Marking 5 Years Of COVID Grief With Rebecca Soffer

Five years since the world first shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, grievers are still asking: Where is the acknowledgment?

In this powerful conversation with Modern Loss founder Rebecca Soffer, we talk about: Why COVID grief is still so raw for so many. How good leadership supports—instead of minimizes—grieving people. Our fantasy grief rituals to honor pandemic loss. What meaningful acknowledgment could actually look like. Why collective rituals still matter, even years later.

Grief Grower is a weekly podcast where I share helpful tools and hopeful conversations for life after loss.

Music © Adi Goldstein, Used with Permission

Transcript

This podcast centers on grief and loss,

Which may bring up strong emotions.

As you listen,

Take care of yourself as needed.

Please know this podcast is not meant to replace professional grief support and makes no scientific claims.

Thank you for listening.

And we have other people who talk about how they haven't had any real feeling of actual pleasure since 2020.

They haven't had a feeling of real lightness because of one or a million things that have happened to them.

I got a lot of stories about people whose people died during COVID,

From COVID,

Not just from COVID,

But who couldn't go to funerals,

Who couldn't hug loved ones to go through such an important ritual of saying goodbye to somebody who died because of all the limitations.

It was so messed up.

And so many people are still sitting with it because we are in this incessant,

Like we must move forward to survive,

You know,

Mentality.

Hi there,

Grief growers,

I am so grateful to be here with you as always.

If you've been growing alongside me in my work for a while,

Welcome back.

And if you are new to me and my work,

Hello,

It's lovely to meet you.

My name is Shelby Forsythia.

I am a grief coach and I have helped thousands of grieving people stop feeling stuck,

Lost,

Broken and alone in the aftermath of grief and start building lives that they genuinely love from the lives loss forced them to live.

This not only includes death and death adjacent losses,

But also losses like divorce and breakup,

Major diagnosis.

And as we'll discuss today,

All the types of losses that came with living through a pandemic.

Here on the show,

We believe that grief is not something to get over.

It is something to grow with and alongside,

And that by treating grief less like a problem to be solved and more like an invitation to live more deeply in our human bodies and lives here on Earth,

We can create meaningful lives that are rich with all of the memories that we carry,

The weight of all the struggles that we faced and the preciousness of what it means to be here on Earth right now in this moment.

Today on the show,

I had the joy of sitting down with Rebecca Sofer,

Who is one of the co-founders of Modern Loss,

To talk about the five year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I cannot believe it's been five years either.

We discussed why good leadership is vital in seasons of grief and crisis.

We talked about some of our fantasy grief rituals that we would love to see on a larger scale for the world to honor COVID loss and how to live inside what she refers to as the third wave of COVID,

Which is not another mutation of the virus,

But the third wave,

Meaning the lifetime effect of the grief of the pandemic.

Here's a little bit about Rebecca.

Rebecca Sofer is the co-founder of Modern Loss,

Which offers creative and candid content and community surrounding the long arc of grief.

She is the bestselling author of the Modern Loss Handbook,

An interactive guide to moving through grief and building your resilience,

And her other book,

Modern Loss,

Candid Conversations About Grief,

Beginners Welcome.

Her work has been widely published,

Including in The New York Times,

NBC Think and Time Magazine,

And she speaks globally on loss and resilience.

Rebecca is a Peabody Award winning former producer for The Colbert Report and a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism alumna.

Rebecca,

I am so excited to talk to you and just be in space with you again,

Because something that just happened is the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic,

The beginning of COVID-19.

And we live in a world where so much is happening all the time,

As my wife says,

All the time,

All the time.

It went so under-acknowledged,

At least on my radar.

And I'm a person who has lost somebody to COVID.

And I know that so many people who I interact with,

Who are on my social media,

Who are coming across as clients and students,

Everybody is like,

Where's the acknowledgement that this was actually a big deal?

And I've always seen you and your work as like a beacon of COVID,

Like a holdout,

Almost like standing on this island being like,

Hey,

We see you,

This is important,

It matters.

It is the greatest loss event of our lifetime.

And I would just love to speak on what it's like for people who do not feel honored or recognized as this five-year milestone goes by,

And also how people who are supporting people who've lost somebody to COVID can continue to support the friends and family in their midst and continue to treat it like it was something significant that happened because it was.

It was hugely significant.

And I think if you're somebody who doesn't think it notably changed your life in 152 different ways,

Then you're not paying attention.

You know,

I know a lot of people who died from COVID.

My best friend said goodbye to her mom in May of 2020 through an iPad because she was in the ICU.

And then a couple of months later,

The same thing happened to her husband's mom.

I am related to people who have long COVID,

Have had my own personal struggles with this terrible virus.

And I think that so many people,

Like you say,

In the community.

So let me go back.

For many years,

I was working in this grief space and I was talking about how we have to talk about grief and how it doesn't have to be this like tiny little niche thing that we talk about just in therapy,

You know,

That therapy hour or in like the religious circle or in the hush tones by the water cooler,

How it should also be really and mostly be something that we talk about out loud,

Out of the shadows,

In a let it all hang out way because we all go through it.

Right.

And for many years,

It was an uphill battle for me to convince the people who didn't get it yet why we need to talk about it and convince them why it's not a morbid or morose thing to talk about because I don't believe it is.

I think it's very life affirming to talk about grief and loss.

And then COVID hit.

And I want to say that when I look back,

I literally feel like it was from one day to the next that people viewed the work that that both you and I do as less of a,

You know,

Niche experience and more of an,

Oh,

I get it,

This should be on CNN kind of conversation because everybody understood suddenly what grief feels like,

Even if it wasn't through death loss.

We all understood what it feels like suddenly to wake up and not understand what not just like next year might look like for you or next month,

But what four o'clock might look like in your day.

We were thrust into a grief space.

We had our coping mechanisms that many of which we had spent years building and honing and perfecting ripped out from underneath us.

And seemingly,

At least in my recollection of things,

Which let's not go by that because I don't think my brain has worked since March 2020 correctly.

The community of mine ballooned because all of a sudden we had all of these people who not only were,

Yes,

Like going,

Moving across that long arc of loss,

Maybe they had a loss 10 years ago,

20 years ago,

Last year,

Last month.

But now we had all these people coming back to us who had free triggered losses,

Like they were having all these things come up as a result of the pandemic.

And then we had all these new people who were like,

What is grief?

What is this loss thing?

How do I move through it?

And so,

Yes,

Since the very beginning,

I have been beating the drum of we are in a time of enormous grief and loss.

And if we don't take something meaningful from this piece of crap experience that the world is being handed right now,

You know,

Tease some meaning out of it that hopefully might make us somewhat more empathetic toward each other.

I don't know what we have left.

You know,

Like this is our opportunity.

Here we are five years later and.

I can't believe I'm saying this,

But we're in a country where a lot of covid protections and restrictions have disappeared,

Have vanished,

Where a lot of people are going about life if they have covid and they're like,

OK,

Whatever,

I'm going to go to school,

I'm going to go to work,

Not really thinking about the fact that there are immunocompromised people out there who are absolutely terrified to commune with society when there are spikes in the illness because of what might happen to them.

And we have just so many people who are wondering whether they're going insane because they themselves have had people die close to them or they themselves are living with a long term illness,

Which is now,

You know,

Long covid that we have so much left to discover about with regard to treatment and how it works.

And they feel marginalized,

They feel invisible because our country and our world is very much set up for these thank you next mindset.

I think that,

You know,

There's a certain amount of like kind of dialing down that we have to do in order to move through life because life is very painful and we're taking a lot of painful things with us.

But I also think that there's a real danger in not contending with real enormous grief that hasn't really been fully examined and respected and dissected five years in,

Mostly because we're still watching the dust settle around everything that has been lost,

Not just the people who have died,

But the myriad ways in which our lives have been rattled and shaken and changed as a result of it all.

And I give everybody credit.

We do get the long tail.

We deserve many years to start dealing with this.

But I think we're not really doing it in the way in which we should.

I think we can do a lot better to make people who are dealing with physical covid death in their lives and just real covid loss.

Do them the service of respecting and honoring those losses and making them feel seen in them.

It's really hard to move through something difficult unless you feel acknowledged in that thing.

Yeah,

I was literally going to bring that up.

You wrote a wonderful piece for NBC,

And I can't believe I'm saying this.

I think it was written in October of 2020,

The first six months of the pandemic.

And you have this lovely quote that says there's no healing until grief is processed and it cannot be processed until it is acknowledged.

And you literally almost just said that word for word.

And I kind of want to I want to sink into some fantasy space for a second because I feel like this is an element of grief that we don't often do.

Please,

Calgon,

Take me away from all of this.

Take me away.

But in this piece,

Something I loved is that you were already dreaming of putting together something like a million mourners march or some sort of national or global acknowledgement of the losses from covid.

And as of the fifth anniversary of covid,

We've now lost seven million people worldwide to this virus.

And that's just what gets reported to the World Health Organization.

So chances are the toll is higher.

So I think if we could put you in a time machine and I'll invite listeners to answer this question as well and go back to 2020 when this was first starting and then also come back to the present and sit here in the now.

What if you had infinite power in the world and you knew people would go along with it,

What would you have done to acknowledge the grief that's coming up in the world?

And and what like fantasy world would you create now?

I hate saying it's a fantasy world,

But what fantasy world would you create now to acknowledge and honor all the grievers that even more so are feeling unseen and unheard today?

That's a great question,

Shelby,

And.

I want to think about it and I'm going to answer,

I think,

In two parts.

I think the bigger part is going to be the second part of your question,

Which is like what would I,

You know,

If I could Franken design a fantasy reality in which we're living right now,

I think part of that reality,

On the one hand,

Is coming true.

And I say that in a way that is hopeful and optimistic because I can't deal with like zero.

Well,

I can deal with zero optimism.

I don't have a lot of it right now,

But I do have hope.

I always have hope because I can't move forward without that.

On the one hand,

We are seeing a lot of things coming to light.

We are finally starting to see COVID folded and woven through narratives in artistic expression.

And I think that it took years for that to happen with many people.

And I'll give you an example.

Rachel Bloom,

Who,

You know,

My crazy ex or crazy ex-girlfriend,

I'm always aware you're not it's not my crazy ex-girlfriend.

It's crazy ex-girlfriend.

She had this musical comedy show on The CW and she's so funny and so wonderful.

And her writing partner,

Adam Schlesinger,

Who was one of the guys from Fountains of Wayne,

This hugely talented songwriter,

He died from COVID in,

I think,

Late March 2020 at the latest,

Early April 2020.

And it was when her own newborn daughter was in the NICU after being born.

And talk about an absolute mindfuck that required time to,

You know,

I guess,

Reflect upon before trying to make sense of any of it.

And she has this wonderful show that I've now seen live twice called Deaf Let Me Do My Special.

And it's all about her going there and how she spent so long trying not to go there.

And there's a character.

Their only other character in the,

You know,

The performance is Death,

The actual character of Death.

And he's like,

Wow,

Why don't you tell me the hard thing that happened in March 2020?

And she's like,

Oh,

My God,

Totally.

You know,

Like I had this special and I was really scared that it wasn't going to go on because there was a pandemic.

And he's like,

Go deeper and then,

You know,

Pushes.

And she's like,

Well,

I had this baby and she was in the NICU and that was really scary.

He's like,

Aha,

Cool,

Cool.

Go deeper.

And he finally gets her to get to the nut of it all,

Which is that her friend died from COVID V1.

0 and it was an insane time.

And she talks about it and she goes there and she talks about,

You know,

The things that I talk about all the time,

Which is like,

How can you move forward or find meaning from anything really hard unless you sit with it for a while?

You know,

How can you release some of that pain and anger and confusion unless you really sit with it?

There's really no way to do it.

And so that's just an example of one of the things that I am seeing,

That is,

You know,

People who are putting things out there.

You know,

There are albums out there.

There are a lot more,

You know,

Specials out there.

You know,

Marc Maron has something on HBO from Bleak to Dark,

Which is like one of my favorite specials.

And he talks about losing his partner during COVID,

During a pandemic,

Not from COVID.

So you're going to see a lot more of that coming down the pike.

And that's like my hopeful thing,

Because I think that really people were frozen for literal years into trying to figure out how to process this.

On the other hand,

I did a survey of my readers and we have readers all over the world,

Thousands upon thousands upon thousands.

And I put it out there a month ago and I said,

Listen,

I want to know how COVID has changed your existence five years on.

And it's going to be unattributed.

I'm not going to use your name.

Be honest.

And I cried.

When I read the responses,

Because so many people are still mentally in that moment of deep pandemic lockdown and lifestyle,

And they haven't been given a chance to share those stories with someone who really wants to hear them.

There's a woman who talked about how she gave birth during that time and how it was the most screwed up birth experience that she could ever imagine because she had to do it alone.

Her husband wasn't allowed in the room with her.

You know,

There was very limited visiting hours.

Her mom couldn't meet the baby for more than a year.

And how that's just sitting inside of her and talked about all the isolation that she felt as a new mom stuck at home with no one to hold the baby,

Help her,

Give her a break,

That X Factor someone in the room.

And that is just one of the hundreds of examples that I had sent my way.

Of course,

Then we have other people who talk about how they haven't had any real feeling of actual pleasure since 2020.

They haven't had a feeling of real lightness because of one or a million things that have happened to them.

I got a lot of stories about people whose people died during COVID,

From COVID,

Not just from COVID,

But who couldn't go to funerals,

Who couldn't hug loved ones to go through such an important ritual of saying goodbye to somebody who died because of all the limitations.

It was so messed up.

And so many people are still sitting with it because we are in this incessant like we must move forward to survive mentality.

If I could Franken design a reality that was present day,

It would be a reality in which we have designated a national day of mourning for COVID victims and not just like a national day of mourning,

But for people who died,

But really like for grief,

For COVID grief,

For the pandemic and made it open to if it feels like grief to you,

It is people.

And what I wish for a national COVID day of remembrance is maybe a way to honor not just our people or our pets or our own losses,

But to have some sort of tradition where we do something that really feeds that need for nourishment that we're living with in our own ways as a result of the pandemic.

Like,

Did you have to move because of the pandemic?

Guess what?

Fun fact,

I've moved twice.

Wasn't in my plans.

I've moved twice,

You know,

Partially thanks to COVID.

And I miss a lot of like my former community.

Is it a day where I try to reconnect with that community?

You know,

Is it a day where did you have a parent who died from COVID?

Like,

Can you is it a day where you really honor what you lost with them?

You reconnect with their memory or their people who maybe are no longer in your life.

You know,

Is it just something where you missed the sense of touch for so long that you just have a big party because that is how you are creating ritual around something that you lost that that was that has affected you so deeply?

Just,

You know,

DIY ritual here.

But I I think that we have to carve out a day in which we have kind of an invitation and really maybe a mandate to do it.

And I really don't think there should be work on that day.

Yeah,

I agree with that.

I don't think it should be on a Sunday.

I don't think it should be on August 30th,

Like grief awareness day.

I don't really understand why it's,

You know,

On a day when when really nobody is like really physically or mentally available.

But,

You know,

In my mind,

It's,

You know,

Early March and that's early to mid-March and that's when it happens.

Additionally,

I wish that we were in a world where places of employment have now adopted bereavement policies that really recognize the real grief that people live with,

Where,

You know,

Something meaningful that has come out of this awful time of years long layers of grief,

That people have a guaranteed five days of paid leave from a job if they have a loss.

And maybe they can take them in non-consecutive ways,

That they're promised that they're not going to lose their job if they have to take some time off,

That we,

You know,

Have cut each other a break a little bit more and don't ask for,

Say,

A death certificate to prove that there was a loss in the workplace or a funeral,

That,

You know,

That we ideally,

Honestly,

Haven't gone back to a mandated in-office work situation,

Which so many places have gone back to.

You know,

Even though we've proven that we can be quite effective being flexible,

You know,

In flexible geographic situations,

Because a lot of people are still dealing with the added layers of identity and responsibility that they've had to take on as a result of the pandemic.

You know,

They've moved to be closer to family members for that support or to support family members who are ill,

Who they're caretaking.

You know,

Like,

I wish that we were in a world where we had more permanent flexibility and more cutting the cutting a break of to people in addition to the formal recognitions like national days of mourning.

And,

You know.

I wish we were there.

And many of us are there,

Many of us,

I think I'm not talking about me,

I'm just talking about a lot of people I've met have become really deeply,

Much more empathetic over the last several years.

There are a lot of incredible human beings out there who are helping people,

Even if it's just by showing up for one person who needs them in a deeper way because they have a better,

Deeper understanding of what grief is as a result of covid.

But if you look at the headlines,

It's a real frickin bummer.

You know,

You can't get free covid tests anymore through the mail.

They got rid of the long covid,

You know,

Research project,

Which maybe in some ways sure was not being effective,

Who knows.

But in other ways,

I don't know,

Shouldn't there be a lot of funds going towards something that probably,

I don't know,

Billions of people around the world are suffering from right now?

We are just,

You know,

Not honor,

We're not honoring it.

In the way in which we should be.

Yeah,

Well,

I think that's a perfect segue into my next question,

Which is like how you have opinions on this and I have opinions on this,

But like something you wrote about in your article in 2020 was how important it is for leaders to demonstrate that grief is important.

And when they don't,

What they relay is a message of your grief doesn't matter.

Buck up and get over it.

It's not so bad,

At least at least.

And if you don't fall in line with that or that doesn't line up with your experience of reality is there's almost this like especially surrounding covid-19,

There's this gaslighting of it's not so bad.

I don't understand why it's such a big deal for you.

And so I'm hoping you can kind of again to do a kind of two pronged approach of like acknowledging and validating like it was that bad and it continues to be that bad and also speak a little bit on the importance of leaders.

I'm talking our president,

The United States,

But also world leaders and acknowledging the weight of grief at large covid war pandemic just on a large,

Large scale.

Can you just repeat the first part of the question?

Yeah,

Just acknowledging to to grieving people that it is as bad as you think it is,

Despite what a leader might be telling you about what's happening.

I don't love using the term gaslight because I think it's like a hashtag,

You know,

Just like hashtag trauma,

You know,

Like he didn't call me back.

I'm hashtag traumatized.

We've taken therapy lingo into real life.

But like,

Yeah,

I think there are certain situations in which you can gaslight someone.

And I think it's like,

You know,

We talk about it in the grief space all the time,

Which is when you use,

Say,

Toxic positivity,

Like,

Oh,

Come on,

You know,

Like it's not all that bad or like,

Look on these bright sides or at least it's not this like at least right.

Like anything that starts with at least is never going in a good direction for somebody.

That's you trying to make yourself feel comfortable,

Not the person who you're trying to supposedly comfort or be there for,

You know,

Things like,

Yeah,

Minimizing a virus and all the tentacles that come out of it that are endless,

Really that affect every,

You know,

Every aspect of somebody's life and can to just like not like not acknowledge that,

Like,

While that may not have happened to you,

You're aware that that is happening to the other person.

And while you may not understand that firsthand,

You care enough to try to.

To me,

That's the mark of a good leader.

I mean,

Because I don't think any of us know everything.

I mean,

Please show me someone who does.

And,

You know,

Even in Modern Loss,

When I'm writing,

I always say,

Look,

I only know my own personal experience.

And that's why Modern Loss is a community endeavor.

It's for people to share with each other.

I'm not like the figurehead here.

I'm just like the person who's kind of like leading it and setting the tone and like trying,

You know,

Like sharing the content.

I think that a real mark of a good leader is someone who doesn't try to belittle people for struggling in something very real.

Make them think that.

They're not strong enough,

They're not doing it right,

You know,

For me,

That's just really an extension of like everything that I always say about loss,

Which is.

You know,

When you have this metaphor that I hate,

Right,

Which is like.

I talk about it in my in my in my newer book,

The Modern Loss Handbook,

Which is like we have this way of talking about grief and hard things,

Which is,

You know,

We approach it from this like warrior metaphor,

Like it's a battle that has to be won and that you're going to vanquish it.

You know,

Like she had cancer and she fought really hard and she lost the battle.

I mean,

Did she or did she just like die from cancer because cancer is just really fucking awful and doesn't care who it kills and doesn't decide who it's going to kill?

You know,

Does that mean that she didn't care to live as much as the person who is in remission?

It doesn't.

Now,

Some of these metaphors may not bother everyone,

And that's totally fine.

I don't care.

I'm just talking about how it sits with me and a lot of people who I talk to,

Because a lot of people do walk around feeling less than or like they're not doing it right because they're not doing it in the way that society tells us that we should do it.

They're not vanquishing the aggressor,

Which is in this conversation,

Grief.

You know,

Well,

There's no there's no vaccine for grief.

It's something that you just have to wake up and do and screw up or maybe do a little better and go to sleep and wake up and do it again.

And that is the way that it goes.

And so leaders,

If they can't acknowledge that,

That grief is folded into the not only of the human experience,

But the life experience of anything that really lives,

You know,

Then I don't know.

I don't really look up to that very much.

I think you have a lot of people who feel really invisible,

Even if you're someone who likes a lot of what that leader stands for.

You know,

Grief is not political.

It's just not.

I mean.

Sometimes I get DMs saying like,

Why you got to make it political?

And I'm like,

I'm literally not.

I'm actually not.

I'm I'm not making it political.

If you hear me talking about how I would like to have gun reform,

That's because I believe in preventing unnecessary grief from traumatic gun violence because I've met enough families whose lives are never going to be anything remotely close to OK,

According to them,

Because of it.

So,

Yeah,

I'm not making it political.

This is a very human subject.

It's not Republican,

Democrat or even libertarian.

And I wish,

You know,

It's I think it's other people who are making it political.

Yeah,

I love you just said something in one way that I say and the exact opposite way,

Because I tell people grief is political,

But it's not partisan.

And so I think politics and grief,

Everybody has politics,

Whether you participate in the political machine or not,

Is up to you.

Believe it or not.

And grief happens to everybody,

Whether you participate actively in the experience of grieving or not,

And how you vote and what you do in your community determines what types of griefs you will and will not face in some part.

There are things you cannot possibly predict coming,

Even though people predicted things like COVID coming,

That are influenced by by what you do politically.

And so I think saying a similar thing,

But entirely a different way.

Grief is not political and that it belongs to everyone.

And grief is totally political and that it belongs to everyone.

Yes,

You are totally right.

Copy,

Print.

Yes,

That whole section right there.

Trademark it,

Shelby.

Yeah,

Totally.

I mean,

You're right.

Yeah,

I mean,

It's tough times and.

You know,

The range of loss out there is so deep and.

It's just this real humbling moment when you realize that hundreds of people are willing to lay bare their true,

Raw,

Candid experiences with something really hard to you,

That they feel comfortable enough with you,

That you're not going to sensationalize their stories or you're not going to like,

You know,

Share their names like they trust you with those stories.

And I I don't take that lightly.

I take it very seriously that people trust me with those stories.

And I do wish that everyone who was grieving had some feeling like that from somebody in their lives.

And I do wish,

You know,

In my fantasy world that they felt like that in their society,

About their society at large.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we're just not there.

We're not there.

And and I think that leads perfectly to my last question.

Then we'll talk about how people can connect with modern loss,

Because it is such an outpost for support,

Even for me.

I've been following along for so many years.

But something that you wrote about in again in 2020,

I keep going back to this article because I feel like,

Wow,

What a piece of journalism to come out in the first six months and then to predict the flow of how everything was going to unfold.

At the time,

We were in a second wave of the virus.

So people talked about the first wave and then they talked about the second wave.

And you're like,

The third wave is going to be grief.

We don't know when it will hit.

We don't know when it will come.

But the kind of aftermath reckoning we will have with this virus is not another mutation of the virus.

It will be the grief that we have.

Right.

As a result of the next pandemic.

Right.

Exactly.

So the next.

So my last question for you is like,

If people are in a place where they now notice,

Whether because of this show or because of their own awareness of their lives,

I am sitting in this third wave.

I am now in the grief of everything that happened.

What the hell do I do next?

Or what do I do with this?

Or how do I cope with this?

And how do I keep going?

Because the world keeps going and it sucks.

And we're all part of this world that's keeping going.

Yes.

So it's just like take us through best practices for third wave,

Because I think that's something we're all inside of.

I mean,

Third wave of this is if it you know,

As you say,

If you've realized if it's slamming into that,

What you're really dealing with is grief.

Then first of all,

Congratulations.

I say that's a really good thing to try to,

You know,

Kind of flip the script a little bit instead of like,

Oh,

My God,

This is grief like I am destroyed.

No more like commend yourself for coming to this realization,

Because that's a really powerful thing to do for yourself.

Like that's a milestone.

I can't even tell you how long it took me to get the right support for myself after my mom was killed in a car accident.

I mean,

Years,

Actual years to build my team,

Which we're not all like clinicians.

A lot of them were just like people in the world,

You know.

Good humans.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Good humans.

And so if you're if you're laid bare with all this stuff and you're like,

I this is grief and it's because of this,

That it's because of my burnout,

It's because of my dead cousin,

You know,

Or my professor who died,

You know,

From COVID or the miscarriage I had during the pandemic or the fact that I had to become an online kindergarten teacher and work full time as an attorney on Zoom for a year.

You know,

This is all grief,

You know.

So congratulations.

You're realizing it.

And then what are you going to do with it is the next question.

Like you have a choice now,

Which is are you going to figure out how to respect and acknowledge and examine this grief or are you not?

And I highly suggest option A,

Because if you do,

Then you.

Contend with it and you figure out what parts of it are the real triggers for you,

Because there are triggers like there are in life,

Everything is a trigger,

A potential trigger.

You know,

You could be going about the day and maybe have some sort of meeting that reminds you of a meeting that you were having in deep COVID or,

You know,

Just reach for the bottle of syrup in the grocery store and be taken back to another hard moment when maybe you were ordering from Instacart for three months because you couldn't go to a grocery store and you were overwhelmed.

Right.

So you have to figure out,

Like,

How are you going to acknowledge this?

How are you going to examine it and what help are you going to get?

And I always recommend as somebody who is not a licensed professional mental health worker,

Get some professional help,

You know,

Do it.

That one of the things that I think is a huge upside of the pandemic,

It's almost weird because a lot of the virtual stuff has kind of retreated.

But online therapy is still very readily available.

You can still very readily do grief sessions on Zoom,

On the phone,

Whatnot.

So if you can't get to someone in person,

There are ways.

There really are.

Get it for yourself.

I think that a grief counselor or,

You know,

Any if you feel like,

You know,

They can probably correctly ascertain whether you're dealing with trauma as well and potentially refer you to a trauma specialist.

Maybe on top of it,

You would like some cognitive behavioral therapy to help with behavioral things that are coming up so that you can,

You know,

Rework how you try and react to things when they come up.

But that's like using your agency to help yourself.

And it's getting a sounding board that doesn't have any judgment attached to it.

And that's the beauty of getting some real counseling that works.

Right.

It's somebody who isn't coming to the table with any biases or any other like shared memories,

Like a sibling when you're talking about a mom and like they have different memories and roommate and you're talking about a friend.

Just go get someone who doesn't give a crap and just gives a crap about helping you,

You know.

But beyond that,

It's in really figuring out how to level up for yourself,

Figuring out where your greatest needs are.

Are you struggling at work?

Then figure out how to help yourself at work.

Figure out what the ideal situation is for you in your professional life and try and figure out if you can ask for it.

And no one gets everything they ask for,

But a lot of people get some of it.

So is it that you might need a more flexible work schedule or maybe there are productivity hours that are better for you that have shifted from what your productivity hours used to be?

Or is it that maybe you'd like to request some time off?

And yeah,

It'll be unpaid.

You have to deal with it.

That sucks.

But is an unpaid time off with a guaranteed job better than maybe no job?

So maybe there's a way to work with if you are at a company that has HR.

Many people don't have that.

Many people are self-employed or at smaller companies or not even working at all.

But is there a way to just kind of ask,

Say,

I want to stay here,

You know,

I want to work here.

Is there a way that we can do it?

You know,

That can happen with me feeling like my needs are being met so that I can really show up fully.

I think that you really would be surprised by how flexible companies are willing to be with people,

But they are waiting for people to go to them with it.

And that's not fair.

Onus shouldn't be on you,

But it is.

Now,

Of course,

In the rest of your life,

Which is your social world,

You still probably have to date and probably have to be a partner or probably just have to be happily single or be a parent,

You know,

Be with your friends.

You know,

What do you need from them?

Think about it.

Do you need friends to support you and show up for you in ways in which they are not?

Do they know that?

So first cut them a break and assume that no one can perfectly intuit what it is that you need.

And we have to do that because I don't want you to cut off your friendships.

I don't.

If they're toxic ones,

I want you to cut them off.

But most friendships are not.

You know,

Most friendships,

People I think generally want to show up for somebody,

But they don't exactly know how and they are waiting for some sort of direction.

So are you having a really hard time?

Are you really having a hard time right now?

Who is it in your life?

Who are the friends who can take having a real earnest,

Tough conversation?

Go to those first.

Give them the chance to show up for you in return and then go from there while knowing that not everyone is going to be able to hang with all of your hard things.

And that's not necessarily a personal reflection of you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's that everyone look at what we're talking about.

Everyone is going through an overwhelming time right now.

So you might have people who just might be able to show up for you in ways within their capacities at any given moment.

But try and think about the fact that that still means that they're showing up for you.

Like,

I'm really just like I'm a friend fan.

You know,

I don't go around telling people to like,

You know,

Tell their friends to screw off because they forgot their mom's death anniversary.

I do encourage people to give people a chance.

And you'll know when they're really not repeatedly coming through for you and then you'll act.

But,

You know,

It really is up to us to ask for things.

It sucks.

It's not fair.

But look at the world right now.

Is there anything that looks fair?

Well,

Not only that,

But I think we are trying so hard as people to simply make it through another day that for as much as we love our friends,

For as much as we love our families,

Or as much as some of us even love our jobs,

Our top priority for the most part is what's in front of us right now.

And unless there's a notification or a reminder or an email or a nudge from a friend or a hey on the street,

It's not what I'm dealing with in this moment.

And for as much as I can be a good grief friend,

I can also be a really bad one.

And so sometimes just having reminders,

Even on my calendar of like this person's things coming up.

And so remember,

And if I'm two days late,

Oh,

My God,

I'm so sorry.

I forgot whoever's date sending you some love and care.

Let's hang out next weekend.

I'm a big scheduler.

I'm a big I mean,

It's how I remember everyone's birthdays.

I have a list of people who I know,

You know,

Consider Mother's Day season to be a huge trigger.

And I specifically reach out to them two weeks in advance.

That's just what I do.

You know,

And guess what?

It takes me a total of like seven to ten minutes because everyone knows no one has time for a home call anymore.

And if you can have that,

That's amazing.

Ask for it.

Someone will give it to you.

But I don't have time to reach out with a phone call.

I just start reaching out with a text.

Hey,

Oh,

How obnoxious.

Mother's Day is happening again.

You know,

It's garbage.

How are you doing?

You know,

And that's that's what most people just need,

Which is like just,

You know,

Knowing that someone else sees something coming down the pike just like they do.

And a tacit acknowledgement that that could be hard.

And do you need anything?

You know,

It goes so far.

I mean,

It just goes back to what I always say,

Which is like,

We just need to be all seen.

I mean,

It's really,

Really hard to feel like you can be compassionate towards others if you're stewing in not having received compassion yourself.

Yeah,

It just I mean,

Put simply,

It just helps to know that somebody gives a crap about you and what happens to you and what you think that is in the Bible.

And I hope it's in the Bible,

I hope it's in something.

Leviticus.

I don't know.

I actually I don't even know that I'm Jewish and I'm always like I literally don't know any of the of the books as it were.

So I feel like it's I always say Leviticus because I know that one,

Yeah.

I love it.

Yeah,

I love it.

Rebecca,

Thank you so much for coming on Grief Grower today.

I am so,

So glad to talk to you and just honor this milestone for what it is,

But also for what it will continue to be moving forward into the future.

And I always just love introducing you to people.

So thank you so much for coming on.