Erin Allen: Good afternoon, I'm Erin Allen and this is The Rundown. 

So, grief. When you first hear the word, the natural thought is of death and dying. And a lot of us have lost loved ones in the last three years. Whether it's to complications from COVID or dealing with the death in the midst of COVID isolation and social distancing. But we've also lost other things: relationships, homes, jobs... and that general sense of comfort and normalcy. Whether we realize it or not, grief like loss and death is a part of life and we often want to avoid it. Or because of lack of experience, we don't know how to really deal with it, but really we might as well just learn to deal with it because it's one of those age old things that ain't going nowhere. I've asked one of my close friends to come and talk about how to do that. Julie Weatherhead is a grief counselor and the co founder of Got Grief House, an organization that works to engage and normalize grief. Julie, thanks for being here.

Julie Weatherhead: You're so welcome. Thanks for having me.

Erin Allen: What are you noticing about how people's experience of grief is evolving in the last few years or with your clients and with the people around you?

Julie Weatherhead: Yeah, it's been so interesting. And I guess I don't want to say good to see, right? Because we hate that we see more grief publicly right over the last two or three years, grief has become a more shared experience. And it's been in the media more. A large part because of COVID and it has triggered I think some grief that also people have experienced from earlier in their life that they realized was a little bit unaddressed, right? When we get pounded and pounded and pounded by learning about all the other people grieving and dying around us, sometimes it can trigger past experiences we've had that have either had space and time to exist or maybe they haven't. For me, somebody who has been dealing with grief for a very long time and feeling very isolated in this experience, I feel grateful. As you said, you know, this is a part of life and the more that we understand and learned about it through others or through their own personal experiences, the better we can support each other through it and accept that part of life.

Erin Allen: Yeah. Speaking of accepting that part of life, I mean, a lot of people, they're not even, you know, they don't feel like they're even at the point of acceptance, right? It is the loss or the grief has rocked their world so much that, you know, sometimes we feel like we've lost track of what we know is good for us. Can you talk about how we focus on getting to that point where we're taking care of ourselves when we're grieving?

Julie Weatherhead: Yeah. Um there's a saying that grief is love with nowhere to go, right? Which to me, I don't love that saying in the sense that you know, there is still love there and it is still flowing. It just might not look as pretty as it did before, right? It might come out in tears, it might come out in anger, um, in bitterness. But the hope is that through time we can understand that we're allowed to have those certain feelings and we're allowed to make space. We need to make space for those feelings to process them to hold them. And then we need to learn about their own grief and our own self of "how do I transition to the other feelings and the other emotions and the other experiences that exists for me in this world." And also understand how do we feel the feelings and also find the people who we can lean into a little bit.

Erin Allen: So speaking of other people, you know, you have those relationships. You have people that maybe are trying to support you through your grief, and then there are those people that you try to connect with or try to connect with you who feel a little bit awkward still, talking about grief with their loved ones. They want to be there for you. But maybe their grief... Your grief triggers them or they just don't know how to have that type of grief conversation. What would you offer to folks struggling with that?

Julie Weatherhead: So the thing I would challenger and suggest people to think about is, well, what are your strengths as a friend? Right? How are you in relationship with this person? Are you funny? Like, can you help this person experience these other emotions that are going to be a little bit hard to come by? Um, are you really thoughtful? Are you, do you like to send flowers for no reason at all? Right? They can be flowers in memory of the person that they lost, or they could just be thinking of you. I love you, right? If you know how they're feeling, which that's another point to address as well as sometimes we might assume, say we don't know the person I extremely well but we do care about them and may be, we would assume that their heartbreak and broken or they might need things that they don't actually need. So another suggestion I would have is to ask and say, "hey, you know, I heard that you lost, you know, your so and so, your person, how are you doing letting it go from there? How are you doing with that today?"

Erin Allen: Just focusing on that open ended question and just letting them... yeah.

Julie Weatherhead: And remembering that you are not saving anybody from anything. You're just supporting them through it.

Erin Allen: That's really helpful Julie. It takes the pressure off because I think a lot of people, especially like for me, there was a time when I had never experienced grief before and so I'm like, I don't know how to engage with this. And for me, a lot of it was thinking like, if I'm talking to this person about grief, that means I have to try to make them feel better, and I don't know how to do that. So how do I even enter that? And I think you're saying that it's not that serious that you have to actually make them feel a way. Really you just need to lean into what you already know about your friendship with them or your relationship with them. However, that exists. Um, I think also when we're so wrapped up in our grief, it could sometimes feel hard to think about how other people are experiencing things and the fact that those people can be all around you, but sometimes they are your own children. Um, I know that you work with young people and I really want to bring children into this conversation because I don't think that we, I'll speak for myself... I don't think about the young people in how they're grieving as much as I think, you know, it would serve them to. What has your experience been with this? 

Julie Weatherhead: Oh man, huge! It's been a huge experience, a life experience. My personal experience with this was my brother died very suddenly when I was 13 years old in the house with me and my mom. He had a brain tumor nobody knew about. It happened right before Christmas. So the death anniversary, which is, it's been 25 years, which is insane to think about time like that. But it's been 25 years since he died and - man, was experiencing grief and trauma, because they can be one and the same, but there are also separate. I got to see my, my mom and my dad grieve so hard. And the last thing you want to do is add on top of that, that's how I felt, right? And from my experience, I know that's how a lot of young people feel, right? And then there's assumptions that young people are resilient and oh yeah, they're back to school. No big deal. Yep. They're going back to their activities, everything's fine. Children deserve space to grieve. And it's so difficult because again, when we open up those channels of emotion that can come with grief that are so overwhelming, it's hard to know how to be with it.

Erin Allen: Um, you know, oftentimes when we lose something or someone, there's kind of two ways that I hear people talk about it. It's either sad language and then there's this more positive kind of celebration of life approach. Recently, I was talking to a homey and he said he went to a divorce party. So this is like the loss of a relationship and this person is celebrating you know, this loss. Um I think we often think of grief as being so sad, but is it really true? Does it have to be sad?

Julie Weatherhead: So yeah, I love that you'd bring that up, right? There's a celebration of life. My mom's mantra right after my brother died was we were so lucky to have him as long as we did, right? She just kept saying that over and over again and that can be something that can be helpful to get us through. And then yeah, there is the extreme sorrow and there's the both/and. We can have the both and we can have the celebratory, the joyful um, strong moments. And sometimes that's the danger too - is when we see somebody being quote unquote "strong," oh, you're so strong, you're so strong. Right? Sometimes we forget to, as they say, check in on your strong friends. To understand that there may be some things that they're feeling a certain type of way about, you know? So I think leaving room for the both/and, and also understanding that everybody grieves differently. And people, again, it's not about talking, it's about creating. It's about releasing the energy that you have, period from all of these emotions that have swelled up in your chest, in your body.

Erin Allen: I love that energy framing. That it's an energy. It doesn't have to be a conversation. Energy manifests in so many different ways. Well, Julie Weatherhead is a grief counselor and co-founder of Got Grief House. Julie, thank you as always for sharing your heart and sharing your energy.

Julie Weatherhead: Thanks for the opportunity and this really brings joy to my heart. So thank you so much to everybody listening and go tell somebody you love them today, just for the heck of it. 

Erin Allen: I love you Julie.

Julie Weatherhead: I love you too.

Erin Allen: And that's it for The Rundown today. I'm Erin Allen, I'll talk to you bright and early tomorrow morning.

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