The Fine Art of Grieving

Can art heal the deepest wounds of our hearts? In this powerful episode, we bring you the moving story of Jane Edberg, an accomplished artist and former art educator, who has navigated the unthinkable grief of losing her 19-year-old son through the transformative power of creativity. Jane shares how her art evolved from processing childhood trauma to confronting the immense sorrow of losing a child. She recounts a deeply personal moment where, with the support of her daughter, she turned her grief into a profound artistic expression, capturing it poignantly through photography.

We also delve into the concept of finding purpose through creative expression during times of sorrow. Jane opens up about her personal rituals and how they helped her navigate her grief, including the metaphor of an ever-changing river that taught her life continues to flow and change. Through documenting these experiences, Jane discovered a new way to heal, eventually creating a book filled with insights for others facing similar losses. This episode is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the intentional choices that allow us to navigate the transformative journey of grief with newfound purpose and meaning.

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

To Reach Jane:
Website: https://www.thefineartofgrieving.com/

Credits: 
Music by Kevin MacLeod 

Copyright 2020, by As I Live and Grieve

The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

Welcome to as I Live and 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.

Speaker 2 0:26

Hi everyone. Welcome back again to as I Live and Grieve another great episode. Yes, with us today is Jane Edberg. Jane, thanks for joining us today, my pleasure. And also with us is Kelly. Of course she's found time in her busy schedule to pop in and be my co-host today. So, hi, kelly.

Speaker 4 0:44

Hello everyone.

Speaker 2 0:46

All righty, let's get started. And before I start with the questions, of which I almost always have many, Jane, could you just tell the listeners a little bit about yourself? Who is Jane Edgbert?

Speaker 3 0:58

Yeah, primarily, I'm an artist who taught art and photography for many, many years. I have a master's degree from UC Davis and I taught there, and I taught at Gavilan College, which is a small college in California, and I have continually, most of my life, made art and exhibited all over the world. I used art primarily as a way to process a childhood.

Speaker 3 1:29

that was very difficult and that's putting it lightly, and so, doing that, I had found that I could process what I was going through and process my feelings and began to understand how to look at the world through another lens, not just the cultural lens, which isn't always correct, right, and that the culture tells you to do one thing, but you're feeling like that doesn't fit me, especially with grief, and I had CPTSD from my childhood and that kind of trauma shows up in many, many ways and needs to be resolved as well.

Speaker 3 1:57

And so I was working on that and my artwork had a lot to do. My professional artwork had a lot to do with healing past trauma and then my son dies. It's like, oh, you think you know it right, and then the child dies, right, and he was 19. Oh, that was 26 years ago and I knew right away that there was that. Well, I knew that that was such a huge problem that it looked bigger than art. And how is being creative going to get me to understand something that seemed impossible?

Speaker 4 2:31

at the time Right right.

Speaker 3 2:32

I mean, it's just devastating, right, yeah, and I felt like I'd lost myself, my connection with family, friends, life, everything, everything, the whole world, everything. Sure, it's changed in a moment, sure, absolutely. Life, everything, everything, the whole world, everything. Sure, it's changed in a moment, absolutely. And including, like my projects, that I was working on art projects which had to do with childhood trauma. And how was I ever going to use art to process something like death and the loss of a child? That seemed completely impossible at the time. Interestingly enough, I was actually processing things, but not in a way that I would have called art. So, in other words, normally I would draw and paint and do narratives with photography about some of my childhood trauma in a kind of like mythological looking images or metaphorical, you know, using symbology and so forth. Now I was like wiped out. I felt like there was no me left to even conjure anything that could even match what I was feeling. But my daughter pointed out about a year later that I was doing things that she thought might be art. Thank goodness for these daughters Absolutely smart and um, and she was right, but I didn't know at first what what she was talking about, and and so this is going to sound very odd.

Speaker 3 3:53

At one point about a year almost a year was coming up, in the anniversary of my son's death, I pulled the box of ashes out. I hadn't buried him like I still had this box of ashes, hadn't done anything, I just couldn't. They're sort of like hid in my studio for a long time. I get that to this. What if I can learn something from it? So I opened it up and I poured the ashes out and I saw that they're little pieces of bone and ash and you get a real you know wake up call. Right, this is what's left. You know, six pounds of ash and you know, from a guy that was like you know 160, 180 or something you know it's like this is weird and it was so abstract and as an artist it looked like a material and I thought, oh, I'm just gonna touch it and see what happens.

Speaker 3 4:50

And I saw my fingerprints and then I saw my palm print and then I started to observe that there was something about them. So I spit them and made a very fine ash and put both of my hands in and pulled out and then I saw my lifeline and it was like a powerful kind of like.

Speaker 3 5:06

I'm within this trauma of my son's remains, I see my own reflection and I put my face in the eye and when I pulled back, my face stared back at me. So, and at that very moment where I pulled my head up, I thought my daughter was still at school. She came home early. She came through the living room where I was all set up and I had a camera because I was going to photograph this stuff, right, and she walked in and I've got ash falling off of my face and this bowl of she's looking at me. You, you know she goes. Do you need help? Wow, actually, because she knew I was an artist, she meant did I need help photographing it?

Speaker 4 5:53

Right.

Speaker 3 5:54

Man, have you lost your complete mind? And I said yes, and she came over and she helped me photograph my face with ash, photograph the images in ash and that's one of the first images in my book, in the very first chapter about facing ashes.

Speaker 2 6:12

And now that photo is also on your website. It is. Because I saw that photo which, now that I've heard the story, is so much more impactful.

Speaker 3 6:24

Isn't it? Yeah, it really is. And who in their right mind does that? An artist does that sort of thing, you know, and someone who's grieving because we're not always in our right mind, yeah exactly right right

Speaker 2 6:37

yeah, but it was certainly what you needed to do at the time exactly absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 6:43

I didn't expect it at all. I was just like wow you know, I just like boohooed right into the ashes, yeah oh my goodness yeah, so it's very powerful to see that it certainly is, especially when you know the story.

Speaker 2 6:57

Yes, yeah, right now you mentioned your book, and the title of your book is the fine art of Grieving.

Speaker 3 7:03

It is backwards, it is backwards. Anyway, it's the Fine Art of.

Speaker 2 7:06

Grieving. Yep, it's not backwards to me.

Speaker 3 7:09

Oh, it's not Okay. Great, and it won the Literary Titan Book Award, which is nice.

Speaker 2 7:13

Yes, I saw that and I read the reviews on your website.

Speaker 4 7:16

They're great, aren't they?

Speaker 2 7:18

It looks like an amazing book and it's a memoir. It's a memoir and it's filled with images and art. So now you mentioned taking pictures.

Speaker 3 7:29

Well, it's filled with photographs, and the photographs are things like the ash photographs of my face, the imprint of my face and my son's ash. And then there's a photograph of my face, three of them in slow motion what grief looks like. And then there are some photographs of my family. My son died on the railroad tracks. He was crossing from one side of town to the other and he had to walk across the railroad tracks. He was inebriated, but he was walking.

Speaker 4 8:03

Still not safe.

Speaker 3 8:04

He even got out of the way, but he was in, you know, still not safe. Even got out of the way, but he was in the foul line. There's a oh, yeah, it's a. It's a rough, rough story. Oh, that's so traumatic.

Artistic Expression and Symbolism

Speaker 3 8:12

But interestingly enough, when he was a little boy, he was about I don't know eight. So he said to me we're walking down the railroad tracks in the same town and it was a part of railroad tracks where the trains didn't go anymore but you could get to town really faster by going down the railroad tracks in the same town. And it was a part of railroad tracks where the trains didn't go anymore, but you could get to town really faster by going down the railroad tracks. Plus, we loved collecting weird stuff on the railroad tracks. We're the creative types, right, bring home all kinds of weird, little, right, dumb things that you know piano keys and books, with grass growing through them and stuff you know, right, right, it's just the way artists are.

Speaker 3 8:44

But he said, when we were on our way home, he said oh, can you photograph me? Because we all had cameras. We're taking pictures because I was teaching photography. My kids, of course, all had cameras, even my little one. That was like four at the time. So my three kids and I were walking along taking pictures and he says take a picture of me on the railroad tracks, dead on the railroad tracks, dead on the railroad tracks dead like what do you mean?

Speaker 3 9:06

it goes, you know, like like roadrunner, like a cartoon. And how old was he? About eight. I have the image, I'll show you. You know it's interesting because it's like, how do these things happen, right? It's like you couldn't make this stuff up. Um, yeah, he, and so he laid down on the railroad tracks. I don't know if you can see that or not. Oh, my goodness, wow.

Speaker 2 9:28

And I photographed him. I'm like, okay, and that's also in the book, of course, yep and I didn't find it until about 19 years after he died.

Speaker 3 9:37

I'd forgotten about it entirely. And I was going through some archive of photographs and I went oh my God, what is this?

Speaker 2 9:53

And then bing, I remembered what we had done and I thought what a story. Oh my God, absolutely yeah, oh, okay, so I have a. This could be a somewhat profound question For me personally. I could look at a piece of art, a photograph, whatever and, whether I knew context or not, I can be awestruck, I can be angered, I can have a very intense emotional reaction to something like that. It could even be a piece of art where you can't really tell what it is Abstract, yeah, some abstract piece. I can personally have a response. There may be listeners out there that don't have that intensity, so to speak. So, as a professional artist, photographer, and one who is taught in everything, is that something that can be taught? Can someone learn to acquire that affinity? If you will?

Speaker 3 10:48

I call it vision. Okay, absolutely, absolutely. Art is learned. We aren't born with the creative bone. Okay, we learn it. And I drew a lot when I was little and I liked looking at things and my grandmother used to show me oh, look at the way the light is hitting the flowers you know, and lighting them all up in the field and it's like if somebody shows you that stuff, you're going to learn. You're going to learn to look, and you're going to learn to see things and you're going to learn to feel it.

Speaker 3 11:14

I mean, everybody's different, of course you know depending on our sensibilities and our mental health and there's a whole myriad of things, right, but I, as a teacher, could teach people to expand their vision and their openness to what they're seeing and how to interpret and how to feel comfortable with what they see and what they feel is theirs, their interpretation. It doesn't have to be right, even Right.

Speaker 2 11:39

And the same thing is true of music as well. Yes, I mean, I can listen to a piece of music and just it will take me somewhere, just somewhere, and then other pieces will be like nails on a chalkboard. Yeah, if you listen to it long enough though if you expose yourself and be open to it.

Speaker 3 12:01

You might never like it, but you might appreciate it exactly. Exactly that was one of my favorite classes to teach was art appreciation. You don't have to like it, but try appreciating it because somebody took the time to make it.

Speaker 2 12:13

Yeah and try to understand it better. Okay, and then another, something very common. You talked about symbology. Something very common one who is grieving is the cardinal. I don't know how the image of the cardinal as a symbol of your loved one paying a visit or giving you a message. I don't know how the cardinal got chosen, but can you, as an artist, describe, think of other things other than a cardinal that could be symbolic?

Speaker 3 12:40

It's often winged creatures, isn't it?

Speaker 4 12:44

Like butterflies or hummingbird.

Speaker 2 12:47

Right.

Speaker 3 12:48

You hear about those a lot or even a leaf that's coming, like it comes down from the tree and then goes back up, or a feather, a feather.

Speaker 2 12:55

A feather yeah.

Speaker 3 12:56

I think that that lightness of being is we're so attracted to it because we're in the heaviness of being. Oh, I think that that lightness of being is we're so attracted to it because we're in the heaviness of being, oh, I like that.

Speaker 4 13:04

Yeah.

Speaker 3 13:04

I just think that we're so weighted down that when we see something that can take off or just fly or land and be very gentle, it also is a reflection of our vulnerability too, because those creatures can be killed very easily or broken very easily.

Speaker 2 13:21

Oh, I like that lightness compared to the heaviness.

Speaker 3 13:25

Yeah, it's a lightness of being compared to our being.

Speaker 2 13:28

Yeah, I like that. That makes perfect sense. Wow, and for you personally, in your grief after you learned of your son's death, what is your son's name?

Speaker 3 13:38

Nanda.

Navigating Grief and Healing Through Art

Speaker 2 13:39

Nanda. Okay, After his death and of course I know you, like everyone, were hit with that initial devastation of grief, especially for a traumatic death that you've experienced how did you come to that conclusion, or how did you decide to turn to art? Was it just very natural for you or did you make a conscious decision?

Speaker 3 14:04

well, like I said, like I was making art, I had been creative all my life because I've been shown how to be creative. My father helped me learn how to draw, my grandmother showed me things, and you know just my life was filled with a lot of stimulation, right, right stuff.

Speaker 3 14:18

But and then I had childhood trauma which I was sorting through with art I found and there's a story in my book about you know my mother was very angry with me and trying to do my hair and put it in curls and stuff and I was wailing and screaming, you know, and then she was tugging and pulling and I finally got out from her grips and out and I'm in this little chiffon dress, I'm you know getting ready to go right, oh, in the backyard, and I see that there's mud in the garden and I get a stick and I start whacking it because I'm so mad, and she comes out and like whack you know that was yeah but I saw the look on her face before she did that and the look on her face was, I made her feel a certain way and it was so powerful that the whack with the stick or with her hand or whatever on my butt was nothing in comparison.

Speaker 4 15:12

And.

Speaker 3 15:12

I thought there's power in doing something visual. And I saw the visual of it. I got mud up on the wall of the house all over her flowers. I mean, what a naughty child, right? I think it was all of like four. You know, a little bit of spunky, but yeah, I think that that was it. And then I saw that over and over again, that when I did certain things it got people's attention, and not necessarily I didn't want the attention to be on me, but it just got their attention, and so when my son died I'd lost that. So I'd learned how to make art and show it to people and get their attention for the thing that I wanted to express.

Speaker 4 15:52

Okay, and when he died.

Speaker 3 15:54

I couldn't do it. I'm like that's just useless, that's not serving me.

Speaker 3 15:57

I can't make art anymore. I'm done, I'm like washed out, and I still had to teach it. It was very difficult. I was very conflicted right. And then, like I said, after that ash incident, my daughter. She pointed out the other things that I was doing. I had taken my son's blanket, which is a nice red cotton blanket, down the river and I swam with it and had my husband take photographs of me swimming in the river, and I didn't know why I was doing it. I just felt like, in some way, I felt like being one, being in water would be wonderful, and I wanted to take Nanda with me because he loved that place, he loved that river and he was a water boy.

Speaker 3 16:34

So I took his blanket, you know, as a kind of symbolist.

Speaker 2 16:38

It sounds like a ritual.

Speaker 3 16:40

Yeah, and I think a lot of what I did seemed ritual, but it also was art. I was expressing something and I wasn't clear until I actually started writing, that the river always changes and when you're in grief you feel like nothing, like the world is stood still and everything's gone on ahead of you, definitely, definitely. And I saw that I'm like I'm not quite there yet, but I will get there. So it was a beautiful reminder and to feel that freeness in the water and the floating and the lightness of being right, sure.

Speaker 3 17:12

So, there was some things that I did, and I took photographs along the way and wrote about it.

Speaker 4 17:25

Those photographs early on.

Speaker 3 17:25

I didn't know what I was doing. It just turned out to be art. I didn't think I was making art. I was surprised when my daughter pointed it out and then I went oh, I can have an intent. Now I can actually say I need to work on this and this and this express those things about losing self, about gaining a new self, about what does it mean to heal grief? What is grief? So, really starting to investigate the embodiment of grief inside myself and with other people and my relationship to the world, was I going to just sit in grief the whole time? Hell, no. I was ready to embark on a life that was different than that. I didn't want that.

Speaker 2 17:59

Yeah, you found your purpose I did In your grief. You found your purpose I did and where, how? When did the decision to put it into a book?

Speaker 3 18:10

It started pretty early because I couldn't you know. If you guys think about your loss. Do you remember that? It's kind of like you're trying to suck the world through like a little nanotube, like you can't process anything. Everything's too gigantic, right?

Speaker 3 18:25

And so I couldn't make art and I'm like I can document though, I'm a good documenter and I don't know what I'm looking at here. So maybe I'll write it down and look at it later, because maybe later I'll know something. And it was true, I sort of came to at some point I started writing things down really journal boring, you know. Today I did blah, blah, blah and then I felt this wave of blah, blah, blah you know so it was all very journal writing kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 18:52

But there were also some observations in there, like the river, like yeah, what is a river? A river is never the same. We're never the same. We are constantly changing and we don't feel like it. When we're in grief, we feel like we're doing that one awful thing right, I'm just buried in it. It informed me that I too could be like the river. I could decide to flow more than being static and stuck in grief, and I think a lot of people get stuck in grief.

Speaker 2 19:21

There's just I don't think there's enough resources to help people and in your story, in your book, for someone who reads your book who is grieving, what tidbits will they find that will help them?

Speaker 3 19:38

Well, I was very, very thorough when I wrote this book, and so I don't think there's anybody I've never met a person yet that didn't get something out of my book. Even people that haven't had a huge loss, they feel prepared in some way. I didn't hold back. I really it is a harrowing story. It's not just a story about that. It's also the story about you know some of the childhood trauma and going through that as well. So it's got a few layers of stuff. But my premise is and it was early on in my grief when I went to a grief group and I asked the grief counselor because we were going through all these questions, that felt like we were walking on eggshells around.

Speaker 3 20:19

I just want to like throw myself on the ground and scream, but I didn't because I was going to be polite, but I felt like there was this sort of there are boundaries around how one can express their grief and I thought there's got to be wider than that. It just doesn't seem right and I felt like a lot of the folks that were in that group were really suffering more from being held closed not being able to express themselves.

Speaker 3 20:42

And when I started to bring in my art boy, they were like they had no idea. I started showing them before I even knew what I was doing. I was showing, well.

Speaker 3 20:50

I took some pictures at the river and I showed them. They're like, oh my God, and it started to help them to do things and I could see that it was moving them. They weren't feeling so static about what they were going through. There was like some intent and like you're on a voyage with grief. But you don't have to. Grief doesn't have to be the boss, Right, it is in the very beginning. Let's be real.

Speaker 2 21:12

Yeah, it is because and I think the main reason it's the boss in the very beginning is because you are just too wiped out to even consider fighting it Right.

Speaker 3 21:23

There's so much shock that you'd like, exactly, I feel like I've got put on a different planet and you're like where are my people?

Speaker 2 21:29

All you can do is make sure you breathe yeah, moment to moment.

Speaker 3 21:34

Yeah.

Speaker 4 21:34

Moment to moment.

Speaker 3 21:36

So I had asked her how long does grief last? And I was in that moment to moment time that. So I had asked her how long does grief last? And I was in that moment to moment time, that horrible pillage of awfulness in the grief, absolutely yeah, and she said forever. And it really pissed me off because I felt like nothing's forever. I was just in the river, I don't know. Yeah, I was on a mission to change that theory. There's a few theories out there. There's one where grief comes into your life and it's this big ball right and it. There's the thing. It doesn't get smaller, you just get bigger. Yeah, but I disagree. I got bigger and my life got bigger, but grief got smaller for me. I worked on it, it I was. I don't have grief anymore.

Speaker 3 22:24

I can think about my son, talk about my son, I could. If I want to, I can but, I don't have anything that comes up and bites me anymore, and that was by about the seventh year. I think that I really had that under control and I miss him, but I don't think about him every day, of course, of course.

Speaker 4 22:44

Yeah.

Speaker 3 22:45

Yeah.

Speaker 2 22:45

Yeah.

Speaker 3 22:46

And so I think that I understand that idea of grief stays the same, but I don't believe it. I think that grief is made up of this myriad of emotions and complications. It is the most complex of all what a person goes through. I can't think of anything that's as complicated as that. Maybe love, yeah, which I say love can help shrink grief and get it worked out and get it out of the way.

Speaker 2 23:13

Yeah, well, there's a quote that I absolutely love. It's one of my favorite, and the last line of the quote is that grief is just love, with no place to go. Yeah.

Speaker 3 23:23

However, I like that too, but I also think that for me, grief is love and there is a place to go and there is a place to be. And that grief, you can start letting go of the pain, the suffering, and start to enjoy one's life and also enjoy the one that's gone, your dead one. Absolutely, absolutely. Love them and include them and you have a different relationship. You just don't get to see them, which is a real sucky thing. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 23:56

You know and I'm very familiar with the meme that you've described with the ball that you know. It shows that the container just gets bigger and bigger. It's very popular. I prefer to think of it not as grief-changing size, but changing in texture.

Speaker 3 24:10

Oh, that's interesting Because initially it's extremely hard.

Speaker 2 24:13

It's a rock, I mean, it's there.

Speaker 3 24:15

Oh it's awful.

Speaker 2 24:15

It's in your chest, it's in your stomach, it's in your gut your chest, it's in your stomach, it's in your gut, it's just it's hard as a rock, except the room right, and then eventually it starts to morph, it starts to get a little softer and now, you know, almost seven years after tom's been gone, I can, you know, if I have a day where, for some reason, it's a little more present in my mind than others, I could just kind of smoosh it down and tuck it, and just you know, I'm okay and I can deal with it later. So for me it's a textural thing, that's wonderful.

Speaker 3 24:46

I like the textural thing, yeah, but I have to say I just want to make sure that it's really clear that I believe that I don't have grief. We'd have to describe grief. To me, grief is that where you're longing and there's a pain for that person, right, and it, like it's just, it rips you apart. I mean, it's just in this devastation and you think about it and it literally takes over your life. You know, it's like a weird addiction, right yes, yes, yes and I don't have any of that.

Speaker 3 25:20

I don't have any of it.

Speaker 2 25:21

yeah, I, I understand that and I know there are many people out there that really kind of choose to hold on to that intense grief and I have no judgment about that. I think that's perfectly. You know, we can all choose how we want to handle our grief, especially when we get to a certain point in that journey. You know, we can have it as present as we want or as reticent as we want. We can do whatever we want with it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 25:49

I think that that's true and, and you know, for me it went from my relationship to having, you know, dealing with death and loss, to making art in a relationship to the art around that loss, and then writing a book, and then the book being in relationship to my son yes, and then, now that I finished the book, I went oh my God, now what do I do? Like I almost feel like I'm going to fall off a cliff. But I've got some other projects going, so that's good.

Speaker 2 26:18

Are there other media in your book other than photographs?

Speaker 3 26:23

There's one. Yes, there's a. It's towards the end and it's a woe agent, a woe agent, a woe agent.

Speaker 3 26:30

So I found a woman in my town that is much older than me, probably 30 years older than me and she does a workshop called Clay is a Way so that people can get their hands in this stuff. Ah yeah, feel their emotions and make things out of it. You know, it's a whole process of going through whatever trauma or loss or experience that you're having and making it into something that informs you about the next thing that you make. Oh, and it gives us a purpose and meaning and so forth. It's very detailed. I'm making it sound really you know a little woo, woo or whatever but I ended up making.

Speaker 3 27:09

after making a lot of things in her workshops, I started taking a lot of them. I made these little creatures and I wanted there to be something where you could take something that was bothering you about your grief, write it down and tuck it into this little creature, and I called them woe agents. Oh, I don't know if you can see that or not.

Speaker 2 27:29

I can.

Speaker 3 27:30

Oh, oh, I like that, yeah, I like that so the little woe agent is like bring it on I I know all about this dark stuff you know, and you can like take it out of your body for a while and have a break oh, that's, that's really neat, that's really yeah, and so at my book launch, I made a 100 of them and I gave one to everyone.

Speaker 2 27:52

Oh, now I'm sad I wasn't there.

Speaker 3 27:55

No.

Speaker 2 27:55

I can send you one. Would you like one? I would love one. I'd be happy to buy it. No, no, it's not for sale.

Speaker 3 28:04

They're little messengers and I make them sort of like I pray. When I make them, I'm like give this person some peace you know just a little bit, even just a little.

Speaker 2 28:15

Yeah, I love it, I love the idea, I love everything about that, because there's angels we love angels.

Speaker 3 28:20

We don't have anybody that represents like I've been to the darkest, deep pit of despair. Bring it on, I'll take it on. You can just have a rest.

Speaker 2 28:29

Yeah, I like that. A woe agent. They're a little bit grisly looking. They're not cute. No, they have to be. They're supposed to be. They've been through a lot, oh my goodness. Sadly, our time is just flying away. This has been such a great conversation, kelly, do you have any questions? That maybe I've talked too much and you haven't been able to get a word in.

Speaker 4 28:55

My mind is just whirling at the different facets of grief and how each person can take it so differently, and I think it'll give me a good thing to think about and look at my own grief in ways that I've gone through things and how to maybe package them a little differently, so I'm not impacted so much and I thank you for that.

Speaker 3 29:14

We have yes, we have choices. I think that's the most remarkable thing. When you finally go, I can I have a choice. I can actually, you know, prepare this journey a little differently or take a different route or have a different attitude, or you know any of that, and I think that's really, really helpful.

Speaker 3 29:33

I think I did it a million times through my grief process yeah sometimes I was like spitting mad, don't talk to me about it, I'll punch you in the nose, you know, yeah, and other times it was like somebody please talk to me yeah, for me.

Speaker 2 29:47

I remember very distinctly standing there one day and saying I do not want to live this way for the rest of my life. Right, right, that was from from that point on. Uh, it was with intention, whatever I did intention is very important.

Speaker 3 30:01

I think you can build resilience. I really do, yeah, I think that, and I suffer with depression and other sorts of mental health issues my whole life.

Speaker 3 30:11

I'm sort of like used to it, like I feared not to almost. So I'm always incorporating new ways of seeing because I think that I can really be bored with a life that's just going down the same channel and it's like we don't get a whole lot of years. I'm like 68 now and I'm like I'm approaching 70. I'm getting to be an old lady and I want to like have a life and I want a little bit. I don't want to like control, necessarily, but I do like a say in it.

Speaker 2 30:43

Yeah, absolutely Absolutely Well, jane, this is the point in our podcast. Every Absolutely Well, jane, this is the point in our podcast. Every episode. I do this where I'm actually going to turn the microphone over to you and let you speak to our listeners, without me leading you with questions or directing the conversation or anything. So the floor is yours.

Speaker 3 31:02

Thank you. So the biggest message that I would like to send out into the world that's really important to me because I've lived it, I've experienced it, I've tried it and I didn't have an easy life I might look like I did, but I didn't and is that we do have choices and that grief can be healed. I have healed my grief devastating, awful, like can't dig yourself out of the emotional pit of it and healing being pulling yourself out of the emotional pit of it and having a life and a new self in a new world with a new purpose and meaning, and that my book will show you how I did it. I don't think anybody should follow what I did, but everyone has an individual path and they get to choose. If it's not working, try something else, try lots of things, try things that you swore you'd never do.

Speaker 3 31:54

Take trips. One thing that really helped me was doing service. I painted a mural in a child interview room in a police department. You can imagine children having to tell their stories. I went in there and painted this beautiful, surround, sort of wildernessy, ocean-y kind of scene for them so that they weren't stuck in just a dismal office. And it was remarkable to do something like that, because it wasn't just always me ruminating in my terrible life and terrible tragedies. I got to give something in my vulnerability to somebody else that's suffering, that's even younger than me, you know, starting out their life. So those sorts of things are wonderful and it doesn't have to be that. It can be. You can cook, you can, you know, take up running, you can.

Speaker 3 32:41

It takes a little while, though, that first year. Just eat lots of French fries. I don't know, that's what I did. The only thing I could eat was french fries. Practically. I think the first year is such a struggle. The second year, the anesthesia wears off and you, you know you have to do something and you don't know what it is and you're figuring it out and then, slowly but surely so, I want to offer hope that you, that anybody that's experiencing grief, whether it's old or new, that there are many, many ways in which you can approach it. That's what I want to offer, and I think my book offers that perspective, at least offers how crazy you can be when you're in grief.

Speaker 2 33:23

I'm sure the book does not showcase any craziness on your part. A little bit, but not yeah. Yeah, this has been such a great conversation. Somehow I think we could go on for hours just back and forth and talk about it.

Speaker 3 33:38

We need to have dinner sometime. Yeah, oh that would be wonderful.

Speaker 2 33:42

Yeah, we'll just all meet virtually and eat our french fries.

Speaker 4 33:45

Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 33:47

So to our listeners again. Thank you so much for tuning in. You know I I love you guys. Wherever you are around the world doesn't matter, because this is similar for all of us. We have a lot of parallels. Perhaps our grief is different for each and every one of us. It's like snowflakes or fingerprints. Everyone's is different and, as as Jane says, you have choices. Don't always just assume that whatever your neighbor says or that friend of yours that is trying to be supportive but doesn't quite know what to say at the moment, you don't have to do what they say you have choices you do you Absolutely Big time.

Speaker 2 34:29

Someone told me at one point when I made a comment about something and I can't even remember the details now, but they said that whatever you're doing is good enough until it isn't Right, and you'll know when that is. You'll know when you have to make a change. Just keep an open mind for yourself. Sense what you're going through, feel what you're feeling, be honest with yourself. The honesty part is big, absolutely. And then you know, take care of yourselves as well. We always talk about self-care. It's so important, especially when you're grieving Because, let's face it, you got to take care of yourself because likely that other people aren't going to be doing as good a job as you can do yourself. You know what you need, right.

Speaker 3 35:12

Yeah, that's really true so choices, take care of yourself 24 7 absolutely so.

Speaker 2 35:19

Yeah, choices, open mind, there is hope, and jane offers hope for everyone. And please come back again next time, as we all continue to live and grieve. Thanks, jane.

Speaker 3 35:31

You're welcome. Thank you so much. I feel really honored to be here and really enjoyed talking with both of you. Thank you, thanks.

Speaker 1 35:41

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 as I live and grievecom, 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 and grieve together.