The Dignity of Grief with Melissa Anne Rogers

In this episode of The Dignity Lab, Melissa Anne Rogers, an associate pastor and trained marriage and family therapist, shares her journey with grief, both personal and professional. Drawing from her experiences of losing her high school sweetheart and later her husband, she discusses how grief is fundamentally an expression of love rather than something to overcome. Rogers emphasizes the importance of giving grief its proper dignity, understanding its various forms, and recognizing it as a transformative lifelong journey rather than a temporary phase to be exiled.

Episode Resources

• A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing by Amanda Held Opelt
• The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief by Jan Richardson
• Grief Is a Sneaky Bitch: An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss by Lisa Keefauver 
• Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness by Kathryn Schulz
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
• When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi
• The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, Nina Riggs
• Spirituality of Grief: Ten Practices For Those Who Remain by Fran Tilton Shelton

Takeaways

• Grief is fundamentally an expression of love, not something to overcome or avoid
• Avoiding grief can lead to anger, depression, and living a less full life
• External barriers to grieving include workplace policies, family expectations, and societal pressures
• Internal barriers include physical fatigue, cultural conditioning, and gender socialization
• Grief is transformative and should be integrated into life rather than treated as a temporary phase
• Understanding grief requires both personal experience and education about different types (disenfranchised, ambiguous, complicated)
• Children grieve differently than adults and may process loss over many years
• Substances, excessive busyness, and other numbing behaviors can

Exploring what it means to live and lead with dignity at work, in our families, in our communities, and in the world. What is dignity? How can we honor the dignity of others? And how can we repair and reclaim our dignity after harm? Tune in to hear stories about violations of dignity and ways in which we heal, forgive, and make choices about how we show up in a chaotic and fractured world. Hosted by physician and coach Jennifer Griggs.

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Transcript

Jennifer

Welcome to the Dignity Lab. My guest this week is Melissa Anne Rogers. Melissa Anne is an associate pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is a marriage and family therapist by training. Her work focuses largely on pastoral care and counseling, working with older people, and helping people who have experienced or are facing death and dying. In our conversation, we talk about Melissa Anne’s path to her work with people who are grieving, her evolving relationship with her own grief, and the ways we can honor the dignity of grief itself and of people who are grieving. Melissa Anne shares what she’s learning lately about grief and her wish for you, our listeners.

Melissa Ann Rogers, thank you so much for being on the Dignity Lab.

Melissa Anne Rogers

I'm honored to be asked. Thank you for having me.

Jennifer 

How have you come to do the work that you do?

Melissa Anne Rogers  

I felt the Holy Spirit leading me to this kind of work from the beginning. I grew up in a family that had a lot of sadness and I was kind of a melancholy kid because of that. And so I think I was always attracted to difficult emotions. It's just what I'm familiar with. That's what I've known, living in the tensions of pain and joy in the middle of that. And so I think that's what led me to be drawn to caring for people who are suffering, who are hurting, coming alongside them. 

I tried to run away from doing this kind of work. I think a part of me recognized when I was in my late teens and early twenties that this would be a different kind of life. And so briefly, I went to law school, I mean, very briefly. And then I gave into this sense of calling and ever since have been doing something related to caring for people, their emotional health, their spiritual health, and helping them navigate really difficult emotions that are inevitable for all of us.

Jennifer: Law school to start?

Melissa Anne Rogers  

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it was brief. And of course what kind of changed my my direction on that was that I I met a guy I mean I fell in love with a guy very briefly who happened to have cancer, and the relationship didn't last as it turned out but it sort of landed in my life in a time where it caused me to re-evaluate, What am I doing with my time? What's important to me? I could die. If this person can die, I could die. I'm 20 years old, 21 years old. Why don't I start living every day as fully as I can as opposed to following the plans that others have set for me or trying to meet other people's expectations? It was just that reset that I needed and he was a wonderful human being and he went on to live a pretty full life and he wasn't in my life but that's how God sort of got me unstuck from my determination to avoid this kind of work.

Jennifer  

I heard you say earlier that you were “running away.” My ears perked up at that.

Melissa Anne Rogers  

Mm-hmm. Yeah, when I was ordained to ministry, the text that I chose for my ordination service was the story of Jonah, which really resonated with me in terms of just saying, no, I'm going to go the other direction. And then the belly of the whale is not a fun place to be. So when we emerge out of that denial of our fullest selves, we…we find the joy that we've longed for all along.

Jennifer 

Would you be willing to share your personal relationship with grief?

Melissa Anne Rogers  

Sure, it's a very intimate one. As I said, I was always a melancholy person. When I was in high school and then going into college, my high school sweetheart was killed in a car accident. He was a wrestler, his car broke down on the side of the road and he was walking at home a mile from his house and a drunk driver came along and knocked him right out of his wrestling shoes and killed him immediately.

And when my mom called to tell me about that, I remember this feeling of grief in such a profound way. And I said, I'm just not ever gonna feel this again. This is the most horrible thing I've ever felt. I'm not gonna do it. And I really think I was afraid that being a melancholy person, if I gave into grief, I would just really get swallowed up in depression. And so I tried to keep grief at bay for a long time. 

And finally, over the course of time, I...realized that the more I understood grief, learned about it, I had to objectify it for a while to kind of study it, and then I could bring it back into my life as the legitimate emotion, the necessary emotion that it is. And over course of time, I came to realize that grief is love and grief is love. When I started to really enter into that space, I met my husband whose wife had died not long before of a brain tumor at the age of 50. And so I willingly walked into a family as the stepmother of two children who had lost their mother to cancer and a spouse who had lost his wife. And that moving into their house and living in a home where grief is in the air really gave me a lot of opportunity to become more comfortable with grief.

And then, as my husband, 20 years later, was diagnosed with dementia and type one diabetes and began the long seven year journey of dying in front of us and in front of our children, his children and our children together. Again, I became more and more comfortable with grief and began talking about it more openly. So my relationship has become a more public one. It's an intimate relationship that has become more public. And it's one that for me is essential to be authentic about, genuine, open, transparent, because as we all know, when we admit the truth, grief is the one thing that unites all of us. Everybody will feel grief, everybody will die, everybody will have someone they love die, everyone will have a pet that dies that has pets, so there's no way of, grief is not something any of us can avoid. And I think, once that became clear to me, I decided that it was my calling to try to be better at it and better at helping other people do it, feel it, and navigate it.

Jennifer  

What's the cost of avoiding grief?

Melissa Anne Rogers 

Anger, depression, and not being fully alive. You cannot live as fully as God intends for us if you can't feel the range of emotions just as Jesus did, just as Jesus did. So for me, it's a truncated life. It's an amputated life. To try to cut grief out is to not be able to explore all of the beauty and all of the love and all of the joy that comes to us. You just can't do one without the other. And in fact, grief really enhances our ability to feel those things. I once remembered that my mom used to sprinkle salt on watermelon. She was from South Carolina and she'd say, it makes it taste better. And I just thought that was the most ridiculous thing, but she was right. And I think of grief a little bit that way that it's hard, it's salty, it's rough, but it brings out all of the good of the other emotions that we want to feel in life and the experiences and the relationships. It is necessary and we can use it to enhance and flavor all of that as opposed to seeing it as the thing that we want to most avoid in life.

Jennifer 

What do you think gets in the way of our feeling grief?

Melissa Anne Rogers  

Well, there's a lot of things that get in the way, both internal and external. So if you think just from an external perspective, none of us grieve in a vacuum. We grieve within a context. So there's the family around us. There's our work environment. And that often gets in the way of grief. When my husband died, I said to the church, all right, my husband has died. I'm going to take some some time off for bereavement. And they said, well, our bereavement policy is that you get three days. And I said, who the hell grieves in three days? Nobody does that. Certainly not anybody that's acquainted with their emotions. So that was a great opportunity for me to go to the church personnel committee and say, this is absolutely unacceptable. And here is why, because that's what society always said was, you get three days to grieve. You should be over it within three days.

Now that was years ago, I will say we've done a lot more research on it, but there's still a little bit of that mentality in the world. You know, people lose a first cousin and they think, well, it's not their spouse. They should be able to get over that and back to work more quickly. Or within a family, if you are navigating a family as you're one of the primary parents and you've got kids and all of their activities in school and you you lose your best friend and...you feel like you're gonna fall apart, but you're not allowed to because you can't take the time to do that. So there's those external things, but then there's, the other part of the external is that everyone around you is a mirror in which you see yourself. And when you see yourself as a grieving person in the mirror of other people that are not comfortable with grief, it makes it much more difficult for you to be comfortable with your own grief. 

And I think that's really where we as therapists and counselors and pastors have a lot of work to do to help people become better mirrors for those around them when they're grieving. The internal things get in the way too. I mean, grief is hard. First of all, it's physically fatiguing, very fatiguing. And anyone that's had someone close to them die knows that it's kind of that many days that you just wanna take to your bed and get under the covers. And not just because you wanna avoid those emotions, but because you're legitimately tired.

And some of that comes from the situation that preceded the grief, of course, with you or caregiver or something like that. But then, you know, so much of it is how we're raised. We are a product of our, it's not just nurture, it's nature and nurture together, but when we grow up in families where grief is denied, where grief is seen as a weakness, where grief is shoved to the side, then we aren't given the resources. And so that internal part of that is why we have good grief counselors and therapists to help open the doorway to that. In the church, I do a fair number of memorial services, as you know, and so often somebody will call me and say that they've lost a loved one and we need to do the service right away. How about day after tomorrow? And when I explore that with them, it's clear that they think that getting past that service, getting one thing buttoned up is gonna make their emotions more reliable, more stable, that they'll feel like they're beginning the pathway through and to get over grief. And that's really the fallacy is that we get over grief. None of us gets over grief. We absorb it and we learn to carry it and utilize it as a resource.

Every grief is unique and different. And that's part of the challenge is trying to let it be what it is for the person and what they're dealing with. But if you just think about how, I mean, my experience of leading grief groups is it's much more difficult for men than women to enter into those spaces. If you think about how many men are socialized and raised in our world to kind of be the tough guys. it's just, that's one of those internal barriers for men is to enter into that deeply emotional space and be vulnerable and to feel that being vulnerable is actually a strength.

Jennifer  

How can we bring more dignity into the grieving process and even our discourse on grieving?

Melissa Anne Rogers  

Well, there's lots of ways I think we can work at that. It's a process. Part of that is in order to give grief its own space for it to have dignity is to understand and know about it. So the more we learn about grief and the studies that are being done now are just so exquisite in what we're learning about the emotional content of grief and the purpose of grief and the journey that we take with it.

So I think being open to learning and not believing that we've mastered it, you know, that somehow we've gotten it down. I think also a part of giving grief a dignity is to recognize this relationship to trauma. In today's world, in today's world that I'm living in, that you're living in, none of us can deny the surge of traumatic experiences and responses that are happening to everyone. And grief is, I think, different when it's paired with trauma. And I'm not sure I even understand how yet, but that would be my next phase of study and understanding for me to give it dignity. I think that giving grief dignity is at the heart to allow it to be authentic and real and present and not to try to shape it into our expectation for it or our hope for it, but to allow it to take its own kind of pilgrimage through our lives and to walk alongside of it, to get to know it, to befriend it is really, I talk a lot about befriending grief and I think that is to give it dignity is to let it be its own person in a sense within us.

And don't we often think of grief as like sort of a phase like, okay, I'm in a good joyful part of my life now, but then grief comes and now I'm in the grief phase? I have to deal with grief and then someday I'll get past that and I'll be back in the joy phase. We don't integrate it very well into the whole of ourselves and it is love and it is life. We are all grieving people all the time. How much of that we're living into and feeling and letting well up inside of us is different for every person, but the more we integrate it into our being as an understanding of it, the more dignity we give it.

Jennifer  

We talk about dignity having acceptance of identity, inclusion, safety, recognition, acknowledgement, understanding, benefit of the doubt, autonomy, fairness, and accountability, and it feels like nearly all of those elements could apply to how we treat grief.

Melissa Anne Rogers  

Yeah, grief is already a part of us, you know, really from birth, it's there. And so the more we can recognize it and understand that part of ourselves and leave space for it to grow and change and become a resource. I mean, grief as a resource for us is huge. When we're talking about understanding other people and the dignity of other people, our own grieving gives us perspective. It gives us status. It gives us an opportunity. And I don't think we talk about that side of grief enough.

Jennifer

Could you say a little more about that?

Melissa Anne Rogers

Sure, I mean when we have gone through any kind of grief and navigated that and thought about it and felt it, now we are more acquainted with it. Now we are, we're more alert to it. And so as we then meet the range of people in our world, our children, our parents, we are in a better position to come alongside of them, to create a space for them to grieve more fully. There are people, I think, you'll find great lists of these things online, like things you shouldn't say after someone has a loss, like it was God's will or they're in a better place or whatever it is. The more you grieve and you think about, all right, what was helpful to me? What is helpful to me? The more you can apply that to the people around you, it makes us all more accustomed to understanding it. So for me, it also gives you a kind of status. You know, when my husband died, the people that I found that were most helpful to me right away were people that had lost a spouse that had taken that journey and not because other people couldn't understand it. But you join a kind of club when you're a widow that, you you don't want to be in, but once you're there, you certainly recognize in other people. It's when people have lost a child, it's very difficult to then go and be around people who haven't had that experience and not feel that pain all the time. So I think there's something that we can do for each other in that way.

Jennifer 

We've talked a lot about grief related to the loss of a loved one, somebody in our life. There are other kinds of grief, course, disenfranchised grief, ambiguous grief. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about those other types of grief.

Melissa Anne Rogers

Once you start working with people in grief settings, you start to understand what the other losses are, when what makes grief, I would say complicated. There's certainly the kind of disenfranchised grief and ambiguous grief that comes when, like, let's for instance, somebody has a miscarriage and they're within their first six or eight weeks, there's a woman that I met recently that that had happened to and they had not told anyone that she was pregnant and she just did not know how to, she didn't know where to take that because nobody knew but she and her spouse and that kind of hidden grief and it can be difficult. 

There's also grief that comes that you didn't even expect because here you are, you know, you're sort of living your life the way you think you should and you're pursuing your dreams and suddenly things don't feel right anymore. I'll just use an example of like hitting midlife, the midlife crisis, which I call midlife opportunity. You can wake up at the age of 45 or 47 and start to feel like maybe this is not what I wanted. And I'm starting to grieve that this is the life now that I've chosen and I'm either going to change it and rock everyone's world around me or I'm going to do the work to stay in that and feel those feelings. And not all of us can talk openly about that to our loved ones. So there's that part of it. 

I know I'm kind of jumping all around, but I will say that as a marriage and family therapist and a pastoral counselor, when I began meeting with grieving people, it's just peeling the onion. You're just finding the layers and layers of things. And I think one of the really important components about grief is I sort of think of the spiral nature of it, that as you experience a grief, you begin to grieve again for the other losses that have preceded it. And it's on a continuum. So they come back and you're circling back around to them. 

So when my husband died, I was also grieving my mother who died in 2018, my father who died in 2019, my high school sweetheart who died in 1988. They were all coming back in different ways, those feelings, and having to look at those again. So, and that's another fatiguing aspect of grief is it's never just one. It's a life of grief that comes back to you. And so what most people don't do, I think in any of these losses, Jennifer, is give time and space for it.

It's just like we're too busy, there's too much going on, I just need to keep it together. We're not afforded the luxury, which should be the normal thing, of taking time to be with our grief, to explore it, to think about what's ambiguous, what's complicated about that, of doing the work of going and talking with someone. It's just often not what people feel compelled to do either because they haven't been taught that that's a good thing or talked about that, or they literally can't because their lives don't permit it.

Jennifer: In my experience as an oncologist, I’ve noticed that when people don’t embrace grief, grief can take on a life of its own.

Melissa Anne Rogers  

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it does take on a life of its own. You know, I think of all the... In those situations, you're seeing it come on and you're feeling what I know because you feel so deeply that you feel what they're feeling in those moments as an oncologist and as a doctor. I'm sure that many doctors don't have that gift, but it is your particular gift and probably a burden at some level that you readily accept because it's such a treasure and a gift to be able to walk that closely with people.

I see a lot of people where I have a similar situation in my work, but I also get to experience people trying to control grief. If I can control these situations, then grief won't be as powerful or as, what's the word, discombobulating, you know, if I can prepare for it. And I think to some extent, I'll just be from a personal perspective as I watched my husband. declining, I know that I was trying to do that. I was trying to prepare for the inevitable and sort of thinking a lot about that and how I was gonna master it. And so within the first year, I did really well. And then within the second and third years now have been where I'm beginning to feel it much more fully that it comes when it, it comes when it needs to. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but you have to be ready for it and be attentive to it when it does come and allow it to have its way with you so that you can get to a new place with it.

Jennifer 

As you're talking, I'm thinking about people who've lost a parent or partner with whom they had a difficult relationship. And there's a special kind of grief around that, I think, that I'll never be able to make that relationship right because that person is gone, whether it's an abusive parent or a sibling, a child where things, you where we have regrets.

Melissa Anne Rogers  

Mm-hmm. Yeah, so much regret in those situations and regret is a real barrier to healthy grieving. But I heard Gloria Steinem say recently that when our loved ones die, we still have a relationship with them. It's just a different relationship. And she was kind of just describing her own experience of grief. And I think that's really important in those situations that you're describing, even more so that when we have a relationship that's unfinished or difficult and we lose that loved one, we need to continue on in that relationship with them. 

It helps that we can, well, part of one of the tasks of grieving is to, the first task is to name the loss that you've experienced. The second task is to locate the person or locate the situation somewhere. So if you can decide, all right, this is where I think this person is now, I can begin to enter into a new kind of relationship with them and do the work to try to repair it on my end on this side to try to find my way to a peaceful recognition that we did the best that we could. It wasn't what we wanted it to be. But given where we were in life and the circumstances, this was how it was. And in the end, it's going to be okay. We're always trying to work towards that.

Jennifer  

What are some of the ways we violate the dignity of people who are grieving and how can we do better?

Melissa Anne Rogers  

Well, so much of it gets back to those old expectations that, you know, grief will look the same for everyone and it'll be a three day process of mourning and then we'll have a service and life will get back to the way it is. I think we don't recognize enough the transformative nature of grief and that it is transformative, not just in a short time, but over the long haul of life. The more that we can explore the feelings that we're having and how those feelings are guiding us or becoming a barricade to us moving forward, the more we will help other people to grieve as well. Yeah, I just think we all would do well to spend a lot more time exploring the role that grief plays in our own journey thus far. 

When we get to people that are dying, often are asked to do sort of a life review with them. But why wouldn't we do a life review at different times along our continuum, our pilgrimage of life, and begin to think about how is grief functioning in my life? Let's take a look at that. Let's think about grief because grief is love. So how am I having both grief and love in my world, in my life? How am I living off of that?

Jennifer

Is there something that's caught you off guard recently or surprised you about grief?

Melissa Anne Rogers  

That's a great question. I'm still getting to know grief, so I'm always learning more about it.

I think one of the things I've come to recognize is that grief is not helped by substances. People often want to numb grief by alcohol or exercise or whatever it may be that...that helps them put it out of their mind. Busyness can be a drug, right? And those things are temporary helps and they can even be acceptable for a short term. But what's important in grief is to recognize the things that we turn to that will temper our grief or enable us to walk with it a little more comfortably.

What are the things that we pick up that we that we may not even be conscious of but that make grief more bearable that actually are impediments to it and thinking about what the impediments to grief are is one of the things I'm starting to think about in my own life I guess is what I'm saying that maybe that's one of the surprises for me is how many impediments I have been able to lean on as a person who does grief all day, you would think that I would automatically recognize those things, but I don't think any of us can fully know that at the beginning. It's that the grief over time reveals ourselves to us. Grief kind of pulls the mask off of us, and over time we can see ourselves more clearly. And that's one of those things I'm continuing to learn.

Jennifer

When I was a child, our dog was killed after he got loose from our yard. And our parents asked me and my sister, 10 and 8 years old at the time, not to talk about our dog for fear of upsetting the other parent. How does this type of message affect the way children grieve?

Melissa Anne Rogers  

Well, that's really critical, Jennifer, that you think about what you were taught about grief at young ages, right? Children grieve in different ways than adults. We know developmentally that it's going to be different. And I think parents would do well to understand a little bit more about that as they're raising their children because they often deny what that is. At the same time, children don't grieve in the way that an adult, a healthily grieving adult would. When my step daughter lost her mother, she was 15. And I had read a number of books right before that about how teenagers grieve and especially around the loss of their mother, which all indicated that it was like a 10 year thing. It was gonna be sort of a, not a denial completely, but she was gonna probably feel some physical effects and she would navigate that early stuff with a lot of resilience.

But then at the 10 year mark, she would really start to grieve that anew and deal with her own feelings as she went into motherhood. And that's exactly what happened. She was sad initially, but then very resilient, got back into school, did fine. Five years later, started having performance anxiety related to grief that, you know, it wasn't denied. It's not like anybody said you can't grieve. It's just as a teenager, as an adolescent, you're gonna do it different. And there's different reasons for that.

But again, it's keeping that door open to it as you age and as the different stages of life, you know, shine a light that brings out the different colors and shades of what you've been carrying all along and letting it be seen and experienced.

Melissa Anne Rogers (34:36.834)

I don't know that everybody can deal with the intensity of emotion that I think you and I are particular and there's many other people like us, but there's many that are not like us. But to be able to walk into any room and I mean, I've been in like you some just terrible situations in the emergency room when I worked there as a chaplain and you you walk in and there's a young man who's just committed suicide and his parents are walking in and just the dramatic heavy shock.

Distraught feelings that that you walk into and are suddenly present to them and you have to have a kind of gravitas but also a kind of peace that is within you and it's very hard to have that I Mean to me, I think it's a natural gift and I think that's what calls us into this kind of work But I don't know for some people. It's a natural gift that then that then develops over the course of their experience. For others, it's an experience of what they've been through in childhood that they respond to by developing that gift. But, there's probably other ways that that comes to people, but I know for you and I, feel a real kinship with you because I know that we've had some similar experiences of that kind of heavy grief.

Jennifer  

What's one wish you have for our listeners?

Melissa Anne Rogers  

I wish that anyone who is listening to this would sit down and read a great books about grief. Not just, not books that just tell you what grief might look like or the components of grief, but to read of someone else's experience of it. 

For me, spiritual memoir and grief, specifically memoirs of grief have been exceptionally helpful at understanding, becoming more accepting of the people that I encounter in every day. And also it makes you more intuitive and more sensitive to understand and know about grief, makes you more sensitive and intuitive to the people that you encounter so that you can meet people that wouldn't necessarily tell you that they're grieving or wouldn't be obvious, but you can feel it. You can pick up on it. 

So I think strengthening that kind of the grief muscle that we all have of knowing and understanding would be, would just be such a gift to give people around us and especially as we were saying earlier, in this age of so much trauma, the more that we can grow in our understanding. And also I think for all of our listeners, for all of your listeners to spend some time with their grief. Everybody has it. It might not be from yesterday or from six months ago, but everyone carries grief.

So how about if we all spent some time, some intentional time journaling, thinking about it, reading about it, just becoming more attuned to it, our world would be a lot better if we had lot more, we would be a closer people, a more understanding people if we just did a little bit more work on learning about grief and experiencing it.

Jennifer 

We’ll put links to a couple of your favorite books in the show notes. 

Melissa Anne, thank you so much for being on the Dignity Lab today.

Melissa Anne Rogers Thanks for h

aving me. I hope this was a helpful conversation for people and you know, hope that people will seek out those that do grief work if they are in need and take advantage of that because it's a gift to give yourselves.

Jennifer  

Thank you. 

Jennifer

We hope you enjoyed this episode. What are you taking away from my conversation with Melissa Anne? What would it make possible for you if you were able to see the dignity in grief, your own and that of others? I’d love to invite you to take a few to reflect upon and perhaps write about what you heard and what it means to you.

We love hearing from you. You can reach us at our website, thedignitylab.com, or you can email me at jennifer@jennifergriggs.com. 

We’ll be back next week with another dose of dignity. We’ll see you then.