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On the WorkWell Podcast, Jen Fisher — Human Sustainability Leader at Deloitte and Editor-at-Large, Human Sustainability at Thrive Global — sits down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations about how we can develop a way of living and working built on human sustainability, starting with ourselves.
Jen Fisher:
I'm really excited to share that my TEDx talk, the future of work is out. It combines my personal story with practical ways we can all come together to create a better world of work by focusing on human sustainability. Just search for Jen Fisher TEDx on your preferred search engine to watch my talk, and please join me in the movement to make wellbeing the future of work by sharing it with your networks. Thank you. Navigating Life after loss is a difficult journey. And living in a society that treats the topic of grief as taboo only makes the journey that much more difficult. How can we create space for more open and honest conversations around grief and help those struggling with loss to move forward with strength and resilience? This is the Work Well podcast series. Hi, I'm Jen Fisher, and I'm so pleased to be here with you today to talk about all things purpose, wellbeing, and human sustainability. I'm here with Rebecca Soffer. She's the co-founder and CEO of Modern Loss, a website and global movement offering creative, meaningful, and encouraging content and community, addressing the long arc of grief. She's also the co-author of the book, modern Loss, candid Conversation about grief beginners welcome and the author of the book, the Modern Loss Handbook, an Interactive Guide to Moving Through Grief and Building Your Resilience.
Jen Fisher:
Rebecca, welcome to the show.
Rebecca Soffer:
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm honestly, it was like a bright spot on the calendar.
Jen Fisher:
Same here. So tell us who you are. Tell us a little bit about your story, and then of course through that, how you became so passionate about encouraging candid conversations around the topic of grief.
Rebecca Soffer:
Yeah. well my name is Rebecca Soffer and I'm a mom. I'm a friend. I'm a wife. I'm a journalist and a speaker. And I am a long-term griever slash person living with loss. And I say all of those other things because one of the reasons I do what I do is because I got tired of feeling like a lot of my world was starting to define me by the things that had happened to me, as opposed to the things that, you know, I was doing. In addition to the things that have happened to me. I shepherd a global community and what has turned into a movement really called Modern Loss, which I've been running for 10 years, since its inception in November of 2013 when I was nine months pregnant with my first child.
Rebecca Soffer:
And you know, at once an online magazine. It is a community that exists on all the social media platforms to talk to each other and engage with each other and pull each other through the very, very long arc of loss, living with loss across the long term, and pull each other through the muck with commiseration and empathy and humor, because you need it. Just like the acknowledgement that you had something really hard happen to you, and that sucks, and it must be hard to live with. And also, we want you to live a really great life, not just in spite of, but maybe even because of the things that you've had to deal with. So that's what Modern Loss is. You know, we we're a publication, we're a community. I've written now two books on the topic, and I do this work, not because I grew up kind of dreaming of working in the grief community, because I think when I was a kid, I didn't know that was a thing you could do that wasn't, you know, a thing I knew you could aspire to.
Rebecca Soffer:
I grew up wanting to become a journalist and work in comedy, and that's what I actually did. I was an original producer for the Colbert Report after gonna getting my master's in journalism at Columbia. And that was kind of like, I was on my merry way. But when I was working in political satire and I had just turned 30, my mom was killed in a car accident. And I would say, as many people would say, when things happen to them that are unexpected and specifically sudden that certainly wasn't my life plan to go about, hopefully the majority of my life without a living mom. You know when you're 30, it sounds maybe like you're older, but you're not, you know, you feel like a kid no matter when this stuff happens to you. You feel like you're flailing and like you're untethered from everything you had ever known.
Rebecca Soffer:
Also, she died in a very terrible and violent way, and on the New Jersey Turnpike, and I was suddenly ejected into this world of what I call the after, which is, you know, I call the before, like when I was kind of blissfully ignorant about some of the really hard things that people can deal with in life. And for me, the after is this profound and intimate experience of living with loss every single day in different iterations and figuring out how to navigate for me, what was the build mode of my life, along with the extreme loss mode. Like how do you do those two things together? And four years later, my dad died. So between the ages of 30 and 34 I managed to acquire two dead parents and again, not my life plan. So for me, this entire modern loss experiment came out of my personal experience and that of my co-founder in Modern Loss, who I launched the magazine with Gabby Birkner, who also had severe parental loss.
Rebecca Soffer:
Just our experience of feeling really sick of how stigmatized this topic seems to be and how sticky it is. Like people they want it to be something that can be explained easily or compartmentalized easily, or fit within a certain timeline because that makes them feel comfortable with the topic. But, that just didn't jive with my experience of it being just a whole mess that made no sense, and that didn't have five stages, but had a billion stages that existed in any which way. And so Modern Loss really was just like my response to filling in the white space that I strongly felt existed within the conversation about grief and loss and humanity and messiness and humor that, you know, just kind of really needed to counteract the whole talking about this in platitudes or in hush tones or in reverential terms. Like, that's just like, not the way that it really looks. And I just think that when you deal with it like that, you're not really truly helping a lot of people feel seen in their hard thing.
Jen Fisher:
Yeah. Thank you for that. And, and a personal thanks, you know, this for the work that you do and the impact that it's had on me personally in my life. And one thing I want to highlight that you said multiple times in your introduction and what I so appreciate is that you started out describing yourself as a wife and a mother and a journalist, and all of the things that you are, and you're someone who's living with grief for a long time. And I think that that's so powerful because these things can exist together.
Rebecca Soffer:
Yeah. And I think you're so right, and, and it sounds so silly, right? Like, you say these things and you're like, oh, like sometimes I'm speaking to somebody and I'm like, this is so obvious to me that I must look like an idiot to them. Like, I must look like the most simple person ever. But it's not obvious to everybody. You know, like you say, like, these are soft skills, but guess what? They're some of the hardest things that you have to learn. And sometimes you really only can learn them through either experience, shared experience, direct experience or being a witness to somebody else's experience, like a real witness to their hard thing. And so my goal is to just like beat this message into everybody's head that, you know, we're not just what happens to us, we're all the other things as well. And you know, I got really tired of being the person that like walked into parties. I was 34 years old and people, I could have sworn that, you know the temperature changed a little bit. Like, oh, Rebecca, her parents are dead. Like, oh, what do we say to her? And like, I didn't just want to be seen as that person, you know?
Jen Fisher:
Yeah. Well, and I mean, what I appreciate about it so much is, that's been so powerful to me is that and of like, I can live my life and grieve, or continue to grieve or find a place in my life for this grief. It's not one or the other, because it, to your point, it doesn't just go away you know some people might try to push it away or push it down or pretend that it's not there, but the healthy way is to learn to live with it and to learn to live a healthy and thriving and joyful life with grief. And I think you, and I believe that that is not only possible, but it kind of is the way you need to do things,
Rebecca Soffer:
Exactly. I mean, you hit the nail on the head, which it's not like, yes, that is like the way that you should do it, but also it's the only way to do it. Grief is so obnoxious, like, how dare it not respect business hours? Like, how dare it hit you with a wave when you're just trying to finish your fricking report for your manager, or you're about to give a presentation, you know.
Jen Fisher:
I love that, it’s just so obnoxious.
Rebecca Soffer:
It is just so rude. It's like a sneaky thing. It loves staging sneak attacks, and it loves doing it at any stage of the game. And like one of my parts of my job and my role that I've kind of put upon myself again, like, I just want to make it clear this isn't something that I grew up wanting to do. In fact, if you had told me, Hey, would you like to do this in your lifetime? I would've said, why? Why would I ever want to do that? But it's just, I got so tired of feeling so lonely, so stigmatized, so othered, and I got really tired of seeing other people feel the same way. And I just felt like somebody who, you know, look, my background is not only in journalism, but in, in satire and political satire.
Rebecca Soffer:
And when you work in that stuff, you learn how to serve up messaging that might be, I don't know, like kind of boring or wonky or a little scary and overwhelming, but do it in ways that are warm, that are engaging, that don't send people running for the hills that, you know, make them kind of stop and listen and come back for more. That is the only way you can do it with this stuff. You can't scare people when you talk about death and grief and loss, because we're not just trying to pull people in who are going through it, but we're trying to really create empathy and make people think who aren't going through it yet, because they will. Like, that's like the dun dun dun, it just is, it's the most universal thing. So, we're trying to just like teach people by extension, like, what this feels like, what it looks like.
Rebecca Soffer:
It doesn't look like what you just think, it looks like, it looks like all these different things. Because we just want people to not only feel like better prepared to support other people in their lives who are living with loss, but also when it happens to them. And it will, to not be so hard on themselves that something isn't working for them that might be working for somebody else, or that they're not adhering to like, you know, a certain timeline that someone says you should be adhering to because that's just not what it looks like. We're just trying to show it for what it is.
Jen Fisher:
Yeah. So, let's go there. Let's talk about grief and like, why is it so taboo, or how did it become so taboo in our society? Especially because it is something that we will all experience without a doubt, yet it's a topic that no one wants to talk about, and we tend to feel very uncomfortable or shy away from it.
Rebecca Soffer:
Yeah. I mean, and ironically, as I said, few of us who don't have the need to talk about it. Like many of us, it's seeping out of us. We have an abject need. We have a desperate desire to be invited to engage with this stuff, but we're not invited a lot. So, you know, it kind of like builds up inside us. And I think like what people need is just to have it made clear to them, but they have an ongoing invitation to talk about their grief, their loss. It doesn't end on day 365. In fact, it could get worse after that for a period of time. It goes in any which way, you know? I think that people, you know, back to your question of like, why do we not want to talk about it?
Rebecca Soffer:
I think there are a lot of reasons. You know, I think that first we're in Western society and we're in the united, I mean, I'm sitting here in the United States of America. Our culture really likes fixing things, we like getting crap done. You know, we like getting her done. Like, we like filing the report, doing that thing before we go on vacation, buttoning everything up coming up with a fix, right? But grief isn't fixable. There's no fix for it. There's no vaccine for it. There's no antibiotic for it, there's no magic word for it. There's just waking up and doing and maybe messing up and maybe learning something that's helpful, going to bed, waking up and doing again, that is the only way to do this stuff, right? And so, we get nervous when we're kind of faced with talking about somebody's grief or loss somebody else's, because it's very obvious that like, we don't have those magic words to take it away from them to take somebody's pain away.
Rebecca Soffer:
We don't have a fix for it. And also, I think that we really don't like imagining the really hard things that happen to people because we don't like thinking that they could happen to us. We don't like imagining those things happening to people we care about. We offer platitudes or we ask really silly things like for details of somebody's loss, which doesn't provide any support to somebody, but rather kind of helps us try to explain to ourselves like, you know, if somebody died from lung cancer, what's our go-to question? Were they a smoker? Right? Well, how is that going to help you support somebody grieving? I think that we ask questions for information because we like trying to make sure that if we have details, then maybe we can prevent that stuff from happening to us.
Rebecca Soffer:
So, there are a lot of reasons why we don't like engaging with the topics of loss, right? I mean, we simply don't like being reminded that we have no guaranteed timeline above ground, you know? And it's a hard thing, and I don't blame anybody for not wanting to think about that, but it's just the most universal thing of all time. And, you know, one of my favorite episodes of TV that deals with grief is ironically a show called Big Mouth. Have you heard of it?
Jen Fisher:
I have not. No.
Rebecca Soffer:
So, it's probably got like more obscenities in one 22-minute segment. And I've seen in like any show, it's animated and it's got all the big comedians in it, like Nick Crow, et cetera. And so, there is this one episode and it's kind of like magical realism, and there's a character in there, and it's voiced by Henry Winkler and his character is called Keith from Grief, and he's a sweater, he's a grief sweater.
Rebecca Soffer:
And his whole job is to help this person whose mother is dying, talk about it. Like his mother is in the hospital and she's dying. And he's like, I'm Keith from Grief, I'm your emotional support grief sweater. But the character just is like, I don't want to talk about it tries to like ignore Keith, right? And the more he ignores him, Keith gets unraveled, he's gets put back together in like a total mess. He grows out of proportion. And so, like, my point is, is like, that was the best episode I'd ever seen on grief and tv because it just shows yeah, we don't want to talk about it, but like, just because you don't want to talk about something or you ignore it, doesn't mean it goes away. It just gets bigger and batter and harder.
Jen Fisher:
It usually means it grows.
Rebecca Soffer:
Yeah. It pulls Henry Winkler, you know? And so, bottom line I don't blame Joe in accounting for not wanting to talk about grief with his colleagues, you know, who's clearly gone through something really hard. But it doesn't make that person not going through something hard, you know, it just, right. It is what it is. And you know, the more we deal with it and the more we educate ourselves and normalize grief concepts in terms of what grief can really look like, the bigger favors we're doing to ourselves in the long run.
Jen Fisher:
Yeah. I love that. And also, I think grief is so often associated with death, and of course that's a big one. But, but it can come from many other things. And in many other forms, which you've said a couple times now. So can you talk about what some of those are and why?
Rebecca Soffer:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's a great question because I read this article once, and I think it was at the beginning of the pandemic, and the takeaway was, if it feels like grief to you, it is. And I fully believe that, I mean, grief is certainly not associated with just like a physical death, right? Grief, you can grieve so many things, and we're living in a time of enormous grief. We're still watching the dust settle from the pandemic. You know, we're still grappling with covid. People are still getting very sick. We're in a very divisive world politically and culturally identity wise. So many of us have taken on roles over the last few years that they didn't anticipate taking on, you know, caregiving roles teaching at home roles losing a job role you know, just so many of us have shifted parts of our, of our identity, both by choice, but also by having them being foisted upon us.
Rebecca Soffer:
And it's very natural to grieve, you know, losses of dreams that you would've had that no longer seem possible. You know loss or maybe a dream of becoming a parent if you've learned, you can't do so loss of a career, a loss of a relationship of, you know, a marriage, a friendship, anything. I mean, if it feels like grief to you, it's, and it's worthy of examining and respecting. And I say examining because I think, like I said beforehand, if you don't examine this stuff, if you just push it away, it's not going anywhere. It's, you know, there's a book that's been on the bestseller list for many years called The Body Keeps the Score. And, you know, it basically codifies how the body holds onto trauma. I mean, it does, it remembers. And I'll just give you one example.
Rebecca Soffer:
You know, every year my, my mom died on Labor Day, like such an insulting time, right? Like, everyone's barbecuing and I'm thinking of my dead mom, my mom dying on the New Jersey Turnpike every September 4th. And every year without fail, in mid-August, my body starts seizing up no matter what year it is. And I'm like, ah, and it's summertime. It's like the most wonderful time of the year for me, right? It's lazy days, and I'm with my kids, and, you know, the sun is setting late. But no, I start getting very tense and my heart starts beating quicker, and I start getting like, you know, just kind of like not in a great mood. And it's because my body knows, it knows that it's approaching this like, really hard day for me. And so, I'm saying that like, you might ignore your feelings of grief, but your body holds onto them. Have to contend with them. And even if you don't have a physical death, you know, if you are grieving, being laid off or getting divorced, or, you know, losing a friendship that was dear to you, that's grief. No one can tell you it's not.
Jen Fisher:
And, and you know that quote that you said that if it feels like grief, it probably is. Well, what, what does grief feel like? How do we know?
Rebecca Soffer:
Oh, that's a very good question. You should do a podcast. No, it's a good question because I think, well, first of all, grief can feel like so many things, right? And you can look like so many things for the Modern Loss account. I'm kind of known for creating grief memes, which are really snarky because guess what? You have to laugh because there's so many ludicrous aspects of grief that you just need to know that you're not crazy for feeling how nuts some of these things are. And so I am known for like showing things as they are and kind of like injecting some dark humor in them. And I think that grief can look like so many things. It can look like somebody who is just smiling at work and trying to get through the day with gritted teeth.
Rebecca Soffer:
You know, it can look like curling up on the sofa and not being able to pull yourself up. It can look like anger. It can look like so many things. But I think that when it turn in terms of what it can feel like, I would say that if I put myself in like those early days of grief, which I can very easily, a lot of it can look like, feel like, you know, brain fog, having trouble concentrating, you know, feeling literally like something is wrong with your memory. Like, you just can't even remember simple things. You have to be reminded, you have to be corrected. It can feel like uncertainty. Like literally not having any concept of what a year looks like from now, but even what tomorrow looks like, what, four o'clock today looks like, you know, a lot of us who are in abject, you know, those, those, those early raw stages of grief really have trouble just seeing what the near future looks like.
Rebecca Soffer:
You know, it's just a lot of uncertainty, a lot of trying to kind of adjust to your new landscape without someone or something that was really important to you. And it can look like, you know, it can feel like anger, like anxiety, like extreme, obviously sadness and depression. There are so many things that it could feel like, you know, I'm talking about these like early stages of grief, right? But I think that like, the most important message is that it really can look like a lot of things. And, which is why I always say, if it feels like grief to you and you're like, oh, but I don't know why I have a right to feel this, this awful, this sad. It's not like, you know my friend had a miscarriage, I didn't have that. It doesn't matter. Everybody has their really hard things happen to them, and this might be yours, and that might be hers, you know? And it's worthy of respecting and acknowledging and figuring out how to work through it. So that's why I say it can look like so many different things, you know? And I also think that there's no one size fits all for how you manage your grief, but as long as you're not hurting yourself or anybody else, Modern Loss, like the whole community is a proponent of doing whatever feels right.
Jen Fisher:
Yeah. So, one thing that I want to make sure that we talk about that I think, you know, we don't talk about grief enough, and then there's a certain aspect of grief that I have recently learned more about because of my own personal situation with my mother, who's at the end stages of Alzheimer's disease. And it's anticipatory grief. And so that knowing, right, that knowing of, you know, no matter what I do or how I do it for her, she's never going to get better. It's a disease that's only going to get worse. And so, we know what the end game is, and some might say, well, we know what the end game for all of us is, but that doesn't help. And so, can you talk to me about anticipatory grief? Maybe that, how, I don't think it differs necessarily. It a type of grief, I guess. But I think that it's important for people to understand that because I didn't know anything about it until I started going through this with my mother.
Rebecca Soffer:
Yeah. And first I want to say that obviously I'm so sorry that you have any firsthand experience with anticipatory grief because, you know, losing a mom, losing a parent, losing anybody that you love, to something like this, it's, it's so hard. You know? And anticipatory grief is, I would say the big difference is that it's something that we have to respect more and legitimize more, you know, in our culture, I think a lot of people don't have the phrase that you do, right? That they feel weird and they feel angst, and they feel urgency, and they feel grief, but they don't, and they can't coin. Like, I feel like I'm having anticipatory grief, you know? And, and it basically is the process of grieving that starts prior to somebody, you know, I would say, let's just, let's couch it within a physical death, right?
Rebecca Soffer:
It's the process of grieving that starts prior to somebody dying, right? And with regards to say Alzheimer's, you know, people can go through so much. First of all, they might be in a caregiving situation. So when we talk about all this, like, that's a grief of losing your prior identity or taking on a role and maybe losing coping mechanisms or, you know, like parts of your life that, that had lots of leisure or pleasure or anything. You know, becoming a caretaker is an entire, you know, identity shift that comes with a lot of grief, right? When it comes to say Alzheimer's, we're grieving somebody's personality who is changing, who is no longer there. You know, let's say we're taking care or we're losing a parent to Alzheimer's, you know, they're losing memories. Maybe they don't recognize us.
Rebecca Soffer:
We're losing witnesses to our life. We're losing people who knew us when, who have memories of us that maybe nobody else has, right? And you're basically losing somebody while they're still there. And that, you know, from what I understand from many people who I know who have gone through this, is it’s a particularly excruciating type of loss. Because it's like a very stressful thing because they know that their person is still there, but they're no longer there. And that can come with a lot of anxiety. It can come with a lot of denial. It can come with a lot of anger, you know, when their person isn't recognizing them, suddenly it's just so hard. And then I think also that a lot of people say to themselves, well, I know that this person is dying. And I also, it comes with the added angst of you actually don't know when that's going to happen.
Rebecca Soffer:
Like when they're going to actually die. It could take days, it could take years, it could take months. Like no one has a crystal ball, right? No one knows. So that's another layer of grief that you're dealing with, which is like the extreme unknown of, you know, being with somebody while they're either suffering, you know, abjectly or, you know, you just know that their time is very finite. And I think that a lot of people make the mistake of saying, okay, well, when mom dies, I'm really going to need the support. You know, whenever that happens, I'm going to need the support. But they don't acknowledge that what they're going through right now requires support. Anticipatory grief is grief. And it requires support. It requires mental health support. It requires support from your community, you know, like peer-to-peer support. And you need it now. You don't just need to say, well, I'm going to throw all of my efforts into caring for this person and being there for them. You actually need support now. And that is, I think, the biggest mistake that people make because they don't realize that, you know, this is part of the grieving process. It doesn't start with the physical death.
Jen Fisher:
Yeah. And, I didn't have words for it either until I started researching. Because I knew that I was experiencing something and I needed a name for it, and I needed to know that I wasn't alone. And I found that, and I recently read an article specific to Alzheimer's, and I don't want to go down a rabbit hole on this, but they coined the term for me that I'd never heard. That's relief grief. And so, it is, you know, when that person who's been suffering for so long finally passes, there's this sense of relief. But then you feel grief over being relieved that they're gone.
Rebecca Soffer:
Right? You feel grief, you feel guilt, you feel guilty, right? I mean, I would say we have a lot of chatter in the Modern Loss community about feelings of guilt. It’s like this one vicious cycle, right? I mean you feel relief when somebody is suffering when, when they die, right? Because you don't want them to be suffering. And also, let's be honest, we're suffering as well watching them. And also, maybe our lives are just dramatically impacted, you know, in a stressor way. Maybe we have no time for self-care. Maybe our intimate relationships, our friendships, our parenting relationships are being deeply affected. Maybe we can't work. Maybe we had to like, you know, give up our job for something we don't know. There's so many different scenarios here. And so, it's very common to have feelings of relief when somebody dies after you know, an illness and then immediately get hit with a wave of guilt.
Rebecca Soffer:
How awful am I for feeling like this? I mean, God, it's almost like I'm happy that they're dead. No, this is just normal human feelings. It's normal. These are human feelings. I always tell people, just because you talk about somebody's grief with them, doesn't mean you're going to catch grief. You know? You're not going to catch their grief just because you're feeling a feeling of like relief. You know, it, it doesn't mean that you're happy. You know, you're happy about it. You're just, this is a normal feeling, and you have to go easy on yourself. And I think you have to realize that all the feelings in the world are at play when you're grieving. And that's normal because you're not actually choosing to feel them.
Rebecca Soffer:
They're just happening to you. You know? They're just feelings. And they're really normal. And the more we talk about this stuff, the more we talk about how much relief a lot of us feel, and then how much guilt a lot of us feel. You know, I have an article on Modern Loss written by somebody who writes about jealousy, who writes about anger. You know, about jealousy. There's a piece on our site a personal essay written by a woman who talks about like, how we just don't talk about the feeling of jealousy enough. I think she had had a couple miscarriages, and she wrote about walking down the street, and all of a sudden, every baby around her, even though of course that wasn't the case, but like everyone around her looked like they were pregnant and had like big families who were so happy.
Rebecca Soffer:
And obviously that's not really the way it's, but she was looking at it and just seeing that right? And how jealous she was. And then she felt like this awful person for being jealous. These are just feelings. They're normal. But that's why I say they're worthy of examining and respecting. You have to work through them. And I am a big proponent of grief therapy, a huge proponent of speaking with a mental health professional, because I think it's invaluable. But also, since grief it's not a pathology, and a lot of us tend to think it is. In the DSM five as a prolonged grief disorder is actually a designation in the DSM five. And it says basically if you are struggling beyond the period of a year to the point where you are not able to really get any enjoyment out of life, you're not able to function well, you're not able to work well.
Rebecca Soffer:
You know, you might have prolonged grief disorder. And I think that, you know, a lot of us are in danger of kind of viewing grief as a disorder, as a melody because of this stuff. And it's not. It's a normal human experience that outlasts a year. And you don't just need a mental health professional to work through it. You need community, and you need people who won't make you feel like what you're going through is weird or stigmatized. And I really think the more we can talk about this with our friends, with our coworkers, with our managers, the more we're going to help ourselves.
Jen Fisher:
And, obviously that's what Modern Loss is built on, this universal experience of grief that we all have. And you say a lot of things about it, obviously, but you know, you talk about kind of how, if we talk about it more and speaking about it and, and talking about it not only helps us personally move through it, but it brings people together, it unites people. Can you explain to me, might seem obvious, but can you explain to me like, how, like why is that?
Rebecca Soffer:
Yeah, I mean, it definitely unites people. I mean, one of the reasons that I started Modern Loss was because I felt so isolated. You know, I felt like I was at work and I was definitely, you know, look, I was working in comedy. I was, I was only 30 years old. I was kind of the test case for my colleagues most of whom were my age. And they were amazing. You know, a lot of them showed up at my mom's funeral in a rented van, like 15 of them rented a van from New York, showed up at my mom's funeral in Philadelphia. But it really was like, kind of up to me to figure out what I needed and ask for it, at the workplace, and with my friends. And that was a really hard thing to do, because it's really hard for people to ask for help.
Rebecca Soffer:
And it's really hard for people to feel vulnerable and share that they're feeling vulnerable. Like that's a really scary thing, because you don't want to be perceived, especially at work as weak, as not capable, you know, you don't want to be perceived as like there's something wrong with you. You want to be seen as, you know, being other things in your life as well. But when I first had there was a friend of mine who said eventually a couple months after my mom died in New York, you know what, I've got a dead dad. You've got a dead mom, and I know like three other people who have dead parents. Why don't we just like, all have dinner, just come to my apartment. And I was like, okay. And I didn't want to go, but then I kind of did, you know, it's like the inside.
Rebecca Soffer:
I was like, wait, I kind of wait. This sounds kind of kind of good. And I went and there was this very awkward chitchat at the beginning because nobody knew each other. And then finally after we'd like eaten all of our food, you know, someone finally was like, like, okay, so we're here for this thing. Someone should say something, right? And then someone started sharing, right? And then another person started sharing. There were just five of us. And then all of a sudden we were just letting it all hang out. We were laughing with each other. We were nodding our heads to each other, listening to what they were saying, right? And all of us felt like we were having this emotional exhale. It is so hard to feel like you're healing from something hard without feeling acknowledged in your hard thing. That's what I've learned very well.
Rebecca Soffer:
Like, that's the lesson I've learned with living with loss for like, you know, a good 15 years and having the honor of meeting so many amazing people who are doing the same for the last 10 years. It is so hard to feel like you can be meaningfully grounded in this world if you don't feel like at least a couple people are seeing you and saying, I see what you've been through, and that looks so freaking hard. You know, it enables us to kind of free up the, all the energy that it takes to try and, you know, to try to feel seen, and figure out what we need to take care of ourselves. You know? And so that first dinner with these people, it was like all a sudden I just had this emotional exhale, and I was like, oh my God, this is what it feels like to not feel clenched all the time.
Rebecca Soffer:
To not like, feel like, oh am I looking happy enough? Am I looking like with it enough? It just felt so awesome to be able to just talk about it, you know, because then I could go to work the next day because I felt like I had, you know, I could go to next work next day, even focus a bit more because I felt like I did finally have an invitation to put my hard things. And everybody needs that. And that enables you to connect with people. And while I wouldn't wish loss on anybody, unfortunately, there's no possible way that anybody gets away without experiencing it. You know, if you care about anybody or anything, you're going to have grief in your life, right? And so, a really important message is that community is what you need. Grief is a very individual experience, and there is no way that anybody can make that different for you.
Rebecca Soffer:
Even within the same family, you'll have siblings and parents who are grieving completely differently from each other, right? Because everybody had a different relationship with a person who died. Different memories, different preferences, different resentments, right? Grief is always individual. But my point is that it doesn't have to be isolating. We don't have to feel like we're living through it in a vacuum, you know? And so, when we talk about it with other people, doesn't have to be the world at large. Like, I'm not telling everybody, like, you know, post everything about your grief all the time, and if you want to do it, if you're more private, don't, you know, like, it could just be with a couple people, but the more you feel like you can share what you're going through in ways that are raw and vulnerable and real, the more you're going to connect with other people who need that same invitation and need the same thing.
Rebecca Soffer:
And you will discover that you speak a certain shorthand with each other, that kind of cuts through the bs, right? Of niceties and like, you know, you know, just like chitchat and, and gets to a place more quickly of like real intimacy, like real friendship, real empathy. And, that is amazing. It's an amazing thing. And like I said, I wouldn't wish grief on anybody, but since it's going to happen anyway, I just want to say that some of the most amazing connections I've made in my life have been in the after of my experience because of this. I mean, I have these incredible friendships that I never had before my mom and my dad died and with people with whom I don't think I would've ever come into contact with. So, you know would I change what happened, of course, but I don't have that ability.
Rebecca Soffer:
So instead I have to kind of say, well, it is what it is. And what meaning can I try and tease from the mess, you know? And I'm not in a Pollyanna way, not in like a, oh, it's all going to be okay. Like, you know, life is good, but it's also really hard, and it's not good or bad, it's just life. And life is all the shades of gray all at once. And when you're living with loss, you're holding space for joy, for sadness, for hard things, for easy things, for laughter, for crying, for anger, for loneliness, for friendship, for community. You're holding space for all of that, because that's the real experience of the long arc of loss. And it is just so much better experienced in a community that you find, be it, of two people, of 50 people of whatever.
Jen Fisher:
Yeah. That's beautiful. Thank you for that. I mean, you've touched on this a little bit but does grief ever go away? Does it have an end to it?
Rebecca Soffer:
No, I mean, I think that's a very simple answer for me, because to me I'm going to unpack my answer a little bit. I call Modern Loss, not modern grief for a reason, I don't describe myself as grieving, right? I don't feel like I'm a, a grieving woman. I feel like I'm a woman who's living with loss, who lives with loss. It accompanies me every day. It shapes decisions that I make it affects me suddenly without my ability to control it. It's, it's a presence in my life because I'm alive. And so, because I'm alive and I'm one person in a relationship where the other person is no longer alive, grief and loss, it's very much a, it's kind of like a evolving dynamic thing to me. But when I say I'm living with loss, to me, that feels, that's my choice to describe it like that.
Rebecca Soffer:
And it feels a bit more active. It feels a bit more like, I feel like I have a bit more control over it than I did when I would describe myself as I'm a grieving woman, you know, I felt, and this is again just me, but when I felt like I was grieving, like really in the deepest stages of it, I felt like it was having its way with me. Like, I felt like a marionette, right? And like, I could feel completely different at 2:05 than I could feel at 2:14, right? I mean, it was crazy town, you know? And that is what grief looks like. It’s all over the place, and it's on no timeline whatsoever. And in any stage whatsoever, you know, those Elizabeth Kubler Ross, five stages of grief, you know, they weren't written for people who were grieving.
Rebecca Soffer:
They, they were written for people who were dying. We've somehow packaged this as suggestions for how you should grieve the loss of something. And that's just not the way it's, sure there are five stages, but there are like a hundred more, and they happen in every which way, and they repeat, and then they don't repeat. That's just the way it goes. But when I was in like the real raw stages, which lasted a really long time, incidentally, I felt like grief was controlling me a lot more. And now, when in the stage where I'm kind of further down the road, I live with loss, it absolutely still affects me. It has affected how I am a parent. It's affected where I want to live. It's affected what I want to do for work. It's affected how I treat friendships, how I value friendships, how I value community, where I put my efforts.
Rebecca Soffer:
It affects everything. And it will until the day I die, you know? But I view it more as like something where I have a bit more of the bigger picture, and I've developed a lot more coping mechanisms that I did not have in the beginning. And so, I feel like I have more of a tool toolbox, right? Of a variety of things like from, mindfulness techniques, to breathing, to grounding. Like sometimes yoga movements, sometimes writing creative music, exercise, you know, using nature therapeutic stuff. I've just developed all of this out of necessity to just not lose my sanity over the years. And so, I feel more grounded, and I feel like when I suddenly don't feel grounded, which is normal and happens at any given moment, at least I know I have this toolbox and I can pull stuff from it.
Rebecca Soffer:
And if one thing doesn't work, okay, it doesn't work, let me try another thing. And so that's why I feel like when I answer your question, does grief ever end? No, it doesn't end because I think it ends when you die, when you're no longer alive, you'll of course always miss something or somebody who is no longer here, who had an important presence in your life, how can you not? But the deepest stages of grief, my hope is of course, that they aren't as raw as they are at the beginning of it, you know?
Jen Fisher:
Yeah. I think that’s really helpful, for me personally, and I think probably for so many listening. And Rebecca, I have one final question. I feel like I could talk to you forever about this. But, you've touched on this a little bit, how can we all do a better job showing up for others that are grieving or experiencing loss? I mean, you've talked about how there's never a right thing to say, there's wrong things to say, but there's never the thing to say that's going to make it all go away. So how do we show up?
Rebecca Soffer:
Yeah. I guess the good news and the bad news is that there's no perfect thing to say, right? Sorry, bad news. Sorry, there's no perfect thing to say. You're never going to take away someone's pain. You're never going to take away their grief. There's just no way to do it. But in a weird way, that's the good news. The good news is it's not your job to, because that is not the way grief works. Your job in somebody's life, someone who you care about, someone who you even just kind of like, right? An acquaintance, a colleague at work, someone who you see is going through something really hard. Your job is to make it clear that you are willing within your own capacities to acknowledge what they're going through, to ask them questions about it, you know, within their comfort zone.
Rebecca Soffer:
And also to make it clear that they have an invitation to sit with you, to talk to you about stuff, or that you are willing to sit with them in their hard thing and you won't be scared off by it. That is the most basic thing that anybody who is grieving is looking for, just to feel a little less alone, if even for a few moments with somebody else, that's it, right? Just to feel seen, to feel like they aren't contagious. That they aren't a pariah, right? That like what happened to them isn't scaring someone else off. Because again, newsflash, I want to underscore this grief is not contagious, and we really act like it is, you know? And so, I always say to people who are like, well, you know, what do I say? What do I do? I feel like I'm not the most empathetic person.
Rebecca Soffer:
I actually get asked that a lot. You know, you don't have to be the most empathetic person. And I think that all of us can actually learn how to become more empathetic. If you are at a complete loss for what to say, which is understandable, all you have to say is, you know what? I just want to say, I wish I had the right thing to say to you. I know that you're going through something really hard, and I wish I could help, and I wish I knew the right thing to say, I don't, but you are important to me. Or like, I'm here to talk. You know, just like make it clear that you're willing to listen and you want to learn more if they're willing to share it with you, you know, it's so important. It goes so far. I guarantee you that I remember the people who came out of the woodwork for me with the most simple things after my mom died.
Rebecca Soffer:
You know, the woman who sent the cleaning person, like, without even asking who sent the cleaning person to my apartment. She was like, there's no way Rebecca is cleaning her apartment. And I wasn't. It was awful. It was a pigsty. You know, my mom had just died in a car accident. I didn't clean my apartment for a month. And she sent this amazing woman over who still cleans for me to this day because I love her so much. You know, I had people who sent sure, like lots of you know, arrangements made out of fruit, which was, you know, helpful to a certain degree. But then I had people who sent food. I had people who checked in and said, I know you may not be interested in eating dinner tonight, but I'm going to invite you every week, literally every Thursday, I'm going to see if you want to have dinner.
Rebecca Soffer:
Maybe there's like one Thursday that you want to have it. And guess what? I think it was like the 12th Thursday. I was finally like, you know what? Yes, I would like to have dinner. I'd like to be with somebody. And so you know, do little things. You don't have to be the end all, be all to them. Just be there. Reach out, make a Google Calendar note to reach out to people. Find out when somebody's mom died. Put the date in your calendar. Guess what? That's going to be the date every single year for the rest of their life. Put it in as an annual reminder and put a reminder in for like, the week beforehand so that you can just send a text and say, Hey, oh, I see that next week could be kind of a tough one. You know, do you want to get together or, I'm thinking of you. This stuff goes so far with people. It really does.
Jen Fisher:
Yeah, it really does. And on that note, I can't think of a better way to end this podcast, although I don't want it to end. But Rebecca, thank you so much for being on today. I personally have taken so much away from this conversation, as I do every time I talk to you, and I know our listeners will as well. So, thank you.
Rebecca Soffer:
Thank you so much.
Jen Fisher:
I am so grateful Rebecca could be with us today to talk about grief.
Jen Fisher:
Thank you to our producers, rivet 360 and our listeners. You can find the Work Well podcast series on deloitte.com, or you can visit various pod catchers using the keyword workwell, all one word to hear more. And if you like the show, don't forget to subscribe. So you get all of our future episodes. If you have a topic you'd like to hear on the WorkWell podcast series, or maybe a story you would like to share, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. My profile is under the name Jen Fisher or on Twitter at Jen Fish 23. We're always open to your recommendations and feedback. And of course, if you like what you hear, please share post and like this podcast. Thank you and be well. The information, opinions, and recommendations expressed by guests on this Deloitte podcast series are for general information and should not be considered as specific advice or services.