Grief Held in Community

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth: Welcome back to the Living Love Podcast. We’re on episode 9 of Season 2. This week our topic is Grief Held in Community. This goes with our season 2 theme of Kinship through Life Transitions.

If you listened to the previous episodes (or if you didn’t), I’ll just give you a quick summary: I had gone through the cancer journey with my beloved fiancé, Rick, and it turned out to be a terminal cancer. In the previous episode, we walked through the stories from the hospital with him dying. We had just gotten married in the hospital and were thinking we’d do a big wedding later. So, it was just a crushing life experience.

Today’s episode picks up the story with me coming back home to the new house we just built and being surrounded by family, friends, and new neighbors. There was a community that was able to carry me and carry each other through the time right after his death. We’ll explore what kinds of kinship supported me finding my way through that grief and rebuilding my life.

The stories that I’m sharing in these episodes happened over ten years ago, so I have had a lot of time to integrate, write, and think about them. You’ll hear about some painful times, but recognize it didn’t happen yesterday.

Today I am grateful to have a friend of mine named Adam with me. He’s a friend who was introduced me to Buddhism and meditation. We collaborated in a non-profit together. He was on the board, and we became good friends.

I mentioned him in the previous episode, he’d had hospice training and done work with meditation practices around “becoming friends with death”, as he says. He was a great support in conversations the week before Rick died, helping me recognize: we want to keep hope that Rick will live, but he might not live. How do we stand in the ground of that possible reality, as well? So Adam, I’ll just say hello and welcome you.

Adam: Good morning. Great to be here.

Beth: Adam was there through all these events, so we’ll be getting his insight of that as well.

I’ll pick up the story: The morning he died, Rick’s closest family, me, and my friend Margie were there. More family came, and then eventually it was time for people to go back to the house.

My mom was there with me. One of my closest friends, Sarah had not been able to get there. She had been on a business trip, had to go home first, grab her dog, and I heard that she was desperately rushing to be with us in this moment. We agreed that my mom would go back to the house, I would stay with Rick at the hospital a bit longer, and then Sarah would drive me home when she got there.

My mom told me later, that when she left the hospital room, she was walking down the hospital stairway. She heard someone running up two stairs at a time in the stairwell below. Then she saw it was Sarah. I always thought that was so touching, the way she was running to get to me. I remember her bursting in the room, giving me a big hug. We both were there a while longer together. We slowly made our way home, which was just such a beautiful way to have her show up.

When we got home, the house was abuzz with people. There was all the stuff we’d adapted for Rick: our bed had been moved downstairs and there was all this medical stuff. Everyone was moving things around, clearing out all the medical stuff, pill bottles, and things. They had ordered pizza and had a fire in the wood stove.

I remember coming in and seeing you talking with my dear friend Jack, who was Rick’s best friend, and our other friend Margie, who you might have met in previous episodes. Do you remember some of that? I think you guys went on to become good friends from that moment, right?

Adam: Yeah, for sure. We had met, I think three years prior when Rick had organized a birthday where Margie led some improv comedy.

Beth: Yes, that’s right.

Adam: That’s where I got to meet Jack and Margie for the first time. But it was a super busy time in my life with my eldest in college and two kids in high school. I had a really demanding startup job. You and I were in phone contact through those years, but I kind of missed having the time to build those relationships with Margie and Jack. So sadly, (and at the same time in a way of beauty, how beauty and tragedy are often intertwined,) those relationships really were established and began to flourish around Rick’s passing… the time before it and after.

Beth: It was a beautiful example of what Margie mentioned the other day about cancer. When the community comes together around it, different people showed up at different moments and some were only able to give him a ride from the hospital.

One time, you brought me home from the hospital, stayed and had that critical conversation with me about coming to terms with where we were at. You were able to show up and play a critical role that day, so there was some serendipity to it.

I think sometimes when we have other friends who are going through things, we can carry this guilt about, “Oh my God, I should be doing more.” But what I experienced was often people just showed up at the right moment. They needed to be there, and others showed up when they could, and we were held.

Adam: Actually, the infrequency of me being able to come, allowed me to see Rick’s tragic decline.

Beth: Yes. You could see it more.

Adam: I was training myself in a teaching about the “Wisdom of No Hope” from the Buddhist teacher named Pema Chodron. When I saw Rick near the end, it was pretty clear to me that this was going to end in the most tragic way for him.

And as a friend, I just felt it was incumbent to give that voice in the most gentle way because that was the truth that I was sensing.

Beth: Yes, because you hadn’t been there regularly, you saw what the real changes that his physical body was going through. It took courage as a friend to step up and have that conversation with someone who’s trying to stay in the hope. I honor your courage to do that because it wasn’t an easy conversation to bring up with me.

Adam: Yes, it’s tragic and really sad and very necessary.

Beth: So that day when I got back to the house, one of the other small examples of people showing up was my sister. When Rick and I had left the house to go to the hospital in an ambulance, I remember there were about 10 emergency responders with muddy boots and snow trekking through our house. I’d left breakfast dishes… I had just left. My sister had driven over an hour to the house one of those nights just to clean everything up. It was so sweet. There were things like that going on all the time.

Adam: Yeah, you and Rick together, you created that welcoming. You were speaking about my courage, something that I felt palpably at that time, was both your and Rick’s courage to be vulnerable and to invite people in and to build relationships amidst that circumstance.

I started my Buddhist practice in the mid 1990s and appreciation this notion of “workability,” which is even in the most trying circumstances with the right attitude and skillset and intention and heart, that one can build a relationship and connection. I think you and Rick together did that so beautifully and that showed up in some of your stories in the prior episodes.

Beth: I think that’s really true and that’s very much the theme of this whole season is Kinship Through Life Transition. You said it beautifully. The last four episodes are transitions we wouldn’t have chosen. Yet we could choose how we showed up and how we built community within and around the experiences. I think that was the spirit of how we both went into it. And I think that leads well into the next story.

I want to share a couple of the rituals we created. Neither Rick nor I were in a church or temple, but we had facilitation experience. We had just moved to a new community. Part of what a faith tradition/religion offers is at these moments have certain structures and buildings and ministers or rabbis or whatever who will help guide you through. So we needed to create the rituals, which I think we did in some really beautiful ways. I want to share what that looked like.

The first ritual was the evening he died. He died in the morning of February 8th. When I came back from the hospital with my friend, I asked you to facilitate something that evening. It was really simple. It was just a very core group, like my mom and his parents, sister, stepmother, Margie, Jack, Sarah. We set chairs in a circle. Another friend of ours showed up right at the last minute – she just had intuition to come. I remember we had a big wide bowl of water and we lit some candles in it. We went around the circle telling stories about Rick.

It was such a great way to touch into his spirit and feel his love among us, on a dark winter night. Towards the end, you said “Rick went through so much pain with his illness and so we want to imagine we’re directing all that pain and suffering into the water in the bowl so that his spirit can pass cleanly out of this life.” We meditated and imagined that together. Then we all put on our coats and our boots and we went out in the cold night. We took that bowl of water and poured it on the snowy ground together, huddled in this circle.

I remember that it was really windy, and there were these tall white pine trees behind us. I had read this book about the death of a very spiritual woman it said “there’s a saying that when a great soul dies, the winds go wild.” There were a bunch of serendipities happening with the Earth at that time. The woods were making these noises. I can share more later, but it was pretty profound.

I remember coming back into the warm house after that ritual that we all did together and sharing food. I recall how nourishing that was to all of us.

Adam: Yes, and the phenomenal world definitely showed up as a participant in interesting ways.

One of the things that I had wanted to bring in from my Buddhist teachings, you had mentioned this notion of “making friends with death.“

And just a little background about me: I’m first generation in this country, so into my mid-thirties, I had not yet been to a funeral. My family of origin was kind of insular and most of my family was overseas and we had an agreement that we traveled when people were alive. My grandparents said, “Don’t come to our funerals, come visit us when we’re alive so we can enjoy each other.” I think just makes a lot of sense.

There was a Buddhist teacher who’s deceased now named Sogyal Rinpoche who wrote this book, “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.” One of his statements was, “In the mirror of death, we can see our life clearly.” So, we have that as a companion and it shows up in different ways in society, like if you had one year left to live, what would you do? What would you do if this is your last day? This is a very core human thing.

Beth: I appreciate you sharing that story about your family experience with death. I feel in America where we have people from so many different places and countries and often people in their lineage who had to leave places or were forced to leave places. In the difficulty of the trauma, people often turn to the future and we kind of avoid death and illness in this country.

So having you as a friend, who had done some work on that, and the Buddhist tradition has some beautiful practices around death and dying. That tradition has more focus on, “how do we help those grieving and dying and those who’ve died and the grieving process?” I was so blessed to benefit by you showing up with that understanding and practice. It was like you brought a groundedness, having worked with your own resistance and fear of death.

At that time, I had not really lost anyone, other than some grandparents, but it’s very different when it’s someone your age dies, right? Having even one person in a circle of friends who’s willing to go do that work, it helped the entire community.

Adam: Yeah. And it was hard because you and Rick, it was like a true love, right?

Beth: It was.

Adam: Yeah. So there was so much amazing life ahead of you and that made his rapid death just four or five months after the onset of the second round of cancer was so much harder to accept.

Beth: It sure was.

Adam: The whole study of grief is evolving. Something I learned about recently is this notion of anticipatory grief. When you have someone in your life or a loved one or a family member that’s going through dementia or some of the cancers that are evolving slowly or heart disease, you have two or three years to get your head around it. This person’s not going to be with us too long, and so there’s an opportunity for anticipatory grief which can minimize the grief after the loved one passes. You and the family and the community really didn’t have an opportunity for anticipatory grief.

Beth: No.

Adam: It happened so fast and because of that there was quite a bit of attachment to the desire for Rick to get through the cancer and for you and the community that to have that amazing life, that your union had a promise or that portended, I don’t know what the right word is there.

With the rituals that you invited me to participate in, I wanted to bring in the release Rick and those hopes because in some way. In the Tibetan mindset, those attachments hinder his clear passing. The Buddhists believe in reincarnation, so it would hinder him having a clean reincarnation. Continuing to have attachment to someone who has passed is really not optimal for the living, so the sooner we can accept someone’s passing and do the grief work, the better it is all around.

Beth: And acknowledging that the grief experience will look and feel different for everybody. What I want to share in today’s episode is just what it looked like for me in our community as one example. We didn’t have a lot of time to be ready for it.

I remember at one point right after he died, we were still in the hospital room and I expressed to a friend, “what am I going to do with this new house we built?” I was so present with Rick that I hadn’t even thought about the future that much.

You’re then in this whole shock. I remember that first night home without him next to me in the bed, and these coyotes were howling in that forest. I woke up that morning and my practice at that point was doing a lot of morning pages from “Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron’s book.

I’d get up and free write. Some mornings I would write five pages, and I called them “M-O-U-R-Ning” pages after a while. It was a very helpful practice just to get my ideas and feelings and everything out and even like write about the events because there was such a jumble in my mind. I remember that morning I was wrote, this is the first day in 48 years that the world doesn’t have Rick in it.

Adam: A very sad day.

Beth: I wanted to share the story of the second ritual. We ended up deciding to do three. We did that small ritual the night he died, I think that was a Thursday. Then on Saturday afternoon we were able to reach out to family and friends near and far. We had about 20 to 25 people, a slightly bigger circle of friends and family came to the house for a ritual gathering we created.

We decided to take a Jewish tradition, as Rick was Jewish, called Shiva where people come visit the home. So that whole next week between that gathering and then a much bigger funeral that we did at a nearby town hall, we opened the home. We put a lot of his stuff out and different people could come see the house and visit the space and talk about him. Then we did a much bigger funeral.

For today’s episode, I’d like to share about the second ritual because I’ve written a book about this experience. I feel like that our US culture misses so much about how to do ritual in community and hold the grief altogether. At one point I was talking with a friend from Egypt, someone I worked with. I was telling him about someone calling me a “grief warrior” because I had just gone into it and I was courageous. He was kind of scratching his head and said, “that language is so foreign because in our culture it’s held in community. Everyone comes to your house and everyone’s wailing and crying. The idea of an individual going through grief alone is foreign, it’s always shared.” I think that’s in the Western culture where people are split off from kinship traditions, it becomes an individualistic thing. Yet, it’s more than one person can often hold.

Adam: I think you made an important point there: that every person’s grief is individual and it’s just going to take the time it’s going to take. For some people it’s four months. Some people it’s four years. The whole gamut of emotions can be varied. People want to do it in their own ways. For some people,  it’s very private. For some people, it’s more open and public.

Beth: And the support can look different. Some may join a bereavement group, for some it’s a therapist. There are a lot of different needs, even at different times in the journey.

To bring us back to the story, I remember that morning I tiptoed out of the house. It felt also weird to have all these people in our house because we’d had such a sacred quiet time at the end of his illness. I went out in the woods behind our house for this long walk. I was in tears because some elements of the funeral ritual we planned were similar to the small wedding we planned to have at our house. It was the same group of people who were supposed to be coming to our house for our wedding. It was just about as hard as you could get. I had my own grieving, crying time out in the woods and then came back to the house.

That day was a bright winter day with this sparkle of sun. Everyone had made the house really beautiful.

My friend Jack hosted the ritual. He was a beautiful wise soul. We sat in a big circle and we had a rock that was like a talking piece. Jack invited people to share stories of what they appreciated or remembered about Rick. We took as long as it took. One of my favorite ones was my sister. She took her turn and shared how meaningful it was that she and Rick had developed their own friendship, not just through me. He would call her on the phone and she’d pick up and he’d say, “Shar…on…. Ten…er, how are you?” And then she’d go, “Rick Bell, how are you?” It’s was this beautiful moment, like “I’m here with you”. It was funny because all these people around the circle reacted like “Wait! That was my thing with Rick, he did that with me!” It was sweet.

Through the storytelling, people named different qualities or stories – each of us was hearing other dimensions of Rick. It was like this multifaceted diamond in the center of the circle. We learned how he was with his nieces and nephews or how he was with his work colleagues. It was an incredible way to honor him. We were gleaning what we could from his life.

Then to close the ritual, we had the same big broad green bowl full of water we had used in the first ritual. Jack said, “we’ve shared all these stories about how Rick touched our lives and what was special about him. One way we can keep his spirit and memory alive is to live the qualities that we loved in Rick in your own life.”

We had these little tea lights that would float. Jack invited each person to light a candle and float it into the bowl of water and share what part of Rick they intended to carry forward in their own life. It was so beautiful, the combination of the heartfelt words and the lessons we’ve learned from him and then seeing the beauty of these candles floating with all our intentions and the reflective light of the candles in the water. It was incredible.

Then I think you invited us into some silence and that was really moving. There was some music as well. I remember at the end, there was this new bird feeder we’d put up and no birds had come. And the birds showed up at the feeder. Right at that moment I remember looking at Jack smiling like, “okay, that’s amazing.”

I really felt something in me shift, like we touched the essence of his life and laughter and there was some sense of a completeness. Then we went right to sharing food. Your brought your classic avocado dip and a bunch of us just devoured it! The ritual of sharing food in community is a real inherent need, like food and music.

Francis Weller writes about grief, and he talks about these primary satisfactions we’re hardwired to need. When we do the brave work of facing what we just went through together with death and losing Rick. The food gives us life. It felt like that too, is such an important part of the ritual of honoring him.

Adam: I remember was food and music and community were very central to Rick.

Beth: Greta came during that week when we had different people visiting the house. It was valuable to have the continuity of her as a healer and guide there with me through all these chapters. We talked about things and then she said, “You know, you’re just deeply tired and drained. It took so much effort for you to care for Rick and so much strength and exertion. You really need time to deeply rest. If you rush back into work and busyness, you’re going to get sick yourself. You have been in vigilance, and you need to let your body restore.”

That was such a clear guidance, I really took it to heart. She said “with grief it’s like you’re the sand on the beach and you just have to let the waves of grief wash over you and surrender into that.”

In the weeks after that, it felt like I was in still in the space of like trusting surrender. I needed to just rest and not do a lot. I was able to, given he had a life insurance policy from his work, Thank God. So that gave me a cushion of money so that I didn’t have to get back to full-time work. I could be flowing through what was happening week by week. I spent a lot of time writing and in nature, with some friends, mainly trying to be present with how things moved week by week.

Adam: It was a privilege that you and Rick shared, that you were able to take that time. Many people in our society and around the world don’t have that. So for those that do, it’s really important. There’s this notion in Tibetan Buddhism that when we do our spiritual work or we do our meditation, we’re not just doing it for ourselves, there’s like a consequence that ripples out for the thousands of people that don’t have the same opportunity to do that. It was fortunate in the midst of this tragedy that you had the time and the means to grieve in the way that was needed.

Beth: I agree. Particularly, in the first few months after, I had an incredible feeling of raw vulnerability. I was so tender in my heart; it was really hard to often to be around people who hadn’t understood what I went through.

I was trying to make sense of what happened because it felt like such a betrayal of my trust in life. That feeling that “it was supposed to be going this way.” It was so heartbreaking to lose him. Then you’re in this most intense grief and the person you turn to who always helped you through the hardest things isn’t there, right?

In my writing and little rituals, I had to keep unraveling all those different threads of what was so painful. At one point, I listed out like 19 different things I was grieving: not only that he wasn’t there with me but the pain he went through or that I’m making dinner and he’s supposed to be here in our new kitchen.

In our culture, we tend to want to rush, we want to avoid, we want to get out of the emotional state that’s uncomfortable and just override, get busy, or turn to alcohol and other things to help us cope. What my meditation practice and the support of friends allowed me to realize was, “Okay, I think I need to tend, note and honor each thread of what’s painful.” For me, that was a helpful way to allow it to move through, like a continual honoring process – feeling and then letting it move through like the waves.

Adam: I think that’s such a helpful practice. I call it “naming, not complaining.” When we name and feel, then it has an opportunity to, I guess, reside in a healthy way. This way it doesn’t get twisted into denial or sarcasm or cynicism.

Beth: Or bitterness.

Adam: The naming of these tangible daily things that I’m really missing, to name that has an honoring aspect.

Beth: What we did together at the ritual at the funeral, we also did with a small group of us at other gatherings over the months after. We kept coming back together, sharing stories. That practice is both a personal practice and a communal practice that is quite beautiful.

In March, about a month after he died, I decided to attend a retreat with my yoga community. I was part of a yoga teacher trainer group. They had been amazing through the process. We had about 12 yogi ushers helping at the big funeral. They were having a retreat at a nearby retreat center, and I thought, “You know, I think I’m going to go even though I’m very raw and tender. Everyone there knows what I’ve gone through, and it’d probably be nice to be in spiritual community and do some yoga.”

My teacher was great, she got me a room to myself. The theme of the retreat was Discipline: How do you commit to your regular yoga practice? Honestly, that probably wasn’t the topic I needed at that point, but I went. I remember we’re in this meditation hall upstairs and one of the other teacher trainees was guiding us in a meditation. She was bringing in these self-empowerment affirmation phrases: “If you dream it, you can do it. If you will it, you can do it. You can manifest your dreams.”

And I was sitting there in meditation pose and just thinking “Bullshit.” I was so mad. I was literally just wanted to yell, “Shut up. No, you can’t.” I literally wanted to scream it into that hall and stomp out of the room because I felt like her words were just cutting into my experience. Rick and I had been trying that positive visioning and having the dream and saying, “Let’s keep asking to manifest what we want to happen” and we couldn’t. So, I was just feeling that real betrayal  –  “No, you don’t always have the power to just manifest and make the world what you want it to be.”

I had to do a lot of working through “How do I make change? When do I let go and surrender? When can I impose my will on the world or bring in my co-creative gifts to the world and when can’t I?”

I later to another weeklong silent meditation retreat. One of the teachers, Narayan, knew what I’d come through and she said she wanted to check in. She said they usually didn’t recommend people doing a retreat that soon after a loss. But she knew I had a lot of meditation experience, so she trusted it. She was so kind and she said,

“With where you’re at, I want to stress that you be gentle. Like so gentle.” So again, it’s the opposite of discipline. I remember being like, “Maybe I’ll do a fast and start this big new healthy eating program” and people said, “No, no, no. This is just the time of gentleness..” Narayan said, “If you face a moment wondering if you should push yourself to meditate more or get a cup of tea, get the cup of tea, and have some honey. Go take a nap.” From both her and Greta’s guidance about the gentleness of being with grief was so helpful.

Later I was telling her about my angry reaction to the “You can manifest your dreams” meditation and how crushing that was because I felt like I’d put my faith in that kind of thinking, and it totally crumbled in this time of crisis. I remember her saying: “it’s this New Age type of thinking, but it’s not dharma (what they call the truth of life, what the Buddha was talking about). She said, we see a lot of suffering with those ideas.

I asked, “What do I have the power to manifest and what can I control?” And she said, “What if you let go the word ‘manifest?’ How about “ how can I live in a way that reflects my understanding of truth?” That felt like a beautiful way to help me think about it. I remember through that whole retreat turning it over in my mind –  where is personal will and where do I need to bow down to what life is bringing to me? Welcome your thoughts on that Adam.

Adam: I can empathize with your responses there. For myself I call it, “how can I fully live life with strategic questions?” So, my strategic question would be: “How can I fully relate to the reality that’s showing up?” Even when it’s the most unwanted reality that any of us could imagine or whatever want and then how can I fully relate to it?

I saw that you were doing that in bringing the ritual together. It was affirming both of Rick’s beautiful life and affirming that he has passed and he’s on his way, on his journey that doesn’t involve the life he had up to that point.

Beth: I agree. I remember one of the second nights on the retreat, the evening talk was called the Wisdom of Disappointment. And this teacher shared this Tibetan prayer which was, “Grant that I may be given appropriate difficulties so that my heart may be awakened and my path of compassion fulfilled.”

It offered a way of relating to those hardest moments in our life. I felt “Okay, I would never have wanted to see Rick suffer that pain or watch his healthy body like transform and weaken and die.” And, that was the truth of what was happening, even though I didn’t like it. Going through that difficulty was changing my heart and bringing me into living my life more in the truth of “what it is” as opposed to some idea that my vision can be imposed on reality with the force of will.

Adam: That’s a very key lesson to living fully.

Beth: It took a while to get it. I think I might have swung too far into not having goals over time, because I was knocked back from dreaming big. And that is the complexity of this. I also was sitting with that truth that the Buddhists talk about a lot: that life is impermanent. We’re not immortal so we’re all going to encounter the death of things we love.

I remember right towards the end of the retreat I had another meeting with Narayan. I shared how the week had gone and talked about that impermanence idea. I told her about the kind of love I had with Rick and I was trying to accept that these things changed. She was so sweet, she paused, and said she wanted to clarify and really be sure I understood this. She said

“Beth, unconditional love is permanent.”

I just loved that. I realized, “Oh yeah, that love we shared is not going to change.”

Adam: That’s just a wonderful like focus point. That unconditional love that you shared with Rick and that Rick had and perhaps still has for you from the beyond, that still animates, that still lives within you.

Beth: Yes, I think so. That guidance that she gave me at that point was such a gift.

I later found this quote from James Finley, that relates to the truths I was working with at that point. It says,

“Love protects us from nothing even as it unexplainably sustains us in all things. Access to this love is not limited by our finite ideas of what it is or what it should be. Rather this love overwhelms our abilities to comprehend it as it so unexplainably sustains us and can continues to draw us to itself in all that life might send our way.”

Adam: That’s lovely.

Beth: We’re coming towards the end of our time together and I want to share where the story went from there. I named this time Slow Time. It was an orientation to living at a much slower pace than life normally is.

I ended up getting a puppy, a little Corgi, so that created a lot of new chaotic life in my house and gave me kind of a structure and a little comforting dog to have with me all the time, which was sweet. Also, in terms of kinship, I developed some new friendships in the neighborhood with people in this new town I’d moved to.

One of them was a friend who was into permaculture and had lived a long time in that community. She had gardens and landscapes that were incredible. I was blessed to have her as a mentor. That spring I learned to garden and I planted all these vegetable gardens and landscaping. That was a metaphoric way of restoring life to this land since there was construction because we built this house. It was a very healing way to spend time being connected with the power of the Earth and then eating food you have grown.

The kinship pieces that came in were also that little tight-knit group who’d gone through that journey together of losing Rick, like his sister and his niece, Margie, Jack and I, and my friends. We all stayed close in terms of doing ritual regularly, which was also really helpful.

Then I found some new friendships in the new town. There was a group of women that were called the Bettys who all played basketball several mornings a week. They’re all a little older than me and fun, athletic, and social. We didn’t keep score and we had no rules. It was huge for me to be back in the regular rhythm of seeing people and exercising and having that social connection to get up and out of the house.

A friend and I did weekly co-coaching calls. We had a set call every week with half an hour for me and then half an hour for her. We offered each other listening. At the end of that call we would say, “What do you feel moved to do this week?” And we would hold each other accountable the next week. It was such a simple format and it was a container for her caring for my journey. That first year was: “Do what you need to do. You’re the grieving widow. You get to do what you want to do and not feel the guilt of should I travel, or I should get back doing this or that?” It was helpful to honor the Slow Time. Honor what your heart and your body need. And there’s no right or wrong answer but most of the time the answer was slow down and just take the time it takes to come through it.

Adam: I’m glad you had that, all of that, that what came to you through the love of community and family and friends and what you invited and orchestrated.

Beth: Thank you, Adam. I’m looking at the clock and you might have remembered in my story of us getting engaged. We got engaged at 10:20 in the morning on 10/20 and it’s actually 10:20 right now. So I think that is a sign that Rick’s still here and it’s probably a good moment to end our time today.

Thank you again for your friendship and for talking through these stories with me and reminding each other of all the meaning we found in that most difficult time.

Adam: You’re so welcome Beth. I just appreciate you and our long, deep friendship and there’s this other notion of “include it all and transcend.” So it’s been great to share that in our friendship.

Beth: Yes, it really has. As both of us are people who have worked quite a bit on how our society is responding to the changes of climate change and what’s happening to Earth and social justice. Partly why I feel it’s important to share this story of the ability to walk through grief and let go when we need to let go. It’s is metaphorically important in these times of change. I was walking on a beach last weekend that was totally changed through the recent storms. There’s just a lot of places where we need to be able to be with the grief right now because if you don’t go into the grief and have the courage and the social support to hold it, we can just get kind of stuck.

I feel like that orientation helps us with the grief of needing to wind down the organization that’s served its purpose, or the grief of needing to move your home that you loved because sand is shifting, or whatever it might be.

With this episode, just sending lots of blessing and love and care to all those who may be grieving or will be grieving because it is an inevitable part of life. Wishing and hoping that this provides some solace. So thanks again Adam,

Adam: It was great to share this time with you. Thanks.

Beth: Thank you for listening to this podcast today. I would love to make a request to you, my listeners, if this conversation was helpful to you. I think this conversation and how we are with death and dying and grieving is one that we don’t often talk about enough in our communities. If you found this helpful and could share it with friends or family you think could benefit, I would so appreciate it.

Thank you for being with me on this journey and I look forward to having you join us next time.