We read your letters! Thank you for writing in.

In the middle of our break, Tracy and I decided to check in with you all — our beautiful, weird community of grief navigators. This week’s episode felt like sitting down with a cup of tea (Celestial Seasonings… or is it Celestial Seasons? Discuss.), wrapping ourselves in a blanket, and wading into the deep waters of your stories. And let me just say, your letters reminded me why this podcast exists: to hold space for the strange, complex, and often contradictory experience of grief.

The Gifts in Your Stories

One listener’s letter hit me like a freight train. They shared the weight of losing both a sister and a mother, navigating the BRCA1 mutation, and the constant tension between health anxiety and resilience. It was a profound reminder that grief is rarely a tidy, single-layered thing—it stacks and twists, pulling in fears, hopes, and even our very DNA. Tracy and I both resonated deeply with the letter-writer’s efforts to make sense of these layered losses while grappling with their own mortality. Their story illuminated how grief doesn’t just live in the past but shapes how we move through the present and imagine the future.

And then there was Marco, who shared the quiet heartbreak of watching his daughter build a life far from home. Grief, in this case, wasn’t about a death—it was about the loss of a dream. His honesty cracked open such an important conversation about how grief shows up in the spaces we least expect, like between the lines of a happy moment. Sometimes, we grieve not just for what’s gone but for what we hoped might someday be.

And let’s not forget the woo-woo. One listener found solace and healing through a life-changing connection with someone who bridges this world and the next. Tracy and I are huge fans of stories like this because they remind us how vast and mysterious the human experience is. Plus, we might now be on the hunt for someone who can teach us how to connect with the other side. (Applications are open!)

We also heard from a listener who wrote in about the tender losses that sometimes follow a death - when we have to give up someone’s beloved things because we don’t have room for them. There is a special ache that comes from being able to handle someone’s books, or clothes, or favorite kitchen gadgets after they’re gone, and there’s a special pain that comes from having to let any of these things go.

Announce! Announce! 

With the holiday season barreling toward us like a runaway gravy boat, we also took some time to tackle the unique challenges grief brings to this time of year. Many of you shared how the holidays magnify loss, dredging up a mix of anticipation and dread. You’re not alone in feeling this tension—it’s okay to want the warmth and magic of the season while also bracing for the ways it won’t be the same.

If you’re someone who struggles with the holiday season for any reason - grief, loneliness, or anything else. I know how easy it is to pour all your energy into crafting the “perfect” celebration, as though a beautifully decorated table might somehow fill the empty chairs around it. Spoiler: It won’t. What it can do, though, is leave you exhausted and disconnected. 

We have help! 

First of all, we have put together an online community for you! It’s called the Hope Circuit and in this space we have live zoom meetings, workshops, and resources to help you through any moment in your life - griefy or otherwise. Here’s what you get if you sign up: 

• 2 open forum sessions a month

• 2 movie nights a month

• 2 journal sessions a month 

• 4 accountability meetings with Tracy a month 

What are you waiting for? Sign up here: https://hopecircuit.circle.so/checkout/all-access 

As a part of the Hope Circuit, we also hold pop up workshops. Tracy and I are teaming up for a live holiday survival workshop on December 14th to help you build a holiday toolkit—practical tips for boundaries, connection, and finding moments of joy amidst the hard stuff. Sign up here: https://hopecircuit.circle.so/c/holiday-survival-toolkit-workshop/?sort=asc and bring your favorite cozy beverage!

Let’s Keep Grief Weird Together

The letters you’ve shared with us are a testament to the messy, beautiful truth of grief: It’s never just one thing. It’s everything, all at once. And that’s what makes it so deeply human.

If this episode resonated with you—or if you have your own story, question, or woo-woo experience to share—drop us a line. We’re building Season 2 as a space to dive even deeper into the uncharted territory of grief. Let us know what you want to hear, learn, or explore, and we’ll make it happen.

Until then, keep grieving weirdly and wonderfully. And maybe bake those cookies in the freezer before it’s too late.

With love and a healthy dose of weirdness,

Thank you for listening, sharing, and grieving with us.

Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!

For our paid subscribers, here’s the video version of our podcast!
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

And, SCENE. We made it through a whole season of Keep Grief Weird! In celebration of the end of the season, we made a recap wrap-up episode for you. Look at all these topics we traveled through this year:

Keep Grief Weird- Season 1:

1- Tracy’s Grief Origin Story

2- MC’s Grief Origin Story

3- Grief Waves

4- The First Year

5- Death Anniversaries

6- The Stuff

7- Disenfranchised Grief

8- Music & Grief (Tracy’s fave!)

9- Grief Brain (MC’s fave)

10- Grief Types (Tracy’s fave!)

11- Grief Models

12- On Healing, Where to Begin

13- Grief is Both/And

14- What No One Told Us

15-Grief & Other Relationships

16- Listener Letters

17- Only the Good Die Young

18- Myths about Grief

19- Finding Meaning

As we close the chapter on season one of Keep Grief Weird, we wanted to pause and reflect on what we’ve explored together over the past several months. In this recap, we wanted to take a moment to revisit the key themes we've uncovered and share some final thoughts on the strange, messy, beautiful experience of grief.

Grief Is Not Linear

One of the most important takeaways from this season is the understanding that grief is not a linear process. The traditional five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) often are packaged up with a misconception that grief is something we can move through in a tidy, predictable way. Check the boxes in order and you’re done! But as we've explored throughout the episodes, grief doesn’t unfold in neat stages. It hits like waves. Sometimes it fades away and other times it comes roaring back. It’s cyclical, non-linear, and entirely unique to each person.

You might wake up one morning feeling okay and then be knocked down by a wave of sadness later in the day. You might experience moments of joy and peace, only to be swept back into the depths of sorrow. These fluctuations are not a sign that something is wrong. Instead, they reflect the natural ebb and flow of healing. Grief, as we’ve learned, has its own rhythm, and we need to give ourselves permission to move with it rather than force it into a structure that doesn’t fit.

The Myth of "Moving On"

We’ve also addressed the cultural pressure to "move on" from grief, as if it’s something we can leave behind or overcome. This myth can create unnecessary guilt and shame for those who find themselves still grappling with loss months or even years later. But here’s the truth: grief doesn’t end. It changes, it evolves, but it doesn’t go away. And that’s okay.

We talked a lot this season about how grief is like having a child. When you lose someone that you love, you are gifted this tiny being that is with you for the rest of your days. In the beginning, that tiny being is loud and disruptive. Needy and demanding. It takes up all of the space and time and you can’t quite remember who you were before they got here. And then as time goes by, they grow and you grow and you travel through a thousand stages together. Sometimes they need you less, sometimes they need you more.

This is awful feeling at first, but then it turns hopeful. The fact that our relationship with grief is lifelong means that our relationships are too. We transcend death. When we lose someone, the love we have for them doesn’t vanish. Instead, it transforms into grief, into memory, into the ways we carry them forward in our lives. Rather than "moving on," we move forward, integrating the loss into our evolving stories.

The Intersection of Grief and Joy

Another powerful theme throughout Keep Grief Weird has been the idea that grief and joy are not opposites but can, in fact, coexist. We often think of grief as a purely negative experience — dark, painful, heavy. But as we discussed in every episode, moments of joy can and do emerge even in the midst of grief. Whether it’s laughter in remembering a loved one or finding beauty in unexpected places, grief can open us up to a new kind of appreciation for life.

We’ve also explored how allowing space for joy in the grieving process can be healing. It doesn’t mean we are dishonoring our loss or minimizing the depth of our pain. Rather, it’s a reminder that we are still living, and life—despite its inevitable losses—offers us moments of connection, meaning, and even light.

Grief Is Personal and Cultural

One of the most fascinating things we uncovered this season is how grief is both a deeply personal experience and one that is shaped by cultural norms. Every society has rituals and practices around death and mourning, and these can either support or hinder our individual grieving processes. In some cultures, grief is communal and visible, while in others, there’s an expectation to grieve privately or quickly.

We spent time talking about parasocial grief—the collective mourning we experience when a public figure or celebrity dies. This phenomenon reveals how grief extends beyond personal relationships and taps into something collective. It shows that even in our individual losses, we are part of a larger community that is also reckoning with loss in its own way.

The Role of Rituals in Grief

Speaking of rituals, we also explored how rituals — both personal and communal — can play an important role in navigating grief. Whether it's lighting a candle, writing a letter, creating an altar, or participating in a memorial, rituals give us a way to externalize our grief and honor our loved ones. They create a bridge between the internal world of emotion and the external world of action, allowing us to process loss in tangible, meaningful ways.

Rituals can also help you move into active grief and out of passive grief. Throughout the season, we’ve talked about the rituals that have helped us as well as encouraged listeners to develop their own grief rituals, ones that feel authentic to their experience. This might be as simple as setting aside time to sit with your emotions or as elaborate as organizing an annual celebration of your loved one’s life. The important thing is that these rituals serve as touchstones, reminders that grief is part of the ongoing fabric of your life.

Grief in the Digital Age

One of our more contemporary explorations was the intersection of grief and technology. We discussed how social media, AI, and even holograms are changing the way we grieve. For example, we can now keep someone’s digital presence alive through their social media accounts, or even interact with AI versions of them.

While these developments can offer comfort, they also raise questions about the nature of memory and what it means to truly "let go." Is it possible to fully grieve when digital traces of a person remain so present? How do we navigate grief when technology can create the illusion that someone is still with us?

These are questions that we’re just beginning to ask, and they will continue to evolve as technology advances. But it’s clear that grief in the digital age looks different from anything we’ve encountered before.

Nostalgia Corner! It wouldn’t be an episode of Keep Grief Weird without a good ol’ fashion ramble around nostalgia corner. This week we spent some time wondering what 80’s-90’s sitcom super power we’d like to have. Do you remember these shows and this trope? Zach Morris could pause time. So could Evie. Would you rather swing on a star? Or would you rather be a robot like Vicki from Small Wonder?

Well, no one wanted to be the robot girl from Small Wonder. Although we do have AI now and robot people are a thing… I do wonder a lot what happened to that actress and what your teenage years look like when you spent pre-pubescence playing a robot in a frilly dress.

As we close out season one, we want to thank you for joining us on this journey. Our hope is that whether you’re grieving the loss of a loved one, a relationship, a job, or even a version of yourself, that Keep Grief Weird has helped you feel seen, heard, and supported in your journey.

Grief is strange, and grief is sacred. It’s a reflection of the depth of our love and the value we place on what we’ve lost. As we move into the future, let’s continue to keep grief weird — to honor it in all its messiness, to find joy in its midst, and to hold space for the ways it changes us.

Thank you for listening, sharing, and grieving with us.

Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!

For our paid subscribers, here’s the video version of our podcast!
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

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Howdy Ho, Neighbor! Anyone else remember Home Improvement? I have a story for you about the meaning of meaning.

When you do a PhD, the very last thing you have to do is write a dissertation and then defend it. A dissertation is just a book-length paper where you make a unique argument and/or present research that is intended to contribute to your field in some way. At your defense, a panel of experts and professors who have read your dissertation ask you questions designed to pull your work apart like an Oreo. They decide, based on how well you answer, whether or not to grant you your doctorate. In any defense there is something that we lovingly termed “the fuck you question.” This is less a question and more a dagger sunk directly into the heart of your research. Are you strong enough to pull it out, stop the bleed, and carry on?

Usually the “fuck you question” comes at the end of your hours-long defense. Mine came at the very beginning, when my incredibly supportive dissertation advisor asked, “what is meaning?” and then after a long pause reminded me, “if you can’t define this, your project is untenable.” Regrettably, I have to tell you that I have no idea what I said. I blacked out and bumbled through and apparently was coherent enough to have been granted my degree. That was almost ten years ago, and that question has haunted me ever since. With the help of the existentialists, here’s what I would say if I was asked today:

Meaning is a thing we make. It is work of art that we place on top of life’s events to make them our own. To render them coherent, to get closure; to cope. It’s a dynamic work of art – we can go back and change it whenever we want. Add color, take it away, switch mediums entirely, turn it into a song. Meaning making is our greatest power as human beings, and it is also a crushing and relentless responsibility that we carry into all of our experiences. And, it’s a critical stage in the grieving process.

So much so that David Kessler actually added it to the original five stages or grief that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had already established (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). His book on it is fantastic, and he just came out with a workbook! Probably because he knew we were going to record an episode about him. Hi, David!

So. How do you do that? Find meaning in your grief? Let’s start with the misconceptions.

• Finding meaning is not about "finding a reason" for the loss — there is no reason for death or tragedy. You never have to find meaning in the death or the loss. The meaning to be found is in the LIFE. Theirs and yours.

• Finding meaning is not about making grief disappear but about making room for joy and life alongside the grief. This is not a step that you can (or should) rush through. It’s something that comes with time. And will shift with time.

If this whole thing still feels weird and overwhelming, that’s ok. We have ideas. Here’s some questions to get you started.

Questions about the person you lost:

• What did your loved one teach you about life, love, or yourself?

• What qualities did they have that you admire or want to carry forward in your own life?

• How did their presence shape the person you are today?

• Are there ways you can honor their memory in your daily life or special occasions?

Questions about your grief journey:

• How has this loss changed your perspective on life?

• What strengths or insights have you discovered in yourself through the process of grieving?

• Has this loss deepened your relationships with others or opened up new connections?

• Are there any ways your grief has influenced your decisions or actions for the better?

Questions about your connection:

• How can you continue your relationship with the person who has died in a meaningful way?

• What gives you a sense of purpose or fulfillment now, and how does that connect to your grief?

• What brings you comfort or peace as you navigate your loss, and how can you lean into that more?

Nostalgia Corner!

It wouldn’t be an episode of Keep Grief Weird without a conversation about nostalgia, would it? This week we talked American Girl Dolls and Dollhouses.

Check out this super rad dollhouse I had when I was a kid. (Listen to the episode for the story about how and why I smashed it in the driveway). Those lights all worked and you can’t see it but there was a blue convertible in the garage. It was straight up magic.

We also talked about American Dolls. Why, exactly, were we all so very obsessed with these? Who knows. Did you have one?

We’ve got one more episode this season, so stay tuned! We loved keeping grief weird with you. And we’d love to hear what this episode brought up for you!

Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!

For our paid subscribers, here’s the video version of our podcast!
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

Listen, grief is hard enough as it is without having to battle a bunch of myths about how it’s supposed to go and what you are supposed to be doing (or not doing). So that’s why we’re here today - to bust some grief myths. Some of them much worse than others.

But before we do that, we have to have a silly and completely random intro, as per usual. Most of the intro falls under the umbrella topic of “things that get a little weird in your 40’s.” So we talk compression socks, which you probably need. Oh, and here’s a pack of readers.

And we even talk the brain science behind why you always forget why you just left one room and walked into another room. Seriously, it’s a thing called “the doorway effect” and it’s fascinating.

Lemme nerd out for a sec because this might actually be helpful if this happens to you a lot and/or if you’re worried about it:

The doorway effect is just a term that describes the short-term memory loss that can occur when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another. You get up from the couch for a very specific reason, walk into the kitchen and immediately forget the specific reason. Then you stand there for a couple minutes shaming yourself and wondering if you’re losing your mind. It’s not you! Just your brain. Basically, this effect is caused by the brain creating an "event boundary" in the mind when passing through a doorway, which separates episodes of activity and files them away. 

Why on earth does this happen? Because the brain organizes information from different environments into separate networks - kitchen stuff and activities and memories go into a kitchen network, for example. This helps with overall capacity, but can also lead to loss when transitioning between spaces. 

Two extra factors that can make it happen more often -

1) If you are trying to multitask. Our brains actually cannot and do not multitask well no matter how good you think you are at it. Over time, forced multi-tasking will simply destroy your ability to pay attention. When you’re overwhelmed, your working memory gets too taxed and you start to lose your short-term memory. So if you’re doing 50 things right before getting up to walk to the kitchen, and then you do 50 more on the way, no wonder you forgot what you were doing.

2) If your environment is cluttered. Too much visual stimulation can impact your working memory too and this can make it more likely that you’re going to forget why you went into a room.

Ok, brain nerd rant over, onto the myths. I won’t re-explain them all here because, well, that’s what we do in the episode. But, if you like a list, here they are:

• Time heals all wounds

• There's a time limit to grief

• You must go through the five stages

• Kids are resilient/kids don't grieve

• The first/second year is the worst

• It gets easier (it does, it’s just not linear. Remember grief waves?)

• You can go back to being the same person once you've "healed"

• Your friends and family will be your best support

• Grief is easier when you know someone is dying

• Therapy always helps

• Grieving means you're constantly sad

At the end of the podcast, we talked about something called “third man syndrome,” which is a very well-documented phenomenon where people in life-threatening situations suddenly get help from a figure that appears out of nowhere. Usually impossibly - like in the middle of the sea - and then it’s revealed that the figure cannot have been there. 

The most famous example of this was reported by explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton during his Antarctic expedition, where he - and three other people - felt a fourth presence alongside their group, who expertly guided them home. Once they got back to land, all three men reported that a fourth man had been there helping. He had simply shown up in the middle of their emergency (again, in the middle of the sea) and no one had questioned it. 

Since then, numerous other adventurers, mountaineers, and survivors of things like 9/11 have recounted similar experiences. They often describe feeling as though an additional person was there, offering reassurance or directing them on how to escape danger. The figure might not be seen but is typically sensed or heard.

No one knows why this happens, but we think it’s cool. And weird. Like grief. Oh, and hey, maybe while we keep grief weird in our compression socks and readers, we can plan a bank heist together.

We loved keeping grief weird with you. And we’d love to hear what this episode brought up for you!

Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!

For our paid subscribers, here’s the video version of our podcast!
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

This is one of my favorite pictures of my parents. My mom would be pissed that I’m sharing this picture of her with you, but she’s not here, so here we are. This slice of life took place in August 2014. It’s one of the first photos in my favorites album on my phone. I’m sure she would say, “Why???”

Let me tell you.

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We all know the feeling — a favorite artist or actor passes away, and suddenly, it feels like we’ve lost someone we knew personally. But why do we grieve so deeply for celebrities we've never met? In our latest episode, we explore this question, digging into the emotional and cultural currents that drive our collective mourning.

Bear with us please, we start this episode with quite the ramble. We talk about Billy Joel, the controversy of the song “Only the Good Die Young,” Amy Winehouse, Avicii, and we discover live that we had no idea just how vast The 27 Club is. Seriously, go look. Thanks, Wiki!

Let’s talk parasocial relationships. Parasocial relationships are one-sided emotional bonds that people form with public figures, like celebrities, influencers, or fictional characters. While these figures don't know us personally, we feel a deep connection to them because they are consistently present in our lives. Whether it’s a musician whose songs have been a soundtrack to our lives, a TV character we’ve watched grow over several seasons, or an influencer who shares personal stories online, these relationships feel real and meaningful.

These relationships are normal! In fact, they tap into the same social and emotional processes that govern our interactions with people we know personally. Our brains are wired to recognize and respond to faces, voices, and stories, so even though we know logically that these figures don’t know us, the repeated exposure and emotional engagement create a sense of familiarity and attachment. And these relationships also offer us a lot! Parasocial relationships can provide comfort, inspiration, and a sense of connection, especially in moments when we might feel isolated or in need of a role model.

Can they become problematic? Yes. Everything can become problematic. We really only need to worry if our parasocial relationships start to replace real-life relationships or lead to unrealistic expectations about the nature of the connection.

And, we can lose parasocial relationships just like we can lose any of the other people in our lives. This grief is interesting. Like any other grief, our first impulse is to judge it. “I didn’t even know them! Why am I so upset?” But, parasocial grief, the sorrow we feel when a celebrity or public figure passes away is not only very real and important - it can also offer valuable insights into how we process grief for our real-life connections. When a famous person dies, the collective mourning we witness can mirror and even amplify the personal grief we’ve experienced or anticipate experiencing. It also gives us a chance to confront the universality of loss in a way that feels more safe — grieving someone we never personally knew, but who impacted our lives in meaningful ways.

Also, parasocial grief can shape how we approach grieving in our personal lives by providing a template for public expressions of sorrow. When we see others share memories, tributes, and communal expressions of grief online, it can help us find ideas, words and rituals for our own experiences of loss. It can also foster a sense of shared humanity, reminding us that grief is a common thread that connects us all, whether the loss is of someone close to us or a distant celebrity. This shared experience can encourage us to be more open about our feelings, seek support, and perhaps approach our own grief with greater compassion and understanding.

In other words, it’s a whole thing. We go through a whole list of the celebrity deaths that impacted us the most. You might be surprised that celebrity animals were at the top of our lists.

Among them Wally of Wally & Molly and Grumpy Cat.

We loved keeping grief weird with you. And we’d love to hear what this episode brought up for you! What celebrity death made an imprint on you? Did it help you process other grief that you’ve been through?

We would love to hear from you! How’s your grief? Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!

For our paid subscribers, here’s the video version of our podcast!
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

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This week, we read your letters! We are so grateful that you’re listening, and even more grateful that you’re writing to us. Keep it coming! If you’d like to send us a letter or a question, email us at keepgriefweird@gmail.com.

Letter #1: Earla!

Earla wrote us expressing appreciation for the podcast, and went on to share personal reflections on the importance of swearing and anger in grieving, recounting how she used these expressions after her sister's death (fuck cancer). She humorously describes how crocheted "f-bombs" became a part of her grief process.

Earla’s F-bomb:

Letter #2: Rosie!

Rosie wrote us about the recent loss of her father and talked about how she is navigating the early stages of grief. As an oncology nurse, she was prepared for the physical aspects of death but was unprepared for the emotional aftermath.

Thank you for encouraging our F-bombs, Earla & Rosie! (Bev wouldn’t be happy about that) (sorry, Bev!)

Speaking of letters and online communities, Tracy and I both grew up in the halcyon days of America Online. Did you have AOL too?

AOL chatrooms were… well, they were a lot of things. I somehow made a friend who was twenty years older than me (and totally safe, totally platonic), and Tracy met a whole husband on there!

What were your favorite chat rooms? A/S/L?

Letter #3: Valerie!

Valerie recounts her experience growing up with a single mother and the complicated thing that it is to have a strong physical resemblance to her. Since her mother's passing, Valerie has struggled with seeing her own reflection, as it reminds her too much of her mother. While she has taken steps to differentiate her appearance, such as growing her hair longer and wearing makeup, she remains conflicted about her gray hair, which she loves but now finds painful. Valerie asks if we or the listeners have had similar struggles with appearance after the loss of a parent and expresses gratitude for your podcast's unique approach to grief.

Well Valerie, we are very familiar with this. See?

Tracy & Bev have the same hands:

Tracy and Bev might look alike but their sunglasses preferences were so different.

These are the glasses that were embarrassing as a young youth in the 80s.

It’s giving…

Here’s Suzanne in sunglasses, looking like an absolute boss:

And here’s MC:

Just kidding, that’s a bunny.

Here’s Suzanne (or, wait, is that MC?) in 1965.

Who took these photos? Where did they come from? What was hell week, Mom? And can I borrow that jacket?

And Tracy also has the added layer of having a son who looks a lot like her mom. It’s pretty wild to be raising your Mom.

We also talk about aging and how looking like an aging parent can be eerie. If we were better at grief, would we be better at aging? Here’s a rare picture of Bev with her grays showing.

Forever brunette!

Thank you Earla, Rosie and Valerie for writing to us!

We loved keeping grief weird with you.

We would love to hear from you! How’s your grief? Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!

Listen, if you’re out here drinking bubbly water (is anyone not?) you have bubble preferences. Every brand has a different style of bubble and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, yes you do. The best bubbles of all the bubbles are in those glass Topo Chico bottles. I don’t know how they get those bubbles so crisp and spicy out there in Monterrey, Mexico, but there’s nothing like it.

Hold on. What on earth does this have to do with grief? Well nothing, except that when you’re grieving everything else in your life keeps going on. That’s one of the mercies of grief and it’s also one of the hardest things. Because you’re grieving but you’ll also find yourself drinking Topo Chico and eating tacos and doing laundry and going to work and doing your commute and raising your kids and making dinner and taking showers and talking to your friends and grieving. And sometimes you’re glad to be doing something else other than grieving and other times you’re a little bit horrified that you’re having a conversation with someone about bubbly water even though the most important person in your life just died.

It’s one of the many many reasons that grief is weird. And also one of the reasons that we start each episode in the middle of life. Because that’s where grief finds us.

As we start the episode today, Tracy tells us a little bit about the eeriness that is raising a child in grief (more on this later). One of their family traditions is to track everyone’s height on the wall in the pantry. This ritual has also become a measuring stick for grief - how long has it been since the loss, and how do we measure?

The topic of the episode today was how grief can change your other relationships. There’s so much more here to say, so this is just scratching the surface but we have some thoughts that might be helpful.

Negative Changes — 

• Grief can lead to emotional withdrawal from others as a protective mechanism. This distancing might create misunderstandings or feelings of rejection among loved ones.

• Grief can make individuals more sensitive to others' words and actions, sometimes leading to conflict. Even among grievers this can happen - conflict can come from differences in grieving styles or unmet expectations for support.

• Grief can create a potential for resentment if one person feels neglected or misunderstood during their grieving process.

Positive Changes — 

• Grief can bring people closer, fostering a deeper connection and support because the vulnerability in grief can lead to more authentic and meaningful interactions.

• The same heightened sensitivity that can lead to conflicts might also deepen empathy and understanding in certain relationships.

• Grief can introduce new relationships or strengthen less prominent ones, as people seek comfort in unexpected places. support groups or communities around loss can make you feel more connected than you were before the loss. 

What to do if you’re a griever —

Wait, are we giving grievers a to-do list on top of their grief? Yes. Stay with me! It might seem counterintuitive to think about what a griever has to do to maintain their relationships as they grieve. But since we’re all living in a society that just does not know how to do grief, that means we all have work to do. It’s really hard to lose connections in addition to the loss you’ve just suffered and here are some things you can think about that might help.

• Clear and honest communication about needs and feelings during grief. You don’t always know what you need and that’s ok! But as soon as you do (even if it’s after the fact), bring it into the room. Your loved ones likely want to help and be there for you but may feel overwhelmed and at a loss about what they can actually do or say. Also. Unspoken expectations are the seeds of future resentments.

• Consider therapy to navigate the complexities of it. Individual therapy is great support, and so is couples therapy. Even if you do not think you need it, consider this anyway. There are so many options out there and sometimes just a couple of sessions with a therapist on communication can right the ship.

• Carve out space for grief in the relationship allowing for shared mourning without overwhelming the relationship. If you’re grieving a shared loss, you can each pick 2-3 things to put on the calendar to commemorate. This enables each person to carve out time to grieve in the way that feels natural to them.

What to do if you’re supporting a griever —

You might be thinking, "Shouldn’t I just be present and let the griever lead?" Yes, absolutely. But the reality is, supporting someone in grief can be confusing and challenging, especially when you're unsure of what they need. And just like the griever, you have work to do too. This isn’t about taking over or fixing anything, but rather about being a compassionate, steady presence. Here are a few ideas that can help you support your loved one effectively.

• Offer consistent, gentle check-ins without pressure. Grievers often feel like they’re burdening others with their pain. By regularly reaching out with simple messages like, “How’s your grief?,” or “Status check!” you let them know they’re not alone without making them feel obligated to respond or share more than they’re ready for.

• Be patient with fluctuating needs and emotions. Grief is not linear. One day they might need company, and the next, solitude. Respect their boundaries and be adaptable to their changing needs, even if it’s hard to understand. This flexibility shows deep care and respect for their process.

• Help with practical tasks, but offer rather than assume. Grief can make even the simplest tasks feel overwhelming. Offering to help with things like grocery shopping, meal prep, or household chores can be a huge relief. However, always offer first instead of assuming what they need; sometimes the smallest gesture means the most, but it has to come from a place of sensitivity to their current state.

Supporting a griever isn’t about fixing their pain but being a reliable and compassionate presence in the storm.

As we wrapped up the episode, we talked about how to conjure us in a seance. Because of course. We each picked three things you’d need to access us from the beyond.

MC:

The first and most important thing is Schleeps, my bunny from childhood. (If you read Unbroken, Schleeps is the bunny that replaced bunny and I have not lost this one.)

Topo Chico, because, duh. Do I love it so much that I had a photo of it readily available on my phone? Yes, yes I do and did.

Also, chicken nuggets, because they are the perfect food. (Did I also have a picture of these in my phone? Yes. I might need to get a life.)

Tracy:

First you are going to need a DISCOBALL!

Followed by a camera! Tracy is going to come out in your photos. She’ll help you find some/capture cool light.

And you’re also going to need some TEA!

Sweet & Spicy Tea- by Good Earth

You might find a bit of her wisdom in your tea!

We would love to hear from you! How’s your grief? Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!

MC here: One of my earliest grief memories was right after my Dad’s funeral. Like, that afternoon. So many people came to the house to see us, and I was standing in the kitchen when someone came to the door. This person was a friend of my parents, and I’m sure she was very well meaning, but we had the following conversation:

Her: How are you? (grief head tilt)

Me: I’m ok.

Her: No you’re not. You just think you are. You’re in shock. In six months you’re going to feel so much worse.

Me: (stands there blinking and silent)

Seriously? Listen, I’m a firm believer that there is nothing that you can possible say in a situation like this, that we are all just doing our best and probably almost always saying the wrong thing, and that it’s the showing up that matters, not the words you string together. But I think we can all probably agree that telling someone whose father just died that it’s only going to get worse is not advisable. Right? Let’s go ahead and decide that.

As grievers who have a combined quarter of a decade of experience in grieving, we wanted to share what we wish people had told us in our earlier stages of grief. We could probably come up with ginormous lists of these, but for this episode we each shared three.

Here’s what we came up with:

MC #1: This will not take you out. You don’t need to go to war with your emotions like they’re trying to kill you. They’re not and they won’t, I promise, so just sit down wherever you are and cry for a minute.

Tracy #1: When someone dies, a part of you dies as well. You might lose your foundation, your values, your ability to take care of people, and to cheerlead for the people in your life. You’ll have to figure out how to do all of that for yourself and it’s tough.

MC #2: Whatever you are feeling is OK. You don’t need to grieve in any particular way or order. You can’t make a mistake here. If you’re sad? That’s ok. Miserable? That’s ok. Anxious? Oh look, still ok. Happy and confused about it? Yep. Also ok. No need to compare or interrogate your emotions.

Tracy #2: Grief doesn’t just apply to death, it applies to any kind of loss. We grieve often and for so many things. An old life, an old career, a lost friend, possibilities that you didn’t take. Understanding that can help you understand yourself and have compassion for your process.

MC #3: Your relationship with grief is going to change radically over time. It never goes away, but that does not mean you are always going to feel bad. The grief for the person you lose is like a new relationship. When they die that relationship begins, and it sustains. That’s kind of beautiful.

Tracy #3: Loss can sometimes isolate you from other people because part of the identity change also means that you are less tolerant of people who haven’t experienced loss. I didn’t know how that would change how I viewed or connected with other people.

What do you wish people had told you about grief? Or do you have stories about things that you wish people hadn’t told you?

Tracy here! Something weird I miss? Talking to my Mom after she did her weekly obituary readings from the newspaper. She inadvertently made me think about death a lot.

On this episode we talk a bit about anger and how it gets trapped in the body. I have been on a fitness journey for the past two years and it’s helped me process a lot of emotions and grief as I try to make better choices for myself! You can read a little more about my workout routine here!

Also: you have our permission to SCREAM. Get that anger/rage out. Practice! It might come in handy one day.

We would love to hear from you! How’s your grief? Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!

Hi Friends, MC here. When I was in the seventh grade, my English teacher told me that I was a walking contradiction. To this day I have no idea what motivated her exasperated statement, and so I have no idea what she meant. I don’t even know if she meant it as a compliment. Context cues at the time told me that it was probably not a compliment. But! She’s probably long gone and I am going to choose to reclaim it and make it one. Because one of the very hardest things that we can do as human beings is to hold two contradictory things at the same time. Like the fact that your parents did the very best they could, and you didn’t get what you needed. Like the fact that you are relieved that your loved one is out of pain and miss them with each and every molecule in your body. Like the fact that you are really grateful for that friendship and what it taught you but also never ever want to see that person again.

I like to call this the both/and. The both/and is that place of tension between opposing truths often appears in the context of grief and emotional healing. Our brains very much like to make things clear and simple - and singular. So when something happens, our brains are quick to label it. This experience was good. This other one was bad. This one over here? Huge mistake. There’s the one that proves that I’m a failure. And although some things are clear and simple and singular, many many things are not. What is much more common is that a single experience is good and bad, beautiful and awful, frustrating and generative. Learning how to hold the two opposing labels helps us to heal and to integrate the experiences.

Sounds good, but how do we do that? I’m so glad you asked. Let me show you what this looks like.

Examples of the Both/And:

When we lose someone (or something), the temptation is to either lean into the strength and resilience on offer or to collapse into permanent sadness. The both/and answer tells you that you can (and should) do both:

• Contradiction: "I am becoming a stronger person through my experiences," versus "I am profoundly sad about the loss I’ve endured."

• Integration: It’s possible to recognize that personal growth can stem from challenging experiences while still feeling the deep sadness of the loss.

It can be really confusing when we recognize that two opposing things are true at the same time and this can make us get stuck. You might be angry at someone you’ve lost and also feel deep and sustaining love for them. It might feel like the town is simply not big enough for the both of you. The both/and answer says you get to have both:

• Contradiction: "I love the person who has died" versus "I am angry at the circumstances or at them for leaving me."

• Integration: Feelings of love and anger can coexist. Loving someone doesn’t exclude the possibility of feeling anger related to their absence or the situation surrounding their departure.

When it comes to the events and circumstances that we don’t choose - loss of a job or a pet or a loved one - it is super common to get super stuck in wishing that things were different, while feeling the pull to accept so that you can move on. Guess what the both/and answer is? You guessed it!

• Contradiction: "I accept the situation as it is," versus "I wish things were different."

• Integration: One can accept a situation as it stands but still wish for things to be different. Acceptance doesn’t negate the desire for change.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy:

In my humblest opinion, DBT has kind of terrible marketing. It sounds clinical and arch and confusing and so do most of the tools it uses (behavior change analysis sounds like something you have to do once a year and dread like file your taxes). But it is a brilliant and fascinating modality that is so helpful I think it should be taught in middle school.

What the hell is it? Ok, stay with me.

DBT is a therapeutic modality built off of a model from philosophy (Hegel, to be exact). The idea was that when you had an idea and an opposing idea, if you put them together they would synthesize into a new idea that gives you a better understanding of whatever you are looking at and wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for the opposition. So basically the both/and.

When DBT is applied to grief, it begins with the understanding that it is normal to hold conflicting feelings and that these can be integrated. There are (at least) three ways this is helpful.

1. Validation and Emotional Regulation: DBT helps individuals validate their emotions (e.g., sadness, anger, gratitude) and manage them effectively, acknowledging that it's okay to feel multiple things at once.

2. Balancing Acceptance and Change: In the context of grief, DBT supports the idea that one can accept the reality of the loss while still working towards personal growth and adjustment to a new life without the loved one.

3. Cognitive Flexibility: By teaching individuals to hold and integrate opposing truths, DBT encourages cognitive flexibility, which can be particularly useful in processing the complexity of grief.

So. Maybe I am a walking contradiction. And maybe that’s a good thing.

Weekly Nostalgia Nook:

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but each episode we find ourselves wandering into some nostalgic corner and laughing about how things used to be. This is becoming a bit of a theme. This week we talked about life cereal, the game of life, and the show The Facts of Life.

The 80’s was such a weird time to be alive. Do you remember any of these oldies but goodies? What’s in your nostalgia nook?

Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!

Hi Friends, MC here! So, you’re probably here because you’ve had a loss (duh, MC). I’ve talked almost every episode (maybe like 6 times per episode) about how grief is made more difficult in our culture because we live in a grief phobic culture and grief needs to be witnessed in order to be healed. So that means you most likely need a therapist. But how on earth do you find one?

Let’s start here. What on earth should you look for in a therapist in general? First, here are a couple of general points.

• ALL the research shows that the success or failure of any psychological intervention hinges on the quality of the relationship between the therapist and patient. Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself:

  • Do you feel safe sharing without fear of judgment?

  • Do you feel like you can be open without editing yourself?

  • Do you feel heard (rather than dismissed or minimized?)

  • Do you feel safe/calm in your body?

• Bring it into the room: In general, a therapeutic relationship is one where you get to bring everything you are thinking and feeling to the table. We don’t always do this in our other relationships, so it can be foreign but also incredibly healing to do this in your relationship with your therapist. If there is something that you don’t like, or would like to do differently, say so!

  • For example: Tracy likes homework in therapy! That’s totally fine, and it’s also totally fine if you don’t want homework. If you’re like Tracy and you’re not getting homework in therapy, bring it into the room and ask!

Ok, now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s move into what therapies are most common when you’re dealing with grief. Here are some of the most common therapies used for grief. There are many more, so this is not an exhaustive list! But if you’re just getting started and want to know what is out there, here are some things:

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) -

• Goal: To identify and change negative thought patterns and behaviors. This can help people process their grief in a structured way and develop positive coping strategies.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) -

• Goal: in ACT, grief is considered a normal human emotion, and suffering comes when we do not accept these emotions. The goal of ACT is to accept things as they are rather than trying to control them.

Complicated Grief Therapy (CGT) -

• Goal: includes techniques similar to prolonged exposure (repeatedly telling the story of the death and exposure activities). The treatment also involves focusing on personal goals and relationships

Grief Groups -

• Goal: to provide a space for individuals to share their experiences with others who are also grieving. Offers mutual support, reduces feelings of isolation, and provides a sense of community.

Mindfulness and Meditation -

• Goal: to teach individuals to focus on the present moment and manage their emotions through mindfulness techniques. It can reduces stress, enhances emotional regulation, and promote a sense of peace and acceptance.

Less Commonly Suggested InterventionsArt Therapy -

• Goal: to use creative expression to help individuals process their emotions and experiences. Can provide an alternative means of expression for those who may find it difficult to articulate their grief verbally.

Ecotherapy -

• Goal: involves engaging with nature to promote healing and well-being. Also reduces stress, improves mood, and provides a calming environment for reflection and healing.

Dance/Movement Therapy -

• Goal: to use movement and dance to help individuals express and process their grief. Enhances physical and emotional expression, improves mood, and provides a sense of release.

Bibliotherapy -

• Goal: reading and discussing literature related to grief and loss. Provides insights, offers different perspectives, and helps individuals feel less alone in their experience.

Where do you even go to find a therapist? Now that you have all of this information about what’s on offer, where do you go to find it? There are lots of resources out there and many of them depend on where you live.

• Word of mouth - Most therapists get a large portion of their clientele from word of mouth. If you have friends and family members who have had great therapists, ask them for a referral! If you don’t feel comfortable asking around, that’s ok too.

• Psychology Today - Psychology Today is a great resource for all things mental health. There are two great things about their directory. First, there are filters that you can use to find clinicians in your zip code who take your insurance and speak your preferred language. Second, every single person on their has been vetted. When I signed up to be on it, I think I had to send transcripts all the way back to high school.

• Grief.com - This is a resource and directory for grief coaches, therapists, and educators that was set up by David Kessler. Like psychology today, everyone on grief.com has gone through Kessler’s grief training, so anyone who you find on here has a baseline understanding of grief.

Couple of other things we talked about:

• Not every modality is for every person. Please please please listen to yourself. If you are in a therapeutic setting and whatever is going on does not speak to you, that does not mean that something is wrong with you. It means this is not the therapist/modality for you at this moment.

• It’s totally ok to reject or put off things that everyone keeps telling you helped them. They might be things that help you at a different moment in your grief, or they just might not be for you.

  • For example, meditation is great and we know it! But it is not the right tool for every person at every moment. There are even studies that show that meditation is contraindicated for things like anxiety and PTSD.

  • Yoga is another example! Tracy and I both have had moments where yoga was really wonderful for us and moment where we had to stop completely.

  • We also both avoided the grief bible, the book that every single person will recommend to you when you are grieving, which is The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Didion is my idol and I have read everything she wrote, but that book was not for me for the first couple of years after my parents died. And that’s ok!

Tracy here to remind you that not all of your experiences can be communicated with language. Art can help you express so much more!

Do something productive with your feelings- that’s what my Mom taught me!

Here are some of the posts I (Tracy) did for Skillshare that boosted my interest in art therapy- Bullet Journaling, Watercolor, and Keeping a Sketchbook!

DANCE is also a big part of working through grief.

We LOVE The Fitness Marshall. You can see some favorite workout videos here!

Wanna take a break for a second and ride a nostalgia wave? Look at the life of a Doozer!

A Doozer is as a Doozer Does!

We recorded this a few weeks before Shelley Duvall and Richard Simmons passed. How weird is that? Did you also watch Faerie Tale Theatre?

Want to share your grief stories? We’d love to hear from you!

Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!

Happy new episode day, friends! MC here. One of the most infuriating things about living in a grief-phobic culture is that we pretend that grief - you know, that thing that literally every single one of us is going to have to face more than once in our lives - is not important enough to learn about.

Did you know that thanatology is a whole entire field of study? I bet you didn’t. It’s the study of dying, death, loss and grief and you can get a whole ass PhD in it. Is there anything else on earth that effects us so universally that we don’t talk about? We all have hearts. Wouldn’t it be weird to not know that you could get a degree in cardiology? Yes, it would be.

Here’s the thing about studying something: it demystifies it. Makes it less overwhelming. The word study comes from the Latin studium which means “zeal, painstaking application.” When we look at something with zeal, with painstaking application, we make sense of it. We trace its edges. We make it palatable, understandable. What we don’t study, we don’t understand. We might know it, but we don’t understand it.

I didn’t learn about the models of grief when I started dating a terminally ill boy at 14. I didn’t learn about them in high school or college. I didn’t learn about them until graduate school, which happened to be while my parents were dying. And the only reason I learned about them was because for some strange reason I had decided to study grief. To be completely honest with you if I hadn’t been studying grief, I’m really not sure that I would have survived those losses. Knowing that grief was a real thing, a thing that people wrote about and talked about and studied, a thing that could be mapped out and conceptualized probably saved my life.

So. You probably didn’t learn about grief types or models. Maybe you heard someone talking about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on Oprah or saw a social media post about the stages of grief. But that’s not enough and that’s also why we’re here. To give you more.

Here are some of the most commonly referenced grief models. These are just different perspectives and approaches to grief. You might resonate with them, you might not. I suggest that you approach them cafeteria-style - glance through them all and take what looks good.

Grief models:
Freud: Mourning involves searching for a lost attachment. To heal, the ego needs to accept the reality of the loss and disengage the energy from the lost ‘object.’ Once this is done and the ego can attach to a new object, mourning is complete.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler: There are six distinct stages of grief. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance, and most recently, Finding Meaning. Little known fact: these stages were initially developed out of Kübler-Ross’ work with terminally ill patients. The most common misconception is that one must more through these phases in order, or that if you haven’t felt one of the stages, you aren’t grieving ‘correctly.’

John Bowlby: Grief is triggered by the loss of any attachment figure. The nature of the grief depends on the nature of the attachment. There are four stages to grief: Shock & Numbness, Yearning & Searching, Disorganization & Despair, Reorganization. Bowlby is best known for his work on attachment and is one of the reasons that we have an understanding of attachment styles.

Therese Rando: Six R’s of Mourning -

1) Recognize the loss

2) React to the separation

3) Recollect & Re-experience

4) Relinquish old attachments

5) Readjust to the new world without forgetting the old world

6) Reinvest emotional energy

William Worden: 4 Tasks of Grief -

1) To accept the reality of the loss

2) To work through the pain of the grief

3) To adjust to the environment without the deceased

4) To emotionally relocate the deceased and move on with life.

Strobe & Schutt: People experience grief as an oscillation between loss-oriented and restoration-oriented responses.

Loss-oriented responses are:

grief work, intrusion of grief, breaking bonds, denial, etc.

Restoration-oriented responses are:

attending to life challenges, doing new things, distraction from grief, avoidance of grief, new roles/identities/relationships.

The balance between these two helps us find the balance between the reality of what has been lost and how to re-engage with life after loss.

Mancini & Bonanno: Their refreshing research was aimed to look at the toll grief takes on people. What they found was really encouraging: most people respond very well to loss (despite what we might think), and in fact loss is something that enables us to strengthen our resilience. This is more true for people who have support in their grief processes and can be tracked culturally as well.

Kessler: David Kessler worked with Kübler-Ross but also has contributed his own important work to the field. One of my favorite things is that he articulates the six needs of the grieving -

1) To have your pain witnessed

2) To express your feelings

3) To release the burden of guilt

4) To be free of old wounds

5) To integrate the pain and love

6) To find meaning in life after loss.

Because we are us, we laughed a lot in this episode and sang the “apples and bananas song.” You know the one.

We’d love to hear from you! What pieces of these grief models resonated the most with you? Did you have any realizations as you were listening?

Want to share your grief stories? We’d love to hear from you

Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!

Hi friends! MC here. If you know me, it will not surprise you to know that a couple of times a week I find myself saying out loud, “Can you imagine what the world would look like if we taught this in schools?!” I’m usually talking about basic nervous system regulation tools, or how to pick a therapist, or understand how to be an effective listener when someone is disclosing a trauma.

This episode is centered around the same question. Can you imagine what the world would look like if we taught grief types in schools? Well, we have to first address the skeptics and the critics who are right this very second wondering, why on earth it would be helpful or important to know how grief splits itself into types?? I’m so glad you asked, dear critical skeptic! Because the first step to healing from anything is accepting that it is. Accepting that it is requires that we are able to give an account of it, to say what it is. If we don’t know what to call it, we can’t validate it. We can’t talk about it or share it or express it or know that we are not alone in it.

I’ll give you an example. When my parents died, it became necessary very quickly to sell the house I grew up in. The house sold very quickly and to a completely lovely family who had grown up in town and always loved the house. We’d walk out of our nightmare, and they’d walk into their dream. Seemed perfect, right? The loss of that house, the dismantling of our lives up until that point was excruciating in a way that shocked me. And since I didn’t know that secondary loss or cumulative grief were terms, I didn’t know how to talk about what I was feeling. So I turned to the feeling with judgment - what was wrong with me? Why was I this sad about the house? Weren’t the people in my life who I had just lost more important? Shouldn’t my grief about losing them be bigger?

If I had known that losing your childhood home was an incredibly common, separate, and distinct type of grief, I could have named it. And if I could have named it, I could have also expressed it. Would expressing it have made it go away? Nope. Would it have made it easier? Absolutely.

Anyway, without further ado, here is a list of very commonly experienced types of grief that are recognized in the grief literature. It doesn’t encapsulate every kind of loss, but it’s a start.

• Delayed Grief – grief that we don’t feel in the moment because it’s not safe or we’re in survival mode.

  • An example of delayed grief: After losing her mother to a sudden accident, Jane had to immediately take on the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings and managing household duties. In the months following the incident, Jane felt numb and focused solely on survival and practical needs. It wasn't until an entire year later when her siblings were more independent and she had some space to breathe that she began to experience intense waves of grief, realizing she had never allowed herself to mourn her mother's death when it happened.

• Disenfranchised Grief – grief that we judge or minimize.

  • An example of disenfranchised grief: John had a deep emotional connection with his beloved dog, Max, who had been his companion for over a decade. When Max passed away, John felt an overwhelming sense of loss. However, when he tried to express this to his friends and family, they judged his grief, thinking it was inappropriate to grieve so deeply for an animal. This minimization of his own grief left John feeling isolated and unsupported.

• Ambiguous Grief – grief that is hard to see, usually because of the circumstances around the loss.

  • An example of ambiguous grief: Sarah's husband, Tom, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. As Tom's condition deteriorated, he became a different person, no longer recognizing Sarah or their shared memories. Sarah experienced grief for the loss of the man she once knew, even though Tom was still physically present. This ambiguous grief was hard to see because Tom was still alive, yet the person Sarah loved had essentially disappeared.

• Inconclusive Grief – grief that doesn’t have an object, such as when someone goes missing or disappears from your life without giving you any closure.

  • An example of inconclusive grief: Mark's brother, Alex, went missing during a hiking trip. Despite extensive search efforts, no trace of Alex was ever found. Mark struggled with inconclusive grief, constantly vacillating between hope that Alex might still be alive and despair over the possibility that he wasn't. Without a body to confirm Alex's fate, Mark found it difficult to fully grieve and move on.

• Complicated Grief – when painful emotions of loss don’t improve with time and are so severe that you have trouble resuming and/or creating your life (now called prolonged grief, extended from 6 month mark to 1 year)

  • An example of complicated grief: After losing her spouse in a car accident, Lisa found herself unable to move forward even after a year had passed. Her intense pain and longing for her spouse persisted, preventing her from engaging in daily activities, maintaining relationships, or finding joy in life. Lisa's grief was so severe and persistent that it became complicated grief, interfering with her ability to resume and create a fulfilling life.

• Collective and Public Grief – when we grieve as a group, usually due to something like a terrorist attack, natural disaster, or even the death of a beloved public figure.

  • An example of collective grief: When Princess Diana died, millions of her fans around the world collectively mourned the loss. Vigils, memorials, and media tributes became common as people come together to share their sorrow and celebrate the individual's impact on their lives. This collective and public grief unites people in their shared loss and remembrance.

• Traumatic Grief – combines trauma with bereavement or grief responses.

  • An example of traumatic grief: Emily witnessed her best friend die in a violent incident. The trauma of the event, combined with the grief of losing her friend, left Emily with intense emotional scars. She experienced nightmares, flashbacks, and severe anxiety, struggling to process both the trauma and the loss. This traumatic grief intertwined her bereavement with trauma responses, complicating her healing process.

• Masked Grief – grief that is presenting another way (anger, anxiety).

  • An example of masked grief: After his father's death, David began experiencing frequent bouts of anger and anxiety. He snapped at coworkers and had trouble sleeping, but he didn't recognize these symptoms as expressions of his grief. Instead, he thought he was just stressed from work. It wasn't until a friend pointed out the timing of these changes that David realized his grief was manifesting in ways he hadn't anticipated.

• Anticipatory Grief – grief that comes before death.

  • An example of anticipatory grief: Maria's mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and doctors gave her only a few months to live. As Maria cared for her mother during her final days, she began to grieve the impending loss even before her mother passed away. This anticipatory grief allowed Maria to begin processing her emotions and saying goodbye, though it didn't lessen the pain when the actual death occurred.

• Cumulative Grief – when someone experiences multiple losses during a short period and or unattended grief that builds up.

  • An example of cumulative grief: In the span of six months, James lost his job, went through a divorce, and his father passed away. Each loss compounded the previous ones, leaving James feeling overwhelmed and unable to properly process his grief for any single event. The cumulative effect of these multiple losses in a short period made it difficult for him to cope and recover.

• Secondary Loss – the other losses that accompany grief in addition to the primary emotional response.

  • An example of secondary loss: After the death of her husband, Susan not only grieved his absence but also experienced secondary losses such as the loss of financial stability, the loss of her social life, and the loss of future dreams they had planned together. These secondary losses added layers to her grief, making it more complex and challenging to navigate.

We also talked about TikTok in this episode, the way that viral songs can skyrocket creators like #girloncouch to fame (she got a record deal), and how relieved Tracy and I are that our embarrassing teens and twenties were captured on disposable cameras and not the world wide web.

We’d love to hear your grief stories. Does anything from this week’s episode resonate with you? Do you see yourself in these grief types?

Want to share your grief stories? We’d love to hear from you

Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!

Why (why, why, why) does grief take such a toll?

My clients ask this question in a variety of different forms: Why am I still so sad? Why do I keep forgetting that my loved one is really gone? Why am I so tired? Why can’t I seem to eat? Why is this so hard? When we are sent down the grieving path the difficulties that we encounter can sometimes be shocking. I remember the morning after my Dad died I woke up and for a couple of seconds didn’t remember what had happened. And then I had to remember again. Which meant I had to relive it. It was exceptionally cruel, but it had only happened yesterday so it made sense that I had forgotten. It was a shocking loss. And then the next morning it happened again. And again. And again. Every morning I had to reorient myself to the world, every morning I lost him again, every morning that loss took my breath away. What was happening? Why couldn’t I remember the most important thing that has ever happened to me? Why did I have to re-experience the loss again and again and again? How long was that going to last?

I wish that someone had told me at the time that grief is a learning process. And one that takes an incredible toll. That my brain was suddenly tasked with re-mapping itself and the world. That it was going to take a while. And that it was going to be ok.

We’ve talked before about how grief is like having a child. Grief is also like getting a graduate degree. When you get a graduate degree, you spend several (kind of brutal) years devoted to a single subject. You spend hours and hours listening and reading and taking notes and writing papers so that you can gain mastery. It’s hard and painful but you stick with it because it matters and because you are growing. Good and neutral things happen along the way and years go by but the main thing that you are doing is gaining mastery. Not so that you can be finished, but so you can integrate a new skill set into your life. Make it a career. Use it to enhance your life. Is it hard? Absolutely. Will it bring you to your absolute limit? Probably yes. Is it worth it? Of course. Every learning process is worth it.

But can you imagine how different grief would be if we valued it as much as we do education? If we supported grief students the way we support school students? Let’s do that.

Other things we talked about in this episode are: the difference between grief and mourning, Six Feet Under, how we tend to turn away from grievers because we don’t know the “right” thing to say, what integration can look like, and so so much more.

We also talked about all sorts of hilarity, including the fact that my first sentence on this here planet earth was, “You is a bozo!”

Tracy here! What a cutie you are here, MC!! I love Suz’s hair. Incredible!

Here’s the accidental theme song I wish I could talk to my Mom about but I get to experience it with my son, Cooper so that’s cool.

Instagram account we mentioned of really clever obits!

@theydidntdie

Finding Her Shoes

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Listen, I have to tell you a story. (MC here) This is maybe my ultimate Keep Grief Weird story. Ready? In 2020 right around Christmastime, I was standing in my kitchen at the counter making sugar cookies. My laptop was across the room on the table and it was open because I was referencing a recipe but nothing was playing on it. All of a sudden, while I was standing across the room, my computer started playing Pie Jesu which just happens to be the song from my father’s funeral (Jake’s amazing friend Joelle sang it and I will never forget how beautiful it was). I didn’t even know that I had that in my iTunes library because let’s be honest, has anyone opened their iTunes library since 2015? I was so shocked I just stood there for a minute while it played, slack-jawed and goose-bumped.

Our lives are soundtracked, so it shouldn’t surprise us that our grief is too. We all have songs that remind us of cities we used to live in, loved ones we have lost, and relationships that have crumbled. And we all have stories about crying in public when a breakup song came on over the grocery store loudspeaker, or in the Macy’s dressing room. Music opens portals to the past faster than almost anything else. Like any other portal, this is a blessing and a curse.

Music memories are richer and stickier than our other memories. It’s tempting to just chalk this all up to magic, but it’s at least in part because of neurobiology! This is because listening to music engages so many different areas of our brain that the memories and neural connections are harder to break down. Studies have shown that music can help activate the parts of the brain that have become inaccessible because of Alzheimer’s and other kinds of dementia. There’s even a story in Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia about a man whose memory only spans 7 seconds for everything but music.

Music is also a great entry point for active grieving. Making a playlist for whatever it is you are grieving (loved one, relationship, city, pet) helps you keep that person place or thing close as well as access the emotions that might otherwise get locked away. The even better news is that you can do this anytime. Whether it’s immediately following the loss or 39 years later, music will act as a little portal to your past.

I still have my Mom’s backup of her iTunes library from 2007.

I tell the story in the podcast of my disaster playlist, which I made at a time when far too many disasters were happening simultaneously (pandemic, fires in CA, personal disasters galore) and so I listened to this playlist with noise cancelling headphones and paced around my apartment. Try it out!

And here’s the Jeremy playlist. My first serious boyfriend had cystic fibrosis and I just wrote a chapter about him in the joy book (that doesn’t have a title yet but is coming out May 2025!). This is the playlist I made to conjure our teenage love story:

Tracy here! I am excited to go through your playlists, MC!

In this episode, I talked about what I listened to when I was on the way to the hospital when my Mom was dying. It ended up making the entire situation super cinematic thanks to The Hours soundtrack. Perhaps that’s why it felt like I was in slow-motion for a bit.

Bev’s Playlist AKA MOM SONGS!

This is an on-going playlist of songs that remind me of my Mom. It was the first thing I did when she when she died because I knew it was the easiest way to keep her close. When I meet these songs in my everyday life, it makes me feel like her spirit is close by.

My favorite part is that through the power of repetition, her songs are now part of the songs my son Cooper will associate with his own childhood. YAY.

Other things we referenced in this episode include:

Maya Rudolph Movie- Away We Go

Six Feet Under Ending- a tearjerker. The show still holds up…minus the flip phones and old technology. It will also help build your awareness about what happens when you’re no longer here.

John Mulaney’s “What’s New Pussycat” is my “Dock of the Bay.” This will make sense when you listen to the episode.

It’s a fun prank to play…if you can find yourself a jukebox these days.

(good luck!)

If you’re wondering where my love & dancing comes from…there’s NO DENYING IT’S FROM BEV!!! This was our last family trip in 2017.

(she was so fun)

SHARE YOUR SONGS/PLAYLISTS!!

We’d love to hear your playlists! Please send any playlists or songs to us via DM at @keepgriefweird⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠keepgriefweird@gmail.com to share with the broader Keep Grief Weird community!

MC here!

(Captain’s Log: This episode was recorded the week after Christmas of 2023. You know that middling week that sits before Christmas and New Years and just feels sort of generally weird? It’s June right now, and when we were listening back to this one, we found that a little bit odd, so we’re logging it here in case you do too. Time isn’t real.)

We talked this week about disenfranchised grief. There are many, many types of grief and we have a whole episode that breaks down some of the most commonly described types of grief.

Disenfranchised grief is grief that society does not fully acknowledge, validate, or support. The word ‘disenfranchised’ comes from the Latin ‘dis’ which means apart or asunder and ‘enfranchise’ which means to make free. When someone’s grief is disenfranchised, then, it means it is torn from them, not allowed.

Think about that for a second. You’re grappling with a devastating loss. Which as we well know is quite hard enough. But then your grief is torn from you. Not allowed.

Oof.

What would an example of disenfranchised grief be? It can happen for many reasons. A stark example is someone whose affair partner has passes away from a sudden cardiac arrest. Since the relationship is not viewed as legitimate, they are not allowed to grieve. They might not even be notified of the passing, they would certainly not be welcome at the funeral, cannot be public with their grief, and if they do express it would likely be judged for the nature of the relationship rather than held in their pain.

This example might seem extreme, but disenfranchised grief can also come up when someone loses a family member that is very close to them but has reached their golden years; when someone loses a mentor or influential person in their life who has been critically important to their development but whom they are not close with daily; when friendships end.

We are also disenfranchised from our grief when it persists longer than society deems acceptable – mention an old breakup, or a loss that occurred in your youth and you are much more likely to be questioned for continuing to have feelings about it, rather than held in your pain.

Disenfranchised grief is so painful for two reasons – one is because in the wake of a loss, grief is the only thing left over from the loss you’ve just suffered. To have it torn from you is to lose what you’ve just lost all over again. The second reason is because unless your grief is acknowledged and held by other people, it cannot be healed. When society at large or people in your own life disenfranchise you from your grief, you are left two options – either internalize the judgment and come to feel shame about your grief or attempt to justify it to them. In either case, you are left isolated instead of attuned to.

How do you recover from disenfranchised grief? Well, we do a good bit of it in the episode, but in general the first step is to acknowledge that it has been disenfranchised. Once you’ve got that awareness, rebel! Refuse to internalize society’s inability to witness your grief. Other people’s failure to attune to you is not proof that you are not allowed to feel. The next step is to find others who can and will acknowledge your grief. Because here’s the truth and it’s also the reason that we’re here in this space with you: all of our psychological wounds need and deserve relational homes to be healed. A relational home is a space where overwhelming emotions that are too much to bear alone can be borne by another who attunes to you.

We talked a lot in this episode about time, about how grief changes over time but does not disappear, about how we can think about our grief as if it were a little being that grows right next to us as time goes by. We wouldn’t expect a six-year-old to have a full-time job and full control over their emotions, would we? So why do we expect our six-year-old grief to be fully matured?

I wrote a post about that here: My Grief Just Turned 18

And because we are us, we also got silly. Because of course.

Tracy here!

Update/correction. It was Cook Like a Pro! not Cooking for Jeffrey (which Bev had and now I wish I could ask her about).

Want to share your grief stories? We’d love to hear from you

Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!

MC here. This is the one where we talk about what remains.

The stuff you are left with. Grief, kitchen tables and armoires, mysterious notes and photos, memories, dress shirts, and, well, you get the drift.

Speaking of mysterious notes, I found this in one of my mom’s books a couple of years ago and have no idea what it means. It was tucked inside a greeting card inside a book. Tracy and I sat down and pondered it together for a few minutes last week and came up with basically nothing. This is part of what gets left behind and part of what it is to be a griever - to be haunted by questions that you can never get answered.

Mom, what did you mean?

Speaking of books, there are two beautiful passages that touch on the things that remain and the way those things can unravel us. The first is from a memoir called Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana. He writes about losing a man at sea, which you might not think would resonate, but it does because all specific losses have something general to say about loss.

Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea. A man dies on shore; his body remains with his friends, and "the mourners go about the streets;" but when a man falls overboard at sea and is lost, there is a suddenness in the event, and a difficulty in realizing it, which give to it an air of awful mystery. A man dies on shore—you follow his body to the grave, and a stone marks the spot… Then, too, at sea—to use a homely but expressive phrase—you miss a man so much. A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark, upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap… You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.

We had hardly returned on board with our sad report, before an auction was held of the poor man's clothes… Accordingly, we had no sooner got the ship before the wind, than his chest was brought up upon the forecastle, and the sale began. The jackets and trowsers in which we had seen him dressed but a few days before, were exposed and bid off while the life was hardly out of his body, and his chest was taken aft and used as a store-chest, so that there was nothing left which could be called his. Sailors have an unwillingness to wear a dead man's clothes during the same voyage, and they seldom do so unless they are in absolute want.

This passage starts out by pointing out what is different about loss at sea and loss at land, but this position that the sailors find themselves in - wanting to make use of the things that remain but having a superstition about using them on the same voyage - that’s the same one we find ourselves in when we are left with someone’s belongings. They are comforting and haunting, an anchor and a burden.

I also talked about a passage from The Great Gatsby that made a huge impression on me before I had even lost anyone. In it, F. Scott Fitzgerald has us peek in on one of Daisy’s grief waves. It’s anticipatory grief because she’s in love with Jay but already married so can’t have him, and also Fitzgerald is foreshadowing his death. Oh, spoiler alert: Gatsby dies. If you didn’t already know that, the book was written in 1925 and has been made into a movie like nine times.

Here’s the quote MC read from The Great Gatsby:

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired the soft rich heap mounted higher, shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids and coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly with a strange sound Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

I remember thinking in the midst of intense grief after my Dad died that I didn’t realize how much you could miss someone’s shirts until I experienced my own losses. Why didn’t anyone tell me how much you lose when you lose someone? Well, I guess Fitzgerald had told me. Anyway.

Here’s an important takeaway form our conversation:

If you are in a situation where you have to sell or donate or get rid of stuff and you are tortured about it, know this: you cannot lose the person you lost again. You will not lose them any more than you already have. Yes, losing the stuff is sad. It is it’s own grief.

But you cannot lose the person you lost again.

We’ll get to MUSIC in another episode, but we recorded this one around Christmas, and so here are the Christmas albums that Suz and Bev loved:

Tracy uncovered an old newspaper in her storage unit and found BEV! This happened a couple of years before Tracy was born. If Bev didn’t save EVERYTHING Tracy wouldn’t have seen this.

And here’s Bob’s biblical skiing note, tucked right into The Book of Chronicles, because duh:

Want to know how to copy and paste a URL into INTERNET EXPLORER?? Bev made us notes! She would be mad that she didn’t add the extra S in address.

Here’s one of Tracy’s favorite kitchen items from Bev- a potato peeler!

MC here - it’s one of my favorite kitchen items too! In talking about grief and stuff and the stuff of grief, we realized that we both have the exact same one. When my parents were in what would be their final years, they loved to cruise Williams Sonoma and in particular the tools section. They weren’t big shoppers, but they had reached a stage in life where they could replace some of their rattier things with things they loved. One by one, they upgraded way outdated kitchen gadgets (like - way) with fine RÖSLE ones.

I remembered this a few years ago and have started (very slowly) to follow in their footsteps. And this is how you end up with Amazon Basics flatware and a beautiful RÖSLE potato peeler. I’ll get there.

Want to share your grief stories? We’d love to hear from you

Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird on Instagram.

Sometimes on Saturdays, my dad would take us to the stained glass store. While he looked for supplies, we got to pick out these little glass beads. There were four million colors to choose from and something about the whole thing felt like magic.

After he died, I started finding these little beads everywhere and in the strangest of places - like smack in the middle of a hiking trail or on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store. It always feels like Dad tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “Hi! It’s me. Don’t forget there’s still so much magic in the world.”

In all of his emails, my dad spelled weekend with a hyphen. You could say that the hyphen doesn’t belong but you’d be missing the point. It’s a space holder for magic, just like these little glass beads.

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Welcome to another episode of Keep Grief Weird!

On this episode, we get a little nostalgic for our childhood (80s kids!) and do a mini deep-dive.

Remember Sharon Lois & Bram??

What about KIDS INCORPORATED?

Here’s the theme song if you wanna sing along with Tracy.

What about FAME? “Ya got big dreams? Ya want fame? Well fame costs, and right here <raps cane on floor for emphasis> is where you start paying.”

Look at all the leg warmers.

We discuss our grief and how old it is. Tracy’s grief is a 6-year-old, ready for 1st grade. MC’s grief is 18 and off to college. Have you ever thought about grief that way? It definitely puts the experience into a unique perspective.

Tracy age 6:

Tracy, you look like you’re getting ready to preside over a courtroom!

Here’s MC at 18, laughing on a cordless phone with Handi-Snacks, because what else was there to do in 1999?

I kind of love thinking about what it would be like if my 18-year-old grief could bump into Tracy’s 6-year-old grief. Maybe in the grocery store. I would tell her that’s she’s doing so so great, that I feel like her mother’s soul is shining right through her, and to keep going.

We also talk this week about the ways that we honor our lost loved ones. I (MC) write a letter to my Dad every Christmas. Tracy makes an altar to her Mom on Thanksgiving (that’s Bev’s death anniversary). What do you like to do to honor your lost loved one on an anniversary (death/birthday)?

Tracy’s altar to Bev:

This past year Tracy made a town with all of the Christmas ornaments her Mom saved for her. The weird grief thing is that she wouldn’t have known she had a whole TOWN to stage if Bev was still alive.

I (hi, MC here) talk this week about what it meant to take back Christmas. My dad died on Christmas morning, and so it was both a very big and hard and very easy and natural task to make Christmas a beautiful thing again. There’s that both/and again.

I’m really grateful to still have some of my parent’s old ornaments, and I decorate the tree with them every year. They are really unique and beautiful and I remember as a kid lying underneath the Christmas tree and looking up at the lights bouncing off of the ornaments.

I pepper my own in too, naturally:

It would’ve been easy to hate Christmas. To dread it every year. I do feel grief every year, and I do feel an uptick in anxiety, even 18 years later. Part of this is that the days get so much shorter and the nights so much longer. Those first few years, Christmas felt jagged and awful. The days leading up to Christmas dripped with fear, and the actual day was just something to survive. “Just get through. It’s just a day. Just get through.” But now I don’t dread the season. I love it. Christmas feels like a day to celebrate the joy that my Dad brought to the world. Do I still cry sometimes? Yep. Probably almost every year, but I’m not keeping count because it doesn’t matter. Crying doesn’t mean that I am healing wrong or that I’m not over my grief. It means I’m sad. It means I still miss my Dad. It’s been 18 years but if he hadn’t died, he’d just be 81. It’s kind of eerie that he’s been gone so long but would still seem young.

Anyway. What I want you to know is this: loss need not ruin holidays. If you got divorced near Valentine’s Day, lost a beloved pet on Thanksgiving, or a family member on Christmas you don’t also have to lose the joy of the day. At least not permanently. And listen, there’s no wrong way to do this. If you want to lean into the holiday hate because being Grinchy feels good, go for it. Want to take off to a different country for Thanksgiving so you don’t have to deal with it? By all means. But just know that if you want the holiday back, you can have it. I promise. In fact, I love Christmas so much now that I put my tree up extra early with just lights, and keep it up extra late with just lights.

Want to share your grief stories? Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird on Instagram.

You’ll be able to share your love for your lost loved one there.