A Heart-Centered Approach to Grief and Loss with Suzanne Jabour

Picture this: the world as we know it grinds to a halt, and you're told not to come into work. Navigating the new normal, you're thrust into a state of uncertainty like never before. Join us as we sit down with Suzanne Jabour, a beacon of wisdom and resilience from Vancouver, BC, Canada, who helps us navigate this unfamiliar terrain with love, self-compassion, and heart-centered kindness. Suzanne unwraps the intricate layers of grief, drawing from her intimate experience of losing her son, Ben. As we meander through the complexities of grief, she encourages us to view these challenging times as a season of winter, knowing that spring, with all its vibrancy and hope, is indeed on the horizon.

Following Suzanne's heartfelt sharing, we tap into the transformative power of self-awareness and the therapeutic potential of journaling. Suzanne guides us along this path, shedding light on how to face our fears and shift our focus towards love. Her personal testimony serves as a reminder of the importance of acknowledging all emotions and the impact of sharing our stories in a world often uncomfortable with grief. As we venture further into this conversation, we uncover the courage in vulnerability and the significance of disrupting societal expectations around grief.

As we approach the end of our journey with Suzanne, we discuss practical ways to support those in grief, including the importance of holding space and witnessing grief. We challenge societal conditioning that urges us to carry on, instead focusing on asking, "What is the most loving thing I can do for myself right now?" Suzanne's wise words serve as a reminder: we are here on this planet to learn, grow, and find love, even in the most challenging moments. Tune in for an enlightening and comforting conversation that promises to shift your perspective on grief and loss.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Thank you for being here with me and welcome back. My name is Catherine Daniels and I love to empower people with spiritual healing and wellness. The best thing about retreat to peace is the gift of inner peace, greater love and joy. And during these times of changes and uncertainty in our world, nothing is permanent except our souls, and that's why we need to come together, traveling through one another's countries, creating a bridge, removing all labels and just finding our home in one world, as one people, and this is why our signature talk today is so important.

Speaker 1: 0:41

Today I have the privilege and honor of welcoming my guest, suzanne Jabbar. Hi, suzanne, hi, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being here, and I'm so excited to interview you because we have been going back and forth honestly for my audience for months, so I don't have an interview done, so I'm super excited we're finally here. But Suzanne comes to us from Vancouver, british Columbia, and has an incredible life journey to share with us. So hang in here with us and it's a difficult topic, but one that we definitely will get through together, and I just want everyone to know. You know we have our arms around Suzanne as she shares her story. So, suzanne, if I could have you introduce a little bit about yourself to our audience.

Speaker 2: 1:42

Sure, I am. As you said, I'm from Vancouver, I'm a proud Canadian and I come to share, you know, everything I know and have experienced about grief, which I know for many people is a topic that they're scared of, that bring up fear and worry and it feels taboo and uncomfortable and like maybe it's somehow contagious. So I'm here to you know, as Catherine said, to put my arms around you and welcome you into this conversation. It's such an important topic for us to be talking about and I feel like every time I go on a podcast like yours, where the intention is to just hold space for people, to connect human to human, that that's the place where we can have really powerful conversations about grief, because you and I are connected in a way that is safe, that is heart centered and that then creates a space for other people to just listen and to know that there is nothing at risk, no one is in danger, we are all safe, we are all loved and we can have this conversation in a way that opens up things we don't understand. Opens up things we don't know about how it really works for people because we don't talk about it. Opens up ways we can support each other better. And really my mission is to help us move away from fear and move into love, because if we come at this from love, then we really can do no harm.

Speaker 2: 3:22

And what I hear almost universally when I ask people about what holds them back from supporting someone who's especially in the early days of grief, where it's so big and scary and all the emotions all the time, as my daughter so brilliantly put it you know, if you can feel their heart from your heart, you can do no harm. If we are heart centered and we're coming with love, we will say the right thing, we will offer the right offer. You know we will support them the way that they need to. And when we're the one who's grieving, we need to feel that love and that self compassion for ourselves, because unfortunately, not everybody's ready to support us. Not everyone has the skill set or the mindset, or the ability or the space or the capacity, whatever is holding them back. So we really, you know, until we can make this big, you know, paradigm shift, we really have to provide that to ourselves, and so the way we do that is to lean deeply into self compassion and self love as our starting point. So, thank you, I'm excited to have this conversation.

Speaker 1: 4:28

Well, I mean, that was a home run right out of the gate. I mean, I asked you to briefly describe a little bit and you're just like wet and rare and no, that was amazing. It was amazing. Don't be sorry, I mean this is what we do here, so this is really amazing.

Speaker 1: 4:48

I know for this show this show actually started during 2020 and you know the pandemic and all of these things that were happening in the world, and one of the things that was very pronounced was that grief was abundant. You know, far and wide with, I think, honestly, every human on the planet, because their life had changed so much and whether it was job loss or losing a loved one, just relationships I mean, how many relationships have changed, you know, during the course of the last few years. So there's been a lot of grief and I feel that, you know, this heaviness has kind of been. You know this dark cloud that's kind of sitting over us and I say this often on the show we're in a season of winter and winter doesn't stay. You know spring is coming. We don't know how long it's going to take before we get to spring, but if we're an awareness of where we're sitting, then we have opportunity to look for the things that are going to help us get through.

Speaker 1: 6:00

You know this period of time and I think what you said earlier about being heart centered and just being in that space and having compassion, it really is for everything, you know, like you said. So, whether it's your relationships or the changes that have occurred over the last several years, just going into it with love for yourself and love for your fellow human, I mean that alone, just raising the vibration of where you are sitting in this moment and how that manifests and, you know, ripples out, is beyond capacity to explain, but it's so profound, so profound. So, thank you, thank you, thank you, because, out of the gate, you definitely hit the home run. So 2020, let's talk about 2020, because I know for 2020, like I said, every human on the planet was changed in some capacity. So maybe we need to start earlier than 2020, suzanne, but where were you in 2020? Like what was happening? And if you need to go back further than that, that's fine too.

Speaker 2: 7:22

Yeah, no, it's so interesting and I think you're so spot on in that sense that you know, one of the things I do with people is I encourage them to do a grief, like a loss inventory, and if you can think back to where you were when you realized that this thing we had watched sort of slowly moving across the world was here, right, I have a distinct memory. I worked on a TV show at the time and I literally had my hand on the doorknob to go to work and my boss called and said don't come in, they've shut us down. And we had one episode to go, the season finale and we did not shoot the season finale. And so for anyone who knows anything about how TV works, it's a big deal to not shoot your season finale. So when they were pulling the plug on that, that was really my first indicator that this was going to be really serious, and I think we all thought it was. You know, I remember my daughter at the time lived in Toronto, which, for those who don't know Canada, is at the Great Lakes, so she's about halfway across the country from where I am in Vancouver, on the West Coast, and I remember saying to her like I think you need to come home, like I don't want you to be in Toronto by yourself. We don't know what this is going to be Like. Just come with a couple pairs of leggings and some t-shirts and like your PJs, like she literally came with about a half of a carry on bag, like nothing. She's still here, right, like it just absolutely was life changing for so many people. And I think you know, oh gosh, we could go a million directions with this, but we're going to stay focused on grief.

Speaker 2: 8:52

But you know, one of the things I think that happened for us as a collective is we were forced to slow down. Right, especially in North America, especially in our Western culture, we were very entangled as a collective in go, go, go, do, do, do. Like we're all presenting these curated lives on social media. We're all living in our little silos. You know, and I think the thing that happened really with that, you know, with the restrictions and with us staying at home more, you know, more, like all the time, right, my house was all of a sudden my office and my gym and my theater and my restaurant, right, my, everything. You know we were forced to slow down and I think for a lot of people. That allowed us space to really see what was happening in the world in a different way. I mean, there were, you know, social justice movements that spring after the murder of George Floyd like none that I had seen in my lifetime I'm in my mid fifties I had never seen anything like that. It made me so hopeful. You know, we really all you know, looked at the. We're watching the environment. We were watching, you know, the world was literally on fire. There were, globally, there were forest fires, and we were watching, you know, the catastrophic environmental things that were happening and we had time to see what was happening different places and how the world worked for different people. Inequities were laid so bare, like they were so highlighted by how much care people could get, how much access people had to hospitals, and then over vaccines and all of that controversy. You know it was really interesting to watch from that slowed down perspective and so, absolutely, our lives were changed. We lost so many things.

Speaker 2: 10:31

I'm someone who lost a loved one. My son, ben, died that September of 2020. And I know that part of what weighed on him was seeing. I mean, he felt things very deeply anyways and had struggled with mental health for much of his life and I think for him to see so clearly, you know, the world was absolutely a mess, it was an absolute. On every level it was a mess and I think that that was really hard for him to watch and hard for him to see.

Speaker 2: 11:04

And so you know, I'm someone who lost a loved one, not to COVID, but you know, during that time, and what worries me, you know, when we think about kind of our collective awakening and our collective, you know, upliftment. I don't think that's word, but you know what I mean. You know what worries me is that we're bypassed, passing all of the emotions that come out of all of those losses. We don't even want to talk about them and I think, especially because it was a time of so much loss of human life, which is in our sort of stratification of losses, the one that we think, you know, as much as we think anything to be grieved the loss of a loved one does. And if we're being honest, we don't really want anyone to grieve about anything. It makes us very uncomfortable. We'd rather you not do it at all. But if you're going to, you can, for a loved one, hopefully for a very short time, preferably privately, not with anybody being disturbed by it. We have all this loss of life, and so people who experienced other losses, I think, felt almost badly about having a lot of feelings about them, and so what I encourage people to do is just embrace those also as losses.

Speaker 2: 12:18

Every time we have a loss, it will bring grief, whether it's a big loss or a small loss. Sometimes it's a change for the better, but even that brings loss right, and that loss needs to be grieved. It might take a moment, it might take. I mean, I'll be grieving Ben for the rest of my life and I'm okay with that. I've accepted that. So I'm not saying it's always going to be the kind of tsunami you get with the loss of a child or a loss of a close loved one or a loss of something really important to you, but there will be something, and I think that all of our desire to kind of push back to normal like that's the conversation we hear being had in, certainly in the media is you know, how do we get back to normal? Well, the pre March of 2020, normal doesn't exist anymore. There's no going backwards. That's not actually how life works, and we all kind of know that, but we really want it to be that simple. So the only way is forward, and I, you know, what worries me is that when we have this push back to normal and we just want to get back to what we used to do and, you know, get back to whatever we think is important If we're not acknowledging the losses we had and we're stuffing all of those emotions, that's a really heavy burden for us to carry.

Speaker 2: 13:35

And grief doesn't stay quietly in its box. It will lash out. It's, first of all, very patient and it will wait for you, and all of the grief that you have not acknowledged and integrated and dealt with will wait for another opportunity. And so the next time you have a loss, it will be more. It will be. You will feel it more, more than maybe you would have otherwise.

Speaker 2: 13:59

So that's one aspect of it, and the other aspect of it is that all that stuffed emotion eventually will lash out. That's what it does, you know. It sits in our body and becomes malignant, which is a whole different episode with someone far more, with far more expertise in that area than me. But what I see happening is a whole lot of anger and a whole lot of fear and a whole lot of laughter in the air and laughing out, and to me that correlation is so clear. This is unexpressed emotion that we're not expressing in a healthy way Now coming out in an unhealthy way.

Speaker 2: 14:32

So as a collective, we have a choice to make about where we go from here, because where we are right now feels pretty ugly and, as you say, like we're in the winter, like it is frosty, cold, it's hard, there's no, you know, if you fell you would break something, like there's no soft place to land.

Speaker 2: 14:52

And that's the choice that we each get to make every moment, every day, every all of those little choices that we make. We can move away from fear and into love. We can move towards feeling our emotions, and you know our, you know. You know those of us who grew up in a family and a system where we were frustrated to not feel our emotions are really good at it. My dog has decided now is the moment he must jump down. So you know we're really good at not feeling them, at stuffing them away. You know we get taught there's good emotions and bad emotions, which is kind of a bizarre concept to me, because all emotions are a message. They're all a message coming from our body to tell us something, to teach us something, to give us an opportunity to learn something different, to look at the world a different way, and if we stuff them, we're missing all that opportunity.

Speaker 1: 15:46

So it's so true everything that you're saying, and I look at the world in a sense of there is this culture, there is, you know, this going back to normal doesn't exist, like you said, and I think that's a misconception that people have bought into that. But, but, as they're starting to awaken to the fact that that is not going to happen, that is not a reality. That is where this fear actually plays into the life, right, because now it's. What is this new normal? What does it look like? And I think it's important to make mention that throughout world history, we have seen changes come about that were very scary throughout generations.

Speaker 1: 16:40

So you think of something like you know inventing a car, so we have a horse and buggy, and then, all of a sudden, somebody comes into the picture and says we have a car, we're going to put you on four wheels and a motor, you're no longer going to use a horse and carriage. And people would say that's not going to be my future, I'm not going to do that. That doesn't work. I can't trust that. And now everyone around the world knows what a car is, because that is what we use, right, and even that technology has advanced and has changed, and I feel like you know, culturally there is this adjustment period and there is this morning period, and recently I was brought into awareness that the highest population of suicide is actually with our elderly, and I was shocked to learn that, because you know, when you think about that, they're at the end of life and you know they're seeing life in such a way where they don't know what the hope is anymore, Right. So this, this deliberate attempt to take their life, it just saddens me so much because they have so much to still offer everyone and I would just say and pause right now that if anyone is feeling suicidal at all or have any thoughts of suicide, to please reach out for professional help and please get some assistance, because you don't have to do this alone. You can get support, get the help that's needed and it's nothing to be ashamed of. I mean 2020, the best thing that came out of 2020 is this heightened awareness of mental health, in my opinion, and the fact that people can talk about it more freely, and people can say you know what it's okay to talk about postpartum depression or losing a baby, or you know all of these things that we never could talk about before. So in that aspect. I do feel that this has been an incredible blessing for everyone on the planet.

Speaker 1: 19:04

But during the, you know, during the process of change, that's a very uncomfortable state to be in and I love how you just break it down Very simplistically, very black and white. It's, you know, getting yourself into your heart center and go into love to face your fears. And the more that you can do that, the easier it will get day by day and things won't feel as difficult as they are. Because what most people my through and through listeners know, most people do not know that when you're in a state of love, you're in a higher vibrational energy. When you're in a state of fear, you're in a lower vibrational energy. So when you're in that state of love, it's it's harder to break you and put you into fear. So it is.

Speaker 1: 20:05

It's very sound advice and very good advice, you know. But I think the age old question goes Well, how do I shift my state and go into a state of love when I'm feeling so depressed or, you know, saddened, anger, I mean all of these other feelings? So what would you advise someone? How, how can they shift their state and go into love?

Speaker 2: 20:36

That's such a great question and for me the best and fastest way is to face whatever the emotion is. So, so often our fear or our anger or our frustration is founded in a story. It's not generally real, right, it's not factual Right. So we, you know it. One of the things that happened to me very early after Ben died is I knew, you know, I could see myself, because I lost myself as well. Right, when your child dies, there's a whole identity destruction that happens. So I could see myself and my life in big pieces on the ground, like those big, you know, the 3D puzzles they do on Survivor, like those big kind of chunky puzzle pieces on the ground. And my arms were already full of all the ones I could carry. I couldn't carry anymore. So I had to be really discerning about what I was going to carry with me and what I was going to leave behind. And I was very clear, I knew very clearly I wasn't leaving Ben behind. That was not optional, right.

Speaker 2: 21:47

All of the things we say to Griever's, you know you should get over it or get through it or move on. All that stuff All has the subtext that somehow we're leaving our person behind and I wasn't going to do that, but there were a number of ways that I was in the world that I had no capacity to be anymore. So all of that kind of performative stuff that we do when we're being, you know, we're reaching other, we're living into other people's expectations for us and not our own truth. I had no capacity to do that. I had no capacity to pretend, frankly, anything. I'm sure you know the vastness of my grief in those early days and the way that I was kind of living it out loud, because I just knew if I didn't live it out loud I would shatter like a glass that gets hit by that note from the opera singer right, I was just going to go, pshh. I could see that very clearly for myself. But I knew I had to be conscious and curious. And so when we're talking about making that shift from fear to love, that for me was the two step thing. So the consciousness is about allowing all of the emotions to just be, not trying to resist them. You know, I think for grievers, especially in that early acute phase, when the emotions are so big and we're so overwhelmed and you're in this tsunami and you can't breathe, that's where we start to feel fearful because we start to worry that that's never going to end. And the reality is that if we can look at it, if we can face it, it does, it flows through, it goes on by, you know you, slowly.

Speaker 2: 23:24

For me, I love water metaphor, so we're going to do an extended water metaphor. Here we go. So, for me, I realized that I wasn't actually like a piece of driftwood, I wasn't like Flotsamangetam, I was a cork. So what that meant was, every once in a while, because of the way I was made, I would bob to the surface, I could look around, I could gas the breath, the way it would come, and I'd be under again. But I would know, as I spun around, that eventually no idea how long, but eventually I would be back to the surface.

Speaker 2: 23:56

So, you know, turning to face those emotions, being really conscious of them, being conscious enough to want to name them, to feel into okay, but what am I feeling? Yes, sadness, obviously. That's easy to identify when you're in grief. But what is that about? Oh, it's the despair, it's the loss of, you know, the future that we were supposed to share, all of the things Ben was supposed to be here for, you know the role he was supposed to play with his sister. Right, I never wanted an only child, I always wanted two, so that when I was gone they would have each other. Well, now that's gone. So there's so many losses compounded on top, on top, on top. So it really was being conscious of each emotion as it came and trying to feel into.

Speaker 2: 24:38

And you can't do this from your head, right. So all of us Westerners who are so great from the neck up, you can't do it there. That's the worst news I'm going to share with you today. You can't do it from there. You have to let yourself go into your body and feel it and like where is it? Is it in my gut, is it in my throat, is it in my shoulder? Like where is it? What is it? So all kinds of curiosity about that. And that was kind of the conscious piece, because I knew I couldn't stuff it. I knew this grief experience was too big and if I stuffed it I would explode. I wouldn't survive it if I stuff it. So I couldn't. And then the curiosity piece is where we start to get to look at where is that? So where is that coming from? And if you're in those very. I want to be really clear. If you're in the earliest days after the loss of a loved one and you're in the point where you're listening to me thinking this is the most ridiculous conversation you've ever heard, I want to share that.

Speaker 2: 25:35

In those early days my curiosity was about how do I breathe, right? So if you're there, if you're laying on the couch swabbing and you can't figure out how to oxygenate your body, I am with you. I have been there. This will not last forever, I promise. So the curiosity in the early days absolutely was like oh my gosh, how do I breathe? How do I just like, stop this cycle of overwhelm? How do I disrupt this stress cycle?

Speaker 2: 26:07

And then the curiosity became like how do I do these impossibly hard things? When someone is dying, you have to do unspeakably hard things. You have to phone strangers and repeat the most horrifying thing that's ever happened to you on the phone to close accounts. You have to go deal with things. You have to deal with landlord Like unspeakably horrible things have to be done in those early days. So the curiosity for me was okay, well, how do we do that? So my daughter and I made our rule. Our rule was we would do one hard thing and the rest of the day the to-do list was to breathe. That was it. So figure out what your capacity is, figure out what you can do, and that curiosity allows you to then be expansive instead of constricting. And if you can be expansive, if you can hold that curiosity even about the tiniest thing.

Speaker 2: 26:58

The curiosity is about how do I feed myself today, how do I get from my bed to the couch? How do I show up at work? So many people are having to go to work in those very earliest days how do I show up at work? That's the kind of curiosity it can be very self-centered in the best way. How do I care for myself in this moment and how do I remind myself that in this moment, actually everything is okay, like and I? That became one of my mantras.

Speaker 2: 27:27

Okay, you feel the overwhelm coming and all the emotions are coming in. With them comes anxiety. For many greavers that I'd never had felt anxiety before. Anxiety was the new partner of mine, you know so. Okay, where is that coming from? How do I unpack that? How do I just stay curious about what's going on and how can I resource myself? Who can I rely on all those things. So that, to me, is the path from fear to love, conscious of the emotions, allowing them to be wherever they are in your body and staying curious about them. Are they coming from a fact? Are they coming from a story? Are they coming from something we're worried about? That is a whole, because what happens with fear? It's really smart. Fear is really smart and it will build on itself. So if you start down that fear path, the fear will hook into another fear and hook into another fear, and hook into another fear, and hook into another fear and hook into another fear.

Speaker 1: 28:24

And they all get a little bit bigger.

Speaker 2: 28:26

The good news is, love does the same thing. So if you can just start with a little bit of love, as you said, that little bit of love turns into more love, turns into more love, turns into more love. And that's where we build resilience, that's where we build our ability to hold big, scary things and not stay overwhelmed. We all get overwhelmed sometimes. Let's normalize that we all get overwhelmed, that sometimes the emotions are too much and sometimes we get overwhelmed. We just need to, like, scream into a pillow, that's totally normal, and so we do that, and then we go okay. So I am really frustrated about something. What is it? Is that really the truth? I'm not sure. Let's explore or give yourself a pity party. You know, I fell recently and I managed to break my left ankle and my right wrist. It was very skillful and hit my head, anyway. So I gave myself a day pity party. So I'm all about the temporary pity party, and then you have to get back to curiosity. It's the only way.

Speaker 1: 29:28

Well, I'm so sorry to hear that you fell and you had all that happen to your body. I mean, you know I had actually fell. Well, last year I fell down a flight of stairs and that that impact to my body, oh my goodness. I think as we get older, it just definitely makes it harder to recover. So I would say it's okay to have that pity party, Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 29:55

Whatever it is, yeah, and we have to give ourselves permission for that too, right? Like I'm not suggesting that you not allow the. You know that you go. Oh, you know I'm not allowed to feel that emotion. No, I want you to feel them all, the ones on the good list that your parents wanted you to feel all the time and your teachers and everyone taught you how to feel those. And the ones on the not so good list. They're all good. They all have something to teach us, yeah, and with all of them we can hold that space of curiosity and figure out where in that emotion is the love.

Speaker 1: 30:29

So true, and I feel that the piece that you didn't mention here, that I'm going to make mention, is just doing these things, are actually showing love for yourself. Yes, so acknowledging where it's sitting in the body, making yourself aware of how you're feeling in your emotion, in your body, all of these things and they've done studies on people with trauma and what it does to the body and on a cellular structure we're able to identify our traumatic experiences because we know exactly where we were, we know the details of the room, we know the details of the people that were around us. All of these things that most people would think well, how, how do you remember that? Like, how do you know that? But if I said to you, where were you when you heard about 911?

Speaker 1: 31:29

Immediately you can pull it back into your memory bank and you know exactly where you were, who you were with, what you were doing, what was playing. You know whether it was a radio, television, if you were in the car, whatever it was. But there's a reason for that, because it's stored in the body. So the fact that you're saying to the audience get centered with yourself and figure out where the grief is sitting in the body and then, as you stated earlier, having that journal and journaling it out and getting it down on paper is actually extracting it from your body so that you're helping to release that. And there's so much power to journaling. And I know I've talked to so many people and they say I don't like to journal.

Speaker 1: 32:23

I don't want to do it.

Speaker 2: 32:25

I'm not a great journal or I'm terrible at it.

Speaker 1: 32:28

Well, my, my advice, my advice is always the same. So I tell everyone the same thing Just get yourself it doesn't matter what it is if you want it to be a notebook or just a piece of paper, whatever it is and, honestly, what I do is I just set my phone for a couple of minutes and it maybe it's just five minutes and the first day and just write whatever's coming to you, like if you're thinking to myself I don't want to do this, I don't want to journal, this is stupid. Whatever your thoughts are, then just put them to paper.

Speaker 2: 33:06

But then your journal starts with that entry.

Speaker 1: 33:08

Yeah, but then, but then. But then you can also put it away and then go back in a couple of days and if you want to rip it up, throw it away, whatever, that's totally fine. But if you start to do this each day and you add a little bit more time each day, you'll notice after a few days you're actually going to start pulling stuff out of your body that you didn't even know was sitting in there, and the most beautiful thing about that is that you can again put it away, go back to it later, and I know so many people who have done this exercise and literally after a period of time they go back and they're like, oh, my goodness, I did not see this pattern of behavior, I didn't connect these dots, and now I see that, you know, something I've been doing actually isn't serving me or isn't working for me, and they're making those shifts to go into their authentic, true self, because what they now realize is that there were things that they were doing that maybe they didn't have boundaries for and maybe they were, you know, putting more pain into their body than necessarily needed to be. So there's. So just journaling alone actually helps to put love back into you, you know, helps you to love yourself.

Speaker 1: 34:35

And I think I think that's so instrumental, especially with the grief process, because, as you stated earlier, in those early days it's a very confusing time. You're going through a lot of things and you're also you're also kind of fumbling through life like you just are, and people are reaching out and you're not sure how they can support you because you're not even sure where you are in that moment sometimes. But it's okay to give yourself grace, it's okay to allow yourself to move through it on your timeline, because really this is your timeline. There's no timeline, but it is your own.

Speaker 1: 35:25

And one thing that you said that I do think is really important is that people expect you to just go right back into work and, you know, go right back into where you were prior to losing someone. And that always has bothered me, because I feel like you have to spend some time, you know, moving through this process and, like you said, if you don't acknowledge it, then one thing will just pile on to the next and to the next and to the next, and then this is where we start to see a lot of breakdown, and mental health is when that pile gets too heavy and overloaded, and now we're at a breaking point and that's where I think you know people really do need a lot of love and support and I really appreciate you sharing, you know, these tools to help people, because I think they're so, so important, but I feel like you want to jump in, so go ahead.

Speaker 2: 36:35

No, I just wanted to rough up a couple of things that you're saying, and I think you're exactly right. That time, especially an early grief, is so confusing, and part of why it's confusing is because we don't talk about it. So all the symptoms that we have, which really are absolutely normal, we don't know they're normal because nobody tells us about them, right, because we all end up kind of grieving Because society doesn't really want it to be public. You know, we all end up kind of trying to grief privately with a little bit of support, and we don't want it to be as anyone. It's just this whole big mess, the whole way we grieve is so I don't know. To me it makes no sense at all.

Speaker 2: 37:17

So what I would say to people in those early, early days and you know for so for me there's those very acute days which is like right after, when you're just barely functional and you're in survival mode. That's the first thing that happens. And then early grief really is about the first two years. So I know people want you to be over it and through it and done with it and all the whatever they're saying to you. Those are the people that are not speaking from their heart, because if you were speaking from your heart, you would never say that to anybody. Let's be very clear. But it is that sense of having to give yourself permission to have your own timeline, because society wants us to be done in days or weeks. They don't want us to be done in months or years slash never right. So we do have to give ourselves that permission. And I think if you're someone who's got someone in their life, who's in those early days of grief, there's a lot of things you could do to support them. There's so many. So if you're the griever right, you probably have brain fog, you probably have digestive issues, your sleep pattern is all messed up, your relationship with time is all wonky, you have no idea who you are. You don't understand why the rest of the world is continuing on while you live in a post-apocalyptic nightmare Like this is all very normal, and if we talked about it and shared when we're experiencing it, then it wouldn't be so scary when it happened to us, right? I love to think about the difference between the beginning of life and the end. So if you think about when you get pregnant and we're talking about a healthy pregnancy and I want to acknowledge not everybody has a healthy pregnancy and if you, like me, have experienced the loss of a pregnancy, that's absolutely devastating and I understand that.

Speaker 2: 39:01

When you have a healthy pregnancy, from the moment you show, the whole world appears to show up to touch your belly in the grocery store, to tell you their birth story, to tell you the best tool they had, to tell you what diaper bag to buy, to tell you what kind of diapers, what kind of bottles, breastfeeding, bottle feeding, what kind of formula, like all the things. And I never understood as a pregnant woman, why other women insisted on coming and telling me their horrifying birth stories. I never got that. I'm like, how is this gift you're giving me? Until I was in the middle of my own a little bit scary birth stories and then it was like, oh, okay, but like that woman in the grocery store, I've no idea who she is, but she had a scary birth and I'm like, oh, I'm having one and not so okay, because other people have had them. So we share all those stories.

Speaker 2: 39:42

When you have a child, people want to come and tell you how to raise it. That mean you don't necessarily want any of this advice or attention, but you're getting it from all sides and you can pick and choose what makes sense to you and leave the rest. At the other end of life, there's crickets, there's nothing. People don't come and say, oh, like what if you came up to someone who was newly grieving to say, oh my gosh, did you know that there was going to be brain fog Is it just of issues? And you wouldn't be able to sleep and when you slept you wouldn't wake up rested anyways, and that you would like lose track of time and you'd have to talk yourself through how to have a shower. Did you know all those things Like, but we don't talk about it.

Speaker 2: 40:18

So then, when it happened to you as a griever, you're left thinking something's wrong with you and you don't want to say anything about that. Because now, like for me, I was like okay, so I'm a grieving mom, I've lost myself, my life is shambles and my muscles currently don't work, so I also can't open jars and my brain doesn't understand anything. So I also have immediate onset Alzheimer's. So I don't really want to make any of this to anybody because I sound like there's something wrong with me. Now, for me, I just chose to share all that with everybody because I couldn't hold it all myself. So you know you were all going to hear about it. But for most of us we don't have that permission and we're not giving that permission to ourselves. So that's the one problem.

Speaker 2: 40:59

And then the other problem is for the people that want to support you if they haven't had a significant loss themselves, they don't understand what you're going through. They don't know what to say because they know on some instinctual level, right, we're evolving as a collective and we know all the old things we heard said are probably not helpful, and that's a good instinct. Don't say them they're terrible, but we don't know what to replace them with. So then we make a full circle, loop back to that heart centered place, right? What if you just spoke from your heart to the other person's heart? Right? I got to the point where I had to stop listening to the words people said because some of them were so hurtful and just listen to the energy. And if I could just listen to, like, they're trying to say something thoughtful from their heart, and I just heard that, instead of whatever words they were trying to put on it to make it better or make it okay or whatever, that really helped me.

Speaker 2: 41:48

But if we can come as the helper with that and then make really specific offers. I love how you identified how people want to show up and help you but you don't even know what you need, and that's so true. So many people say, oh, you know anything you need, let me know. Like I'm here for you, I want to help you. All those things those are lovely things to say. If you really want to help the person, you need to make a specific offer Everything practical that you need in your life, if they need in there. If you're going grocery shopping, offer that. If you're mowing the lawn, offer that. Are you doing the weeding in your yard? Would you love to do the weeding in mine? Offer that, right.

Speaker 2: 42:27

We all know all those practical things we're doing every day. I was talking to someone a few months ago and she had some angelic neighbor go up and do her laundry. She came on Wednesdays, took the bins of Dury Laundry, brought everything back on Thursday, folded ready to go like did the linens, did everything. That's an amazing gift. And then, of course, I'm thinking how did we do laundry? I think we just bought extra underwear. I think that's what we did. Terrible, I know, but I was like we cannot keep up with the laundry. This is not working. What are we going to do?

Speaker 2: 42:57

So, all those practical things, a specific offer, preferably something you like to do. That's how we help each other, that's how we connect with each other. And if you can offer something that you're doing anyway, then for those of us who've been raised to be fiercely independent and not a burden, that helps us accept your help, right. So if you can phone and say hey, I'm going to the grocery store. Do you need milk or bread or eggs or whatever you're getting, as a griever, even in those early days, I could say I don't think so, but let me go look in the fridge and I'll tell you what I do need. Or I would know oh no, but I do need bread because this morning I couldn't make toast, I had to have crackers or whatever it was. So those kind of really specific offers are super helpful, super helpful, and all of it has to be griever centered. So you're offering. If they're saying, no, that's okay, offer again later. Or say is it okay with you if I continue to offer, and let them decide.

Speaker 1: 43:53

Yeah, and even sometimes just sitting with someone holding space can be so powerful.

Speaker 2: 44:02

Yeah, grief needs to be witnessed. So that's the other problem that happens when we live in a grief phobic and a grief-illiterate culture is we don't get to be witnessed. And it needs to be witnessed. We can't do it by ourselves, right? I mean, none of us can become ourselves by ourselves. We all need a support system and especially in grief particularly, it needs to be witnessed.

Speaker 2: 44:23

So if you're someone who has that emotional intelligence and the vulnerability skills to be able to say you know, the best supporters for me were the people who said, like I don't know how this works and I don't know what you're going to need and I don't know how to help you. And this is horrifying. And I'm coming anyway, and can we just sit or can we go for a walk, or can I just bring you a coffee or you know whatever your beverage of choice, a cup of tea? And that was amazing to just have people who would just show up, no expectations, no desire to fix it because you can't fix it right. And that's the other place we get stuck because we're so good as a culture at like identify the problem, strategize, make a plan, execute the plan, fix the problem. None of that works in grief. So all our best skills and the places we feel the most comfortable don't work. So then we have to go. Then we're looping right back right.

Speaker 2: 45:15

Curiosity, love. What does love say I should do? If I was going to do the most loving thing for this person, what would it be? That's a great and, as a griever, what's the most loving thing I can do for myself? How do I love myself in this moment of overwhelm and post-apocalyptic nightmare? How do I love myself?

Speaker 1: 45:35

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean just to ask that question. Yeah, it's a really great question because it does give you a different perspective in changing and shifting where you may be thinking you're being helpful but maybe you're not really being helpful because you're not coming from the right place, like you have a good intention, but it's a matter of shifting where you know the wording and where it's coming from. So I think the point that you're making about meeting it to be witnessed is so profound because, to your point, society kind of makes you stuff it all down and you're supposed to just carry on and everything's supposed to be fine.

Speaker 1: 46:22

But I think that's where people get stuck, because they feel like, well, I'm not fine, and now, because I'm not fine and I'm feeling fragile, I'm different, I'm not strong, so I'm weak. It's like all these scripts that start going in the head and it's really not any of that. It really isn't. No, it's like undoing the societal conditioning and just allowing yourself to be authentic in your heart space of where you're sitting, and being okay with that for as long as it needs to be. I mean, it's a process and sometimes, sometimes because people don't have a strong support system they may have to lean into finding counseling or finding a support group or finding something other than just sitting in it by themselves. Go into something that will have that support with you and help you and surround you with people that are going to love you through it, because they too either have been in it or understand it and can assist in that process.

Speaker 2: 47:34

Yeah, you can't do it by yourself. It's impossible.

Speaker 1: 47:38

So for you. When did you know, suzanne, that this was going to be your path to help people with grief? That's so interesting.

Speaker 2: 47:50

I actually knew that fairly soon. So one of the things that I did, because I am not a happy journaler, but I also had so much spin in my head and it was overwhelming. All the things that were happening to me and what's going on was so overwhelming and I just knew I needed to get it out, which is the power of journaling. But I started writing about it and sharing that on Facebook, as you do right in this social media era. So just sharing it with friends and family, because, also, this all happened for me in the time of COVID, so we were in lockdown and restrictions and all those things. So people, you know we couldn't have a big group of people come to the house, which in many ways, was a blessing. So I started writing and sharing it on Facebook with friends and family and the response I got from people was universally oh my gosh, I'm learning so much from what you're sharing. Thank you so much for talking about this, because nobody ever does. I can really now I can understand how I could help people better. I can understand more you know, for my own grief, where I might have missed pieces, and so that's why I'm still feeling what I'm feeling. It just was this overwhelming response that what I was able to do was so needed and I absolutely understand that not everybody is able to do that. That's, for me, was not actually a magnanimous choice at the beginning, it was a survival mechanism, but it's become so powerful and really a way for me. You know, I had this very clear sense and I heard someone else I think it was Ocean Robinson listening to him the other day and he said you know, sometimes terrible things happen and this terrible thing happened to me and I was not going to let it be for nothing. I was very clear this was not going to be for nothing. And if me sharing what happened and how it operationalized, what happened in my body, what the symptoms were, you know how I found support, you know how people supported me the best way, what I'm learning from other people they need, if I could share all of that and start to disrupt this conversation, then maybe that would help other people. And so over time, you know I'm now two and three-quarter, you know, just over two and a half years after Ben's died, and it's really become now my mission, like it's so clear to me that grief doesn't need to be as bad as it is for us right now, because of the culture around it, because of the societal expectations around it. So if we can disrupt those, if I can help to be a catalyst to disrupt that and to help people open up conversations and to help people think about it in a different way or approach it. You know it's incremental.

Speaker 2: 50:35

I'm not saying that today you're going to be able to go oh, I just feel loved when I think about grief. That's not how it works, right, where I'm all about baby steps to success. So the next time you have a loss, maybe we practice with the smaller ones, right? What if you said you know, here's a great example. We have people in our lives all the time we have losses that aren't of loved ones.

Speaker 2: 50:54

So what if you knew someone who was applying for a new job and they were really excited about it? They could see their path like it. You know we all make up a big story immediately right of what the future is going to be. When I get this job, you go to the interview, you think you've nailed it and then you don't get the job. Our gut instinct, like our cultural conditioning, tells us what we should say is it's okay, you're so talented, you'll find a better job, there's another place for you. That wasn't the right fit, all of those kinds of things.

Speaker 2: 51:22

What if, instead, we said something like oh my gosh, that must be so disappointing. I know you had this whole idea about what this job could mean to you and you were so excited about it and it seemed like such a good fit and I'm so sorry it didn't work out. Yeah, what if we said something like that? What if we could detach ourselves from do, do, do, go, go and look at the emotional reality, which is that's disappointing. And so, instead of trying to buoy the person up and make them feel better which we can't do anyways, can't make somebody do anything, can't make them feel better you can acknowledge what might be true and then you're getting them permission, you're creating a safe space for them to have emotions, you're leading with love, you're doing all the things.

Speaker 2: 52:14

So practice with the smaller losses, because I'm going to tell you I know, like me in those early days, grieving mom, grieving out loud, I am not a good first assignment. Don't start there. Start with the smaller losses right, because if we could practice there and if we could be honest with each other there. Then, with the bigger ones, we have a little bit of comfort, we have a little bit of confidence, we have a little bit of sense of okay, maybe I could stretch and try here. And if you're faced with really big losses right now, baby steps, baby steps, baby steps, how can I find love in this moment? How can I release the fear? What's under the fear? Right Under the fear, is disappointment.

Speaker 2: 52:56

Under the fear is frustration. Under the fear is isolation. Right, most often under the fear is shame and isolation. So how do we disrupt those? Because if we're in shame and isolation, we can't learn anything. Right, right, and I think we're on this planet to learn. That's why we're here. We're not here to just like doop to do our way, and no one is going to ask us if we got our to-do list done, right. We're here to learn how to be better humans, and how we be better humans is we learn better how to love ourselves and each other.

Speaker 1: 53:26

Absolutely so. Here you are two and a half years later and at this point, the grief process for you with your son Ben. Where do you feel you are with that?

Speaker 2: 53:43

So my aim with grief is integration, because I'm very clear that I will carry Ben with me the rest of my life. He will have a presence in my life. He does every day. I feel actually pretty close to that, and what integration means for me is that more often than not, I think about Ben and I remember him, or I feel him with more love than pain. So what that means to me is, yes, I still have days where I cry because he's not here. I still have days where I miss him terribly. I expect I will have those days for the rest of my life and that's okay. More often than not, I feel so much more love than pain.

Speaker 2: 54:30

So that, for me, is the goal, and I feel like I'm pretty close to there, and I understand that life's journey is a journey of healing. So I will continue to heal, I will continue to be curious, I will continue to learn, I will continue to see him all around me and find ways to honor him, because he's part of my life. You know, when you're talking about a biological child, he's literally part of my body, like a part of my body is no longer on this planet. So, yeah, there's a gap there that can't be filled, and that's okay. I don't expect to fill that. I don't really want to fill it Because I want to know that there's always space for him.

Speaker 1: 55:16

It's really beautiful the amount of courage that you have to bring forward with this experience and, as you're talking, you know I can feel the love. I can feel Ben with you. I know you're saying it, but I actually can feel it and it's just very beautiful. And, as you stated, he's always there with you, he's always working alongside of you and the fact that you can do what you're doing, given the circumstances, and put this out into the world, the way that you are, is really a testament of your character and who you are as a person and even a mom, like truly even a mom and I just, I just feel like it's just so powerful, like everything that you're doing, and I know that he's very proud of you as well, because it really is life changing for so many people.

Speaker 1: 56:21

Every person that's listening right now is really impacted. You know hearing your messages in your tools and ways to help. So I just really appreciate and have so much gratitude and can't thank you enough. I do wonder if there's anything on your heart that you feel like you still need to share with the world about this journey, or maybe you know something that can help people going through this journey of grief. Is there anything on your heart that you would like to share?

Speaker 2: 57:00

What I would say to people who are grieving is it's okay. Everything that's happening to you right now, in this moment, even though it feels horrifying and terrifying and like it's never going to end, is okay, and your person, your loved one, whoever it is, they are always going to be with you and if you can lean into that, there's a great amount of peace.

Speaker 1: 57:30

Yeah it's really true. I mean, I can't express enough how true that is. It's just so true. So I always ask my guess. One final question and if I were to pick up your earth angel feather off the ground, what would your message to the world be?

Speaker 2: 57:57

I'm trying to be succinct, and you might have discovered already that I'm not very good at that, so my message would be it's all about love.

Speaker 1: 58:09

I think there's a mic drop happening right now. I mean it's really true, like that really is the statement right there, like it's really true. And I think, if and if, I think, if every human on the planet could learn that valuable lesson through life, what a different world it would be.

Speaker 2: 58:34

Right, yeah, one choice at a time, it's all about love.

Speaker 1: 58:37

It's so true, so true. Suzanne, thank you so much for sharing this time with me and my audience and just can't thank you enough, you know, for your vulnerability, your courageousness, your impact and just leaning into, like you said, something really uncomfortable and just taking you know and shutting the light on that to make it a better space for people. So very much appreciated.

Speaker 2: 59:09

Thank you. Thank you so much for opening space with this conversation. It's so important and I feel like if we can have it and other people can hear it, then you know we're just gonna, we're gonna start to shift it.

Speaker 1: 59:21

It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. I think we are shifting for sure, so definitely, and every, every little bit is a pebble that creates that rippling. You know, one by one. So we're on our way, but thank you, thank you, thank you and, to my audience, this is Catherine Daniels, with Retreat to Peace, reminding you to live your authentic life with peace. And, as always, retreat to peace and we'll see you next time.