Choices in a Choice-less World

The grief to grit podcast is all about how we can move forward in the difficult, awkward journey of grief to find meaning after loss. Host Judy Pedersen is a grief counselor who shares her twenty-plus years of experience with warmth, humility, and curiosity about how much she still has to learn. 

Through stories from her life and conversations with inspiring guests, Judy answers her questions—and yours—about where to get the help we need to feel empowered and hopeful. 

We’re a community of grievers here to ask hard questions, tell stories, and share the wisdom that makes the journey of grief a little more manageable when we are on it together. 

Your stories are what make the grief to grit podcast richer and bring hope and healing to all.

Please share your stories, experiences, and any grief questions to podcast@ourheartsofhope.org. or through our website at www.ourheartsofhope.org.

You can find grief to grit wherever you enjoy your podcasts.

The grief to grit podcast is a production of Hearts of Hope Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit organization offering a wide range of services to provide grievers the opportunity to find help, healing and hope.

Thank you for sharing a few minutes of your time and for making space to take care of your grief. Until next time, grieve on.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Judy. I've been a grief counselor for more than 20 years, and during those years I've learned a lot from the families I've served, the communities I've visited, and the many times grief has come from the most unpredictable places—especially with the work I've done with my nonprofit, Hearts of Hope. 

What I've learned the most is this: I still have a lot to learn. That's what inspired me to create the Grief to Grit Podcast. I researched how many other podcasts that were out there that focus on the topic of grief, and I found more than forty. In fact, I know several people that offer podcasts. I know the people themselves, and I know the information they share and it is so valuable. It inspired me to look at this podcast from the perspective of: 

Where do we go? How does our journey—that begins as such an awkward, difficult, impossible journey—how do we move from that to a place where we feel empowered enough to find meaning again in our lives?

That sounds like a simple statement, but for those of us—most of us have had this experience of grief—for everyone that has experienced grief, we know that in the early days it seems impossible. 

So that's what I would like to do with this podcast. I'd like to share my stories with you. I certainly want to hear your stories. I want to hear your experiences, your challenges and the things that have helped. Ask me your questions. I'll ask you some of mine too. 

The millions of us grievers out there never wanted to be part of this club. We travel this strange, unpredictable journey toward hope, and we pray for healing. But when we get to share our experiences with one another, the path becomes a little less lonely. Let's keep learning and healing together. 

So in our first episode, I would like to share one of the exercises when I worked with grievers that has been one of the most powerful, and that is the exercise I call “Choices.” It's especially important for us as grievers when we’re in environments where we feel we have no choice at all. Certainly that is the early days of grieving. I've had a couple of examples where people have said to me, “I really can't put one foot in front of the other. I really don't know where to turn.” And as they continue to talk about it, the path becomes a little bit more clear. I certainly love the group environments, because you get a number of people in a room, and the experiences, while not any is an exact mirror of any other, there are some areas close enough that it helps, that it helps to hear the stories of others, because you can glean from those stories: “Yeah, I get. That's happened to me. I felt that way.”

So when things seem so out of our control—like illnesses, like accidents, like natural disasters—what do we do? 

So in our group, I can tell you about a couple of examples that we've tried that have been interesting, certainly very enlightening, and for the person who was sharing the story, it created for them the “Aha!” moment, when the light bulb goes off. 

One young mom came in. She was so emotional, young kids, young husband. And she was more bereft than anyone could imagine. She was mostly upset because it was getting close to the end of the year and Christmastime. All she wanted to do was make a nice Christmas for her kids, and she couldn't see her way to making that happen. In our group, we offer tips and examples and they were helpful, they were okay, but still she was in that strange place of not really knowing what to do or how to do it. 

In this example, her choices were pushed along for her by the help of her friends. Every year, her husband decorated their home from stem to stern, inside and out. As it kept getting closer and closer to Christmas, she still wasn't feeling that inspiration, or even that energy, to get the Christmas decorations out of the attic to bring them down, to set them up. She was feeling bad about that, and guilty about that. She felt so sad for her kids. 

One night, after dinner—it was dark by then—she glanced outside the window, and her entire lawn was covered—the bushes, the trees, the doorway—was covered in blue lights. It just so happens that blue lights were her husband's favorite. This was the thing he loved doing more than anything else. Blue was his favorite color, and he thought that the blue were the perfect Christmas lights and that's the only color he ever used. The neighbors knew this. In fact, the neighbors were grieving the loss of that young man and his tradition, and to help themselves and to help this family, they decorated that lawn so beautifully, that it motivated the mom of these kids to go and decorate the whole house too. 

She came back after Christmas and she said, “You know what? It really wasn't all that bad. We did open presents. We remembered dad. We sang songs. And we made it.” 

So with the help of her friends, she was able to make the choices she needed to make to help her with her wish. Her wish was to give her kids a good Christmas. And that's exactly what she did. The help of her friends helped her, and she helped her young ones. 

Another time a person looked at this Choices exercise and said, “This exercise is going to be a crazy one because I don't have any choices whatsoever to make at all. Everything is just: I got to do this, I got to do that and truth be told, I don't want to do anything.”

So she went home with that exercise that week and she came back. This was a woman whose husband had died. It was a long-term marriage, a long term happy marriage, and from the sounds of it they weathered all the storms and made it. So she was bereft at losing her husband, the life she knew. She just couldn't see away out of it. Certainly she thought she had no choices. 

So she took the exercise home. She came back the following week. The whole page was filled with things she had to do, including one example, and that was to go to the birthday party of her two year old granddaughter. And I asked her: “Well, that sounds like that might have been a fun experience.”

“I didn't want to go. I felt pressured. I didn't want to do it. It was too much. I didn't want to see family. I didn't want to hear what they had to say. I just didn't want to do it.”

It turns out she did do that. She did go to the birthday party. And I said, “Well, what made you get into the car to even go to that birthday party?”

“Well, I feel sorry for my son and his wife. They had trouble conceiving their first child, and then the second one was like a miracle that had happened to them and to their family. So for him, I didn't want him to feel bad, so I decided, ‘Okay, I'm going to go.” 

She loved the party. She had a nice time at that party. She was happy that she went and when we spoke the following week and I pointed out to her, “Look at this as a choice you made. And look at what the result of that choice was.” And it was wonderful to see that realization occur for her. Something that she had dreaded, something she did not want to do became something that was enlightening for her, was enjoyable for her. It helped her with her building of resilience to know, “I can do this. This is why I'm going to do this. I am doing this deliberately, and it has meaning for me.” There are two examples. There are so many others. 

When you experience loss and start to feel out of control, the things that happen in your life, it can have a real impact day-to-day. You can have anxiety about the future. What's the future going to look like? How’s it going to be? You can try to over control and micromanage everything. Certainly we are all guilty of doing that sometimes. We grieve not only the loss of the person who has died, but the loss of our routines, the decisions we made as a team. We feel numb, often. 

There is some good news in all this. There is a way that you can take small steps, not big steps, not monumental steps. Certainly a decision like going to a birthday party is not a monumental step in and of itself, but as they start to add up, it begins to help you get your footing. It begins to help you regain a healthy feeling of control, when often things seem so out of control. It is important to make space for your grief, and that in and of itself is a choice. A choice you can say, “Okay, songs are triggers for me. Things that we used to eat together are triggers for me.” Maybe set some time, maybe choose to set some time to be alone with your grief and let the feelings come out, let the emotions happen. 

There's one exercise that I always encourage people to try—and we can do this as early as tomorrow morning, as we're waking up. We all know that time when, as we're waking up, we're kind of groggy and then we're waking up and we're thinking—many of us are thinking, “Oh, I don't want to get up. I’ve got so many things to do today and I just don't want to get out of bed.” My challenge to you is: why don't you just sleep a little bit longer? Why don't you say to yourself, “Well, I could probably afford ten minutes. I might have to give up that second cup of coffee. I might not catch up on the news the way I typically do, but I do have 10 minutes.”

The making of a choice like that is so empowering that it can be refreshing. It will offer you relaxation, and as you do finally get out of bed to start your day, you're in control. You've empowered yourself enough to make a choice in your best interest that makes sense. Not a monumental step, but one of those little steps that lead to the monumental steps. 

I hope this has been helpful today. There are so many experiences that I am excited to learn from all of you. If you try any of these techniques, I hope you'll let me know how it goes. I want to hear what works and what doesn't. Send your experiences and any great questions you have to our email address, and that is info@ourheartsofhope.org. We have a link at the beginning of this podcast to our website. Certainly you can send your questions there. And you can listen to From Grief to Grit wherever you get your podcast. On Spotify, Amazon, you name it. Thank you very much for sharing a few minutes of your time with me and for making space to take care of your grief. 

Until next time, grieve on and keep your active choices in mind.