As I Live and Grieve®
It’s time for grief to come out of the basement, or wherever we have stuffed it to avoid talking about it. When you suffer a loss you need support, comfort, and a safe place to heal. What you are experiencing is painful but normal, unique but similar, surreal but very, very real. As grief advocates we understand and want to provide support, knowledge and comfort as you continue to live and grieve. Host, Kathy Gleason; Producer, Kelly Keck. www.asiliveandgrieve.com
As I Live and Grieve®
Getting Through the Holidays - HOLIDAY BONUS EPISODE!
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Shelby Forsythia, the grief coach renowned for her compassionate wisdom, returns us for a special holiday episode of "As I Live and Grieve." She shares her personal journey into the world of grief, a journey that began amidst the chaos of what she calls her "four years of Hell" in college. Shelby unveils her G-R-I-E-F method, a comforting framework designed to help those mourning find grounding and resilience, particularly during the emotionally challenging holiday season.
Listeners are invited to explore Shelby's enriching resources, including her books "Permission to Grieve" and "Your Grief, Your Way," which provide a structured roadmap for navigating grief's complex landscape. The "joy jar" exercise is highlighted as a tool for capturing small glimmers of happiness, encouraging a mindful approach to healing. Whether you're seeking solace, guidance, or a renewed perspective on grief, this episode offers valuable insights and practical tools to support your journey toward embracing life beyond loss, all while rediscovering joy along the way.
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To Reach Shelby:
Shelby Forsythia (she/her)
Grief guide, author, and podcast host
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Featured in O Mag, Huffington Post, and Modern Loss
Ready to grow through grief? Check out these free resources:
- Grow Through Grief Workshop—MOST POPULAR! Three easy, proven tools that help you stop feeling stuck and start moving forward.
- Dear Grief Guide: My weekly podcast where I answer anonymous letters from grievers with compassionate advice and gentle reframes.
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.
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, hi, everyone.
Speaker 2Welcome back again to another episode of as I Live in Grief. Now, this is not just any episode. This is our special gift to you, our bonus holiday episode for every one of you out there around the world that listen and have listened to this podcast. And I couldn't be more excited about our guest today. She's been with us before. I love talking with her. I love seeing her face. I know you can't see it, but she has this special smile that just makes you feel warm. All over With us today is Kelly, co-host, and our guest, Shelby Frisithia. Shelby, thanks so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3I am so excited. I know we're recording on a Monday, but this is really the highlight of my week and the week hasn't happened yet You're so sweet to say so.
Speaker 2I just you know I think of you every day because whenever I log on on social media one place or another, I always see a clip of you. So that makes me think of you every day. And I also have a copy of your book, which we're going to mention later on in our podcast, so people can make sure and grab a copy of it, hopefully for the holidays, so that they can get started in the new year with it. We'll talk more about that later. So let's get started To kick us off. Shelby, would you tell the listeners just a little bit about your background? Who is Shelby Forsythia?
Speaker 3Yeah, well, shelby Forsythia is actually an alias I created when I started working in the grief space and writing books, so my given name is Shelby Forsyth, but when I decided to write a book, I added the two letters to the end Forsythia. To a mirror, the flowers of the same name. My dad would plant them in our yard and he would look at me and my sister and be like these are our flowers because they have our name in it. But also and I don't think I mentioned this last time I was on the show but I've been trained for six years as a florist and so I have a lot of experience working with flowers and I became a grief coach At the same time. Time I was working in a flower shop and the relationship between grief and things that grow and are alive and then have meaning and then die and then also have meaning was not lost on me, and so I really really loved kind of the parallel of the world of flowers and nature and then the world of grief.
Permission to Grieve
Speaker 3I know when most people ask me this opening question, though, they're looking for my grief story, and I'll tell you that the loss experience I had I affectionately refer to as the four years of hell. It was my entire four years in college, but college had nothing to do with it. My family and I went through essentially as many unique loss events as you can go through in the span of four years, and the cherry on top of those four years was my mother's death from breast cancer. So my father lost his job. We went through some financial loss and household change. I came out of the closet as a queer person in the South in the United States, in a Christian family, which was a very weird and hard thing to have happen. My father was diagnosed with two brain aneurysms, one on either side of his head, and had to undergo two separate brain surgeries and then he recovered when we very much thought maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't. It was weird as a 19 year old to watch my dad like wrestle with potentially dying and then, as soon as he was out of the hospital and we were like, okay, we're done driving to Duke hospital, we're done with the casseroles, the meal trains, the caring bridge, which is a website where you update your loved ones on your progress, and all that, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and then again, the whole time I was in college I was studying for things and trying to build my launch pad for my life after school and my mom's breast cancer went into remission in January of 2013. And we were so dang excited because it was like, finally, both parents are as well as they possibly can be. Excited because it was like, finally, both parents are as well as they possibly can be, they've had every scan known to man and and everything's going to be okay.
Speaker 3And then, around Thanksgiving time in 2013, after I had just gone on this huge scholarship trip to New York, I wanted to be in advertising and so I got this big old advertising scholarship. It was my senior year. I'd come home. I said I know exactly what I want to do. I got a call from my dad that my mom was in the hospital again and by the time we got to winter break ish, so like middle of December they'd confirmed that her cancer had returned and they tried to do as many essentially like fluid draining surgeries as they could and they were like we can no longer cure you. We can buy you time. And that was on December 19th and we called in hospice and brought a hospital bed into our home and my dad started being her caregiver, in terms of, I don't know a lot about what was given to her exactly, so I don't know if it was morphine or some sort of other medication, but essentially their bedroom became a hospital room, and they pretty much advised our family, and I don't remember who said this, but somebody was like, given what we've seen before, you probably have six weeks to six months to say goodbye.
Speaker 3And she died in a week, on the day after Christmas, and the metaphor that I always give for this is that it was like somebody pulled the rug out from underneath my feet, but then the floor, and then the foundation of the house, and then the ground underneath that, and then the center of the earth and then the other side of the earth, and so it was like one of those cartoon scenes where somebody falls out of a window and then the foundation of the house and then the ground underneath that, and then the center of the earth and then the other side of the earth, and so it was like one of those cartoon scenes where somebody falls out of a window and then the awning catches them and then they fall, yeah, then they fall through another one and finally they crash into the fruit cart at the bottom yeah on it, yep. So it felt as if, like everything I had ever known or understood or built my life on crumbled. And so I was grieving and this happens with so many losses, especially the death of a parent, but like the loss of my mother, yes, but also the sense of being her daughter, the picture of a family, home, my faith in God and a universe that, if you were good enough, good things would happen and if you're bad enough, bad things would happen, like a just for that sort of universe. And then, and like, my creativity tanked and I was sleeping all the time, I just didn't recognize who I was anymore. And then every dream I had for my life of, you know, being a big wig in advertising, doing a scholarship crashed and burned, and so it was the death of a thousand things all at one time, and I really did not want to engage with my grief. I was mad Like I was. I was so furious that this was the way my life had gone and no one had asked for my consent, and it was very much an experience of what the hell. I really did not see my life going this way, and I was mad at everyone and I tried really hard to make my life fit back into the old one.
Speaker 3I moved to Chicago, I got a job in a marketing adjacent industry. I tried to keep going forward and I write in my first book, permission to Grief, that it was like grief was a wolf that I was keeping locked in the basement and I was living on the ground floor and at night I would hear it howling and pacing and kind of tapping on the door. And the thing that I share with people, especially on podcasts, when I tell this story is that what I was afraid of is that if I let that metaphorical grief wolf out of the basement, either it would eat me alive or the emotions that I would feel would be so big that I would either need to be committed to a hospital or I would die. The intensity of what I felt felt so big Again. Early twenties never had any experience with anything like this before. I was like I will surely die if I let this in.
Speaker 3And the day that I gave myself permission to grieve, which was the story that I based the first book on, is about two years after my mom's death. I was in a coffee shop in downtown Chicago and somebody stole my wallet and having something so precious and essential to my life my wallet be taken kind of opened this trap door to something so precious and essential my mother taken. And so first time it was like that grief unlocked the other grief and I was able to. I went home, I screamed, I cried, I wailed, I essentially threw like an adult temper tantrum and when I was done, it took 15 minutes, half an hour. It's like wow, that was all I really needed to do.
Speaker 3Yes, I heard these words in my head and it was you just gave yourself permission to grieve and I was like what is that? Like I have. I have never heard that before, I've never heard that phrase. I've never had this feeling. I've never known that there was another side to these emotions, that I could go through them and come out somewhere else. I thought if I gave them, it would be all I felt for the rest of time, forever and ever. Amen.
Speaker 3And kind of launched me on this path of researching and learning about grief. And the short story is I slowly started sharing what I was learning on my private Facebook pages and enough people said you should do something with this because it's helping me that I took it public. I started doing Facebook lives, I did a podcast, I published now two books and I'm going on three. But it has grown into something beyond me and the work that I do now in relationship with grieving people is helping them, not just through the experience of loss, but to wrap words around and give maps or frameworks to experiences that almost all the time feel like they have no words and they have no maps and they have no way through.
Speaker 3And I don't know if you've noticed this either, just in talking between the two of us, but talking with grievers too, sometimes we can make it funny and I know if you are deep in the early days of grief I know, nothing is funny right now and also when you can give yourself a slight bit of wiggle room to play with grief or create with grief, or ask grief what it wants, even if what it wants is to say F off and go sit in the corner even that's a little bit funny and so to treat grief not as this tyrant or this dictator or this oppressive force that's out to get you, but something to be in conversation with. It really changes your whole experience of being a grieving person, and it's okay. If you then grieve forever, it becomes easier to live with as I live in grief, like literally, it becomes easier to live with you across time. So that's a long story.
Navigating Grief Through the Holidays
Speaker 2That's okay. In those minutes, honestly, you have described so eloquently what that intensity feels like, with your analogy of falling through layer after layer after layer, with the wolf on the floor below you, and at night especially. That seems to be the most obvious. Everything like that, ashley, that seems to be the most obvious, everything like that. I know for a fact that there are probably dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands of people saying yes, yes, yes, because of the way you just described it. At any rate, the Shelby that I know and met has made so much progress in her grief journey and you, as I remember, have come with this really, really special thing that we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 2The holidays are approaching. We are actually recording this mid-December. Christmas is just 10 days away, nine days away now, and already people who are grieving are thinking oh my gosh, how am I ever going to make it through the holidays? Whether it's Christmas or Hanukkah, kwanzaa, doesn't matter. How am I ever going to make it through the holidays? So sit back, listeners, and listen, because Shelby's going to give you some great tips. Go ahead, shelby, tell us what your method is called.
Speaker 3Yes, it's called the grief method and that's funny, but it's a five part method and it spells out grief G, r, I, e, f and, especially with regard to the holidays, you can actually use this framework as questions to ask yourself like, what do I need the most? And I'll go through each of the five and then we can talk about examples of how you might give yourself these things. Take it away. But I created this in 2020 after working with grievers for four or five years and kind of seeing the same journey or pattern pop up for everybody, kind of noticing that everybody sort of needs these things in this approximate order, to feel as if they're growing a relationship with grief, not getting over grief or moving on, but to feel as if it's possible to rebuild life after loss again. So this is not the five stages, it's something else entirely. But the first step G is ground, and this is how do I feel safe or secure in a world where loss has taught me, anything can happen to anyone at any time, and this can be death, divorce, diagnosis, financial, any major loss that can befall your life. You know, any of these things can happen to anyone at any time, and grounding a lot of times looks like taking stock of. What can I still control? What do I still have power over? What is still true?
Speaker 3One of my favorite exercises when it comes to grounding is asking what I call the Oprah question, and she used to write this column at the end of her magazines called what do I know for sure? And when I'm working with grieving people, before we start talking about, well, I'm grieving the death of my dad, but not just my dad the historian, the person who watered the plants, the keeper of the house, the breadwinner I'm grieving all of these traits about him. It's like, yes, you have a lot to grieve and there are still things that are true about your life after loss that were true before. So, instead of everything has changed, I need to grieve all of this. It's most things have changed. I need to grieve a lot of them, and changing that story helps you feel like you have something to stand on at a time, kind of again, where all the ground is falling away from underneath you. And so, in what I know for sure we talk about, do you drive the same car? Are your eyes the same color? Do you hair the same color? Do you still have your least favorite and favorite foods. My ground what do I know for sure is always I hated olives before my mom died and I still hate olives after she died. Loss could not take that away from me. But there are traits that are still true about you too, of I still believe in the kindness of strangers, or I still, for a lot of people who are spiritual religious. I still have faith in a higher power, even if I don't understand what's happening right now. For a lot of people, prince is still my favorite artist. That'd be true for my mother. Prince is still my favorite artist.
Speaker 3But the point of it is we tell ourselves oftentimes the stories that all is lost, everything is different, when in reality it's a lot of it. It's a huge majority of your life that has changed and there are central things about you, small and big, that you still have left to rebuild on top of, and that is a form of grounding. And then we talk about other things. In the course that I teach about creating rituals and devoting five, 10 minutes a day to just sitting with grief or whatever that looks like for you. But how do you, or where can you, create these pockets of mindfulness or security or calm in your day that help you feel like you are anchored to something, because loss can feel like you're kind of just drifting in the world all the time.
Speaker 3The next letter release is about what emotions am I struggling with or where can I release? Anger, guilt, sadness, heartbreak, despair, pain. This is what a lot of people talk about when they talk about I need to move through my grief. It's like I need to find something to do with these emotions and in this part of what I teach, we use list making to figure out what is it exactly that you're grieving. And so we don't just say I'm grieving my mom. I say I'm grieving loss of faith. I'm grieving a loss of a sense of home. I'm grieving loss of a picture of a nuclear family. I'm grieving my sense of creativity. I'm grieving being a morning person. Like grief changed all those things about me. This is where we start talking about what? What did loss take from you? What did loss change invariably about your life? And then for each of those things on a list to find some way to feel them, the despair of having lost them, but then to turn it into some sort of ritual so that you can release it and you don't just release things once. You practice releasing things for the rest of your life. So it's more of a practice than it is a one-time deal, because you will grieve and regrieve things for the rest of your life. And so, yes, I'm grieving my loss of creativity when my mother died. The things that felt fun or artistic to me died when she did, but I'm losing creativity and other elements of my life down the future too. I may grieve creativity a hundred times before I die and find ways to move through that emotion and process it.
Speaker 3So question worth asking yourself is do I have difficult emotions that I would like to release? Once we've done the work of releasing, we move into integrate, which is, how can I fold the memory of the person I love into my life, or the people I love, or the pets I love, or the loss that I've been through? How can I integrate that into my life? So it shows up in ways that I want to see? So how do you embody your loved one in your life? This is a question I love asking grieving people is are you willing to see yourself as a griever? Because that will really change your life when you say how do I show up in a work meeting as a griever? How do I date or be a spouse as a griever? How do I raise my children as a griever? How do I go to the mailbox as a griever? How do I go to my local coffee shop as a griever? How do you see yourself in the world now that you're a grieving person? What new accommodations do you give yourself in the same environment you used to be in or in the same relationships you used to be in, but now through the lens of grief?
Speaker 3I often say that when you experience loss, especially for the first time, it's like life glues a pair of grief glasses to your face and you can't unsee through grief ever again, because you know that you and everybody around you will one day die and you have sort of this like mortality awareness, and so it shifts your priorities, it shifts how you show up, but that's not all bad. Sometimes it's like I got to get out of this job because it's actually really draining and I want time to travel or I want time to spend time with people I love, and a lot of times, especially for people who are dating in the wake of a loss, whether they've lost a spouse or they've lost somebody else but they're dating again. It's like, how do I want to have these conversations about the people I've lost or the people I love, or how grief has changed my life? How do I show up in the world as a grieving person and then, with the integrate element of it really is, how can I also feel like I am surrounded by the people I have lost? And so this starts looking like how do I create a dictionary of signs and symbols to see around me?
Speaker 3So for a lot of clients I worked with, it's like, yeah, I'm grieving my ex-boyfriend who died by suicide and I really remember him through seeing cockatiels. I was working with somebody in Australia once and cockatiels apparently are everywhere, right Wild birds and she's like I see him through cockatiels. I'm like cockatiels are great. Can you generate or think of five or 10 more symbols you can have for him? She's like, yeah, absolutely, cats, red Patagonia jackets, a Jeep and all of these things that she told the person who died. And I said now you have 10 more ways to see him in the world around you. And even whether you feel like you've manufactured it yourself, you feel like it's a spiritual, magical coincidence that they just popped up somewhere. You are now seeing him in the world around you, and they could be songs, they could be smells they don't have to be, but you work with the five senses to say how many bits of this person can I draw closer to me? So I feel really surrounded, even though they're not here.
Speaker 3The establish E part of the grief method is about doing grief with other people, and this is often my favorite part about working with people, cause they're like yeah, I'm grieving, I have thick feelings about it, but my relationship with everyone in my life has changed. My workers treat me differently, my kids treat me differently, my best friends treat me differently, and there are different ways that people respond to loss. And so a question worth asking yourself is how would I like to show up in my relationships with other people around the holiday season? Do I want to set boundaries around who I spend time with? Do I want to limit the number of parties I'm going to? Do I want to dress a certain way? When we're grieving, comfort is everything I'm like I do not want to wear sequins or velvet or tights Like get those off of my body, especially when I'm grieving. And then there are other things too of I help people again in my online course, develop scripts for when people say things like oh, you're not over it yet.
Speaker 3To have responses for yeah, I'm going to remember insert person here for the rest of my life and that's okay with me, that's how I want to be. But to have scripts for retorting back or coming back at people when they push against your grief, or to lovingly gently escape relationships or conversations that are really painful to exist in. So somebody keeps trying to get you to see the bright side and at least you got so much time with her and you got to say goodbye and they lived into their nineties and whatever, like you can have scripts or kind of exit and self eject buttons like they used to have in James Bond movies. It's like how do you get out of the situation? And like parachute yourself somewhere else, somewhere safe, and how can you ask the people who are really good for your grief I call them your green light people or your grief allies how do you ask people like that to be extra on call for you this time of year and so will you text me at eight o'clock and if it's bad, I'll pretend it's an emergency and I'll leave and if it's not, I'll brush you off.
Speaker 3Or one of my favorite tips to give to grieving people, especially if you live in the same household or like the same friend group, or like our coworkers or something is like to buddy up and so you have like signals that you give each other across the party Like you, good, you want to leave, you want to make up an excuse to my go, and having somebody else be your excuse to leave when you're grieving is a wonderful gift you can give them. If you're not sure how to support a grieving friend, I'm like be their excuse to leave as a part at a party, whether you text them, call them or you're physically there to pull them out of the room. Be their opportunity to exit a situation. And then, lastly, is F for foster and this is how can I form a lifetime partnership with my grief. And these are more for generally grieving people who are more than a year or two out from their loss. Because this is about where do I find hope again? What is my purpose for being here? What's the meaning of all this? Does joy exist? How or who would I like to model my grief after?
Speaker 3And a lot of what we talk about in talking about fostering a partnership with grief is how do you see grief again, not as a tyrant or a dictator or something holding you captive, but a long-term relationship. And so there's kind of like the new relationship stage where you and grief are looking at each other like what the hell are you and how dare you invade my life? And then there's the getting to know you phase of how and when does your grief show up? What does it often look like? What does it need from you?
Everyday Grief and Healing Insights
Speaker 3And then there's the longevity of grief, of how do you remember your people years and decades down the road. How do you carry their legacy forward, whether it's through individual things you do or a lot of people do things like starting charities or running 5ks or or tributing something, and then writing songs or making art in their honor. It's how do you let grief really fold into the long-term of your life? And then how do you plan for bigger things Like, again, holiday seasons, traditions without them, maybe make a recipe book or pass down a tradition that you do every year, especially around the holidays, and it's really a question of going from ground. How do I feel safe in the world again after the worst thing has happened All the way to how do I live the rest of my life now that I've got grief in tow? And so it's not a framework that's dependent on time, on overwhelmed not sure where to go next to having a path forward, not just for the next little while, but literally for as long as you and grief both shall live. Yeah.
Speaker 2Yeah, that is a great roadmap. I'll call it roadmap, for lack of anything else, and it's often so helpful to have an acronym for something like that because it helps you get through it and helps you remember it. I wrote down each of the steps as a reminder. I've heard it before, but it just is such a great reminder to me and it does take you from those early days of your loss to your future. It really does, and even though you've gone through each of these letters in a very brief time, it can take years to get from G to F, correct.
Speaker 3Correct and I love that you pointed that out, because I tell people when you sign up to take the course or to work with me through these steps, you ultimately get all the information over 10 weeks. They're released every two weeks and there's five of them, so 10 weeks in total. So if you wanted to fast track it and learn everything all at once, you can try and smash it all into your brain in 10 weeks. But you're a member of the course and the community and get coaching from me for a lifetime, because how I generally see it working is people stay in these steps for anywhere between a month to six months Because there's a lot to work on inside of all these and it's not because something's wrong with you.
Speaker 3It's because you're grieving and you're doing life. You're working, you're potentially raising a family or negotiating partnerships or going to school in the midst of also doing the work of grief, and grief is a job and nobody. It's like people talk about caregiving being unpaid labor. I'm like so is grieving. They are both labor, especially in this country, and it is so important for me, as the person who's providing this, to not pressure the students and clients who are going through it to complete it in a certain amount of time, because I don't think grief's ever done. I think we just grow through it. My catchphrase for my podcast is even through grief, we are growing and it's not even through grief we are growing and it's not even through grief we have grown.
Speaker 3It's like the difference between healed and healing. It's one is something that's sort of always happening and the other is a completed project and it really is never a completed thing. And I have seen people return to the course and Life After Loss Academy and the Facebook group and the coaching when new losses appear, and so it's like maybe I joined to grieve the death of my father and now my mother has died, or maybe I joined to grieve my child and now my pet has died. Or they come back because they find out new information about a loss that's already happened. One of the most vivid examples was when a student came back in the group over this past summer and she was like I just got diagnosed with this thing that my mom had and she never told me. My grandmother also had it, and then all the women in my family have had this, and so now it's unlocking all these layers of grief, because my mom should have told me more, but she's not here to talk about it and it's only with the women and all I have left are my dad and my brother and sort of all these new grief emotions were coming forward, so we went back to ground.
Speaker 3It's like how do you feel safe in a world where you can get any diagnosis at any time, for any reason? How do you release all these emotions that are coming forward of? I can't talk to her. I feel guilty about this, I'm angry at her. I feel like I'm so sad that the legacy of women never got a real diagnosis, and so I couldn't help. How do you fold this loss into your life and integrate module? How do you start talking about it with family and friends when you talk about establishing, and then how do you live with this for the rest of your life? And so it really is a circular framework or roadmap that you can return to over and over again for every new loss that comes your way too.
Speaker 2Definitely, and I kind of want to reiterate and focus on that for a moment In this podcast.
Speaker 2Of course, we most frequently speak about losing someone you love through death, by death.
Speaker 2But regardless of the loss in your life and you mentioned numerous losses that you experienced while you were in college it can be the loss of a job, the loss of a marriage, the loss of a relationship, the loss of a dream that you thought you were going to have, for whatever reason, it can be any loss.
Speaker 2And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that in a world that has still recently gotten through not over, but gotten through a pandemic, I have to think that every single person in the entire world grieving the losses that they suffered through COVID, that whole social experience, that social environment, and now so much of it is just online for a lot of kids. There's so much loss in our world today that it is a natural state for everyone to be grieving. And sometimes, if you just take a moment and open your mind and think about something you've lost and think, maybe, how that's impacted you and you never gave it a thought, you never thought about the fact that you are grieving that loss, this can have a huge impact on your life and can help you immeasurably if you will just realize that that a loss you experienced will cause you to grieve.
Speaker 3Yes, yeah, absolutely, and this is something I learned pretty early on when I was becoming a grief coach is that loss starts so much earlier than when you experience your first death. Because for many of us, I've experienced my first like death in the family-ish. When I was in fifth grade, my grandfather died, my mom's dad but I remember the first time I ever experienced a feeling of grief or a feeling of loss is when I was a little kid and I was recounting a story of something that happened to my parents and they didn't believe me. And there's this grief of not being believed when you have this expectation of I'll come to the safest people in the world, the most knowledgeable people in the world, the most trustworthy people in the world, and to have that fractured. And it's a small grief. It's a small grief in the grand scheme of my life and I think only we can rank our own griefs. Nobody can look at our life and be like that looked like the worst. I'm like you have no idea what the worst losses for me, but you can definitely dream even how things were supposed to be. Even futures that never came Absolutely Are things that are worth grieving and, Kathy, I'm sure you'll agree with me with this. We don't say this to bum you out. We say this to normalize and validate the fact that grief is a part of everything and so it's not relegated to sadness or death or when someone dies.
Speaker 3I think grief teaches us. I'll give you one of my favorite tools, for this is the other side of grief often is something that you really really care about. I don't love the phrase grief is love with no place to go, because I think we can grieve things and people that we had difficult relationships with, and so I can't always sign on to the idea of love. But I will say oftentimes and I see this a lot of times with breakups and divorces, when I'm walking people through the grief method with this is, they say things like I am grieving the betrayal, I'm grieving the lack of loyalty, and I'll ask the question of well, what's the opposite of loyalty, Commitment, faithfulness, open communication, and your heartbreaks or your griefs can often point towards?
Speaker 3It seems like you really care a lot about loyalty, communication, consistency, consideration, and so the flip side of the things we grieve are things that we care a lot about, and so in it, for instance, telling my story to my parents and not being believed, trustworthiness is a huge thing to me and feeling seen and heard and validated. And so to say I'm grieving not being trusted is to say I care a lot about feeling seen and heard and validated in the things that I know are true for me. And in grieving a betrayal, you value loyalty, communication. In grieving especially like a parent's sense of consistency in your life, you are grieving kind of everyday routines or having somebody always be there, that reliability. In grieving deep love, you're grieving. Grieving deep love, grieving that sense of connection and that sense of really truly being known for who you are. And so in grieving all these things that we feel are terrible or like I feel so guilty or I feel so angry, I feel so overwhelmed, Oftentimes, the opposite of that is something you really deeply value.
Speaker 2Absolutely, absolutely. As always, shelby, this time goes much, much too fast. I know I was just thinking that. We've gotten to the point in the podcast where I turn the microphone over to our guests, and this is your chance.
Grief Resources and Practical Tools
Speaker 3Now you've mentioned several times you've alluded to a workshop that you what they might find when they visit your website, because I'd really like them to check out your website. Do I need to feel secure in the world? Do I need to release a difficult emotion or several? Do I feel disconnected from my loved one? Do I want to integrate them more into my life? Do I need to set boundaries with friends and family establish, or do I need to feel like there's more than this, fostering a lifetime partnership with grief? And asking yourself any one of those five questions, or Whichever one jumped out at you, that might be the thing worth looking into deeper or holding onto as you get through the holidays and I'll say this too Christmas is hard, hanukkah is hard, kwanzaa is hard. The turning of a new year is oftentimes one of the hardest milestones we go through as grieving people, because it is such a loud reminder that more time is passing and it literally sucks for so many people who are grieving for myself, for my clients, and then, of course, hashtag I've got a holiday grief over here. Day after Christmas is hard, and so that weird limbo time between Christmas and New Year's is when my grief is the loudest. So I am with you this time of year. I'll tell you everything I do. Lives at shelbyforsythiacom.
Speaker 3And if you want to learn more about the grief method, life After Loss Academy, just go to the website. Just go to the website. There's a bright yellow button in the top right-hand corner. It says free workshop. Just sign up for it. It'll email it to you immediately. You can watch it whenever you want. It's always available and at the end of it I talk about the grief method, how you can join the community if you want to join the community and learn from me. But if not, you'll walk away after an hour's worth of teachings and tools and lessons with things that you can actually use to deal with your grief, whether or not you actually decide to join and to work with me. But I make it as easy as possible. Shelby for Cynthiacom bright yellow button. We're all grieving and we've got grief brain, so just put it all in one place, and that's also where you can find social media and email or anything else If you'd like to get in touch.
Speaker 2That was very concise.
Speaker 3That's my favorite part Listening to podcasts and working on podcasts. People spend five minutes telling you where you can find them. I was like I listened to the first two sentences.
Speaker 2Now tell us about your two books.
Speaker 3Yes, I sure can. So permission to grieve is my first book, and this tells the story of the stolen wallet and how I finally gave myself permission to grieve after the death of my mother, and it walks you through what I call the three permissions, the three things I realized that all grieving people need to give themselves after loss. There's permission to feel. This is to have your feelings and to be able to work through them and to be able to express them, sometimes to yourself and others. There's permission to be, which sometimes gets confusing because it's like what is permission to be? It's permission for grief to change your identity or who you are, how you show up in the world. Maybe you're grieving a role as a caregiver and stepping into a role as an independent person. Maybe you're grieving a dream of going to grad school and now you're not sure what your future holds, and so it's kind of like permission for grief to come in, shake it up and then either be in this limbo space of I don't know what's next, or to be in some new identity you may or may not want, and so permission for that to exist. And then the last one is permission to do, and this is my favorite because it's how would you like grief to show up in the world? Do you make an altar for your person in your house? Again, do you do something like start a charity, run a 5k? Do you just hold doors open for people Because that's what your dead grandfather did Like? How are you taking them into the world with you?
Speaker 3I always give a disclaimer for permission to grieve that there are swear words in the first two chapters, because those are the number one. Negative reviews I get are from people who were not expecting curse words, and but it's me telling the story of a finding out my mother was dead and then also getting my wallet stolen. So swear words are there, if you're cool with that. But my second book, which Kathy mentioned, was is your grief your way, and this has no swear words in it and this is a super easy to read daily, non-religious devotional for grief, and so it's made up of 365 really short passages great for grief brain that help you learn to live life after someone you love has died. So this one's very specific to death of a loved one and they're sistered passages. So every other day is a quote and some thoughts on the quote, and then every other day is an exercise or something practical to do, and this could be as small as a journaling exercise or meditation, but they're also very practical scripts for what to tell friends and family when they ask you have you moved on? Are you starting dating? When are you going to have more kids? I'll give you, like, some tools or words to say when things like that pop up.
Speaker 3One of my favorite exercises that I wrote was how to stop a loved one's mail coming to your house, because my mom kept getting magazines for six to eight months after she died and my dad was like I am so overwhelmed and we're seeing her name on everything and she's dead, she doesn't live here anymore and we don't know what to do.
Speaker 3And so, literally, how do you stop a loved one's male from coming to your house is one of the exercises, and then one of my favorites for New Year's on December 31st.
Speaker 3It's an entry about creating a joy jar, and this is or you can call it a grief glimmers jar If you're not interested in the word joy right now which I totally resonate with and that's to fill like a Mason jar and post-it notes.
Speaker 3Keep them on your bedside table and every night before you go to sleep, just write anything good that happened, no matter how small, on the post-it note and stick it in the jar, and then fill up the whole jar throughout the year and then every new year's Eve dump it out and read all the things that happened. And this works in lovely ways for two reasons. The first thing is that it helps your brain start to notice that small, tiny good things are capable of happening every day in the midst of all the crap and the awfulness. And the second reason I love this exercise is because it trains you over time to recognize that not only is it possible for good things to happen, they're already happening, like you don't have to try to make them happen. Maybe you saw a bird out the window, maybe you found a dollar on the street, maybe somebody you love reached out to you without you having to do the work to reach out first.
Speaker 2Maybe somebody dropped your name right.
Speaker 3You know what that's funny. I love that you bring that up. I, my wife and I, have an inside joke of Starbucks spelling our names wrong, because especially during COVID, when we're all talking through masks and saying our names, people hear whatever they want to hear and whatever they're capable of hearing in a loud coffee shop.
Speaker 3And so my wife and I have a whole album in our phones of wrong Starbucks names. I've gotten Shelly, I've gotten Chelsea, I've gotten Chevy like the car brand, and I'm like, okay, my favorite, my wife's name is Heather, but our best one we ever got was for her. Instead of Heather she got Kevin and we're like all right, so even that can be a source of joy for your joy jar. But I did this for about three years consistently after my mom died. And just taking about an hour or so on New Year's Eve to dump out this jar with all these colorful little papers and not remember what I've written many, many times I was like I don't know what I wrote in January or March or August, but to re-remember all these moments it's like, okay, I know the turning of a new year is really hard, but the turning of a new year could also bring more stuff like this, and so it's like a way of hope sneaking in through the back door when you're grieving. So that's one of my favorite exercises. That's in the book.
Speaker 3Yeah, totally hear that this time of year is just. It's a slog to get through and one of my favorite parts about it that grieving for more than 10 years now has taught me is that you don't have to try to get through the holidays because you already are, like the holidays are happening with or without you and you just have to continue to exist Like that is. That's it One of my favorite death duels, a Lua Arthur. She said don't have a happy holiday, just have a holiday. Yep, and that's that's where the bar is. That's the minimum, that's all you got to do. Yeah, I really love that perspective this time of year especially.
Rediscovering Joy in Grief
Speaker 2Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 4Kelly, I just wanted to say a couple of things. For one, I love the word permission because I've had so many things happen in my life that I feel is a loss. But I feel if I said that to somebody else they would be like that's stupid. Yeah, like why would you feel lost over that? And so I love that word permission because now I feel like I can go forth and accept those things, regardless of whether someone else would think it was an effective loss.
Speaker 4Yeah, and I love the joy jar because so many times I see people and they tell you gratitude every morning, gratitude every morning. Well, for me, if I'm grieving, I couldn't tell you what I'm thankful for because I'm just sitting in the pit. So I love the joy jar because that's just the tiniest thing that was good that day. Put it in a jar and then you're done. And then at the end of the year you can have that happiness of like the New Year's coming and it sucks. You can have that happiness of like the new year's coming and suck. But look at all this stuff that happened last year. That was so amazing. I love that and I appreciate it.
Speaker 3Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that's a really fun one to do with. Like kids too especially if you're grieving with a family or with a household full of people is to have a group joy jar. Everybody kind of have their own Cause. I'm with you If you ask me to wake up in the morning. That's what I can see. And I also agree, I rarely use the word gratitude in any of my work because it's like sticky velcro with grieving people.
Speaker 3It's like you want what now? When I'm feeling this now, I just can't get on board with it. And if you don't want to call it a joy jar, you can call it whatever the heck you want. A lot of grief. Experts will call them grief glimmers or grief glitter because it's like tiny and sparkly throughout the day, even if the rest of the day crap. But having it happen at the end of the day you're like I survived a day and look, a tiny good thing happened and then to accumulate that over time, and then much less to do it over many, many years, is a really, really lovely way to rebuild or reintroduce hope at a time when it feels like there isn't. I'll never feel hopeful or happy again, like why would I? Why would I? And the jar is like this is why would you with?
Speaker 4or without.
Speaker 3With or without your consent. The holidays are happening, with or without your consent. Joy is also happening, or grief glimmers, or yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2Absolutely, absolutely Well. The time has come. I do want to say in wrapping up that your book, your Grief, your Way, is probably my number one favorite grief book. Yes, you beat out Megan Devine. It's for so many reasons, but maybe the primary one is the format and that's.
Speaker 2It's really hard to sit down when you're really especially in those early phases of grief. It's really hard to sit down when you're really especially in those early phases of grief. It's really hard to read a sentence, let alone an entire book or entire chapter. And the way yours is written it's a daily. You can pick it up every day and spend just moments reading a section of it and then put it down until the next day. However, I admit I got a little greedy and I read through a number of days at a time, but then I repeated them. But it's a wonderful book for that purpose. With the holidays coming, I encourage people buy yourself a gift for the holidays, consider buying Shelby's book, either one or both of them, but especially your Grief, your Way. You won't regret this one at all.
Speaker 2The other thing I want to point out is about her website. When she was talking about her website, if you heard nothing else, I want to make sure you heard this one very special word that she uttered, and that word was free. There is indeed a free workshop there, so if you do nothing else, check it out. Check out her website. Her contact information, like other guests, will be in the podcast notes. If, for some reason, you can't get to it that way, send me an email and I will put you in touch with Shelby.
Speaker 2But do yourself a favor, because Shelby doesn't spend time telling you what grief is or anything like that. She's going to help you start to move forward and she's going to keep you start to move forward, and she's going to keep you moving forward. As long as you stay in touch with her her website, her books, her workshop, her social media she will just keep you moving forward, and if you check out her social media, you will see that smile that I told you about at the very beginning of the podcast. She is such a wonderful, wonderful personality. You owe it to yourself.
Speaker 2Give yourself a gift this holiday of reaching out and connecting with Shelby. Shelby, thank you so much for being with us just before the holidays in 2024 and helping us all with some clues and some tips on how we can not only get through the holidays, but how we can get through our grief days, which we face every single day. That being said, tune in again, everybody. I hope you enjoyed this special holiday bonus episode, and Kelly and I and I know Shelby wish everyone happy holidays as we all continue to live in grief. Thanks, shelby.
Speaker 3Thank you all so much. This was so beautiful.
Speaker 1Thank 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 asiliveandgrievecom and let us know. We hope you will find a moment to leave a review, send an email and share with others. 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.