How we change as a community is just I think so crucial to being able to create an environment where we don't have to have not only not have shame about our loss, but not feel like we have to protect others from who we are because we're still in a state of mourning.
TS: Now, I want to dig in a little bit deeper here because you're saying, "I don't know what to say. Well, that's not the right way to go about it; it's your presence that matters." But, I don't know what to write in the card. I don't know what to say when I get on the phone. It's one thing if it's a close friend and I can just sit next to them, but for people who are not in that immediate circle I just don't know how to reach out in a way that makes sense. I'm so overwhelmed with sadness and I don't have the kind of connection. I don't know what to do. What would be your advice for those situations, which I think a lot of people find themselves in a lot of the time?
PO: Yes, well, I think again simple is good and that is it can start with an authentic, "I am sorry that you are going through this difficult time." And, that I think is the shortest version of connection. Beyond that is—if you want to—I want to hear more about your life with him or her, about what this has meant to you. I want to be able to listen, but I think the really initial response is to just—and it may feel overstated, but there's not many other ways of saying this—is, "I am very sorry. My loving condolences to you about this." Then, [do] not go further; [do] not say, "And, I know exactly how you feel." Or, "I know it's going to get better." Just, stop with the acknowledgment of your sorrow for their sorrow.
TS: OK, I'm going to be a little challenging here Patrick. You're the expert, but I went through an experience of loss and I got many cards that said, "I'm sorry for your loss." And, I noticed at a certain none of them touched me or penetrated. It was like, "Oh." I was like, "Everybody knows to say now, 'I'm sorry for your loss.'" So, I have 50 cards that say, "I'm sorry for your loss." And, none of them really touched me.
PO: Right.
TS: Those cards didn't touch me.
PO: Yes, well, if you look at that and I agree that can be—that's kind of the most simplistic and short thing to say. But if you look at that from what you wished you had heard, let me try and take that back to you: What do you wish you would have heard?
TS: Something more personal, "I know how much blah, blah, blah meant to you." That might have helped if there was something like that, yes. It's almost like Hallmark got a hold of, "I'm sorry for your loss."
PO: Right, right. I agree. And I mean I see that again as a starting place, but I think something more personal is that I know how much you loved him or her—or again, not "I know," but, "I imagine your life without him or her will be very hard or different." Something that does have more personal touch to them.
Or if they knew the person to say, "I knew who he or she was as best I could in your life and what an absence or what a hole that may be for you." Those kind of things take it up a step again without trying to overprescribe anything that needs to happen. And then I think the next level is indeed the more personal and that is, "Tell me more. Tell me how you are."
TS: Now, having sat in the counselor's chair and heard people share with you the damaging things that they heard in the grieving process, can you just summarize for our listeners some of the things that were really—these are the things that reported historically have just been so painful. Don't do these things.
PO: Yes—the don't—some of the things I've heard—I mean, the most consistent thing is that it feels minimized. What the response is, is to say, "This is not that big a loss." I mean, that's the implied—is that you know we know you and you're going to get fine and you're a fighter—things that again just change the acknowledgment.
Now sometimes—and I think I tell a story in the book about a woman who came to see me whose baby had died and one of the relatives says to her, "You know, God must've really wanted that baby more than you." Well, that's damaging. The poor woman had to really work through the question of [whether she was] being punished.
You can get things that are an edge like that. Again, I'm not able to judge whether that woman had bad intent—I doubt if she did—but it was the kind of thing that ends up with somebody having to now think through their own character. "Is something wrong with me, did I do something wrong?"
I would say the majority are not hurtful like that. The majority are just in some form minimizing or, again, a cliché that tends to simplify it. And all the clichés usually have a spin towards something that's better—that it's more positive. "He or she's in a better place," or, "At least they got to live a full life." Those are not necessarily—depending on your beliefs—untrue things, but they're not where I am right now. Where I am right now is in the deep missing and pain of this relationship of my life that's lost.
TS: Now, and another comment you make is that often people say something like, "Please let me know if I can help." But, that can sometimes not be the most effective thing because you're not really offering any actual help—you're just kind of throwing that out without any follow-through. I thought that was interesting because I know sometimes when there's a loss I either say something like that or I think to say something like that, because I want to help but I also feel just kind of ineffectual, and I'm probably not going to do anything. What's your suggestion around that?
PO: Well, actually do something, you know to say—
TS: Oh, that!
PO: Yes, that. It's like, "I'm going to bring you dinner next Thursday and if you want to visit, we can visit. If not I'll just drop it off." Or, "It looks to me like your grass needs to be cut and I can get that done for you." Or, "Do the kids needs to be picked up?" Look [and] kind of use your radar to see if there isn't something to do rather than that kind of open-ended offer—because, again, I think [it's] well-meaning. But, very few folks are going to follow through with that. So, I think if your intuition is working for you, you should be able to see something that might be done and then actually do it. And then do it again.
So, the bereaved I think don't want to have to solicit the help they need. They can and they may, but it's just good to have it offered. If you get turned down, don't personalize that. Better to have offered and you may learn a little bit more about what they do need. I do think that's an often-stated, often-made statement that isn't necessarily over time become sort of meaningless.
TS: I think one of the traps that a lot of people fall into—I know fall into it—is just avoidance. I just sort of avoid that person somehow, because I don't really—I just avoid. And it seems like that's actually the opposite of the acknowledgment that they really want.
PO: Yes, and the avoidance can come in a couple of ways. One is, "I don't want to make them feel worse by asking them how they're doing." Well, let them tell you that they don't want to talk. I really would encourage folks to err on the side of being told, "You're giving me more than I need," than for somebody to be as isolated as they can get.
Yes, I think it's important to approach and make yourself a note if you have to, to say, "It's the anniversary of the death. I need to make a call." Or, just an email, "I was thinking about you today." Or, "You know, let me take you to coffee. I didn't know your dad very well. I'd like to hear some stories about him." Just reaching out I think is offering such the kind of support we ought to be giving each other when we're going through this.
TS: Now, there's one sentence I took out of the book that I want to hear you comment on it—it has to do with the kind of listening that you mentioned bereaved people really crave and need. And here's the quote: you said, "Listening with deep attention and compassion literally changes something in the brain of the person being heard." I thought that was so interesting. What happens in the brain of the person being heard?
PO: Well, you know we in the therapy business have been doing what we've been doing for a long time without really much scientific evidence that it's useful. So, aren't we lucky that now we have all this brain science that's coming out? We can actually take pictures of the brain and see that maybe something's actually happening.
So, I think what is happening in the brain is that deep acknowledgment and recognition opens up the mind and what we would say is it sort of creates new neural pathways—where I can just get said what I need to say, have it acknowledged and supported, not have to defend or self-criticize, and it really has a powerful effect on just the state of mind that we're in because it's that loving, caring, holding attunement. Those of us who've done the parenting thing you know we learned that 50 years ago in terms of how do we listen to kids.
You get a whole lot further if you're able to listen and reflect than sometimes guiding and coaching. Something happens where just my humanness and your humanness connect. Really, what's probably happening more than anything is just the sense of safety—that I can feel safe with this person as I tell them what's inside me, and thus we're in a relaxed, not un-painful state of mind, but we're not in an anxious state of mind that feels unsafe because we feel like we're going to get judged or criticized or abandoned in what we're doing.
So, I do think if we summed up, "What does that kind of listening do?" it creates safety. How does our mind respond with safety? It opens up. We're able to hear ourselves and understand and really create our own self compassion because we understand that what we're experiencing is what happens when we love someone.
TS: There's a chapter, Patrick, in Getting Grief Right that you call "The Culture of Positivity," and you're looking at our contemporary Western culture and how it handles grief and mourning with this emphasis on, "Get on through it! You're strong!" I'm curious how grief and mourning have been approached in other times and other cultures, and what you think our contemporary culture needs to learn from these other times and cultures.
PO: Well, we looked probably at in our culture pre-industrial time when life was more in the community, and those who were bereaved were honored for a period of time. You remember the wearing of the black or the black arm band.
So, those who were grieving were noted in the community as going through a special time. The theory would be that when industrialization started and communities sort of collapsed and everybody sort of crowded in, there wasn't any time or acknowledgment of that. So, I think we did probably have good acknowledgment and rituals in the community at a certain point in our own culture that have changed with modernization.
You can certainly still read some of the anthropology of other cultures that really do take time out and create rituals for the ones who are grieving and help them process that over time.
The culture of positivity—we write a little bit in the book about the history of that and it's deep, deep, deep in our culture. I'm not making a statement that there's something inherently wrong with positivity. But, when you begin to label emotions as either negative or positive, then we would likely label the emotions of grief as negative. And that's dangerous. That's again suggesting I'm doing it wrong.
The label of negative or positive emotion really should not be applied to many of our human experiences. It just is what we are experiencing. In this culture, we have to fight—and I'm one of many, many voices who are trying to say we need to have a different way of treating people who grieve and not see that they are wallowing or stuck in negative emotions, or they're not being positive enough. The other thing I think we inadvertently do is reward people who look like they're not grieving and we'll call them positive. Well, I can promise you many of them are just presenting like they're not grieving because it doesn't feel safe, and when the day's over and the door is closed, they've got to be with their sadness over their loss.
You can kind of hear that in language. "How is he or she doing?" "Oh my gosh, they're doing horrible. They're just a mess." You know: "They can't really get up and function." Speaking of their grief, "How is he or she doing?" "Oh they're great, they're back at work in a few days." "Really? So it's a positive person."
I think our language—not necessarily by intent to harm—it sort of reinforces that if you're doing well, then you're a positive person. But, that doing well may mean that that person is just having to shut down everything they're going through.
For listeners: be conscious of knowing that you don't know how somebody is doing and how they're presenting may be what they've got to do in a certain circumstance to get through the day. By all means be careful to not label their grief and their grief process as something that's either positive or negative. It just doesn't led itself to that.
TS: At this point in your life, Patrick, how do you honor your grief if you will? What do you do in relationship to your baby son Ryan that you talked to us about, or any grief in your life?
PO: Well, we were just at—every day on the anniversary of his death, I don't work. I haven't done that every day since he died, and that was May 17. So, May 17 my wife and I were, spend our time at the cemetery and we have two or three family members—my mom and my dad are both buried near my son. So, we make that trip to do that.
This book has really been that. It's been a way of honoring him and there's a deep desire I have is for folks to see that here I am all these years later. And in the process of writing this book, I just had so many days where a surge of sadness would come and this sense of, "Gosh, today he would be 36 years old. What would all that look like?"
I'm very conscious of when you lose someone as young as he was there's a "who he was" and then a "who he was supposed to be," and so I'm very conscious of that.
My lovely new Japanese daughter in-law at Christmas—this was just kind of caught us off guard—she said, "Let's do something today that's in my culture. Can we take food to the cemetery?" "Well, yes, we can do that." She'd never been to the cemetery to see where our loved ones are buried. So, we packed up the family and the grandkids and off we went to the cemetery on Christmas day, and we put a cookie on every grave. It was just the sweetest thing.
In her culture they—several times a year—go to the cemetery and honor their ancestors and do so in very defined ways. And one of the ways they do that is to take food to leave for them. So, she brought to us a real gift. We'll do that every year. We'll load up on a holiday and go to the cemetery and leave some food.
TS: Now, one of the things you emphasize in Getting Grief Right is that we each have a unique way of grieving—that there's no one path to grief. Why is that so important for people to understand that—that each of us has a unique way of grieving?
PO: I think that's all still in the idea of making sure we are careful to not be self-critical about how we grieve. We talk about the idea that we—several things happen. One is we have a unique relationship. We have a unique attachment. So, that's part of our uniqueness.
The other is we have our own personality type. How we are wired in our basic cells is going to have a lot to do with that. So, that uniqueness is to not be competitive or comparative with how you think you ought to grieve or how you see other people grieve, but again to own that for yourself as, "This is who I am. This is my story." And although there are certainly within a family many overlapping stories, there still is a sense of uniqueness to it.
We really emphasize that uniqueness to bring out the point of attachment—that attachment is what is at the basis. We cannot again grieve who we're not attached to and we attach because we love and because we're bound to attach. We look at that uniqueness both in terms of how we are, who we are, the circumstances of the death, the life stage where we are. All of those are part of our story. So, when we talk about that what we're really trying to do again is help folks deepen their story. It's not stuff they don't know—our desire for the book is to bring that out in some ways that may have not been evident.
TS: I want to ask you Patrick kind of a reaching question, if you will in a certain sense—I noticed being with the book Getting Grief Right, as I was reading it I reflected on various losses in my life. But I also tuned into a feeling of grief about species loss and the environment, and other collective issues for the whole planet. And I thought to myself, "I wonder what Patrick O'Malley has to say about getting grief right when it comes to the grief we feel about the environment and our collective."
PO: We were specific in our approach to deal with death loss, but there is really such importance in understanding living loss in the same way. That living loss is things like you've just described—what's going on in the world that saddens us; what's going on around the world that saddens us; what happens to the environment; fractured friendships; divorce. There's just so many living losses.
What I would say is that's again going to be unique in terms of who you are and what you find you're attached to. So, if you notice those feeling of grief related to sort of a sense of the environment or the species or the culture or whatever it is, I think go back backwards a bit and say, "If I am feeling this sadness, then it is describing to me an attachment that I have to certain parts of the world, to certain parts of my world, that are either in jeopardy or are dying, and thus I am going to be sad about that." There is nothing again unhealthy or diagnosable about that. It speaks to the fact that your heart takes in what it takes in and attaches to it, and in that you've created a bond. And when that bond is threatened by extinction or death or whatever it is that's our natural response—is [to] again have that sense of loss and sadness.
TS: What do you see—having worked with so many people—is the shift that happens when we connect to the idea that our grief is a function of our attachment or our love? How does that change the griever?
PO: Well, what it does I think is take the pressure off. And it's [harder] to argue with, "Now that I'm sad, it's about my love," than, "What's wrong with me?" I think it's important—I'm going to steer off on this for just a second to talk about complicated attachment.
I mention that in the book. I see many folks who wonder why they're not grieving, or why they may even be feeling—and this is a very hard thing for folks to say—a sense of relief. Well, it's the same principle, and that is that that attachment was complicated. That attachment—if you want to even call it that—may have been dangerous.
I get a lot of folks who come in and say, you know, "Somebody in my life has died and I ought to be feeling more than I'm feeling." I get the opposite rather than, "Why am I feeling so much?"
Well, when we walk into that story, typically what we're looking at—or what ends up happening—is that the attachment itself was in peril because it wasn't safe. It's the same sort of relief I see with people who realized their sadness is about love. I see a lot of relief in folks who understand that the fact that they're not grieving is not a character flaw—not grieving like they thought they would, but is really based on an attachment that was complex, and maybe an attachment that was even painful and damaging.
So mostly—to answer the question—what I see is relief that, either direction—either, "Why I'm not feeling more than I do?" or, "Why I'm feeling as much as I do?"
TS: Well, don't a lot of people feel relief when someone who's been ill for a long time or an elderly person dies and there's a sense of "They're out of their suffering"?
PO: Right.
TS: How does that fit in with what you're saying?
PO: Well, that's a sort of relief usually based on a loving attachment and that is compassion for someone's suffering. For somebody's soul to be released from their body is a relief. Now, I still hear some folks saying, "That doesn't feel right. I feel guilty for even thinking that."
But again, if you look at it from the point of their love for them it was their deep pain for their pain and their suffering. So, to again attach that back to love and to understand that your loved one was in pain makes that sense of relief not feel like you're feeling something wrong.
TS: There's one thing I want to highlight here before we conclude our conversation. You were talking about recently going to the gravesite and offering a cookie—Japanese ritual to the beings that have been deceased in your family. And here's something you write about in the book that we can think of grief in a different way as quote, "An ongoing relationship between the living and the deceased." That really got my attention—this idea that when grief comes up in our life, it's part of a relationship between us and the deceased. That really touched me, and I wonder if you can comment on that.
PO: Yes, the sort of clinical way of describing that—or at least a model—is the idea of enduring bonds—that our bonds don't stop after death. When you look at the steps and stages in closure model it almost, if not does, that it seems to imply that the bond is broken because of death—that there is no more ongoing relationship. And so, I'm clearly in the camp of enduring bonds and that honoring of the relationship—that remembering, that thinking, writing, rituals, whatever those are continues that relationship in this lifetime.
Other cultures probably do that differently and maybe more than we do. And I do think in other even subcultures in this culture, that's a very acceptable way of thinking about it. But, I believe those two words are a really lovely way to put it—and that is it's an enduring bond. It's not a bond that ends because of death. And yes, to stay in that process of honoring that in whatever way feels like its honoring is a very healthy place to be.
TS: Finally, Patrick, you wrote Getting Grief Right with a good friend of yours and coauthor Tim Madigan. As I was reading the book, one of the things that touched me was how when we feel our grief in a deep and pure way, it can connect us with friendship, and how much we love certain people. I wonder if you can comment on that—the connection between feeling our grief, honoring it, and friendship.
PO: You know there are—we didn't say this specifically, but let me—I think it's a good time to talk about the power of support groups as an example of that. I will hear some folks who connect with others who have gone through loss who were strangers to them at the time of the death create a lovely intimacy. And they will say, "This feels to me closer than some of my friends and family members, because we share our loss together."
That is so important as a part of a community, and when you hear somebody talk about their loss and you have had your loss, and there is intimacy, it's just a lovely, sacred, deep intimacy. That's certainly the experience Tim and I have had with each other. We've had our losses and we had friendship for many, many years. We just kind of kept working at this and it's been a wonderful, bonding time for Tim and me through this to have shared our losses with each other and to take this message to the world.
I think it's as deep a community that you can have when you have that kind of connection of love and support and compassion and reality-sharing, and telling your story with each other. That's what we hope to happen out of this is—that folks will open up and tell their story and receive story and create that really—as you described it—just wonderful, deep, loving, intimate connection with each other.
TS: I've been speaking with Patrick O'Malley. Along with Tim Madigan, he's the author of the new book Getting Grief Right: Finding Your Story of Love in the Sorrow of Loss. Patrick, thank you so much for your true heart and for all of the energy you put into writing this beautiful and hopeful book. Thank you so much.
PO: Well, thank you Tami. I appreciate this time very much.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Thanks everyone for listening. Many voices, one journey.
You can listen to the audio recording of this interview here.
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What a great article! I really appreciate what Mr. O'Malley has to say. My husband's mother passed a few years ago and in dealing with his grief I realized that trying to say "the right thing" is nearly impossible. The platitudes and cliches are meant to make the giver feel better, not the receiver. This article has helped me understand how to carry out my role better, to be more supportive of my husband. When someone feels such intense grief and you don't, it's very uncomfortable. You feel guilty, you want to make them feel better but instinctively know you can't. This article has opened my eyes, thank you!