I know in the short time I've been posting these podcasts that many of the stories have come from my years working in hospice. I make mention of having a life beyond that; my work in a cancer treatment center and my work as part of the Palliative Care team. And those are still areas in my life that are open and sometimes available to me as I remain on a PRN status at that hospital. 

All of the things I have done in my working life have involved grief and loss. And some years ago, I began to focus more heavily on those aspects of what it means to us in living these lives. Even when I was working as a Toddler Montessori educator, I could see that the children starting in my classroom, some as young as 15 mos of age, had baggage that, once unpacked, almost always held an element of loss.

I will always remember how much the Little Ones taught me. How grateful I am to have had those years of innocence and joy with them, before starting my work in end of life. 

I came to believe that part of their innocence and joy is because they have not been in their human form and away from the spirit place long enough to become afraid of what happens next. When they are being well cared for and understood, they are open, curious, literal, grounded and soaking up every second that they are alive, every moment of their living. When a child under 2, is not those things, backing up in their family of origin would always reveal some sort of trauma or loss. And very young children have no tools for processing grief or trauma. They can develop tools to survive, but they cannot develop the necessary tools for understanding that the hurtful things that happen to them at the hands of the adults who are suppose to be taking care of them, is not their fault or their baggage. But it becomes theirs; when really, all along, it belonged to the parents or the grandparents or the great great grandparents. Ancestral grief is a very real phenomenon and is being studied among some of the worlds greatest grief scholars. When I first started teaching, almost immediately I wanted to study parenting and find out why there were beautiful, sweet, tender, children coming in my door dragging along a bag of stuff they didn't know what to do with AND was clearly interfering in what their job was; which is to learn to be human beings who care about and for one another and the planet. So I did. I studied parenting and I started asking each parent or set of parents, before their child started, to schedule a time to bring their child to the classroom when no other children were present. These were short 30 minute appointments in the late afternoon or on a Saturday where the child might never leave mom or dad's lap but the adults would sit and talk about the order of the day in our classroom and I could answer any questions they might have about anything to do with their child being part of our Toddler program. And I began to ask for a home visit, for me, to each child's home the day before they were to come to school for the first time to be left. This was for many reasons. I wanted the child to see me in their home, in their safe place under the safest circumstances. It was a visit with no agenda and at a time of day chosen by the parents as the least transitional time of day for their family. It was casual, and easy and friendly and the next day when the child would see me, I was not a stranger. I noticed immediate results with the children who's parents could accommodate these requests. The transition was smoother, the child settled in easier and everyonbe's life was easier because of it.

In the work of grief and loss, there are many parallels to that time at Montessori.

So much of the suffering I see people endure, can be traced back to unmourned loss. Un-grieved loss. It could be part of the reason we know we have to go back, before we can move forward.

In the field of Grief and Loss, conversations around the difference between grieving and mourning usually sounded something like this:

When we lose something or someone we care about, grief will be present. It's there. It's the pain. Mourningthe loss is the activity of expressing that pain. Loss occurs in so many ways. I say, we are born of loss because the cutting of the umbilical cord is our first major loss; and then our lives are just a series of losses big and little until one day that monumental loss happens and down we go.

I believe it is as healthy to look at losses in our life, to determine if we have done the necessary work around processing and understanding them, as it is to have those conversations with our loved ones about what we want our death to look like.

I know it may sound like I am not a very fun person to know. And I admit to being deeply challenged by answering the question; “What do you do for fun?” but we can talk about that later. We've talked quite a bit about the difference we can make in the lives of those we love, IF we are willing to talk about our death. 

Today I wanted to talk a bit more about grief and how critical it is that we acknowledge the reality that losing someone or something we love, hurts. Nothing we do can make that diferent. And really, we need to understand that we don't want it not to hurt, we just want to know better how to process and handle the pain. So many of us have grown up in a culture that doesn't know what to do with hurt. Doesn't know what to do with grief. It's one of the biggest obstacles to having those other conversations about death and dying. We fear what we do not know. And most of us do not know what to do with our hearts when we suffer the assault of the loss of a loved one. 

There is a thread in this jumping back and forth to the Little Ones and how much they taught me and the thread right now is that when I started working in EOL, and I began to look at Chaplaincy as an additional way of developing skills for being with the dying, I saw right away that it was not just the one doing the dying that we would be caring for; it was those who would be left behind in the wilderness of grief that also needed care. 

I remember being acutely aware of that need and wanting desperately to study how people heal from loss and I remember telling my husband that the minute I was finished with CPSP (college of pastoral supervision and psychotherapy) and certified as a Chaplain, I wanted to delve into understanding grief better. It was like the 'backing up' thing when I first started teaching. Backing up to work with the parents of the children in my program as a way to better serve those children. And, as it turned out, 'going back' is a very real part of processing and understanding grief. 

I was extremely fortunate, thanks to one generous and grateful friend and a kind, supportive and understanding family, to study healing in grief with Dr. Alan Wolfelt in Fort Collins at the Center for Loss and Life Transition. He facilitates week long workshops on a wide range of topics designed and geared to those in helping professions who want to better understand grief. I learned so much from those workshops and still refer back to discussions and teachings from the weeks I spent in Fort Collins.

I do not mean this to dilute the impact that training had on my work, because I know that there are fundamental skills necessary to being an effective companion to those in the acuity of grief that do not necessarily come naturally to most people. And I will say this anyway. The ones doing the grieving, are the very best teachers. I am so speechlessly grateful to every bereaved person who has allowed me entry to their story, their journey and their grief. 

Dr Wolfelt's workshops prepared me. They tilled the garden and fertilized the passion I already had for this work, but it has been those people, who in their raw vulnerability during the acuity of grieving a loss, who have helped me understand what someone in that place of such profound pain, might need.

When grief comes, some people want to run from it. They want to stay as busy as they possibly can to avoid having to look at it. The old adage, “Time heals all wounds” is a lie. Because the only thing time alone does with the wound of grief, is to eventually allow a big gnarly scab to form over a hot molten lava of pain; a scab that something, somewhere along the way of life, will pick off and the volcanic outpouring of what comes will be astounding and confusing. Grief waits for it's due. It waits to be honored by being mourned. It waits to be given the attention it deserves. And it's hard to know how to do that when we've never been shown what that looks like; what it looks like to do grief well. Some of us have. Some of us have been shown by our elders what it is to keene and wail significant loss. Some of us have been given the freedom to express however our hearts show us, the pain of losing what is loved. But most of us have not.

I have been graced and blessed in so many ways in my life. I have suffered losses and I have found ways to make friends with the grief of loss because I so clearly understand that it means I have loved, and I have been loved.

For me, it's that simple.

This is Sean Jeung. Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting these podcasts. I hope you'll join me again, where the veil grows thin.