Finding Life After Loss: Conversations on Growing through Grief

Summary
In this episode of Growth from Grief, Susan Andersen speaks with Reverend Krysia Burnham, a hospice chaplain, about her journey from journalism to chaplaincy, the importance of grief support, and the role of hospice care. They discuss personal experiences of loss, the significance of community in grief, and innovative approaches to healing, including expressive writing workshops. The conversation emphasizes the need for open discussions about grief and the potential for joy even in the face of loss.

Takeaways

• Grief is a universal experience that everyone faces.
• The role of a hospice chaplain is to provide spiritual support.
• Anticipatory grief affects both the dying and their families.
• Community support is crucial in the grieving process.
• Expressive writing can be a powerful tool for healing.
• Loss can lead to personal growth and new paths.
• Joy is possible even after significant loss.

Thank you for listening! Visit www.sueandersenyoga.com for Yoga for Grief classes and additional resources.

Transcript

Susan Andersen (00:03.382)

Hello, I'm Sue Andersen, grief guide and yoga teacher dedicated to helping individuals navigate the challenging journey of loss. Welcome to Growth from Grief, where I aim to offer strategies to transition from the depths of grief to the path of healing. Whatever loss you are grappling with, here you'll discover support to ease both the physical and emotional burdens of grief. Together, let's embark on a journey towards strength, peace, and healing. I'm so glad you are here.

Susan Andersen (00:54.858)

In today's episode, I'm speaking with the Reverend Krysia Burnham. And Krysia is an ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, where she's a chaplain caring for people at end of life and supporting their families. Krysia is also a veteran hospice chaplain who has created and led virtual bereavement support groups since the start of COVID-19.

She's currently a candidate for the doctorate in ministry at Boston University School of Theology, where her dissertation will focus on the use of expressive writing and movement to tend to those in times of loss and change. And in this episode, Krish and I will talk about how we met and our common goals in terms of working with people who are grieving loss and maybe some things that we want to try to do together. So I'm really happy to be speaking with her and sharing her viewpoint with you and all the good things that she does as a hospice chaplain.

So let's take it away without further ado. And here's my conversation with Krysia.

Susan Andersen (02:19.726)

Hi everyone and welcome to this episode of Growth from Grief. I'm so happy to be here with my friend, the Reverend Krysia Burnham. And as I mentioned in the introduction, we have known each other for actually not a very long time. And I wanted to start by first welcoming Krisha and talking a little bit about how we got together. So welcome Krysia. Thank you for being on the podcast.

Krysia Burnham (02:53.121)

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. 

Susan Andersen:

Great. You're welcome. You're welcome. So it's funny, prior to the recording, we were just talking about how it's only been like 11 months since we first connected, but it feels like we've known each other for five years. And I think that goes to the power of connection. And when you really feel like you're connected to somebody and it's important for both of you in terms of your mission and what you're doing in this world. So that was just kind of funny as we were chatting about that. But I did want to mention and just sort of start the conversation by talking a little bit about how we met. 

And how we met was Krysia sent me an email. So I mentioned again in the introduction that she is a hospice chaplain and she does virtual grief groups. And so she was looking for something, another dimension to add to these virtual groups and had sent me an email to see if I'd be interested in doing some collaboration with her. And so that's how we got talking. 

So, and we're still talking, we're still thinking about things that we want to do together in terms of collaboration. But, Krysia, I wanted to ask you, you know, why is this work so important to you? This work as that you've been doing for many years. and I didn't actually start by saying how long you've been a hospice chaplain, but maybe you can talk a little bit more about sort of how you got into this line of work from your from your other work as a writer? 

Krysia Burnham:

 I'd be glad to. It's a story I like to think about and share and retell because it helps me realize sort of the power of universal love and kind of blessing that is available to us sometimes if we're open to it. yes, so I was a journalist. My first career was in magazines.

Krysia Burnham (05:17.101)

From my early 20s on, I started at the New Yorker magazine, which was super glamorous. And in fact, I was a typist there as it was a starting job and was a great entry into the world of journalism at the time. And I went on to become a magazine writer and editor at Vogue, European Travel and Life, which was a Murdoch magazine and a couple other places. And then our path, my husband and I led to the Middle East where we sort of left everything and moved to Istanbul. We were going to do a two-year adult gap year kind of a situation. And we ended up staying 11 years and we had our family there.

Istanbul is a really one of the great cities of the world, right? And it's so spiritually and culturally fascinating. You know, there's this overlay of Islam and Christianity, ancient Christianity, and a tiny bit of Judaism and a lot of different cultures end up there. And so was there that I came back into church attendance, international church, just felt very inspired by the place and started this kind of like little tingling. I was going to say tingling. I don't know if that's the right word. You know, just kind of like a little sparkle of, hey, what do I want to do with my one wild and precious life? As Mary Oliver writes so beautifully.  

And long story short, 9-11 happened and we came back to the States because we felt like we wanted to be home after that and be with our family. So we did and we decided to move to Boston where we had some of my husband's family lives. I was kind of still dabbling in journalism, being a mom and trying to figure out my next steps. And it so happens that we got a house pretty much down the road about not even 10 minutes from

Krysia Burnham (07:31.763)

a divinity school and I ended up going there almost as like a hobby and then later, much later, like years later, finishing there with a degree in divinity. And so that was a big period of discernment where I felt the call, the call to ministry. It's like a spiritual process, right? Really the call to anything, the call to yoga, the call to..writing can be also very spiritual. 

I didn't plan on going into the ministry, but that's kind of the profession that chose me. Actually, fast forward to 2013, my mom was very sick at the time. She had had a bunch of neurological things go wrong, but had been a trooper and had lasted through that many years. But she was at the end and she was on hospice, which I had zero experience with, even though I was in training for the ministry and had already had some chaplaincy training at that point. 

But when hospice came in and tended to her mostly beautifully, some things that they did I did not like, I was like, note to self, I think this could be better. And I kind of in that space, so I saw myself like entering into that conversation at the bedside and being able to be in those sacred spaces with folks who are at a, you know, they're at a turning point. You know, they're between dimensions and varying levels of cognition. 

I was really moved by the work that the hospice did. And my mom actually passed that Christmas 2013 and I started becoming a volunteer and really just dabbling in hospice and eventually was able to become a per diem and then a half time and later full time. So total, I would say it was roughly 15 years I've been a chaplain in hospice. 

I did have some time in the parish and in the hospital as well. But really hospice is what calls to my heart. And so I'm now serving a population in Metro Boston for

Krysia Burnham (09:54.271)

the oldest hospice in the Commonwealth, it's called Care Dimensions. So everything's kind of come full circle. 

Susan Andersen:

Wow. Yeah, that's very inspiring. I know also that you had a personal experience of loss early on in your marriage. And that added, I'm sure, some dimension to this as well, right? 

Krysia Burnham:

Absolutely. Thank you for bringing that up. That's an important part of the story. I'm sort of, you know, I've developed a version of that without this experience because it can be so personal. It's not every context that can accept it. But thank you for asking. And you and I have chatted about this before. So when I was 30 years old, I got pregnant with our first child. We were living in the New York area. And I'm from New York, so we're living in the New York area before we went to Istanbul. And we were pregnant and things were going okay up until I want to say five and a half months through the, 10 month pregnancy. 

And then I started going into labor and I didn't really know what labor was, my first kid, but I was pretty, pretty different. So I did eventually go into the OB's office and interestingly, he minimized it and said, it's just, you know, false labor, just go home and rest, which was the wrong thing to say because I was in active labor. Anyway, I went into labor and then met him later in the hospital, uh, emergently and we, unfortunately it was, um, we found out later an infection of the, think it's called coreo amniotic fluid. Um, something was infected in, in, a way that basically started the pregnancy in at the wrong time. And so our daughter was born. So that was April, 1991. um, she was born April 27th.

Krysia Burnham (12:17.729)

And she was very premature. However, when it's your kid, you don't really notice that or like you don't really, that's not what's on your mind. It's just your child, you know? And I was, you know, on a lot of meds and stuff, but she was born and she died in my husband Steve's arms that day. So she was born and died on April 27th.

And her gravestone is a place where we go for the summer and we visit her. And I think that experience, and I know you know this all too well, sadly, is life changing, right? It just doesn't, you know, it's not the same afterwards. So we had quite a hard time with that grief. It wasn't easy.

Sometimes people grieve differently, which was the case. We were both young working people, so we had to stop out from work for a little bit. And what it did do, though, is it empowered me to think about, what can I do? I've lived through this. I'm still alive. My child is not, which is horrific. What can I do? What can I do for the next person? 

Super quick side note, I happen to have had a labor and delivery nurse who I think was also a doula and I believe was from some UK country, had this lovely accent and she was amazing and she helped me through everything, sort of looking at what the bereavement might look like. 

And she made us footprints and she made us like birth certificate and so I have a whole basket, you know, that's Eleanor's basket that I don't usually go looking for, but I do have her footprints on my, in my bedroom. And so, you know, she is a very real person, right? Even though she was a tiny preemie who died halfway through a pregnancy. long story short, that was the catalyst for me to start looking into how to become a bereavement, like a lay at that time, bereavement counselor. I never really did that then, but I did, it inspired, think, my ministry later on. 

Susan Andersen (14:39.387)

Sure. Yeah. And I think also, excuse me, the timeframe that you're talking about, people did not talk about this. It just was not talked about. And I mean, before my son was born, I had two miscarriages, which, you know, people were - I don't know -iIt was just very weird. You know, you were just expected to kind of go on. And I remember years later finding out when I was doing family history, my family history, finding out that like, this grandmother had, you know, a stillborn child and this aunt had, you know, a still or whatever, you know, and it was just amazing because you would never know that people didn't really didn't really talk about it. 

And I feel like nowadays this this day and age, it's a little bit more, you know, people are more willing to talk about it. And there's groups to help people grieving, infant loss and, you know, and pregnancy loss. 

Krysia Burnham:

Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. Cause I remember some of my husband's extended family, like his cousin's wives and people like that who weren't my closest family, but they were my family.

I remember them coming and visiting me and sitting on our back deck and them saying, you know, this happened to me too. And that would never have come up if for, you know, but for this. And I felt like, okay, so this happens to women and I'm not a freak and you know, God willing, I will go on to have children, more children someday. I mean, I wasn't really thinking about that then, but I thought, well, is every pregnancy gonna be like this? Am I just gonna not have kids?

And yeah, I'm so glad people talk about grief more now. And that's really kind of become my business, if you will. Talking about grief, helping people voice what's going on for them.

Susan Andersen:

Sure. Right, right. Yeah, it's so important. So I wanted to just shift the conversation a little bit and have you explain a little bit more about the hospice chaplain.

Susan Andersen (17:04.946)

What is that role? Because when I think about hospice, I know a few people that were very ill and had hospice care. But when I think about that, I just remember nurses. And so I don't know if they had other care. I just remember it was about nurses. So can you talk a little bit about that and the maybe the role, the important role that you play, not just for the person who is dying, but for their family.?

Krysia Burnham:

Yes. Yes, it's such a good question. And, you know, Sue, I think people don't really broadly understand what hospice is until they're smack in the middle of it. As I was, that happened to me, too. And hospice is from it's it's it's a Latin root word. It's the it's it's host base which means guest so it's the same root word as hospital and hospitality which I find cool as a word person because originally host space was a guest house and there's a beautiful poem called the Guest House by Rumi if you look it up, right? 

Yeah, you probably know that poem and so it's like the guest houses were places I think on the road there was transportation so people were I guess walking by foot. This is the Middle Ages or something early Middle Ages. So people were walking by foot from place to place and they these guest houses along the way probably still exists in you know along the pilgrimage road. I don't know. So, you know, it's a place of welcome. It's a place of sanctuary place of safety comfort and then eventually grew into hospital and hospice where there's medical care.

And so hospice is actually kind of the opposite of what people think, which is a death sentence. I know, when you have a terminal illness and your physician, your specialist says, I'm really sorry, we can't do anything for you, more for you. You know, it is, feels like a death sentence and feels like I've had people say, you know, they gave up on me. The medical establishment has thrown me out and it's well, hospice is your only option.

Krysia Burnham (19:24.711)

Well, from a hospice point of view, that's not untrue. And we who work in hospice feel it's kind of like death doulas and things like that. Like we feel there is a beauty and a sacredness and the possibility of peace and maybe even hope and you your hope changes drastically. But hope is still possible and a kind of a what's a good word?

Krysia Burnham (20:03.046)

Like a place where you can come into your dying process, and it won't be scary and it can be as painless as possible. That's the medical part we do so well. And, um, oops. And, um, you know, like meaning making, can be meaning making there. Right. And so. Hospice is a team of trained professionals. You have a hospice physician, hospice nurses, you're right, absolutely, very nursing driven business. When I say business, I mean, it is a business, but it's not a business to me. It's a calling. 

Social workers, chaplains, they call us spiritual counselors now, volunteers, huge part of hospice, volunteers who come and sit with people. Nurses, aides, and then you have a massive group of people in the back office doing all the admin. So it's really large, large teams of people. When you look at all the teams, like in Care Dimensions, we have a thousand people on our service every day. per, you know, that's our daily count. So it's it's a pretty large operation. 

And so you have to have that physician in the hospital or wherever your physician is, sign you onto hospice and you have to have the hospice physician signed. People don't realize it takes two doctors to sign and what they sign is a piece of paper that says, Ms. Jones, you have approximately six months or less to live if your terminal disease goes its course. It's sort of like expected course which sometimes it goes way quicker and sometimes it goes much, much longer depending on a ton of things. 

So that's why it's, yes, it could be the end of the road. And some people do graduate from hospice because our care is so good. They actually leave. So it is a six month benchmark. I think the average length of stay is 30 days. If you take all the people and average it, so I don't know, I don't know math, like that's a kind of a maybe. That's the math of it, is that it's 30 days.

Krysia Burnham (22:30.113)

But I see people on a lot longer, honestly. Not to give people false hope, but... the chaplain, spiritual caregiver, comes in as part of that team and we do our spiritual assessment. Like the nurse will take your vitals and the doctor will make sure your meds are right and the social worker will help you with like your insurance and things like that. The spiritual counselor comes in and says, hey Sue, like how's it with your soul, how's your heart? How are you today, know, holistically, basically? And we get a lay of the land of where you are with your disease. 

And I'm glad you mentioned your family because a huge part of the spiritual care piece is families. You know, so your spouse, your close relatives, your whomever is your... favorite sister or whomever is in your life. Those people are also adjusting, right? Like it's, as you well know too, there's a huge impact on your loved ones. And so sometimes that's going well and sometimes it's not. And religiously, like people are all over the map, right? 

So people are lapsed Catholic, never darkened the door of a church since my wedding or Protestant attending a church, not that close to my minister, they really accept the hospice chaplain instead of their own pastor or in addition to, and all different kinds of religions, Buddhist, Jewish, Wiccan, Nazarene, Hindu, you know. And oftentimes, let's say if we get a Buddhist patient, they might prefer their own Buddhist clergy and that's totally fine. we completely accepting with that.

Krysia Burnham (24:35.0)

And, so yeah, and we also do a lot of bereavement work after the person has died and the Medicare benefit is a year plus a month. And the reason is that, you know, you need that first month just to like take care of business, the immediate business. You're not really, most people aren't really fully in their grief yet. You know, they're kind of numb. And so that's why they give you a month plus 12 months that you can come and have bereavement services in the hospice. Actually, Care Dimensions, where I now work, does a little differently. 

They have a whole department for that. So typically we will send letters, we will do calls like, two weeks after and then maybe once again later on we can do in-person visits. I have those online grief support groups that you mentioned that I have been working on in the past very heavily. And then there's like all kinds of stuff in the community, which is a lot of what you do, right? So yeah, that's a little bit about what we offer. 

Susan Andersen:

Yeah, I think that, you know, that's one thing that I didn't think about was that, you know, there's anticipatory grief, right? So when you're as a family member or the friend or the close people to the person who's dying, you have that anticipatory grief that you have to deal with. And then after they die, then your, you know, your grieving process after, after the loss kind of starts. And I was not aware. And I bet a lot of people are not aware that there is that benefit from hospice to continue with that kind of care, with that grief support. 

Krysia Burnham:

Yeah, and it's so amazing. I mean, it's not really long enough, which is where my sort of academic life picks up the conversation. Because, OK, what else can we do that's way better than what we do now? And there's a ton of room for improvement, even though the services are really good.

Krysia Burnham (27:02.249)

And people just need to call. They just need to pick up the phone or shoot an email. Plus every hospice is also required to offer those services to anyone in the community, not the calls, but the groups. So like if you Google grief groups in Massachusetts or any state really, you, you research that you can pretty much join most groups. 

Some of them have a kind of a, have to join by a certain day and then membership closes for six weeks and then they open it up again. Sure. But so people maybe might like to know that, you know, that those services are out there. 

Susan Andersen:

Yeah, I think, I think that's really important to know. So one of the things that I know you did, because we talked a little bit about it was the starting these virtual groups during COVID. So I was kind of wondering, know, with the, with hospice being so, you know, one-to-one kind of focus where you're going to the person's house or something, how did that work during the pandemic? 

Krysia Burnham:

That's such a great question. That, that, you know, it's sort of a theme in life, I think, you- it's like very cliche, but a door slams shut, a window opens. And that was the case for, I think, many of us in hospice, well, at least in psychosocial work in hospice, myself included, where COVID was horrific and people were dying off camera, if you will. Actually, they were dying on camera because sometimes we were holding the iPhone by the hospital bed of the person dying of COVID, right? We were completely gowned up in our whole full protective equipment. And a couple of times like that, FaceTime with the person was the last time that family member would see the person, their loved one, and say goodbye that way, which was...

Krysia Burnham (29:22.868)

essentially causing complicated grief. It's like folks whose loved ones die overseas in battle. Vietnam is a perfect example of that, or really any war, I guess. But you just never got a chance to say goodbye. Or the way you say goodbye was so tragic and disjointed. And you didn't even know if the person heard you.

You know, the chaplains came into this breach at this moment. Like there's this beautiful phrase in Hebrew scriptures in the book of Esther for such a time as this, you know, that she was a queen, an unlikely queen for such a time as this to save her people. And that's kind of what we did. It was like, this is our time. You know, we're jumping in. It was really hard. A bunch of people quit and never came back or just went to do other things. Somehow by grace, I stuck it out. That was a total God thing that was happening. so that was maybe the first part. 

The second part is that after those deaths occurred and kept occurring, obviously, right, until COVID was over, people were, people who were in normal grief were just suddenly in heightened grief. And then you had people whose loved ones died of COVID in a variety of difficult ways. My husband and I were just talking about ventilators and his point of view is, I don't know if this is medically right or wrong, that ventilators were actually medically unhelpful. That the use of ventilators actually hastened more deaths than they should have.

There was a lot of mistakes that were being made and a lot of conversation around the vaccines and such. alongside that was these folks who loved ones died of COVID who were in deep grief, right? So you have these kind of two levels, like normal grief, normal grief in a pandemic, and then...

Krysia Burnham (31:44.514)

COVID related grief in a pandemic. So those groups of people kind of funneled into our, our group, which my then hospice said, okay, you can take this online because we can't see these people in person to go take this group onto teams. And they kind of gave me carte blanche to do what I wanted. And we, my social worker and I learned how to do Teams, learned how to do groups, totally self-taught. 

There was no time to like, you know, take a class. And the groups continue today. And they are smaller, like microcosmic, right? It's not a hundred people. It's like maybe eight people at a time. Some have suffered the loss of a spouse, the loss of a child, the just general loss. And most hospices have these groups. I don't know how many have them online like mine, but they're on Teams, you know, on video like mine. 

But Sue, like, again, just a total gift from heaven of being able to lead these groups, kind of create them and be a bit of a, like a container, right? For what people were going through. And so that's kind of, what my research is headed in that direction. Because I want to do more of that. And I want to do it differently and better. 

Susan Andersen:

Right. Right. Yeah, that was going to be my next question. with the work that you're doing towards your doctorate, that's something that you're focused on, is these different kinds of ways to help people that are grieving. that the high level of it? Not the detail.

Krysia Burnham:

Yeah, the high overview. Yeah. I'll just, you know, I'll give a shameless plug to Boston University, which is school of theology, which is where I'm studying. It's a wonderful institution within a huge institution. It happens to be where Martin Luther King also got his divinity degree. So how cool is that? Like walking steps of giants, our tiny, tiny feet in this huge steps, but footprints, but so it's got a very big justice focus, BU School of Theology.

Krysia Burnham (34:06.913)

And the doctoral program there is, it's about practical theology. So taking your belief system, whatever that is, and it's a multi-faith and like, how can we do better of taking that to the world and doing good things in the world, like right now, you know, not just being the ivory tower talking. As fun as that is about all the theory, but like the practice of it, which I'm very interested in. And so it's practical theology. And then it's also for transformational leadership because the face of ministry chaplaincy, pastoral care, church ministry is changing rapidly. You know, our churches are shrinking, mainline Protestant churches are shrinking. That's my denomination. 

So it's like a really interesting time to be in this work. For me, I'm gonna be writing this whole next year about how to take a page from my first career, which is writing, and I'm gonna be working with expressive writing. So people who write about expressive writing like James Pennybaker and Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron, who does The Artist's Way. 

Like there are a lot of people out there who are trying to teach us how to use writing for healing purposes and for creativity and for self-affirmation. And then there are also a lot of really interesting writers who were just writing their grief narratives. So I'm sort of taking all that, using expressive writing as a tool, and I'm going to create four workshops where we help folks basically practice really super easy writing that anyone can do towards healing from their grief, loss, change. And it doesn't have to be someone died. It could be the loss of a relationship, a home, a job, a role, you know, like I was a mom and everybody left and now I don't even know who I am, you know, or whatever. But also any kind of loss.

Krysia Burnham (36:33.26)

And, you know, multi-faith, multi-age, all are, all will be welcome once I build this thing. And so I'm really excited. I'm using the framework of some of my best teachers. One is named Dr. Shelly Rambo. She's a theologian who's trauma informed at BU school theology. She's incredible.

Dr. Rambo wrote this book, Spirit and Trauma, where she looks at Holy Saturday in the Easter cycle and how it's kind of a day no one really, we don't really focus on. We focus on Good Friday and He is risen on Sunday, but Holy Saturday is the descent into hell. And she writes about how Jesus goes down into hell and like, he's as far from God as you could imagine, and he sort of is in hell with us. And it's like the total absence of God and he also doesn't have God either. like through his spirit, through his breath, through this possibility of hope, like, you we rise with him out of hell and, you know, we come to Easter together. 

And so like, to me, that's exactly to me, that's exactly, that's a big piece of what the chaplain does is like, kind of enter into the hell of loss with people and we walk with them. We stay there. Like we were not, I'm just saying a good chaplain is not afraid to just be there, like to just be with you in that, whatever that is, however long it takes. That's why some of our visits are really long and they don't go by the standard regulations, always bumping up against that. 

And how can I walk with you through whatever it is you are experiencing right now and be a companion, offer you some tools, maybe writing, maybe yoga, maybe something else. Maybe you're a fine arts person or music or maybe you're a scientist and you just want to reason your way out.

Krysia Burnham(38:56.008)

Like, where we are, that's kind of where. But this particular project is using the arts to try to make that a more imaginative process. So, yeah, I want to partner with folks like you and folks like my sister-in-law who does movement education at Brown Medical School. And my piece of it is going to be writing. 

But then when we actually launch the workshops, I want to have a big second half be the movement. I hope you'll join me. I'm counting on you. 

Susan Andersen:

Yep, I will. Yeah, that's, you know, one of the things that you were just talking about in terms of being a companion and walking beside somebody that's really difficult to do. You know, because our natural tendency, I think when - and we all, including me, I mean, we all fall into it. Your with somebody you're speaking with a friend or an acquaintance and they've just lost, you know, recently lost somebody or had some experience of loss. And what you immediately want to do is say, yeah, I understand that. Yep. I, know, that happened to me last year or my father died through, you know, whatever, instead of like not saying anything and just listening and you know, just being quiet and that, wow, that takes a lot. 

I mean, I've been practicing that myself. and it's, it's, really hard. It's really hard not to talk. If you're a talker, really, that's, it's really hard not to talk. 

Krysia Burnham:

The silences, the, I just, I think I mentioned to you, I'm studying coaching cause I think it's a great tool for grief work and ministry. And so in coaching, we have this power of the silence, the power of the pause, the intentional silences. So if you and I are talking and I suddenly go quiet, let's say you're my client, all this stuff is going to come to you in the quiet. And I think that's true of the chaplain work in grief care. Yeah.

Krysia Burnham (41:18.749)

Of course I'm doing a lot of talking right now, but if you and I were working together, there'd be a lot more silence. There'd be a lot more time for breath than it'd be more time for like, you know, just, just sitting with each other. that is really hard. Coaching is amazing training because it teaches us, what it's teaching me, is not to try to fix you or come in with the answer or be like, we can just pray through this and it's going to be better.

Yes, I believe God is love and can change the world. Of course I believe that. I'm a Christian minister. And that might not be where you're at today, if ever. And so I'm also learning in my training how to just kind of help the client find the answer for herself. And that is really, think, I mean, you know this, like grieving.

Unfortunately, it's kind of a lonely road. I think we can hugely benefit from community. I think we forget about community sometimes. It's very isolating, which is I hope my groups, like your groups, foster community. The more I live, the more I realize I need other people, you know, which is partly why I reached out to you. Like, I don't know, I'm just gonna go in the dark here and...email this cool person who's doing some things that I'm also interested in. And I'm glad I did because look what happened. Yeah. It's a skill. It's an art. Like you learn, you  learn sort of when to come forward, when to hold back. 

I have a former pastor mentor of mine who left church ministry for other wonderful things. he once said, you know, he had a prayer which is like, help me to know when I need to speed up and when to slow down. And I always remembered that. That's such a great prayer, you know. So it is a cultivated learning. And you have bad days where you're like, I don't know, I don't know. 

Krysia Burnham (43:39.043)

And inevitably on a bad day in the field with clients and families, something amazing will happen. Like a patient or their loved one will just do or say something that is this like a total game changer. And I'll take out my phone and be like, have to write that down. I can't believe you just said that. You know, whether like they have some epiphany or they realize that like life really is good. Like I have lived the life that I was given and it's okay. I'm going to be okay. I know, like whatever they're okay is like they get to this place and you're like, my gosh. Cause that's kind of like, I don't want to say when that happens and it's okay if it doesn't, feel like I've done something for the person. 

You know, like I've brought some little tiny measure of understanding or awareness or like hope or, and sometimes it doesn't happen. Sometimes a person is just going to go down fighting, you know, and nothing I say or do or don't say or don't do is going to change that it's going to be more anxious and more agitated. And hopefully medically we take care of the anxiety and the agitation, but some folks, and that's another thing, like I have to know Sue when it's like, I'm not fixing this. I'm not changing this. 

As I said before, like, I'm just going to try to be here and maybe I have a chance to show up a couple of times and the rest I have to leave up to sort of, you know, the spirit. Like, it's frustrating sometimes you're, just like, okay, I guess I just have to walk away. That's really hard. Really hard. Cause you can see, you can see there's a path and you're like, if you could only, but yeah, that person doesn't see it. 

Susan Andersen:

Yeah, I understand. Is there anything else that you would maybe like to share with our audience? Other, you know, any tips? You know, people that might be in a situation where they're looking for? Yeah, mean, Yeah.

Krysia Burnham (46:04.066)

Yes, I think that in some ways not to be downcast, but I do think in some ways we all have losses in our lives. They might be small, they might be large, they might be old, they might be new. I sound like Dr. Seuss, but like I think we really all have loss or change. My sister-in-law is like, don't say grief. It's really depressing. You're going to turn people away. Well, yeah. And that's the work I do. You know, it's like, it's like Anderson Cooper has a whole podcast on this. Like it's okay to talk about grief. You have a whole yoga practice on this. So I think demystifying grief, which by the way, it's the same word as the grave gravitas serious. 

Um, you know, it can be heavy, but it also is I think so powerfully a part of the life cycle. I'm a Christian minister with Jewish ancestry. And so I am really connected with the whole cycle of life in Judaism and the cycle of days and cycle of the week and the Sabbath. And I think the Christian and Hebrew scriptures both really try to help us understand and probably many other sacred texts, I don't know, like help us understand that there's a unity to our experience. 

There's so many similarities between birth and death, so many. And obviously there's sudden death and there are accidents and there's traumatic death that is a whole different category. And even there, and especially there, there is possibility of integration of your loss, of finding a new path for yourself. It's not something you ever forget. It's not something to be diminished. It becomes part of the fabric of your life eventually with time and with care and with dedication and with community.

Krysia Burnham (48:25.09)

Reaching out to people, trying not to be siloed. Easier said than done. There's times when we need to be alone. I'm not saying that, but like if there's one thing I could leave people with is to try to see loss as the flip side of love, which is something a friend of mine found a lot of comfort in when she lost her beloved father. And she found that online and she was like, Krisha, this is everything for me. And it, you know, it, if we love, we're going to lose. 

Yeah, we might go first and the people are left and we're the one they lost. Right. But like the loss is built into our human condition. It just is. And so if we can somehow like befriend or pinky, like little pinky out and try to make contact with that in a way that makes it less scary. We're also going to go through that someday ourselves. And so it's not like looking at the world as a sad place at all. It's actually the opposite. It's like, you know what? Joy is possible.

Joy is possible in all things. Like that's a biblical promise. And that's really why I do this work. It's because of joy, the possibility of joy. I think CS Lewis has a book about that, Surprised by Joy. You know, he lost his beloved wife and it totally changed his life. Great book. I have a lot of books, by the way, if anyone wants to talk to me about what to read.

So I think that's what I leave you with. I mean, I don't know if that's true for you, if that's what you've experienced, but you know, there's still life for us after loss. And that's why I'm doing this crazy thing. 

Susan Andersen (50:43.834)

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation and thanks everyone. I will have information on how to get in touch with Krisha and a little bit more about the work that she's doing in the show notes and in the transcript of the episode. So thank you for listening and we'll see you in the next episode.

Care Dimensions

BU School of Theology

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