Transcript

Jessica Fein: Welcome. I'm Jessica Fein, and this is the “I Don't Know How You Do It" podcast, where we talk to people whose lives seem unimaginable from the outside and dive into how they're able to do things that look undoable. I’m so glad you're joining me on this journey, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. 

Welcome back to the show. My guest today, Lisa Keefauver, has a brand new book out today called Grief is a Sneaky Bitch, which is also the name of her top rated podcast. Now, I could probably just stop there because that alone says so much.

But there is a lot to know and then love about Lisa. To begin with, she has survived a lot. Raped at 15, widowed at 40, diagnosed with breast cancer at [00:01:00] 51, Lisa knows what it means to pick up the pieces and move forward. Based on her career as a social worker, her training in narrative therapy, and her own therapeutic support, Lisa openly and warmly shows up for others in the face of their own worst things and offers us on language to see, hold, and care for people in the dark seasons of their lives, including themselves.

If you're a griever, this episode is for you. And maybe even more important, if you know anyone else who is grieving, And you're wondering how to show up for them in a meaningful way, you'll want to tune in. So essentially, this episode is for all of us. Without further ado, I bring you Lisa Keefauver.

Welcome, Lisa. I have been waiting to get you on this show, and I am so excited to have this conversation. 

Lisa Keefauver: I am thrilled to have this conversation with you today. Thanks for inviting me. 

Jessica Fein: I have to tell you, I didn't expect to laugh as much as I did when I [00:02:00] read Grief is a Sneaky Bitch. So kudos to you and hats off and we'll get into all of that.

Lisa Keefauver: Well, I love to hear that. Yeah, not many people think they're gonna pick up a book on grief and be able to laugh. So that's high praise. I appreciate it. 

Jessica Fein: So let's just start at the beginning and hear a little bit about your personal journey and what led you to become a grief activist and an author. 

Lisa Keefauver: Yeah.

Isn't it funny? You might experience this and maybe your listeners do too when you're like, you know, I'm 52. It's like, what? Hmm. How do I summarize the threads that pull me through all of these decades? And if you're 20, forget it. You're not even listening to this. But, um, yeah. But when I really have been thinking, of course, over these last couple of years about the through line, first of all, both of my parents come from various sources of sort of trauma in their life.

Very loving parents, but limited in their capacity, given what they went through and of the times. And then early on in my teens, I survived. Being raped and was sent to therapy, but no one knew how to [00:03:00] talk to me what to do. There wasn't trauma informed therapy. My parents needless to say, were uncomfortable, didn't know how to hold space for me, show up. Even the therapist that I had looking back, I'm like, recognize the ways in which they weren't particularly helpful. And I bring that up to say that was the first really traumatic event that really started to, of course, shift the trajectory of my life, but also planted that seed in my mind that there has to be a way to hold space and bear witness for people in a way that is healing.

I didn't have the language, obviously, as a 15 year old, but I just knew that. I knew there was something missing and that that was the piece that was missing from my own healing and from other people's healing. I went on to work sort of in the research field just. Just kind of got a job and one job after another, but kept coming back around to this notion that I'm meant to be a helper in some way.

I was actually the victim of a couple of other crimes in college. A very close friend was also assaulted in college. I saw the way nobody knew how to show up, even me then, because I hadn't really processed my own. [00:04:00] And so I eventually, in the loving relationship that I had with my now late husband, sort of woke up one day and said, babe, got to quit my job and go get my master's in social work.

I think I'm meant to be a social worker. And he graciously was like, absolutely. Yes, you do. You know? And so I went. to graduate school at the University of Vermont. And what I loved about the program was it was really focused on narrative therapy and the power of language and social construct, and how important it is about our language and our culture experiences the ways in which we experience the things that happen to us in our lives and the power of the ways in which we tell our stories.

And the minute I sort of glommed on to that, I was like, Oh, this has opened up a whole new window for me. So my master's thesis was on holding space and bearing witness practices. And I went on to work in foster care and adoption and then crisis services and family services and was a clinical director of a non profit and we had a refugee resettlement program.

We had an [00:05:00] adult care program. This was in 2008, 7, 8, remember the, when the financial, for those of you who were around the financial market crashed. And all of those things were coming down on me, and that was the time in which this previously warm, athletic, kind man, Eric, my late husband, started to become someone neither he nor I recognized.

We were going from doctor to doctor, asking questions, getting no answers. Oh, it's just a midlife mental health issue. Oh, no, actually, those meds are making it worse. No curiosity whatsoever. And I want to put a pin in that, because curiosity is something that I talk about often in my work. And it wasn't until two and a half weeks before he died in my arms that they finally ran a scan and found out that it had been a grapefruit sized brain tumor all along.

They tried a surgery. He collapsed into a coma afterwards. Thankfully, stars aligned and I got to say a few words to him post surgery. Between that and his falling into the coma, more surgeries and more efforts. And I found myself having [00:06:00] to make the decision about bringing my child to the hospital to say goodbye to her father.

Our child was 7 at the time. And I did, you know, I had them take out all the tubes and try to cover him up as best as we could to make it the least scary, but the first of a lifetime of only parent decisions. Right. That I've had to make. And when I had my friend come pick me up, peel me out of the bed and take me home, I was asked to return to work within two weeks.

Jessica Fein: Oh my goodness. 

Lisa Keefauver: And this was in a therapeutic setting. And I still am very close and love my executive director. And it was definitely a, you know, it wasn't an insistence. It was an invitation. A whole bunch of senior staff had decided to leave in the three weeks that I was away. The graduate students were coming back because I was a field supervisor, clinical supervisor for all the students.

And they said, can you just come in and just be in the office? And to be honest, he covered our health insurance. I mean, I was a social worker, let's be real. I was not bringing in the dough. You know, I needed health insurance. I needed a [00:07:00] paycheck. Now I was an only parent who had a house and a mortgage and a life, right?

And to sort of swirling around. I was 40 years old. So when I returned to work and I started seeing my clients, I started supervising my students, working in community. That's when I started to snap. Snap is a wrong word, but that's when I started to like the light bulb started to go off is how are we not talking about grief?

And our grief illiteracy became so visible to me. Here's all these people who had fled another country. I'm working with folks in foster care and adoption from birth families to the adoptees themselves to the adopters themselves. I'm an adoptive mom myself. Grief, grief, grief, grief, loss, grief built into the very fabric of our lives.

And yet we're walking around labeling and pathologizing people as depressed and anxious and having eating disorders and drug addiction. And I want to pause and say, I think those things are valid, right? I'm not saying those things don't exist, but when we stop taking in the [00:08:00] context of the cognitive, physical, emotional, relational, spiritual impact of our grief, we're left with a very thin description of people's presenting behavior and we pathologize it. So that was sort of the spark. I didn't leap into action right away to become a grief activist, but it started sort of planting the seed. And wherever I went in my personal life, I co founded a nonprofit to help cancer patients. When I moved to Texas, I worked in all kinds of nonprofit spaces.

And actually it was with a previous health scare than the one I'm going through currently in 2018 ish that I thought I can't have had all this professional experience. I'm going to be talking about grief and loss. And public speaking because I had founded a non profit. So I was going on TV and radio and writing grants.

And this clinical therapeutic experience. And this profound personal experience. Because I might add, three years after my husband died in my arms, I was with my friend Joe in the hospital and he died in my arms. And so, I just had a kind of light bulb moment and I [00:09:00] thought, I need to be helping the world reimagine grief.

I need to be changing the narratives of grief. Taking this narrative training that I have and do something with it. And that's when I don't do this at home kids. Quit my job, you know, without a plan, almost quite like that, and started my podcast, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch, started a line of empathy cards, started working with organizations, started speaking, and just really have not looked back.

Jessica Fein: Well, thank God you did because we all need you. 

Lisa Keefauver: I appreciate you giving me the space to tell that long story, but it's just so funny because I get up on stages now. I was just doing a keynote in Ohio, and I think like no little girl grows up and thinks, you know what I want to do when I grow up? I'm going to be a grief activist.

Jessica Fein: Especially not one from lived experience. 

Lisa Keefauver: No, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I love what I do. And I'll just add one more thing. We might come to it later, but so many people, especially when I started the work, Especially people in my life were like, Oh, Lisa, it's going to be so depressing. And why are you going to do this?

And don't you just want to, and they said those [00:10:00] dreaded words, move on already. And et cetera, et cetera. I feel, and you might feel this way too. I feel so much more capacity to engage with wonder and awe and delight and gratitude on a daily basis. Even when I'm holding space for individuals in my work, even when I'm hearing stories from audience members, after I speak the guests on my show in whatever place I'm in, it's such a powerful reminder to look around in my now new hometown here in Southern California and just think like, it's a sunny Friday and there's bougainvillea and roses blooming.

How lucky am I? You know? 

Jessica Fein: I feel that exact way. Absolutely. But it's not in a, like… 

Lisa Keefauver: It's not in a Pollyanna. Like, I can hold that. Just gonna say it. Yeah. Not in a Pollyanna way. But in a way that holds the both and, which, again, I talked about a lot in the book, is that we don't have to choose. That's a false binary that we've been given, culturally.

Jessica Fein: That's been one of the biggest things, the biggest discoveries for me as I've gone through so [00:11:00] much loss and then obviously most recently the illness and death of my daughter, but this both and that we can hold this beauty and joy, seemingly conflicting things, right? Beauty and joy, wonder and magic and all these things with the sorrow and grief and despair, they can all just be there together.

It's so surprising to me. 

Lisa Keefauver: Not only can they be there together, and I was kind of, I think people would have described me as a half-glass-full kind of person even before all of this loss, I would say. But it's actually turning towards the hard, being with the suffering, that allows me an even greater access.

I'm not saying everything happens to a reason. I'm not saying if I couldn't wave a magic wand and bring Eric back, I wouldn't. Don't twist it up, which we'd like to do. It's the both and. But I do think that not just having the hard thing happen to us, but turning towards it and being with it and holding space for our own hard thing is what is the door opening for us to have that kind of new relationship with gratitude and with life and with wonder. And that we're always kind of moving back and forth between [00:12:00] those spaces in a way. And to envision it as that as opposed to like, Okay, I've arrived here now. 

Jessica Fein: it's a dance. 

Lisa Keefauver: It is. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Jessica Fein: So, we have the title of the podcast, “Grief is a Sneaky Bitch,” and now the book, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch. So, first of all, I mean, like, you can't not want to tune in when you see that title. But, tell us, what is so sneaky about it? 

Lisa Keefauver: I know, I love it. Another thing people were trying to warn me against when I was naming the podcast back in 2019, like, are you sure you want to do that?

And I said, yes, because I've never heard anybody not go, yes. Right? Aha. It is. First of all, those words came out of my mouth. That's came from a story of like, I was at a party, didn't know there was a picture of my husband in my purse. Surrounded by people. I did not know it was new people. I pulled it out of my purse having it actually one of my first happy nights, you know, post widowhood.

And I find this picture of him and I just start bawling in the middle of the party. And I said to my friend, “God, grief is such a sneaky bitch.” 

Jessica Fein: And so did your friend say, Aha, [00:13:00] that's it? 

Lisa Keefauver: Yes, she did. She did. And because she'd experienced child loss. And, you know, so she was someone who got it right away. You know, I have two answers for why grief is a sneaky bitch and why it's such a truism for all of us.

I think on the one hand, there's something inherently sneaky about grief because it comes with these bursts or waves, we sometimes call them, and they get triggered and because it transmutes over time. And just when we think we've arrived at some new relationship with our grief, you know, a new happy thing happens or a new sad thing happens or a milestone.

And it kind of just sneaks up on us because we don't have control over it because we have the illusion that we have control over so much, frankly, that we don't in life. So I think there's some inherent ness to grief being a sneaky bitch. But part of the reason I named the show, and even my book, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch, is part of the work I'm doing as a grief activist.

I think much of why grief is a sneaky bitch for all of us is because of our cultural illiteracy around [00:14:00] grief. Because we've told ourselves this story and this myth that grief happens, by the way, only when someone you're close to dies, which is, of course, absurd, and that it's just the emotion of sad, maybe a little anger if you're allowed, that you should keep it to yourself or see a therapist or find another group of grievers so you don't get your grief on other people, and that you should keep busy and get back to work and if you're good enough and strong enough in about a year, you'll move on and you're done and voila.

Right? So that's the story. And anyone listening to this podcast who's experienced any kind of loss, whether it's an ambiguous loss from illness or disease, a disenfranchised, a traumatic loss, whatever, knows that that story bears no resemblance to your experience of grief. And so it feels sneaky because we are comparing ourselves to this story and we're like, this doesn't match.

And it's not just a story, by the way, stories. As my narrative therapy trainings taught me, have power. [00:15:00] That story then means We have no bereavement leave policies at work, particularly for people who have an experience of death loss of a primary family member, right? We don't have cultural conversation.

We don't have community and ritual the way we used to do and the ways our health insurance do and don't cover mental health and coverage around grief. So the stories that we have that implement the policies and the systems and then the ways in which our family and friends can or can't. show up for us well, are all impacted by this story that we've sort of all collectively consumed.

And that's why it's so sneaky, because when we have brain fog, or grief brain, which is a real thing. Thank you, Mary Frances O'Connor for helping us understand that scientifically, right? When we have aches and pains, when we have bursts two years later, or four years later, when we can be happy and sad at the same time, when all of those things happen, We're caught off guard because it doesn't [00:16:00] jive with the story that, by the way, nobody has even necessarily explicitly said to us.

It's all the implicit behaviors and messages we've consumed throughout our life. It's what I call our grief beliefs. 

Jessica Fein: And what's so strange about it is, it is universal. If you haven't experienced it yet, I'm sorry, but you will. Yeah. And so many of us don't really start to learn about it in a meaningful way until we're in it.

Yes. How can we get people having these conversations and understanding this, the important things that you're talking about now that are in your book, how do we become more literate as a society in grief? 

Lisa Keefauver: You know, I think you're doing it. I think I'm doing it. We're having podcast conversations. We're writing books.

We have people like Joelle who's advocating at the federal level to get bereavement policies. We have all these incredible hospice and palliative doctors and folks like even the creators of the death deck who are creating kind of games as ways for us to talk about death and grief and loss, Endwell project.

In 2019, when [00:17:00] I started the podcast, there was kind of a desert landscape, in my opinion, around movements towards real honest conversations and shifts in our culture around grief. I think we're not there. We haven't arrived yet. But I think we are there more and more. You know, one thing that I'd like to encourage people, and I've heard this from so many listeners over the years, is if you don't know how to start the conversation with someone you love, but you have an inkling it's important, either because maybe somebody just got diagnosed, you know, or just because this is of interest to you, share an episode, share this episode, share an episode of my podcast as a way of like, hey, I've been thinking about this.

I know I don't have language. Can you listen to this episode too? And then maybe we can talk about it. you know, as just like a tool as a like service. I mean, I was an early podcast consumer in the wake of Eric dying. And again, there weren't really grief podcasts back in 2011. But I found different podcasts that had different topics touching on the topics.

And when I found one that resonated, and I didn't know how to talk to all of my 40 year old peer married friends who [00:18:00] were staring at their healthy husbands and didn't know what to say. I sometimes shared those things as well. And so I think that can be a tool if you don't know. And also another problem with our grief illiteracy and the way it impacts us is we have become such an expert obsessed culture that we're afraid to say, we don't know, I don't know if you said to a friend or your parent or your kid or whoever you're wanting to approach a subject with.

I really don't know anything about grief. I don't know what you know about grief, but can we learn about it together? Because I think we all believe something about grief. I just think we don't believe things that are truthful. We all hold grief belief. I asked the series of opening questions for every guest for the past five years, which is what is your earliest memory of loss?

And how were the adults in your life modeling explicitly or implicitly? What grief should I use air quotes look like or feel like? And from that experience, that was the beginning of us cultivating a set of grief beliefs, even if no one ever said the word grief. It's when they change the subject every [00:19:00] time you talked about the person, or when they told you to stop crying.

So maybe start there. What are my grief beliefs? What was that early experience? And what do I hold on to? And for so many folks, I do this and it's a continuous iteration, by the way, because old beliefs are hard to sit down, the older you get, the harder they are. I asked my students when I taught loss and grief at the University of Texas at Austin this question too.

You start to be able to make visible the beliefs that might be harming you. It might be keeping you from showing up for other people. And then you can do a sort of Marie Kondoing, like, do I want this belief anymore? Is it bringing me joy or is it causing me suffering? And then you can start to work with some narrative tools or CBT tools to interrupt that old story and set it down and pick up a new belief that serves you.

Jessica Fein: Let's get into some of the specifics of your book. Let's start off with AFGOs. Okay. Did I get that right? 

Lisa Keefauver: You're just gonna make me, you're just gonna make me swear again and again on this. I am. 

Jessica Fein: Oh, we're gonna get into it.

Lisa Keefauver: Yeah, yeah. Okay. 

Jessica Fein: [00:20:00] Because I read about AFGOs and I started laughing because boy, you and I have had more than our fair share of AFGOs.

So tell us about that. 

Lisa Keefauver: So an AFGO stands for “Another Fucking Growth Opportunity.” And this is something that my mom taught me, and it was in the wake of this horrific thing that happened to me, as I shared, right, that I was assaulted. I was kind of in a therapy, which in retrospect wasn't particularly helpful, and then some other bad thing happened way minor from that.

And I was sort of in my, why is this happening to me, and you know, and further down as I'm sort of processing it, she said to me, not in this way of hurry on and move on, but, Sometimes what's helpful is to name and recognize this thing happened to me. It didn't happen for a reason. That's a BS statement.

Don't ever say that to anybody. I find it extraordinarily cruel and not helpful in my opinion. And there's my favorite word. And what we do with the result of that experience is up to us. [00:21:00] Right? So how do we then show up in the world and pivot in some way to grow, to heal, to be of service to other people?

Again, we're not glad that the hard thing happened. You know, when something hard happens, we're very quick to toxic positivity in this country. So I want to be very mindful that I'm not trying to toxic positivity your way out of your thing. I think we need to hold space and be with both for ourselves and the people we love the I'm sorry, this happened to you. This fucking sucks. 

Jessica Fein: Oh, well, let's get to that. Because that's my favorite. This is your empathy cards. And you have to make sure people understand that it's not a line of sympathy cards. This is empathy cards. And the most popular one. Says, quote, there's nothing I can say except this is fucking bullshit and it sucks so much.

I mean, that's the best card ever.

Lisa Keefauver: You know what's great? A couple of years ago when something different happened, not my current cancer diagnosis, but something else happened. I had a friend send me one of my own cards. It was just like such a. full circle moment. It was amazing. [00:22:00] So I think we need to be there.

I think we need to learn culturally, you know, before we get to the AFCO, we need to learn both turning inward towards ourselves with empathy and compassion, but also externally to the people who love us. We need to stop trying to jump into the fix it mode. We need to stop trying to jump into the toxic positivity and we need to just name it.

This is hard and you don't have to swear if you don't want to. This is hard. This sucks. I hate that you're having to be in a world I would say to you, Jessica, without your child, right? So we can say that and we can start there and we might not benefit from living there. So at some point, and that's going to look different for all of us.

We might say to ourselves, and this is the acronym that I'll do to myself. When I've heard my story over and over again, when I've sat in the suck, you know, and acknowledge the pain, I say to myself, okay, what's the AFGO here? It's like a question I ask myself, and sometimes I go, I'm not ready for the AFGO, and I shove it down, but it's an invitation, I would say.

It's an invitation.

Jessica Fein: Oh, well, an invitation, and that's part of [00:23:00] the whole structure of your book, and I love that, that you have invitations and actions throughout the book. So it's not just, you know, here I am pontificating, you're really inviting the reader in, and you write about the grieving brain, and then you give the steps that readers can take to nourish the brain while grieving. Tell us some of those steps. 

Lisa Keefauver: Yeah. And I want to just thank you for noticing that. I really, it was important to me to write this book. I really wanted to sort of be your wise best friend. 

Jessica Fein: I think you are. 

Lisa Keefauver: Because I wanted the book I didn't have and the person I mean I loved my friends and if they're listening bless you all but they were living in a grief illiterate world that had no experience right so I wanted it to be invitational I wanted to be your wise best friend meaning I did bring my own social work training my own narrative theory clinical training to bear.

I brought the wisdom and training and expertise of other people, but I didn't want it to be a scientific book. I wanted it to be that warm, comforting. I wanted to be the [00:24:00] person who shows up for you basically and says this fucking sucks. 

Jessica Fein: And you're also not only the wise best friend, but you're also like, just like the funny cousin too, you know, you're just, you're the whole family.

So tell us some things that we can do. I love the idea of nourishing the brain. I think that's a beautiful concept. 

Lisa Keefauver: Let me just say, these are some offerings. I hate a top 10 list and I hate a top five, so you're going to not hear them from me. And here are some things that we know.

We know from science and we also just know from our lived experience that Grief causes us to be in a chronic state of stress and a stuck stressor state, which has physiological impacts on our cognitive functioning and our physical functioning, emotional functioning, which, by the way, all things are connected.

We are not a separate head from body, but That's a story for another day. So some of the things we can do to nourish our brain in the wake of loss, and I say this knowing that it's not easy for everyone. The number one thing is sleep. Now, for some grievers, they might feel like they're oversleeping. And I would say, [00:25:00] sleep away.

Do the best that you can. If you can't sleep, think about what are the ways in which you're setting up your sleep zone? Is there no blue light in your room? You know, do you have soft music? Do you have sense? Do you have something comforting? Do you have darkened window panels? Sleep is huge. The second, and maybe actually the first, I'm going to split the order, is stop expecting your brain to work like it did pre-grief.

Right, when we talked about the harms of this grief story that we have and why grief is such a sneaky bitch because it doesn't match our lived experience, one of the things I think we need to all come to grips with to nourish our brain is to stop expecting our brain in the early phase of grief, not forever, to function the way that it did.

So if we can gift ourself that slack. Okay, so then what does that mean? That means you're going to be setting timers and alerts on your digital phone. You're going to be setting up automatic payments. If friends want to show up and help, these are great things other people can do. Can they get your bill pays on auto pay?

I used sticky notes, [00:26:00] wall calendars, digital reminders, and I still didn't show up for things and also just start saying no to some things. Your brain only has so much capacity in this time because it is you. being bombarded with the stressor. So shifting your expectation, setting up these alerts, reducing the amount to the degree that you can.

I still had a kid I had to raise, right? So it's not like I could just be like, see ya, you know, I'm just going to lay in bed for a month, but the job that that wanted me back, which I went back to. So shift your expectations, start to set up those reminders. around you, set up things automatically, get some sleep, water and nutrition, and lack of vitamins and minerals can impact again, the ways in which you are able to sleep or not the ways in which you're able to function.

So when people want to help, and it's so hard to know what you want, Try to get as specific as you can. What is the healthy food that you want them to bring? Maybe it's not the lasagna casserole that everybody keeps bringing you that your freezer is full of. Maybe it's a [00:27:00] Whole Foods run and get me all the produce that you can or bring me the smoothies or whatever it is, right?

So that's another thing. Again, these things simple and trite. But because Our physiology, our neurophysiology, is so impacted by our grief and loss. We really want to nourish ourselves in all the ways that matter. I hate to say this, give up alcohol if you can. I know I'm such the bearer of bad news. Sorry.

Jessica Fein: Yeah, people can't see my face right now, but it is not happy. 

Lisa Keefauver: Alcohol is a depressant. We know that. We know that the guidelines now are zero is the amount of alcohol that is healthy for you. Look, you do you. If you used to have five, have four. If you used to have four, have three. Make some decisions. It makes it hard for us to sleep.

And again, sleep is that most critical thing that we need to have any kind of buoyancy, right? You might recall this or the listeners might be recalling this. In those early days and weeks and months, maybe even years of grief, we're like a [00:28:00] nothing to make us snap. And so when we nourish ourselves, we're kind of just bringing in that tension a little bit because we're going to have more ups and downs.

We're going to have to sort through their clothes. We're going to have to maybe sell the house. We're going to have to have difficult conversations with extended family members. We're going to have to face the first Christmas or Thanksgiving or Hanukkah or the birthday or the anniversary. And so when we can nourish our brain, we can kind of build in that cushion so that we have more capacity to withstand all of those other secondary losses and grief moments that are coming our way.

Jessica Fein: I love the practical advice that you're giving not only for the griever, but for the friend of the griever, for the person that cares about the griever, when they want to be useful. 

Lisa Keefauver: Helping your grieving friend make decisions, helping them understand when some decisions don't need to be made right away, and when they have to make some.

Our decision making is impaired in that state because of the cognitive overload on our body. So even as a friend, if you're a close friend, you got to know the [00:29:00] relationship, you know, say you've got a lot of decisions to make or things to sort through. Can I sit with you? And maybe we can talk about them out loud.

You know, we usually think about casseroles and like flowers and the, okay, stop with the flowers and the things, right? But I think it's some of those day to day practical, can I just come sit and help you sort through mail? And figure out which things are a priority and which things not. You would be surprised if you haven't experienced profound loss, how the simple everyday tasks of life feel absolutely impossible.

Jessica Fein: And as you point out, you're not only being called to do the simple everyday tasks of life, but for many of us, we're also doing all these other things associated with our loss. I'm still, I had so many estates that I'm managing between, you know, losing my sister. I had her estate and my parents estates.

And I'm telling you, there are still things years later because there's just so much. 

Lisa Keefauver: There's so much it's to your point. So there's the everyday things that we took for granted that we did easily in the before that we still have to do now in the [00:30:00] after that are excruciatingly difficult. And then there's all these other lists, we have to go get copies of death certificates, and we have to change our status on every credit card and mortgages and solar house and estates or whatever you have to mention.

Jessica Fein: The interpersonal kerfuffles that tend to happen. Yeah. I have yet to have a significant loss and I have had very many where there hasn't been some surprising interpersonal strife. That's a whole other thing that bubbles up. 

Lisa Keefauver: Absolutely. Again, because those people too grew up in a culture illiterate around grief, and they cultivated grief beliefs by the behaviors that they witnessed or didn't in their families, and so we are not equipped writ large. I mean, some of us are to really show up in that way. And how could we have been in a way we can have some global compassion for ourselves? And I say all of this around here in the West, because I think other cultures and other places do it better. So how could we have known any better?

And now that we know it's a problem, we got to do something about it. 

Jessica Fein: Right. And you're talking about grief beliefs, but tell us about grief thieves.

Lisa Keefauver: [00:31:00]Ooh, grief thieves, you all know them, and sometimes you've been them, I'm gonna say that. This is another, you'll notice when you read my book or if you listen to my podcast, I love a good metaphor, I love a good saying, I love a good acronym, because again, back from my narrative training, I think when we have these big complex subjects, it's so hard to wrap our brains around, and when we have metaphor, it's a way at getting at something that we can understand.

So I came up with this term years ago, the grief thief, and really it's the ways in which other people. And sometimes ourselves. Get into comparisons around hierarchy and ranking. Well, at least, okay, any sentence that starts with at least, no, just don't. I wrote a whole article about that one. Exactly. No, at least, right?

You know you're being thieved when someone starts the conversation with at least. So grief thieving can happen again from, you know, people not knowing any better. Sometimes they do, but a lot of times they don't. It happens when we find ourselves or others rank ordering our [00:32:00] grief. in comparison, as if there isn't enough ocean for all of our grief, which there is.

We know we're being grief thiefed when we are hearing the words should or shouldn't. Right? You should be better by now. You shouldn't be talking about your person in public. You should and shouldn't, shouldn't, shouldn't. And by the way, sometimes the grief thief is in the mirror. Much of the work that I do when I work with folks one on one, in particular, is helping them become a should detective.

What are the ways in which we are harming ourselves because we are bringing that false story and sort of holding ourselves to that standard, right? So grief thieving comes in those ways. They come in that gratitude con, I call it, and the toxic positivity sham. That's when we're being grief thieved. When you want to talk about your person again and someone says, shouldn't you move on already and don't you be grateful?

I had a friend who lost their young son and they had a baby on the way and when the baby was born, everybody said, You should stop talking about your son and you should be grateful that you still have a child, which I know, right? [00:33:00] We can't believe again. I don't know that person. Maybe they thought they were being helpful, but that's the ways in which we make things binary again.

So to that person, that mother couldn't hold both the grief over her son and the joy and gratitude of having her new daughter. So grief thieving comes in all these ways. They come from other people at us. I'm going to admit, I have definitely, I'm sure looking back, grief thief, other people, and I'm not sure I've met a griever yet who hasn't grief thief themselves.

One of the invitations that I think I shared in the book and I share all the time in my work with people is to start to become just aware. It starts with that mindfulness practice of noticing, not judging, so sort of listening inward. Either the words you're saying out loud to your friend, I should be doing this, I shouldn't be doing that, or just that inner dialogue that we have going on all the time.

That grief thief lives in our head. They're very bossy. and rude. They have no compassion, right? And to start to just notice, how do we know? Ooh, I just heard myself say, [00:34:00] should is a keyword, but is a keyword that you notice when you're grief thieving, right? Those are some of our should and the inverse shouldn't and but are some of the signs that you're being grief thieved and it doesn't do us any service.

It doesn't help us actually feel better. People often do it because we're trying to hurry the person out of their pain. They grief thieve you because they're trying to sometimes, you know, make the pain go away. But actually that grief is going to be there. The emotions are going to be there and they need to be seen and witnessed.

And so we need to find a way to interrupt the burglary that's happening. Be with our emotions, be with our thoughts, be with our feelings. We don't have to stay there, but we have to allow them to move through and then we can move on. 

Jessica Fein: How can we respond when somebody's grief thieving us? And it's not only things like, “at least.”

Sometimes, I think there's a very inappropriate line of questioning and what I mean by this is for [00:35:00] example My sister died from lung cancer. I would say that more than 50 percent…

Lisa Keefauver: I know where you're going I know where you're going.

Jessica Fein: Right? For those in the audience who might not know where I'm going when they hear that they will ask me the question “Did she smoke?” same exact thing as saying if somebody dies in a car crash.

“Was she wearing her seat belt?” What do you say to that?

Lisa Keefauver: You know, I think I talk about this a little bit in the book and like knowing your needs and knowing who's got your back and part of what you're going to unfortunately walk through as you move through your grief is you're going to start to discern who's capable of having your back and who isn't? Who's worth you educating them versus telling them off versus ignoring them? Those are kind of, in a way, our three choices. This is your little, you know, cups game that you get. You get to shuffle around which thing, and part of that depends on how valuable is this relationship prior to the loss, right?

If this is a passerby, if this is a somebody you might choose to ignore or tell off. 

Jessica Fein: And it's amazing how those casual people will have the gall to ask these kinds of questions. 

Lisa Keefauver: [00:36:00] Unbelievable. And that's your choice. So I don't have a stake in the game as far as what you decide to do. But I'm just reminding all of us that we do have that opportunity.

Those people, I will say again, this is an and. I'm going to give humanity the benefit of the doubt eight times out of ten, let's say. That person doesn't recognize it as harmful, but what they're doing, where that's coming from for most of us when we've said that, and maybe even you and I have said some dumb version of that.

Is we have an innate capacity in our body to survival, right? That's neurophysiologically wired in us. And so when the unimaginable happens, when our worst fear comes true, because you now are a walking embodiment of their worst fear coming true. All of us grievers are there walking, especially when it's like a, like when I showed up in groups with my girlfriends who are married, I am their worst nightmare.

You probably are the other parents in your life's worst nightmare. And so those dumb [00:37:00] things that people say come from this subconscious place of I need to find a reason why this unreasonable thing happened so that I can make my psyche feel comforted that it's not going to happen to me. I really think it comes from that deep rooted place.

It could come from other ignorant things that they've learned from their family. And, you know, I'm not saying that some people aren't more conscious about it, but I really do think that it comes from that place. Now, regardless, wherever it came from, now they said the stupid shit, and now they've put you on the spot.

They've hurt your feelings. They've made you feel othered, which happens a lot to us in our grief. We feel very othered and isolated. Then we can choose to educate, tell off or ignore. So we know ignore, we're just going to um, turn or whatever, leave the conversation. Tell off, use one of the many favorite expletives I offer you in the book to do that.

And that's going to feel good in the moment and it might be a feel good in the long term too. If it's somebody that you previously thought you wanted to keep in your life, [00:38:00] it's a friend, it's a sibling, it's a coach, it's a mentor, it's somebody, then you have the choice, do I, either then or later on, Come back around and say, I wanted to have a conversation with you.

You said this thing. You asked this question, and I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't know that that's a really harmful thing to say to a griever, and that was a really hurtful thing to say to me. When you're showing up to be in my presence right now in my grief, I really need you to hold space for me and to not make it about making things okay for you.

Jessica Fein: And I would add to that, which I love that language, I would add, if you are on the receiving end, because you, like we all have done, have been the person who said something that was hurtful, and the person comes back to you in the spirit of educating, right? That's a gift. That person trusts you. That person cares about you.

Receive it that way. 

Lisa Keefauver: Such an important point, Jessica. And I really want you to say that because we aren't all so good. One of the many other things we're not really good at in our culture is taking [00:39:00] constructive criticism. And we've mistaken it to be an attack on our personal value, our values, who we are to the core.

So if you are the person that the griever has taken the time, which means they care about you to educate you and not just tell you off or ignore you, then treat that as a gift that they are not saying you are a bad person. They're saying this thing that you said or this action that you took was harmful.

And I care about you enough to educate you and to ask you to not do it again because I want to keep this relationship. So you're my gristle because we all do. And you might want to go into, well, I didn't mean it. It's just because you're too sensitive, all the gaslighting things that people say back. And then again, you still have that choice, educate, tell off or ignore.

At that point, I would love to use, like, talk to the hand. I'm really dating myself. Talk to the hand and just interrupt. I hear you're trying to make reasons or excuses for why you said that. That's not really what I'm trying to do here. I'm trying to let you know I care about you and that's harmful, and it doesn't really matter to me what your motives were.

I need you to [00:40:00] understand that it hurt. And I would like you to not do that. 

Jessica Fein: Another thing that you talk about in the book that really, really resonated with me is this idea of how time feels different in grief. And it's so interesting. So we just had the two year anniversary of my daughter's death. And I was so caught between two years, like it feels like two weeks and also two years.

It feels like 10 years. Like I felt both of those things. Why is time so weird in grief? 

Lisa Keefauver: Oh, well, a couple of reasons come to mind. Back to what we were talking about earlier, again, here and now, that those functions in our brain are distorted, as Mary Frances O'Connor talks about it. I'm giving her free plugs all the way to the bank here, but The Grieving Brain is just a phenomenal book if you haven't read it or follow her work.

So there's just the cognitive impact that our brain isn't functioning in that way. But also we go into shock and denial for many of us, dissociation, so we are really not embodied. And so early on, in a way, we are sort of floating in a parallel [00:41:00] universe. It's like you're in Vegas or something. And the world sounds like Charlie Brown's teacher going out there.

It's kind of wah, wah, wah. And so our relationship to time early on is, in a way, in this weird, slow motion. Right? Because it's all like we're just in this veil or in the soup. I'm mixing all of my metaphors. And then as we start to arrive at our anniversaries, maybe the anniversary of the death or that first holiday, et cetera, early on when we are moving out of maybe that initial shock or denial, we're desperate to just not feel the depth of this pain.

And so again, we're not really present to time passing. We're just desperately reaching kind of to this imagined future, which we can't really imagine, where we won't be in minute to minute pain and suffering, right? Then we somehow arrive maybe at the one year or the two year anniversary, and time becomes difficult and different in this other way because now maybe we're having a minute or an hour or a day or a week where we're not consumed.

Right? With pain and maybe we're even having joy and delight in our lives. [00:42:00] But now the distance from our lived experience, if again, with it's a death loss, with that person on earth feels So far away, but maybe also so close and we feel a kind of conflict between how much time has passed Because on the one hand maybe the day to day depth of our pain and grief is not as intense And we've come to understand or believe that our relationship with that person is so innately tied with our suffering and our aches and pains that that distance now feels problematic.

How do I begin and carry forward that person being in relationship with them over time from that distance? Because now we have chapters in our story that we're living into that are that person isn't here in that way. And so we feel sort of at once grateful and at once resentful sometimes as time passes.

Time also becomes problematic for us, by the way, because not only are we good at showing up for people early on, we're especially horrible at keeping [00:43:00] showing up for people. Time becomes even more cruel because we feel maybe not as consistently, but we can feel the intensity of our grief as we once did in the beginning.

But everybody else has moved on. On, so to speak, and they assume you have to, and that's another reason why time is a real tricky, tricky thing for us in grief. 

Jessica Fein: So true. And this is my PSA. If you have photographs, videos, letters, memories, and you are wondering whether or not to share it with the person who's experiencing the loss, share it.

And I had this happen twice. As I mentioned, the other day was the two year anniversary and two people reached out to me and one was a photograph and one was a video, neither of which I had seen. It is the biggest gift because we cannot make new memories with our person. All of our memories are done. But when we get a picture or we get a video, we get to imagine this new thing.

We can either remember it if we were there, or we can have a memory of something we [00:44:00] didn't get to personally experience. And so it is such a beautiful thing to do. And so again, it's my PSA, if you're wondering whether or not to do it, please do it. 

Lisa Keefauver: Absolutely do it. Say their name, share a story, ask them if they want to share a story.

I would add to that PSA, my phone is absolutely chock full with the death anniversary of everybody I'm close to. So the moms, the sisters, the cousins, the children, put that in your calendar because whether it's two years or 10 years, this year is going to be the 13th anniversary of my husband's death. I just passed the 10th anniversary of my friend Joe's death and very few people reach out.

And I wanted to, and I wanted, in fact, I even did a Facebook post. I was like, can people please write on here all the stories, all the memories and whatever. And it was even that people didn't really show up in the way that I asked them to, right? Or couldn't, but they might have, if that had been a practice that we started early on.

So show up, share the pictures, share the memories, say the name, say the story and put it in your calendar. And all you have to do at the [00:45:00] very bare minimum. Ascend a text and say, I'm holding you in my heart on this day. 

Jessica Fein: I love how much useful advice there is for the person who cares. There's just so many tools.

I mean, we can only barely scratch the surface. Everybody needs to go out and read this book. But what are three tools that can help grief suck less? 

Lisa Keefauver: Yeah, I know. I love that. That was the title of my TED Talk. Why knowing more about grief can make it suck less. Ooh, top three. Okay, here we go with our top three, top ten list.

My number one, honestly, is working on ditching the beliefs that you're holding yourself to account. Like, really being that should detecting. Like, how can you start to have grace, compassion, right? For me, that comes with a mindfulness practice. A mindfulness meditation practice. Just mindful noticing. I teach it when I'm on stages, when I'm in one on one, when I'm in workshops.

Mindfulness practice has been one of the most useful tools because much of why we're suffering in our grief is because we [00:46:00] are caught up in those shoulds, we are caught up in the stories, we are caught up in the ways in which we're trying to resist pain, and a mindfulness practice can really allow us to be with ourselves as we are to bring compassion, self compassion inward, right?

So that's a kind of mindfulness practice that allows us to sort of work against those grief beliefs that are causing us harm. The second is find community in ritual in whatever way you can. It could be a Facebook group that could be people who listen to the same podcast or a book club. You know, I'm encouraging folks to have a book club discussion around my book.

It could be going to a support group. It could be a part of being a part of a nonprofit or charity, but find community and ritual. We've really lost that in our culture. I mean, we all live alone, separate and siloed, and grief is meant to be held in community. So find ways to do that. Colin Campbell's book, Finding the Words, he talks a lot about that.

I really love the way he reminds us about the power of community and ritual. So I think that's maybe number two. And the [00:47:00] third is really around care. back to that nourishing where we started our conversation. You're remembering that grief is physical, cognitive, emotional, relational, and spiritual. So when you are thinking about how do I need to care for myself and my grief, take a look at those five pillars of those five domains in our lives.

And just be curious, always be curious, not judgmental of where you might be suffering the most. And then take the next five pillars. best step to alleviate that suffering in a little way. Don't have to be overwhelmed. You don't have to do it all. What's the next best step? Start close in as David White, the poet says.

Jessica Fein: And I'm glad that we got back to curiosity because you mentioned it at the beginning and we said we need to get back to it. So like I said, we scratched the surface, but listening to this, people understand how much wisdom there is here and how accessible everything, the way you speak, the way you write.

I'm just grateful that we were able to spend this time together. Thanks so much for being here. 

Lisa Keefauver: Thank you so much for having me, Jessica. This [00:48:00] was just such a beautiful conversation. I'm so glad to be in your company. 

Jessica Fein: Here are my takeaways from the conversation with Lisa. 

Number one, turning towards our hard thing and holding space for it can open the door to a new relationship with gratitude and wonder. Not in a Pollyanna way, but in a both and way. 

Number two. Grief is sneaky because it just sneaks up on us and bumps heads with our illusion that we have control. 

Number three. Our cultural story about grief bears little resemblance to the reality of grief, which is another reason it feels so sneaky.

Number four. When we make our grief beliefs visible, we can Marie Kondo them and get rid of the beliefs that are no longer serving us. 

Number five, sometimes the best thing we can say is, there's nothing I can say except this is bullshit and it sucks so much. 

Number six, grief causes us to be in a chronic state of stress, which has physiological impacts on our cognitive, physical, and emotional functioning.

We can nourish our brain in the wake of loss by ditching the expectation that our brain is going to work like it did pre grief, and by prioritizing sleep, [00:49:00] eating healthfully, and reducing alcohol intake. 

Number seven. Don't be a grief thief of someone else's grief or your own. Watch out for words like, at least, and should.

Number eight, when someone says something harmful, you have a choice to ignore them, tell them off, or educate them. And if you find yourself on the receiving end of someone else's efforts to educate you, think of it as a gift. 

And number nine, be curious, not judgmental, of where you might be suffering the most. And then take the next best step to alleviate that suffering in a little way. 

As Lisa suggested, one of the best ways to expand our understanding of grief is to share information. So I invite you to take a minute and send this episode to someone you know. As always, I'd be grateful if you could rate and review the show, which is the best way to ensure people find us.

Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you next time.