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®
A Space in the Heart
Grief is a journey that no parent ever wishes to take, yet it is one that our guest, Larry, navigates with profound insight and courage. As a former Rolling Stone Magazine editor, Larry found solace in writing after the tragic loss of his son, Rob, to suicide. This episode offers a heartfelt exploration of how grief can transform parents, endowing them with extraordinary resilience and strength. Larry shares his journey of becoming "extraordinary" and how his book, "A Space in the Heart: A Survival Guide for Grieving Parents," came to life as a vital part of his healing process.
We unpack the emotional layers of grief, drawing on the metaphor of metamorphosis to describe the personal transformation that occurs. Larry also delves into the curious absence of a term for parents who have lost a child. We discuss the controversial notion of labeling grief as a mental health disorder and emphasize recognizing grief as a natural process while acknowledging the importance of support for those who might need it.
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To Reach Larry:
Email: lcarlat@gmail.com
Website: www.griefforguys.com
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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.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone, Welcome back again to another episode of as I Live and Grieve. Great guest tonight. I know, I know I say it every single week, but I mean it. I don't know how we do it, but we managed to get some of the greatest guests ever. Tonight is the exception, and I'm really looking forward to this conversation because behind the man, there is an extraordinary book and we're going to mention that as well in the conversation. With me today is Larry. Hi, Larry, Thanks for joining me. It's a pleasure being here, of which I never seem to run out of. Would you just do us a favor and introduce yourself to our listeners and let them know who are you.
Speaker 3:Okay, let's see, I'm going to start at the end, and at the end is my son, rob, took his own life almost six years ago. He suffered from depression, he was also, he had bipolar disorder, he was an alcoholic and also had conflicted feelings about being adopted. Okay, so that was six years ago. Yeah, and I'm a writer and an editor and I've written for a number of places and I worked at Rolling Stone Magazine for 10 years and the way I grieved was writing For 10 years and the way I grieved was writing. I wrote every day for a year and it was a way for me to stay connected to Rob and also to process my feelings, to ventilate and really also to be witnessed. So I did that and that was really a big, big part of how I was able to heal. And, yeah, I wrote this book. It's called the Space in the Heart a survival guide for grieving parents, and I'd like to read something, if I can.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'd love it if you would. I haven't read the entire book, but I am just enthralled with your writing style and your words. Thank you, they're very compelling.
Speaker 3:I appreciate it. You know what? Let me just set it up a little more. So the book is in three parts, and the first part is the end, and it's the end of your child's life and it's also the end of the way you lived in the world. The part two is called the Middle, and the Middle is really the emotional grief journey and what we go through trying to process our grief, and it's very raw and it's very painful. Part three is the beginning, and it's the beginning of our life, after we've processed it, integrated our grief and have become one with it, and how we very often become better versions of ourselves and what I like to call that is being extraordinary. So that's what I'm going to read right now Super.
Speaker 3:I've always found it strange that there's no word for a parent who loses a child. Why do widows, widowers and orphans get to have all the fun? I think it's time for someone to right this wrong. Bear with me for a moment as I reaffirm what you already know Children aren't supposed to die before their parents. That's just not the way life should work. We give birth to children or adopt them. We love and nurture them, we raise them, they grow up, we grow old and then we die. The circle of life Sunrise, sunset, rinse and repeat. Choose your own metaphor. That's what every parent expects and by and large, it's also the way things play out.
Speaker 3:Losing a child, no matter the circumstances, goes against the natural order of things. It's not part of the ordinary experience. It is something entirely different. And we become something entirely different when your child is taken from you. You are no longer ordinary parents. Ordinary parents don't visit their child in a cemetery. Ordinary parents don't cry themselves to sleep at night. Ordinary parents don't wake up each morning knowing they'll never see their child again. We become extraordinary. We become the ones who are unlike the others. We become the newest members of the world's cruelest club, one that is already overcrowded and where the cost to join is the steepest price imaginable. We become those people, the tragic ones, who are whispered about and pitied. We become the ones who are shattered seemingly beyond repair. Remember Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People that? But after a while, something strange takes place. That's right out of a Marvel comic.
Speaker 3:A metamorphosis occurs during our grief and mourning, transforming us from extraordinary to extraordinary. A lot happens when you close up the space between those two words. We are extraordinary parents, not in the sense that we are exceptionally good, which is what people usually mean when they use that adjective, but look it up and you'll find we are the very definition of the word A Going beyond what is usual, regular or customary. B Exceptional to a very marked extent. We are extraordinary parents who must go on living in the world with a hole in our heart. We are extraordinary parents who, in many cases, still love and care for our other children. We are extraordinary parents who go to work every day and function as human beings, while most people are unaware of our secret identities.
Speaker 3:We are extraordinary parents who feel things that no ordinary parent has ever felt, and we can endure the deepest pain because that has become one of our superpowers, and that's another notable thing about us. We all have different superpowers because each of us experiences our loss in our own particular way. Some of us have an unlimited capacity for compassion and forgiveness. Some of us become impervious to pain. Some of us are masters of disguise. Some of us can turn to stone, some of us can become invisible, and then there are those of us who can open up and share it with the world. We walk among you, we are your friends and neighbors, your co-workers, the quiet couple who sat at the table next to you in a restaurant last night. We are the extraordinary parents, and we don't mind if you want to call us by our first name.
Speaker 2:Wow. Okay, let me collect all my thoughts, of which I had many. I get emotional every time I read it, I'm sure you do. I'm sure you do. I'm sure you do, and I have several things to say. First of all, I read those words in your book. As a lover of audiobooks, in particular because I spend a fair amount of time in my car nothing appeals to me more than when I hear the author themselves read their own words, and this was no exception. And the reason I feel those words more is because I know I'm all of a sudden privy to exactly what the author intended to say, not my imagination of that voice, that intention. So thank you for that, thank you for sharing that.
Speaker 3:Thank you for understanding that, absolutely.
Speaker 2:The second thing I want to say is I love that you use the word metamorphosis, because I have a presentation that I do different times I'm asked and I call it the chrysalis effect, and it uses the analogy of the caterpillar and that metamorphosis that takes place because I believe I personally experienced that in my grief journey. And the last thing I want to say is not a comment on the work or anything like that, but when you talk about there being no word for parents who have lost their child, there is a gentleman whose name is Henry Cameron Allen. He's on Facebook. I encourage you to look him up. He is coining the word peregrine for just that purpose. He has written his own book. He talks about it. He talks about his son, cameron, and then he legally changed his name and gave himself Cameron as his middle name so that he would always carry his son with him. So he is adopting the word peregrine To mean parents who have lost a child. So just FYI, okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's cold.
Speaker 2:Now to the good stuff. You talked about the end, the middle and the beginning, in that order.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I have not really heard I mean other than knowing that the end is the end of someone's life. I have not heard that phase of grief, that initial phase of grief, called the end. I've heard it called the beginning but not the end. Why did you choose to do it in that order?
Speaker 3:I chose to do it in that order because I really was trying to chart the emotional journey that we go through. So it starts with me. It started with the day I got the phone call that Rob died and that was the end and that was the end of his life, and it was the end of the way I lived in the world. And really the way the book works is it takes you from the first chapter. It's called A Day in the Life, if you can still call it that, and it's brutal. I very purposely wrote that because I wanted other parents to know.
Speaker 3:I know the pain, I have felt the same pain that you've felt, and so that was the start. That was the starting point, where it was like Emily is at the end, and you know this very well. In the beginning it's just you're hopeless, you're absolutely hopeless and everything is dark and you are just in the worst pain that you've ever been in. So it's the end. But as I write, as I wrote and as we've experienced, we know it's not the end, but that's the way it feels like the end, because we're in the dark, we're just totally in the dark, absolutely.
Speaker 2:There is a place in your book that I want to call attention to. It's one of the things that sometimes will get me to pull my soapbox out from under my desk. And you talk about now how a form of grief is actually part of the DSM listing. Would you talk about that a little bit, Because I've covered topics? Is grief a mental health diagnosis? Well, officially it can be, so would you clarify exactly what version of grief is in the DSM?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I got stuck on it originally because they used the language after a year. Okay, and I also work at a place called Our House Grief Support Center. I run grief groups for bereaved parents. Those groups go for two years.
Speaker 3:After one year, people are still having a very, very rough time with their grief. A lot of people will tell us that entering the second year is even more painful than the first year, because the fog of disbelief has dissipated and you're really feeling the pain. So when I read that after one year that this is now going to be labeled a pathology, it really just sort of pissed me off. So that's what I reacted to. However, there are people that do have complicated grief and they're stuck on certain things and many times it's for years and years and years, and I'm glad they can go to a psychotherapist and work their way out of that. But for all of us, all the things that it says about complicated grief, all the emotions, we still feel them. We feel them a year out, we feel them two years out. We feel them for the rest of our lives. We learn how to cope with those, but those emotions never go away.
Speaker 2:No, I mean, I still experience many of them. It's been almost seven years since my husband died. It's been well 50-ish years since my infant died and I never really grieved his loss, because, well, I find that I'm really grieving that loss now. But and for the listeners that don't know when I say DSM, dsm is a book that the Psychiatric Association has created and they use it to actually list diagnoses for guess what insurance company purposes.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Primarily and see soapboxes out. I'm sorry I won't stay on it very long, but it actually stands for something like Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Health Disorders or something Something inane like that, and I, too, got very upset when I found out that they had actually listed grief, because to me, it's more of a normal process that you go through. However, I do agree that there are people that just can't move on for one reason or another. Those people do need help and for them, likely it's a diagnosis. For me, personally, it wasn't a diagnosis. It was and remains an experience.
Speaker 3:Curious if I can answer your question. You said something that really got inside of me. Do you feel any sense of relief grieving your baby from 50 years ago? Now that you can finally feel it, does it come as any sort of relief at all?
Speaker 2:If I can set aside the pain while I'm experiencing memories, or there are so few memories. This happened. It had been an entirely normal pregnancy, no problems at all, and of course this was back in the late 70s and mid 70s. And I got to the hospital, they ruptured the membrane and then, within probably 10 minutes, I had a fever of 104 and everybody was panicking. So they wound up starting labor. They wound up taking the baby by forceps and I had always done a lot of research and I was waiting to hear that baby cry first of all, and I was also waiting for the APGAR score, which I know is on a scale and everything. So I was waiting for that and nobody was saying anything.
Speaker 2:I had a perfectly natural childbirth, except for the antibiotics they had started giving me, and I heard nothing. I had a perfectly natural childbirth, except for the antibiotics they had started giving me, and I heard nothing. I didn't hear a cry. I didn't hear anyone giving an APGAR rating. I just heard a lot of mumbling. And then a nurse came to me and said I'm sorry, your baby was stillborn. And then I heard someone say in the background wait, wait, we have a heartbeat. And all of a sudden this baby boy is alive.
Speaker 2:And then everything was kind of because of the fever probably. Everything was really kind of confusing. But I remember being told that because the baby was so ill, they were transferring the baby to another facility that had a neonatal intensive care unit and they whisked the baby off. I never saw the baby, I never touched the baby, and that was in generations where they didn't take pictures of the baby, there were no smartphones, so I never even had a picture of the baby. That was a time before ultrasounds. I never had an ultrasound of the fetus. I had nothing to remember that child by.
Speaker 2:So it was very easy when everybody's telling me you know, put it behind you, move on, move on, move on. It was very easy. When everybody's telling me you know, put it behind you, move on, move on, move on, it was very easy to pretend it never happened. So do I feel any relief? I do feel some. I feel like now I'm finally allowed to grieve, if you will, and I think that's where most of the relief comes from the feeling that it's okay for me to feel this, regardless of how many years ago it was, regardless of how or what happened. It's okay for me to grieve this loss.
Speaker 3:I think it's beautiful that you're doing it and it's obviously so healing for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it has been. It has been. Yeah, when I first started that kind of cycle of grief, it was very, very difficult. It's gotten a little easier, like grief does of grief.
Speaker 3:It was very, very difficult. It's gotten a little easier, like grief does. I know it's so hard to tell that to people early on because they can't take it in, and we know because we've been through it. But, like in our groups, I'm not a cheerleader, that's really just holding space for people. But I try to be optimistic, I try to give them a little hope and I know in the beginning they can't even take it in.
Speaker 2:Right, okay, now you're a wordsmith, a renowned one. You've written for places that I'm very jealous of. What, for you, is the difference between grief and mourning? Is there a difference?
Speaker 3:I'm not sure. To be perfectly honest, I always thought that one was more emotional than the other. But to be honest, I don't know if I can really sort of entangle them. I think they were used interchangeably, but I don't know. I always thought that grief was a part of mourning. I thought mourning was sort of the emotional journey going forward and grief is just the feelings part. But I'm a good wordsmith. But you asked me a question that I always struggle with. So good on you.
Speaker 2:And the reason I'm asking and I just see you, larry, quite honestly, as somebody that I can pose these questions to and have a good discussion. Other people might just avoid the issue. But the reason I ask is someone in my network at one point forwarded a link to me and said Kathy, you have to listen to this sermon. And the topic of the sermon was you can choose to grieve or not. And I said what? No, you can't choose, it's a part of life.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:His approach was and I wouldn't normally listen to a sermon, but the topic really provoked me His perspective was that mourning represents a period of time. Like generations ago, they would wear certain clothes to show they were mourning for a period of time.
Speaker 2:And after that period of time, mourning was over. You move on. So that was his perspective. Grief is the entire journey. So his situation was you can choose to mourn, get through it, move on, or you could choose to grieve and be mired in this emotion forever and he was pretty emphatic about his you could be mired in this emotion.
Speaker 3:The key word? I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think the key word you said and I think this is such an important thing is that you have a choice. Yes, yeah, and in the beginning you are so unaware that you can make a choice in how you grieve and how you mourn. You can't see it. And then at some point, when a little light comes into the room, you realize that you can make a choice how you want to go forward.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:And that happens at different times for different people, for different reasons. But when it does happen, it's such a revelation that you can say to yourself I can still love my child, because I will always love my child and be connected with my child, but I don't have to carry all of the pain for the rest of my life. Some people which always saddens me some people older. I know of people in their 80s who still talk about how they never got over a loss that happened many, many years ago. Well, because they confuse the pain with staying connected with their person, instead of realizing that the person lives right here in their heart and they will stay connected. They don't have that. They don't have to struggle, struggle with the pain of it. So that choice is so important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's the word that I chose out of that entire thing was the word choice, that you can choose how to grieve. Whatever other word you want to attach to it, the choice is yours. For me, it was. You know, I was in that initial phase and then one day, I remember getting up and thinking to myself I don't want to live the rest of my life like this, I can't live the rest of my life like this, and that, for me, was my turning point. What was yours?
Speaker 3:Sue. The first turning point was the acceptance that Rob was mentally ill. I was beating myself up about what I was always. My superpower was saving him. I would swoop in and I would always save the day. And I beat myself up a little bit about it and then I just finally accepted that he was mentally ill. He had been diagnosed when he was 17, but he never took any meds. He never acknowledged it himself and once I sort of accepted that he was mentally ill, it was a skeleton key that just really opened up. It opened up my world in terms of how I wanted to go forward.
Speaker 3:So that was a big one. But the other one, it was witnessing the transformation. And that happened, you know, close to two years in a grief group. There was just one day that all of a sudden there was light in the room and I realized that people were coming back to life and that has such a profound effect on me where I decided I wanted to be on the other side of the table. I wanted to become a grief coach, I wanted to run groups for bereaved parents, because seeing the transformation and being a small part in that transformation for other people is the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life. So those were like the two sort of pivot points.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Now when you mentioned people were coming back to life. Do you mean that in their own grief journeys they had kind of made that pivot? If you will? I just saw people and I see people because we do this for two years. I see that the spark is back in their eyes. They're still grieving. But you can just see they're managing it, they're coping with it, they're looking it right in the eye. They're not in denial, but you can see this is a spark in their eyes.
Speaker 2:Good, good, I love that story. Thanks for sharing that, because I've not heard anyone else express it that way. It's an amazing thing. Yeah, kelly, how are you doing? Is your mind full of comments and questions? It always is full of comments.
Speaker 4:You know you're my daughter.
Speaker 2:What can I say?
Speaker 4:Having recently decided that I don't know if decided is the right word accepted that I've experienced grief in many different forms, of which I didn't realize at first there were different forms. I thought grief was what happened when somebody died. I'm in all kinds of different phases with each one of those forms, some I'm still denying, some I'm accepting. None of them, thankfully, are deaths of a child, which I can't even begin to imagine. But I just find it interesting how one person can feel the gamut of grief in one form or another or in all, especially the older we get, the more we experience of life. And I just find it interesting and I love your perspective on it. It just it blows my mind really. Older we get, the more we experience of life and I just find it interesting and I love your perspective on it. It just it blows my mind really. You see, I can't even get the words out, but I just no. I think you're getting where I'm I love and I hate grief at the same time. Yeah, no totally.
Speaker 3:I think that's such an important thing that you're saying, because not only is there the gamut, I think what's amazing? Because you just don't know before it happens to you that you're feeling all of the feels. You're feeling all kinds of complicated and conflicting emotions, you're feeling all of them at the same time and you can't necessarily disentangle them and it's like it, it's, it's sort of you know, it's a total. Total. It's a mind blower type of thing like how can I, how can I be sad and angry at the same time? How come it's a? No one tells you that this is the way it works. So there's the gamut and the journey, but through the journey you are juggling all of the emotions many times all at once. It's like keeping the balls in the air.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. Sadly, these 30 minutes go so fast they really do, but that is usually, larry, in all honesty, why I wind up having people back a second time. So that could very well happen and is likely to. As such, this is the time in the podcast where I actually turn the microphone over to you. I want you to tell our listeners a little bit more about your book. Make sure they know where to get it. Your contact information will be in our podcast notes so they'll be able to reach out to you either through a website or email, whatever you choose or, if you would rather, they can just reach out to you through myself or Kelly, and we can pass their information along. At any rate, the microphone and the floor are both yours.
Speaker 3:All right. So again, the name of the book is Space in the Heart a Survival Guide for Grieving Parents. You can get it on Amazon or Audible. I always suggest that people listen to it on Audible, I find to be it's a much more intimate experience and you can actually hear my emotions, and I think that is just a great way to sort of connect us together, because I feel very connected to everyone in our lousy club. I am also a grief coach and you can check me out at griefforguyscom.
Speaker 3:And spoiler I don't just deal with guys. I deal with anyone who is suffering or stuck on some form of grief. Guys sort of have a hard time opening up, so that's sort of why I sort of branded it that way. That's it Trying to think. If there's anything else, I'm happy to share my email because, frankly, I really love to hear from people, particularly if they've read the book, but also particularly if they're struggling with their grief. I'm happy to help them and it's my email is lcarlat C-A-R-L-A-T at Gmail.
Speaker 3:And then, if I have a few more seconds, I just want to read a teeny. I'm going to read a tiny little thing. It's called the Little Reminder. Please do Okay.
Speaker 3:Here's the little reminder of an important thing that often gets lost in the grief sauce. It's simply this there is always hope. It's hard to see, sometimes the sadness blinds us, but hope is always right there with you. All you have to do is reach out for it Whenever you're having a really bad day. Wrap your arms around it and don't let go, and it doesn't hurt to also hold on to it on the not-so-bad days as well. Let hope guide you. Hope is the light in the darkness. Whatever you're feeling right now will pass. Things will get better, and then they'll get worse, and then they'll get better again. You know the drill. You've been on the exhausting grief ride for what feels like forever, but it's not forever, and as long as you have hope in your heart, everything is going to be okay, because hope is everything. Hope makes you look forward to the next day. Hope heals your heart. As Rob would say, hope is dope.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for that, kelly. Did you have anything you wanted to add or ask? No, you're good Wiping your eyes. Yeah, I know I have tears in my eyes too.
Speaker 2:I want to talk for just a minute about his book, although now that I know it's on Audible and I don't know why I never thought to check guess what's going in my queue. So, kelly, it will be there if you want to borrow my Audible account. But I want to say again, I've not read the entire book. If you read the first page, it'll be enough to make you want to read the rest. The book is real, it's genuine. It's in what I would call a conversational language. You feel like you're sitting down and having coffee with Larry when I say it's real, it's genuine.
Speaker 2:Here's some of the chapter titles Stuck in Suck City. The People in your Heart Will Make you Cry, scream. Real, loud Answers from the Great Beyond Comic Relief. We Were Robbed. What to Expect when You're? Yeah, there's a book called what to Expect when You're Expecting. This chapter is what to Expect when You're Expecting to Cry Forever. The book is real. It quickly has gone on my resource list. I have a list of books, especially that I have acquired through guests and everything, and not every book goes on this list, but this is definitely on my list for people who have lost a child and many times when people will ask me, I'd like to give a book to someone who has lost spouse, partner, child, parent, whatever and they'll ask me for some recommendations. So your title is now on my list.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:And I'm going on a grief cruise at the end of February and I have already met a number of the people that are attending, and many of them have lost a child. So if there's room in my suitcase, your book is joining me. If not, at least the title will, and maybe a clip from the audio book as well, because that's easy to pack. Okay, I guess it's time for us to say farewell. I always talk about self-care. Self-care can be so simple as finding a good book that makes you feel valued, that makes you feel you're not the only one going through this horrible, horrible thing we call grief. So remember to take care of yourself somehow, and please join us again next week as we all continue to live and grieve. Thanks so much, larry.
Speaker 3:Pleasure, absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1: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 asiliveandgrievecom 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.