Life After Loss: Navigating Grief and Learning to Live Again

Midlife Loss And Why It Grows

How are you? Yeah, you've got me. How are you?

Aging gracefully, how are you?

Oh, aging gracefully. That's good news. How does that feel?

Um well I've had years to get used to it, so uh it feels pretty good.

Good, good. I'm looking forward to our conversation. I've already hit record, so you know we can we can flow into it.

Okay.

You know, sometimes the the good bits are the bits that you start with and then you hit record, so um yeah, so I haven't um I'm I'm basically I feel like I'm in your hands because I haven't spoke I haven't spoken to any other guests about this particular topic of grief. But it's interesting because um, well, obviously I'm talking about all the things that happen in midlife, and midlife seems like quite a big passage of time. Now I'm coming to realise. It sort of starts in your 40s and it just keeps on giving. So, you know, there's there's certain things that happen that get, you know, in your 40s to 50s and then 50s to 60s, and then, you know, I've talked to two um guests about retirement and caregiving. And obviously, another thing that is um prevalent at this time of life is the loss of loved ones. Um I think parents um predominantly, but no doubt other, you know, we lose other people in our lives, friends. Um and so that's what we're talking about today.

Yeah, and it um it keeps on happening and it it accelerates a little bit the older you get.

Yes, yes. Well, it's certainly, you know, I talk to my dad once a week, and uh there's often a a loss of a friend that's become sort of more of a regular part of the conversation.

Yeah, it's well I know quite a few elders, and uh we spend a lot of time talking about illnesses. Um the health report is a big part of conversation.

Yes, yes.

And and people do die regularly. I um I had uh 30 aunts and uncles, I think. Uh they're all gone.

Wow, yeah, that's a lot of grieving.

Yeah.

Were you close to all of those relatives?

I'd say half of them were pretty regular parts of my life, um, at least when I was growing up. And then you kind of move away from the family center of things and people get spread out. So I still have a couple of cousins that I connect with regularly, but there were I think between the two families there were over 30 of them. Uh, and I've got contact with about three or four now. So uh just getting old is uh uh that's what happens.

It's part of the process, isn't it?

Yes, it is. It's an uncomfortable part. You don't forget them, and you're different for having known them. Uh and um uh the folks who are gonna survive you are different for having known you.

Yeah.

Uh it's all part of the soup.

It's a difficult, it is a

Meeting A Philosopher Of Grief

difficult part of the life process, isn't it? And I'm sure you can talk to this because you've had your own experiences and this is the work that you do. Um what would you? I know that you're a philosopher. What would you say your title is?

My my title.

Like um, oh well, I've got this written down Revolutionary Voice in Grief Studies.

Well, that sounds pretty good.

That sounds pretty cool.

Yeah, I'm well I'm a philosopher by training, um, but there haven't been many of us who have spent our entire careers focused primarily on death, dying, grief, and loss. Um so uh yeah, I think uh I'm I'm empathetic, caring, um, curious, um philosopher seeking wisdom as opposed to pretending to have it.

Right.

And there's nothing wrong with seeking it. Uh and I I sure wish there were more people who were doing that, especially people in charge of things that they likely uh are not entitled to be in charge of. Right. Um and so on. Um yeah, I'm I'm a philosopher. Uh that's I'm comfortable with that. I think everybody uh to some extent is a philosopher. Everybody has things that puzzle them enough so they're really curious uh about how to think it through and maybe learn something that will be helpful in engaging with things that we never really fully control. Uh and that's I I guess I'm seeking wisdom about what we can't control. Okay.

That's kind of an interesting paradox, isn't it?

Yeah.

Um how

How Death Shaped His Path

did you come to bring philosophy and grief together? Like what happened? Obviously, you've you've already shared that you you've lost many people in your life. So was there a point where you went, ah you were witnessing it in yourself?

Or I'll try to be as succinct as I can be, but it's it's really kind of a life history. Okay. Um when I was growing up, I was a member of two large families. My dad was one of 10, my mother was one of nine. Uh, and all of them, except for one on each side, married and had kids. Um, my dad was 18 years older than my mother. So when I was a little guy growing up, um my dad's side of the family started dying. He was 50 when I was born. Uh so uh he had elders in his family, and uh a letter would come uh to the house, and it would be about someone having died. Uh, and at that time it was not comfortable for people to drive long distances to funerals. So the letters would typically be fairly long-winded uh and detailed about how someone had had a tough time on their way to dying, had an illness or an injury or whatever. Uh and my mother would just read the letter out loud to my brother and my father and me, uh, and that was normal. It turned out that uh most families didn't do that. Uh and uh so I became acquainted with things uh that other people didn't become acquainted with. Uh, by the time I was a teenager, uh people started talking to me a bit about difficult things that had happened in their lives that were much more unusual for them than they were for me. Uh, and I got comfortable with that. I had no ambition to become a philosopher for one, or someone who did death and dying, uh, grief and loss for two, but I became accustomed to those things. I wanted to be a math teacher. I always wanted to be a teacher, nothing else would do. Uh, and I was very good at math. So as I went off to college, I thought that that was gonna be it. And then I had this dawning that if if you teach people math and they have no interest in trigonometry, what's what are the classrooms going to be like? And do I want to do that for the rest of my life? And my older brother had become a history teacher, and I thought the humanities were probably more interesting to teach because you could have interesting conversations. So I tried out some of the humanities and I landed on philosophy, and I went to graduate school in philosophy, and I was planning to teach phenomenology and existentialism. Phenomenology is what philosophers do when they try to describe and interpret the broad range of human experiences, and existentialism is what philosophers do when they inquire about how to lead a finite life with meaning and integrity. Uh I thought, well, I can teach this, uh, and I went off to teach that. Started doing it at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, uh, and was there for a couple of years, and they founded a new College of Health and Human Services on campus. Uh, and I thought, given what students had expressed interest in in my classes, uh, that there were several topics having to do with death and dying that you could put together into a course. Uh, it kind of fits with phenomenology and existentialism, but it just hadn't occurred to me. Anyway, I got permission to teach the course. Uh, I found it uh to be quite satisfying. Uh on my way uh through graduate school, this is a pivotal happening. Um my father died. Uh he was in his early 70s, and I was coming back from his funeral driving, and I thought to myself, I'd like to um get an appointment with one of my philosophy teachers and just talk about the meaning of such things, what it's like to face up to this kind of a loss in your life. And I realized that I wasn't happy about the idea of going into any of my professor's office for those purposes. So several I didn't know. Uh, the ones that I did know seemed pretty formal and a little bit stiff. And I just said to myself, uh, I want to be the kind of philosopher where people want to come into my office and talk about this kind of thing. I didn't feel desperate. I didn't feel like I was going to fall apart. I just wanted to have a sensible talk uh with someone who could speak seriously about that. And I thought if if the occasion ever arises, uh, I want to be the kind of person who's ready for it. Um that was the setup that got me into death and dying. Um I thought um ethical issues having to do with death and dying are issues that people who are in nursing or social work or gerontology are gonna be dealing with very often. My students are gonna be afraid to go into a room where someone's dying, or they're gonna not know what to say when they're dealing with the family where someone is dying. They haven't had enough experiences, or if they have, they haven't thought about them very carefully. So I'm gonna invite them to think about their own experiences often in the course. One of the exercises I put together asked them to talk about what they thought of as their three most important loss experiences. So they they wrote short essays on three losses, and they wrote hundreds of them in the first couple of years I was teaching. And I learned about how they were experiencing loss, and amazingly, although Kubler Ross has had written a book about death and dying and five stages of dying, um nobody talked about five stages or even one stage of what they were going through. They talked about something completely different. And uh I started feeding back to them what they were telling me. They were telling me things like um they were wondering about what do we do now that dad's not around and we're not gonna have enough money. Or how am I gonna talk to my grandmother now? I love talking with her, but she just lost her son, and I lost my dad. I don't know how to have this conversation. Um, are we gonna have to leave the house because we don't have enough money? Um, do I want to continue going to church where they're saying things that don't seem to jibe with the kind of experience that I'm having? Um and they were all over the map. I remember one young man who was in his early 20s, maybe a sophomore junior in college, and he told us about how um he went into the living room at home one day and found his dad with a gun in his hand contemplating suicide. And uh he found himself, his experience was wrestling the gun out of his father's uh hands and saving his life. The variety is endless, and I fed back to them in beginning ways. You know, you're not talking about suffering in any kind of rational sequence or five stages or anything like that. You're telling me that there's a major change in your life, and you don't know how you're gonna live with that. And it seems to me that grieving from the hundreds of people who've now been talking to me, um, is not about anything like going through stages or anything regular in a sequence. It's about learning how to live in a world that's changed in a major way. And they all went, yeah, you're the first person who seems to understand what we're talking about. So I started writing about relearning the world and how to live in it, uh,

Why Grief Is Relearning Life

as the central focus of what grieving is. And it turned out I made a career out of that. That's how it happened.

That's how it happened. It's I find it really interesting. Like uh my my parents are in their 70s, early 70s. And I I just recognize uh when we talk about death, you know, parents are sort of uh it's all very practical. You know, I'm gonna leave you this in my will, these are the things I'm gonna do if I get unwell. And it's it it all seems very matter of fact. But uh then in contrast when we're actually faced with that moment when we do lose a loved one. It's so uh I would expect I haven't had a a a you know a very close well, I've lost grandparents, but you know, I'm kind of um yeah, that it's such an extreme uh difference. Plus, there's probably is a whole bunch of stuff going on. There are the practicalities when you lose someone, like you said, of uh not knowing whether you're going to be able to afford to stay in the house, but there's also all of this emotional stuff going on. But it's yeah, we just don't talk about it. How do you break the ice with that kind of taboo subject?

I'll I'll try to answer that in just a minute. I I think what people inclined to think is that it's just um a painful event or um a time of emotional upset and so on. And I think one of the things that surprises people is how all-encompassing it is. Your whole self um is up in the air. Um there are physical challenges, there are emotional challenges, there are relational challenges, there are economic challenges, there are um think of an aspect of spiritual challenges. Um there are challenges in family relationships, in work relationships, in relationships to work. Um your whole life is in a jumble all at once. And I think um I have a title for one of my little books. It's called Catching Your Breath and Grief. And a frequent description of what happens is that people say I couldn't catch my breath. It took my breath away. Uh, it's overwhelming. It's it's so much bigger than I ever thought it was going to be. I mean, people talk about it fairly casually, but I feel overwhelmed. I feel um I haven't got enough energy for this. Uh I don't have enough insight for this, I don't have enough um compassion and understanding for this. It's just um one of the biggest blows you can suffer uh in life, and you haven't given it a hell of a lot of thought going into it. And then, my God, I mean, how are we gonna have dinner anymore? I mean, she made it. What what are we gonna do? Um anyway, um, how to how to get past the uh the kind of quiet of it. Um I think just encouraging people to talk to one another um or saying some simple things which are truth that people are reluctant to say, like, I really don't know what to say to you. I just know that you're hurting. Uh and if just being with me helps, fine. And if you want to tell me some

Breaking The Silence Around Loss

things, I'm willing to listen to whatever you have to tell me. Um, can open a lot of doors, and um people will test that and see if you're really ready to be a good listener or not. But listening is very valuable, and it simply affirms to people that um you've lost someone who is a major figure in your life, you haven't lost everyone, and this brother or sister or best friend or advisor or school pal um is ready to talk about anything, or if you just need somebody to be with you quietly, they said they're willing to do that too. Um and I think people can serve people better if they stop searching for just the right thing to say, and when they don't know what to say, saying, I don't know what to say, uh, but I know you're hurting and uh I'm here for you. I think that takes you a long way. It has to be true.

Yes. Yes. So you teach this in a university? You're teaching philosophies on grief?

My uh university days are long far behind me, my year. Um I I retired 32 years ago.

Did you now?

Oh yeah.

Okay.

Well, I'm retired from university teaching and I did some online teaching for about a dozen years after I officially retired. Uh I retired for good reason. My um second wife was waiting for me to come to uh uh a new country, Canada. Okay. Uh to live with her. I th I thought I'd do that. And teaching 2,000 miles away wasn't gonna work.

Wasn't gonna work long term, no. Um so what have you been writing? So for the last 30 years, you've spent the time as an author um sharing those those um ideas and the philosophy. Of what do you call it? The philosophy of grief. Okay. So you I was just curious, is it like whether this can be learned? Or is it about is it learning about ourselves more? Is it having a spiritual practice?

Is it like what I think uh it is involved? We learn about what it is to be a human being.

Right.

We learn about

Problems Versus Life Mysteries

um solving problems. I think one of the things that people underappreciate is the variety of challenges in living a human life. And I think especially in the United States, people are expert. They become expert as problem solvers, uh, which are little challenges that can be solved, resolved, moved beyond, overcome, um, manipulated, controlled, uh, and so on. And we're very good at that. We're very good as a nation, U.S. citizens and their schooling and so on trains them very well in problem solving and managing everyday problematic challenges uh in life. And I think that one of the uh under-described differences uh and challenges for people who are grieving is that they're dealing with a different kind of challenge. Um, problems can be solved, you can make a list of them and tick them off as you finish with them one at a time, and sometimes in a cluster, and so on. But there are constants in life that I call mysteries that challenge us in a different way. Um, problems challenge us to find ways of changing the world around us or changing our everyday behaviors. Umsteries challenge us to change ourselves. Uh, and our freedom is a mystery, uh, our mortality is a mystery, um, suffering is a mystery, love is a mystery. Um and I think we're under-trained in contending with the kind of challenge inherent in a mystery uh and at a loss as to how to change ourselves. We're not used to changing ourselves very much. We're used to changing the world around us. But when someone dies, the challenge is not something that you solve or finish with. Um you will always miss the person who died. You will, if it's a good relationship, you will always love the person who died. But how do you love in separation? Uh and thinking about that and wondering about it with others together and working out ways of changing your life. So in part, it reflects your continuing love for your mother or for your grandfather or for your best friend. Uh, and it involves you carrying the pain of missing them that will never go away, it will likely diminish. But uh if you ask grieving people, are you ever gonna stop missing your grandma? No. Are you ever gonna stop loving her? No. Um, that's a different situation then. Are you gonna continue living in this house that isn't serving you well? Yes. Are you gonna miss it? Well, maybe, but maybe not. That's a problem you can solve. But how are you gonna live with still loving grandma, but you don't get to look her in the eye anymore? Um I'll I'll just give you a couple of um questions for you and your audience to think about.

Okay, great.

You and I have gotten together today to talk to one another via Zoom.

Yep.

Um

Loving In Separation After Death

this is being recorded, so at some point, at least in one instance and then later, maybe in different ways, but when it's first broadcast, the first time it goes out on the air, about 20 or 25 percent of your audience is going to be gathered together at the same time thinking about here we are talking about grief and loss. So let's imagine that they're with you in your studio right now, and I'm speaking to you and your audience.

Okay.

Um and the the issues are loving and separation, uh, and so on. And my contention is most of the time we're in separation from the people that we love, including right now. Your loved ones are not in the studio with you, and mine aren't here. All right. Did you stop loving them when you came into the studio? No. No. Do you think they stopped when you came into the studio, stop loving you?

No.

No. I didn't have that kind of feeling either. You know what we do? Most of the time, even in the most important relationships that we have, we're apart from the people that we love. I think a good thing to think about then is how do we love them when we're apart? Well, we could sit here and talk for a while or have a conversation with your audience. People would say, Well, I've been sitting here and the way things are going, I've been thinking about uh my mother, although she's not here today. Um well, that's a way of loving her, isn't it? Think about it when she's not with you. Yeah. Do you suppose maybe she might be thinking of you while you're here and uh uh you're not with her? Yeah, well, we think about one another, we remember one another, we talk about one another, we smile, we cry when we're apart, as we think about one another, or we think about experiences that we've been having or challenges that we've been meeting together, and so on. We're really good at loving people when we're physically apart. That's what we do most of the time with the people we love. Well, most of that can be done also after they've died. But if you decide you don't want to talk about her because it's too painful, then you're stopping one of the avenues that would uh be open to your continuing to express or feel touched by um their loving. Um and I think a lot of what grieving people do is they avoid talking about the people who died. Um they are shy about remembering, they don't want to disturb anybody else if they bring up the topic or tell a story, uh, and they start putting a barrier between them and the person who's died rather than opening up the way we do when we remember them and care about them when they're alive. So a simple suggestion is don't stop talking about them, don't stop thinking about them, don't stop remembering them, uh, don't stop appreciating them, don't stop a lot of other things. And you can do that your whole life. You just can't see them in person.

Yeah.

And that can be that will be painful, and that'll be missing them. Uh all the stuff that absolutely requires that they be physically present with you, you can't have that anymore. But you can have everything else. Uh and I think the most hopeful and healthy um prospect in grieving is finding your way to move from loving while they're physically present in your life to continuing to love them wholeheartedly after they've died. And the opportunities are almost endless. Uh some things can make it very difficult, especially if the death is an ugly one. Uh, and uh the experience of the death itself is heartbreaking, uh, if not horrific, and traumatizing, uh, and so on. In some cases, there people need help in working past the trauma uh to getting back to what they still hold uh that allows them to continue to love the person who's died. There you go. Is that is that a little bit for you today?

Definitely, definitely. I was just thinking about that the that idea um that you shared about, you know, we don't stop loving the the people in our lives just because they're not with us. And like in fact, when they pass away, that feeling they're not with us uh

Distance Guilt And Staying Connected

in the room. But I feel like I think that one of the things I've heard, and it could potentially happen to me because I moved from the UK to Australia 30 years ago. So I'm very far away from my family. So the idea of or the feeling of guilt or you know, I should have spent more time with them, been with them more often. Um, you know, if something bad happens, I should have seen that hap that coming. Like there's there are all those sorts of things that I expect could potentially surface.

Well, they could surface, and you know, if you feel guilty about having left, um go back. No, no, I mean you can tell them and say, look, uh, we are really missing uh opportunities here because of the choice that I made. And then I'm not happy about that any more than you likely are. Uh, but I let's try to make up for it in other ways uh rather than bemoaning or being apart. Um figure out how to get together a little bit more, even though it's thousands of miles, uh, or zooming. I can see your face, you can see mine.

Yeah.

Uh, and so on. That's a heck of a lot better than an email. Yes. And you can hear voices, you can you can see smiles, you can hear the laughter, um, you can maybe witness tears and try to comfort from the distance, uh, and so on, rather than well, this distance has uh taken us apart forever. My my son um moved 17 years ago and happens to be living in in Brisbane.

Oh, there you go.

With his family. Uh he's he's married, he's got two uh children, grandchildren for me, six and two. Uh and we just talked on the phone yesterday. Uh it happened to be my wife's birthday, so he was calling and we had a good little uh talk, and we kind of vowed that we would do that a bit more because it it feels kind of thin, but you can only control so much. I imagine you have gone back uh once or twice. Yeah. We've connected in Australia. I don't know how how we've done it. We live in Canada um at least eight or ten times. Uh yeah, and um it's second best, but it's pretty darn good. And uh and when we do manage to connect uh via Zoom or on the phone, uh it's wonderful, especially watching the little guys growing. I've I've got a uh a six-year-old uh grandson who was up to my ribs uh at age six. Wow. And I'm I'm six foot three, uh, so he's gonna be a big guy.

Yeah, well, he's in the genes, it's in the genes.

Um I think um sort of what else to say about um the grief and loss. Um I think the idea of problems versus mysteries is pretty good. I think the idea of grieving as a process of relearning how to live. Uh that's probably uh sort of second in line for among the best thoughts I've had. I've also had, I think, a more grown-up idea of what a what it is to be a person.

We Are Webs Of Connection

Uh I think, especially in the US, which is where I came from, uh we inclined to think of ourselves as self-contained. Everything about us is within our skin, uh, and we're floating in social space over here, and our partner is over here, and our kids are two more little atoms floating about, and so on. And this is completely anti-what a self is like. Uh, if we were like this, what would bereavement be like?

Yeah.

We're still exactly the same.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

This this other being has just disappeared. Yeah, we're not like that. We're much more like um webs of engagement with people and things and places and activities and projects uh and so on. And when we're born, we are welcomed into a giant web of everything connected to everything else. Uh, and there are lifelines that feed us and clothe us and house us and water us and clean us up and put us to bed and wake us in the morning uh and so on. And we're fed by lifelines from everywhere, um, from the sky, from the ground, from the water, from the uh workers, uh, from the teachers, from the uh people who run our corner of society, from the people who manufacture what we use, the people who raise what we eat and draw what we eat from the sea, uh and so on. And it's as if we are a web of connections connected in our corner of the world. Uh, and when someone we love dies, um that part of the web is a whole tattering. It's it's tattered. And there are there are still connections we have with him, but there are connections in memory, there are connections in influence, and so on. And I think uh a grieving person uh is still carrying within him or her um what that person who has died has poured into us. And we pour love into one another as we're growing up together in families, and we pour memories into one another, we pour influences into one another, and so on. And I think a good part of what happens in grieving is we find ways of continuing to be moved by, nourished by, influenced by those lines of connection. Um, when they've died, they've stopped pouring anything new into you, but everything in their love that they poured into you before they died is still in there.

Yeah.

You're different for knowing them in all kinds of ways, and we can help people to remember those things and connect with them and take inspiration from them, still uh be moved by them, uh, be grateful for them, uh, and so on. And you can have a pretty still pretty webby pattern of connection with the person who's died through the remaining years of your life. And I think a good part of counseling and helping and supporting people who are grieving is helping them to recognize what they still have of you've got your mother's face, uh, you've got your dad's laugh, you've got your brother's way of teasing me, uh, and so on. And we can appreciate those things in others of the person who's died and let them know that you know you're still so much like your sister. Uh you're still so much the anti-brother you always had, or you always were. And your brother can appreciate it uh after after you've died. Does this make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. I was just um I'm wondering about uh you you just mentioned grief counseling and whether the work that you do, are you in connection with grief counselors? Is are their well their

Grief Counselling And Key Books

processes probably vary.

Um I can tell you that there is an organization called the uh Association for Death Education and Counseling in North America. Uh, and they have had something like 1,500 to 2,000 members for the last 50 years. Uh I've been president of that organization.

So you've got some influence there.

Yeah, there's a thing called the International Work Group on Death, Dying, and Bereavement, which is international invitation only. I've been a member of that organization for 40 years. I used to go to annual conferences in Montreal for care of the dying. Um, I've written three books for Oxford University Press about grief and loss. And uh a good um academic book will sell oh four to six hundred copies, and the publisher will be happy having done that. Um, my first book called How We Grieve sold um 14,000 copies. Um and the people who read it are counselors and teachers, okay, and there's and their students. Uh, and a second one was called The Heart of Grief, Death and the Search for Lasting Love, and that one sold about 10,000. And there's the one that's brought us together today called Seeking Wisdom in Death's Shadows, and this came out just last December. Uh again, this is from Oxford, the editor of Death Studies, who edits all the stuff that gets written in this area. Um, I had to pay him heavily. Uh well. He calls it a masterpiece.

Oh, that's pretty good.

You know, and um it it basically captures my history of writing about this starting in the 1980s, uh, and uh teaching starting in the 70s, and uh it's got the best of the obscure essays that uh didn't make it into a book, uh, but made it into journals that no one ever finds and reads. Uh, and so I took the best of it, collected it, and added about nine or ten new things. And it's sort of like an intellectual autobiography of me, but it's my best thinking about things like mysteries and uh relearning how to live in the world uh and the like. And oh, I don't we didn't talk about this ahead of time, so surprise for you, maybe not. Um, Oxford University Press is selling this. If you go to Oxford University Press online and look for this title, um there is a promotion code that can be used to save your viewers 30% on the book. And I hope people will do that. You might want to do it too.

Would you um would you say that the contents of that book, like you mentioned that the other books were sort of uh academic? Would you say that this is um this book is uh accessible to uh someone like me who might be interested in uh understanding more about the grief process and how I might absolutely experience?

I'll tell you I'll tell you a personal experience. When I was writing my dissertation, I was writing in the context. Where the professors on the other end, with the exception of my advisor, were all in a different philosophical position. And if I didn't write away from technical existentialism and phenomenology, I would not be understood by the people who were examining me. So I had the good fortune in my graduate experience of being forced to speak absolutely plain English. And I think you've been hearing plain English so far today. That's the way I write. So academics are happy with what I write, but all these grief counselors and therapists who don't read philosophy normally have found good things in what I've had to say. So I think it's accessible. Some of it is of a special interest for professionals with uh special interests of their own. Um, but that doesn't come across as the only reason this thing was ever written. Um, because I'm interested in reaching everybody. I will tell you about another book that I published myself. Okay. And this is a heart-to-heart book for grieving persons.

Okay.

And you can find it at Amazon and where else I don't know. It's called Catching Your Breath in Grief, and Grace Will Lead You Home. It sounds like it might be a little bit religious. I would say it's spiritual and anything but doctrinaire religious, but it's almost every page is like this. That's pretty top is a photograph, and the bottom is like 200 words to reflect about. And there are about 50 of those in here. Um, I'll tell you just a brief story. Um, I was active in a church here, I was on a committee. The spiritual care uh woman was also working in the local hospice, and she came to me one day after being there, and she said, I was walking down the hall today, Tom. You'll be interested in this, and I heard an especially noisy kind of room where this fellow was dying, and he had members of his family with him in there. I wondered what's going on in there, and I I snuck in the corner of the room. They had your book, they were reading the pages to one another. So it's got that kind of appeal. Yeah. Um, if I've given this to friends, uh I would give uh the other books that I've written to friends as well, but this one is really heart to heart. So um the seeking wisdom, everybody seeks wisdom. We all do that, and we don't realize that we're doing it, but how can I live with these things that I can't control? Is the basic question. Uh, and I think a number of people, when confronted with uh a loved one having died, uh feel overwhelmed by uh that sense that, you know, I I really can't control this. Uh it bothers me to no end. Uh and I think uh my writings are filled with ideas of what you can do when you can't control. You can control yourself, you can decide how to shape your life differently, how to shape your thinking differently, uh, and so on. And uh that's where I've made my life, and it's been pretty good. And people tell me that uh they value. When I meet a counselor, sometimes they tell me, you know, I've got your books. I say, Yeah, yeah, where if it where have you got the book? And they say, I sit at my computer and your book is right here.

Yeah.

Okay.

I know that I've I've been reaching people who are trying to be counselors, uh, and an awful lot of them have appreciated what I've put together. I'm not saying I'm Mr. Grief, I'm the only guy you ought to pay attention to, but uh you won't be wasting time if you open those pages.

What do you feel is the most important thing for people to understand? Like

From Reacting To Responding Well

obviously, this work has been a lifelong journey for you. So you've philosophized about about the topic a lot, coming to your own conclusions and which you've been sharing with us. But what do you think is the is there one thing that you think is the most important?

I think probably the most important thing that I haven't talked about already is this. The culture, up until about the early 1980s, and still in large part, thinks of grieving as something that's just awful. It's the terrible stuff that comes over you when someone has died. It's the awfulness of the sorrow and the suffering and the innervation and the paralysis and the discouragement and the uh I don't know what to do. Um, and it's it's the heaviness and the weightiness of the sorrow and the suffering that the whole culture emphasizes. And there's an aversion to talking about it because what's the point of talking about something you can't do anything about?

Right.

It's just gonna make you feel worse, and so on. And I think at the core of what I've done for decades now is to emphasize that in our life uh we experience all kinds of things that challenge us, and when we are challenged, we react to what is challenging us. And reaction leaves us passive and helpless and out of control uh and hurting typically. Um and grieving is not just about how we react to bad things that happen to us, it's how we respond actively, thoughtfully, carefully, deliberately to what has happened, how we actually can reach through the sorrow to living well again, to living in separation, to continue to appreciate the goodness that came into your life when this person lived with you, shaped who you are. So grieving isn't only sorrowful, it's helpful. It's healthful, it's positive, it's constructive if you learn about how it can be those things. And my work is among the most influential of things that have been done uh about that. We don't just react to uh and live passively in uh in uh reaction to an awful thing that's happened. We reach for something that's healthy, something that's constructive, something that's positive, something that's meaningful, something that's precious, and moving from loving in separation or loving in presence when a person's alive, to loving in separation after they've died. Uh, and that message that we are responsible for our responses, and the responses can be positive, constructive, loving, helpful, hopeful. That's my one thing.

You've obviously found uh a very strong purpose in your life with this. How does it make you we I'm conscious we're coming to the end of our conversation, but

Purpose, Impact, And Farewell

I'd love to hear from you about how you feel with this as a purpose. Like why is it important to you to do this work?

I think it's a uh difficult for lots of people to find things to do that feel like they're making a contribution. Um I haven't had that problem. Uh it's just um I'm I I'm obviously not changing the world or profoundly changing how people grieve, but if people pay attention to what I've had their saying, differences have been made in their lives.

Yeah.

There are an awful lot of people who can reflect on their own living and can't come up with anything that matches that. Um and it's not just my family or a few friends uh and so on. I've had the privilege of I think reaching out heart to heart and actually connecting with people where they're glad I've been alive. And that makes me glad I've been alive too.

Yeah, that's pretty fulfilling. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your wisdom with us. We're going to share your profile in our guest directory with links to your book and any other um links that you want to share, like a website perhaps, or social media. Great.

Would you like to know my website right now?

Uh we'll put it in the show notes.

When we go when we go off.

Yeah, we can put it in the show notes. Yeah. Great. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Was it all right? Yeah, it was great.