Dr Lucy Hone - What has loss taught you?

Learning from Loss with Dr. Lucy Hone

How do you survive the unthinkable? When resilience researcher Dr. Lucy Hone lost her 12-year-old daughter in a tragic accident, she didn't just study the science of grief—she had to live it. In this episode, Lucy joins Kenny Primrose to share the practical, evidence-based tools that help us oscillate between mourning and living, and what we can learn about life in the wake of loss.

In This Episode:

In this new series on grief and mortality, we explore why the "stages of grief" model often fails us and what actually works instead. Dr. Lucy Hone discusses her journey from the University of Pennsylvania’s resilience program to the frontlines of her own personal tragedy.

Key Topics Discussed:

• The Myth of "Bouncing Back": Why we need a more pragmatic definition of resilience.
• The 3 Habits of Resilient Grievers: Simple, actionable shifts in attention that can change your trajectory.
• The "Helping or Harming" Test: A vital tool for psychological flexibility.
• The Jigsaw Metaphor: How to rebuild your life when the old pieces no longer fit.
• Hidden Grief: Understanding "non-death" losses and how to process them.

About Lucy:

Dr. Lucy Hone is a best-selling author, TED speaker, and co-director of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience. Her work has been published in The Journal of Positive Psychology and featured in The Washington Post, BBC, and The Guardian.

Resources Mentioned:

• Book: Resilient Grieving: How to Find Your Way Through a Devastating Loss
• New Book: How Will I Ever Get Through This? (On hidden and non-death grief)
• TED Talk: The Three Secrets of Resilient People

Connect with The Examined Life:

• Host: Kenny Primrose
• Website: www.examined-life.com
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ExaminedLifePodcast
• Follow & Subscribe on substack: https://thisexaminedlife.substack.com/ 
• Support the series - buymeacoffee.com/kennyprimrose 

If you found this episode helpful, please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it helps others find these conversations.

Transcript

Grief As A Portal To Meaning

Lucy Hone 0:00

In the struggle to put our lives back together again in the wake of traumatic, dramatic change and loss, we unearth who and what really matters to us, an inner strength that we didn't know we had, and a distillation of really who we are and you know what is important. So I think that grief and loss are a portal to a more meaningful, in tune life, and I truly think that they are our greatest teachers.

Kenny Primrose 0:48

At some point, something happens that changes everything. A loss you didn't see coming. A moment that divides your life into a before and an after. When it happens, the question isn't, will it hurt? It will. The question is, how do you go on? Most of us have lived through some version of this, whether it's a breakup, a health struggle, or the death of someone we love. I'm Kenny Primrose, and in this new series of the Examined Life podcast, we are stepping into the spaces that we often avoid. We're going to be talking about mortality, meaning, and how to live well in the shadow of grief and loss. These are subjects that I have tended to avoid, but life is an unavoidable teacher, and as my guests will show, it has a lot to tell us. Today I am thrilled to be sharing my conversation with the psychologist Dr. Lucy Hoon. You may have come across her TED Talk, Three Secrets of Resilient People, or her books Resilient Grieving and How Will I Ever Get Through This, published just earlier this year. What makes Lucy special, I think, is the bridge she builds between academic rigor and research and a profound lived experience. She understands the after better than most. This conversation stayed with me long after we finished recording, and I hope it does the same for you. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Lucy Hoan. Dr. Lucy Hohn, it's such a pleasure to be speaking to you today. Thank you for joining me on the Examined Life podcast.

The Question That Changes The Lens

Lucy Hone 2:24

Honestly, thank you, Kenny. It's such a privilege to be asked to share my work and lived experience with you and all of your listeners. So truly, thank you very much for having me. What a lovely way to start.

Kenny Primrose 2:38

We've already done a bit of kind of pre-work through emails, and I know you've got a question that you think we should be asking ourselves. I wonder if we could frame the episode by you explaining what is your question that you think it would be helpful to be asking?

Lucy Hone 2:52

So my question is what have grief and loss taught you? And why I think it is so important is that these terrible moments of our lives when we lose someone or something, you know, it doesn't have to be a death loss, it can be an unexpected transition or even an anticipated transition, like empty nesting. When we go through these big changes and transitions, we don't like it, they're awful, we can really struggle and suffer. But my job and my lived experience is to understand that in the struggle to put our lives back together again in the weight of traumatic, dramatic change and loss, we unearth who and what really matters to us, an inner strength that we didn't know we had, and a distillation of really who we are and you know what is important. So I think that grief and loss are a portal to a more meaningful, in-tune life. And I'm not saying that we want to do it, but I truly think that they are our greatest teachers.

Resilience Research In Real Life

Kenny Primrose 4:27

Okay, wonderful. Thank you. I'm looking forward to exploring that more. As you said, this is your work and also your lived experience. For those who haven't read your book, Resilient Grieving, or seen your extraordinary TED Talk. I wonder if we could begin by maybe your professional life. You you've studied positive psychology at the home of positive psychology, Penn, Penn State. This was what, 20 odd years ago?

Lucy Hone 4:52

Um 2009. So we are coming up sort of 17 years now. That seems unthinkable. So unthinkable that I had to check my maths for a moment then. Um so I went there because I have always been interested in resilience at the University of Pennsylvania. They've been testing in pre-2009 whether the ways of thinking and acting and being that help people cope with adversity, whether all of the science that them and their colleagues had been producing, whether that could be packaged up and taken to people in their everyday lives to enable them to stave off depression and increase happiness. So I went to UPenn because they had two programs, well, one program specifically that interested me, which was called the Penn Resilience Program, the PRP, and it was a world first, and they had been rolling it out into schools, teaching students the skills of the life skills, the ways of thinking and acting that actually enabled them to cope with whatever was going on in their daily lives. And the early signs from that research were really promising that they were seeing lower scores of depression and anxiety and higher levels of happiness they were measuring at the time. And so I turned up there, and then I had the extreme fortune of being in Philadelphia, aligned with the psychology department at UPenn, who were then putting together the military resilience training program. So my fascination is always about how do we take the best of science out of the ivory towers of academia and package it up so that it actually might be able to help people in their everyday lives. So being there when that team were, you know, raking through all of the research and then packaging it up in ways that it might help the army, who at the time were in Afghanistan, it, you know, that was a really amazing training ground for me. So that has been that was my academic training. And then I came back to I am I'm a Londoner, but I call New Zealand my home. And I'd only just been back here not very long when the Christchurch earthquakes hit my adopted hometown, which was a massively devastating event for us. So suddenly I was doing just what they'd been doing in Philadelphia, really. You know, I found myself looking through all the science, reading through all the papers, thinking about what I knew, and wondering what I can share with my community as we all endeavour to get back on our feet in that post-quake world. And I work with all sorts of organizations here doing that.

Kenny Primrose 8:05

So we sometimes kind of conflate resilience with tough-mindedness. You're doing this with the military. That's not exactly your definition of resilience, though, is it? What's your definition, Lucy?

Lucy Hone 8:16

So the first thing I don't like is the most common definition of resilience as bouncing back because I don't know about your listeners and you, Kenny, but when I have gone through the hardest days of my life, and certainly in that post-quake period, I didn't feel bouncy. I felt devastated. I felt sad and anxious and exhausted, depleted, overwhelmed. I mean, you know, so yes, we got through those years, but I would say firstly, it's you don't feel bouncy and you don't go back. I mean, this is the this understanding sits at the heart of my question to you and your listeners, that these big events of our lives teach us, they shape us, they mull our whole core beliefs and our internal operating systems and our relationships so that we are we are changed. You don't go back to where you were. So I guess my definition is something along the lines of steering through. You know, honestly, sometimes it feels like you're crawling through quicksand, but you keep on going in that tiny act of bravery every day, just finding what works for you so that you can keep going and know and never give up hope. Know that eventually there will be better days ahead.

Kenny Primrose 9:56

Okay. So some combination of optimism or hope and agency, being able to do even small amounts of agency, one foot in front of the other.

Lucy Hone 10:05

Yes, very much that. And I would call it um all of my work is also about pragmatism. So, you know, pragmatism, optimism, and agency, I think, really are key because I'm not one of those sort of sugarcoating, positive thinking, happiology people. I'm like, you've got to be really truthful and pragmatic with the fact that what you're up against in these life moments is a lot. You know, this is a tough situation, you need to be telling yourself. But I never lose hope that I can do things and find my way through this.

Kenny Primrose 10:48

I've got a half-remembered story in psychology from it's called the Stockdale Paradox, based on prisoners of war in Japan. And it was taking on the reality, the grimness of the situation, but not being defeated by it, thinking that this might not end tomorrow, but we can get through it.

The Family Tragedy Behind The Work

Lucy Hone 11:04

And what they found was that the people who just thought, oh, this will all over be over by Christmas, actually really struggled. So I think that does make the point that the pragmatism, the realistic optimism, is what all the studies show really does. It's the bedrock of our ability to cope with unwanted events.

Kenny Primrose 11:27

It's really helpful and a helpful segue because when you returned to New Zealand after the earthquakes, you did have the most unwanted of all events. Would you mind telling listeners and myself a little bit about that, Lizzie?

Lucy Hone 11:42

Yes, thank you. So I worked uh in the aftermath of the earthquakes with all sorts of government organizations and search and rescue, you know, all of those, the Heart Foundation and community groups. And I thought that was my calling, my moment to put all of what I'd learned and all of the science to good use, and it was, but sadly, we had the most awful personal family tragedy a couple of years later. So in 2014, we were off to um go and spend a long weekend mountain biking with friends, and our daughter, our 12-year-old daughter Abby, wanted to drive down to the lodge with her best friend Ella, who was also 12, um, and Ella's mum, Sally, who was a really good friend of mine, and um a car sped through a stop sign when they were driving down and hit them and killed all three of them. So I just have this, you know, terrible moment and weeks and months and years after it where I have to really rethink everything I know about resilience and find you know what is useful for me in the most extreme family tragedy. So, you know, it was terrible, uh unthinkable, and you know, I did doubt that we'd ever get through this, but we have, and so much of my work in the decade, over a decade since has been about helping other people find their way through and back from unimaginable loss.

Why Most People Adapt

Kenny Primrose 13:47

It is an unimaginable loss, and it sounds like you know, echoing your question that it has taught you a lot in spite of how profoundly you wish things were different. I I understand that in the wake of that tragedy, you were visited by people who told you about grief and what to expect, and that advice was not always helpful advice, Lucy. Is that right?

Lucy Hone 14:19

That is so right, Kenny. And I don't blame those people. I you know, I sometimes feel bad about saying that um the people who came to talk to us about, you know, the kind of yeah, all the well-meaning health professionals and much of the literature that we were sent afterwards, it felt that it was unhelpful to me in its passive tone that we were told to expect to write five years of our lives to Abby's loss. And you know, there was this kind of understanding that we were now prime candidates for divorce, mental illness, and family estrangement. And I remember thinking I've seen all the studies that show that while we never want to go through these things, and going through them is not easy, it's really hard. Actually, most people get through potentially traumatic events, grieving and loss, and don't require any kind of intervention, you know, medical counseling. It's not to say there's anything wrong with those things, but my point here is that humans are incredibly adaptable, you know, that ability to cope with just the most awful things really is in our inherited DNA. We're so much more able to cope than we want to be or we think we are.

Kenny Primrose 16:09

Interesting you you said there about optimism and hope, and it seems like when you're being told that you you're not gonna write off five years of your life or your prime candidates for estrangements or divorce or whatever, uh that has a profound effect on your your ability to get out of bed in the morning. Where did you get the resources to kind of push back against the conventional wisdom of the day?

Lucy Hone 16:36

Yeah, so I think that is a really good point. That that's what I knew I needed was hope. And I knew I needed that largely because of my role as an academic researcher and someone who is just steeped in the research that shows what people need when they're going through these awful life events. And having lived through the earthquakes, that was really obvious living through the earthquakes, is that the people who had this ability to be able to kind of flex both in their behavior and in their thinking, that had that kind of flexible attitude of, I don't know how I'm going to get through this, but I now realize that I can't do that. So I'm going to have to do this. I'm going to focus on what I still have got. This kind of we call it in psychology, behavioral and cognitive flexibility, psychological flexibility. You know, this is the bedrock, that mental agility, if you like, of being able to just go, this is awful, but actually, what is still good in my world? Who is still here for me, who is showing up. And for me, I just remember having this voice in my head that said, choose life, not death. Don't lose what you have for what you have lost. And we're lucky enough to have two beautiful sons who really needed us now. I remember thinking they were 14 and 15. And so I couldn't really afford to spend five years of my life, you know, just completely derailed. They needed me now, and so I became really fixated on knowing that I was doing everything I possibly could to help us adapt, to relearn to live in the world, to somehow learn to live without Abby. And so I did really lean on all of the tools that I had been taught at the University of Pennsylvania. In my PhD, I'd done, I was towards the end of my PhD when this happened. And so I ended up writing this book. This is a resilient grieving book that you mentioned, which was kind of just me testing these tools out on myself, thinking, what have I learned about so far in my career that might be useful to me now? And I think that is kind of my modus operandi. That's how I work is I test things out on myself, but I also think, well, what how can we translate this for other people? How can I put this in language that might be able to help them too?

Kenny Primrose 19:35

And you have, I think, distilled, well, more than three, but there are three like core habits of resilient people in grieving. Can you just run through them? I think they're really helpful for people who are listening. And for me, I find them really helpful.

Lucy Hone 19:50

So, yeah, the first one really is to accept that we all struggle and suffer, that any human life isn't perfect, and we all go through tough times. So if you've watched my TED Talk, so you know this, but at the beginning I asked people to stand up is you've ever lost someone you truly love, ever had your heart broken, had to go through an acrimonious divorce, or been the victim of infidelity. And then I list, you know, I keep listing things abortion, miscarriage, infertility, physical impairment, any kind of unwanted, terrible physical diagnosis, mental illness, suicide. I mean, the list just goes on and on. And within, I don't know, I can't remember, about 90 seconds, you've got over a thousand people standing up because everybody goes through something. So the first one is to accept that and understand that. And this is so important because if you know this in your bones, then should the worst happen in your life, it stops the why me question. It stops you from feeling singled out and discriminated against. And I think that is really important because that stops the kind of passive, you know, take it, lie down, and don't ever get up again kind of attitude. Um, and the second one is to choose. So really making a determined effort to keep looking at where you are focusing your attention and focusing it on the things that you can do, have got, and can change, and somehow accepting the stuff that you can't change, you know, not easy to do, but absolutely vital when you are really up against it. And the last one is focus. And it's, you know, it's about encouraging you to do what helps you and not what harms you. And so in that of these three tools, I suggest that people ask themselves: is what I'm doing right now, in this moment, the way I'm choosing to think, act, or be helping or harming me in my quest to get through this? Or even maybe maintain this friendship or keep this job or get home on time from work tonight, you know, the spending your time at work doing something that you shouldn't be doing, wasting time, you know, is that helping or harming you in your quest to get home and spend time with your kids, for instance? So it's an incredibly flexible question. And I think that is why it's so potent. And that question in particular is what I'm doing, helping or harming me in my quest to is the one that people write to me from all over the world, like every single week, and say, that changed my life. That put me back in the driver's seat of my mental health. So pretty simple tools.

Kenny Primrose 23:19

It incredibly clarifying, though. Before we were recording, I was explaining that my dear brother recently lost his beloved wife, and he's found that question incredibly helpful. You know, there are people who will just train you and they will not be helpful, and they might mean well, but you don't have the resources and kind of strips you back. I have a question on the pragmatism thing. It's a little bit tangential. My grandfather, who died a number of years ago, quite old, had an extraordinary life, and he was a desert rat in Tabruk and Al Alameen, and he was writing about this in his journal, which I read, and he lost two of his closest friends. And he said, I chose at that moment never to get close to anybody again. And it was a and I could see this in his life, and sad to say, because there was a kind of distance to him. And it's a very pragmatic response, I suppose. He'd been so hurt by loss. I wonder what you might say to people who, through self-preservation, withdraw from life, because there's a sense that is pragmatic as well. We'll get back to my conversation with Lucy in just a moment. If you find yourself wanting to sit with these ideas a little longer, then do head over to this Examined Life on Substack, where I regularly write and send out updates about the podcast. It's a space where I try and make sense of these before and after moments in more detail, sharing the reflections that don't always make it into the edit. It's also the best and almost the only way to support the production of the show so that it can be ad-free and I can continue to make it. You can find a link in the show notes or at examined-life.com.

Lucy Hone 25:13

I think we could do a whole podcast on just this topic, Kenny. That is so fascinating, and it's such a perfect example of the times when the environments and the circumstances of our lives, the only way we can cope with them, we think he thought, was to take this really rigid stance and say, I'm never going to open up my heart to love again. But actually, even you, as his grandson, felt that distance and frostiness. And so you're actually cutting yourself off from love and opening yourself up to further losses. And so I think it is in his brain, it might have been pragmatic. I think it is understandable. I don't think it is advisable, because we also know from the research that I, you know, I'm looking at all the time that our connections to others, our strong supportive relationships are the bedrock of our ability to cope. And also what makes life meaningful for us. And I think this speaks to the fact that life is tough, isn't it? Because to live a life well lived, to live a full life, you have to love. We want to love, we are pro-social beings, and yet with loving and attachment come lots. And I've recently written a new book that I think you and I have just sort of gently kind of touched upon. I'm going to grab it now because so this new book, How Will I Ever Get Through This, is very much about this topic because it essentially says that to be human is to love, connect, and attach to others. But when we do so, that opens us up to the vulnerability of heartache and loss. You know, as humans, we are hardwired for love and attachment, and we live in a world of impermanence. So loss and grief are just part of life, everyday life. Every, you know, we're all having these minor disappointments and losses all the time. You don't need someone to die. You don't have to go to a funeral to experience loss. And I'm willing to bet that your grandfather had other losses and experiences and sadnesses because of that stance. But his rigidity was the stance he took when actually what all of my work and lived experience and all of my client work would say that we're all better to have a kind of flexible attitude and not cut ourselves off from other people.

Kenny Primrose 28:33

Yeah, as you say, it's through grief that you find connection. And then, as you say, there's the losses that someone who hardens inside feels but never processes, but all the losses that they never get to experience because they're never open enough for those connections and the losses that we don't know, I suppose.

Joy And Tears Can Coexist

Lucy Hone 28:51

Absolutely. Um, I also want to say I'm sorry about your sister-in-law, she must have been young, and that is terrible. In fact, let me ask you in this moment, so far, and this is a a raw, recent loss for you, isn't it? What has grief taught you?

Kenny Primrose 29:13

Thank you. I think grief has taught me the importance of those I'm closest to for sure. I know this is probably just the most common answer, but the sharpest focus was my brother, his children, being there for them. It has taught me, I think, that we uh often misspend our attention and misspend much of our lives on things that uh in any analysis really are of little importance. And it's taught me also, I think it was not necessarily too early to say this, that your your phrase accept the good. So Ali died a bit before Christmas, and Christmas we were dreading. It could have been awful. We expected it to be awful. And for some reason it was actually really special to Ali's sisters and my family, and my brother and his kids. And it was uh a really special day. We played a game of like mafia, you know, like traitors or whatever, and we laughed, and it was for some reason we kind of sat above the baseline grief that everybody felt. And um I think it was a good thing that we could all accept that and kind of dwell in it. And there have been other days since for them as well, I think. So one of the myths I understand that is really unhelpful that you go through when you're grieving is that it's pervasive and permanent. It will like uh maybe I don't want to use the word contaminate, it sounds like grief is a bad thing, but it it touches everything and it won't end. And I think when you have those flashes or those experiences that are deep and good and real and genuine, they are there to be uh enjoyed and savored as well.

Lucy Hone 31:06

So true. Well said.

Kenny Primrose 31:11

Can I ask you, Lucy, about uh the grief back in 2014 and you're now kind of 11 years, 12 years on, what what have been the lessons?

Lucy Hone 31:24

So I think the number one lesson for me was that you can live and grieve at the same time, which is just what you have described, isn't it? And life is wild and precious, you know, it is both things, it is unpredictable, so drink in the good bits, because you never know what's around the corner, and it yeah, it really has taught me to value it's taught me yeah, who and what I love, what to really value the time I have, the short time I have on this planet. But I really didn't know beforehand that you could live and grieve at the same time. And what you have just described was very much our experience too. I went back to work about six weeks, I think, um, after the girls died. And I wanted to go back to work because I wanted my brain to have something else to think about. I think that awful, intrusive rumination is the technical term, but that never being able to stop thinking about them, that incessant thinking about them, and I'm sure that is what your brother will be experiencing now, that it's exhausting, terrible. I just wanted to get away from it. I didn't want to leave Abby behind and stop thinking about her, but I didn't want to think about her 24-7. And so going back to work was good. But we also went back to work, both of us, my husband and I, he's a builder, thinking we would sort of do so on our own terms, you know. We would work when we could, but when we felt like crying or lying on the floor, grief is exhausting, that we would succumb to the exhaustion and you know, crawl under the duvet too. So in my work with my clients, that is very much the messaging that I give them that you want to be, you know, it's fine to go and get on with your everyday life. It's absolutely fine to laugh and cry and to feel proud of yourself in moments. You know, there are so many mixed emotions involved when we are grieving. But all of that is typical and normal. You're not doing anything wrong because you're suddenly forgetting about them for a moment or you're laughing. Because actually, the research shows this very, very clearly that what is both typical and helpful is for us to oscillate backwards and forwards between grieving and distraction, you know, getting on with our lives. And I think that is really helpful for people. I know from my own clients how helpful people find that to go, okay, I haven't got to feel bad about that. That's okay, is it? And what the research also shows, though, is that you don't want to spend too much time in either the grieving or the living at the, you know, getting on with life. So it is important not to avoid your grief so much that you're never grieving. And ideally, you know, you need to get off the couch, get out under the duvet, and go and do the kids' lunchboxes, drag yourself onto the bus, you know, to bring in the groceries and all of those things. Annoying as it is, the world goes on. So I hope that is helpful to your listeners to know that you are going to ebb and flow oscillate between living and grieving. And over time, you will spend less time in that grief zone and more time back in the rest of your life zone.

Kenny Primrose 35:21

Yeah, I think that oscillation is super helpful actually. And partly because it gives you permission, right? There's a sense that I ought to be sad all the time because it's recent or whatever. But I've done some good belly laughing in the last few weeks. I was on the phone to my siblings last night and we had some good belly laughs. It was and uh and yeah, we will also have lots of tears as well. And both are good.

Lucy Hone 35:48

Both are good. All of it is good. That is very much one of the lines in my new book. It is about we have to somehow learn how to handle and sit with all of our emotions. And this is not easy for lots of people because people can be terrified of grief and sorrow and sadness and crying. But actually, you know, birth and death, they're all part of life. Um and we need to be able to just find our own individual ways of sitting with the misery and not avoiding it.

Kenny Primrose 36:31

I had last year on the podcast Dacker Keltner, the psychologist, who studies awe, and he talked, he he says that awe tells us what's most meaningful to us in life. And of course, you get it from you know, wild and beautiful scenes, but also from death, from funerals and things like that. And that these are these are pointers, uh, as you say, to what really matters. I wonder if we were talking in your question, like grief and loss are teachers, what kind of student they need you to be?

Lucy Hone 37:03

Such a great question. I think you need to be open, self-aware. And by that I mean noticing what is helping and what is harming you. And that question is so good, you know, asking yourself is what I'm doing, the way I'm thinking, the way I'm behaving, helping or harming me in my quest to get through grieves. So I think you need to understand, you need to be patient with yourself and others, because my research and all of my client work continually reveals to me how annoying other people can be when we're grieving. Um, so you've definitely got to be tolerant and patient with them and understand that very often how they are responding is more about them and their experiences of grief than you and your grief. And you also have to be tolerant with others to understand that we all grieve differently, that no two people's relationship is exactly the same, and that no two deaths are the same, and that we grieve so many things beyond death. So very often there is grief present, but not acknowledged or identified. And more than anything, I think you need to be prepared to go the distance, giving yourself that acceptance that you're going to be tired, it's going to be hard work, and to look after yourself as you're going through it, to do what you need.

Rebuilding With The Puzzle Metaphor

Kenny Primrose 38:40

Hmm. That's really helpful. Thank you. I wonder as you've been going through this and as you do work with groups of people and clients, whether there are any metaphors or pictures that you use that you find particularly kind of helpful.

Lucy Hone 38:56

Yes, in in all of my resilience work, I have come to think a puzzle is useful as a metaphor. Because when the girls were killed, I remember thinking it was like someone had thrown a wrecking ball at our lives and just smashed it all to, you know, hundreds of pieces, and nothing made sense anymore. There was no cohesive picture. And so I think that's when I first started thinking about the puzzle as a metaphor, that someone had kind of picked up this picture of my life that I thought I knew what my life looked like and roughly where it might be heading, and just smashed that apart. And so then what you are doing over time as you are grieving is putting back the pieces of your line in a new format, in a new jigsaw puzzle. Um, and I often have thought with my clients and readers over the years, I think of each individual insight that they pick up that is helpful for them as a little piece in their puzzle piece. So some of the things that you and I have been talking about today, Kenny, might have been aha moments for your listeners. They might have suddenly thought, oh, it's okay to laugh when I'm grieving. Well, that's a little puzzle piece. So you can pop that back in your puzzle and go, okay, that makes sense. I've got that now. You might also think, oh, Lucy said it was absolutely exhausting to be grieving, and that I need to do what I need. And that's another puzzle piece. And the helping and harming question, that's another puzzle piece. So in resilient grieving, I've got a thing of the puzzle. I've got a diagram of the puzzle pieces that I cover in this book and at the end of it. And so in lots of my work, we have templates of those puzzles where we get people to add their insights and aha moments into each one of those puzzle pieces as we go.

Kenny Primrose 41:12

It's really helpful metaphor. Um I guess particularly because one of the things you grieve apart from the person is the loss of the life you had and the loss of the future you planned together. And it's this, okay, so there's a kind of 52-card pickup here. How do I put this back together as a different picture, which integrates different things and creates something that is still can be good and beautiful, even if it's not what I'd once hoped.

Lucy Hone 41:41

That's a what it was before. And then at one point during COVID, like most people, when we were doing jigsaw puzzles, we ended up doing a jigsaw puzzle that had a piece missing. And my husband said, What's the point? And then I looked at him and went, but that's us all over. We have a piece missing. So that suddenly seemed really kind of pertinent as well. To go, there has to be a point in life to keep on rebuilding and reimagining, recreating, even when bits of your life are missing and absent.

Kenny Primrose 42:20

So it's that flexibility piece, the ability to kind of respond and grow around. I want to be cognizant of your time, Lucy, and I've so appreciated it. Our listeners can find your brilliant TED Talk, your incredibly useful book resilient grieving. You've also got another book coming out and a website and a blog, which is really helpful. Can you say something about that?

Lucy Hone 42:41

Thank you. So my website is just drlucyhone.com, and people can follow me on social media too. I'm pretty active on all platforms at drlucyhone. Even TikTok now, because I really want to help people of all ages, and of course, more young people are on TikTok. So I do daily grief tips on TikTok too, but Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and all of those. And I write regular newsletters to help people who are going through any kind of life event. And that is what my new book, which is out in the UK at the very end of February, beginning of March, so will be out by the time you publish this broadcast, I think, isn't that this broadcast? And this book is about living losses because people kept coming to me, Kenny, and saying, I've read Resilient Grieving, and you know, that was really helpful. But actually, no one has died in my life. They might have been, for instance, living with someone who had dementia. They might have had a family member estranged. And then that really got me thinking that actually people who are going through job loss, you know, redundancy, divorce. Migration, if you're forced to migrate, any kind of natural disaster, if you have to leave your home. There are so many challenges and transitions in life that involve hidden grief. And my job is to help people with grief. So this book is about those. It is really about answering, responding to the questions that people ask themselves when they're going through these big life events. So this question, how will I ever get through this, emerged as the number one question people ask themselves when they're going through a stressful life event. I did the research to ask people, you know, what do you ask yourself? And I'll just read you really briefly some of the. So each chapter deals with a question that people would typically ask themselves when they're going through something. And the first one is, how will I ever get through this? But I bet some of these other ones resonate with your listeners too. How did this happen to me? What is wrong with me? How am I supposed to accept this? Why do I feel so physically exhausted? Why do I feel so lonely? Why do I cry so much? Will I ever get over it? Will I ever be happy again? And who am I now? Because when we go through these things, it creates a crisis of identity. We don't know who we are and what matters any longer. So this book, I've just been getting the early readers' feedback from it. And I am yeah, I'm really pleased to say that it's I'm gonna I think it's gonna help a lot of people who are going through something and they feel completely overwhelmed and lost and you know, kind of rudderless and hopeless. And this book, it goes through those questions, and then there are other tools to help you just put your life back together again, given whatever is going on for you.

Kenny Primrose 46:12

I I'm absolutely sold on that pitch, Lucy. And I think you've got an amazing niche because it's basically every human being that can read, it will, I hope and trust serve lots of people. Lucy, thank you so much for your time today. I've really, really appreciated it and enjoyed speaking to you.

Lucy Hone 46:28

Thanks, Kenny. Um, you know, my love and thoughts are with your family, and that's so tough to go through, and you will all need each other, and you will all grieve differently. Um, my love to your brother-in-law and his family. And I hope that yeah, you'll find my blogs and my resources and books useful because there is so much we can do in grief to help us find a path through. And I'm such a believer that the more we understand, the better we are equipped to cope. So thank you for inviting me.

Reviews, Substack, And What’s Next

Kenny Primrose 47:11

I've already found your work helpful and I can't wait to get onto that next book. So thank you so much, Lucy. I hope you enjoyed listening to that conversation with Dr. Lucy Hoon. Oper words gave you a bit of a map for whatever you might be navigating, and do think about sending it on to others who you think might appreciate it. All the links are in the show notes, as is a link to Lucy's new book, How Will I Ever Get Through This? If you're enjoying listening to The Examed Life, then do please give it a review, send it on to other people, share it on social media. If you're finding these topics on grief and resilience and mortality generative, then do please join me on Substack, where I'm trying to grow a bit of a community around this podcast. When you sign up, you'll get my essays, which are relatively regular, and try and go deeper into these themes. Plus, you're directly supporting the independent production of the show if you become a paid subscriber. For the price of a coffee a month, you help keep these conversations going. You can find more about this at this Examined Life on Substack or through the website examined-life.com. My next guest on the podcast is BJ Miller. BJ Miller is a palliative care physician who lost three limbs in a freak accident as a young man. He spent his life at the edge of mortality, both his own and his patients. And he has a perspective on living well in light of grief and loss that is unlike others I've encountered. He's a man who finds beauty in brokenness. It was, for me, a wonderful conversation, which I really hope you will enjoy. I'm looking forward to sharing it with you. Here's a short clip to leave you with.

BJ Miller 48:56

That grief can be this very beautiful thing. So, yes, there are those hard feelings of loss, but if you really let yourself be with that loss, you begin to see how amazing it is that you're alive at all to have experienced loving something or someone so much that they're lost is agonizing, that the loss of that person or whatever is agonizing. It is, it's tricky, but it does tell you how alive you are and how amazing it is that we get to feel these love connections at all. And that they're so powerful that that they hurt when they end or seem to end. So, so it can, if you let it, if you keep rolling with the feeling, it will tell you that you are very much alive, and that that life, by virtue of learning how to lose things, you realize it is precious. It doesn't stick around forever as such. So it can help as a quickening force, it can kind of wake you up to your aliveness.

Kenny Primrose 50:07

Let me finish this episode with a note of thanks. Firstly, to my guest, Dr. Lucy Hoon, for coming on today. The show is obviously not possible without guests, and I'm deeply grateful for the time these really busy in-demand people give up. I'm also very much grateful to Moby Gratis for the free use of his music and my brother Colin for the music he has made. And last but far from least, I'm grateful to you listeners for tuning in, for leaving reviews, for sending it to other people. The other week I was contacted by someone who listens to the show who found about 18 months ago and has found it really encouraging, has found some kind of solace in it. It was so gratifying and encouraging to hear. It's the reason I keep making the show. So do please keep leaving reviews, sending on to other people, letting me know how you're finding the show. It propels me to keep having these conversations. Thank you, wishing you well, speak to you in a couple of weeks.