Author Thomas Attig: Grief As Relearning

Grief can feel like you’ve been dropped into an alien landscape where the smallest routines no longer make sense and the future stops looking familiar. I sit down with applied philosopher and grief studies pioneer Thomas Attig to talk about why that disorientation is not a malfunction. It’s what love does to a life, and it’s why grieving is less about “getting over it” and more about relearning the world after loss.

We dig into the difference between reactions and responses in bereavement. Yes, sorrow hits hard, but Thomas argues that grief also includes agency: how we meet the changed facts of family, work, identity, and daily life. Along the way, he shares the teaching stories that shaped his work in death education and grief counseling, including what people actually need from us when they’re mourning and why platitudes can land like harm.

We also explore continuing bonds and the heart of grief: moving from loving someone who is physically present to continuing to love them after they die. We talk spirituality in a grounded way, including remembrance practices, speaking a loved one’s name, and the soul and spirit language Thomas developed over decades of writing. He closes with a powerful “fragile humanity, handle with care” reflection that asks whether it’s okay to be small, impermanent, mortal, uncertain, and sometimes suffering.

If you want to go deeper, Thomas’ new collection, Seeking Wisdom in Death’s Shadows, is available through Oxford University Press, and listeners can use a discount code shared in our conversation. Subscribe, share this with someone who’s carrying loss, and leave a review so more people can find honest grief support.

Thomas Truths / Key Wisdom from the End

1. Life is centrally a grieving process: letting go of what you cannot hold onto, and carrying forward what you can.
2. Grief is not only pain. It can also bring wisdom, gratitude, growth, love, and a deeper sense of being alive.
3. We are fragile humans, and that fragility has to be handled with care.
4. It is a privilege to be alive, even with suffering, uncertainty, impermanence, and loss.
5. We are made with the capacity to grow, learn, recover, and become one another’s teachers.

Reflection / Journaling Questions from Thomas

• Is being small and insignificant in the great scheme of things okay?
• Is impermanence okay?
• Is mortality, or dying, okay?
• Is suffering okay?
• Is not knowing, or uncertainty, okay?

Seeking Wisdom in Death’s Shadows

Book Discount Code

AUFLY30

It gives listeners 30% off Seeking Wisdom in Death’s Shadows through Oxford University Press.

Website

griefsheart.com

Transcript

Welcome And Why Grief Matters

Elena Box 0:00

Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to another episode of the Ode to Joy podcast. This is your friend Elena Box again with another fantastic episode. I'm so excited to bring you into this conversation with Thomas Addig. Welcome, Thomas.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Good to be here.

Elena Box 0:19

So glad to have you here for this conversation. I am just fresh off of this trip. I went to Ireland with my family, my little and the little baby. And so this is the first episode back after a little brief hiatus. And it was great. It was, it's my husband's ancestral homeland. So yeah, it was really pretty big for us to go. And so I'm excited to come into this conversation fresh and to dive into the topic du genre, which is grief. And for those of you listening, you know this is one of my favorite topics. And the season theme is all about the art of letting go, uh, the big losses, the small losses, and the ways we're asked to keep living in the midst of change. So again, I'm I'm joined today by Thomas Addig, and I'd love for you to let us know. I ask all of my guests to land us. Where are you joining us from?

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

Elena Box 1:23

Wow. Very nice. I hear it's beautiful there. I've never been.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

It's gorgeous. You should all come, not all at once.

Elena Box 1:32

You've heard the invitation here first. So a little bit about you, Thomas. Thomas is an applied philosopher and a leading voice in grief studies. He holds degrees from Northwestern University and Washington University in St. Louis. And while at Bowling Green State University, he helped establish the world's first PhD program in applied philosophy. He's received, not bad, not too shabby. He's received multiple lifetime achievement awards in death education and counseling. And his work has shaped how so many people understand grief, not just as something we go through, but something we learn through. He's also the author of several books, including How We Grieve, Relearning the World, The Heart of Grief, and his newest collection, Seeking Wisdom in Death's Shadows. Which is amazing. It's so nice to have you on because really, what I from what I know of you and your work, you're you're really a scholar. Is that is that uh the right way to to put it?

SPEAKER_00 2:39

I I'd prefer a philosopher, a seeker of wisdom, as opposed to a scholar that uh I've known a lot of them, and they're very bright people and wonderful, and and so on. But scholars can get a little stuffy.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

And uh they they can be uh self-important, and that's the last thing I think a philosopher should be. A philosopher should be someone you could imagine walking down a sidewalk with talking about something that matters. And I think of scholars, probably a stereotype I should get over as stuffing themselves into libraries and not talking to people very much.

Elena Box 3:23

That's so that's pretty accurate when I think about it. I love that. I love that. So we'll consider this conversation. We're inviting you in, dear listener, to walk down the sidewalk with us. And so here we go. So, so, you know, the question that I've been really pondering as I've been speaking with other people in death workers, you know, I'm I'm a death doula. And one of the questions that we've been discussing is how did you first come into a relationship with death? What was the experience in your life that really brought you into this relationship with death?

SPEAKER_00 4:00

It was a series of uh experiences. My father was

Early Encounters With Death

SPEAKER_00 4:05

one of ten, my mother was one of nine, dad was 18 years older than mom, so there were a lot of people in positions as aunts and uncles who were growing old, many before, one group before the other group. And my mother was one who thought that when news came in, the whole family needed to hear it. We didn't go to a lot of distant funerals. Mom's family was in the Chicago area, but dad's was spread all over the Midwest. And when someone would die in his family, it was rare for us to go to a funeral. It was just too far. This is a long time ago, and people didn't travel the way they do now. So typically a letter would come in. And when I was four or five, I remember hearing the first letters. And when they would come in, mom would open them and read to my brother and my dad and me the whole letter. So I'm four or five years old, and I'm learning of someone dying out on a farm in the Midwest. And some of the letters were pretty graphic and some of them were pretty lengthy. And by the time I was, oh say, through through grade school, I'd probably heard 10 or 12 such letters. And I remember talking to my uh editor for the first book I wrote long ago, and she wondered what my background was, and I told her about this, and she said, that's so unlike my family. I didn't go to a funeral until I was in college, she said, and no one ever read letters like that. So it was strange territory, and I said, it just became home territory for me. And then my mother was pretty attentive to her friends, and some of them were dying. So we went to some funerals in that context. Someone would die in school, and mom would have us going to the funeral uh following up. Uh, and uh, you know, I learned that people my age can die too. Yeah. And sometimes uh the circumstances were grim, and sometimes they were beautiful, and I just kind of grew up with it. And that that got me started, I think. By the time I was in high school, um, I would take several walks with people where someone had died, and we just talk about what had happened and what it was like for them, and what it would have been like for me or was for me if I happened to uh attend and so on. So it became familiar. I cannot say that I acquired a desire to teach about death and dying. That was pretty remote from my mind. I was getting to be pretty good with numbers, so I thought I'd be a mathematician. Uh, and that changed a long way. We can talk about how that changed.

Elena Box 7:03

Yes, I'm I'm very curious about it because I think, you know, for the people that I know who've gone into this world, at least for me, I'll speak for myself. You know, my past was always in performance and and comedy when I weave a lot of that into into the work that I do. But for me, I really reached this point where there was really no choice. It was, it was, well, I can try to keep going this one direction, but what's really in front of me is something that feels so much more rich and really enticing in a way, because what I noticed was I wanted to help build a bridge when I looked out at the people around me, and it seemed that nobody really had a guide or a way to move through this. And so that's when I went really deeply into studying this work. And yeah, so I'd be very interested to hear for you what was that moment when you decided to really dive in deeply, because you know, I'm thinking about someone who might be listening to this, and perhaps grief and death and dying to them is very far away. Maybe they have no experience of it, and and perhaps it's something that they're interested in diving into more. And I know for most it it it can be a really scary topic. So so many people avoid it, which is why I love to talk about it. So, yeah, let's talk about it. So, what was that moment for you when you decided to dive in?

SPEAKER_00 8:22

A sequence of moments. I wanted to be a teacher. My favorite people were teachers, and they were good to me as I was growing up. Mom and dad were pretty good at taking care of me materially. Mom was talkative, but but sometimes a little dogmatic, and dad was quite quiet. So my teachers are the ones who really opened me up to thinking hard and studying hard and learning some things and the advantages of getting an education and so on. So I vowed early I wanted to be a teacher, but

From Math To Philosophy Of Loss

SPEAKER_00 9:00

I didn't think it was going to be death and dying. I thought it was going to be math. I had perfect scores on my SATs and on my advanced SATs in math. So people were offering me scholarships and the like, and I went off to Northwestern, and I took my first semester of math there, and it seemed like every math professor got sick or broke a leg or had an injury of some kind. I had seven math teachers in my first 10-week quarter at Northwestern. And I looked at what it was like to teach that, and I thought, well, I might be a high school teacher. Do I want to teach hundreds of students who do not have any interest in trigonometry whatsoever? Trigonometry, and from the same textbook and the same examples and the same theorems and so on, year after year. Not much conversation in that, or enthusiasm either one. And I looked at my brother who was nine years older, and he was a history teacher, and it looked as if history teachers got to talk to their students, and the students talked back. And that looked pretty good to me, so I thought maybe the humanities, I don't know if I like history that much. So my second year, I took a year of philosophy, a year of literature, and a year of history. That was the plan. I dropped history after the first term. They just wanted you to memorize facts, and that didn't seem like what I wanted to do. And I wound up studying philosophy and was interested in phenomenology and existentialism. Phenomenologists are trained in methods of describing and interpreting experience, and existentialists are encouraged to think seriously about how to go about living a finite life that ends in death with meaning and integrity. I think those are easy ways of understanding those two. The techniques can be a little bit more complicated, but that's for another day. I really liked what I was studying. I still didn't think I was going to teach about death and dying, but I was on the way. A block was put in the in the foundation. I went off to graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis, and I was there into my second year studying again phenomenology and existentialism. And my dad died. It was an expected death. He was 73. When he was born, his life expectancy in the 1890s was 45 to 50. And he had a serious illness in his early years, and he never ate a vegetable on principle, and he smoked three packs of camels a day for about 40 years, and he lived to be 73. So this was an expectable death. And I I was on good terms with him. He knew I loved him and I knew he loved me. He was quiet, as I said before. I went to his funeral and was driving back to St. Louis, and uh I had a a colleague from the graduate program there with me. And on the way, I thought it'd be really nice to get back into operations in St. Louis and have a nice conversation in an office with one of my professors. That's what philosophers are for. And I couldn't think of one that I would feel safe with in their office. And I respected some of them a great deal, but they seemed a little bit stuffy, a little bit conservative, a little bit not so comfortable with younger people to talk to. They like to talk to their older colleagues. And I vowed on the way to, this is the first real block here, I vowed on the way back to St. Louis that I'm gonna be a philosopher, I'm gonna be one who you want to sit down and talk with.

SPEAKER_02 13:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

And that was a big resolve on my part, and I meant it. This is what I went into it for. I went into it for thinking seriously about serious matters with other people, which is not to say leave humor out of it completely.

SPEAKER_02 13:37

Right.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

I went off to teach at Bowling Green in Ohio, and I was teaching my courses and some ethics, and they invented a new college, College of Health and Human Services, that had programs in nursing, gerontology, social work, child and family development. And I thought, you know, a course on death and dying could work here. I I've never really studied this much, but I think that would be a good idea, and it doesn't have to be or even shouldn't be an ethics class, because that's just too rare for people to be encountering. But as I look at these young undergraduate students, and they were younger than me by six or eight years, so how how young were they? I said to myself, these people are gonna be frightened to go into a room where someone's dying.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

They're not gonna know what to say to someone who's grieving.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

I've got to get them to think about their own personal experiences and see what we can learn from them. And I had them write an exercise on their three most important loss experiences. And they wrote hundreds of those things in the first years I was teaching the course. And son of a gun, nobody ever mentioned five stages. No one mentioned even one. Right, right, yes. And they told fascinating stories that were distinctive, individual, about, oh, for example, what are we gonna do with the stuff she left behind in the closet? It's huge. How am I gonna talk to grandma? My dad just died. That means her son just died. How can I talk to grandma? She's uh a grieving mother. I've I've had nice conversations with her before, but now it's tough. One fellow wrote about how he came into the living room one evening, and

Teaching Death Dying To Students

SPEAKER_00 15:40

his father was in the living room with a gun, and he was contemplating killing himself, and this young man had to take the gun out of his father's hands, which he did. People talked about not going to church anymore given that there seemed to be some kind of flaw in how they saw the church operating. They they talked about how money was going to be tough now because the breadwinner of the family was dying. And watching mom struggle, given that dad isn't around to make the money, is hard. Uh, and I started thinking about what is it that these people have in common in grieving. And they all talk about sadness and sorrow coming over them, but then they talk about challenges in living and how there's a major change, and they're wondering how they're gonna live with it. And I started writing a little bit, and one of the first essays I wrote was on grieving as a process of relearning how to live in the world that's profoundly changed. And I asked them, is this what I'm hearing? Is this right? They went, Yes. No one ever tells me that this is what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:02

Uh but now that you say it, yeah, and we're all different, but we're s similar because we're dealing with a world that has changed profoundly, and the scale of it is big, not small, and it's very painful. But pain isn't the whole thing, it's what we do with this very painful stuff that makes or breaks us. And I thought, I'm on to it. And yeah, that's that's been my career. Huge.

Elena Box 17:32

And you know, you pointed something out that I think is so important, which is finding someone who you feel safe to talk about these things with. It's so huge. And you know, when you're going through it, when you really look around at the pool of who you can talk to, you're kind of like, well, that person, you know, I think people have gone through loss, but they haven't truly metabolized it. And perhaps they sort of went through the motions of, well, I went to the wake and I went to the funeral, but they haven't quite gone through the process of grief. I mean, they've gone, they understand it to a degree, but perhaps they haven't gotten the tools to really process it. And so that's why I love this work and these conversations is to bring light to all of this. And as you said, to remind people that there's a university, a universality to it where even though the losses may be different, there is something that's consistent across the grief experience. And yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

And I think most importantly, it's not about just about what happens to you. It's about your challenge to change how you're living. Right. So psychologists talk about the difference between reactions and responses. And I think the culture gives an awful lot of people the message that grieving is only about reactions. It's about the sorrow that comes over you, the the pain of loss that hits you in the head and kicks you in the stomach and takes your breath away.

SPEAKER_01 19:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

And it's something to get over. It's something to get past. You've got to live through it somehow. We don't know exactly how, but give us some time, but not too much time, right? And be done with it. Yeah. And that's just that's half the story.

unknown 19:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Yes, bad stuff comes over you, but you have plenty of choice in how you respond to it, how you actively engage with changing this little corner of your life, this little corner, this big part of your life. Maybe you change jobs, maybe you kiss a couple of friends goodbye who were ugly to you when someone when you're drinking and so on. You know, that kind of stuff happens. And I think once you open people's minds to recognizing that they have choices and there is room for hope as well as sorrow in the experience of loss. And I think, and the second book that I wrote is called The Heart of Grief, Death in the Search for Lasting Love. I think the heart of grief and the the crux of it, the hardest part of it, is moving from loving people when they're physically present with us to continuing to love them after they've died.

unknown 20:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 20:32

And a lot of people say, oh, well, that's not possible. Who thought who thought of that idea? And so on. I can tell you one context, I don't intend to be biased in this. I think most every religious tradition and talking about the founding characters, male, female, mythical, and so on, talk about continuing to love this person who's been sacrificed or died and so on afterwards. I don't mean to be biased here, but I happen to be a Christian in my background, and in most every church that I've been in, there's a thing up in front, and it's a table where people are encouraged to have what they call communion in Christian churches. And Jesus, supposedly, with his disciples, when he dies, or is he on his way to die and they have the Last Supper, and that's why these things are carved on tables, he says, he introduces the practice of communion, where people have a little wine and a little bread, and they think of him, pray for him, remember him, and so on. He says, Do this often in remembrance of me. One of the things he's doing there, if you think about it, he's teaching people to love him as After he's gone by having these memorial services typically once a month, sometimes more, depending on the church it is, and so on. And people go through a lifetime being taught this and not realizing that one of the things he's doing is teaching people to continue to care about him after he's died. And people go, Oh, yeah, well, that's actually a pretty good idea. That's what he's doing. So I'm sitting here thinking you can't love someone after they've died because they're not here anymore.

SPEAKER_02 22:34

Right.

SPEAKER_00 22:34

Well, he's saying, I'm not going to be there, but you can continue to love me.

unknown 22:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

And that's pretty central. And it's pretty central in almost all of these religious traditions when you look at it carefully.

Elena Box 22:47

Yeah, it's so true. It's, you know, so my perspective, how I approach working with clients, is I approach it very much from the spiritual perspective. I work within the world of shamanism, which calls in so many different belief systems. And so this makes complete sense, of course. And that's the one thing that I think people often misunderstand, which is they go, well, well, so-and-so died, and that's it, and so sad, and you know, goodbye. And then you're just sort of left there going, and you know, well, I don't think that's just it. Because to me, my experience has been in connecting to those who have passed in whatever way. And that can be very, you know, individual based on the person how much they want to connect. But to me, my experience has been that that person is more here now than they ever were, in a sense. Because when my father passed, of course, I couldn't call him on the phone, but I could feel him on the wind. I could hear him in a song. I could taste him in the recipes of his that I would cook. And you brought about something, you brought up something that I think is also so important, which is what one might call, you know, ancestor veneration, which is when you make something that's called an ancestor plate, or you invite them into your life by continuing to remember them and really bring them into your everyday life. I think one of the other huge misconceptions is around grief. You know, so often people are so afraid to talk to the person who's grieving and to bring up their past loved one. And I think for the most part, granted, some people aren't in a place to talk about it, maybe with you, maybe at all. That's on them. But for the most part, I think it's so important to ask someone about their past loved one and to say, you know, what, you know, what was his favorite meal? What did he love to do? What was his laugh like? You know, and people like to talk about them because, like I said, to me, my experience has been they are more here now. They they live within all of us. They live within the way we walk and talk and dance and pray. And so I'm interested to hear from you. And I have so many questions because you brought up so many wonderful topics, but I'm interested to hear from you. What do you feel are some of the biggest misconceptions or or misunderstandings about grief?

SPEAKER_00 25:05

Yeah, it's a big one. Well, the first that I mentioned already is that it's

Grief Is Response Not Just Reaction

SPEAKER_00 25:10

just about what happens to us, and it's choiceless, and it's uniformly painful, and something to be gotten out of the way, as opposed to kind of an agenda for reconnecting and firming up connections that we have with people who have died. And this idea of people don't want to talk about it or whatever, and whatever, let me tell you just two quick stories. In the early days when I was teaching, I met up with two couples who had gotten together to form a mutual support group because their children had died. They small children in their lives had died. And in the one case, a three-year-old girl had fallen from a swing in her backyard. She didn't break her skull or anything like that, but she shook up her brain enough that it triggered an incipient illness that was in there, and it started to really go gangbusters. She fell from the swing on Friday and she was dead by Monday. And the mother told two stories when she came to visit my class that I just want to mention briefly. The first one was she goes up the stairs toward the church where she and her husband had taken their young kids for Sunday school, and then they'd gone to church. And the minister holds out his hand and says, Congratulations. And she says, You said, What? You have a uh you have a child in heaven. And he said, She says, if I'd had the strength at the moment, I would have clocked him. I would have just punched him. Yeah, yeah. It was, I was hurting so badly, and you're telling me to celebrate, really? You don't understand what you're doing at all. And then later in the week, after the weekend and the service and so on, there was a woman down the block, and she had a little girl, and their little girls had played together quite a bit, but the moms had never really gotten together socially. But this woman who she barely knew called her and said, You know, I know what happened last Friday, and that you've been through a service and so on. And I just thought, thought of you, and I was remembering how our daughters played together so much and just delighted in one another. And I realized I took a lot of photographs. I think I'll ask her if she'd like to come over for tea, and we can look through the photos together. And that's what they did. And she said she knew where I was, she knew what I needed, she was approachable. This other fellow was official and officious and standoffish and so on. And this is again one of those situations where what she needed was someone who could talk honestly, openly, and lovingly about the little girl that she lost. And she said, that's what I want in response to losses that I've experienced. Right. Um what else I want to say? Oh, you had me on a topic. I got on it, but then I got bounced a little bit. So bounce me back.

Elena Box 28:24

That's okay. I'm not sure. I don't know where we were. I but I'll bring us to the next question, which, and then if we come back, we we come back around again.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

Okay.

Elena Box 28:33

But you mentioned one of your books, How We Grieve, Relearning the World. And I want to talk a little bit about that specifically. And you and you have mentioned a little bit about this, but what are people actually relearning after loss? And you're kind of like, well, I wrote a book about it. So read the book. But yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:52

Um I mean, there are two major kinds of contexts within which people are are relearning. We all sort of establish a way of living in daily life. We we come and go on on a regular basis through the days of our life. We meet with familiar people, we engage in familiar activities, we we do regular work, either at home or in an official capacity somewhere. And our daily lives take a very complex shape, and there are regular characters who show up in those daily lives, some periodically, some regularly, some sporadically, and so on. But our souls and spirits, the deep stuff in us that makes decis make decisions that matter, shape a way of living that becomes familiar, becomes at home to us, and so on. And when someone dies that's close to us, the characters that make up our daily lives, it's a different roster. And there's a loss all around in different relationships and so on. So together we reshape our family lives and our work lives and so on, and individually we we really reshape the whole thing around an absence that makes it so that lots of things are no longer possible while new things become possible, and our souls and spirits take us into the new shape of life, setting some things aside that don't work anymore, and opening to new things and welcoming them, and meeting challenges that we haven't met before because a missing person makes a lot of difference. And then we also not only reshape our daily lives, but we sort of redirect our life histories. We've been living certain chapters that have become familiar to us, and we've never even thought very much about a chapter where mom isn't there, or my husband isn't there, or my child isn't there, and we reshape how we live in the next chapters of our lives that we really didn't anticipate. So fresh challenges, fresh opportunities, and so on. That's a big picture of what we do when we relearn how to live in the world.

Elena Box 31:29

Yeah, it's big. It's very it's everything changes and suddenly it's it feels like you're in an alien landscape. And so I will

Loving The Dead Through Practice

Elena Box 31:40

definitely have all of the names of all of your books in the show notes for people to check out. And so I wanted to steer the conversation, the conversation towards your new book that came out in December, I believe, a couple months ago.

SPEAKER_00 31:54

Yes. I think the most important thing is the picture is really pretty.

Elena Box 32:03

Yeah. So for our listener, the the photograph is of what kind of trees are those?

SPEAKER_00 32:09

Just big tall ones in the woods.

Elena Box 32:11

There's a couple of big tall trees in the woods with a beautiful little path leading through the woods.

SPEAKER_00 32:17

And particularly what people are hearing is our talking, not seeing any visual, correct?

Elena Box 32:22

That's right. They're hearing us. Yes, yes. Which, you know, to me is nature is really one of my biggest tools for people that I work with, is spending a lot of time in nature. So I'm really curious for you, just to lead us into the conversation about your latest book. What do you say in this book that perhaps you hadn't said before? What was it that really spurred on the inspiration for this for this next book?

SPEAKER_00 32:52

I s I started writing my first book with Oxford, came out in 1996. So that's 30 years ago. And I have been writing essays and so on for 17 or 18 years before that. I'm a really old guy. And what you have in this book is a collection of the best of my early essay writing, as opposed to books, on specific topics like the nature of the grieving self, or grieving as an active process, or grieving as relearning, early ideas about that, early ideas about the nature of the self, and about the the passive aspects of grieving and the active aspects of grieving. And what you have here is fourteen essays that sort of captured what I've thought about over the thirty years, uh sort of unfolding. And nine new essays that reflect on sort of prominent themes in those and the development from a very simple idea of a grieving self as like a web within the great web of being, where lifelines feed us from the time we're born, and we we feed back and we establish connections uh with other people, with places and objects and activities of one sort or another, and this web idea of a self. Well, what's doing the weaving? I mean, and eventually I came around to talking about soul and spirit, but it took almost 20 years to really sink into what exactly is a soul. And I a soul is, as I understand it, the the part of us that cares deeply, that love that makes itself at home, that connects and grounds us in the realities around us, social and other. And the spirit is the part within us or the aspect of what we are that enables us to change, to grow, to mature, to overcome hardship and negativity, to reach for hope and reach for growth. And so we've got soul and spirit doing these things together. It took me 20 years to find the vocabulary to refer to what now eventually in the last oh twenty years or so, I started writing quite a bit about spirituality.

SPEAKER_01 35:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:50

And it's about soul and spirit in very deep senses. So what you get in the book is so this is where this stuff started. And this is how it grew, and how it became more mature, and how it connected with other people have been with what other people have been writing about grief and loss. And I must say, I I don't I should say this somewhat pridefully. There's no reason to dismiss the significance of what I've done. There are things there that other people just didn't do. And if there were kind of competition and so on, I'm a pretty successful comp competitor in thinking about grief and loss. But that's not the objective. The objective is to help people understand themselves and their experiences and means of meeting those challenges effectively.

unknown 36:50

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 36:50

And this is this is my intellectual and personal autobiography in this book. By the time you're at the end of this book, if you didn't know me before you started, you got to know quite a bit of me. Wow. And I'm not embarrassed to say uh I think I come off rather well. That's good. It feels good. And I'm getting toward the end of my life.

SPEAKER_01 37:18

Right.

SPEAKER_00 37:19

And I I can say uh when I started out, I wanted to be a teacher, I think I became one. And you can you can see the teachings in me in that book, and they're not they're not inaccessible, obscure, technical, this, that, and the other thing. It's if you're sitting and talking with me, that sometimes you're gonna go, as you do on the other end of this video that we're making, heads go up and down when we talk, and that feels good.

Elena Box 37:49

Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, you speak, you bring up the the topic of legacy, which I think is a very important thing to consider. And I am now in my late 30s when I first started really diving into this work. I was, well, I'd say maybe 22, and then I started writing my book around 26. And I remember sort of having this feeling of imposter syndrome when I first started, because I would look around me at other people who were diving into all this work, and they had quite a bit of years on me. And and I sort of looked at myself and I kind of thought, well, who are you to be talking about death and dying? You know, you're you're a little young thing, you know? And I also believe that it's so important to grant validity to those who have had experience, if it is a lived experience, whatever that means to them. You can speak to anyone of any age and talk to them about their grief experience. And I remember, you know, I wrote in my book, I said, listen, 20 years down the line, I might look back at this and go, well, that's a load of. Or I might go back and go, actually, you know, that was pretty good. So I think it's pretty cool that you've put together this collection, really, that that presents your work as a legacy. And I'm really curious, actually. This is an interesting question that goes off my my list of questions, but it's one that I think is important for people at any age. And this is really a lot of the work that I do with people who are perhaps in that moment of anticipatory grief or kind of in like the baby stages of I'm working a lot now with women who are supporting their parents in their old age. And I think it's not only to consider their parents and their loved ones' legacy, but more so I think to consider their own legacy and to lead from that place of, well, who do I want to be as I reach the end of my life? And so I'm curious for you how you've approached that throughout your journey in this life of building your legacy.

SPEAKER_00 40:00

Part of what I was uh doing in writing this book was gathering it all together. And uh, where did I start and where did I end up? And how did the motivations that turn me toward thinking about grief and death and loss uh yield something that's worth my time and worth my effort and worth others' uh attention? And I think back and I think I think about some of my teachers. Most of the teachers I had were just wonderful. And then you can have some bad ones. And uh I I've now written three books for Oxford University Press. They've been publishing for 400 years. They know what they're doing and they they select carefully. And somebody said, Why don't you send it to Oxford? The worst that can happen is

Soul Spirit And A Grieving Self

SPEAKER_00 40:50

they'll say no.

Elena Box 40:51

Right.

SPEAKER_00 40:51

And I said, Well, yeah, that's right, I think I will. And they liked it, and I wound up as a pretty decent writer of theirs. I I've sold about ten times as many books as they thought I would. And I I I just I've come around to the idea that I I must have learned something along the way, and people have valued what I had to say. And I'm thinking of a 12th-grade teacher who was teaching us to write a bit, and she was trying to teach us about metaphors and similes and things like that. And she I was one I was one of the leading students in the school, and she told me I would never write. And I've just wished I could sort of pull her out of the grave and show her what I tell her. But she was in part a stimulus. Right. I'm gonna write this so Mrs. Lindstrom can will roll over in her grave.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 41:54

That's not the highest uh motive I've ever had, but it's realistic. I I as you're thinking about having a career and teaching, for example, you want a sense that you're on a path where some of what you have to say and offer in conversation and discussion with your students and so on, will be appreciated.

SPEAKER_01 42:17

Right.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

And you can look at yourself and say, that was time well spent. I mean, it's not the definitive say on anything, but it's carried the conversation forward in constructive ways. And I've known an awful lot of people who get toward the end of their lives, and as they look back, they've got a lot of wishes and they've got a lot of regrets. I don't have those. And I I I don't mean to be like sanctimonious or aren't I a wonder or or whatever, but as I look back, I said, how did that all come through me?

unknown 42:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:56

And I think I've always listened well, and I that started out with those big families.

SPEAKER_01 43:01

Right.

SPEAKER_00 43:02

And I've paid attention to teachers and sort of uh how do they get things across as well as they do when they do? And and you have to find your own way of doing it, but you're you're echoing the people who did well by you on the way. So I have found that my life has been one of growing in deepening gratitude as you can as you get farther down the road. And I think in general about life as centrally a grieving process, letting go of what you can't hold on to and carrying forward what you can hold on to. One of the things that I do in this book is, in the last part of it, I think there are four, I think there are four chapters, maybe it's only three, but I think there are four, where I'm trying to harvest the wisdom that I. Think I've come to through the years. And there's a little essay that every once in a while somewhere I just almost talk my way through it, and it's like 12 good things, a dozen good things about grief. Nobody think thinks there's any good thing about grief.

SPEAKER_02 44:18

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:20

I I was sitting one day and I was challenged, I was gonna have to speak to a group, and I was sitting in the group, and I got an envelope, and I thought, well, I don't know what I want to speak about. How about trying to come up with a dozen good things about grief? And I did. Well, that essay's been published and it's in this book. I I and the last chapter is sort of all about harvesting. What do I think are the best ideas that have come to me over these years? And the the web understanding of the nature of persons, an understanding of the difference between problems and mysteries, a maturing understanding of spirituality, the idea of grieving as a process of relearning the world. And then here's another one, if if you'll indulge me. When I've been teaching for seven or eight years, a bunch of students in a dormitory had decided they were going to have professors come and give their last lecture.

SPEAKER_02 45:23

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 45:23

And the hypothesis is this is your last chance to speak to an audience. What do you want to say? And they had three of us, and one was from the communications department, and I swear this woman, if she took the hypothesis seriously, did a remarkable thing. She gave a talk about transforming the shape of television commercials. And I thought, really? With your last breath, that's what you want to talk about. Really? Oh, okay, and you listen. She's got a passion. And the patch the thing that I came out with that day is really one of the last things I talk about in here. And it's I called it fragile humanity handle with care. And I talked about four questions. Uh and they were these. Is being small and insignificant, as we all are, okay in the great scheme of things? Is impermanence? We don't last. Is that okay? Is dying mortality? Is that okay? Is suffering okay? And is not knowing uncertainty okay. These are pretty profound deep aspects of who and what we are. And my discussion uh in response to those questions was if you persist in thinking any one of those four is not okay, you'll wind up in counseling somewhere or in alcohol and substance abuse somewhere. Uh your life will not go well if you can't embrace the idea that this is part of who I am. And it's good to be what I am and who I am. And I remember it went over all right in that dormitory that night. I gave it to a professional conference on a on a couple of occasions, and most of the audience was counselors. And I said, people who are trying to say no to any one of these fill counselors' offices. Yeah, and it they almost stood up together, but they're all going, Oh, yeah, oh yeah, well, and then there's that guy. I mean, you can just see their faces sort of melting into he's right. And I now in my view, and we can stop here if you want, or we can go on. But it's a simple wonder to be a human being and have the kind of life our finite existence affords to us. We can see something and respond to it, we can touch it, we can hold it, we can kiss it, we can love it, and so on, and just for a few moments is an absolute miracle. And you get a whole lifetime full of all of these things, and sometimes they hit you kind of hard. Yeah, but it's remarkable, you're here to take the blow. Yes. And most of I agree. Yeah, and most of the time it's it's pretty good. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 48:36

All right, put me back in.

SPEAKER_00 48:38

What's the next one?

SPEAKER_02 48:40

All right, keep it coming.

SPEAKER_00 48:42

So that that's where the book winds up, and and you can kind of see it moving in that direction. Um, so that is what it gives you a pretty good idea of what it's about.

Elena Box 48:53

It's fantastic. So, for our listener, we're gonna have all of the information in the show notes. And interestingly, I was going to, I always finish out all of my episodes with some reflection or journaling prompts. And I think what you just shared is so beautiful. So I'm going to include those questions, if you don't mind, from you in the show notes for people to consider. And, you know, just for me, as I was listening to you, I mean, how beautiful what you just shared. And I was thinking as I was just on this trip in Ireland, we were up on these cliffs. They're called the cliffs of Kilkey. And if you don't know, take a look, do a Google, because these cliffs

Legacy And Fragile Humanity Questions

Elena Box 49:30

are just absolutely gorgeous. And we're we're standing up on these cliffs and you're looking out into the ocean. And my husband and I both independently had this realization, and then we discussed it afterwards. But it was really that moment of feeling our own insignificance because all of this beauty, all of this is happening, whether we're watching it or not, whether we're here or not. And I kind of had this moment where I thought, you know, if this was the end of the world and this was it, and if I was here, I'm good. It's good. It's all good. And I think these questions that you've offered are so important to come to again and again and again. And we will come to new realizations of this more and more in life. And as you said, it's not always easy. And I would say it's worth it. For me, one of the biggest gifts in grief is are these moments of catharsis, of just having your heart and your mind and all of you blown open to receive and experience more of all that this is.

SPEAKER_00 50:40

And the wonder of it all is we're made to deal with it. Yeah. We're spectacular.

Elena Box 50:46

Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I'm I'm curious to hear what you think about this, is a lot of people I've noticed sort of resent that phrase of, well, God only gives you whatever you can handle. I think is is is the is the phrase that people usually receive. And I remember hearing that at first when my father was first diagnosed with brain cancer. And I at first just went like, wow, well, this is a lot to handle. What do you mean? But I also realized I was very specifically ready and capable to handle it all. And even if you might not feel ready in the moment, you learn the tools on the way. And and the people come, the, the, the teachers come. You've spoken a lot about teachers. The the books come, the writings come, the music comes. It all of it comes to help you along the path, is is is my experience.

SPEAKER_00 51:37

There's a lot of it, and you have to be ready to accept it and and work with it. Yeah. And a lot of people need readiness training to get better at it. But we're also blessed with capacities to grow. Yes. And to learn from going down the wrong path and turning on a better one, and and to be one another's teachers. We're surrounded with opportunities to learn, but we're also the underbrush is full of missteps and ways of going wrong. So we have to, if coming up short is something that's gotta be okay, we shouldn't be surprised that we don't always triumph and that we don't always prevail. And that we we learn some hard lessons, but the whole package together is it's just a privilege to be alive.

Elena Box 52:38

It really is. I've talked a lot in a recent season about becoming what I call an athlete of joy. And as you said, it's really training. And it doesn't mean that we're, oh yeah, everything's great all the time, but it's learning that as you have those fumbles and you have those moments of, oh, took a little, took a little wrong step there, and you're kind of in one of those downward spirals and learning how to reorient yourself towards joy, even if it's just a little glimpse and finding these little practices and tools along the way to reorient. And remember that we're all learning along the way. So we're all training, we're learning, we're growing, and that's and that's live. So, Thomas, we're gonna close out this conversation. And I'd love for you to share a bit about where people can find your new book. And you did mention you have a really lovely offer that people can take advantage of.

SPEAKER_00 53:34

Well, I was uh we were at the point where the book was being released in December, and Oxford has been publishing books for 400 years, so they know what they're doing, but they have published a lot of books, and I just wondered how much attention they might pay to any particular new book. And um the book had been out about a month or so, and they sent me a note saying that they had an offer for readers of a 30% discount on the book, and all people have to do is go to Oxford University Press and look for my book, Seeking Wisdom in Death's Shadows. And when you find it, you indicate you want to order it, and it'll take you to the shopping cart. And when you get to the shopping cart, there's a little code that you can use, and I'll spell it out for you. When you enter it there, and then go to order book, you'll get a 30% discount from $35 for the book, it's a hardback, to $25 for the book. And the code you need to use is five letters and two numbers. A U F L Y 3O. A U F L Y 3O. And I think it's worth it. Yeah. In fact, I'd recommend that you buy 15 or 20 and give them out to your friends.

Elena Box 55:15

Yeah, it's a good party favor. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 55:19

I'm amazed because I was visiting friends in uh the Netherlands uh just a few weeks ago, and he's got this scholarly book with a publisher there, and the thing's selling for like 120 uh Euros, uh-huh actually, which is a huge fortune.

unknown 55:39

Right.

SPEAKER_00 55:39

Uh and he was looking at my book, and we we both do things with grief and loss and counseling, and so on. He said, My God, how can they offer it for that price? People don't get hardback academic books for $25. But Oxford, I think, wants people to have this thing, and they've been pleased with a couple that I wrote before. And I think they really should. This is a legacy book. That's what it is. And it feels awfully good. So again, that it's A-U-F-L-Y-3-0. Uh, and you got to get to Oxford University Press and know the title of the book.

Elena Box 56:16

That's right. And I'll have all of the links in the show notes so people, our

Book Discount Code And Where To Find

Elena Box 56:20

listener, can go and actually just click on it, and it'll take you right to the website, and then I will have the discount code there in the show notes as well. So, so many ways for people to enjoy your book. Uh, how else can people find you? Do you want to let us know your website, or do you have anything else coming up? Sort of workshops or or teachings, anything you'd like to share with our listener?

SPEAKER_00 56:46

I'm really getting long in the tooth, so uh don't tour very much. My my website is griefsheart.com, and there's no fancy punctuation in that at all, just griefsheart.com. There's no apostrophe in the apostrophe, just griefsheart.com, and it describes all my books and some of the history of my writing and and some awards and other things I've received. And I just found out over this weekend that at Amazon they have authors pages. And there's an author's page for me. Great. You can find out about my other writings there.

unknown 57:28

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 57:28

Good enough?

Elena Box 57:29

Very good. I will have all of the links there in the show notes, and people can go and check you out, read your books. And I know that there is so much wisdom there. And thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing with me and our listener your wisdom. Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 57:47

It's been great to be here. Thank you.

Elena Box 57:49

Very good. All right. Well, my dear friend, my dear listener, this has been another episode of the Ode to Joy podcast.