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- [00:00]
Grow Therapy Announcer
Grief doesn't keep a calendar. Anxiety doesn't clock out after five, Depression doesn't care if it's your busy season. But support can still fit into your life. With Grow, you can find a therapist who meets you where you are. They connect you with thousands of independent licensed therapists across the US Offering both virtual and in person sessions. You can search by insurance provider, specialty treatment methods and more to find a therapist who works for you. And if it's not the right fit, switching is easy. There are no subscriptions, no long term commitments. You just pay per session. Find therapy on your time, evenings, weekends and Cancel up to 24 hours in advance at no cost. Whatever challenges you're facing, GrowTherapy is here to help. Sessions average about $21 with insurance and some pay as little as $0 depending on their plan. Visit growththerapy.com acast today to get started. That's GrowthTherapy. Do growtherapy.com acast availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.
- [01:09]
Prolon Diet Announcer
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- [01:53]
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- [02:24]
Host
Welcome everybody again. We are so thrilled to be here with grief and trauma and grief and loss. Expert extraordinaire, founder of Grieftastic Book Fair, author of these two books, Megan Reardon Jarvis. Thank you for coming.
- [02:38]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
Thank you. Thank you all for coming. This is amazing.
- [02:43]
Host
So we thought now with the holidays and everything going on in the world, this could not be a better time to talk to you about grief and loss. I don't know anybody who is not reeling from all of the horrible, horrible news from the last couple of days. This has just been one thing after another and feels like it's not even stopping. So, Megan, help us through just a short order.
- [03:05]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
Well, so let's say this just at the top, which is there has been a lot lately that is a real thing. So if you think about how do we experience the world, what do we do with grief? It. We filter it through our bodies. So let's start like, everyone's doing the holidays. Everyone's overspending, overeating. Some of us are waiting to hear where our kids get into college. There's all kinds of stress at this moment. Every two minutes. There's all kinds of stress that just is this part of year. And unlike the Norman Rockwell painting that, you know, those propaganda things from that war that made it look like Thanksgiving and Christmas were times for family, they're really times where we have a perception that there's going to be joy. And there is often, like, in our left hand, but there's often in our right hand a whole lot of other stuff. And the world just gave us a whole lot of other stuff. And I think sometimes people feel like, well, that I don't live in Australia or I didn't know Rob Reiner or. But the thing is, we as humans have this really strong capacity to care about things. It's our empathy. And so just being able to say, this is pulling on me, and it's draining on me, and it's draining on me emotionally, but also physically, people lose sleep. You know, they overeat, they undereat. We filter it with our bodies, and it shows up in our bodies.
- [04:30]
Host
Anybody been losing sleep under eating, overeating?
- [04:33]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
Yeah.
- [04:33]
Prolon Diet Announcer
Nobody.
- [04:34]
Host
Oh, my gosh. Okay.
- [04:36]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
That's not this crowd. So, you know, what I always say is sort of be gentle and intentional. So intentional meaning I wake up in the morning. I have a journal that I buy at Target, my favorite pen, which was discontinued and is now back, thank God. And I just write for 10 minutes about what I can feel like, what am I feeling? And I write about the joyful stuff, too. You know, I have three teenagers. They have this unbelievable capacity to, like, go down hard because things are hard, and then they just, like, pop back up because things are joyful. So I write about the good stuff, but I also just check in on the bad stuff, and that's a little bit like, oh, the cup is getting full, like, Zibby and I Were together in an event two days ago, and we woke up to, like, three crises. All, you know, that's. It was actually really special to be able to be with people who were then going to process that. But most of us are just going to end up in our Monday meeting at 10, you know, so spending a minute to just, wow, that was a lot. This is how I feel about it. This is how it's showing up in my system. Just kind of naming it, it's like a little duck, duck, goose, takes a little bit of the heat out of it. It pours the accumulated tension out and what is still in the cup, what you still feel. One of my ways of navigating grief and loss is to give back that that works for me. It's not always simple, but sometimes it is simple. So even though it has nothing to do with Bondi beach, we dropped some things off at a food shelter because that was the easiest way to sort of attend to. I need to feel like I have some agency around doing good in the world today.
- [06:20]
Host
So when you spoke at Zibby's Bookshop in Santa Monica in the aftermath of the fires.
- [06:25]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
Yes.
- [06:26]
Host
I watched you on the livestream talk about all the ways we can process trauma and how actually writing. And I've quoted you, probably misquoted you, but many times since, about how the act of writing from a neurological perspective takes the trauma out of your head. And when you put it on paper, it frees up the brain.
- [06:46]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
Totally. Great.
- [06:48]
Host
Tell us a little bit about that. Because even if we haven't been traumatized, right. Even if we haven't been on that beach or, you know, any of the things that have been going on at Brown University, all of it. We all feel the trauma around us, and we're all exposed to the news images of it and feel like we're there and look at it on our phones, and how can we not? So talk a little bit about the role of writing and processing trauma.
- [07:14]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
Sure. So let me say something about trauma first, which is don't assume you weren't traumatized by what happened on Bondi Beach. Trauma is a bad event that happens. Covid was an absolute trauma, but not everybody was traumatized. So the way that we get traumatized and how we define traumatized is it leaves a negative imprint in your system. So you're more afraid, you're more overwrought, you are less likely to take risk. You don't believe the world is a good place. The way that we end up traumatized has everything to do with what's already happened to us and what's already inside our system. So it's super confusing for people to say, I don't know why I can't seem to recover from this thing that didn't even happen directly to me. But you absolutely can end up with trauma in your system leaving you. You know, you're susceptible to being traumatized if we don't get it out. The role of writing, which is super cool, is just exactly as Zibby described it. So one thing that happened after my mom died is that I had a repetitive thought rumination that it was my fault that she died. There's a lot of guilt in, you know, when something untenable happens. We wish that there was a different outcome. And so our brain will come up with a way that there was a different outcome. That is usually you would have had to have done something different, and that then makes you feel as though you have done something wrong. It's a tricky sort of slippery slide of untruths because what happened is what happened. But what we can end up doing is we can end up sort of cutting the circuit of that thought process, that idea, by writing down what my thoughts are. And it's a bit like writing a grocery list. So if I said, these are my friends from high school, Megan and Lauren. They've known me since I was 13 years old. If I said, okay, Megan, I need you to buy these seven things at the grocery store, and Lauren, can you Please remember these 12 numbers? You would have to sit there and repeat them in your head or remind yourself multiple times during the day. Now, the grocery store is not traumatic, and those numbers don't have anything provocative. But what if it was remembering the events of the day your dad died or how your husband approached you to ask you for a divorce, that jacks your system up, and your day goes from neutral to totally intensely reactive. But if you write it down, write down the seven things I asked you to write. Your brain says, I don't need to keep thinking about that. I don't need to keep thinking about it, because I know she wrote it down. And so if she needs to remember it. And your brain thinks you need to remember terrible things because it's constantly trying to predict bad things happening to you. So it wants you to remember the bad things so that you never let them happen to you again. And so it's adaptive, but it's also terrible. It can be. So writing just loosens the brain for that. It also, for some folks, and I had this when I was writing at end of the hour, there's a very long, terrible car ride from my mom's house back to where I live in D.C. that I just couldn't remember. And the reason I couldn't remember it was like the worst 13 hours of my life. I was having panic attack after panic attack. And I was writing the book, and I was like, you guys, I can't remember this part. And I talked to a neuroscientist, and she said, just keep writing. You lived it. It will come back. And it did come back. I woke up one morning and I was like, oh, I remember being in Rhode Island. I remember. So when your brain trusts that you're in regulation and it trusts that you can handle things without getting triggered, which the writing helps, it will allow you to remember some of the things that you know you need to remember because they're part of your life.
- [11:00]
Host
You also gave advice that sometimes just moving your body can really help. Why?
- [11:07]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
Yeah. And how. Yeah. So I teach this thing called the grief mentor method. And one element of it, so it's just. It's six components to a daily grief practice. Because it's completely, totally bananas that every single person goes through profound loss in your life. And we are just like, good luck. You know, let me know if you need anything. Instead of being like, let me tell you what's going to happen. These are all common, completely normal experiences. And I actually. After my dad died two years before, my mom and I spent a lot of time flying up to see him on Cape Cod, and it really interrupted my running. I had been running half marathons. I do not do that anymore. But at that time, I was. And I just sort of let the running go. I didn't really know the neuroscience on how important it is to process the energy that lands inside your system. But here's the thing. You can run and dissociate, and you can run and process trauma. They're not the same. So a lot of people who are saying to you with a lot of pride that they keep their mental health in check by running or swimming or what they're really doing is trying to outrun their difficulties. And there hasn't. It's interesting to me that people have not helped folks to distinguish those two things. So there's exercise that's healthy, which is you are just allowing yourself, not with super intensity. So what I always say to Grievers is, if you are already a CrossFitter, fine. You can do CrossFit. But we're not picking up CrossFit right now we're talking about gentle walking with friends. And the reason it works is because your brain has two hemispheres. You have two centers in your brain. One is the sympathetic nervous system, which does your fight and your flight response responses. And when that's overactive, you get anxious. And then the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the freeze response. And when that's overactive, it looks like depressed. And what's interesting about the parasympathetic nervous system for any of you that are parents, is that the vagus nerve, which is our 10th cranial nerve, is what activates. That's where that system is. That's what activates and controls that system. And the vagus nerve is what develops at four months. So when your baby is super distressed and screaming, all of a sudden, it falls asleep at four months because it cries itself into such a state of distress that it activates this calming system, but then makes it feel a little bit stoned and falls asleep. So when people are talking to me about grief and loss and they say, I don't want to start crying because I'll never stop, I get to say, no, no, you have a vagus nerve. It developed when you were four months. What will actually happen is you will cry really hard, you will become exhausted, and you'll fall asleep. So when you're exercising, you're actually activating both the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system with bilateral stimulation. And bilateral stimulation is if any of you have ever had trauma and done emdr, that's the technique that they use. And they use EMDR is something that you do with your eyeballs because you're optic nerve is actually part of your central nervous system. Maybe everybody knows that, but your, your optic nerve is actually part of your brain. So it's the reason why people are often traumatized by images because they go straight into the brain and then they immediately impact your, your spinal cord. And then that messaging goes up and through the body. But it also means you can use imaging as a way to balance the energy across the brain and sort of soothe yourself. So simple walking. And if you walk with a friend for bonus points, because most of us feel safer with people. After my mom died, I had a friend who actually her twins were a Brown. She every single day came over to my porch and said, do you want to take a walk? And I was like, I will take a walk with you, but I don't want to talk. So she would walk like behind me, like Secret Service, and we would just walk around the block and then come and sit down because she had sat through these lessons. But it's not complicated. The moving the energy through the body is not complicated, but it is totally and completely important. And for many people who have that over activation in the depressive side, they don't want to get out of bed, they don't want to exercise, they don't. And one of the things that I think is so important in grief and loss is like, it's terrible. Your partner just died, your mother just died. And as adults we're sort of like, okay, you don't want to come out of the house, that's okay, call me when you do. But really what we need to be saying is, of course you don't want to come out of the house, but it's not good for you. If I, my 15 year old son wants bigger muscles, he's a soccer player and I'm like, well then you need to eat more protein than you do. That's just the way it is. If that is the outcome. Most of us don't want to end up in our houses totally isolated. So in the protocols that we use in the grief and loss work, we say, I know, I get it, I totally understand, but you, you have to. So just come with me. And a lot of us having a friend or someone who understands that they're not going to push you, they're not going to. My neighbor was not insulted when I said, I just don't want to talk to you. That movement is really at the core of being able to shift the energy.
- [16:34]
Host
So you mentioned images that you see. Yeah, we've all been just inundated. I mean, I'm going to speak for all of you. I have been inundated by my own fault. Right. Just watching the videos over and over again, even when there's a warning and I'm like, should I? And then it's like, well, I have to know what happened. So I guess I'll just like blow past this warning and watch like, what do we do? Is it the same like, and should we really not watch them? And what do we do when we're trying to find the news and we get it on social media or whatever and obviously it's triggering but like we still have to get the news. I don't know.
- [17:10]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
What, what are we supposed to do? Well, it's interesting. I mean, I don't know what to do. I don't know what the right answer is. What I can tell you is that, that we can't avoid trauma really, we just have to be able to recover from it. So sometimes people will. Will DM me and say, like, the advice that you're giving is. Is like sticking your head in the sand. Because I'm saying avoid tv, avoid. Really, when I'm doing that, I'm talking to people who are in my trauma cohort, people who I know already have a lot inside their cup, a lot of energy that it can get activated like popcorn. The interesting thing about the brain is it keeps information in like, colored file folders. So if you were in a car accident, let's say when you were 10, every hard event that you either see on a movie or are in again goes into like the yellow dangerous car experiences. And so for some of us, we have a lot of folders inside that have to do with what we witnessed. Other people, it might be what you read, but when you've witnessed it, it's particularly provocative. So it turns out that the trigger warnings on things don't actually. They don't actually prevent people from watching the video. Interestingly, they might even provoke people to watch the video because you just told them it's going to be something like super compelling. So what's more important than avoiding? Because I'm certainly not trying to tell people to stick their head in the sand, but I am not exactly answering your question, but I'm going to say this anyway. I think there is a bias towards action that people like. So when something terrible happens, we like to protest and we like to raise money and we like. But not everybody can do that. I go down really hard, really fast when things get overwhelming. So when something happens and I'm in dc, I feel like something happens, you know, every day. I do. I am like, oh, I'm going to bed. I am not like, quick, let's raise money and bring things together. There's not one right way. I think there's one right way. If you're in the military. If you're in the military, you need people who do not run away and do not go to bed. You need people who fight, but otherwise people eventually come back to the protesting. It's just not always in that immediate moment, the images and whether or not we should watch them. You know, they'll tell you whether or not you should watch them because they'll either stick with you. I mean, there are images that every time I'm in New York that I wish I had not seen a 911 that pop back up into my head. Those obviously traumatized me or I wouldn't still think about them. But you can't always know what's going to traumatize you. I would just say that the central nervous system, so your spinal cord and your brain, when it's not good for you, it often feels like a gong, like a little humming inside your system. Now people will also tell you, but that's what it feels like when it is really good for me. But you know the difference? When it's really good for you and you're humming because it's so exciting. That can also set people over the edge and make them go into that sort of collapse state. Cause it's too much energy inside the system. But you just have to watch it. And I will. I'm not bragging about my kids. My 17 year old has OCD and so she's. Which she developed during COVID Many of you may know this, that OCD in adolescence went up 300% in Covid. Because adolescents, my friends from high school can tell you, like, adolescents are just really super physical with each other. They sit on each other, they hug each other, they lick each other. They smush five kids into a bus seat. They make out all the time. They couldn't do. These kids couldn't do any of that during COVID And their bodies are still really trying to recover from that. But my kids are really tuned like a bell to whether or not something is too much for them. Because for my daughter, if she activates an OCD flare, it can be like three or four days. So it's been an interesting thing to watch them because I grew up in an Irish Catholic family in Boston with five brothers and sisters. And my mother was like, get up, you seem fine. You know, there was like, is it bleeding? You're fine. We sort of have the opposite, which is, you know, stay home if you don't feel well. And maybe I've gone overboard on that edge, but being able to sort of check in on your own system and say, this is not hard for me, it's bad for me. There's a difference. Is it hard to watch or is it bad for you to watch and don't watch what's bad for you? You can get your information other ways. Listening to it on the radio is less provocative. It's still awful, but it's less provocative.
- [21:58]
Quince Announcer
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- [23:54]
Grow Therapy Announcer
Grief doesn't keep a calendar. Anxiety doesn't clock out after five. Depression doesn't care if it's your busy season, but support can still fit into your life. With Grow, you can find a therapist who meets you where you are. They connect you with thousands of independent licensed therapists across the US offering both virtual and in person sessions. You can search by insurance, insurance provider, specialty treatment methods and more to find a therapist who works for you. And if it's not the right fit, switching is easy. There are no subscriptions, no long term commitments. You just pay per session. Find therapy on your time, evenings, weekends and Cancel up to 24 hours in advance at no cost. Whatever challenges you're facing, Grow Therapy is here to help. Sessions average about $21 with insurance and some pay as little as $0 depending on their plan. Visit growtherapy.com acast today to get started. That's growththerapy.com acast growtherapy.com acast availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.
- [25:03]
Prolon Diet Announcer
Busy work, weeks can leave you feeling drained. Prolon's five day fasting mimicking diet works at the cellular level to rejuvenate you from the inside out, providing real results that include fat focused, sustainable weight loss with no injection needed. NextGen builds on the original Prolon with 100% organic soups and teas, a richer taste and ready to eat meals. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute and backed by top medical centers, Prolon supports biological age reduction, metabolic health, skin appearance, fat loss and energy. Get 15% off plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com start that's prolonlife.com start.
- [25:49]
Host
And what about. And this will be the last question about the news per se, because I know people have their own grief during this time as well, just piling on. But what about people who are like, well, I don't have a right to be upset. Like, I can't stay in bed and cry when these things didn't happen to me or someone I knew personally, but it feels like they did. Can you just, like, make people feel better about that?
- [26:12]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
Yeah, I can. Because it's the same thing that happens in a grief group. It's like, you know, my friend Colin Campbell, who wrote this gorgeous book called Finding the Words, his two teenagers died at the same time in a car that he was driving when he was hit by a drunk driver. That is such a hard story that other people are like, I'm not going to complain about anything. And what he said was he found it really hard to go to grief groups because the minute he said what he was going to say, everybody else shut up. And so then, you know, what's the point of being in a grief group if people aren't going to share their stories? My friend David Kessler talks about this, which is like, you can only attend to the energy that's yours. So. And I use this all the time. It's like, grief is like hunger. Trauma is like hunger. So if you haven't eaten since I saw you two days ago, and I just haven't eaten since breakfast, there's no question that Zibby is way hungrier than I am. But I can't do anything really about her hunger. She has to get a bagel. But I still, I'm still. And her getting a bagel is not going to change the fact that I am still hungry. So I can only attend to mine. So when people say I don't deserve to feel this way, it's just a minimization and a misrepresentation. Of what feelings are. Think about all the things that you have feelings about. It's for a lot of people, you know, you start to worry, let's say at about 5:30, 6:00 clock at night, your anxiety goes up. It's a, it's a biological thing that happens when the sun goes down. Our body takes that as a threat. In old folks homes they actually call it sundowner syndrome and they give people anti anxiety medicines at that hour. But the feeling is real. Should you have the feeling?
- [27:56]
Host
Probably.
- [27:57]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
I mean I won't even have conversations with my kids about what they're worried about. After nine o'clock at night I'm like, nope, we'll talk about it in the morning, watch a TV show, listen to something. Should you have the feeling, it doesn't really matter. You do and the minute you have it, it's inside your system so it's yours to attend to. So when people say I should not feel this way, it's a way of minimizing their own experience and I think a way of talking about the helplessness around it. Because if you tell yourself you shouldn't feel this way and then you minimize, there's really nothing for you to do. And we need people to be able to do and care about things that happen that aren't yours personally.
- [28:42]
Host
Are there different ways to attend to different forms of grief and loss? Like what about the loss of a sense of security? Right, The Jewish people are being targeted right and left right now and it's just not the way it was a couple years ago. How do you attend to something as nebulous as that? The way things were.
- [29:01]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
So if we had different grief experts in the room, there would be other people who would say what Megan's about to say is wrong. So I just want to say that, but I know I'm right because this is how I teach it. So a lot of people will say people who lost their mothers before the age of 20, they're going to be in a group. And people who lost, you know, pregnancies, they're going to be in a group. And the rationale behind that makes perfect sense. And I think people find those groups to be really supportive. The way that I teach is everybody can be in one room because a parallel processing, which is being around other people who are doing hard things like you, is really good for you. And B, again you can only attend to your own grief and loss. What you're going to do to attend to that, that is the stuff that I love the most. So the Thing that I teach, which is this curriculum called the Grief Mentor method is designed, you go through, through the process and you come out the other side with the things that help you. So I can't tell you what would give you a sense of security around what has been part of the Jewish person's history for thousands of years. I don't know. And in fact someone else might come and say, well, this is what I do. You should do this. This happens a lot when I teach in lectures. I say, what do you think it is that helps people who are grieving? And inevitably people will be like yoga. And I'll say, what gives you that idea? It's like, well, my sister in law went to yoga and she really liked it. I hate yoga. Like I'm never going to tell people to do yoga and there's 26 different kinds of yoga. But if someone comes to me and says yoga is what helped me through my son's autism diagnosis, I am not going to tell them that it did not. So like I just said philanthropy and giving back. When my dad was dying, I worked for Glennon Doyle has an incredible. It was such an honor to be a part of it. Together Rising an incredible charity that gave away $32 million in 10 years. And I would just call them and be like, give me something to do, give me something concrete to do. And they would give me some hard, complex, distract me process. And at the end I would feel like it had nothing to do with curing cancer, helping my father's cancer. It just gave me peace. So I don't know the answer, but walking through these six core components, I bet you would come to one. And it could be coloring, really adding art to the world really makes me feel like I am. Or baking. I have people who, when their people are being persecuted or harmed, they have chosen to bring back the culture in some way, particularly ancient rituals of the culture. I wouldn't even know how to tell someone to do that.
- [31:47]
Host
I wouldn't.
- [31:48]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
But it is this extraordinary process for me to get to be a part of. And I have watched people. I think what I would say is inherently we know how to grieve. I think some of it is epigenetic. I think we have had it handed down to us. You know, I always use music and again, my people come from Ireland and like they're big singers around funerals and that kind of thing. You know, I don't think it's random that that's what I lean towards in grief and loss. So what I would say is if you're struggling with something and you. You think, like, God, there's a little part of me that wants to pull the violin that I haven't played since I was 16 out from underneath the bed, I would assume there's some wisdom in it. I would assume that your system knows something and to move towards it and what you know, is that going to be enough? Maybe not. But there's six elements that we use in this curriculum, and usually people will say, these are my three really reliable things. So, for me, live music is tip top. I had a totally terrible thing happen to a client. I was completely devastated by it. I called my husband and told him. He came and picked me up from where I was, and then he took me to the National Cathedral, where there was a choral concert, and he had bought, like, some stupidly expensive tickets that I could sit right up front and just, like, let the music move through my body. Didn't solve the problem. I still had the things the next day, but I was more prepared, more able to be to show up to the thing the next day.
- [33:26]
Host
So is the question to ask ourselves, what has helped us get through things in the past? Or is the question to ask, what are the things I do that take me out of my own emotions the most and go towards those?
- [33:40]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
Yeah. So it's not necessarily taking yourself out of your emotions. It's being able to sort of be with your emotions without them destroying you. So what most of us do is just, like, push our emotions away, and then we find something, some work to do or some hustle to do. You could ask yourself, what has worked in the past, what I know for people with profound loss. So when my mom died, you know, I had a whole life that I lived and strategies that I used. One thing I had never done in my life was write. But when she died, I felt really compelled to write, and I started writing as you know. So I do think when the. When the loss is deep and profound, we become a griever in a way that we weren't, like, two minutes before. And that there is inherently always novelty in that there is a newness of you. And the stories that I've heard from people are like, I never wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail. I never thought about, you know, doing pottery. I never. But that's the. The instinct in you that's like, how am I going to navigate this new space? And for a lot of us, one of the hardest things after my mom died is people kept looking at me like they knew me, and I would get Furious about anger was like, a really big part of my. I had a very strong, what I call fight response after my mom died. But people would look at me and, like, I made sense, but I didn't make any sense to myself. And so it was. The dissonance was really difficult. And so I found it more comforting to do sort of nonsensical things. So when people would say, what are you doing? I'd be like, mom, you know, I'm learning to take apart this electrical equipment. And I remember my brother being like, what? And I was like, yeah, I don't know why I'm doing it either, but it's what I'm doing. So there were still music. Music has been with me since I was tiny. It stayed, and if anything, I just sort of leaned into it. But the writing was a real surprise. I didn't see that one coming. I just didn't want to talk. I'm a talk therapist. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I didn't want to talk. But it was important to me when I was writing to have an audience. So I also didn't want to isolate. I wanted to connect. And I think instinctively I had been isolating. I isolated when my dad died. I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to be with other people. So one of the things that we. That we, when we're teaching, we say is you will surprise yourself in this space. You'll surprise yourself about sort of what can become from here. And, I mean, you would never say this to somebody who, you know, they're two days into their grief. But the most extraordinary thing for me with Grievers is beautiful stuff happens all the time. They create, like, foundations. And, you know, even just going to your kid's school to talk about something. They write books, they. But it's not all about what you make. It's also sort of, I think, about how the energy sort of flows out of you into the world. And I think most Grievers would say it's not all, only bad.
- [36:55]
Host
I also would love your advice on helping people who are grieving. Like, let's say you're feeling good, or you process the news in a different way, or you haven't lost anybody, specifically this year. Whatever. You're just, like, feeling okay, but you know that a dear friend is going through it, or a loved one or whatever. How can we help them?
- [37:14]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
Yeah. So this is the question that I get the most. And so I don't answer it with, like, concrete answers. I mean, I have like, there's something in like Woman's Day magazine, Megan's top 10 lists of things to do for Grievers. The first thing that I will say about this is do what is authentic to you. So I know that somebody is putting together like a food train. Nobody wants my lasagna. I am a terrible cook. That is not what I'm going to do. But I will take your whole family and your dog and put them in the back of my car and take them away for the weekend. And that's chaos. No problem with chaos. So I would say offer what you can do for real. Offer what you can do is the most honest response and answer. So if it's, you just had a baby and you want to be there for that person, but you can't, don't say you can. So offer the thing that's real and true, that's authentic to you. And then the other thing that I would do, and I mean, you don't even want to see what my calendar looks like, but just put in people's anniversaries into your phone and when you have somebody who's just, and it's just, you just text them. I just send a heart. That's all I do on the day. I don't even do more than that, but it's really meaningful. The other thing, and I don't always do this, is when you see that person for the first time, even if it's three years later, acknowledge the loss. I haven't seen you since your dad died. I forget to do this. But I know it matters because it makes grievers feel crazy. They feel like they don't have any arms anymore and people are just like looking at them and pretending they don't. So if you're able to think about that, a lot has moved on. When my, when my mom died, my in laws were unbelievably kind and supportive. And then I went to their house in England six months later and they just like didn't mention it. One, because they're English and that's the way they do it. But two, time had moved on and they were into the holidays and it made me feel nuts. And then I started doing this thing because I was passive aggressive and angry where my mother in law would say like, do you want a cup of tea? And I'd say, you know, really like tea. My mom, because I needed to bring her, I needed my truth, the reality of how I was feeling to sort of have space. I would not recommend doing that. It's very passive aggressive. But I. I had to take care of myself more than sort of take care of the politeness of the room.
- [39:49]
Host
But it's probably a good idea if we know people, even not that well, but we have their phone number, we email with them, and we know that they have gone through a loss. It's probably just a nice idea to reach out and say, I'm thinking of you at the holidays. This must be a tough time, or I'm here or whatever. Right. Isn't that a good idea?
- [40:08]
Megan Reardon Jarvis
Yes. I mean, I think the thing that people love the most is any story that you can tell. So I think about this all the time. My husband has a friend from graduate school I don't even know that well, and he was at a Christmas party. My dad was at a Christmas party. And I remember seeing them talking and like, their body language and being like, oh, I probably need to get rich away from my dad. Like, that was my whole experience. And after my dad died, he wrote a note and was like, I remember meeting your dad, John. I doubt he remembered my dad's name. I'm sure he looked up the obituary we had. We once had this really heated discussion about this thing. And I was really impressed with his intelligence. I'm sure my dad was actually like an ass in this moment. That is what I. He was sort of known for that. But it was so touching to me. So during the holidays, if I have a concrete memory, even if it's just I remember, you know, that your mother used to send you caramel brownies when we were in high school. Like, I remember this. And that concrete thing allows the person to be in the memory of the person instead of just the loss of the person. And people tell me over and over again that's actually what they want. What they want is to remember how that person was loved and admired. And you can't always do that. So a simple like, hey, thinking about you. What grievers sometimes say is like, the holidays are fine. You know, this isn't the hardest moment. So you don't have to assume that they're having a hard time, but just, I'm thinking about you. It's a lovely thing to do.
- [41:46]
Host
Okay, well, Megan, thank you so much for all of your wisdom.
- [41:54]
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