084 How I learned to live after losing my daughter

In this episode, Brian Smith shares his lifelong relationship with death—from childhood terror to the devastating loss of his 15-year-old daughter. Instead of being broken by grief, he and his family discovered a path forward through love, communication and respect. He shares all things grief and the GEMS model.

• How Brian’s early fear of death shaped his life
• The raw reality of losing a child—and how grief rewired him
• How families can grow closer after tragedy
• Society's roles and expectations during this time
• The 4-Pillar "GEMS" Method (Gratitude, Exercise, Mindfulness, Sleep) that helped him survive 
• How to honor loss without losing yourself 

This isn’t just a story of pain, it’s a blueprint for resilience. Whether you’ve faced loss or just fear it, Brian’s journey will change how you see life, death, and healing. 

You can find Brian: 

• Website: https://grief2growth.com 
• Store with free and paid resources: https://grief2growth.com/store 
• Substack: https://grief2growth.substack.com 
• Free online grief assessment: https://grief2growth.com/assessment

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So I had this fear of death, just tremendous fear of death, panic attacks, all that stuff. The moment you take that first breath is that there will be a moment when you take your last breath. The big grief event in my life is when my 15-year-old daughter passed away. I absolutely 100% believe that life continues after our physical bodies die. So when a person dies, your love for them doesn't die. We still love them, whether they're there or not. We're still a family of four. And you see my picture of Shana behind me here in my studio. And when my mother was leaving for the day, she said, this was a good day. Nobody cried. It's like, it's good that you're not sad. Being sad Welcome to Multispective.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

I'm so excited to have you here. Thanks.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

It's good to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

I'd just like to give you a bit of space to sort of share your story and your background and where it all begins for you.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

That's a big question. I'll start with in terms of grief. I would say I kind of start in the middle because the big grief event in my life is when my 15-year-old daughter passed away. And this was 10 years ago. It would be 10 years ago and a little bit less than a month now. As I said, she was 15. It was a sudden transition. She was healthy, volleyball player, basketball player, and she passed away suddenly. She just passed in her sleep. So that was the beginning of my, what I would call my big grief journey. But going back further than that, as a child, I had a terrible fear of death, which is really weird because most kids don't think about death. But I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, and they talked a lot about heaven and hell, a lot about hell, and all the things you had to do to not go there and how God was, you know, I just visioned this angry God, and I just didn't understand why he was so angry. And because I view God as kind of a monster, I was like, I can't really love this God, but I have to, otherwise he's going to send me to hell. So I had this fear of death, just tremendous fear of death, panic attacks, all that stuff. That lasted until I was in my 30s. And at that time, I started saying, okay, I've got to figure this out because it's driving me crazy. So I started studying everything I could find about what happens when we die. What's the afterlife like? What is Christianity are you really right? What do other religions say about this? What does science say about it? I'm a very scientific person. I was a kid. I used to take things apart and put them back together again because I wanted to know how they work. So I'm like, what's the deal here? So that was when I was in my mid-30s. It was about 20 years later when Shana passed. And the good thing for me is when she did make her transition, and you'll notice I don't ever say that she died because I don't believe we do die. So when she made her transition Listen. I knew she was OK. And a big part of grief is we think of our loved ones as gone. They're lost. Their lives are over. I didn't have to go through that. But for me, it's like, well, my life is over, though, because this is my this, you know, when as a person who I had two daughters and I really felt like I became who I was when my first daughter was born and my other daughter is three years older than Shana. So I'm like, but what about me? What do I what do I do? What do I do with this? And you mentioned earlier, you know, the right way to grieve. And it's interesting because we always think there's a right way to do things. How do I do this? Just give me the manual. And a lot of my clients come to me like, just give me the manual. Give me the five steps or whatever it is. I know there are five stages of grief, they'll say. So which stage am I in? That's just not true. There aren't five stages of grief. And someone asked me the other day, how many are there? I'm like, infinite number of stages. And they're back and forth and it's up and down. And grief is unique for every person. And not just for every person, but for every relationship. So when you have lost, say, a spouse, it's different from losing a child. When you lose a parent, it's different than losing a spouse. When you lose a best friend, it depends. It's just such a multifaceted thing. So there are some things that we can do to help us cope with grief. There are some things we can do to make ourselves more resilient. There are some things we can understand about grief in general, but there's no playbook. There's no right way to do it. Also, last thing I'll say on this is it's not a disease. It's not something to recover from. It's not an ailment. It can be here to teach us. We can learn from it. We can grow from it. There's something called post-traumatic growth. We always hear about post-traumatic stress. There's also post-traumatic growth. And it can be an opportunity Hmm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

There's so many facets to what you were just talking about. There's bits and pieces that I want to delve into your journey, and then bits and pieces that I want to talk about, like the topic of grief in general. Starting from the early days, you mentioned that the term death was something that you feared. It was debilitating for you. It got in the way of so much of your health and well-being, and it was partly because of what religion had taught you. And you mentioned that you then decided, okay, I've got to start turning around this narrative now. I need to start to dig deep into it. Yeah, well, in terms of that, I'm going to start reading about

SPEAKER_01 5:57

it. It started again, for me, it started with religion. And it's really interesting because I find people on either end of the spectrum have real problems with death. People who are materialists, who say this is it, death is the end, and we just blink out and we're gone, they have a real problem with it. And then there's the fundamentalists in any religion. I always talk about Christianity because that's what I was raised in, but there's fundamentalists in all religions. And even some spiritual people are very fundamentalist about their mindsets. So what I decided to do is basically start with a blank slate. What's true? And I can only start from the blank slate. So I first studied my religion, Christianity, and I found out about the origins of the Bible. Where did this thing come from? Because a lot of Christians think it came wrapped up from God and wrapped in leather with gold gild around the edges. It's like, that's not the way the Bible came to us. It was written by hundreds of men, only men, over a hundreds of years from different timelines, different types of things in the Bible. Some things are meant to be taken literally. Some things are not. Christians tend to take all these things literally. So I had to separate that out. I'll learn about the way that the canon, we call it, was put together, which books were selected to go in, which ones were left out. A lot of that was political. An idea I was taught in Sunday school was it's perfect. The Bible is perfect in every word, every letter. You can't change anything. And that's just not true. There are even hundreds of translations even now, and some are more accurate than others. The King James is one of the worst. So I started with that. And I said, okay, what does this really say? So I went from being an evangelical or fundamentalist Christian to I became what's called a Christian universalist. And I realized the early church, most of the early church fathers believed in what we call universalism, that God saves everybody. And And so I came to that perspective, which really alleviated my fear of death. I mean, it was just kind of gone at that point. But then again, went from that, like, what does Buddhism say? What does Hinduism say? Because I'm only a Christian because I was born in America to Christian parents. If I had been born in India, I would be a Hindu. So what is Hinduism? And I found out that all the major religions anyway, there's a whole lot of truth in them. There's a big, giant kernel of truth in them. But there's all this crap around them. There's all this stuff that they layer on that makes them feel more, you know, more right and more exclusive or whatever. So I'm like, what is the core? And then again, started looking at science because I'm an engineer. My background is chemical engineering. So I looked at that. So what did I discover? That. As near-death experiences tell us, it's all about love. It's all about love. This God that we've been told is so angry and all that stuff, that's a projection of man onto what they think God would be like. That's not what the infinite is like. That's not what the creator is like. I found out there's a lot of truth in some of the fiction things we watch. There's a lot of truth in Star Wars. There's a lot of truth in the movie The Matrix. So I believe that there's this source, this context, constantly reaching out to us, that we're constantly reaching back to, that we all come from and that we all return to. And this trip, this life that we're on right now is just a little blip. It's like an adventure. It's a vacation. It's a trip to the amusement park. I wrote a piece the other day. I referred to life as a trip to the amusement park. All these analogies, but it's not the ultimate reality. And where we come from, where my daughter has returned to, we all come from there. And you talked earlier about facing things. And the thing, it's natural to, if something is scary, we want to turn away from it. And death is scary because we don't know about it. And anything we don't know about, we're going to fear. So what do we do? We try to pretend that we're going to stay young forever. We try to pretend that we're not going to die. But it's the only thing in life, the only one thing in life that's absolutely certain, the moment you take that first breath, is that there will be a moment when you take your last breath everything else is is up for chance yeah so why avoid the one thing you know is coming for us certainly and you can turn this from and that sounds maybe kind of morbid it's like we're all gonna die it's more like we're all gonna go home we're all going to we're all here on this adventure and enjoy it learn as much as you can while you're here but just like a trip to the amusement park you go you ride the rides you have the you have the ice cream you have the But there comes a time when you're tired and you just want to go home. And that's the way I view life now. So that's what I've learned in a nutshell.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

That's interesting. I'm not sure if you'd said this, just to clarify. Do you think, though, that there is life after you've left this particular life? Do you think that there is a karma, the soul has dues, and it has to kind of fill or learn something in this particular immune system? Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 12:03

Yeah, that's a great question. Now, what I've come to understand, a lot of concepts from a lot of religions, I think, have been misunderstood. And karma is one of the most misunderstood things, because the way some people view karma is that, okay, if you do a certain thing, there's like this abacus or something, there's somebody keeping score. So you did a good thing, so something good is going to happen to you. You did a bad thing, so something bad is going to happen to you. And it's all got to balance out in the end. I don't believe that's what karma really means. It's really what karma means from So the thing is, there is a natural tendency, of course, if you put bad things out, you create an environment where bad things are going to come back to you. If you're walking around being mean to people all the time, it's not very likely people are going to be nice to you. So that's just a natural law. I do believe in that. I absolutely 100% believe that life continues after our physical bodies die, and that's because of all the things that we do. I look at it, there's like all these pillars of information. There's near-death experience. There's mediumship. Now there's consciousness research. There's precognition, ESP. There's after-death communications. There's all these different things that add up to show quantum physics is starting to show that this reality is not what we think it is. So when I add all those things up together, I feel like I can make a very strong case. for the fact that the afterlife exists as strong as I could possibly make without having been there myself. But I've also talked to a few hundred people who have been there and say, yeah, when my body was on that gurney, I was up in the corner of the room. When I had my heart attack in the house and they put my body in the ambulance, I went in the ambulance with my body. In fact, I talked to someone the other day and she had a near-death experience at seven, age of seven, at one at seven and one at nine. I forgot which one it was. But she had one where when she fell backwards, when she hit her head, she left her body and went to the hospital. And I said, I've never heard of anybody who went straight to the hospital. And then her body came later. So I've talked to people that have had these experiences.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

I've done one episode as well where I interviewed somebody who had a near-death experience. We always think that science is the closest thing to the truth, but science also admits that they haven't really found the answers to everything. When there's a large enough number of people that can validate or verify that this has happened, then therefore it has to be accepted. It's just maybe there isn't a scientific evidence to prove it, but they've never disproved it. They've never been able to say, no, that doesn't exist. They're just saying, give us a little bit of time until we can find the evidence.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Yeah, that's the promissory note of science, I think is the term that they use. It's like they'll say, well, we haven't figured this out yet, but give us enough and we'll figure it out, and there will be a, quote, natural explanation for it. We will find a mechanism. And I've studied near-death experiences quite a bit, and I've seen people who are skeptics try to take them apart, and they'll say things like, well, it's just the evolutionary thing of the dying brain, and then it fires off DMT, and you have these experiences. Okay, well, let's assume that that's true. First of all, why would we develop that evolutionary thing? How is that beneficial for you to have the most lucid experience of your life At the time when you're dying, why would the body develop that way? And then secondly, what about people who like my friend Penny, who had a near-death experience and was in the hospital and saw her sister like several states away in her car driving to the airport to go to the hospital and knew what she was wearing. And when her sister got there, she's like, why were you wearing that god-awful outfit when you were driving to the airport? Now, they can't explain things like that. And there's thousands of those. I think there's about 5% of the population they think has had a near-death experience. So when you apply that to the world, hundreds of millions of people have had these experiences. And when you talk to them, they'll say, no, it wasn't a dream. No, it wasn't drug-induced. It was more real than me sitting here with you today. And by the way, I've completely changed my life since I've had the experience. Or I couldn't paint before, but now I'm like a world-class painter. I couldn't play the piano. And now we can play, people come back with these abilities. So yeah, they're absolutely, you know, there's something going on there that science can't explain materially.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

Can you go back a little bit to that moment when sort of this happened in terms of like, how was the processing mentally, emotionally for you and for your family at that time?

SPEAKER_01 16:54

Yeah, that's a great question. For me personally, Okay, so I had this understanding that Shana was okay, right? And, uh, I remember it, you know, when it happens, when you find someone who's no longer breathing, like your, your mind can't accept it. So you're, you don't, you, you're, it's just, you know, it's happening, but you just reject it. So it feels like a dream. Um, but I, I did have enough to know that, like, when I was yelling for her to come back, like, she's probably right here. I just need her to come back into her body. Um, So there was that. But then there was also this thing like, okay, well, if you truly believe what you say you believe, then you shouldn't be upset, right? Because she's okay. She's happy, whatever. But there is that aspect of grief of like, we miss that other person. We want them to be with us physically. And I remember listening to a near-death experience by Dr. Mary Neal, who'd had this experience, and she had gone to heaven. She'd seen Jesus and all this crazy stuff and she was told her son was going to pass away before her like within like the next 10 years or so and so she lived with that after she came back for like about 10 years and then her son did pass away at like 18 or 19 and when she was telling the story she said she grieved the loss of her son and I realized that That gave me permission to grieve because if someone who has had that experience, who's been to the other side, who knows what it's like, who knows about the life plan, the soul plan, who knows that her son's okay, knows all this stuff to the core of her being, if she still grieves, then I should still be able to grieve. And so I was like, okay, it's okay for me to grieve, right? But then there's this feeling like, But it's not fair for me to go on because that person's gone and my daughter was only 15. And so, you know, I don't want to be here without her. Parents, it's our job to protect our children. And, you know, I need to be there to protect her. And then I got to the point where I realized I went back to, okay, this is what's the way it's supposed to be. This is planned. I believe it's planned, not by God, not by some other entity, but by us. I think we sit down before we come in and we plan these major points in our life. So if this was planned, then what's my plan? That was her plan for her time here. What's my plan? And so that's why I started doing the work that I do now, because I'm like, I want to be able to share this with people so that they don't have to go through the fear that I went through when I was a child, the So that when we grieve, that we do it in a way that... honors our loved one. I realized that for our loved one that's passed, you know, it's interesting. People will say, well, they would want you to be happy. And I always say, no, they do want you. It's not that they would want you to be happy. They do want you to be happy. They are right here with us and they are cheering us on. And they're like, okay, what are you going to do with your time while you're here? Because we're all going to be together soon enough. So make the most of it.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

Would you say that your wife and your other child your other daughter also processed it in a similar way or what kind of effect did it have on your family?

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Yeah. For me, I was very, very fortunate. Now, I was the weird one. I am the weird one, but I was the weird one reading these books about near-death experiences and mediumship and stuff. I always visit myself, my wife, in the bed at night and she's reading a romance novel for her book club and I'm reading Gary Schwartz, The Afterlife Experiment. So I had an advantage over them. But my wife really, I'm really proud of her and my daughter Kayla because Kayla was only 18 when her sister passed. They quickly said, okay, what are we going to do about this? How are we going to face it? And my wife is, we joined an organization called Helping Parents Heal a little bit less than a year after Shana passed. We became very, very active in that. I'm on the board of Helping Parents Heal now. My wife is what we call a caring listener. So when people People are struggling. They reach out and they call, you know, they call one of us or they call other people in the organization. So, yeah, and my wife is, she had never been interested in afterlife stuff, but she started reading the same stuff and listening to the same podcasts I do and having, we've had medium readings where we sat with a medium who's told us about our daughter. So, yeah, they've done, they've done incredible. My daughter, Kayla, she switched her major. She went she became a mental health counselor so she wants to help people um so she's doing that now she's 28 now um so that's that's what she does and we um We are on the same page. It's like we're still a family of four. And you see my picture of Shana behind me here in my studio. Shana is a part of our lives, a very big part of our lives. We celebrate her birthday every year. We get together on the day that she passed. And we just, we really make her a part of our lives.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

I love that you were able to sort of work through this as a family together, as a family unit. And we're able to sort of like keep that communication open between you guys and sort of go through the process. you know, sort of together. I've done episodes in the past where it's sort of like ripped couples apart or it's just ripped families apart just because they're just grieving in their own ways and maybe sometimes are not able to sort of really connect over it. I know you mentioned that you guys do celebrate events and stuff with her. Do you still kind of communicate with her on a day-to-day basis? Like, In what ways do you keep her sort of memory, I guess, alive? And can you walk me through that as well? Because people feel guilty letting go of... the memory of a person that they've lost. So what was that like for you and your family?

SPEAKER_01 23:06

Yeah, you know, people are interesting. We are our own worst enemies. We beat ourselves up for holding on to them or for letting go of them or for what we should have done or what we shouldn't have done. I've heard people who believe in the afterlife like I do, sometimes they'll say, well, I feel guilty for bothering her. I shouldn't be bothering her a lot of times. She's got her thing to do. Can we hold them back. If I hold onto her too much, will it hold her back? And you'll see that in some movies and stuff. First of all, time is very, very different on the other side if it exists at all. Our loved ones are not so busy that they can't spend time with us. An analogy I use with people, like if you're calling someone on the phone and they're busy, they just don't pick up. So if you're worried about bothering them, fine. Maybe if they're busy, I don't think they are, so they can't talk to us. They They just won't pick up. So for me, it's really, really important to keep Shana in our lives. And grief work and the old models of grief, like going back to Freud, he would be like, okay, you need to get over the fact that that person is never going to be back. They're gone. You have an unhealthy attachment. So Let go of the attachment. And that, I don't believe, works. I know it doesn't work for a lot of people. We use something called continuing bonds in more, I think, more modern grief work. Continuing bonds means we keep the person with us. So whether you believe that they're really with you or not, and I do, but you can still continue. The love doesn't die. So when a person dies, your love for them doesn't die. We still love them, whether they're there or not. So honor that. For me, Shana's picture is all over the place. There's the one behind me. I have an Apple Watch. My face is all pictures of Shana. They rotate through randomly as I look at it. I don't know if you can see it behind me, but there's a digital picture frame, and those are all pictures of Shana. She's a part of my life every day because the work I do is because of her. So it is a daily communication with my daughter. The first thing I do when I walk out of my bedroom in the morning is I say good morning to my daughter. So I tell people I talk to Shana more than I talk to Kayla, who lives 15 minutes from me, because I talk to Shana every day, whether she's here with me physically or not. So in a way, she's actually closer And my daughter, it's funny because my daughter's boyfriend now, he never met Shana. But when we get together, we all talk about Shana. And I think he feels like he knows her because that's how much we talk about her. So she has a scholarship fund that we give out a scholarship every year. So we gave that out a couple of weeks ago. So that's another way. But for me, it's my daily work. And like I said, for my wife, she meditates And I think I know when she meditates, she connects with Shana. or anything else. And so I know that when I see her, she's going to say, yeah, I want her to say you did a good job. And everybody tells me that she's going to say that. That's what the mediums tell me, that she's very proud of you. And so I do live my life to make her proud of me.

SPEAKER_00 26:51

What do you say to individuals that connect memories of their lost loved ones with a guilt. And why I say this is because I do remember once reading on a forum page someone who said, I feel really guilty because I went through one full day not thinking about someone, the person that I lost, the person that I lost and loved. And I haven't done that in 10 years and it's the first time that I went through a whole day without thinking and I feel so bad. Yeah. What do you say to someone?

SPEAKER_01 27:24

Yeah, I'd say that's completely natural. You know, again, I mentioned earlier, every grief is different. So my grandmother lived with us from the time I was eight years old until the time, or actually probably younger than that. But, you know, she lived with us for quite a while when I was growing up. She was like my mother in a very real sense. So when she passed away, of course, I thought about her every day. But it's been 45 years now. I don't think about her every day. That's natural. I mean, my friends, I have friends that are still here. I don't think about them every day. So I don't know why we'd expect to think about this one person every single day necessarily. Now, for me, my daughter was 15 when she passed and she was my daughter. So I expect I will probably think about her every day. I have a friend who passed away just a couple of weeks ago, really, really good friend. And for the first week, I didn't think about it anything other than him. And it's been, you know, a month, month and a half now. And I don't think about him every day. And I think about him in appropriate times when I would think about that person. So it's, like I said, it's different for everybody, but never feel guilt about, you know, forgetting about somebody and not think about them every day. Never feel guilty about being happy. I found that people sometimes will think, well, you know, I should be miserable for the rest of my life. And I was at the party and I laughed. And why was I laughing? Or guilt about, like, for me, when I didn't cry every day after Shana passed. I cried every day for, I don't know, probably a couple years. But I don't cry every day now. And I don't think it would be appropriate for me to cry every day. I don't feel the way that I've felt then, and that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

I was just going to ask you about that as well. Like, the role of crying for a person that's grieving. And especially, I guess, maybe with the expectations of, like, the term men don't cry sort of thing. What was that like for you in terms of did you ever feel any pressure on by your community on how to sort

SPEAKER_01 29:33

of present your grieving? Usually sarcastic. That's my family. So after Shana passed, they supported me. It was tremendous. But my whole family came and stayed for like a week or two. It was great. Much beyond what I expected. But a couple weeks later, they came back and they were visiting for the day. And I had a couple times where I had breakdowns. So I would leave the room. I'd go outside, go for a walk, or go up to my bedroom and have a cry and then come back down or whatever. And when my mother was leaving for the day, She said, this was a good day. Nobody cried. And that was when it really hit me. This is my family, right? on you. Men are not supposed to cry. There's a big thing with that. And I also will say this to you. If you think someone is not crying, you know, there's a guy who's lost someone, you think he's not crying, he's probably crying when you're not around. I would cry in the shower all the time. So that's just when it kind of came out for me. But yeah, there's no right way to do it, and we really need to honor each other. And you mentioned earlier about families coming together or growing apart. There's a myth that when you lose a child. I remember a friend, she said it, she had good intentions, but she said, you know, like 80% of people who lose a child get divorced or 60% of people who lose a child get divorced. That's a myth. It was written in a book in like the 1960s. I looked it up and somebody wrote it. There wasn't any research behind it and it just kept being repeated over and over again until people started believing it. Grief can bring you together. It can bring you closer to people. So it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to fall apart. But also honor the other person the way that they grieve. Some people will get angry. Some people will get sad. Some people will turn to work. So they might say this is a way for them to avoid their grief. They might just start working all the time. Some people might sleep a lot. So understand that just because people aren't doing it the way that you would do it, It doesn't mean they're doing it wrong, and it doesn't mean they didn't care about their loved one. I talked to a family where... The mother wanted to look at pictures of the child and speak the child's name. For the father, it was too painful. So for him, it was like, I want to put the pictures away and not speak his name again. Now, that's the way people in the old days handled grief a lot of times and lost a child, by the way. Siblings would say, no one ever said his name again after he died. And that's because that's a way of trying to avoid it. So for that mother that I was working with, I said, it doesn't mean your father or your husband doesn't love your son, it means he loves him so much it's too painful for him to talk about it. So I say, why don't you say like on Saturday morning at 10 o'clock, we're going to sit down, we're going to pull out a box of pictures, we're going to talk about him, we're going to cry whenever, and then we're going to put it away. So maybe if you kind of like put a limit on it, maybe he could do that and it would satisfy both of you. So you can come to these compromises where you can honor them, but not let it bleed Mm-hmm. Last thing I'll say about this is like, you know, like her room, her, my, my wife loved to go in her room after she passed. She was sitting there and she would feel close to Shana, you know, smell her smells and whatever. For me, I couldn't stand going in her room after she passed. I would avoid it. Um, Both very natural reactions, nothing wrong with either one of them, we just reacted differently.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

Yeah. What did you learn about your relationship with your wife and your family during this process?

SPEAKER_01 34:16

For my wife, She surprised both of us. She's a much more emotional person than I am in terms of expressing her emotions and stuff. Obviously close to our daughters, but she and Shana and Kayla, it was like the three of them. I'm surrounded by all females, so they're a very, very tight group. So I was like, how is she going to handle this? What I learned was she was much more resilient than I thought She might be losing a child. It's one of those things that, you know, she had even said, you know, probably out loud, but to herself, I couldn't stand the, to lose my daughter. It's like the worst thing that could possibly happen to me. Um, my daughter, Kayla, um, She was 18 at the time. I was very, very concerned for her, you know, her mental health being an 18-year-old and going through the normal stuff that 18-year-olds go through. And her sister was like, it was a weird combination of like her twin and her child because she's three years older. So they were best friends and Kayla had plans for Shana where she was going to take her and stuff. And I learned she was a lot more resilient than I thought. And I think we all, We're all more resilient than we think we are. We say, if that happened to me, I would just crumble. And I tell people, no, you wouldn't. You would do what you need to do. But we also learned that to honor the way each other does grief, to understand, like with Kayla, I would try to give her books and stuff and give her podcasts, and that's not the way she processes. So she's like, she didn't do it that way. And I didn't realize that's okay. If you have a child, you know, When you've lost someone, children, teenagers handle grief differently than adults do. They typically don't like to talk about it, you know, and just want to check in, make sure they're okay, make sure you know you're available for them. But I learned that, you know, I have to honor the way that they do it.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

I just want to go back to a little bit about, you know, the outer circle of people that were, you know, coming in and out of of this of your lives during this grieving process is there anything any phrase that someone said to you that stands out to you anything that you looking back on you didn't really it didn't rub you the right way um that people can avoid if they come across someone who's in their grieving process

SPEAKER_01 36:48

yeah i actually wrote some of those in my book um and it's different for everybody so there's there's no there's no one right thing to say there's no one you know there's There are some wrong things to say. There's the things that are pretty much universally people don't like. I thought you'd be over it by now is one thing you never, ever want to say. You could have another child for someone who's lost a child, like they're replaceable. If it's someone who's lost a spouse, oh, you're young, you'll find somebody else. People are not... They're not objects. They can't be replaced. You're not going to have another child that's going to replace your child. You're not going to find a spouse that's going to replace your spouse. Religious things, God needed another angel. You know, God had a better plan for them. As if God took your loved one away because, you know, and so, yeah, that never really works well for people. One thing for me, and it's really subtle, but moving on, people would say, you know, moving on. And I'm a very visual person. So my vision was like, okay, here's Shana. She stopped on June 24th, 2015. And I'm moving on, which means I'm moving away from her. I much prefer the phrase moving forward because I believe that we move forward with our loved ones. So a big shift for me was realizing that, again, my daughter is still with me. And as I live my life, you know, she's still living it with me. So those are a few of the things. Some awkward things, you know, and there's nothing anybody can do about this, but when you've lost a child, people say, how many children do you have? And a lot of parents struggle with that. They're like, you know, you think it'd be easy, right? It's a number. But for me, I still have two daughters. I always have two daughters. But then you get into like people ask you more questions. Well, where are they? You know, how old are they? You know, all those things.

SPEAKER_02 38:56

So

SPEAKER_01 38:57

you have to kind of like develop strategies for how you're going to answer this. And for me, it's very dependent. Depends on the situation, the person I'm talking to, how much do I really care? You know, if I'm at the grocery store and someone says, how many dollars do you have? I've would just say two and keep walking. But I had an experience one night at a dinner. It was a woman I knew I'd never see again. And she said, how many daughters do you have? And I said, two. And she goes, oh, where do you live? And I told her, are they at Lakota? And I was like, okay, yes, my daughter goes to Lakota. You know, how old are, and then finally I said, okay, well, my one daughter has passed away because I didn't really want to get into this with her. And then, you know, you get the, oh, I'm so sorry. And her face gets all weird. And I'm like, this is why, one of the reasons I didn't want to say it, but on the On the other hand, I've always said I will never dishonor Shana by saying I have one daughter because I feel like she's standing right there going, you have two daughters. So I'm not going to lie about it either.

SPEAKER_02 39:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:52

Man, it's such a tough situation because I guess it's just, it gets very hard to... Sure. So how would you suggest then, what do you feel like is a safe sort of approach to something like this, to a situation like this?

SPEAKER_01 41:21

Well, the thing is... We're all going to make mistakes because, and again, everybody's reactions to certain things is different. So I tell the grieving person, I'm like, okay, I know this isn't fair, even though you're the one in grief, but you also have to give other people grace. And I understand they're saying these things because they, not out of malice, not to make you feel bad, they're trying to make you feel better. So they're trying to, again, they're trying to take you out of your grief, basically like, oh, you just lost your husband. That's okay. You can find another one. And they don't realize how disrespectful that is. They're just saying it to try to lift your spirits. So when you're talking to a grieving person, a lot of times less is more. It's better to say a little bit less. You can ask them, how are you feeling? Now, it's interesting because when I get on calls with people, I'll say, how are you doing? Which is just the thing that we say. We don't even think about it. And of course, they're not Yeah. What can I do to help is a really interesting one because people that are in grief a lot of times are just overwhelmed and they can't even think of it. So you can offer like practical things like, can I cut your grass for you? Do you need anything from the grocery store? I'm making dinner tonight. Can I make some for you? You know, things that are really, again, those really early grief, just like physical, like getting by type of

SPEAKER_02 43:04

things.

SPEAKER_01 43:06

And then I will help people with like, Again, I just went through this. My friend who just lost her husband was going back to work. And so I'm like, you as the griever need to have strategies when you're going into these situations as to how to say, like... I really am not ready to talk about this yet. It's okay to say that. Or I'm having a really rough day. It's okay to say that you're not... Because we tend to come back with fine. I'm doing fine. I'm doing great. I'm doing okay. Doing as well as can be expected. But... and understand again, you are going to put your foot, I put my foot in my mouth. I've been doing this for a long time. I still, you know, sometimes I was on a, I was on an interview and I was talking to someone and I know you never supposed to compare griefs. And I slipped and I said, you know, there's nothing worse than losing a child. And the woman who was interviewing me said, um, I've lost a child and I just lost my husband. And I can tell you, losing my husband was harder than losing my child. And I'm like, oh, okay. I know that's something I shouldn't have said, but I just, came out. And that's okay. You know, we're going to make mistakes.

SPEAKER_00 44:16

We generally, yeah, I tend to think what we think would be, you know, maybe either like minimizing the other person's problem by, you know, offering some kind of light on the situation or offering some kind of relief, but not knowing how that relief might even sound. But I love how you said, you know, asking to offer to, I don't know, maybe make an extra meal for them or do something. Focus on the how are you feeling right now is focusing on the present moment and not bringing a person into that past or into a future hey let's just let's just take it minute by minute you know how are you in the next five minutes kind of thing

SPEAKER_01 44:51

yeah and that's really really important when people in that early phase of grief to understand that um and i know this from personal experience i can't think about five weeks from now five days from now you know don't talk to me about 15 years from now i would get angry when people would talk to me about the future because i was like first of all i'm not going to be here i had no plans of being here it's it's going to be 10 years now um I'm like, I'm focusing on like now. And I'll tell people that I'm like, it's okay to focus on the next breath, you know, forget about like this evening even. And I saw something in the day I thought was really profound. It's like, you know, you don't have to make it till next week. You only have to make it till 430. So if you're, you know, if you're back at work after you've lost someone and you're having a really tough time thinking about the future, just focus on making it till five o'clock. And I realized this when I used to have panic attacks and I realized this about the whole idea fear because a lot of us live in so much fear. Fear is all about the future. Fear is all about a future that I don't want and participate and anticipate in this future that I don't want. And if you go into the moment and literally right in the moment, no matter what situation you're in, As long as you're able to draw a breath, you're probably okay. Now, I may be hungry and I may need food in the future. I may not have any money and I'm going to need something in the future. But right now, in this moment, I'm okay. So I try to get people to do this. This is why I was talking about the practices that I do every day. One of the practices is mindfulness. Because if we're spinning out, figure out where am I living? Am I in the past or am I in the future? Because you're probably not in the present. If you're in the present, you're probably not going to be spinning out.

SPEAKER_00 46:37

What are some of the other practices that you do? Tell us more about those.

SPEAKER_01 46:41

The first one is gratitude, which I always kind of smile when I say that because when I first heard about gratitude practice, I was like, that's a bunch of crap. Again, I'm an engineer, right? How is this going to change my life, me just thinking that things are okay? And I've realized after practicing this for many years now that it actually is one of the most beneficial practices you can have because there's always something going right in your life and there's always something going wrong. Biologically, we tend to focus on what's going wrong because our brains say, I'm here to keep you alive. We got to look out for the things that are going wrong. So we have to rewire our brain to look for things that are going right. And especially when we're in grief, it's really easy to say, nothing ever goes right for me. My life just sucks. I am cursed. Everything bad happens to me, you know, etc., If we force ourselves to say, you know, I'll just give you an example. You've lost your spouse. You've lost someone that you really love. And you could say, well, it sucks. They're not going to be with me for the next 30 years. We had these plans, blah, blah, blah. But what about the fact that you did have 30 years together? What about the moments that you did, the memories that you have? The fact that you may have some savings, you know, whatever. So we can always focus on one or the other. So gratitude, and just real simply to wrap this up is, for me, I start with first thing when I wake up in the morning, every morning before I even open my eyes, I'm like, where's some things I'm grateful for. It may be that I'm, you know, my feet work. I can go for a walk. During COVID, you know, I was grateful for the fact that I could breathe because we take those things for granted. I'll be in the shower sometimes. It's like this water feels really good. I'm glad I'm able to have a hot shower. So I try to focus on the things that we take for granted. You know, sitting here talking to you right now, it came down to me one day because I heard about someone having a power outage. That feeling when the power goes out that you're frustrated You're flipping light switches. The food's going bad in the refrigerator. There's that feeling that happens when the power comes back on, where it's just like you're relieved and you're just so glad to have lights, right? What if we did that every day? What if we just sat and imagined? So that's the gratitude thing. Exercise is the second part of it. So I walk six miles every morning before I start work. So that's my exercise. It's whatever works for you. But moving your body, whether it's yoga, walking, lifting weights, playing pickleball, whatever it is, that's the body part of it. Mindfulness is the third part. And then practicing self-care. And part of the exercise, the flip part of that is sleep. I know sleep is very, very important. So make sure you're getting the right amount of sleep and stuff. And then self-care. Just take care of yourself. Focus on what you need in the moment. I'm blessed to be able to work from home, so I meditate twice a day. Right after I get done with this with you, I've got another meeting, but then I'll do my meditation. I'll take a break this afternoon and I'll meditate. Sometimes it's like, I don't feel like working right now. I'm going to watch a movie. Just that little thing, doing something for yourself. So those are the four practices that I do. And I do them every day. And I found that that's really helpful.

SPEAKER_00 50:17

And this can sort of apply to anyone that's going through a difficult time in their life, whether it be in a grieving situation, be it in a breakup, be it in whatever the situation is. But yeah, self-care. Self-care, journaling, meditation, mindful practices, gratitude. These are the things that we talk about. So many people talk about how they helped overcome or not necessarily overcome, but, you know, live through that adversity or that difficult challenge in their lives. But yeah, sometimes it's really hard to put into practice, right? Especially when we're feeling really, really low or hurt. But it's really nice to have these kind of reminders every once

SPEAKER_01 50:56

in a while. you're in grief and going through difficult times but it's something we should be practicing all the time anyway because it helps build that resilience you're building that muscle that muscle and it is a muscle I tell people you know you have to you have to work this you have to develop it so and like I said I came up with this framework because it's literally something that I that I follow and it's kind of funny because I do I do my gratitude when I wake up then I do my exercise and then I do my mindfulness so I actually do it the acronym is GEMS in case I don't think I said that but the acronym is GEMS so by putting it into a framework and I've actually written a book that you know people can get and say okay I'm going to start what's and what does it look like for me it doesn't have to look like what I said I mean you might do it differently you might do some people like journaling so you might do journaling for your gratitude you might do it in the evening before you go to bed your exercise I interviewed a woman she had lost her mother and she was going through grief and people were like well you should walk she's like I tried I didn't like it you should do yoga she didn't like yoga she tried all these different things and then she said she found power lifting she goes power lifting turns me on it was the repetitiveness whatever it was and that that turned her on so find what's what works for you this

SPEAKER_00 52:13

is going to actually segue into the the final question of the night but do you find that sharing your story sharing your journey and helping other people through their journey does that help is that a form of self-care for you and is that something you would also encourage people to do in their own Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:31

Yeah. One of the things about being in grief, one of the needs of people who are in grief is to have the grief witnessed, have their grief understood. So find a safe place to share your story. It's got to be a safe place, right? So find like a Helping Parents Heal or another organization like that. There's so great now. There's so many affinity groups. I have a small community, a circle community that people can join. But find a safe place to share your story. share your story with. And I've found that Once people, if there is an arc of grief, and as I said, I try to avoid stages because I don't believe there are five stages or anything like that. But when you get to the point where you're sharing your story to help other people, I think that's kind of like maybe kind of a final stage to get back to that. That is like, that's really helpful for people. I found in interviewing people on my podcast, you know, it's like once you've found this, you want to tell people. Yeah. You want to help people. I find near-death experiences, it's really interesting because some people will say, oh, they're lying. They're just making it up. I'm part of IAN's, International Association for Near-Death Studies. I've heard so many people tell the story. They're not making it up. They're very reluctant a lot of times to even tell their story. But they feel like they have a responsibility to share with people.

SPEAKER_02 53:55

And

SPEAKER_01 53:57

I think that some of us, for some of us, it's not true for everybody. We want to say to people, it's going to be okay. You're going to be okay I was just talking with a woman yesterday, and people ask me, like, well, Brian, doesn't it, like, make you depressed talking to people who have lost people all the time, you know, people that are crying and stuff? And I'm like, no, not at all. It's just the opposite. This woman I got on with her was a discovery call, and I'd never met her. And, I mean, before she even, like, I said, tell me about you or tell me about your loved one, and she just starts crying. But by the end of the half hour, I could just tell things had lifted. She saw hope. And so that makes me feel better. So I love doing that.

SPEAKER_00 54:41

Talk to me about your podcast, about the work that you're doing. Introduce our listeners to all of it.

SPEAKER_01 54:49

Yeah, my podcast is called Grief to Growth. It's grief, the numeral two, growth. And my website's grief2growth.com. On my podcast, I interview, it's a really broad range of people. It's near-death experiencers. It's mediums who have, you know, communicated with people in the afterlife. It's people who've gone through any type of a grief, you know, losing a person or gone through, some people, multiples. I mean, some people have gone through just crazy stuff and I want to it's I guess I hate the word woo woo and I'm not even I'm not even real big on the word spiritual because I'm a I'm a pragmatist when it comes down to it I'm like what works what makes sense and I'm really sick of in our society we've said spirituality is over here and and science is over there and you can believe in one but you can't believe in the other so I interview a guy named David Gaggins who He's an electrical engineer, but he's also a metaphysicist. And he was the one that really introduced me to the term metaphysics. And he's like, when we look at physics, we think of just the material stuff. But there's all this other stuff too. So I'm really digressing. So what I do is I work with people. I do the podcast. I have a YouTube channel. I work with people one-on-one. I have a circle community. If you go to grief2growth.com slash community, you can join my circle community. So you can find me. You just Google Brian D. Smith or Google grief2growth. to growth. And you can find me in all those places. I have two books. The first one is called, uh, grief to growth, buried, not planet. And that was the book I wrote not too long after Shana passed. And it's really my experience going through grief. Some of the things to say, some of the things not to say, uh, what to expect when you're in grief, what is, what is grief? It's just real basic, very short, easy to read book. Um, and then the second book I wrote, it's called gems of healing. And it's based on my, my practice. I And it goes into what those things are scientifically. Why do they work? How do we know they work? It gives you some examples of things that you can do yourself. And I tell people, you know, it's got to be something that's comfortable for you. So, again, I give my examples. I just gave you my examples of my framework. But fill it out however it works for you. But I think you need some of those four elements in there. You know, I think it's really important to have one of those four elements in there.

SPEAKER_00 57:19

Brian. And thank you so much for being on the podcast and sharing your journey and actually so much insight as well for people to take stuff away from. Really, really informative and yeah, amazing. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 57:32

Yeah, thanks. I really enjoyed it.

UNKNOWN 57:35

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 57:36

I'm Jenica, host and writer of the show, and And you're listening to Multispectre.