,
I wanna tell you here's what to say.
When someone tells you, don't speak ill of the dead.
So when somebody comes up to you
and you're like talking about the experience of your life
and they say never speak ill of the dead,
you can say something like telling the truth
isn't the same as speaking ill.
Or I'm processing my grief the best I can
and that includes the hard parts.
Or I don't think pretending about insert person's name here.
I don't think pretending about their life helps anyone heal.
Or you could say grief is complicated.
I'm allowed to feel more than one thing at once.
Or you can pull a page out of my book
and say if they want it to be remembered with love,
they should have been more loving.
You do not need to defend yourself to other people
who are saying things like don't speak ill of the dead
but you can advocate for your voice
and your story and your healing.
And if things get hard or if somebody
will only accept conversation with you about grief
if it is in a positive light,
you have more than enough of my permission
to put up boundaries or to step away from that relationship
for as long as it serves you,
whether that's a temporary thing or a long-term thing
and we'll do episodes later on how to negotiate friendships
with people in your life who are still alive
who are grieving alongside because no one does grief
in a vacuum.
We also did an episode over the summer in 2025
about friendships in the aftermath of loss
so you can go back and find that one as well.
As we wrap up today, I have to say,
the truth is healing even when it hurts.
You do not honor the dead or do them any service by lying
or by covering up your emotions.
You do not heal by pretending that you are not hurt
or that you have never been hurt.
And you certainly do not make grief easier
when you erase how complex and multi-layered and painful it is.
If the person you lost who died
or the relationship that ended harmed you,
neglected you, abandoned you
or simply was not who you needed them to be,
you are still allowed to grieve them.
You are allowed to be angry,
you are allowed to be disappointed,
you are allowed to ache for or long for
or have a kind of broken nostalgia for
what could have or would have or should have been.
And most of all, you are allowed to be honest
about your lived reality with them was like.
Your story does not stop mattering
just because someone else's story ended.
And perhaps, I think,
the best and most beautiful thing that you can do
to honor an abuser or toxic person who died
should you choose to honor them
is to tell the whole truth about what happened
and see healing from it in whatever ways resonate with you.
Commit to making sure that their legacy of pain
ends with them,
that that is a period that you can gently place
on the end of their sentence.
This not only helps you take care of your heart,
but ensures that when the day comes,
that you will be someone that your family and friends
will speak up with love and admiration and care.
After all that they survived, they were gentle,
they were kind, they were focused on their healing,
they were interested in hearing and seeing others.
That is a legacy, that a legacy of pain can create.
And if you are looking for grief supports,
surrounding a relationship that you would consider
less than loving, I encourage you to join us
inside Life After Lost Academy,
which is my online course and community.
Together we'll help you name exactly what you've lost.
For instance, morning the person who died,
but morning what could have been
what the future was supposed to be,
hope for repair, the ways in which they hurt you,
so on and so forth.
I will help you tease apart emotions like guilt
and regret and disappointment and rage,
and also establish clear but kind boundaries
with people who say bullshit like don't speak ill
of the dead.
You can learn more and join at the link in the show notes,
or by visiting shallbeforcitya.com.
That's all for this episode of "Greve Grower."
Thank you so very 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 style quiz
at shallbeforcitya.com/links.
And if you'd like to get support for your Uniqlox experience,
join us in Life After Lost Academy,
my online course and community.
There I'll walk you through my five step grief framework,
G-R-I-E-F, for rebuilding After Lost,
and you can get live coaching from me every single week
to answer your questions.
Replays of our coaching sessions are always available
if you can't attend life.
It's just $33 a month to join,
or $22 a month if you're marginalized
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and you can cancel at any time.
If this podcast about validating, comforting, educational,
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And be sure to share this show with a friend
because you never know what someone you love is going through.
"Greve Grower" is hosted by me,
shallbeforcitya with theme music by Addy Goldstein.
Until next time, grief growers, I see you.
I am so incredibly 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]