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Up Your Average is the “no nonsense” podcast made for interesting people who think differently. Learn to navigate your life with unconventional wisdom by tuning in to Keith Tyner and Doug Shrieve every week.
No one grieves the same. You should not say to somebody, I know what you're feeling.
Doug:That's good.
Keith:Because you don't. Because we don't grieve the same. And so I can say, I understand how you might be feeling or I understand how you're feeling, but I don't know how you're feeling because I didn't have the relationship you'd had. I didn't have the bond that you had. I didn't have the ups and downs that you had, but I may have you know, if you lose a grandparent, I lose a grandparent, we're not gonna grieve the same way.
Narrator:Welcome to the Up Your Average podcast, where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to level up your life. So buckle up and listen closely to Up Your Average.
Keith:Good morning, Doug.
Doug:Hi there. Hi friends.
Keith:It is a great day in Central Indiana, and I'm glad that we got back together today.
Doug:Yeah. Me too.
Keith:It's a while since we've been sitting right here. And I just, I thought we would just talk about something that nobody likes to talk about. Okay. Yeah. So 1988, I was in bed asleep.
Keith:My phone rings at 10:00 and it's Connie. She's crying hysterically and her sister had just got killed by a drunk driver. And we weren't married. We didn't have any long term commitment. And all of a sudden, I'm supposed to be a responsible adult at that moment.
Keith:And I had no opinion on that. Like, didn't know anything about death. And what had happened is she had her sister, Donna had four young children, 12, 10, six, and four. I'm going from memory. And as a 27 year old man, I'm maybe only 26.
Keith:Yeah. I was 27 at that time and 26. And I was thinking, I don't understand any of this. This is too much. This is emotionally in over my head and I have no explanation of that.
Keith:And so death was thrust upon me. And that's kind of what kind of sparked this dialogue. I I think you have if I if I was gonna say, I think you can have death thrust upon you like a headlock. Like when you're a boy, you might tussle with another guy. It might be a headlock.
Keith:You might have death thrown upon you like somebody shoving you in the chest, or you might have it like they just punch you in the face. And I think like the headlock where you kind of see it as maybe grandma or grandpa passed away, right? Like it starts creating it. It has some emotional tie to it, but then the slap in the face might be your mom and dad. And then the punch in the face, I think is when there's a death that's out of sequence.
Keith:Have you ever had one of those things pop up in your life? Out of sequence, meaning grandma should die first and mom and then me. And it doesn't happen in that order.
Doug:One of the benefits of being raised by Jeff and Shelly in the 80s was my parents took me to funerals. And so you know, my memories, I remember being a young boy, and my parents took me to, you know, if a lady or a guy died at church, I'd go to the funeral. And one of the reasons they brought me along, my dad had told me was that that kids bring life to the place. And so he'd bring me and my sisters to bring life. We didn't do anything.
Doug:We weren't juggling or singing or anything, but just just by our presence of being there. And so I have some early memories of being around death. And I think I think that exposure really helped me be okay with it as okay as you can be.
Keith:I think I've read a bit about this. And I think that the farther we get away from the farm, the harder death is to people.
Doug:I've processed this, that thought several times through hunting. Yeah, because in hunting, I'm up near it and the cause of it. And it's it's a it's something that you really have to process when you're close.
Keith:Yeah. So Donna's dead now, which is that sounds really cold blooded, but at some point in the process, you have to be able to say it that way. Like she's not passed away. Have to like, I think you almost have to say dead or died to start kind of being honest about the situation. So this fella, John Jeter was the CEO of the Forum Credit Union.
Keith:He's kind of mentoring him. He invited me, this is 1988 to this retreat down near Asheville, North Carolina. And I didn't know if I was going to a cult meeting or what, but I get there. And as Providence would have it, they had these breakout sessions and one of them was on death and grieving. And I didn't even know that that was a thing.
Keith:At 27 years old, I didn't even know like that you could actually learn and help yourself about it. Had interviewed a former three star general in the Air Force at a Kimball meeting years ago. And I think one of the things he said about like, disruption is what can help you through disruption is training.
Doug:That's right.
Keith:And so if you don't have the farm to train you about death and dying, you don't have these other things, it becomes this mystery that sits out at a distance. And so I sat in that class, and I didn't know what to do with this stuff. I'm still it's this foreign thing to me, and I'm sitting in this class, but I'm learning and trying to understand. And and it may have been one of the greatest gifts I ever had. Like, Donna's death was such a harsh thing that it made me who I am today.
Keith:I don't know. I might've got to where I am without that punch in the face kind of death, but I think everybody's gonna have those. Like, I think you're gonna have a punch in the face kind of death and it's gonna take the wind out of your sails and you can curl up and go into the fetal position or you can train yourself along the way. You can't prepare for all of those, but you can have better understanding of what this really means.
Doug:When you can mourn. Mourn? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Doug:That's okay.
Keith:Yeah. And so what, what kind of stirred me to have this conversation today is I wrote a obituary two years, roughly two years ago today. And I think I can read it to you guys.
Doug:Are you talking about your own obituary?
Keith:No, no. This is like, I do that. Like, I'll write a eulogy or an obituary for a friend that dies or something. So I think I can get this one out without crying, but we'll see. And I'll read it and then I'll tell you the story and then we can kind of jump into some of the ideas behind it.
Doug:Okay.
Keith:So, and this would have been written a week after her death. I'm just going to read it as it was. It says, My young friend's body gave up the ghost last week. That expression evolves from the crucifixion when Jesus cried out to the end of his life. Interestingly, first Corinthians six seventeen radically says, change the expression as that verse says, your spirit is united with his the moment you believe Jesus is the Messiah.
Keith:When her body yielded her spirit, something beautiful happened for which I only pondered and suppose we'll understand sooner than I know. Our friendship extended nearly twenty years from her late teenage days. And I knew then when we had a bond. She pushed hard against the leadership of our fundamental private school. She was doing that long before I advocated as a way to live in her Sunday school class.
Keith:How can a friendship have depth and richness when in total it may have only evolved a hundred hours together? I think it's because of that person, Corinthians. She blessed me two years ago when she thanked me for the encouragement I gave her all those years ago in that class of rambunctious teenagers. I count those private words as one of life's greatest accomplishments and gifts. I added this line to my own obituary just four days before hers would need pinning that I believe our hearts were closer in perspective than our individual attorneys would speak outwardly to observers.
Keith:Don't grieve because I died, celebrate because I lived. Will you celebrate her life with me? That's my friend Elizabeth. That was two years ago. She woke up, think she was mid thirties.
Keith:She woke up having some inflammation in her ankles and five hours later she was gone. And when you think about that kind of scenario, it's intense because it's an out of sequence kind of scenario.
Doug:She was young.
Keith:She was young. I was minding my own business. I was out in Crawfordsville doing some morale hunting, and I got the call that the family wants me in the emergency room. And so it took the offensiveness of death to a level, that I really had only been in a time or two before. And, I was there to love on the family.
Doug:Right.
Keith:I wasn't I don't even think I was there to cry. I think I was there to be strong for the family to to help them through that moment. And I don't think without the training I'd had all those years excuse me. The training I'd had all those years before I would have been able to actually even go. I probably would have said, no, I'm not going to go.
Keith:Yeah. And so I think even the apostle Paul, I think about some of his writings has helped train me. He said like absent from the body is present with the Lord. He said, you know, to live as Christ and to die as king. And I don't know which way to be.
Keith:I'm torn. And so he talks about that this thing is temporary and what are you going do? And so that's built into my training personally. And the reality of it is that death probably isn't an emotional thing. Like what makes death emotional is the sequence of death.
Keith:Like, if I tell you George Washington died, does that get you really emotional?
Doug:Fair enough.
Keith:Yeah. Yeah. What makes it emotional is the closer you are to it. So today, one hundred and fifty thousand people around the planet are going to die. And honestly, it doesn't bother me.
Keith:Like it has no emotional thing. And so between this time and next week, there's going to be close to a million people are going to be dead or alive today, which is just insane. True. So that's what I'm saying is that the sequence and the relativity to it is what really turns it up and makes it significant. And so in that process, the emotional response to it really, it can cause some people to implode and to stop living and to do a lot of things.
Doug:How would you describe the relativity?
Keith:Like the relative relationship of it. Yeah. So
Doug:If it's your dog.
Keith:Yeah. My dog. Like, my dog is a perfect example. Like when our dog was diagnosed with cancer and it was time to do what we needed to do, Everybody in the house shed, like they ran and I had to go along with our dog to the vet and because it was hard, but if your dog dies, we're probably gonna feel bad for you, but I'm probably gonna go have pizza. And that's what I'm saying is what makes death really emotional is the sequence and relative relationship.
Keith:Yeah, it's a % sure. Because it's a % sure is why I thought we'd do this conversation because I think the more you train for the reality that's a % sure, then the more you can actually celebrate that somebody lived.
Doug:And enjoy them while we're living.
Keith:Yeah. And part of this training to me, quite frankly, was I realized that when I said goodbye to Donna the last time, it was goodbye.
Doug:Right.
Keith:And I didn't know it was You didn't know. That's what probably upset me. Like, what would I have done differently?
Doug:Right.
Keith:But what that taught me is when I say goodbye to anybody, I know intellectually it could be literally goodbye. And so do I wanna get an argument with somebody over something that doesn't matter? Right? Like, affects how I live because of that.
Doug:Yeah. And and for some people, that was their last goodbye was the argument.
Keith:Right. Right.
Doug:Which and, and if, if that's you, there's healing for that too.
Keith:There is, there is. And that's what you can learn from that too, is that that's real life processes. There's a lot of energy tied up in that. And so in that class, I sat in all those years ago that they introduced me to the cycle of grieving. The five steps of grieving.
Keith:The first is denial, which is really a pretty ordinary thing. Like there's no way that that happened. Right? And then the next one is just angry about it, being angry and who are you being angry at? Right?
Keith:Like that's like with Donna, she was killed by a drunk driver. I could have chosen to express that anger towards that person. But if I would have added, say a hundred years to her life, she would have died anyway. Right? And it would have been caused by that.
Keith:So something's gonna cause all people to pass. And if it's a tragic situation, that anger can disrupt you and cause you to go to a bad place maybe the rest of your life. You'd angry at that person forever.
Doug:Or just angry at the world Yeah. For not caring, for not knowing that your friend or your loved one just died and you got cut off in traffic or someone didn't smile at you or someone didn't talk with you at Thanksgiving dinner, whatever it is. Yeah. I think that anger, it's real. You got to deal with it.
Keith:And I think that happens less in a, say, 100 year old dying. There's probably not as much anger because I think grieving process doesn't happen necessarily at death. Can, like when mom was dying of dementia, my grieving process started when really her soul or her being was disconnected from her body. And so I didn't grieve as much of the death. Was grieving every time I go see her.
Doug:Right. Yeah. You did.
Keith:Process moves in and out time wise. It doesn't necessarily happen at the end.
Doug:Do you think you have to go through all these stages? Do you think you have to go through?
Keith:No. No. I don't I don't know that I ever get that. I think because I have an attitude about death, I don't usually get that angry about it. These are what some psychologists can.
Doug:I think they're pretty good. Yeah. I mean, you may go through ten minutes or you might go through five years of one of those, but
Keith:I think it probably happens more in the ones that are out of sequence.
Doug:Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot
Keith:of brain. Great grandma.
Doug:For sure.
Keith:Yeah. Then I don't really know what the bargaining one is. I've heard that one. I don't know, like, they put that in there and I don't know that I do that one. But the one that follows that is depression.
Keith:Depression doesn't, I don't know if that word really means anything anymore. I think sadness is probably
Doug:Yeah, sadness. I like sadness. I don't like sadness. I like the word sadness.
Keith:Yeah. Yeah.
Doug:Yeah. That's okay. Yeah. Yeah. Sadness.
Doug:It's real.
Keith:I lost a friend last month, and I think I'm still sad about her passing.
Doug:You bet.
Keith:And she wasn't particularly like a family member or something, but there was just special tie there that had sadness about it. And then the final thing that, and this all, this isn't like, this isn't a concrete, this is just how people define grieving process. And then there's finally that acceptance is like, you know what? Everybody dies. It's time for me to kind of pick up and to celebrate who they are, but I can't really keep grieving.
Keith:And that is not the same for everybody. Some people may never get to acceptance. You
Doug:get to acceptance you're going to be sad sometimes.
Keith:Yeah, yeah. And so in that class, that was the first time that was ever introduced to me. And in that introduction to me, I think the thing that really helped me the most is it seems like in my memory, the person teaching it was kind of a, she's probably my age, but I perceived her as a little old lady. Seems to me that way. She said that no one grieves the same.
Doug:Yeah. That's good.
Keith:Yeah. And she said, you should not say to somebody, I know what you're feeling. That's good. Because you don't, because we don't grieve the same. And so I can say, I understand how you might be feeling or I understand how you're feeling, but I don't know how you're feeling because I didn't have the relationship you'd had.
Keith:I didn't have the bond that you had. I didn't have the ups and downs that you had, but I may have, you know, if you lose a grandparent and I lose a grandparent, we're not gonna agree with the same way.
Doug:Yeah. Because your relationship was different. You're uniquely you. They were uniquely them.
Keith:Yeah. My my dad died when Caleb was maybe a year. So he didn't really grieve over that. Connie's dad, I don't remember. Maybe Caleb was 15 or so when he died, but that, that would have been different than what he might have experienced when my dad died.
Doug:Sure.
Keith:But the experience has a lot to do with where you're at. So just realizing that people grieve differently. But I think what I what I really wanted to jump into is what do you do with that?
Doug:Yeah.
Keith:Yeah. What do you do? Because I think you can be a warrior of grace, a warrior of hope, a warrior of recovery to people who have lost somebody. And what I learned in that class is most people don't do that.
Doug:Most people, yeah, they might do it within the first week.
Keith:Right. Right. And that first week, from what I understand is a blur to the person that lost that loved one. I haven't really lost somebody like I mean, I lost my parents, but the grieving of that, I think even starts when you leave home and you're not with them as much as you've got separation already. But there's all those people around that first week.
Keith:And then what happens when you get space and supposedly from, again, from this training is probably a month later, it gets dead quiet in that person's world. And that quietness is a little intimidating, I think.
Doug:Yeah. One of the benefits of being in this business is we've walked through this sign of life with a lot of people. And just by having our ears open, I feel like we've been able to learn a lot and we've been able to see a lot. I learned something new all the time about this. And I'm just so encouraged by the courage and the strength that especially our widows and widowers experience when they lose their spouse, the things I hear from you that that you've expressed to your spouse during those times, and you've shared with us just, it's been amazing.
Doug:It's been so encouraging. And one of them one of them lately, you know, a good friend of ours just watching her go through, you know, her spouse's life and death. And she was so encouraging. She even spoke to him as his mother. And that that really, that just really blew me away, because it was exactly what he needed as he was dying.
Doug:And that she took the courage and she wasn't offended. And she just she said, I'm going to give my husband what he needs. I couldn't believe it. And so I think you get these great ideas is what I'm trying to say, as you're going through it. The training is good.
Doug:But I think these great thoughts of compassion and strength and courage, I think they just come at you and then to grip it and run with it. That's where stuff starts happening.
Keith:That's part of where courage happens because you're gonna have those contrary thoughts that say don't grab it because it's too awkward.
Doug:Yeah.
Keith:Yeah. And so like what I'd like to do in the future up your average is to, I'd love to get my mother-in-law here to talk a little bit about it because she's one of the most courageous people walking through that that I've I think there's a lot to learn from her, but we'll see if that happens. But I asked her, how did you do that when you lost a child? How did you do that? And she basically said, I didn't think I could.
Keith:I didn't think I could do it. And what happened is that people took the courage when they had that thought to go see her, to go talk to her. And in that training process, learned is that the majority of people won't do that because most people don't like to get out of their comfort zone. It's too awkward to go see somebody that's grieving hard. Well, I mean, death you grieve, but like to lose a child, I don't I don't know.
Keith:But I I assume that that's so hard and people don't have the words. And so more often than not, they just don't show up.
Doug:Yeah.
Keith:And and then that quiet just echoes more and more. But she said there were people that showed up and they really made a difference in the world.
Doug:Carnegie says the sound of someone's name to their ears is the sweetest sound in the world. And I think his idea behind that was your your mom called your name young. And so that affection, that tie stays with you. And so the importance of someone's name bringing up someone's name I found to be very important. And I think one of the challenges that I hear today is there's everybody's got a video of somebody.
Doug:It was one thing to have a picture of your loved one, but now you have a video. And you see them living. And that that's really hard. But just to celebrate that person and bring them up by name or bring them up by story or bring them up by event, especially if it's a funny one. That that's just a great way to break the ice.
Keith:Yeah. And in that training as well, that what they said is that if somebody will come visit somebody, they feel awkward more often than not to bring up the name.
Doug:Right.
Keith:And so it gets awkward in the conversation. What I've found is because I know most people don't do it, will bring up the person because what they say is the grieving person wants to talk about their loved one.
Doug:Yeah, absolutely.
Keith:Yeah. And so I asked a lot of times, I'll ask somebody, tell me a funny story about them because everybody's got like, you're sad already. So why not figure out something funny they did to kind of laugh about them to really relive their life.
Doug:I had a game changer event a few years ago, I was talking with a friend of mine about her husband. Said, Yeah, he was a great man. And she said, He still is. And so just even that perspective of present tense has really changed the way I look at life and afterlife.
Keith:And that's part of the concept of death that I think is true. We all look at the world differently. We all have different opinions about this. But for me, I think you're essentially body and soul, right? Like your inner person drives this body.
Keith:And I think that energy of your inner person goes on indefinitely. And so just because it's operating your body, do you speak of that person in the past tense or not? And I think I've taken that on myself. I think I talk more in the present tense that that inner person still exists. And to recognize that really gives you a longer term perspective on life and what's really important in life.
Keith:If you think it's just if it's all just about this body, it's 100% probability this thing's, it's not around long, so you better eat, drink, be merry. But if there's something different, then there's a longer term perspective on.
Doug:Yeah. There are signs, aren't there?
Keith:Yeah. Yeah, no. It's
Doug:like losing this part of my hair back here or my back pain. There's there's signs that this is not going well for this body.
Keith:I joked, I was invited to speak a few months ago and I joked that gravity is pulling you to the grave. It's the same word, right? Gravity And it is calling your name, whether you want to believe it or not, like getting up and moving is a lot slower than it was say twenty years ago. And to live in denial of that can maybe make you maybe anxious about something you don't really need to be anxious.
Doug:Hey, stop doing stuff.
Keith:Yeah. Start living today is the day. And so when I, when I think of all this stuff, I don't hear a lot of people talking about this topic. And that's why I wouldn't bring it up today. Cause I think my friend Elizabeth, she lived fully all of her days.
Keith:She, I meant to get it before we got on here. She listened to, like when she got married at her wedding, just a few, it wasn't very many years before she passed. She had a John Prine song played at her wedding. And I'm just gonna throw out the name of it because we can't play things on here because they'll vaporize us off the internet.
Doug:Copyright stuff.
Keith:Yeah. Yeah, it's called In Spite of Ourselves.
Doug:I like that John Prime.
Keith:Yeah. And so Elizabeth, she lived, man. She lived, she lived her life the way that it's supposed to be lived. That John prime in spite of ourselves, if you want to know my friend, Elizabeth, just sit back and play that song. And imagine she played that at her wedding.
Keith:And that'll tell you a little bit about my friend who lived. And I just wanted to hang out with you guys today and just talk about the importance of living because not only in the importance of living, there's the importance that we all are going to die and to not be afraid of it, but to live today to the max and to not be afraid to go hang out with somebody who lost somebody because that may make their day. And that's part of your living. Cool. Anything else we need to talk about that, Doug?
Doug:I think we got it.
Keith:All right. Well, you guys, it was very thank trying to be to hang out with us. Hopefully hopefully it upped your thoughts a little bit about death and dying and maybe give you something to do to encourage somebody today. See you.