the conventional advice for how you make these decisions just did not work for me.
Intellectually, I understand that yes, you can categorize things as you donate these,
or you keep these, or you put these in trash, but as a grieving person, no.
These were all things my mother had chosen.
These were all things my mother had touched.
They all became incredibly precious to me.
So the only way that I could choose was to curate, to pretend.
Oh, you know, if I were to curate an exhibition about my mother, which 100 objects would I choose to display,
and that just changed everything for me.
[Music]
Hi there, grief growers, and welcome back to grief grower.
I am so honored to be sharing space with you today, as always.
If you have been growing alongside me in my work for a while, welcome back.
And if you are new to me in my work, hello.
My name is Shelby Fersithia, I am a grief coach, two time extraordinarily soon to be three time author,
and the founder of Life After Loss Academy.
I have helped thousands 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.
Here on grief grower, we know that that not only includes death-related losses,
which is what most people think of when they think of grief,
but also divorce and breakup, major diagnosis, and any other life transition that changes the course of your life.
We also believe that grief is not something we get over.
It is something that we grow with and alongside for the rest of our lives,
and that when we stop treating grief like a problem, and start treating grief like an invitation to live more deeply,
we create beautiful lives that are rich with our memories, our struggles,
and the preciousness of what it is to be alive right here and right now.
Today on the show, I am so freaking honored to be joined by Charlene Lamb.
She is a grief coach, curator and speaker, who helps grieving people engage with the stuff of grief.
She helps them curate all the things that hold meaning in their lives, including the belongings, yes,
but also the stories and symbols that connect them to their grief and the people and pets that they've lost.
Charlene is the author of Curating grief.
I'll show it to you here. We'll show it to you a few more times during the interview as well.
One of my favorite books about grief and loss.
A creative guide to choosing what to keep after a loved one dies.
She is also the creator of the grief gallery, which presents exhibitions featuring the belongings of loved ones lost.
Her TEDx talk What grief and soy sauce taught me about life after loss has been viewed more than 2,000 times.
In this episode, we are talking about the three seas of curating belongings or stuff after a loved one dies.
We are also talking about how seeing yourself as a curator of belongings of life after loss can reframe your perspective on grief and give you a little bit more power and autonomy back.
And we are also talking about so, so many of the cherished objects that we have acquired from our own respective losses.
We're both a grief class of 2013 of our mothers and give so many examples of how people have honored their griefs.
In very small and private memorials for them and also big larger and more museum scale gatherings of objects altogether.
Here's my conversation with Charlene.
Charlene, I am so excited to welcome you to grief grower especially here at the turn of the New Year where so many people are reckoning with a New Year has passed.
The contract for the storage unit has renewed itself again. I'm looking at a house full of my loved ones stuff and I just do not know what to do with the literal stuff of grief.
And you are the founder of curating grief, a TED talk speaker, all that jazz I spoke about in your bio and the author of an incredible book by the same name curating grief.
And you literally write about your whole ethos on grief work is what to do with the belongings of grief. And I'm just so excited to have you here because your life as a museum curator and then your experience as a grieving person have formed the perfect crossover for someone to talk about what do we do with the physical objects that grief leaves us with.
So welcome to grief grower. Tell us a little bit about your lost story and then we will get into what to do with the stuff of grief.
I'm so glad that grief has connected us imagining us connecting across the miles worth kilometers, you know, whichever metric you use.
Because I'm here in Lisbon in Portugal, you're in Chicago and that is the upside. We don't really do silver linings. Actually, I do do silver linings.
But one of the silver linings is the way that grief connects us. So thank you so much for having me on so we can talk about this. And as you named there is something about how the lives that we live before our major losses.
They start to resurface. I do believe they kind of come together and weave together and become the fabric of our new lives and how we live moving forward.
So you mentioned my mom, that is where it all started. Yes, I lost my grandmother back when I was five years old, but I didn't understand what was happening at the time.
But losing my mother suddenly in January 2013, that's something we both have in common losing our mom suddenly in 2013.
That's what really launched me into working with grief in my own exploration and figuring out how to grieve, how to get myself through the situation I've never been in before.
My mother was living in New York. She was a very proud New Yorker Chinese American New Yorker like I am. And at the time I was living in London.
She was divorced, living by herself, and I'm an only child. So almost immediately when I got the news that she was gone, I knew I would have to figure out what to do with the house.
What am I going to do with her 3000 square foot dream house that she had just finished renovating.
What am I going to do with all of her belongings in that house?
And I think it's a very common problem that we encounter as grieving people, whether we have to make that serious decisions in a very short period of time or if we have a longer period of time.
But my solution was to curate. And in particular to use this metaphor or lens of curating kind of as an imaginary exercise.
And as a grieving daughter, I was so overwhelmed and as someone who's very, very attached to belongings and physical items.
Shelby, I was so poorly equipped for this task.
So poorly equipped.
So the conventional advice for how you make these decisions just did not work for me.
Intellectually, I understand that yes, you can categorize things as you donate these or you keep these or you put these in trash.
But as a grieving person, no, these were all things my mother had chosen. These were all things my mother had touched. They all became incredibly precious to me.
So the only way that I could choose was to curate to put on my curator hat and to pretend, oh, you know, if I were to curate an exhibition about my mother, which 100 objects would I choose to display.
And that just changed everything for me. Everything felt different. It was still hard, but it was suddenly meaningful exercise.
It was a creative choice. There was expression involved. There was a feeling of connection to my mom because my mom loved museums. She loved art.
So that also felt like a really fitting kind of tribute to her to make those choices in that way.
Yeah. And I love this as an exorcider or as a creative challenge because again, this conventional wisdom of, you know, what do you donate? What do you keep?
What do you put in the garbage? Like that doesn't necessarily work in grief because suddenly the piece of art on the wall that they painted has the same value as a used Kleenex in a purse because they touched it at some point.
They interacted with it at some point. It belonged to them. And sometimes in my online course, life after laws academy, we talk about all you have left is all you have left.
And so there can be this, this hesitate to use the word clinging, but there's like this, I'm trying to recreate them in reality when they're no longer here because they've died and all I have is their stuff.
And so I'm gathering them as close to me as possible by keeping belongings very close. And so there is another grief event in being tasked with going through things and deciding what to release or let go of and what to hold on to.
And in curating grief, I'm going to hold up the cover your book so people can see it. I know you have your own copy.
If you're on YouTube, you can see Charlene and I holding up our books at the same time. You have a framework called the three C's and I love anything that comes in threes and anything that like goes together in a little collection.
So you have the first C is collect. How do I remember the person curate is how do I want to remember the person, which is a different question than the first question.
And then create is how do I want this person to be remembered oftentimes by other people. So can you cover the three C's framework a little more deeper of like what might that look like in practice or what did it look like for you or how has it looked for clients that you've worked with in curating grief.
Yeah. And thank you so much for naming the different layers of loss that come. We of course know the concept of the primary loss, the loss of the person, whatever other major you lost you've had.
And then there are the secondary losses. And there are these feelings of losing them again and again that you've named where, oh, they're already gone and all I have left is her things.
And now I need to let go of those two that was definitely a theme that was in my head. This is all I have left of her.
And I remember finding photo albums that my mother had put together and cousin said, oh, don't put them in the storage unit. You know, send them over to me. I'll keep them.
And I just startled by how fiercely my reaction was no. This is all I have left of my mother. How dare you.
There's like a troll under the bridge thing that happened is like it's mine. There's like a gremlin that comes out of like this belongs to me.
I've just like don't take it from my very not cold dead hands.
Yes, it's like my precious because yes, even that old the Kleenex is precious in that way. And I will go into the three Cs.
But I just wanted to name to an important concept in the Kiernan-Greyf book about how the objects play different roles for us.
Some of what you've named includes some of those. Some of them are like what the research calls linking objects, things that help us to feel connected to our person.
Something else might be evidence. It might play the role of evidence for us. And for some of us, it might be, oh, that mundane object on her shelf.
That bald up Kleenex, the bottle of soy sauce in my mother's kitchen. It was all evidence that she was here.
It was evidence that they were here. And for someone else, that bottle of pills, it's evidence of how they died. It's evidence of their decline.
And for others of us, oh, that's evidence of how she lived. That's evidence of the relationship we had.
So if we're able to look at it through that lens of, oh, it might play all these different roles. No wonder it makes sense that we feel so attached to seemingly ordinary items.
Yeah.
Do you want me to go into the three Cs?
I do. I just love that because it offers this validation that I'm not crazy for clinging or my preciousing objects.
It is because objects cease to be just objects after somebody dies. Oftentimes they're not just objects before somebody dies. There's cherished pythons that you pass down from generation to generation.
There's the fountain pen on their desk. There's like this snake plant that's been alive for 150 years. That's also gone from house to house.
Things mean something before people die. But then they take on sort of ultra meeting after someone dies.
And so you have these examples of some things are evidence, some things are linking, some things are connecting, some things that I don't remember what all the categories are in your book.
But I loved reading about them because I was going through in my head like what was connection and story and what was she was here.
And so many other things and that helps when it comes to yeah, putting the lens of the three Cs over it as well from a curator perspective.
Yeah.
And because I think something that we share and is really important grief support is that permission. It is that validating.
You know, plug for your new book. I love how practical your approach is that it's grief support in the real world and the way that you talk about.
Oh, here are the common things that grievers are wrestling with. And if you're trying to support them.
Here's how you can support them addressing this point, which commonly is am I crazy?
Yeah. Am I the only one?
And in the context of dealing with the belongings and the stuff, we do often start with validating.
You are not crazy because you pride over a jar of pickles.
You are not alone in still having shoes and the clothing and the closet after a year.
You were so not alone. You are not alone in still having a storage unit years after the loss.
And with the three Cs, which I'll go into, I also want to add a caveat that of course my problem was that I had too much stuff.
And that might be your problem too. If that's someone who's listening or watching.
And someone else's problem might be you don't have enough stuff. You don't have the stuff that you want.
And I just want to acknowledge that range of experiences.
And I'll offer that you can still use the lens of curating.
Yes. So the first of the three Cs is collect. And the guiding question is how do you remember the person?
Is the permission to look at all of it in the same way when you're going through your closet.
You might pull out all the clothing. You're not going to do any choosing yet.
You just need to look at what is in here.
And I think in grief, it's so important to start here.
And in the way that I work with people, whether it's one to one or I have a course called sorting the stuff of life and loss.
Without dealing with the physical stuff, we always start at collect.
Because I think people want to rush to thinking like, oh, I need to start choosing.
I need to start taking action. They need to make decisions.
But there's a reason why it's been so difficult to make decisions.
And often I find, oh, either we haven't given ourselves the time or others have not given ourselves that opportunity to really just sit with it.
Look at that full range of emotions, but also look at the full range of the objects that we have.
Some, when we look at them, we feel love, we feel joy, others we look at them, we feel guilt, we feel regret in allowing for all that.
Yeah. Put it all in one place and look at it.
It's truly the first step. Collect it all in one place.
Yes. And behold it.
Yes. And give yourself time to notice what comes up and not judge any of it.
I think often when people might find they're resisting choosing, resisting, letting some items go.
My theory is that maybe we've experienced times where we tried to acknowledge the full range of what we're holding, the full range and what we're carrying, the full range and what we're feeling and someone shut us down.
Someone said, no, you need to move on. You need to clear out the closet. You need to move on with your own life.
And to me, it makes so much sense that we might resist choosing. We might resist moving things out of the closet or into a different space or into a different role in our life.
When we've been denied that time to just be with our grief and to really experience the full range of that.
Yeah. That's why we started.
Get it done. Get it done. Move on to the next thing.
Yeah. There's not a permission to pause. And so I love that that's like step one. It's like gathering pause.
Yes. Gather pause. I acknowledge all of it.
And then step two, the second C is curate. This is where we start to choose. And that guiding question is, how do you want to remember your person?
First question, how do you remember your person? Step two, how do you want to remember your person?
Because in step one, I might be remembering, oh, I forgot my mother's last birthday.
All those times that I didn't call her back. Why didn't I say more?
Why didn't I know that she was sick? How come she didn't tell more of us?
All of that comes up when I think of my mother, as well as she really enjoyed taking care of us.
We had so many good meals together. I'm so glad we went to Hawaii together.
This is whole range that might come up for you. And then we can choose. It's almost like if you were to choose a moment to print out nowadays a picture of your snapshot of your relationship, what would you choose to frame?
Yeah.
Yes, I do have certain regrets or things I wish I'd done differently with my mom. But what I'm going to choose to frame, how I want to remember her, might include a meal at her dream house on the deck that she was so proud of.
And how we went to Creighton Barrel together and picked out her outdoor furniture. And she loved that so much because she was newly divorced. She got to have whatever she wanted in that house.
And that's the moment that I would choose to frame. And that's where we start curating.
And of course, when we're choosing that, it is kind of based on what we ultimately want to create. Right. How we want to remember our person in all the different ways, what kind of continuing bond we want to have with them.
And then the last thing is create. How do I want them to be remembered?
This step, not everyone needs to come here. People can just curate for themselves. If we think of an exhibition in a museum or an art gallery. Right. There are different audiences.
And what I love about curating grief is it doesn't have to be a public exhibition. It doesn't have to be for public consumption.
It's huge. It's huge.
It varies actually. I've been surprised by how many clients have wanted to do something public.
Sure.
And I've had people do it as part of the memorial because they were in a place where they had access to the belongings and the family dynamics were in a state where they could actually come together to do a curation.
And at other times, someone might say, you know what, I'm just going to curate something for chosen family or for the friends who really supported us and knew us.
And that's who I want when it is saying me and my loss.
So audience is also really important.
And when we do that, we are kind of answering the question, how do I want them to be remembered?
Outside of just me, but the larger community, the larger world, what do they want them? What do I want them to know about my person?
Does that make sense?
Memory come to me.
Yes. And I entirely forgot about this until this conversation.
But a few months after my mom died, my sister, I think, and my dad flew up here to Illinois, which is where my mom's family is from.
And I remember my sister packed in her suitcase, all of my mom's necklaces and bracelets and rings and broaches and jewelry that she did not bequeath.
I say bequeathments. My mom did not have a formal will. She had a yellow legal pad in the hospital and wrote, I want Shelby to have these rings.
I want Paige to have this necklace. I want, you know, so she had bequeathments and everyone in our family was not interested in fighting with each other.
So everybody got what she had written down with no no trouble. But I remember there was a lot of jewelry left over after we went through her closet.
And my sister told everyone to leave the living room and then displayed on the couch cushions across the living room like everything that was left of my mom's jewelry and then invited all of our female relatives, aunts, cousins, nieces into the room to take to go one by one and take their pick of everything that was left.
And I would have never considered that like a curation or an exhibit of my mother.
But looking back now and speaking with you, I have this experience of like remembering my mom as for this third step of create.
My mom was someone who loved adorning herself with jewelry. She was very obsessed with like pearls and sparkly things.
And I thought that if jewelry was a gift my sister and I got her on many Christmas or we'd make it for her and then she'd wear it even if it wasn't her style, especially in elementary school.
She was also a person who inherited a lot of like legacy jewelry from her family, things from confirmations or great aunts, whoever and blah blah blah.
And so she was a keeper of a lot of sentimental jewelry.
She was also a person who just like sparkled in her personality. And so I would have never put two and two together that that was a curation or a museum experience for close family because I was thinking about her memorial.
We didn't do anything like that. We didn't display her clothing or like letters that she wrote or other than putting photos in a slideshow.
We didn't really do much as a memorial or a museum exhibition of her life. But I just had I have not thought about that day in more than five or six years.
And that just like poofed right into my brain and that is so cool because that is one facet of the diamond that was my mother to like rotate and like see very specifically in that living room of one of my aunts.
And it happened because my sister thought to bring all of her jewels together in one place.
That's such a beautiful example. And I feel like I saw when it came up for you when it poofed into your head too.
I was like, oh, what has happened? But I think that's such a beautiful example because when I do share that concept of curating grief, whether it's in a talk or in my monthly grief gathering, people realize I have curated.
I've done this before. Yes.
Yes. It's something we naturally do actually.
And you know, backing up a little bit of defining the word curating. I'm not like a classically trained like museum curator. I don't have an MFA.
I haven't studied art history. I was an independent curator in London when my mother died. So I was working more with ceramicists and artists and makers.
But my belief is that we are all curators that we all have this ability to choose with intention and to curate and to decide what goes into a space and what takes up room in physical space, but also mentally and emotionally.
So if you're thinking, oh my gosh, like, do I need to study this or I'm not a creative person?
No, anyone can curate. And I love this example that you've given of this selection of necklaces that your sister made and then displayed and then invited people to engage with and interact with and bring their own meanings and readings into.
That's absolutely a curation.
It was so cool. And I'm going to skip back really quickly to number two, which is how do I want to remember the person. I don't remember what podcast interview this happened and it was way back in 2018, I think.
I do remember the author Caleb Wilde talks about how we are all mosaics of each other.
And you can kind of turn the jewel of a person and see them through different lenses or different facets. And to your point of how do I remember the person step one and then step two, how do I want to remember the person.
You give some phenomenal examples in curating grief, your book of all the different lenses through which you could see your mother. You could see her as a traveler. You could see her as an immigrant. You could see her as a mother. You could see her as a lover of beauty. You could see her as a fresh, devour say.
You could see her through all of these different lenses. And in my perspective, I'm like, I could have curated a mother remembering experience where she did not accept my queerness as a parent right before her death.
And there were objects that I found books about conversion therapy things like that in her room that echoed that reality for me that I could have chosen to keep.
And without recognizing this and I'm sure a lot of grief growers listening to this podcast to have done this have intentionally or unintentionally set things like that down and said, this is not how I want to remember this person.
So that's a reality of my experience. Those aren't objects I want to keep in my midst. And so instead to choose something else like another piece of art I chose, it's on my wall looking at it in my kitchen right now is a three panel comic strip of a cat playing with a spider that my mom made in her early 20s in the two years that she worked in downtown Chicago.
And that's been my dream since I was like 16 years old is to come and live in Chicago. And so I have that in my house to connect me to the version of my mother who for two years there was a cool city girl and thought that was so cool to grow up on a farm in God knows where Illinois to go working downtown and graphic design was like the coolest thing to her.
And I always thought that was so cool. And so that's the piece of her that I have brought into my home. There are other parts I remember and there's other things that I cannot forget.
But in terms of the objects that connect me to her, those are the things I choose to highlight. So whether or not I even know I was doing it at the time. And I think this is true for people listening. You are already collecting curating creating this just puts language or framework to the experience.
Yes, I think it is noticing that we inherently do it. And I think that's why I love coaching so much because coaching is about bringing an awareness. It is noticing what's happening.
But it's also about expanding what we see as a range of possibilities. So right part of the three C's is about seeing what is happening what we're choosing currently.
And we can also look to see, Oh, what are my potential other choices? Doesn't mean that we need to change our mind, but we just see, Oh, we actually do have more choices.
Sometimes it is a straightforward as people thinking it's binary. I have to keep it or I have to throw it away. Those are my only choices. When really it's like, OK, well, there's more than that.
You can keep the object or then throw away the meaning or vice versa. You can throw away the object, but keep the story and the memory.
And I've had examples of all of these different permutations and this whole range of what I keep and what I've let go of.
And I think you so much for sharing your experience and your relationship with your mom. And I've seen them the way that you talk about her, this full range and all these facets of her.
And I see that with my mother too, where most commonly I will talk about the amazing mother and the amazing woman that she was.
There are also aspects of her where you know what, she really didn't know how to care for me in this way that I wanted her to.
She had her own limitations. And when I'm talking about how you want to remember your person, it doesn't mean you're erasing that.
It doesn't mean that you have to deny the pain of the experience that you had of the person. It doesn't mean that you need to edit out the reality of what happened in your relationship.
And sometimes when we're talking about traumatic losses, we don't have to deny how they died. We don't have to deny that there was substance use.
We don't have to pretend that there wasn't mental illness involved. It's like we can decide though what we spot like in that overall narrative.
I think this work can be so powerful, especially in the context when it is messy. I appreciate you so much, Shelley, for naming the range of ways in which our relationships with the people we lost.
Could have potentially been messy, that it's not a hallmark card of, oh, you know, we love them. It was great. They were our best friends and then they died.
And I know you did lose your best friend. Sorry for that.
I'm curating. No, I'm curating her far differently than I am my mother and I think about that a lot.
That's actually great to have folded into conversation because my best friend died with no bad blood between us for lack of better framing or phrasing.
She was my chosen family and there were bits and pieces of us living together across four years and then being friends for a decade that had conflict in them or things, of course, I wish I could have changed.
But ultimately I felt when she died, it was different than my mother and that my love for her was not confused or I wasn't questioning whether or not she loved me, which was true for my mother.
I loved her like when somebody like rings a bell, it was that clear. And so my curation for her is almost only rooted in a very deep, uncomplicated love.
But and I choose to curate my visuals of her through her love of running, her love of tiny cute objects, her love of corgis, her love of bees, her love of flowers.
Like there's like a few different ways, whereas other friends in my circle who were also friends with her have like a ton of tiny corgifigurines in their house or like silicone baking trays that honor her love of being in the kitchen or like shelves and shelves of cookbooks,
she's to honor her and I remember going through her house after she died because closing up her apartment was one of my jobs and doing a very similar thing of her family was sitting on the couch with a little notebook kind of recording what people took, but it was a walkthrough of the house and everybody was having these different objects that meant something to them and displaying their little handful of jewelry or shirts or running metals or things that meant or plates or cups from her kitchen and things that meant something to them for very specific reasons and they were all different.
And it was really cool to again have that accidental museum curation experience with a handful of people I've known for five to 10 years all at once all in one after it.
That sounds like an extraordinary experience that everyone was doing their own mini curation people got to see got to collect you collected everything what was available to be chosen and then the people who were there got to do their mini curation choosing from what was collected.
And that's such a beautiful illustration of how everyone will carry differently. Same person, different viewpoints, maybe you ran with Tammy right.
Yeah, so running as a big thing for you and your memory with her and then someone else maybe cooking baking was their connection. So of course their curation their imaginary exhibition is dominated by those memories and those objects.
And it is this kind of creative permission to remember our people how we want to and the stories that we do want to tell.
I mean, it sounds like you didn't really have much as we say like unfinished business with your best friend.
Versus with other people that you've lost.
And I would say that's the thing for me too right that yes, there were some things I needed to work through after my mother died, but we had much less unfinished business.
Then I would have with other family members if they were to die currently.
Yeah, absolutely. And I want to get into your defining of the word curator from like the original Latin roots just as a reframe because again to your point of I'm not creative.
I don't have a museum degree. I've never been in a museum. Maybe I don't like museums.
Although I'm skeptical of people who are like I don't like museums because I firmly believe there's a museum for everyone.
They're in Chicago alone. There is like the museum of science and industry, the history museum. But there's also like the museum of medieval torture or the museum of surgical instruments.
Like there's a museum of everything in the world.
But people who are like I'm not a curator or they're telling the story of I had been burdened by this stuff. I've been saddled by this task. I am weighed down by these objects.
This should have never been mine to begin with or my loved one left me with all this junk or I'm frozen or petrified to change anything.
I don't feel I have autonomy or power in the situation.
And you define the word curator for us as you define in the book and talk about how seeing ourselves as curators can shift our experience of being gravers.
So curator comes from the Latin curar to care for.
So even when we think of a curator, which is how I usually think of it as a curator as someone who works in a museum or potential in art gallery, but usually think of it as a museum.
The curator would have originally been in charge of caring for the objects in that museum's collection. That would be a big part of their role.
Nowadays, depending on the museum or institution, the curator might be working with the collections team and those and the people who are archivists and people who repair objects.
So we bring it back down to, oh, okay, so there are objects that might be in a collection. There are objects that might be included in exhibitions.
A curator makes those choices, chooses with intention.
What gets kept, what is suitable, what is deserving of taking up that physical space and the resources needed to care for that item.
A curator chooses what goes into a certain exhibition, which items fit the theme of that exhibition or the particular purpose of that exhibition or the narrative if you're telling someone's life, for instance.
So it is, I love that it comes from this basis of to care for because I think as grieving people, when we put on that curator hat, I do think it shifts something for us.
For so many of us, it's this burden. Maybe we feel like we're being punished for being the competent one, for being the responsible one.
Only child one, for being the last one standing.
Yes, the remaining sibling. Right, the only one who's been tasked with it. There's so many family dynamics that might come into it as well as your personal circumstances.
When I share my story of being only child, a lot of my one-to-one clients are also only children because they really, yeah, they relate to, oh my god, I just was overwhelmed with this burden.
And some people were very young. They were in their 20s, like when you lost your mom.
And it was this amazingly overwhelming experience. When you don't even know what you're doing with your life and suddenly you need to sell a house. Right?
And I think there's also this aspect of it's a grim and difficult task.
And it can feel like, okay, I have to go through this hurdle and I have to go through this hurdle and I have to do this legal paperwork.
If you're an executor of an estate that can take over your life for years, there's been research on this about how maybe on average it takes two years for an executor to deal with an estate.
So it's just enormous list of tasks.
And depending on your family dynamics, that can bring up a lot of resentment on your part or from other family members.
Quite a few of my clients are also people who are having conflicts with siblings.
They kind of have the opposite side of my problem, whereas an only child, I didn't feel like I had enough support or the kind of support that was helpful for me.
Other people are dealing with conflicts with siblings or other family members or other stakeholders that have a lot of opinions.
So the same part of my opinion is the phrase that just popped into my brain. I'm laughing, but it's terrible. I do not enjoy being there.
Bumbarded, guilted. Right?
About like, oh, if you give that piano away, you're going to let down your grandmother.
You live in a studio apartment in a big city. What are you going to do with a piano?
I can't do it with a grand piano. Absolutely. So it's like a lot of emotional opinions as well. A lot of kind of loaded recommendations.
So what if we can shift to that? When I offer the lens of curating, I'm saying, yes, there are hard things we need to do.
And as grieving people, are there ways that we can soften a very difficult experience?
Is there a way that we can bring creativity into it that shifts how we see something, how we see the choice itself, how we kind of reclaim our agency.
I didn't get a choice in how my mom died. I didn't get a choice and heard his poof disappearing, having a stroke and then she was gone.
I didn't get a choice in that.
What I did have a choice in was how I remembered her and what I chose to remember her by.
So I like that lens of curating as something that's very practical, but also is poetic.
And I do very much believe that you need both when you're a griever faced with these situations.
We need practical approaches and poetic approaches.
So I like that combo too. The three Cs and the two P's, practical and poetic as you are collecting curating and creating.
I wonder as we get to the end of the interview here, I want to know some of your favorite examples, maybe from clients or in your travels of grief curations that you've seen.
Whether people are doing it like for themselves or for close friends and family or if you've seen it like in a public space somewhere and you're like this is a curation explicitly surrounding objects related to grief.
Yeah. I think they're.
I'll share some that are from clients who have been me permission and then some from the art world.
And there's a very interesting aspect of reclaiming in this work and why again, I love that you talk about the messiness and that we can reclaim the narrative about a person's life or about a period of their life through our curation.
Sometimes it is because of how they died. Sometimes it's because of our relationship with them.
And sometimes it's because of who they were and how other people saw them.
So for instance, I had a client who had lost her grandmother.
This grandmother, even though she played a pivotal role in this person's life when she was growing up, she was also racist, anti-Semitic, and just a very difficult person in a lot of ways.
And my client was Jewish in an interracial relationship with interracial children.
And obviously this is a very personal curation.
She did a curation. I was just for her.
Her quandary was how to I honor who this person was to me.
I had a pivotal time in my life while not causing harm by exposing my immediate family to all these other aspects of who she was.
And in that case, she curated just for herself a shelf in her personal office that was her own space.
And she chose things that represented the connection that she did have with her grandmother in appreciation for art and how strong her grandmother was as an immigrant.
But that curation was just for her.
In that process, she got to honor who this person was to grieve the loss of the person who was supportive of her, to grieve the relationship that they did not have because of her grandmother's views.
And she got to protect the people who are in her life.
So that's a private curation.
And then I often think about, is there anything you want to say about that?
No, I just love that. It's mindful subtraction.
I like that.
Yeah. And as you said earlier, choosing with intention, I think you've said it a few times, but choosing with intention can involve some mindful subtraction and addition if you want.
But yeah. Yeah. And I think museums, there's something about museums. I mean, it's a time of reckoning for museums because it is this challenging time on different levels in the US.
Museums are getting defunded because museums are choosing what is important, what stories do you tell, what history is important.
Museums in the making their choices, it's for a wider audience. It is kind of saying, this is important for us culturally.
These are the objects and the artifacts that tell the stories of who we were and how our country came about and where we are now.
So it's a very crucial role that these cultural institutions play.
There's also a lot of challenging of who gets to make these choices, who decides which stories are told.
And I kind of like to name that because I think we see that on multiple levels.
We see that on a larger societal level. We also see that on a personal level when someone says, you know what, I have plenty of evidence that because my person was an immigrant, because my person was black or brown.
That their lives are not valued in the same way that other lives are.
And in my curation, in my celebration, I'm going to bring out the facets of them.
How smart they were, even though they didn't have a college education.
How brilliant they were, how loving they were.
And there's so much more than just what their paperwork said or their accent or their language, any of those other kinds of markers.
And I don't know.
Off the top of my head.
Oh, yeah, I mean, there's so many interesting museum level curations.
So Sarah Burman's closet.
You can look that up. If you want to Google that.
It's an artist who did a mini curation of her mother's closet. All white clothing that she had said that she had chosen after her divorce, representing this kind of blossoming and like reclaiming of her identity.
But I'm also thinking of basket.
It's a famous American painter and how his sisters put together an exhibition that was in New York and it was in Los Angeles.
And he's a very famous person.
And his story has been told in so many different ways.
But as I kind of named a little bit in my book that usually his story is told with a couple of key points.
Andy Warhol was his mentor. How substance use was a factor in his life and that he died young.
Also that he was a brilliant artist.
But those are the key points that people use when they tell his story.
And there's this curation that his sisters made was about who he was to them as a brother, as a family member. Yes, as a brilliant creative.
But they were reclaiming that narrative.
They were saying he is so much more than how you know him.
He is so much more than just a headlines. He is so much more than how he lived or how he died.
And this is what we want people to know about him. And I just find that so gorgeous.
And you don't have to be famous. You don't have to have access to museums.
You don't even have to have access to their actual belongings.
That's what I always want people to know. You can still curate.
You can buy a bottle of soy sauce to represent the soy sauce that was in their kitchen.
And you can share that color that reminds you of them.
You can eat that piece of cake. That was their favorite cake.
All of these things that we can bring in can help us to curate and to reclaim that narrative.
So yeah, I mean, I could talk about this forever.
I know. And I have to I just recently remembered I love those examples you shared of like the very private to the very public.
This is a challenge I will issue to you is where have you seen an example of grief curation somewhere in your life,
whether it's been formally at a museum or some sort of institution.
I'm thinking like again here in Illinois, there's like Abraham Lincoln's house.
Like you can go to his house and like or Monae's garden in France. Like he is a dead guy.
But you can go see how they've curated it and his absence here on earth.
But I was also thinking just on TikTok in the last three weeks, someone sent me a woman who made a
one thirty second scale replica of her grandmother's quilt that was in her house.
Her grandmother recently died. And I don't know if she has the quilt or if another family member like took the quilt after her death or they're donating the quilt as something's happening with the large quilt.
So she no longer has access to it.
But so she took like a little piece of foam and mounted it on like a tiny board.
And then each square and the quilt was very different. It was not like a mathematically perfect, there's six of these colors and six of that color.
It was not a perfect quilt. It was a patchwork quilt in every sense of the name.
And so she created a one thirty second scale replica of her grandmother's quilt that sits on her desk.
And it looks like a deck of cards, but it's the same pattern as her grandmother's quilt that's made from fabric and foam and a little wood backing.
And I thought that was just the coolest miniature tribute to an object that meant so much to her as a kid.
And a way that she like curated. I love this quilt. I love my grandmother here. So what I want to remember of her.
But like grief, of course, this is on social media. Like this is on TikTok.
And there's been these very cool videos of like the bottom of my makeup drawer has all of my sisters unused lipsticks.
Like the last lipsticks that were in her purse are just in a special part of my makeup drawer or just like these tiny everyday examples of where objects of grief live in our lives.
One example I'll give I won't get it out because it's in a drawer behind me.
But my mom were the same scrunchy every morning to wash her face before she put her makeup on.
And it's like this 90s. It's stretched out. The elastic is toast. It does not work or function as a scrunchy anymore.
But it's like this 90 rainbow love seat pattern like it's ugly. It does not cutes crunchy.
But it always reminds me of her. And I remember seeing her hair tied in it. She had a little like leopard headband that she puts push her bangs back.
And she'd wash her face in the morning before she put all her makeup on. And it's the last thing I have that still smells like her.
And I have it like in a little box behind my desk all the time. And once you're twice a year, I'll just go revisit the scrunchy.
But it's like one of these tiny objects that like if someone just opened my house and came to this desk and didn't know the story,
they're like, why does she have this random scrunchy in a box? So it wouldn't mean anything to anybody else.
But it's something that means so much to me. And it's like a tiny object of grief that I've just taken with me in every place that I've lived.
And so the invitation I have for people listening to this is there are literally millions of ways the stuff of grief can come with you.
Whether you actually keep objects that were left by a person or you recreate them or you buy them again or you take a picture of them and display them somewhere or you write stories about them.
So they're all in a journal somewhere like I'm sure, surely you agree there's really no way to do it wrong. And then millions of ways to do it right.
Yeah. Yes. It's the choosing that's important. It's the choosing with intention that's important.
Because I'm not saying turn your place into a museum. I'm not saying to keep everything right. We are choosing we are choosing with intention.
And I love the examples that you've provided because yes, you can recreate something. She chose what was important.
But it's not like she had to source the original quilt necessarily and to have the original quilt in her space. She could recreate it in a certain form.
And I love the scrunchy example because it's such a vivid picture that you've painted for us.
And it's so particular to your mom and so particular of a certain time. Yes, you chose and that. It's very I'm like scrunchy. Yes. I mean, they're coming back, I guess.
But you chose that for your collection. This isn't your collection now. You made a choice. You didn't keep all of our hair implements. You kept this particular scrunchy.
And that was you choosing with intention that was you curating and it's such a beautiful example.
Thank you. Yeah. As we wrap up, I would love to know, Charlene, how can people work with you if they are sorting through the stuff of grief?
But where can they find your book called curating grief? I'll hold it up one more time for those watching on YouTube.
How can people engage with your work? Because I know especially again, after the turn of a new year, kind of dealing with the stuff is on a lot of people's minds.
This for you and refreshing cleanse and grief grows if this is not the time of year where you want to be going through stuff. That's a okay.
But I have so many people coming to me being like, it's the turn of a new year. And I feel such a pressure to clean house literally and metaphorically.
And often one of those tasks is managing the belongings of grief after someone dies.
So yeah, tell us how people can work with you. Yeah. It can be a seasonal thing or can be doing the math and saying, I have spent how much on storage units.
Let this be the year where I reclaimed that money.
Yes. So you can go to curating grief.com for access to all of this.
You can find out more about my book, which is Curating grief, a creative guide to choosing what to keep after loved one dies.
I have a course, an interactive course called sorting the stuff of life and loss. And that's offered in partnership with what's your grief, which is an amazing grief platform.
I do work one to one with people, whether it's because you are in a time crunch and you need to sell a house and you need emotional and practical support.
Or it's been 10 years in your feeling like, oh, okay, I think it's time to look through the boxes, whether it's to create more space in my physical space.
Or it's to sort through the emotional stuff that I now feel ready to sort through to create more emotional and mental space for myself.
And you can find all of that at curating grief.com.
Beautiful. Thank you so much, Charlene, for coming on grief. Grower today. I know this is going to be helpful right now, but also for so many people who get to listen to it in the future.
Thank you so much for the work that you do.
Thank you, Shelby, and for yours too, and for all your beautiful sharing.
That's all for this episode of Grief Grower. Thank you so very much for joining me and Shirley and 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 shallbeforcithia.com/links.
And if you'd like to get support for me for your unique loss experience, you can always join us in Life After Loss Academy, which is my online course and community.
As a student, I'll walk you through my five step grief framework, GRREF, for rebuilding life after loss, and you can get live coaching for me every single week to answer your questions as you move throughout the coursework.
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 marginalized or financially stressed griver.
And you can cancel at any time.
If this podcast helped you decide what to do with the stuff of grief, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and be sure to share Grief Grower with a friend, because you never know what someone you love is sorting through.
Grief Grower is hosted by yours. Truly, Shelby, for Cythia with music by our own Annie Goldstein.
Until next time, Grief Grower, I see you. I am so very proud of you and the work that you're doing in the world, and I love you.
Because even through Grief, we are growing.
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