How Grief Changes Us: Shannon Hurst on Loss, Healing and Resilience

Grief touches every life, but most of us are never taught how to talk about it, understand it, or move through it. In this episode of HearMeOutwithBelinda, Belinda sits down with ShannonHurst, grief literacy speaker and author of MyLove/HateRelationshipWithDeath, for a powerful conversation about grief, loss, change, resilience, and why grief is about so much more than death.

Shannon shares her personal story of deep loss, including the death of her brother, the loss of family, and how those experiences shaped the way she now teaches grief literacy and pressure literacy. Together, Belinda and Shannon explore how grief can show up in the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, children leaving home, loss of identity, workplace stress, and life transitions that change us forever.

This episode is a grounded, compassionate reminder that grief cannot be fixed — but it can be named, understood, and integrated. If you’ve been carrying sadness, fear, anger, stress, or the quiet ache of change, this conversation will make you feel less alone.

00:00 Introduction

00:20 Shannon’s story behind the book 

03:07 Loss, anger and early grief 

08:18 Why grief is bigger than death 

14:02 What grief should really look like 

21:16 A healthier way to live with grief

29:27 Why language matters in grief and pressure

#GriefLiteracy #GriefSupport #ShannonHurst #BelindaWaites #HearMeOutWithBelinda #HealingAfterLoss #Resilience #MentalHealthConversations #LifeTransitions #OkotoksPodcast

Host: Belinda Waites

Belinda Waites - Hear Right Canada – Okotoks: where better hearing starts with listening.

Instagram: @belindawaites

🌐 hearrightcanada.ca

Guest: Shannon Hurst — Grief Literacy Speaker and Author

Book: My Love/Hate Relationship With Death

Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/My-Love-Hate-Relationship-Death/dp/B0G6G4LXG2

LinkedIn: shannon-hurst-0b89ba1a/

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Um other than bleeding red and that we are all born to die, there is very few things this entire world has in common. And grief is, as far as I know, one of the only things because grief will touch every single living human being on this planet in one way or another. Not maybe in death, maybe they're the ones who die, but there's like I grief, like I said, is this giant word. And when we hear grief, we automatically go to death and loss. But there's so many other huge forms of grief that we don't even recognize. Even retirement, loss of identity, uh, an injury, a job loss. There's your children leaving home. There's all these different forms of grief that affect us in all different ways, and we don't have a language for it. And at the end of the day, I think that was the big wow for me is that grief is the one thing that touches every single person on this planet. Why do we not talk about it?

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 0:52

And not only do we not talk about it well, we don't listen well because we want to fix things. And grief can't be fixed. That's one thing I reiterate over and over again is grief cannot be fixed. It should not be fixed. You need to learn how to have a relationship with it and integrate it into your life.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Welcome back to Hear Me Out with Belinda. Today I'm excited to introduce Shannon Hurst. She is a grief literacy speaker and author. Welcome to the studio, Shannon. Thanks for having me. So tell me the story of I know you said that you have a love-hate relationship with death. So yeah, tell me about that.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

That is the title of the book. Um, I do, and I've had it for years. And the realization of that relationship was sort of the motivation behind the book, that and I made a promise to my mother. Um, I think the best way to explain it is I've been through a lot of loss and a lot of grief. And grief is this word that has so many things underneath it. But the more grief I went through and the more I would talk to people, we would have these conversations. And I, you know, I I can honestly say I hate grief. It's I hate death. And at the end of the day, death is brutal. But I also love it because I have lived a 10 times, a million times better life because of the death and loss that I've been through than I ever would have had without it. And when I talk to people about things they're going through in their life or their loss, I'll say, well, what are the good things that came out of it? And in over 20 years, only three people could answer that. And that was a really big eye-opener.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Only three people could answer what the the good things that have come out of the death. Yeah. Yeah, I think that is a big one. Yeah. I think also to be honest with you, for based on my experience, it depends on I don't know if it's a type of death or the age of death. You know, if I draw on my own experience, my mom passed at age 54. And um, it was very traumatic, I guess would be the word. Like the the grief did not come easy. There was a lot of anger associated. When my grandmother passed at 94, we accepted it, right? It was it was a different type of of death and a different type of grief. We miss her. Um, and we, you know, we loved her. And I I wish sometimes I would get that letter in the mail from her, but I also understood that, you know, we don't live forever. But going back to my mom at age 54, there was still so much life in her. I needed her. Um, you know, my kids needed that grandmother. And I felt I felt like cheated, you know.

SPEAKER_02 3:38

Um that's the reality of it. So my first um, my first experience with death was when I was eight years old. Um, and that funeral was like most funerals we go to. It felt all kinds of wrong. Uh, you know, some people trying to cry quietly, some people acting like nothing had ever happened, an open casket which looked nothing like the person that we had lost, which was my best friend's mother. And at eight, you really don't understand a lot of things about it, but still that was my first sort of glimpse into it. And then um I lost my favorite aunt. She was 32. And then I lost my favorite uncle. Now he was a little older, but it still didn't matter. It was compiling death. And then uh my parents' marriage fell apart, and death of a marriage and a family photo. That's a really that's a whole other side of grief. And uh, I think the biggest one was when I was 21, my 16-year-old brother was killed in a car accident. So the few years after that, uh, there was a lot of anger. Um, and when I say I've learned a lot from it, so the last thing I ever said to my brother was, I am so disappointed in you. You absolutely disgust me. I cannot tell you how angry I am with you. In fact, I don't even know if I want to talk to you again. And I hung up on him.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:54

So there's a really big lesson, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. Right. So the years that followed, a lot of anger. Um, I walked some really dark roads. I had a very tumultuous relationship with my father uh because he had had an affair and left, and that's how the death of the family happened, the family photo. So there was a lot of anger and a lot of um loneliness and bitterness and confusion. And uh I contemplated suicide twice and realized at the end of the day I was talking to somebody, and whether that be a higher power, God, whatever you want to call them, I was talking to somebody. And so thankfully I stayed the right path. Um, but I had to make a decision after that last dark road, and that was I can't keep doing this. I need to find the light, I need to find my way out of this. And if I'm going to live, then I need to learn from all of this loss and all of this crap. Um, and ironically, a few weeks before my brother died, I lost everything I owned in house fire on my 21st birthday. My dog, everything I owned. And at first you go, oh my gosh, it can't get any worse, and then it does. Another really important lesson. Uh so I think at the end of it, I started to find the positives in it. And I can honestly say, without a shadow of my doubt, that I have lived an incredible life because of the loss of my brother. Because I learned that tomorrow's not guaranteed, that fear's not going to stand in my way anymore. No matter what I want to do, I'm just gonna do it. And if it doesn't end well, then it wasn't meant to. And if something happens to me, then that was my path. And I stopped questioning things on that level. I started to look at how we grieve and um sort of suffer and go through our loss processes in Western culture. Um, and I don't ever go way mad. I'm very careful about what I say. I tell my kids far too much that I love them, but is that really a thing? I don't know. But yeah, so just really I I've lived a better life because of it. It it took all these things out of my way and just left this beautiful path forward because of the loss of a 16-year-old.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

Yeah. I'm left a little speechless. And that went to us. But but I think that's normal, right? Because we don't we're not really taught how to handle grief or these conversations, because they are very difficult conversations. But I think in my life I've realized that everybody faces grief, you know. Um and it's all at different stages, right? Nobody that they say, like, you know, nobody gets out of this life alive, right? And so all this depends on how it impacts you and when. Um, going back to my mom, she had a a cancer diagnosis just after I got married, actually, by the she had a double mastectomy while I was on honeymoon. Um, her and her family, her two brothers, decided that they weren't gonna tell me um that they would give me my honeymoon because she had a lot of support around her. And then, of course, I got back and then we started chemo. And um, we were there um at the time of her passing. And um I can still remember that moment, even though it was, you know, 24 years ago now, you know, sitting with her in the hospital room and how surreal it was, you know, just that moment when you're watching a person that you love deeply take the last breath, um, and you look around and, you know, fame, fortune can't save you, you know, when we we we come into this world and we leave this world sort of all equally, I think. And I think that was a very big lesson for me. But I think I went the other way. I um I became I'd been very much in control of things and I became more in control. So I was, I guess, for lack of a better word, I was a helicopter parent with my kids. Like when I was on the playground and they were like climbing on the jungle gym, I was there ready, you know, to catch them because I was like, oh, they're gonna fall and break their leg. You know, I always saw that worst case scenario. I always had that fear of trying to stop them, you know, from from hurting themselves or from, you know, being taken away from me. And it's only recently that I've learned that that's really isn't a way to live and you can't control everything. And obviously that leads to stress and all of that. And I turned 50 this year. And so it's been a big awakening of my mortality of like, you know, my mom passed at 54. You know, what are you doing with your life? Are you happy? You know, where is the joy? What can you do better? Right. Because I think only then when you really sit with yourself, that's where the positive comes out, right? We want to start living, you know. I didn't, like I said, I didn't have that for about 20, 22, 23 years, even.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

Well, there's two things I want to just say to that, because that's how 99% of the world goes through it. But one of the things um that I really just reiterate over and over to everybody is that um other than bleeding red and that we are all born to die, there is very few things this entire world has in common. And grief is, as far as I know, one of the only things because grief will touch every single living human being on this planet in one way or another. Not maybe in death, maybe they're the ones who die, but there's like I grief, like I said, is this giant word. And when we hear grief, we automatically go to death and loss. But there's so many other huge forms of grief that we don't even recognize. Even retirement, loss of identity, uh, an injury, a job loss. There's your children leaving home. There's all these different forms of grief that affect us in all different ways, and we don't have a language for it. And at the end of the day, I think that was the big wow for me is that grief is the one thing that touches every single person on this planet. Why do we not talk about it?

SPEAKER_01 10:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:38

And not only do we not talk about it well, we don't listen well because we want to fix things. And grief can't be fixed. That's one thing I reiterate over and over again is grief cannot be fixed. It should not be fixed. You need to learn how to have a relationship with it and integrate it into your life. And like you said, the the anger is a real thing, especially when someone's taken from you that you're not ready for them to go yet. My mom uh died last year. Uh, she was 81 years old and she had cancer for the third time, and she had talked about maid. And in the beginning, I was adamantly against it. Like, I'm sorry, we are it's not our job to play God. We're not, that's when your time is up, it's up. And that's another lesson that I really um I think got at a younger age before I was 30, is that there were so many reasons that my brother died. There was he had lied about an ad previous accident. There was a mechanic who had made a bad decision, there was a trauma doctor who panicked and didn't know how to deal with something. There was an 82 car pile up on the QEW that day. So all the helicopters were in use already. So they drove him. So there were all of these things, the safety bars in the car malfunctioned. Like there was literally seven things that caused that accident to go the way it did that day. So that was a real, you know what, when your time's up, it's up. And I can't do anything to change that. Um, and that's that's a big one. Realizing that it was written in the sand or in the stars or wherever you want to see it. So I do get the fear. I think my biggest fear for the longest time was losing my children because my mom lost her sister, I lost my brother, her mom lost her sister. So I thought, dear gosh, are we gonna have, is this a lifelong chain? Is this our family? And I just had to let it go. I just had to say, you know what? If it's meant to be, it will, and I can't change it. And if I can't change it and I can't add a second to my life or my children's life or anybody's life by worrying about it, why am I hurting my own life holding on to that stress?

SPEAKER_00 12:41

Yeah. Exactly. And it is a stress, right? And like I said, it was a long lesson to learn with control. I think just to touch on a bit of the spirituality, I was brought up in organized religion. And my mom was a very strong believer and very faithful. And I think I was angry at God because what I didn't understand at the time was why wasn't I good enough for him to save my mom, right? Because you get brought up believing in this genie God, right? You pray to him and he's gonna say yes or no. And I didn't understand the no. Why wouldn't he save my mom? Um, to this day, but it took me time going through therapy, meeting all these different people, you know, going to these retreats where you hear these different stories. And it took me time to realize that um I don't think God lifts a finger. I don't think God decides who's gonna live and die. I think it's about the person and the choices we make. You know, and maybe if my mom had known that, she would have thought a bit harder. Maybe it was her choice. Maybe she was really, really tired at the time. And she was like, I'm I'm at peace. I can, I can let go now. You know, I don't know. I'll never know. But it took me, I think, a long time. And I don't know if I'm explaining it right, but like I said, I don't think that it there is this God that makes the decisions. I think it's our choices that can lead to it. And it's and it's been a very big shift in my life of how I live and that I've accepted it a bit more. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:09

So I'm gonna answer that in two different ways. Uh, one, um, I don't believe in organized religion either, and that's what I call it. I'll call it organized or political religion because I believe that's what it is, but I do believe in a higher power. I do believe in spirituality. And when I realized I was going to raise my children uh on my own without a dad, I I was a journalist for 17 years and I was a columnist. And I thought, you know, I'm gonna research this. I want to know how to give my boys the best chance I can as a single parent. And it came down to three things. It came down to sitting at the dinner table at least five nights a week, so I have a safe space to have a conversation, and that's where family bonding has. The second thing was to travel to at least one third world country in their life so that they appreciate what they have and they appreciate where they live and they see that the world is a much bigger place. It opens their mind. And the third wing thing was to have spirituality of some kind. It didn't matter what. And and I've learned a lot about spirituality in this whole journey with grief and death and loss because Western culture gets it wrong. And I I don't like to say that anything gets it wrong, but I really feel we did. So all the funerals that I had gone to, like I said, everybody's quiet, pretending not to cry or trying to keep your feelings in. And then when I was 14, I went to my first First Nations burial in the Northwest Territories. My dad was a director of education up there. And uh, I was not prepared for what I saw. I had no idea. I had been fascinated with First Nations and the way they give thanks and appreciate everything, and they don't harvest an animal or anything without utilizing everything and giving thanks and appreciating the gift that that animal gave to them. So I wanted to see what that looked like when they lost one of their own. And I remember walking out the back door of the hall and just was hit with this wow of everything. It was people lying on the ground wailing and screaming and moaning and drums beating, and there was just so much raw emotion. It was unbelievable. And at 14, I stood there in my set of my tracks and went, This is what losing love looks like. This is what grief looks like. This is what we should be doing. We should be yelling and screaming and letting it out, but we don't. We keep it in, we contain it, we don't have language for it, and it builds and it builds. And you get into situations where you end up carrying anger and bitterness and all of these things that are not helping, they're not doing anything good for anybody in that situation. So that's a big part of why I do what I do now is to bring a language to it, to bring, to bring tools that allow you to have a relationship with your grief. Because at the end of the day, you have to.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

You have to, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

And I mean, I'm just gonna go back to the organized religion and say, you know, a lot of people do find a lot of comfort in it, you know, and I and I have a lot of respect, you know, for those people. Um, it just wasn't giving me comfort at the time. I want to shift gears a little bit because something just popped into my head. Uh the the grief of a relationship. And um last September, my son, my oldest son, went off to university in Nathbridge. And we have a very close relationship as well. And I couldn't understand why, even before the summer, I was people would talk to me about him because he'd worked in the clinic a few times and they would ask me how he was doing, and I would just start crying, and I just couldn't stop crying, and the amount of people I had to apologize to through this appointment because I just couldn't get through it without crying. Um, and they were so kind and actually really compassionate about it. And someone had said to me, but because you're grieving the end of that relationship, he's no longer your little boy, right? He's becoming a man. So your relationship is changing and it's okay for you to be happy for him. It's okay for you to be excited, but it and it's also okay for you to grieve that it's the end of that part, you know, like he's no longer your little boy. He's now your your adult child and you have a different relationship with it. So going back to about grief, it's not just about the death, it's about these changes that happen. That's right. And how we have to learn to to adapt, you know, and and face it and be okay with with grieving it, you know. Like I had to learn to be okay with being sad about it, you know, that there was perfectly acceptable to be sad about it.

SPEAKER_02 18:32

Just hit the nail in the head that and why isn't it acceptable? Yes. And why do we put ourselves through these situations where we feel like we shouldn't be emotional and we shouldn't because we just we aren't taught how to grieve. Yeah. And we're not taught that it's okay and we should all do it more openly, and you don't need to be fixed. There's nothing wrong with you. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with you.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:53

Um, interesting, I'm gonna combine the two now. So you can't be fixed, nor should you be fixed with grief. But people do feel broken. And so I had a a real eye-opening moment with a gentleman uh last year. I was going back to put Reeves on the my parents' graves because I'm the last living member of my family, besides my boys. So my mom always took care of my brother's gravesite and everybody else's. So now that I'm it, I went, well, I guess I'm going back to Ontario. So in December, I decided I was gonna do that. And um, there was a whole bunch. I am such a big believer in everything for a reason. Like that is my one of my core beliefs and uh and intuition. I believe that whatever is out there, the higher power, an energy, whatever, when we don't listen to our intuition, things go sideways. And to me, that intuition is that first voice, that very first thing that we feel or we hear or we think is usually the right. And when we try and take control over it, which we all try and do, things go astray. So I uh I booked my flight and uh the day before I went to check in, and I was sitting in an aisle seat and I have motion sickness, and I thought, oh, I I hate paying for plane anything other than the cost. So I finally decided, no, I'm gonna upgrade my seat and I'm gonna go to a window seat. So I went on the little thing and an 11A. I was like, oh, 11A and 27F. I thought, I'm not sitting at the back of the plane. So I went to click on 11A and I clicked on 27F. I went, what the snapping crackers. One more time. Nope, 27. I'm like, okay, 27F it is. So last one to get on the plane, basically, and as I get on, there's a gentleman in the aisle, and I we make eye contact and I say, Hey, that's me. He says, Hey, I've been waiting for you. Come on in. So I sit down and light chit-chat back and forth, and uh he kind of asks me where I'm from and what I'm doing, and I kind of laugh and say, Well, I'm going to put wreaths on graves. He goes, Oh, like, yeah, it's it's a long story. I said, But you know, what are what are you going home for? Because he had told me he was going home to Newfoundland. I said, Are you on break from work? He said, No, not exactly. And I said, Oh, are you going home early for the Christmas holidays? No. And just every fiber of my being knew. And I said, Can I ask why you're going home? He said, I got a call. Oh my gosh, my heart just sank to the floor. There I was, 21 years old, getting the call from my brother and all of that had gone on there, and I said, What kind of call? And he said, The worst kind of call. He said his 38-year-old daughter had died that morning. So what do you say at that point in time? And of course, I go silly Shannon mode. I'm like, Well, clearly I'm supposed to sit in 27F, because let me tell you, I have a lot of experience in this, and I just wrote a book. And he goes, Okay. Like, no, I wrote a book about death. He goes, Oh, okay. And so we start this conversation, but for four hours, it was the ebb and flow. The tears would fall, we would talk, we would change the subject, and about 40 minutes before we landed, he just looked at me, tears streaming down his face, and he said, Shannon. In sixty-four years, I never thought anything could break me and I'm broken. And I said, Chris, it's okay to be broken. But we don't get that. And so as I would talk to people about being broken, uh, one lady a couple of weeks ago, uh, she was like, I hate that terminology. I'm not broken. Like, you're right, you're not broken, but something broke inside of you. And that was one of my big epiphanies with my workshops, was I was trying to bridge and create a language for it's okay to be broken and what that looks like. So I thought of an egg. When you look at an egg, an egg is one of the few things we break open intentionally, and it's ooey and gooey and messy and gross inside. But when you integrate it and you cook it in a recipe and you scramble it, it becomes what? Nutrition. And it's healthy for you. And it's good for your body and it's good for your mind. So if we can look at our grieving experiences, no matter what it looks like, as when we break open and all that gooey, messy stuff comes out, the more we learn to have a relationship with it and integrate it into our lives, it becomes a healthier way to live because you appreciate things more. You love differently, you learn to live live differently. And that's kind of one of the key phrases out of my book is that death has taught me how to love and love has taught me how to live.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

Yeah. And that's And I think it's even more than that. Like if you're not, if you're allowing yourself to grieve and you're allowing yourself to ex like live those feelings and then sort of let them go, you're not creating that stress within your body as well. So I think you're actually healthier. You know, there's a lot of talk, um, different um experts out there on how important it is to, you know, feel the feeling, but not to become that feeling, right? But to let that feeling go. And so if we're never allowing ourselves to feel those feelings, whether it's that anger, bitterness, sadness, um, what are we doing? Right? It's it's staying somewhere within us. Um, and where is it going? And then going back to schools, you know, um or even university kids, like why aren't we taught about um, you know, grieving? I'm gonna bring up a crochet because I think it's really this goes back to 1789 when Benjamin Franklin um he said, in this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes. And going back, like how many hundreds of years ago is that? Yet we still don't talk about death or death of the relationship. Or just say, you know, death of anything, we still, I don't know, keep it as a taboo subject. And we don't know how to grieve. And like you said, you know, having that um First Nations experience like opened your eyes to a different way of grieving. And I think there isn't a right or a wrong way. For some people, sitting quietly dealing with their own emotions is good for them, you know, and for others, we need to, you know, scream and shout and cry. And and that's okay as well. Like there isn't a right or wrong way, and nobody can tell you this is a right or wrong way to grieve. It's whatever it makes you feel better at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_02 25:05

Absolutely. I'll expand that just one way. There is not a right or wrong way to grieve, but not grieving is wrong. Oh, yeah. To keep that inside when you're not identifying it. And you you brought up a great point. Um, so one of the things that I teach people is uh something I call tip of the iceberg. So when you think about what grief looks like, one of the questions I ask people, what does grief look like in the workplace? And everybody has a million answers. And none of them say the right thing, and that is it's competence. Because we're all grieving something, we're all in our own stress and battles in life, but we show up and we do our job and we work hard. And if you're paying attention and you're looking for it, you may see the tip of the iceberg. You may see they don't smile as quickly, they're not as quick to jump into a conversation, they're a little quieter, little things like that. That's the tip of the iceberg of what that person's going through. And underneath is this massive chunk of weight that we carry. And grief is like carrying a weight around that you can't put down and nobody can see it, and you still do all the things that you ever did in your normal life. It just takes a lot more energy. So, um, tip of the iceberg. One of the things that I teach them is the integration process. And this is gonna sound ridiculous because it came to me in a dream. So I was in this room, this actually was a stadium, and uh I there was thousands of people around, and I was standing on stage and I had this big box of ice and this huge, ridiculously unrealistic glass, and I was grabbing ice cubes out of it, and I was yelling, anger, and holding the ice cube and watching it drip down my arm a bit and throwing it in the glass. And I would say, regret. And I went through all these emotions, even good ones. And I had this huge, literally like a chalice, and I poured warm water into it, and I swirled it around and I drank from it. And I yelled to everybody, we need to integrate. We need to name and integrate. So tip stands for the integration process. So when I got up in the morning, I went, This is crazy. But I went downstairs and I thought, I'm gonna try it. So I grabbed an ice cube and I went, exhaustion and threw it in my cup. And embarrassment and threw it in my cup and had seven ice cubes in there and drank my cranberry juice. But the epiphany and the eye opener was at least I was naming it. I was just naming my feelings. I didn't have to cry, I didn't have to get angry, I didn't have to feel all of those feels and let myself go down that path, but I named them. And when you name what's going on in your world, that's a huge part of the integration process because you're just aware of it. You don't have to do anything with it, but you're aware of it. And that's all part of the healing and relationship process.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

Yeah. Acknowledging it, right? Naming it, saying that this is how I'm feeling, this is what's happened. And even if it's just to yourself, right? You don't have to say it to another person. You can. And I mean, some people have some great networks that they can reach out to, and other people don't. And so you name it to yourself, yeah, if necessary.

SPEAKER_01 28:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:06

Absolutely. And you just nailed something else on the head there too. Um, one of the other things I talk about is something I call the denali effect. Denali's my dog. Um, but in my workshops, I break it down why we all need a denali. You need somebody that is there unconditionally, that's not going to try and fix you. Somebody that just lets you be whatever you need to be. My best friend Crystal, when my mom got sick, she said, I've never lost anybody. I don't know how to help. I don't know how to fix this. I said, You you can't fix it. Yeah. Some days I'll feel like talking about it. Most days I won't. But when I say, Hey, I need to hike, that's me throwing out my Hail Mary. Let's just go hike. I don't need to say anything. I just need to get into nature because nature is the greatest teacher for me. Uh, nature is my solace. And so I think having a denali, no matter what it looks like, whether that's a church group, a support group, a grief group, a best friend, a family member, a dog, a cat, a horse, it doesn't matter. Everybody needs a denali.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:03

And it just makes all the grief we go through in life, whether it's a relationship, an injury, a frustration with your child not doing what they're supposed to be, those are all forms of grief that we all go through. So just having a denali effect, having a language. And you must, you must find that with what you do. Is language ever been a barrier? Because while I know you deal with hearing, there's still got to be a language barrier sometimes, even just explaining what's going on with somebody or what the process is.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Do you do you find that language has been an issue? It's actually funny because my first language is English, but I come from South Africa, so I do actually have a little bit of an accent. And I laugh sometimes about the language because I had to adjust the way I said certain things to make sure that people that could actually understand me. And I learned that very early on in my career here in Canada. Um, in actual fact, it became about 15 years ago, actually became a real laughing point between my husband and I because people could not understand him ordering through the drive-thru Tim Hordons. And he would just sit back and be like, off you go, you know. Um, and I think it was just that that accent, you know, sometimes that accent comes through. And so yeah, I do have to, I learned a long time ago that you have to um communicate so that the other person can actually understand you, right? You're not communicating for you to be heard. You're communicating so that that person understands what you're trying to communicate. So whether, so yes, in what I'm doing, you know, whether it's um however I'm communicating in whatever language, um, it's about making sure that person is understanding and that I'm understanding them and what their needs are so that I can help them effectively.

SPEAKER_02 30:43

Exactly. And language is a big part of it. So now I I'm not just grief literacy, I do pressure literacy as well because um the amount of grief in workplaces is astronomical. And if I can help create a language at the top of an organization, whether it's oil and gas, mining, it doesn't matter. Military, it doesn't matter. If you can have a language at the top that can travel down, then you will literally bring everybody into that same cohesive conversation. Silence travels faster than a language does. So being able to name our feelings, being able to integrate those feelings into your life, being able to acknowledge something like cumulative load or cognitive stress, which is what you would say in a high stress industry, because they're under pressure and deadlines and what happens in the boardroom is completely different than what happens on the front lines coming in. But the stresses are all there and unnamed and unrecognized. And when you don't have a language for it, they built. And that cumulative load becomes a behavioral drift and behavioral drift becomes a safety issue. And so by just bringing a language to what we're feeling and a way to check what's going on in the world with a language, just so that everybody understands is huge. And it's really become the main drive in everything I do, whether I'm working in a community workshop, working with hospice, working with oil and gas, at the end of the day, to try and have a language that helps all of us talk about what's going on in our lives without judgment.

SPEAKER_01 32:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:21

Without feeling like you're doing something wrong or that you're broken or that you need to be fixed. Just being able to say, hey, you know what? It's a it's a hard day.

SPEAKER_00 32:31

Yeah. I don't see my family. And I think, you know, we we are all worried about being judged, especially in the workplace, right? Because we need to keep our jobs, because we need to provide food and shelter for our families. So any sign of weak weakness is still almost frowned upon. And maybe we'll move into a world one day where where it's not like that. But I think right now it's definitely we have to be very conscious on how we're presenting ourselves every single day, especially within the workplace. And so we can't be vulnerable in the workplace. We can't say how we're feeling, we can't say that we're having a bad day, or um we're worried about a sick family member, or we have we're disgrieving the the end of a relationship, you know, whatever it is that's going on, we can't, we can't share it just yet. And I think it goes back to kids. If we could teach our kids in school about grief and about all these different emotions and that there are real emotions and they allow to feel them, um, they would be better equipped within that workplace. Because right now um we're in this social media where everything is picture perfect and we all want that picture perfect life. But what we don't see is what's actually really happening behind that picture perfect, you know, that was posted, right? And I think there's some good documentaries on that. But um, yeah, we we we're not we're not showing our vulnerability in the world.

SPEAKER_02 33:50

We we never have. I I mean, growing up, I my j my mom's generation, you kept quiet. You kept your feelings in. Your husband was having an affair, you didn't tell anybody. There was fear of being judged, there was fear of not being good enough. There was, and fear is the main driving factor behind why we don't talk about grief. We're fear of being judged. And we need to get rid of that. And I think social media, I've all, as a journalist for years, I can tell you you can find a case for and against anything you ever want on the internet, which is good and bad. But at the other side of it, there's one thing that social media has done, and that is it has opened up things a little bit more because people are talking about things, people are posting things that you wouldn't see. Um, so I think it's a bit of a gateway and a bit of a door, which is great. But at the end of the day, whatever we can do to create a language, stop judging, try and alleviate the fear and just make it okay to be human. To be human. To be human. To be human.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

I think that's the bottom line when you're dealing with grief. You know, it's not just about death. It's about the end of a relationship, it's the end of a job, it's the end of a career, it's the end of something. And it's okay for you to feel sad, angry, bitter about it, but don't become that feeling, right? Let it pass through you, find the joy, learn from it. Um find the balance. Find the balance, right? I think that would that be the message you would tell to the listeners today?

SPEAKER_02 35:21

I I would absolutely say that there is balance in everything. And um grief isn't living in the dark. It just makes it a little harder to see the light. The light's still there.

SPEAKER_00 35:29

The light's still there.

SPEAKER_02 35:30

The light's still there. But you gotta find that light. You gotta find it, and you gotta be able to allow yourself permission to do that. And you gotta realize that every single human being on this feeling, on this planet, has had one of those feelings.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:42

We're human, and it's okay.

SPEAKER_00 35:44

Well, thank you. Thank you for coming into the show. Thanks for having me, and thank you for the the great discussion.