7 Things To Do When Grieving, Lisa Keefauver

Hello my grieving friends!
Hi grievers.
Hi grievers.

Did that greeting surprise you? Did you think, “Wait, how does she know I’m a griever?” Or maybe you thought, “Am I allowed to be grieving, given 100% of us will experience loss multiple times in our lives?” The answer to that is yes, you’re allowed.

But I have a question for you: In your grief, have you ever stumbled upon joy and then immediately felt guilty? I definitely did the first time I laughed out loud after my young husband died. And if you’ve survived cancer like me, you might also find it difficult to be amazed by something like the sunlight rising at dawn when the long dark shadow of that disease still lingers.

I know it can feel like the world is a relentless force, taking from us all that we hold precious. Because it is. And it’s the same force that gives us what’s most precious, too. As a social worker, grief guide, and activist, I’ve spent a career railing against our culture’s use of toxic positivity to deny our pain and felt enraged by the grief illiteracy causing us all so much harm. So I wondered how I dared get up here today and invite you to focus on the vitality of living. It was in a conversation I had on my podcast, “Grief is a Sneaky Bitch,” that taught me that’s actually what I’ve been doing all along.

I spoke with Cecilel Surasky, a mother whose teenage son died after accidentally ingesting a lethal substance. And what she shared is that before his death, she used to think that the continuum in life that mattered most was moving from sadness to happiness. But what she discovered after the worst thing happened to her is the most important path we can take is moving from numbness to aliveness—right? Aliveness. Then existing on the far end of the spectrum from numbness, aliveness reminding us that we all hold within us the full spectrum of human emotions, from anguish and rage to astonishment and wonder. And that to be with them all offers us a renewed vitality we are so desperately longing for, aren’t we? And that’s why I’m on a mission to center aliveness in a world full of loss. Or, as poet Jack Gilbert so eloquently asked of us, to “have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”

Now, sadly, our culture reinforces actions that lead to numbness and deadness instead. Most of us in this room are skilled and practiced at avoiding, controlling, distracting, dissociating. I’m seeing some knowing nods there. Yeah. Right. Now, don’t be mistaken, aliveness is not a synonym for happiness. It doesn’t require us to always walk around being cheerful and positive and grateful. And don’t panic, aliveness doesn’t require us to jump out of airplanes or scale high peaks, either. I promise. It simply means we don’t get to choose our emotions à la carte. That to lean into our aliveness, though counterintuitive and certainly countercultural, is to feel everything—to build our capacity to hold, and welcome, and metabolize both our individual grief and our collective grief. We must be present to what animates us, too. The musculature, the strength, and the flexibility required to attend to our sorrows is the exact same that allows us to engage with hope, feel connected, and nurture our souls. So I’m not standing up here today asking you to choose between either bearing witness to your grief or being actively astonished by the beauty of this world. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

When I invite my clients to be with their grief, yes, I’m serving as a safe container and witness as they find the courage to turn toward their loss to discover that they are a companion to their sorrow rather than being their sorrow. And in equal measure, I remind them that if we don’t allow delight to dazzle our senses, if amazement doesn’t make us breathless from time to time, if the only story we tell ourselves and one another includes the hardness and depravity of this world, then we lose twice. I know how challenging it can be to center aliveness in our daily lives. It was so important to me that I had a reminder tattooed here on my arm. This black band represents honoring the dead, while the ampersand and blooming flowers remind me to also focus on the beauty of living. Don’t panic, I’m not up here saying you have to go get a tattoo, although, you do you. And for the skeptics among you, I want to reassure you that in recent years, researchers like Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley have validated that to invite wonder and awe into our daily lives, even and especially when the gravity of grief is weighing us down, is good for us. It’s good for our emotional, our cognitive, our physical, our relational, our spiritual well-being. It’s even a healing and generous act because when we choose a reverent approach to the expansiveness of our lives, we’re more likely to engage with the world and one another with more empathy, generosity, altruism, compassion.

It was in January of 2023 that I was given yet another chance in life to practice centering aliveness. Those chances, by the way, are what I like to call AFGOs, which stands for “another [f***ing] growth opportunity.” I’m guessing a few of you in this room have had a few of those. It was just 10 days before the manuscript for my first book was due to my publisher and about a month before I was scheduled to take the TEDx stage that I was diagnosed with triple-positive breast cancer. If you’ve received similar news, you know I was devastated and shocked. And for me, that call came after more than a year of being misdiagnosed, and that fact broke open a deep well of rage and pain that had been closed off, unearthing a complex grief from more than a decade ago when my husband, Eric, was also misdiagnosed and mistreated for more than a year—a year of absolute, torturous hell when he changed as a father, as a husband, as a person—a year that we had to compress into just two and a half weeks between receiving his call that confirmed it had been a grapefruit-sized brain tumor all along to him dying in my arms at the age of 44.

So, yeah, my diagnosis was an AFGO, big time. And it was a reminder of how much new grief triggers old grief. I knew immediately that I would need to give myself permission to lean into the rage and the sorrow and the grief. I did. And that I would need to practice my joy detective skills, too, to let it all happen—the terror and the beauty, as Rilke said. But as I faced a frightening and uncertain future, one that would include the pain and agony of surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy, honestly, I questioned my ability to be in search of delight. And where could I possibly find beauty in this world?

Friends, I desperately wanted to be dazzled, but I also didn’t want to face the world. I didn’t know how I could. But then I did what I ask other people to do. I did what the research told me to do. I did what my body and intuition told me to do. For starters, I asked for and willingly received help. You might be thinking, “Duh, revolutionary.” I know. But how many of us in this room have practiced that skill? Mhm, that’s what I thought. So I committed to saying yes to all offers of help. And I was awed and inspired by the moral beauty of others—from podcast fans I’ve never met knitting caps to cover my bald head and sending beautiful poetry to my inbox to acquaintances and friends flying across the country to be with me when they shaved my head bald. When I sat for hours in the chemo chair, hands and feet submerged in ice, I also prioritized putting myself in the way of beauty, as Cheryl Strayed instructs us. And so I made a plan to be with the vista I love most—the ocean. I made my way to the Pacific to meditate before each of my 12 weekly chemotherapy sessions. And I’ve got to say, though I intellectually knew it would be good for me, I was profoundly surprised at how being able to find any beauty at all in this world opened the door to hope. And still, as my body became increasingly disfigured, I was tempted to retreat further into isolation. But knowing that collective effervescence is a path to aliveness, I muscled up the courage to arrive on my mat at my local yoga studio a few days a week. It turned out that the risk of arriving vulnerably was worth the reward, because strangers became neighbors and friends. I felt loved. I found belonging.

And I paused. Part of centering aliveness is remembering that we’re human beings, not human doings. It’s an invitation to get still, which feels practically impossible for most of us, doesn’t it? So when the days came that I was physically incapable of leaving my house, when the chemo brain meant all I could do for hours was stare at a wall, I let myself. I let myself stare at the wall for hours. I was a human just being. But friends, you don’t have to wait for a cancer diagnosis or the death of a loved one to practice centering aliveness.

So here are seven daily rituals to choose from, practices that will help you move along that continuum away from numbness as you build the musculature of aliveness and the good news is you’ve already started because number one is Seek Community. One of the best ways to soften the hard edges of our hearts is to gather in sacred communities like this one to be present to the sweet delight of feeling held and heard and celebrated.

Number two: Bring intention to your attention. Mindfulness helps us get better at differentiating the story we’re telling ourselves from what’s actually happening in this moment which might just include a state of ease or maybe even a feeling of joy.

Number three: Take beauty or wonder walks, be on the hunt for beauty in a variety of forms and don’t forget that you might be discovering beauty that’s fallen to the ground or that includes the color blue or has rough textures.

Number four of course, be in nature. Beyond putting our lives in perspective and reminding us of our interconnectedness when we see things like “fields lay fallow” we’re reminded that rest is a part of being alive too.

Number five: Become an amateur photographer, be on the lookout for images that inspire you that touch your heart that expand your mind, snap a pick or take a video and make sure to share it with somebody else so they get to experience awe too.

In fact, number six is to deliver delight to others in a variety of forms. That might take the form of giving a specific compliment to a stranger or a friend or you could join me in my weekly practice of delivering flowers to a stranger. As Maya Angelou invited us, “be a rainbow in somebody else’s cloud.”

And, number seven, finally, tell yourself a story of aliveness. Remember that words make worlds so find a set of grounding words to orient you to the sacredness of this life each day.

I’d like to close by offering you the story I tell myself every morning and I’m going to invite you to repeat after me. Okay? May I see love [may I see love] May I feel love. [may I feel love] May I radiate love. [may I radiate love] May I receive love. [may I receive love] Thank you