Grief in the Raw
Ep. 1: Ten Things I Hate About Grief
Welcome to Grief in the Raw hosted by Kelli Holloway!
In this inaugural episode, get to know your host Kelli as she gives you the rundown on the ten things she hates about grief.
Social Media Clip courtesy of John Onwuchekwa:
Watch here
_________________________________________________
Connect with Kelli and the Grief in the Raw Community!
Visit KelliandCo.com
Watch on Youtube: Watch HERE
Follow on Instagram: @GriefintheRaw
- Duration:
- 41m
- Broadcast on:
- 29 Aug 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
(upbeat music) - Welcome to "Breath in the Raw," a podcast about navigating the bitterness of grief. I'm Kelly Holloway, and I'm grateful to be in community with you. So, I wanna start by asking a very important question. Where are you on your grief scale today? Now, I realize that I've not yet set the precedent of what the grief scale means. When I ask that question, I want to know, where's your mind? Where's your heart? How are you feeling? I ask this question oftentimes to my children when I wanna know how they're feeling emotionally. What can we talk about? What challenges can we face? And I understand that if you're at a 10, which means you're extremely heightened in your grief today, you're super sad, you can barely lift a finger, then we can't go as deep as we can. We can't go as deep as we should. We can't go as deep as we want to with our conversation. We have to go a lot lighter. On the flip side of that, if they're at a one, that means the sun is shining, they're feeling really good, they've got those endorphins going, then we can be more playful, we can do more. It's not as much of a heavy lift as it would be all the way to 10. This is gonna fluctuate, but it is a very personal number that you can assign to yourself and to others when you're talking about where you are with your grief, you're talking about the person you miss or the relationship that is no more. It's important to be able to assign it to a number and to let your loved ones know what your numbers mean and how it's relative to you. So for an example, when my mom first passed, I would tell my husband each day, "Just ask me, what is my grief scale? Where am I?" That way, you know what I can handle for that day. And I knew that portion had to be that portion. So if I would say my grief is out of nine, he would know, Kelly's not getting out of the bed today. "I'm gonna have to do all the heavy lifting. I'm gonna have to pick the kids up from school." On the flip side, if I say, "I'm out of two." Okay, Kelly feels like she can go out for a walk. She can go on a date tonight, she can get cute. All those kinds of things are helpful because it took that mental gymnastics out of me having to explain to him over and over. I'm feeling this way because XYZ. It was a quick check-in to let him know, "I'm either high or I'm low, and this is where we can go with our discussion, and this is how to treat me or care for me or show up for me today, based off of this number that I'm assigning." So again, I ask you, where are you in your grief scale today? My grief scale is at about a six because this is the episode one, and I am being very vulnerable and very honest with my feelings that I have been writing, thinking on, marinating over for some time. My mom passed October 3rd of 2022. And I almost stumble over the date and the year because it is beyond me to realize that it's almost been two years since I lost my person. So to go back and to think through those pages in my mind of how long it's been causes me anxiety. However, I'm out of five, six or five because I know that there's glory on the other side of that. I know that sharing my story will help someone else as they walk through grief themselves. So I'm even and I want to be honest with the fact that you may be higher on the scale or lower on the scale, but you're joining for a reason. It's all purposeful and together will slow walk from your 10 down to a one or your six down to a four wherever you want to be. I want you to know that the number you assign, your grief is valid and you have a safe space here. So here with the first episode, I'm going to do something that helps to calm my nerves and my anxiety, which you might think it's a flip side. I'll pour myself a cup of coffee. This is a ritual for me adding sugar in the raw to coffee, being intentional with my French press, slowing down time to make sure that I'm taking care of myself is super important. And I hope that it becomes a practice that we can do together. One, because I love coffee, two, because I love conversation. And I want it to be a safe space for us to share and discover new things about ourselves and about our grief practice. So today's episode is entitled, "The 10 Things I Hate About Grief." And unlike that popular movie of the 90s, there is no comedic relief assigned to it. There's no main characters to pick apart. There's just that heaviness of grief, but I promise to you, there is an upside. So I'll get into my list. And I hope that after this episode, you're prompted to write or share, discover, unpack your list of things that you hate about grief. Or if you have a loved one that's experiencing grief that you take the time to talk to them and ask them, what are the things that they hate, that they feel as though they can't share but should. So number one, navigating the new person that's changed on the inside who hasn't changed on the outside. I'll say that again. The number one thing that I hate about grief is navigating the new person that's changed on the inside who hasn't changed on the outside. There's not a lot of things that have changed about me physically since my mother passed. I actually locked my hair July 1 of 2022. I still have locks and love the journey that I'm on. My face looks the same. I still have the same cheekbones just like she does. I still have the same core unit. My two children, they are now age three and six. And my loving husband, we've been married for 10 years now. Not much has changed about the exterior of what I look like. But everything has changed about the interior. And so when meeting new people or even seeing folks that I know and love that knew me before and know me after, initially there doesn't look like there's any difference to me. So they don't know the questions to ask, to engage. They're not sure how to check the temperature of what's going on behind the scenes. But when I tell you that I have been changed down to the molecular level, that is fact. Obviously, there are a lot of things that happen when grief comes knocking. But what a lot of people don't tell you is that the internal struggle that you have to climb out of it to look for hope beyond it is really, really tough. When I say that I've been changed down to the molecular level, I don't get cold anymore. So I hate being cold. Like it's my Achilles heel. And being in North Carolina, the temperatures would get kind of chilly, you know, in the winter. But after my mom died, I would go outside without a jacket on. And my husband or anyone around me, co-worker would be like, Kelly, you're not gonna put on a coat. It's kind of cold. And I'd be like, I'm not cold. And my husband was super surprised because of course that's the person I spend the most time with. He was like, you're not cold, you're always cold. And it was then that I realized I don't get cold anymore. What does that mean about my body that the turmoil of grief has pushed me into this state of my body doesn't even do the same things that it used to do? And that was the first introduction to me that, oh, this is a new life. I am not the same person. And so a lot of those things that are different about me on the inside, they're now actualizing on the other side of the table. However, people don't know it. And that's a really hard thing to try to explain to someone where nothing is physically different. So I've heard a lot of people explain that when you lose a person, it's like you lose an arm, right? Physically, you can see that someone's arm is gone. But when you're in grief, you can't see or penetrate that unless you start to talk about it, unless you unpack it and talk to that person. But to the naked eye, everything is fine. And so to me, that feels very similar in everything changing on the inside, but the perception that Kelly is the same person, right? I am not the same, I'll get more into that later. Number two, the endless timetable. So I've read many grief books. I have talked to a lot of different professionals and therapists about grief. And one thing that we can all kind of hang our hat on is the fact that grief has no timetable. And that in and of itself is very, very frustrating. I'm big on knowing the end result. I also like to control things. So for instance, if I'm in a workout, and I've got a trainer, I'm gonna say to that trainer, I'm gonna give you all the reps that you want, but I need to know when is the end, right? So I need to know how many reps are you expecting from me? Because if I don't know how many you expect, I don't know if I can hold out, right? So if you want 12, you need to tell me 12. Don't just say start and I'll tell you when to stop. I do not like that. I need to know where is it gonna end? And so I micromanage my life that way, not a good practice, 10 out of 10, do not recommend. But for someone to tell me that there is no end, when I'm expecting one, when my central nervous system requires one, that is a really, really hard thing to adopt. So the endless timetable of you don't know if you're gonna be grieving for two months, two years, two decades. And when that is the heaviness that you feel and you just wanna know when is it gonna get lighter? How is it gonna get lighter? That endless timetable can seem like a death sentence. And I hate it. Number three, how it alters relationships to people, places and things. Cool, this is a big one. When my mom first passed, probably about three months after she left at the onset of a year I would enter into without her, I sat down and I wrote all the ways that my life had changed since her passing. In about five minutes, I had written down 39 things that had changed about my life in just three months. That's a lot for one person to consider, for one person to try to climb that mountain of the unknown. It changes your life. It changes relationships. It changes things and places. As an example for a place, I could no longer freely navigate and visit the places that me and my mother went to together. It felt different, not only is she absent, but her experience is absent from mine. So even if there is some parallel universe where she's walking into Belk 'cause that was our store, that's where we shopped southern style, right? If she's walking into Belk in heaven and I'm walking into Belk, we're not doing that together. I can't see the things she tries on. She can't tell me that something looks good, right? Those are the ways that alter our perception as well. So now, whereas I loved going to Belk, I loved shopping. That was part of my self-care practice. Instantly, I'm not able to do that and find the same joy. Now, I'm not saying I'm forever not gonna go to Belk. I love it too much and I still have a credit card. So I will enter, but it's gonna take some time. It's harder to conceive doing those things and going to those places without your person. Whether you are separated from them in death, separated from them in divorce, separated from them because there's an altercation that seemingly feels like it's not gonna be fixed. Your shared experiences are no longer shared. So you're going to visit those places without that person physically there, but they're gonna continue to stay on your mind. And that's a really hard pill to swallow. My relationship changed with family members and friends. A light example of that because there are also heavier examples, but a light example of that is my mother had this cohort of employees and coworkers from past. She was retired when she passed, but she had this network of friends and acquaintances that through her, we had a relationship, right? And so when she passed, I may have heard from those folks some more than often or some more than not. However, that relationship started to dwindle because she was the connector. Now that's not right or wrong, right? There's no wrong piece to that puzzle. However, if she's not the connector, she's no longer that person. I have no more connection to that person unless we super try hard to keep it going, right? And so if we're trying to keep it going, if we're being intentional about that, but then grief also debilitates you, it makes you super tired. So if I'm not motivated to reach out to that person and they're too busy and they've got their light going on to reach out to me, that relationship starts to become fractured and then over time it may be non-existent. So that's what I mean when I say it alters relationships and there may be those of us who had a fleet of individuals, a fleet of relationships, places, things that were associated with that person that we lost, that person that we mourn and that we grieve, that we no longer have access to. So it's not just the absence of that person. It's the absence of the practice that you engaged with that person on and that can feel really heavy. Number four, it's quiet and it's loud at the same time. I feel like I'm forgetting to call someone every day and I know that that's because I decided to talk to my mom. It gets at its worst when I'm in the car alone because a lot of times on my commute to work or to pick up the kids or to go anywhere at all, I would always call mom, see what she's got going on, see how she's doing. It would be first thing in the morning, late at night, we'd catch up. It was just a small interjection that meant everything that honestly I took for granted at the time. Now, when I'm in the car on my commute, again, the first thing that comes to my mind is I forgot to call my mom today. I haven't talked to her. Still, after almost two years, I don't expect that feeling to change. It's quiet because there's a stillness I no longer hear her voice. As hard as I try, that veil has not been lifted for me yet. But because I don't hear her, what fills the space is the loudness of her absence. So it's very loud when those grief moments come in and it can be triggered by any one thing. I could hear a song on the radio that reminds me of her. My daughter can have a certain look on her face that looks just like her nana and that triggers me. So at any moment, that quietness and stillness can be interrupted by the fact that the absence is so large and the absence is so loud. I hate it. Number five, the fear of making new memories without your person. I remember after my mom passed in October, what seemed to be maybe about two weekends later was the state fair. In North Carolina, it's a huge deal. We always take our families there and of course, I always would go with my mom. And even if she would not go, because as her caregiver, sometimes if she needed to go to a place that didn't have much access, she was in a wheelchair. So sometimes she would choose not to navigate certain spaces, even if she didn't physically go, I would always bring her back a funnel cake. She always wanted a granny Smith apple and she always wanted a apple turnover. So all those things, I would make sure that I bring back with me when we're coming back from the fair. I always went with her in mind. When we went to the fair and it was a very intentional choice to take that first step of going somewhere and creating a new memory without her, it was the hardest thing in the world because there's a fear there associated with, am I making the right choice in doing this thing without my person? I can't hear their voice. So I don't know what they would do or what they would want in this situation, be it something as small as picking out what to eat at the fair or as big as making a cross country move. It all matters. And so the fear was heightened by the fact that we would take pictures with the girls. We'd smile, we'd see their little faces. And on the other side of the camera phone, I'm thinking mom's not gonna see this smile. I'm not gonna be able to discuss this memory with her. She is forever not involved in the physical to our experiences day by day. And that feeling has not gone away. There is a sadness that's under the surface of every joyful thing I do. Every joyful thing my children do as well. When my daughter graduated kindergarten, she was so happy. It was an amazing day. We ate good, she looked good. We let her get her little hair blown out. She was so excited at the end of all of the excitement. Now we're also surrounded by loved ones. So the grandparents were there. Mike and I was there, little sister, Ava was there. She came up to me and she said, this just doesn't feel as special without Nana. I don't think I can do this. And it was hard because it was like putting up a mirror to what I felt in that moment. Being able to be height of heights, happy, followed by the low of lows that you can't share that thing with that person. That's a feeling that's really hard to penetrate. So in that moment, I just said, I know baby, I feel the exact same way. But you're gonna make it and it's gonna be a good day and your Nana's shining down on you. It's hard to calculate in your mind when that specific pain will be over. You want to feel joy, we all do. But realizing that joy now met with grief is forever bringing sadness into the picture. And that can be hard. So we've gone five things in. I want to introduce a new segment that is things that I have seen or things that guests have seen on social media that really put things into perspective for them or have really explained grief well. I am not an expert, I am an advocate. And so it's important for me to elevate other voices into this space that could help you think about your grief and think about your grief practices in a new way. We're challenging the way that we think. Changing our minds about a thing, normalizing, making sure that we're being intentional about how we think about something. So normalizing, what does that say? Normalize changing your mind about something once you learn a new thing. So the new thing that I want to share today is from John O. And he talks about coffee and grief. So I think the algorithm was listening to me. My phone has been listening to me because I've been talking a lot about coffee, I've been talking a lot about grief. So of course, John came across my feet and here's what he has to say. - Most people tend to avoid processing their grief for the same reason they avoid drinking their coffee black. They know that it's bitter. They dislike the bitterness. And so in an attempt to distract themselves, they load it up with all types of sugar and cream, even though they know three out of four of us are lactose intolerant. (audience laughing) So most of y'all don't know, coffee's not a bean. Coffee is a fruit, it's the pit of a cherry. This fruit takes on the flavor of its soil. The thing is though, it only lets the people that lean into the bitterness, enjoy the sweetness that's on the back end. So if you lean in and drink, what you'll find is there's subtle sweetness is on the back end that are only reserved for people that'll lean in. Grief is the same way. So many of us are in distraction experiments where we're trying to distract our senses from the bitterness of grief with sex and accomplishments and compliments and all types of stuff. And in an attempt to mask the bitterness of grief, the only thing that we do is disqualify ourselves from the prerequisite leaning into it that unlocks the sweetness on the back end. Coffee is bitter. Grief is bitter, but we don't have to stop there. Both of those can be bittersweet. - Whew, John, you said an entire word. And my brother, I would love to keep that conversation going with you. It is so impactful to be able to articulate the pain that someone else is feeling. And you have mastered that craft. You now have a lifelong follower in me. Thank you for letting me utilize your example and hold it close to my own. Okay, number six on 10 things that I hate about grief. How it robs us of our productivity and everyday task. Man, this is a big one for me because I have noticed that grief has stifled my creativity to the point that I feel disabled to do the everyday task of motherhood, womanhood, wifehood, all the hoods. It makes it really hard and challenging. I have explained to friends before that I feel like I'm in quicksand. I feel that at any moment I could be pulled down and out because of the emotions that I am carrying to the point that I want to get up, I don't want to move. I don't want to do the things that I know that I need to do. There are a lot of ways that I have become slower, slower to respond, slower to react. And I've even thought to myself, what is happening to my brain that I cannot process what this individual is saying to me? Am I unwell? And then I had to realize, no, I'm in grief. It's very different and hard to understand, but valid. So there are some things that I'm really bad at and my husband will be the first to tell you. I used to be like the most organized person when it came to our finances, our mail. I'm like the home's administrator. When my mom died, all of that got reallocated to him and honey, I'm so, so sorry for that. But I couldn't do it. Something about me could not continue to check the mail, email or snail, could not consider the different things that my family needed to do, make the appointments that we had to have. All of that got outsourced to grief so quickly. It was like this carpet got pulled from under my feet. And so whatever this means, whoever this resonates with, I want you to know that you're not alone. If you feel stifled, if you feel disabled, by what is going on with you and your grief walk, it will get better, it does change. I have heard before that grief doesn't get smaller, our lives get larger. I love that example and I'd like to offer my own to me. There's a difference between a sharp pain and a dull pain, both painful, but have you ever gone to the doctor and they're addressing a situation with your body and they say to you, is it a sharp pain or is it a dull pain? Now you may be on the other end of that table thinking, what kind of silly question is that? It's painful, it hurts when I walk or I move. But what that doctor is trying to assess is the severity of the pain and where it's most targeted. So a sharp pain is like this blunt force trauma, it's fresh, it's new. To me, that's what raw, fresh grief feels like. At this point in my life, it is more of a dull pain. It's still there, but it's under the surface. It's not as in your face. It doesn't trigger me as much as it did, but it is still ever present and I still experience it every day. It's dull, but it still hurts. Number seven, this is an individual journey that must be traveled alone. Now, some may challenge me and I welcome it in this sentiment, but one of the hardest things and one of the things I hate the most about grief is that no matter how many advocates you have, how many people who love you, who are trying to push or pull you out of it, it is an individual walk. Now, you can phone a friend, you can have someone to hold your hand along the way, but at the end of the day, just as we enter the world alone and we exit the world alone, we must go through grief on an individual basis. And because of that, it can feel isolating if we don't know how or when to ask for help. And so the very personal piece of this individual journey is that it's hard to carry that weight by yourself. Only you know the severity of your grief and sometimes it's so heavy and it's so sharp that you can't explain it to others. How in the world can you get help if you don't even know how to explain it to someone else? And so slow walking it, realizing that yes, it is an individual journey that you must travel alone, know that you can make that burden lighter and more attainable by the community that you're in and the people that surround you. Number eight and number nine. So this is a twofer. The instant maturity it evokes and the spiritual maturity it requires. I'll say that one again. On my list of 10 things that I hate about grief is the instant maturity that it evokes and the spiritual maturity that it requires. So what I mean by the instant maturity it evokes. There's no going back to that life of before. I felt like I was just all rainbows and lollipops and just leaping through the fields of happiness. I used to and sometimes I still do. Look at myself or explain to others about myself that I am a radical optimist. There's nothing that we can't do. There's no problem that we can't fix. And while to my core, I still honestly believe that it's so much harder to actualize that. I now am bringing more of a real list mindset that grief is hard and heavy and it just has to be. And to me that has matured me from a sense that I don't look at things in the same way. There's a level of stuff that I'm just not gonna sift through. Now there's a gift in that. That's something that I do appreciate. I know how valuable my time is and how important what I farm out mentally that I don't waste time anymore. That's maturity when you can put the phone down and spend more time with your family because you don't know when your last dinner is gonna be. It's also heavy because it's hard to think about life in that way and some may think, man, that's heavy, that's depressing. But it is a maturity that is pushed upon you the moment that you lose your person because now we're talking real life. That life is not this perpetual, they're always gonna be here. So it's very much so a maturity that is pushed on you and that maturity knows no age. So my listeners that have lost their parent or someone very special to them at a young age, that maturity is still valid to you at whatever age you were when you lost your person. So be it eight or 80 when you lose that person and you encounter deep grief for the first time, that maturity is pushed on to you before you're even ready for it. You now have to become an expert in all things dying. You have to organize a funeral before you're ready. You have to sit on the first row at a funeral before you're ready. All those things push you into this mature mindset that is really, really hard to navigate if you've never done it before. It also requires a spiritual maturity. So to me, my cornerstone is my faith. My foundation is my faith. I have to stay saturated in the word. I have to pray often. I have to do my devotional in order to keep up with the grief that I feel so that it doesn't take me under. And so because I know that God is my cornerstone, that God is the Lord of my life, if I'm not spiritually mature enough to have these conversations with myself and others, not self-aware enough to know that I'm in pain, it's only going to spiral in a downward situation. And so being able to realize and take a step back that spiritual maturity is required. And that is whatever spirituality that you choose, believing in a higher power that you have, is what is going to be paramount in you picking this very heavy grief weight apart. And so it requires maturity, it requires spiritual guidance, but also spiritual partnership. And so being aligned with others who think like you, who challenge the way that you think even is what's going to help make that spiritual maturity and spiritual muscles strong. And to close it out, number 10 on my list of 10 things that I hate about grief is the lack of advocacy and education around grief, particularly in the black community. Honestly, that's why I'm here. When my mom died, I went on the hunt for any resource, book, person, place that I could go to in my pain. That was very personal. And for me, I did not see enough people that looked like me talking about this, which made me feel like, no, I was going crazy. You know, there is this invisible cloak that I, as a black woman, put on each and every day that says, I have to be strong, I have to show up, I have to carry my family on my back. And in fact, it is an expectation that I not only have their care within the center of my heart, I gotta do it for everybody else. So as a caregiver, it was, well, your mom gotta move in with you automatically because she's sick and she needs you, right? Automatically, you've got to be the superwoman at work to save the thing or do the thing or start the thing because we know that you can handle it, right? And so not hearing others that look like me go through both holding grief, but also holding blackness was deafening to me. I felt like I was in this container, something to be experimented and picked apart because I wasn't hearing from anybody else that looked like me or very little that looked like me. So in this self discovery of finding out what I don't know and hearing from those because I know those voices are out there and I wanna be in conversation with them. And I also want for the person who looks like me that their parent just died yesterday, I want them to feel safety and psychological wellness when they are talking to someone who gets it, who gets the fact that we not only have to hold this grief of a relationship dying or an individual dying, but we also have to hold the grief of being black in America. All of that is valid and it makes it heavier and it's something that deserves to be unpacked. And so doing this with my pain on full display, I realize that it's going to help someone else realize that my hair looks like hers, my skin is this color of hers, she could be my cousin talking about this same thing. I want to encourage that person that you don't have to have those discussions alone anymore, that you deserve to find a space within your church or outside your church, within therapy or outside therapy, wherever you feel most safe, you deserve to have that covering and it doesn't just have to come with the cookie cutter, let's pray it away or let's therapy all the way through it. There are so many different ways to access resources and to access help that we have not even scratched the surface. So I'm excited about continuing that conversation with you and I want to thank you for being a part of my very first episode. I'm excited about the work we will do together. This is dope. I want to thank everyone who has believed in me to make this very first step that feels really big but really purposeful and I just want to keep it going and I want you to feel like you're at home within the discussions that we have together. I'm looking forward to having some great guests on the pod that can also talk from their level of perspectives. I want to lift up and broadcast black and brown voices to show that we are not just one or two, that we are many and those are some of the things that you can expect here. You can also expect tears, you can also expect laughs, take what you need, leave what you don't, share it with someone who needs it the most. Thank you for joining me, Kelly Holloway inside of today's episode. For a deeper dive, remember you can watch this episode on YouTube and listen on your favorite audio streaming platform. Make sure to like, share and subscribe. For more information about Grief in the Raw podcast and to connect with me, my special guest and the Grief in the Raw Community Forum, visit kellyandco.com. All links are in this episode's description. Tremendous thanks to the producer of Grief in the Raw, Miss Bethany Anderson, and major shout out to Jeffrey Smith who curated the soundtrack for the pod. (upbeat music) (logo chimes) (logo chimes) (machine whirring)