Val shares about how she actively processes grief. It can come in the form of taking time to relate to others or taking an action. She gives examples from her own experience with grief after her young adult son passed away from complications related to Fanconi Anemia.
00:20 Val gives an example of how grief hits her at random times.
01:00 Val shares how she feels stronger after doing this podcast.
02:10 Val shares her thoughts about the masculine and feminine sides of grief. She found a book, "Swallowed by a snake. The Gift of the Masculine Side of Healing" by Thomas Golden. https://tgolden.com/books-and-videos/
03:10 Thomas Golden's book reports the masculine path to grieving usually happens through taking action. and the feminine path through relating to others. He qualifies this statement with the known fact that men have a feminine side and women a masculine side and the mix of the two determines how an individual processes grief.
03:50 Val shares about the importance of "standing in the tension of grief, " and choices that come with that.
04:35 Val relates to a quote from the author Richard Rohr, https://cac.org/about/our-teachers/cac-founder-richard-rohr/
who coined the term "hope infused with realistic awareness." She feels this is an attitude to strive for when handling tough times. Val shares how she struggled to feel as though she had enough information to have "realistic" awareness.
06:20 Val shares her ideal for how the medical system could include a team member trained in palliative care to reduce emotional pain and suffering for the caregiver.
07:45 Val returns to the subject of grief, and she uses examples from Thomas Golden's book to describe a grief ritual and how to structure it.
09:13 Val shares how she structured grief in the early days after her son passed away and how she is structuring it now.
12:50 Val shares about her grief ritual of going to a coffee shop to drink one of her son's favorite coffee beverages, a cortado.
14:05 Val shares about hiring a death doula to be with her to offer support as she sorts through her son's things at home. Val is grateful to have the opportunity to work with Allie Jones, [https://soulcompanionservices.com/about]
who recently opened a business called Soul Companion Services. Val explains what a death doula does and she shares that Allie has a unique perspective on life, because she was born with Fanconi Anemia, the same genetic disorder Val's son had.
16:35 Val shares her special message about her fears related to needless suffering and that she believes it is necessary to feel the pain of grief, but we don't need to suffer from it.
16:50 Val's cheer: "I'm feeling the pain of my grief, and I'm letting go of the suffering!" Cheers!
Hello, this is Val, and welcome to Caregiver Tea Time. I'm glad you're here, and you can join me for this episode about grief. Imagine this: Everything is going smoothly. It's no big deal fixing my cup of tea when all of a sudden I get this twinge in my stomach and a burning sensation between my eyes and I have this huge urge to let out a big sob. Funny thing is, when this happens I always ask myself "What is this about?" as if I didn't know. But that's grief. It's the emotional response I get because of the many losses I've had.
My grief continues on, and will continue on, long after my caregiving days are over. But I must say, I feel so much stronger today than I did when I first started thinking about doing this podcast almost a year ago. Through creating these episodes, I learned what I could talk about and what I couldn't and what I could process with you and what I needed to process on my own and almost always with a safe person who had grief training, like my counselor or pastor or spiritual director.
Creating this podcast brought to mind all the crazy good things I learned in my efforts to be my best self And, it allowed me to let go of things I didn't need to rehash. At this moment, I feel like my grieving process is a little bit easier, and probably a lot deeper.
So, today, I'm going to share with you about my experiences facing and processing grief.
Lately, I've been considering how we all have a male side and a female side. Masculine energy and feminine energy. A while ago, I was thinking about these differences at the times my husband and son were sick. I knew what was going on in my female brain, but I wondered what was going on in the masculine brains of these men in my life.
Then one day I was wandering in a bookstore and I found a book, "Swallowed by a snake. The Gift of the Masculine Side of Healing," by Thomas Golden.
Well that sure caught my eye. This book was written by a male therapist who noticed that in general, male clients don't seem to fit the program therapists used for female clients. He began a search to find out about the paths that men take to their grief.
He found that the masculine path usually happens through taking action, and the feminine path through relating to others. But he wanted to qualify all this with the known fact that men have a feminine inside and women have a masculine side. So it's the mix of the two that determines how anyone individually best processes grief.
I'm thinking that for me, I need a lot of both action and relating. And maybe if you're stuck in your grief, you could ask yourself, do I need more relating or more action?
The first thing that resonated with me in this book was the line, "It's important to stand in the tension of your grief, meaning to have a willingness to experience your pain." For me, that tension started the day I heard my loved one was sick, really sick. And when I learned the illness was life -threatening, this tension grew exponentially.
I felt like moment by moment I had to make a choice to face and feel the intensity and pain of the situation or step back and take the side of innocence that everything's going to be okay and let's just act as if nothing is different and we will all get through this.
Alas, we cannot stand long in either one of these because it's just not realistic and our bodies can't handle it. I think the best way to go is to "embody hope infused with realistic awareness." I like that phrase, to have hope infused with realistic awareness. I wish I could take credit for it, but it was the author Richard Rohr who said that.
I'm generally pretty good when it comes to the hope part. I am, after all, an optimist. But back in those days, I felt like I didn't have enough information to know what the realistic awareness part truly was. There were so many questions I wanted to ask the doctors and nurses.
I had a medical background, and I did ask a lot of questions, but I avoided asking the most important one about prognosis. Yes, we were given percentages and possibilities, but how did that translate into our situation? I needed honesty about my husband and my son's prognosis so I could have realistic awareness. But I sensed they didn't want to know, and this was their journey. So, I was afraid that if I brought up the possibility of anything less than 100 % cure, things would go horribly wrong.
So without enough information to feel like I had realistic awareness, the emotional ups and downs and, honestly, sheer terror and pain of grief had begun.
I wonder what would it be like if from day one, a member of the team would come into the exam room and say,
"Hi, I'm the palliative care person on your medical team. "This means I'm responsible to help you and your family have the best possible quality of life in this situation. I'm here for you, the patient, as well as you, the family. I'm here to address your physical, mental, and spiritual needs. I'll be checking in on you throughout the treatment and as you recover, and also in all the days after that, as long as you need me. I want to make sure your pain is addressed and suffering is minimized."
Well, Wouldn't that be wonderful?
That is my dream. That is the change I hope for in our broken medical system. I'm putting it out there in the universe with this podcast and in prayer because it's time.
This is my shout out for palliative care. And if you listen to podcast number two of this season, you'll know how much I believe in the important skills of the trained palliative care professional. It's beautiful to imagine the suffering that could be relieved if a palliative care expert would be involved as part of the medical team from the moment of diagnosis.
Okay, back to grief. The author Thomas Golden explains that rituals are an important part of grief. His definition of a ritual is something that is a way to signal a passing of one state of being to another, like saying hello or goodbye when going from being alone to being with someone.
He believes, as do many other people I've met, that our culture lacks rituals that would help us move through our grief when
we have a loved one facing death and the end of their life and they pass away."
So here's the way he explains how a ritual will help. It would move you out of your ordinary state of awareness into a safe place for a period of time where you can express your emotions. The ritual provides an outline for how this could happen.
He says the safe place can be a room or any specific place you choose. Another very important part of the ritual is the presence of a loving person who is trained and experienced and can hold this space with you with compassion.
So if you're thinking of planning a ritual for yourself, consider choosing a defined space with the support of a compassionate person and a plan for what will happen. Will it be around speaking and relating to each other? Or will you take an action like playing music, blowing bubbles or something meaningful to you?
In the early days after my son passed away, my grief ritual was very simple. I met regularly with the counselor. We met two or even three times a week at the beginning because the flat-out tragedy of what had just happened was all -consuming for me. I was angry, very angry, about many things, and her office gave me a safe place to express my anger.
Eventually, my anger was less and I passed from one state of awareness to another, and that's when I went on my personal retreat, where I passed to an even better state of awareness. My retreat was at a designated safe place for a defined length of time, and I had lots of support from compassionate professionals.
I currently have a wonderful counselor. I started seeing her on the recommendation of my doctor at my annual physical exam. Although I saw myself as in a much better place, my doctor could tell that I still needed help going forward. And in the back of my mind, I was afraid of not being able to do this podcast because the first few recordings were very emotional for me behind the scenes. And I started looking for a counselor just in case I needed the help.
A few weeks ago, without using the word ritual, my counselor suggested trying something similar. She suggested I set aside and schedule a time devoted to grieving and use it to remember the good things about my loved one. She said it could be daily or weekly, but it's a time to focus on the positive qualities of my son and husband as well as the losses I've had. I tried it and it worked. I felt really good for a time.
The idea of setting aside time for it regularly, though, is new to me. I'm not really that good at keeping a schedule or routine. But I believe that if I can do it, that I truly need it. Over the past few months, I've had this deep sorrow that just hits me at random times. And when it does, I usually just pause and take a deep breath and let the grief come up and sit with it and imagine that I'm letting go of my unknown stuff that I bottled up and I don't even have words for and I say a little prayer and eventually it fades away.
However, it's been happening pretty often lately and even several times a day, especially when I have other stresses in my life like moving to a new apartment. So, I wonder if setting aside time just for grieving and adding structure to it, like a ritual, would be a good thing. I know I've been through various stages of grief, so at this point, two years after my son's passing, I think I'm ready for something new.
My counselor suggested asking myself questions like, "When do I feel closest to my loved one? Is it in the house, walking outside, or in the cemetery? What was he good at doing, and what did he like to do? What did people tell you they liked about him? What did he like to celebrate, and how did he do it?"
And then to think, "What can I do right now in loving remembrance of him?" I like this because it's a good balance of joyful celebration of the good things along with the painful feelings of loss. And the thing I could do right now to feel close to my son came to me when I was in a coffee shop.
I remember how much my son liked coffee. He liked it a lot. Walking to a local coffee shop was something we regularly did together. He introduced me to a cortado. Let me tell you, that is one strong drink. It's one part espresso and an equal part milk, and it comes in a tiny cup.
Whoo, it's powerful! The first time I tasted one, I confess I could not go on to the second taste without adding a couple packets of sugar. And then, mmm, it was good. I liked it.
Now I want to have a Cortado ritual in memory of my son. Every couple of weeks, I plan to go to a coffee shop and order one, then add my two sugars, and make a toast. Cheers to you, Loren!
I briefly want to share about something I need to do in the coming weeks. I finally cleaned out the little house where Loren lived on the farm, but I still have most of the things he left behind. I just moved them from one place to another, and now they're in the kitchen of the farmhouse.
Next week I'm going to go back and sort through this pile. I've asked a very special person to be there to help me. Her name is Allie Jones, and I met her because she was born with Fanconi Anemia, the same genetic disorder my son had.
Recently, she launched her own business called Soul Companion Services. She offers services as a doula, someone with a special gift to be able to provide emotional, spiritual, and practical support during very specific stages of life, both at birth and at death. Allie has trained to be a birth doula, helping new mothers in the days leading up to birth and in the first hours and days after giving birth. And she is trained to be a death doula, also known as an end -of -life doula or soul midwife. She provides individualized support to her clients and their families during the dying process and in the time leading up to death. A death doula offered skills that hospice does not provide.
If you were to Google Fanconi Anemia, you would find out that this diagnosis comes with the news that the person will likely not live past the age of 30 and will develop cancers at some point in their life. So imagine living with that information about yourself. It gives Allie a totally different perspective on life. She embodies what I've been talking about, the hope infused with realistic awareness.
When my son was getting treatment, one of my biggest fears was that he would needlessly suffer because of a choice made somewhere along the line. My choice, his choice, the doctor or nurses choice. Now in my grief, I'm wondering, "Am I making choices that make me needlessly suffer?
There is a difference between feeling your pain and suffering from it. And that is my special message for you today. It's okay to feel the pain of grief, And we need to feel and process that pain, but we don't need to suffer from it.
So please raise your cup with me and say, "I'm feeling the pain of my grief and I'm letting go of the suffering." Are you ready? One, two, three, "I'm feeling the pain of my grief and I'm letting go of the suffering." Cheers!
Nothing but the good things,
nothing but the good things In this world,
living in my heart
Nothing but the good things,
nothing but the good things In this world,
living in my heart
Caregiver T -Time was recorded at the Koop Studio, Irvington, New York, engineered by Sammy Wags and produced by Bianca Groves.