The Importance of Grief and Grieving, And Why We Get It Wrong Most Of The Time, with Leslie Barber

SPEAKERS: Leslie Barber, Brenda Zane

[00:00:00] Leslie: With addiction, there can be very similar, situations physically there, but psychologically changing and changing and changing and not knowing what’s coming, right? That’s very ambiguous. And that also mixes with anticipatory grief, which is a very human experience where we’re seeing the storm. On the horizon. 


And we don’t know if it’s coming our direction or another direction, but we’re assuming it’s coming our way. So parents who are waiting, waiting for that phone call every day, is it going to be my child next? It’s this ambiguous grief mixed with anticipatory grief of the terror of what might come in the next moment. 


[00:00:48] Brenda: Welcome to HopeStream, the podcast for parents of kids who are misusing drugs or alcohol or who are in active addiction treatment. Welcome to HopeStream. or early recovery. I’m your host, Brenda Zane, fellow parent to a child who struggled. So I’m right there with you. If you’re enjoying the podcast and want to hang out with me and a bunch of other great moms after the episodes, you can check out the stream. 


It’s a positive online space where you can get support and take a breather from the stresses of dealing with your son or daughter. Just go to the stream community. com to learn more. Now let’s get into today’s episode. Hello friends, welcome to Hope’s Dream, and an especially big welcome hug to you if you’re a new listener. 


I don’t know, this might be the only podcast where we start out with kind of a virtual hug because we all know what each other are going through. But if you are a new listener, I hope that you will settle in and feel very welcomed. We do have a lot of new listeners lately. I know this because I am weird and I like looking at data and analytics and the downloads for this podcast, HopeStream, have shot up like a hockey stick in the last few months. 


I don’t know if y’all are sharing it more or what’s going on, but it makes me so happy because I know more parents. Who need the encouragement and need the education that we get here are getting it. So thank you, if you’re sharing the episodes, I really appreciate that. And, more than that, the people that you’re sharing it with are appreciating it. 


today, we are going to be talking about something every single one of us has experienced, and that is grief. The interesting thing about grief is that it is not just an emotion that’s reserved for death. We grieve for lots of different reasons. And as parents of kids who struggle with substances, we have all kinds of grief from seeing some of the dreams that we had for our kids pass them by to the very tragic and sudden death that some of you have experienced when your son or daughter has died as a result of their substance use. 


And there’s also anticipatory grief that we feel when we look into the future and it looks really scary. these things are all really, really hard to cope with. And I wanted to talk about this topic because I think it’s one that can become the elephant in the room. And I was poking around all of my resources to find the right person. 


And I was fortunate enough to be introduced to an incredible woman named Leslie Barber. Leslie is the founder and CEO of Grief Warrior. After her husband Steve died, she launched Grief Warrior to bring recognition and respect and reconnection to the grieving process through organizational trainings and corporate workshops. 


So she does a lot of work in the corporate world, which is really cool. She also does private grief coaching. She has digital courses and these really cool gift packages, sort of care packages for grievers. Leslie has written for Entrepreneur. com and Small Biz Daily. She is a trained coach and she has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management. 


I think you’re going to find Leslie’s knowledge and her firsthand experience with grief, incredibly helpful and refreshing. And also. This isn’t a sad episode. I hope that you’re not deterred from listening because of the topic. I found that our conversation was really empowering, actually, and it gave me new ways to think about and experience grief. 


with all of that, please enjoy this beautiful time I had. With Leslie Barber 


Welcome leslie to hope stream i’m so So grateful to have you here with us today to talk about a really tough topic. That’s such an important one and One that I haven’t spent a lot of time getting any professional Counsel on so thank you for making the time to be with us today Hi, Brenda. It’s a delight to be with you. 


Thank you. I know that we’re going to cover a lot of things, but what I’d love to do is just give people some context for who you are, why you do the work that you do, how you got to doing what you’re doing. Cause I assume you haven’t been doing this your whole life. So maybe you can just take a few minutes and take us on the journey of Leslie and, and where you are now coming from where you’ve been. 


Yes, I would be  


[00:05:56] Leslie: thrilled to do that. my journey with grief, as it turns out, probably started around birth, as it does for, for many of us through different things that happen in childhood. But my conscious journey with it really started in 2014 when my husband Steve was diagnosed with cancer. 


Unexpectedly, he didn’t have any symptoms. I came home from work one day and he was doubled over having a kidney stone attack. And when we took him to the emergency room, they did a CAT scan to find the kidney stones and then also found enlarged lymph nodes and told us we should go to an oncologist. I was December of 2014. 


He died on June 24th. first 2015. It was Father’s Day that year. So just about six months after we first heard the word cancer and so many things exploded in my life as a result. It all happened so quickly. I was working for a technology company. I had to go back into the workplace. So that experience, had all of its own huge emotions going back into the quote unquote normal after, your entire world has been rocked. 


And that’s when my journey with very acute grief really began. And over, the course of several years, I really felt I had been a caterpillar that entered the cocoon. And was emerging with these broken wings that didn’t know how to fly as a butterfly. And that journey brought me to coaching, wanting to help other women live their fullest lives without watching their husband die. 


And, and just wanting to break open a conversation in our culture around grief and around why We seem to as a culture Want to put grief back into the shadows and leave it there instead of welcoming it as love and as the The desire we all have To make sure our people are here and okay So I started grief warrior, two years ago With the mission to change how we think about Grief and the majority of our work is done in corporations because I see that as a way to be able to multiply the impact. 


So if we work with managers and leaders on how to be with their employees in grief, that trickles down, that trickles out, and many people are impacted by the work.  


[00:08:42] Brenda: I love that. It’s similar to my journey where I was doing one on one coaching and then thought, I want to make a bigger impact. And I think you found a really interesting and probably a really challenging place to explore your work and to introduce your work into the corporate world because I can’t imagine a more insensitive place, at least in my opinion. 


From where I came from in the advertising world and marketing in big companies. There is no such thing as grief. there’s not a lot of feeling to begin with or emotion, let alone grief. So I really commend you for, for picking that. Rock up and trying to move it.  


[00:09:23] Leslie: Thank you. You’re right brenda. It’s not easy. 


I hear people all the time asking me If we can come in and do this work But could we just not use the word grief? Reminded me of brene brown when she started and ceos wanted her to come do the work but not use the words vulnerability and shame we just have to go one by one right? We’ll find a person who’s willing to Advocate for the concept and then we get to reach more people, you know every day  


[00:09:51] Brenda: I love what you said about opening a conversation in our culture about grief, because it certainly is not something that is talked about that often, and I’m wondering if that’s just because it makes us so uncomfortable, because it is, it opens up gigantic questions in our minds about What happens when somebody dies, what happens when we die, and at the same time, and I think we’ll get into this too, because of COVID in particular, and with the current opioid, current, it’s been going on for 10 years, but now that COVID is somewhat familiar, I think people are starting to pay attention again a tiny bit to the opioid crisis and the 93, 000 people who lost their lives just in this last year because of it. 


Grief has to be on the tip of every single person’s tongue. I can’t imagine there’s a human being in the United States in particular and other countries who hasn’t been affected by that. So when you said that opening a conversation in our culture, it just struck a chord with me because I think we’ve, we’ve got to learn how to do it for all of our, our health and wellness. 


[00:11:01] Leslie: Absolutely. the definition of the word grief is around endings, right? In our culture, we’ve really associated it with death, but grief happens when there’s an ending, when something changes that we didn’t want. a good example that many of us have experienced, outside of death over the last year and a half is the pandemic. 


And if we remember back to the first couple months of pandemic, so many people were grieving normalcy, predictability, planning, things that we kind of value in our culture, especially as type A personalities that we can control something of our future, which quite frankly, I could argue is is not necessarily the case, but many of us do live in that world of, I can plan a vacation, right now, are people talking about Christmas? 


we have no idea what is going to happen over the next couple of months. And so we’re grieving that. And I don’t know if you, remember in the early days, everyone had a strategy for coping with that grief, right? There were very similar emotions, anxiety, anger. Fear, sadness, all of these emotions were very similar, but the way that we coped with them came out in different ways. 


I know some of my friends were organizing their homes as a way of coping. Others of us were sitting on the couch staring at the wall or binge watching TV shows. I even, I love that last year there was that, and I’m forgetting the name of the show, but there was that show where every, they like to organize everything in like rainbow boxes, home edit. 


I think it was called the home edit. And it just made me laugh because I thought, we’re all trying to organize our chaos into these. Rainbow boxes and that’s such a beautiful metaphor For how we think about grief in this country just put it in a box Shove it into the back of the closet and don’t think about it and then you’ll be fine that’s a huge part of our culture. 


Some could argue it goes back to hundreds of years ago that we’ve had unresolved grief From war, from how America was started, from slavery, from so many causes that the, even the Spanish flu in the early 1900s, so many causes of grief that we just haven’t been willing to acknowledge or validate. And that’s what I really want to bring forward, this concept that grief and love are like the yin and the yang, right? 


They’re, they’re inextricably. Linked and just like we have winter and there’s beauty in winter We have summer and there’s a different type of beauty in summer and grief to me Really symbolizes that you talk to many people who are grieving And they say, I don’t want you to take my grief. I don’t want you to take away from me. 


I want to keep it because to me it’s my connection with my person or with my community or with my loved one.  


[00:14:02] Brenda: That is such a good point. I’m glad that you brought that up, that grief does not equal death. Grief has so many different forms. And I have heard that, that people, immigrants that have come to a different country still grieve the, the home culture and all of those things go with it. 


And you’re right, COVID just is. Blew apart our worlds and I think we did all grieve that normalcy Whatever normal was to you before  


[00:14:31] Leslie: Exactly, and that is often a way That as humans we learn about grief It’s in our childhood When maybe our family moves us to a new community And then our parents are desperate for us to find friends But we’re missing our friends from the old community and the message that we receive You As children is often don’t cry over the old friends go find new friends. 


You’ll find new friends I know you’ll find new friends, right and it’s this loving Way that we try to help our children move on Instead of acknowledging the loss and learning how to move forward. And that happens with pets. I had a hamster that died when I was a kiddo and my parents, replaced the hamster, wasn’t the same hamster and their intention was good. 


I knew it wasn’t the same one, right? I knew that I needed to mourn or grieve that. That hamster or I needed to shut down those feelings and we do that all the time. I have had hour long grief coaching sessions with people who have been absolutely broken open by the death of their pet and they, their dog perhaps, and they bought, they got, went and got themselves a new puppy and they’re not understanding why the new puppy. 


Isn’t solving the grief problem, we carry grief forever. There are no stages when it comes to, to that kind of grief after a death, those stages were meant for when you’re dying. And so there aren’t, there’s no PowerPoint or Excel spreadsheet that will tell you a timeline. We carry it forever. 


[00:16:15] Brenda: Yeah, that is so true about pets. And it’s also the parallel I’m making in my mind is a lot of our listeners have kids that come home from treatment. So they’ll be in like a wilderness treatment program or residential program. These are typically kids under 18 and so they come back from maybe six months or a year or 15 months of being gone in another state away and then they come home and they have to reintegrate into Either the same high school or a new high school and the parents are like, you need to make new friends and It’s got to be so jarring for the kids, first of all, to do that. 


But I would assume that there is some grief there, even if they say to us, which they often do, I hated that place. That was the worst, you ruined my life. You sent me to wilderness therapy. You sent me to residential boarding school, but there’s still got to be a sense. I would think of some grief of that was my normal for a year or more. 


And we, they come home and we push them to, move on and make new friends and, keep going. what are some of the things, because I know parents always love to get thoughts from people like you on these issues that we haven’t necessarily experienced, but what are some of the best and worst things that we can do when we know that somebody’s grieving? 


Whether it’s A loss or a loss of a human or if it’s a loss of a circumstance or a community or a pet or something like that.  


[00:17:48] Leslie: the first thing we have to do is witness the grief and just acknowledge that it’s there, right? Grief Needs to be seen. It needs to be heard and it needs to be Acknowledged and so witnessing is something that is so important with grief and yet not something we’re generally Taught in our culture to do to actually watch someone and be with someone And in the coaching world as you know hold space for them, right? 


Those words are people think oh coaches will do that or clergy will do that But in fact all of us Have the ability to be with someone in in a scary moment And absolutely if someone has gone one of our children has gone to a residential treatment program And they’ve been away and then we bring them back into our normal right into the world We’ve been living but they haven’t you know, there’s grief Significant grief for them whether they like it or not. 


You don’t have to You Like what you’re grieving, right? And there may be huge feelings about coming back into what was the normal before it’s not normal anymore, right? When my husband died, it was like a tsunami. I think it was the tsunami in Japan, that massive earthquake. And then this huge tsunami through everything upside down. 


And it would almost be like, If somebody had said to me, go back to that village where the teddy bear is, on top of the tree and the car’s upside down on top of the house and just pretend it’s normal, just act like nothing happened, just rebuild and just move on, find a new house, right? 


And, and that would be ridiculous, right? When it comes to those moments, that would be viewed as ridiculous. Yet, yet we do that. You know to each other all of the time and it’s so important I think for parents and and i’ve learned this, you know from you and our conversation to really take care of themselves, right and that means witnessing our own grief first You know the classic airline put your oxygen mask on first before you help others you have to witness For yourself that you are grieving that you’re grieving the child you used to have or the dreams you had Or what you wish to be true Those are ending right those have ended and so we grieve those things we witness and we acknowledge And in witnessing, we’re listening, we’re active listeners to ourselves, to what we’re feeling, to our bodies, because grief often shows up in our body. 


And then we’re acknowledging it. I sit every day with a candle on my desk that says, I am present. With grief, because even though I do this all day long, I still live in this culture that wants me to move on every step of the way. So what I suggest to, to your community is to really witness for themselves and witness their children and acknowledge where they are in that moment. 


Acknowledge the grief, acknowledge the pain, and get curious about it. What are you experiencing coming back in? They may or may not want to answer. But the fact that you’re curious about it will speak volumes as they make that transition back into a new version of what they used to know.  


[00:21:17] Brenda: Because the temptation I feel is and I am guilty of this as well when my son came home is you just want to make everything shiny and happy and everything’s going to be great. And we feel like if we even mentioned a word like grief, and I don’t know, maybe we can talk about if there’s other terminology. 


Sometimes, when you’re talking to kids, they don’t necessarily relate, but We feel like if we even mention are you sad? Are you lonely? Do you miss your one cool guy that you hung out with at the treatment program? We feel like if we mention those things, it’s just going to send them spiraling where it sounds like what you’re saying is, it’s actually more healthy to just. 


Acknowledge it, don’t make it the elephant in the room, be a witness to it, ask some questions, or be quiet and hold that space for them, which is so hard to do, I know. It sounds like those are better strategies than trying to put it in a box with a rainbow on it.  


[00:22:20] Leslie: Yes. no one ever told us that becoming a parent was going to be easy. 


And when I think of Glennon Doyle and her, we can do hard things, that’s a battle cry for anyone who’s interacting with someone who’s in grief or who’s going through struggle. We have to do hard things. It may be like ripping off a band aid. It may feel better afterwards. It may get harder before it gets easier. 


What I like to think about though, is that if first you said there’s an elephant in the room, right? And if you want to put that experience of your child being in a treatment center in a box in the basement, right? If you want to put it away and not look at it, it doesn’t leave the basement. 


Am I right? it stays down there until. You choose to pull it out and usually a couple years down the road It’s even more painful to go to the basement and get that box out than it was when you first created the box So if you think about it in in that way that kind of acknowledgement is Freeing and it brings Comfort and I don’t know if you’ve ever had a conversation where you thought this is going to be really hard But then afterwards you noticed You Gosh, that’s that was I feel much better reminds me a little bit of exercise. 


I’ll be honest brenda when I go exercise I’m, like, I don’t want to do the peloton today And then I get off the peloton and I was like that was really hard and boy, I feel better, right? I just feel a little bit lighter And that’s what these conversations are being human is hard. And so being human is not just about The happy and the joyful. 


I feel like life is about moments and there are moments of joy and then there are moments of struggle and they’re just as beautiful as the moments of joy and those moments of struggle bring so much connection. One of my heroes, Pauline boss talks about ambiguous grief. And I was listening to her podcast with Krista Tippett on, in, on being, and she said on there. 


Sadness is treated with human connection. Sadness is not treated with, don’t cry, lift your chin up, just be happy, just be grateful, just think of everything you have. Sadness is not treated with that. Sadness is treated with, I see your sadness, and I’m here for it. I’m here for it for the long haul. I see your sadness. 


Your sadness makes sense. we just have to learn how to open our hearts to the idea that, that the grief and the pain is there for a good reason. For a reason that makes sense. That we want to connect with each other. And that that can be done in sadness and anxiety and, and anger just as much as it can in joy. 


[00:25:20] Brenda: I think, oh, there’s so much in there. First, sadness makes sense. I love that phrase. I think that’s a phrase that we could use with our kids when they come home Or even if they have never been to treatment and they’re just really struggling Just to say this makes sense, you know if they’re if your kid’s an active addiction they’re Missing and grieving the life that they used to know because nobody wants to be a drug addict And so they’re they’re missing The life that they used to have not that that life was perfect, but they’re missing You Parts of that. 


So sadness makes sense. I love that. I think we should get a little tattoo for everybody. , put it on your, I love that arm says that. and also I am gonna put a link in the show notes to that episode that you mentioned of the podcast called On Bean. I listened to that after we spoke originally, and I was just. 


I, yeah, it was one of those where it’s I wish I had, I was out on a walk and I was like, I wish I had a notebook with me on my walk. I want to write down everything. So I will put a link to that because that was just a game changer. I sent it to a couple of the moms in our community who have lost kids recently. 


And I just said, when you’re ready, this is something that I think would be great for you to listen to.  


[00:26:38] Leslie: And I think it’s really wonderful for your community of parents who have not lost a child, right? ambiguous grief, which Pauline Bass coined that term, is really about somebody who’s physically there but psychologically gone, or the reverse, physically gone. 


But psychologically there. So examples of some of these areas where, where we would all understand ambiguous grief would be, the Malaysian airplane that went down and was never found. The families of those passengers are forever going to have this ambiguous grief because there isn’t this kind of quote unquote closure of knowing what happened. 


another example is Alzheimer’s, right? Alzheimer’s is a disease where they’re physically there, but psychologically dying. And so when we watch people who are going through Alzheimer’s, we understand the sadness of all of a sudden this person doesn’t know who I am. They’ve raised me. They’ve been here my whole life and they don’t know me anymore. 


There’s incredible ambiguous grief with that. And then of course, grief when the person. A more traditional grief when the person dies with addiction, there can be very similar situations physically there, but psychologically changing and changing and changing and not knowing what’s coming, right? That’s very ambiguous. 


And that also mixes with Anticipatory grief, which is a very human experience where we’re seeing the storm on the horizon and we don’t know if it’s coming our direction or another direction, but we’re assuming it’s coming our way. So parents who are waiting, waiting for that phone call every day, is it going to be my child next? 


It’s this ambiguous grief mixed with anticipatory grief of the terror of what might come next. What might come in the next moment and all of that wrapped up in this bow of our culture, which says, gosh, this is a problem. Why can’t you solve this problem with so much judgment around the culture that likes to fix things and, and why can’t you just fix this? 


Why can’t you just make this all better? And the reality is that that’s a very cruel part of our culture to think that everything is a problem that can be solved. And Pauline Bass said so beautifully in that. In that interview, it’s not, there are many things that cannot be solved in our culture, and it’s not our fault. 


It’s not our fault that, that we can’t solve everything. So we have to live with that kind of, Loss of someone who’s alive but changing and our dreams may be Maybe ending and as a result We feel grief. It does not mean that those dreams couldn’t change and become something different But both can be true, right? 


You can grieve What you wanted to happen what you want for your child and you can also feel at the same time opportunity or hope for a different path  


[00:29:48] Brenda: Yes, that you nailed it on the head, that feeling for parents of, and I remember describing this to my therapist. I said, I see my son’s body. 


It’s his body. It’s like really skinny and not looking so good, but it’s his body. But I do not know the person inside of it. I have no idea who that guy is. He’s so ugly. He’s so mean. He’s so not living the values that we have. We raised him with, all of those things that go along with substance use and with risky lifestyle, and it’s just torture. 


It is absolute torture. And I think your analogy with Alzheimer’s is exactly perfect. And, and parents of kids like ours will talk about this sometimes that it is very much like it. Having to deal with somebody with Alzheimer’s because they’re pretty mean and they can well, they can be pretty mean and pretty ugly to you and they don’t want help, which is often the case with Alzheimer’s like I’m fine. 


I don’t need any help. Everything’s fine. And it’s just so Mind bending and so frustrating and at the same time you do have that fear and mourning of he’s never going to go to prom. He’s never going to graduate from high school. She’s never going to have a good relationship. all these things and expectations and outcomes that we have built up in our minds about how our kids lives are going to go. 


And then those just go poof. This is not happening. And I wonder what advice you would have on how to start to wrestle with some of that. I don’t know that we could ever do it right, that like you said, there is no fix, but are there things that you coach your, your clients on or that you’ve seen work that worked for you personally to, how do you muddle through life with all of that? 


[00:31:49] Leslie: you muddle, right? that’s what you do is you muddle. Life is not meant to be put into rainbow organizers. stuff gets put into rainbow organizers, but we can’t put emotions and fears and dreams into rainbow organizers. Life is messy and grief is even messier. So much of grief is physiological and we don’t really allow for that in our culture. 


What we generally do in our culture is, Oh, if you’re sad, then you must be depressed. And if you’re depressed, then you go to a therapist, right? I’m a huge believer in therapy, but I also want to say. The grief does not need to be pathologized. The sadness and anger and anxiety because our child is addicted to a substance or because my husband died or because my job was ripped out from under me. 


That makes sense. It actually makes sense that we are grieving, it’s expected, if you were talking to somebody about it, they would expect you to be sad if your husband died, right? But the behavior of it is so different. You’re crying too much, you’re not crying enough. It’s time to get out and date. No, it’s too soon to date really so many grieving people you can’t we can’t get it, right? 


Everyone has a judgment or an opinion about how we should be behaving And I have to really believe that that’s the same in your community. Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you put her in that program? Why don’t you do this more? Why don’t you talk more? Why don’t all the things right everyone’s There’s so much advice, and the truth of the matter is that in all of that advice, for the most part, we’re not actually acknowledging. 


The feeling we’re not acknowledging the sadness or the anger or the missing or the despair. Instead we’re dancing around it because we are too afraid to go there. when I work with clients, with, with coaching clients in grief, one of the top questions I get right off the bat is when am I going to feel normal again? 


When am I going to feel like me again? And it’s, it’s hard to say, but I always say you are normal. You are you right now, you’re a changed you right from where you were before, your child died. You’re a changed you from before you lost your job, but you’re still you. And so what we’re going to work on together is how to be with. 


What has happened and how to move forward, even if we’re talking nano paces, or maybe today we’re falling backwards. Maybe today we’re sitting down, right? Whatever it may be, we’re going to work together on being with that feeling and that emotion as humans, not as transcribers. pathologized or, people. 


And of course, if there is a pathology worth having, then absolutely, a therapist should get involved if there’s a, if there’s a, a mental illness. but for 90 percent of the time with grief, this is, these are normal, natural human reactions to a terrible situation and they should be witnessed. 


[00:35:22] Brenda: Yeah, it would be normal if you weren’t falling apart at the seams at some point. That would, that would be abnormal, I would think. We talked just, you mentioned that you do work, a lot of your work focuses on the corporate world, which I just, Love. And I think that’s so fascinating. And I had a situation where a mom was saying that she lost, sadly, tragically, she lost her son this summer and she’s a, teacher, a professor. 


And so when she returned back in, just recently to the staff on zoom, some of the people knew that she had lost her son. Some didn’t. And so There was this very incredibly awkward, zoom call where everybody was catching up on their summer. And did you have a great summer? And I’m wondering what we can do as people who are supporting other people who have lost somebody, or, grieving something that we might not know about, how do we be careful without being too crazy, but how do we just be careful? 


And especially with co workers who we may not know really well, right? We see them every day, but we don’t really know their details of their life. How can we be better at grief with, with those kinds of situations?  


[00:36:47] Leslie: It’s hard for both involved. I can imagine, your friend, Who went back in, your community member and I mean her stomach must have just been turning When people were asking about each other’s summers. 


I was going to the doctor quite a lot after steve died Because you know when you watch your loved one die of cancer, you think you have cancer everywhere all of a sudden and so I was going to the doctor a lot and there was a receptionist at the doctor’s office Wonderful, beautiful medical facility. 


I loved this place. They were Zen and holistic and thoughtful. They hired a young woman who would ask me every time I went in there, if I was having a super day and I literally, like I had to get all of my energy and grief is energy zapping. So I had to pull all my energy together just to walk in that door and finally, and, and not Fight her head off or quite frankly, jump over the counter and do something terrible. It was awful. And then I would, I’d feel like such a jerk because I really didn’t have the energy to be able to say, I’m having a rough day. And so finally I told the doctor and said, It is painful for me to come in here every time because she asks me if I’m having a super day. 


Could you at least just tell her that when I come in, my husband just died and my day is not super and they did. They did training with her and she was able to learn how to tone it down. She had been hired because she was a cheery. upbeat receptionist, right? And we have to take our audience into consideration and, and just think about, who are we talking to? 


We have a duty as humans to consider The impact of what we do, right? It’s not enough anymore to just say, I didn’t intend to hurt you with my question about summer, or I didn’t intend to hurt you with that joke. No, we, it’s not enough anymore to do that. We have to think more thoughtfully about. What someone has gone through and it does mean that managers need to have the courage to go to the, your friend and say to her, I’d like to be able to share a little bit about what you’ve gone through so that people can be thoughtful. 


And of course, it’s up to the friend, but it gives her an opportunity in that moment to have the courage to say yes, please. Thanks. Even if what they say is a very significant death in the family, people should be more thoughtful or caring. One of the other things I’ve, I’ve done with grief warriors, we built a brand called heartfelt and heartfelt is a line of sympathy gift packages. 


Currently it’s focused on a human death. we will be launching a pet loss box shortly, and then I’m looking to branch out into other types of grief as well. But in there, one of the, the founding. Products that I created is what I call our in morning badge. So it actually says in morning and it’s a little magnetic badge that you can wear because unfortunately you can’t look at someone and see that their heart’s broken. 


You can’t go to the grocery store and that receptionist didn’t know by looking at me that my heart was broken. And so this little in morning badge just tells people. I’m in mourning, and sometimes if I didn’t want to tell the world, I would just stick it inside my shirt, facing my heart, as a way to remind myself that I’m in mourning, that it’s okay that my patience is wearing thin, that it’s okay that I’m not as cheery or diplomatic or polite as I might normally be, because I just don’t want Don’t have it in me, right? 


I don’t have the energy. I didn’t sleep well, or it’s been too hard parenting a grieving child, or my heart’s just broken. So there are ways that we can let other people know that this is going on. And it does take courage from the manager in an environment like that to say, I want, I just want to be able to best support you and best supporting you is going to mean letting people know and it won’t impact how we think about you here or your performance results or, it won’t impact those kinds of things. 


And we’re here to support you because we’re humans like companies are fully humans. Yeah,  


[00:41:23] Brenda: that’s that’s what they are I hope that maybe after covid, or through covid. I don’t even know if there is going to be an after covid But let’s say because of covid I would think that I work for myself So i’m not a corporate environment anymore but i’m hoping that maybe there is more sensitivity to things like mental health that We’ll be able to have some of these conversations a little bit more openly without people Shying away and thinking you’re weird for having those because it is so important. 


And so for somebody who’s grieving, like these moms in our community who have lost their kids, and when people say things that are highly insensitive, intentional or not, I think most of the time it’s not, people are just Naturally, sometimes insensitive. Is there a response that you found, because I’m sure you experienced this too, that people just say dumb stuff? 


Oh my gosh, yes. Is there a response that you can give them, that they can use? Because I know that a couple of them have shared that they’re just speechless. It’s what would I even say to that? What you just said is so incredibly insensitive. And they don’t have a response and i’m wondering if you have any thoughts on that  


[00:42:38] Leslie: Yeah, one of the things I do with my grief coaching clients almost straight up right away is we plan For situations like that. 


So we come up with a list of Things that you can say and we practice them so that you don’t have moments where you’re caught in those scenarios, because I can guarantee you that they’re going to happen like I can guarantee you that more people will say hurtful things with good intention, then we’ll actually say something that’s helpful. 


and so because of that, we, we plan for it. for it could be anything from I had a. grief coaching client who was asked why she had, Oh, actually I’ll give you my example. we had a small amount of life insurance. And when I bought my house about a year after Steve died, I was congratulated for the amount of money that I had to put down. 


And I remember just looking at him and that caught me flat footed. And I just burst into tears and said, I only have This small amount of money because my husband died right and that kind of shut him up But it is you know, people will say I had a massage therapist. Tell me that I shouldn’t be sad About my husband dying because it’ll make my daughter sad, she was seven She was sad on her own, right? 


So There’s all kinds of things people say, but usually I sit down and I plan with the grief coaching client. Okay. What are some things that you can say? And it can be as simple as good for you. Thank you for sharing I appreciate your input You know just generic easy things that feel like your language so that when people come to you and say you know here are 12 different ways that you can You know, that you, that you can help your child or, he wouldn’t want you to be sad, right? 


He, he’d want you to celebrate or whatever. Or they would say, I can, imagine that people might say, you don’t want to be sad for your other children. Or thank goodness, the worst was always, thank goodness you have other children. come on, you can just answer, thank you. Or thank you for sharing. 


Now that may be very different if it’s someone really close to you. If it’s someone really close to you, they may need some education and, we have a blog on the, it’s agriefwarrior. com. We have a blog on that website that tells other people, what to say to somebody who’s grieving. So you could just surreptitiously forward that over to them. 


But it, the idea would be, Hey, it’s really hard for me. You try to cheer me up, it would be more helpful if you would just acknowledge that I’m in pain. That makes me feel seen,  


[00:45:34] Brenda: that makes me feel heard. What can we say? Is it the best just to say I’m so sorry. what are some words that we can use when we, when we recognize that someone’s really grieving? 


[00:45:45] Leslie: Yeah. I have, I have mixed feelings about, I’m so sorry to be honest, just because it, it does turn the conversation into. Me, right? So if we’re talking about your scenario and I’m saying, I’m so sorry. It’s a little bit of More about me. It’s not a terrible thing to say. In fact, it you know, say it if there’s nothing else But I often try to focus on acknowledgement. 


that sounds hard This must be so hard on you. this sounds awful. What, what are you experiencing right now? I try to get curious with coaching questions. Anything from, like I said, that stinks, that sucks, depending on what your language is, to everything from that to, this is so hard. 


I’m here for the long haul. This is really tough. And just the acknowledgement, right? So it’s just seeing it. It can be really hard, if a friend comes to you and says I’m not sleeping because my child died a month ago and grief has taken over my sleep, which is very typical with grief. what do we want to do? 


We want to problem solve. We want to give them all of the ways that we have found it easier to sleep. Are you, are you drinking caffeine? Don’t eat chocolate at night. here, let me tell you about all of the meds that I can, that I can suggest, or this has worked for me. No, no, we just need to stop. 


They’re smart people. They’re whole people who know how to fix it themselves. If that’s what they want to do instead. This must be so hard to not be able to sleep.  


[00:47:25] Brenda: Yeah.  


[00:47:26] Leslie: This is awful. I can, I can imagine that you’re exhausted.  


Dang. So just the acknowledgement, sometimes I’m, I’m more of a complainer on language. 


I like to suggest things not to say, I’m not a fan of, I can’t imagine, right? Many of you, many of your listeners have probably had people say, Oh, I can’t imagine if my child was in that situation. I just can’t imagine what you’re going through. And what does that do? That just separates you. Like suddenly you’re other. 


Suddenly you’re different. It could just as easily have been that person. And of course they can imagine. That’s exactly why they’re saying, I can’t imagine because they don’t want to imagine, right? So oftentimes when somebody says that to me, I say, I’d like you to give it a try because I think you can. I love that. 


And that rubs some people the wrong way, but most people will say, you’re right. You’re right, I can, and I don’t want to. And that takes courage. That’s the truth. So it could be that. It could be, at least, right? I, I’ll never forget hearing Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, talk about her husband who died a month before mine. 


And one of her friends said, at least he didn’t have, I think he had a, a catastrophic brain event or brain bleed. At least he didn’t have that while he was driving your two children. Yeah. And she said, Oh, you’re so right. I’m really grateful. I’m not going to complain. I’m not going to grieve anymore because I’m so grateful. 


I have my children. Yeah. Meanwhile, I’m so lucky. Meanwhile, I’m like screaming at the radio, at the podcast, I’m just thinking how invalidating, like you can mourn your husband without having to feel grateful. That your children are still alive. that’s a given. So if people are saying, at least you still have other children, or at least you had 18 years with him. 


no, just strike that from strike, at least from the vocabulary. There is no, at least.  


[00:49:26] Brenda: Good tip. That is a really good tip. Yeah. Wow. you have a really heavy job. The work that you do is very obviously serious and it’s beautiful, but I’m wondering because I Preach about self care all the time. 


I’m wondering if I can just like peek behind the curtain of Leslie and what do you do for your self care to keep yourself, whole and able to do the work that you do. And at the same time, you still live with grief from, from your husband. I do.  


[00:50:01] Leslie: Yes. And always will because I’ll always love Steve. 


It’s such an important conversation. We have to take care of ourselves. We have to take care of ourselves every day, every hour. And for me, Just the acknowledgement and the witnessing, it’s human connection, it’s validation for myself. there’s some selfishness, a little bit in this, that when I talk with other folks and they’re having similar experience to me, my experience is validated, and so I find that energy healing. 


In fact, a lot of us before we venture into difficult conversations or conversations around struggle or being with people in grief, we anticipate it to be much worse than it actually ends up being. That in fact, people are sad because they love so deeply. And that makes sense to us. They’re anxious because their future has changed. 


And when we translate that into common language, like anxiety is. Fear of our future, which has changed because my husband died. We understand it, right? It’s not scary anymore. Like I’m not scary because I grieve and love my husband. I understand that it’s hard. It’s really hard to communicate with people. 


Who are in that kind of deep grief because their whole life has changed and the way you communicated with them before may not be The same and sometimes I did have friends who said to me I don’t quite know how to be your support right now And oftentimes I would answer. Yeah, I don’t know either. 


So I guess we’re just gonna have to muddle through right? We’re just gonna have to figure it out together and i’m gonna need you to get in the darkness with me I’m gonna need you to not Ask me to come to your light. I’m going to need you to get in the dark and when we get in the dark, then we can move forward together. 


So yeah, it’s just, I think it’s just important to do the things that we need to do. I take a lot of baths, Brenda. I love my bathtub. I walk a lot during pandemic. I was averaging between 20 and 25, 000 steps. a day and I’m, that is way more than I usually do, but I walk. Oftentimes I will block the time after grief coaching sessions to go for a walk. 


Sometimes that means three or four walks a day. I just need to get out and, and see nature. I’ll admit I hug trees. I live in Portland. We love our trees and hugging trees is very central nervous system. Calming for me. so I, and I’ve got my, I am present with grief candle that always sits on my desk and reminds me that it’s really an honor. 


Right to be with people in their struggle and in their sadness. It is an honor and when I just Put all of my attention on that person And not worry about am I going to get the next question, right? Am I going to answer the next thing correctly? Am I going to say the wrong thing? Am I going to say the right thing if I just let it go and just Be and just listen then I find that I, I almost don’t need as much of the energy healing because I’m healing my energy in the process. 


[00:53:20] Brenda: that makes sense. Just asking for a friend.  


[00:53:26] Leslie: it’s important to do what works for you, right? If you sit down and think to yourself, like actually a 20 minute nap every afternoon would help. Or, sitting down with a nice cup of tea. And my journal for 20 minutes would help you got to figure out what brings you energy. 


And I will say, this is one of the, also one of the top things I do with my grief coaching clients, because grief is so energy sucking, as I mentioned earlier, it’s like that, we have that leaky bucket analogy when our kids were little and grief just takes everything out of the bucket. So we’ve got to fill it back up. 


And so we talk through what is your day like? What saps your energy? Okay. Taking the garbage cans out to the curb is so painful because your husband used to do that, that you literally end up on your knees on the curb. let’s find. A 14 year old boy in the neighborhood who wants to make a few bucks and let’s pay him to do that Those are things I had to do. I couldn’t to this day. I can’t wash a dish without thinking about steve He was my dishwasher Now I have a dishwasher and I don’t buy any plates or anything that can’t go in the dishwasher So you will not come to my house and be served on china. I guarantee you because he was my dishwasher and that just took I would literally end up in a puddle In the kitchen, if I did that. 


So we have to think through what, what do we need to do? What was it? Our person did that. We can offload that we can outsource, so that we can maintain our own energy. That is all about taking care of ourselves and all of those things matter.  


[00:55:02] Brenda: Mm hmm. It’s so important. Oh my goodness. this has just been so enlightening and so helpful I know it’ll be helpful not only to people who are In deep grief right now But also for those of us who are trying to put our arms around them and actually be helpful and not harmful so Thank you for all of that. 


I will point people to your website, which is agriefwarrior. com. I love your care packages. I’ve got to go look into those because I think that’s really, really smart. If you could give parents and anybody who’s listening, just a word of hope or a word of encouragement, what would that be?  


[00:55:42] Leslie: Oh, when I shifted my thinking of grief as something ominous. 


To grief as a result of deep love and everyday companionship, right? I just saw the world In a different light, I was able to find that energy, find that connection with other people who are going through something similar. And I, I feel like I can almost guarantee it, that there’s not a human on the planet who isn’t going through some form of grief right now. 


And we can find connection in that. So I just, I, I have a ritual where I put my hand over my heart and I remind myself I’m present with grief or I just sit for a moment and give myself five seconds, to hear my heartbeat, to remind myself I get to live this life, which, which Steve doesn’t. 


And it just gives me that extra little something to take the next step, however tiny it might be. So just know, I’m thinking of all of you. You’re not alone in this grief journey. and my heart is with you.  


[00:56:52] Brenda: Thank you Thank you so much. I’m so glad that you were here. I’m so glad that we met. I have a feeling we’re going to stay connected After this me too brenda  


[00:57:02] Leslie: and thank you for what you do, you know Finding other widows other women and men who had been through something similar to me Meant the world so the fact that you are creating this community and you have created this community and you’re and doing this podcast Just to bring that kind of connection and shared experience is so important. 


So thank you so much for what you do.  


[00:57:26] Brenda: Yes. Yes. it’s important work and I’m honored to do it. So I’ll be pointing people your way and Thank you a million times over. Oh, thank you, Brenda. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to go to the show notes, you can always find those at brendazane. 


com forward slash podcast. Each episode is listed there with full transcript, all of the resources that we mentioned, as well as a place to leave comments. If you would like to do that, you might also want to download a free ebook I wrote called hindsight, three things I wish I knew when my son was addicted to drugs. 


It’s full of the information I wish I would have known when my son was struggling with his addiction. You can grab that at brendazane. com forward slash hindsight. Thanks again for listening and I will meet you right back here next week.