The Complex Tapestry of Immigrant Grief with Vera Snow

Discover the poignant world of immigration grief with Vera Snow, a spiritual director whose life was irrevocably shaped by her parents' flight from Czechoslovakia. Vera's intimate understanding of the hardships faced by refugees becomes the centerpiece of our latest episode, where the past's urgent fight for survival meets the present's journey towards healing. Her unique perspective as a child of refugees offers a profound exploration into the layered emotions that accompany cultural displacement and the forging of new identities in unfamiliar lands.

Woven through our conversation are the delicate threads of cultural identity, traditions, and the balancing act between assimilation and heritage preservation. I reflect alongside Vera on the personal tug-of-war of growing up with Czech customs in the embrace of America, capturing the nuanced experience many immigrants and their descendants navigate. We delve into the sense of loss felt during cultural adaptation, the building of communities that become surrogate families, and the often unspoken emotional toll that shapes the immigrant narrative.

Closing with a heartfelt discussion on the universal themes of grief and storytelling, our episode emphasizes the transformative power of shared experiences. We examine how narratives from veterans to public figures like Padma Lakshmi serve as vessels for understanding and empathy. Join us for a journey through the shadows of grief to the unexpected joys that can be found in embracing the full spectrum of our histories and selves.

Contact:
www.asiliveandgrieve.com
info@asiliveandgrieve.com 
Facebook:  As I Live and Grieve 
Instagram:  @asiliveandgrieve 

To Reach Vera:
Website:  www.griefenthusiast.com
Publications written by Vera:
● When You are Coping with Infertility
● Eight Life Lessons I Learned from the Ricochet Heart of a Narcissist


Credits: 
Music by Kevin MacLeod 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to, as I Live in Grieve, a podcast that tells the truth about how hard this is. We're glad you joined us today. We know how hard it is to lose someone you love and how well-intentioned friends and family try so hard to comfort us. We created this podcast to provide you with comfort, knowledge and support. We are grief advocates, not professionals, not licensed therapists. We are you, hi, everyone.

Speaker 2: 0:28

Welcome back again to another episode of as I Live in Grieve. Yes, yes, yes. I say it every time, but I mean it every time. I have a great guest for us all to chat with this week. Vera Snow is with me today. Hi, vera, thanks for joining me. Oh, thanks for having me. Absolutely Before we get started, I ask all of our guests to do this, but I wonder if you would just introduce yourself to our listeners, tell them a little bit about your background.

Speaker 3: 0:53

Absolutely. My name is Vera Snow and I am somebody who I just embrace grief. It's something I've just come to own in my life as I've grown older. It's just something that has enveloped me my whole childhood into adult life. Basically, I grow in the shade is kind of what I call it and as a immigrant, I'm a child of refugees. We call them immigrants a lot of times, but I have learned that refugee is very different, because it's an escape. You're escaping your homeland. You're not just immigrating because you want to learn French or something.

Speaker 3: 1:39

You know, you are literally escaping, and so it's just something that is just part of my DNA and I've just correlated it over the years to kind of look at grief as kind of like upside down joy. I've come to realize, I guess, and I went into I was going to go into psychology growing up because I was just kind of fascinated by the way my family was. There was depression, a lot of stuff, trauma stuff. I just didn't understand. But I ended up going into more of like a spiritual side of things. So I became a spiritual director in my adult life and then I did get like just something to add to it, a master's in human development. So it's kind of like a combination of spirituality and psychology and it's just something that just built my interest and built kind of my background to approach my life that I just had trouble understanding to become like a. It's like a celebration of my background.

Speaker 2: 2:46

Yeah, yeah. Now you mentioned a couple of things that intrigued me immediately and let me tell our listeners to that. You reached out to me because you had a topic you wanted to discuss and I was immediately fascinated and you kind of termed it immigration relief or immigration grief. I'm sorry, please edit that. I'm sorry, immigration grief. And now, especially since you've clarified a difference between immigration and refugee, there would have to be a huge difference between the two because of a feeling of desperation and even running for your life, so to speak, with the term escape. So I wonder if you could maybe let our listeners know a little bit more how you really kind of connected the concept of being a refugee or part of a family of refugee and how you describe that is grief. For what reason do you feel that grief is connected?

Speaker 3: 3:45

Yeah, that's a great, great question. The way it's connected is so. My, both my parents were from Czechoslovakia, Now it's called the Czech Republic. They grew up under Nazis and my mother left. They escaped. My grandfather's actually a wanted man by the Red Army and so they ended up in a German refugee camp. And then my father. He escaped in the 50s under communism and so, even though, like they didn't, they didn't come together, they met in Chicago, which they termed Czech Chicago. I love it.

Speaker 1: 4:22

I love it.

Speaker 3: 4:23

A lot of Czechs there, yeah, and so I think that is this underlying sadness that I as a child could not describe. I just it just enveloped my, my, everything in our, in our home, and then, you know, of course it spreads because they all find each other, so you have like a community of Czechs, and because I've learned that I'm very empathic, I absorbed this grief and I didn't know what it was. Right, and it's this longing for home, it's the only way I can describe it. It's you had a home, but your family was not really present. Right, because this longing just takes kind of over. And so I've heard grief being described kind of like a. You know, it could be like a wave, an ocean wave, and you really can't stop it Right.

Speaker 3: 5:21

So you learned to. You learned to swim Right, and I never really necessarily when I look at you, know that kind of grief. I've had other grief that comes up over like a wave right, but this was just kind of like a pond. You're just in it all the time.

Speaker 2: 5:38

It doesn't really go. You're treading water, you're not really swimming.

Speaker 3: 5:41

Yeah, you're just kind of. And then you're just kind of, you kind of make friends with it because it becomes normal. That's the other thing. It's just normalized. And then, you know, as I grew and got out of my family system, I realized like, wow, you know, it's different. Other families don't have this, you know. And so I was just fascinated by like what, what is that? I find it, when I run into people who are immigrants or refugees, I can, I can feel it. I can usually feel it in their voice or just there's like an aura about them. There's just this, this sadness. That is just very, it's just not great, it's just real, tangible, yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:24

Do you feel then that you were more or less absorbing grief from your parents because of their overwhelming grief and you were just kind of especially being empathic, but you were just kind of absorbing that into your own body, into your own system? And if we could for a minute go back to what I have used dozens of times, is a very, very simplistic definition of the word grief so it incorporates all losses is that grief is merely a normal response to an unfortunate event. Now, that's extremely simplistic. But if we just think of the, the tone of that as being it's unfortunate, shouldn't happen and even to the level of it's traumatic, it can be traumatic, but it's, it's a reaction to a loss.

Speaker 2: 7:15

So if you think for a minute, if you have to escape your home, your homeland, all of your traditions, your culture and everything and go somewhere completely different that you don't even know what's there when you get there, you don't know if you'll be welcome or ostracized or even killed. You may not be accepted. So there is all of this that goes in. So then I think anyone can understand why refugees would experience grief because they have lost everything they have known. Maybe they've been able to bring a few possessions with them, but with the most part, they've had to leave everything behind, and many of them are lucky that they may have been able to bring their children with them all the way if their children were small. So if we think of it from that standpoint and think also about how you mentioned that you allowed grief, either you allowed grief to grow around you or you allowed yourself to let grief become part of you.

Speaker 2: 8:16

I know I have many of the same feelings. Grief is a huge part of my life now and I love that. You call yourself a grief enthusiast. I call myself grief ad-kit because I can't imagine being excited about grief at all. However, if I think of where I am now in my life, that would make me be excited about grief, because it was grief that brought me here Exactly.

Speaker 3: 8:40

So there's, this whole.

Speaker 2: 8:41

There's this entire transformative property about grief, if you can allow yourself to get to that point.

Speaker 3: 8:49

Absolutely, absolutely. And and to your observation, yes, I absorbed the grief and the community and all that. But then as a child of immigrants and I, whenever I find somebody, I have a great friend. She's Greek and there's this bond we have because we have our own grief, because our parents aren't really Americanized, so we eat funny food, we speak funny languages at home and the biggest thing too was like you kind of are not parented really great either because they don't know the traditions here. So growing up, you have one foot in the door of one culture and then you're living in another and so you're always kind of like who am I? You know, and because you're, you're kind of not feeling at home either any, because your family is out the door somewhere else and then you're trying to navigate. So growing up as a teenager, I did things that they had no idea what was going on. They didn't understand those things. So there is that grief that a child of immigrants takes on too Sure, and I know I worked with a place that did counseling and I remember there were all these.

Speaker 3: 10:10

We have a big Somali population here in Minneapolis and one after the other you'd have these Somali families coming in and they wanted to do this traditional psychology testing on them. You know. So it's always like analyzing, you know, depression, anxiety, and I'm looking at these kids and I'm like you just need somebody to talk to to understand you, what you're going through. Your family has you're. You're going to school here. Your family is, you know, right out the door again back in the homeland and you're just trying to navigate things. So like, of course you're going to be depressed, you know. But it was just like why aren't there more services to just kind of let people talk and how to acclimate to all of this?

Speaker 2: 10:53

Yeah, that's a great question. What services are there that specifically will help refugees Exactly?

Speaker 3: 11:02

Yeah, you know they're a community based right and they deal with the food and you know housing and you know all that stuff and that's all great. But you know, luckily, my parents, you know they kind of acclimate, they're educated, but that way we didn't need housing and stuff. But you know it's a loss, just it, and it goes, it just keeps going. You know, every day they're reminded, every day they're reminded they're not home. You know, yeah, it's, it's just constantly being in that, in that wave of grief.

Speaker 2: 11:35

Right Now. Did your parents, to your knowledge, did they continue with some of the traditions that they grew up with? Yeah, holidays or festivals, anything like that. Did they continue those and introduce those to the family? Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 11:53

We had all of that, and so that's another point that you're making. That is really always fascinated me, because you would have a group. Well and this is probably in all immigration cultures is you'd have a group that would say, okay, we're here now, we're just going to acclimate, we're not going to teach our kids anything. And that certainly went on in my community. Growing up, we had the checks that, like their kid, they're like Nope, we're just doing English, you know. You know they're just, we live here, you know. And then they had my.

Speaker 3: 12:20

My family was in the camp of we're going to teach them a check, and I very much appreciate it. My dad had a horrible accent and he's like why would I teach my kid bad English when I can teach him good check? And you know, you picked it up, you picked it up on the streets, you know, as a kid in the neighborhood, you know we're sponges, so you know. And so they were always worried is that going to somehow, you know, hurt their brain or something? Now we know that not at all, you can learn multiple languages.

Speaker 3: 12:47

So so there is and then there is also the whole idea of access. Okay, access rooting, I call it. It's too much of your roots. You are so bombarded. Sometimes I have a friend who's adopted and she always laughs like she's always trying to find her identity and I'm like I'm sick of my identity. I could not stand any more identity. We used to go to Prague every other summer and it was great. I met my family in roots. I get it, but I was like but I live here now I want to explore America. Yeah, so that was a grief for me too. Why can't I just be American?

Speaker 2: 13:35

Let's get over it, that's an interesting perspective that I was just trying to wrap my head around, because if you talk about grief being the loss of something and yet you're a very young child raised in a family who has emigrated from somewhere due to war, whether it's a worldwide disaster or anything like that you really almost have nothing that you can lose. You have to gain stuff, you have to gain a heritage, you have to gain cultures and traditions, whether it's in your new home or your old home. You have to gain that before you can grieve the loss of it. So what about that perspective? What does that do to a child? Right?

Speaker 3: 14:20

Yeah, that's a really good point. It's like you just overwhelm sometimes with your stuff, like I get it.

Speaker 3: 14:28

Yes, we're going to eat this, we're going to sing this, we're going to go to church. That's in your language. Okay, cool, but I got this whole world here that I'm trying to navigate and you're not really helping. So, yeah, and this is my culture. Now I'm American, so it's like a boundary. It's like a boundary crossing too. It's about you, in a way. It's become so much about the past, and you do have to go to the past to live your future, for sure, but there is a lot to say about just being present.

Speaker 2: 15:10

Well, that's very true. That's very true. But that may be one reason why children seem to be more resilient initially with grief is because they haven't had those longstanding roots of history that make it a more severe loss for them. It's still a loss but, they're more apt to ask the questions about things because they so. Yeah, interesting concept. We should coin a new phrase for this.

Speaker 3: 15:36

Yes, let's work on that.

Speaker 2: 15:38

Yes, I don't know what it would be. Maybe we can scramble the letters of the word grief, I don't know. Yeah, okay, and so you have around you, you had around you kind of a community of those that had emigrated from the same area, right, so, they were familiar with some of the cultures and traditions. Did that community grow into a? You know, I'm thinking like church communities do, where you have celebrations together. Was there that type of community?

Speaker 3: 16:06

Yeah, I mean they just become your family. I think of the Indian tradition you hear a lot of. You know they call friends from India auntie, everybody's an auntie. Well, that's Uncle Roman uncle. You know, everybody becomes a family because you have this connection to them, because they're Czech, you know right. So your instantaneous kind of meshed together. I remember this was a story growing up. They, you know the Czech community would have like coming out parties, you know, like you would come out like a debutante, okay, and you would be like not introduced but like as an adult to the community. And I was such an American teenager like I really Americanized out of my whole family the most and I was like no way, I am not doing that, you know. And I married an American and his last name is snow.

Speaker 2: 17:01

You know, I mean I couldn't have been more.

Speaker 3: 17:04

So there was kind of a. I think the grief also was kind of like a rebellion. It came out as a rebellion because I just I didn't.

Speaker 3: 17:12

I know the language. I have not spoken it for a long time. There's a grief for me too is connecting with family, because some of them don't speak English at all. I've got a cousin who speaks like four languages, so I'm really lucky to have her. But even a simple, you know, christmas card is mostly you know, merry Christmas, happy new year, like. I can write that off on a card, but you know the writing and the emails. I can't really do it, you know. So you know, and just yesterday there was a Prague shooting, a shooting in Prague. I can only email my family out there, just very basically like how, how are you doing? You know?

Speaker 3: 17:52

I can do that in check, but I really wanted to know more, but so it's.

Speaker 2: 17:58

It's again like that disconnect of fitting in Well sure, and that's that's a type of grief, because somehow that connection, even if it's never been established, it's still a connection that your parents would have had, but that you do not, so it's still a loss.

Speaker 3: 18:17

It's a huge loss. Yeah, it's, it's, it's really, and it's hard Like we're having this discussion right now and trying to wrap your head around it. It's really difficult to understand being in that limbo Right, and you're not really American, you're not really the other one. What am I? You?

Speaker 2: 18:35

know yeah.

Speaker 3: 18:35

Yeah. So in a way, yeah, no, go ahead, go ahead. In a way, I was jealous too, because I was like you guys are very rooted in your, in your culture, in your community, like to the point where you're not even present here, and I kind of was jealous of that, because I was like I don't have that. You know, I live here, I'm trying to make my life here, but you're not really there for me to do that, Right.

Speaker 2: 19:08

How do you think your parents felt with your rebellion, like this tradition that was very important to them, that they wanted you to be part of. You didn't want any part of it. How did that?

Speaker 3: 19:19

make your parents feel I don't know. I mean, I imagine it was tough but I just kind of was that kind of kid. I think they kind of expected I was the second born. So you know, we kind of tend to be rebels but I don't think they really understood the anger of the grief Like I was very angry as an adolescent and again going back to that place where I worked when they bring in these Somali refugees, these kids, and they're teenagers, so they're rebelling anyway. But you know, to be analyzing them for all these tests, it was just heartbreaking to me because they're just normal kids Struggling with something that's really hard to define. It's not in the DSM manual.

Speaker 2: 20:07

No, it's not, it's not. Oh yeah, that manual is tricky anyway, but no, there's nothing in there.

Speaker 3: 20:14

Oh, I know Well, and I have a whole theory about trauma very much being like ADHD, like it's in your cells, like even if you don't like. I didn't escape from you, know that country it's. I feel like it's in your cell. Yeah, let's talk about that?

Speaker 2: 20:32

Yeah, let's talk about that for a minute. Certainly, your parents suffered trauma in their escape, in that whole process. So how did you know we I think we kind of explained how you absorbed grief that they were experiencing and feeling. So let's talk more about that trauma. How did you absorb that and how did you see that in your parents? What made you come to the conclusion that it was trauma? This?

Speaker 3: 20:56

is very I mean this. I'm almost like I can't believe that it took me this long, but I could not describe it. I think again, if you can't see it in others till you see it in yourself. So I became aware of my own trauma much later in life, and so I didn't really know what it was that they were doing that. But there was this moment my dad was here my mother had passed when I was younger and with his new wife, and we were watching 9-11, these phone calls of 9-11, that they had done a whole documentary, and it was all these phone calls that people were leaving on the voicemails of their loved ones as they were going to burn up in the towers or jump or whatever. It was just, oh, unbelievably powerful. And I saw my stepmother shaking and I suddenly, suddenly it clicked.

Speaker 3: 21:49

I said, oh, my gosh, gosh, she's like having PTSD. Right now she's having a very traumatic, she's reliving her trauma. And I mean I'm a little embarrassed myself because it took me so long to figure out. That's what this was. This is called trauma and they all do it and a lot of it is being evasive and certainly emotionally closed. That's a lot of it of what they would do? Is they would, just emotionally. You know they're survivors, right.

Speaker 2: 22:18

Right.

Speaker 3: 22:18

And so when this very strong documentary was starting to work on her, I just I couldn't believe it. She was shaking, and then we had to turn it off because she didn't even know what was happening.

Speaker 2: 22:30

So yeah, I mean, and that's when it becomes obvious to someone that someone else is really going through stuff. For the most part, like you say, we close up. We do that with grief too. We close up so that if we finally decide, okay, I have to go out to the grocery store because I have no food in the house, and you drag yourself to the grocery store. You put on this facade because you don't want people to know how you really feel, right, and in some ways it's unfortunate. I joked at one point that if we're grieving we should all be wearing t shirts. You know I'm grieving. Be kind, be kinder than normal, or something.

Speaker 3: 23:06

Yes and I kind of envisioned.

Speaker 2: 23:09

You know all these people in Walmart walking around with shirts on grieving. Please be a little kinder or something like that, because there really is no way to tell when, generations ago, if you went out in public, you were wearing black, you were wearing morning clothing. And then we're wearing bands, arm bands on their sleeves and things like that, and actually you didn't go out for a period of time and morning was so much more obvious than it is today, so you don't know.

Speaker 1: 23:38

So the whole thing.

Speaker 2: 23:40

I have a t shirt that says be kinder, be quiet, and it's one of my favorite shirts, but it's true that you sometimes have to stop and think that the people around you could be suffering immensely, immensely. Are there ways you can think of that? The average person the me could, if I knew, for example, of a family in my community that had escaped from Palestine, from Ukraine and we do have in our community, because my daughter, Stephanie, works in the public school system and she's constantly telling you about a Ukrainian family that you know they're trying to get their child enrolled in school or for preschool, things like that. And there are ways that there are a couple of agencies that are helping them. But for the average person, is there anything we can do or a special kindness that we can show them that you can think of?

Speaker 3: 24:37

I, you know, I guess. I guess the biggest thing would be to just just kind of like know, let them know that you know they're going through a lot. I think, just acknowledging you're going through a lot, because I don't even think, when you're in that survival mode you don't even know you're going through a lot.

Speaker 3: 24:54

Right. So, and then to just kind of embrace them but to just say this must be hard and also, as an American most Americans let's face it like they don't really know, because a lot of times they're, they're it's way back, the generations that came over here is to just be humble and just say you know, we, I can't, I can't relate that that's really helpful to, I can't relate to what you're going through, but I imagine it is incredibly hard and just let them maybe tell their story, if you, if you're willing to listen, because the stories are horrible, you know. And back to your point, I just had this memory of you know when, with the grief, you know, when you're in that survival mode, how you close down. I have this story where I had this dental hygienist and my daughters, by the way, are adopted. They were adopted from Russia and even in their little they were babies. But even even with them I could feel it Right. And so I had this dental hygienist and she was Armenian but she lived in Russia and she was a doctor in Russia. Comes here, right, she has to be a dental hygienist, Right? And we had these wonderful conversations, even when she's working on my teeth and I, we just decided to gather. So I brought my Greek friend and her family because they also adopted from Russia, and then our kids and I'm like, wow, this will be cool, like we're going to eat some food, like cool food, and the kids will see some, you know, actual Russian stuff. And we get there.

Speaker 3: 26:18

First of all, they live in this suburb, you know, whitewashed suburb, and the house had nothing. There was no inkling of of a culture or heritage, it was just whitewashed. Oh my gosh, I mean it would. You could have been in any home anywhere in America and I was. It just blew me away. I was so sad, I was just the grief, just I could feel it like, wow, these people, they can't even go there, like they can't even, they can't even acknowledge it. Yeah, I can't even acknowledge it Because. So then it made me feel better about my upbringing in a way, because you know, we had chachis and Everywhere you know we were like bursting of Czech heritage, but this family, like I, I was just so.

Speaker 3: 27:10

It was so sad for me to see that, to see that, just that.

Speaker 2: 27:14

What effect what effect do you think that's going to have on the children in years to come?

Speaker 3: 27:18

Who?

Speaker 2: 27:19

my children, their children or their children, if, if you sterilize, so to speak sterilize your environment, so that there's nothing historical cultural heritage, anything like that, because I mean whether, for whatever reason, you do it, whether it's too difficult for you or anything like that, do you think it will have an impact at some point on the children and any ideas how it might come out? Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 27:47

I mean that's just cutting off half of yourself. You know, I mean again, it's like that what we had in our community, the ones that wanted to completely acclimate, the other ones that wanted to hold on tradition. You know there is a happy medium there, somewhere when you could do both. But you have to acknowledge the grief, you have to acknowledge the trauma, you have to really Understand what you had gone through. And again, the trauma like they don't want to know, they don't want to remember. But you know, you look at these books by, like Ely Vazel. Yes, you know. Yes, night you know.

Speaker 3: 28:22

These are people who just Embraced that grief and just the beauty and the empathy and just the compassion, passion. Yes, just all that good, good stuff, right, that comes from grief, that's truly mourned and truly embraced. Yeah, and loved on and yeah, what a difference, right.

Speaker 2: 28:43

Yeah, it reminds me, I'm involved a lot with veterans. My late husband was a. He was retired army but he was a vietnam vet and served as a combat medic in vietnam. And in this culture of veterans so I I feel like there's a similarity the veterans, for the most part, don't like to talk about their experience, they just clamor it up unless they're talking to each other, and then, boy, the stories come out. You know funny ones, horrid ones, you know extreme ones. But it reminds me of that and I know even myself.

Speaker 2: 29:18

My own father, who is a veteran of World War two, fought in Belgium. He said almost nothing about it, but it wasn't until I was surrounded by this community of veterans. But I began to wonder about my father's military background and I did some digging and found out. But now what? I think, what I would have given Hear my father tell some of those stories, and even my husband, tom, didn't talk much to his kids about it. But how different some things might have been. And now, of course, there are huge communities of veterans that will go to schools and they will talk about their experiences and they won't answer questions. They'll give tours of memorials and everything like that, because I think it's becoming very obvious that if you close off the history, you lose it, and there's that grief again.

Speaker 1: 30:09

Another loss.

Speaker 2: 30:10

But if somehow you can pass down Some of that history the good and the bad, exactly, then there becomes, in future generations, there becomes, I think, a better understanding of humanity in general, of just the fact that well, I'm almost waxing poetic here just the fact that everybody goes through something and there are good times and there are bad times, and Hopefully we get to be a survivor at some point. And even when you consider grief, do you survive grief? I don't know. I guess you could make an argument for that, but if things go like I feel they should, you will learn to live with your grief, it will morph into a part of you and if you are prone to accept that, there's this huge, I believe again, there's this huge transformative quality to grief that can turn your life right up on its head.

Speaker 2: 31:10

Yes, and I never, decades ago, never would have imagined myself doing a podcast and talking about grief. And I love books. My bookcase is filled with books on death and dying in grief and loss. Right, and you know, and I never would have seen that for myself, but it has become a part of my life and, more importantly, a life I love and a passion, and I'm probably happier than I've ever been in my lifetime.

Speaker 2: 31:39

And that's because of grief.

Speaker 3: 31:42

Amen, it is so true.

Speaker 2: 31:44

And I will grieve until the day I die. So back to the topic at hand immigration versus refugee. Is there a particular quality that's different in the grief aspect of those that you can think of?

Speaker 3: 31:59

Well, I was out of desperation, one may have land right. I mean, yes, they're, they're both, they're. There's a grief in both right. But yeah, one is you have no choice and the other one you do choose. So you know it's.

Speaker 3: 32:14

It's kind of like light, light grief versus you know the really hard stuff, you know, I think you know there's just so many things, right, but one of the things that when you were talking about the veterans to that made me think is that when you talk to, like you said, how can you help refugees and stuff, it's that I don't know what you're going through, and I think that's what the veterans are saying to like you have no idea what we're actually. I'm not even like going to bother telling you. It's like you need somebody to say I cannot understand this, but I, I really am here for it, like I really am sad and worried for you and you know just that compassion and to tell your and be open to their stories. But never, you know. But just with that little caveat, I don't know what you're going through. Yeah, you know veterans, right, we don't know, yeah, what they've been through.

Speaker 2: 33:12

And to share those stories. I agree, Everybody's got a story and even in the depths the horrific depths of some of that there's. I have a good friend that says that even in the darkest moments of grief there's a collateral beauty. And if you try to find that you know that that helps immensely. It would.

Speaker 3: 33:31

It's where the good stuff is yeah.

Speaker 2: 33:33

Yeah, really, you know, the lasting stuff, the stuff that will make it worthwhile, for example, it's like mining for gold right. Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 3: 33:41

Those beautiful, beautiful things that are promised. They are promised to us and they are there, yeah, in the sadness right, because they're. Yeah, there's beautiful things in the darkness right.

Speaker 2: 33:54

Absolutely, Absolutely. Oh, that's such a nice thought, isn't it? Well, do you think? Go ahead.

Speaker 3: 34:02

I think of okay. So there's. There's a woman, panda Lakshmi.

Speaker 3: 34:07

She was on Top Chef, she's she's the host of Top Chef and she used to be a model and I always think of her when I talk about like the beauty in the darkness is she has this. Anyone who's seen her? She has this huge scar on her arm. It's really big and she's always sleeveless and the way her confidence, the way she moves and she's talked about this scar she's like I was in an accident of some sort as a child and she wears it like a badge of honor. You know it's so and it's actually quite beautiful. After a while, when you look at it, it's like wow and you can just see how she embraces it. She doesn't hide it, she doesn't close up and you know and shame or anything. She's just like I lived this, like I made it and I am a stronger person for it.

Speaker 2: 34:58

Yeah, I know exactly who you're talking about and I'm telling the story? I really do. Do you think the key difference between the grief for the immigrants and the refugees is it that trauma component? Yes, yes, I would. I would definitely say that. That would be fair to say that. Yeah, there, certainly I mean there can still be a little bit of trauma in the immigration component. But the big big difference is that trauma factor, that resolution, that run for your life type thing, fair enough.

Speaker 3: 35:27

Absolutely, and I always say that in this country too. Like people don't know, don't have God, you know they've never lived through something like that, but it can happen on a dime, you know it really can.

Speaker 2: 35:39

Yeah, they're, but for the grace of God really Well, you know our time is winding down, actually at Wound Done, but I was enjoying the conversation so much At any rate. What I traditionally do with every episode is I turn the microphone over to my guest, so I'm going to do the same for you now, vera. I'm going to give you access to all of our listeners out there around the world. You can speak directly to them, say whatever you want to say, and I won't interrupt with questions.

Speaker 3: 36:09

Okay, thanks. So I, yes, I think of myself as a grief enthusiast. I have a website, griefenthusiastcom. I like, like I said, you know we're talking about refugee and immigration grief, because that's a topic, but I've got lots of grief topics that live through a lot of things, and so grief has just become who, it's just my passion. So one of the things I do is, as a spiritual director, is I help people you know kind of mine for that grief and look for the beauty and meaning, I guess, behind the grief. I come, I've come up with something like your what is your grief language, and help you kind of figure out how you might talk about it and how you might be in it. And I also do some.

Speaker 3: 36:55

I've been kind of moving into mediumship because I lost a mother at a young age.

Speaker 3: 37:03

The same refugee mom just couldn't take, I think she just it was too much trauma in her body and she passed. So I do something called alter art, which I kind of created with her because she was an artist and I seriously feel her doing art with me, which is, you know, a whole nother topic of immigrant immigrants sometimes put things in the shadows because they can't deal with them. So being an artist and a refugee didn't really mix for her because she had to be practical, she had to make money, so it was kind of squashed. But now I'm feeling through the grief it's reviving through me and so I help people kind of create little pieces of art that they just put by their bedside that just either commemorates their grief or a loved one, and we just use colors, basically colors and textures and mixed media things. So, yeah, so I appreciate the conversation. It's an important topic, especially with everything that's going on in the world right now. Absolutely, and, by the way, your artwork is beautiful.

Speaker 2: 38:02

Oh, thank you I was looking at it on the website is just beautiful.

Speaker 2: 38:06

Well, okay, so you know, I guess now I really do have to wrap up, but I have. I have truly enjoyed the conversation and I look forward to having you back again as a guest to talk about other facets of grief, really kind of get to know some perspectives that maybe I hadn't specifically thought of, as was the case with immigration grief it makes perfect sense. It just hadn't come across my mind yet. So I love, I'm a lifelong learner and, especially with grief, any chance I can get to kind of think about or promote a different aspect of it. I'm there every time. So for our listeners, we tout self care all the time and it's ever so important. Where I am and we're recording this, it's just before our Christmas holiday, so I want to say special blessings to everyone out there. Whatever holiday or festival you're celebrating, take care of yourselves, take care of your family, and I hope you come back and join me again for the next episode, as we all continue to live in grief.

Speaker 1: 39:13

Thank you so much for listening with us today. Do you have a topic that you'd like us to cover or do you have a question from one of our episodes? Please email us at info at asilevengrievecom and let us know. We hope you will find a moment to leave a review, send an email and share with others. Join us next time as we continue to live in grief together.