Loss 47/101: Loss through cumulative grief: Jeanette Koncikowski

#086. We'll all face grief and loss, but what happens when big losses come one after another in quick succession? How do we grieve them when we're barely through one loss before another one hits us?

This is The Silent Why, a podcast on a mission to open up conversations around grief, to see if hope can be found in 101 different types of loss.

Loss #47 of 101: Loss through cumulative grief

In this episode we're welcoming back Jeanette Koncikowski from Buffalo New York, who experienced five big losses in just over four years.

In 2010 Jeanette lost a pregnancy in her second term, then in 2012 her mother was diagnosed with cancer and died later that year, in 2013 her best friend died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 37, and in 2014 she lost her grandma and then her husband of 21 years through epilepsy (leaving her widowed at just 36).

For most of us, we will go through the big griefs one at a time, with the space to think, process and grieve what we lost (if we choose to). But sometimes they come close together, barely giving us time to process what's gone, before something else is taken, so how do we deal with that?

In this conversation Jeanette shares her wisdom on getting through the trauma of not only losing close family, but also losing the people that would have supported her through the other losses. This chat is full of useful advice and hope for how to deal with multiple losses and the support you might want to seek out if you're going through it yourself.

For more about Jeanette you can visit her website: https://www.thrivecommunityconsulting.com/

Or her Widowed Parent Project Facebook group:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/580595715466580

Or find her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/widowedPP

You can also hear Jeanette's Let's Chat episode on how to parent as a widowed parent here: https://www.thesilentwhy.com/podcast/episode/77dffebe/lets-chat-parenting-as-a-widowed-parent

Transcript

Jeanette: 0:02

Hi, I'm Jeanette Koncikowski from Buffalo, New York. And I'm here today to talk about the impact of cumulative grief.

Chris: 0:10

Occasionally, you hear about someone that experiences something really painful, and then not long afterwards, something else happened, and then something else. So today, we're gonna look into what grieving can feel and look like when this happens.

Claire : 0:22

Welcome to another 101 loss episode of The Silent Way, a podcast on a mission to explore many, many different types of loss, to see if it's possible to find hope in some of life's toughest challenges. I'm Claire Sandys.

Chris: 0:34

And I'm her husband, Chris, and together we're exploring all these types of grief and loss specifically with people who have firsthand experience of them, to see how they faced it, what helped, what didn't and where they are now, with it all.

Claire : 0:46

We'll all face grief in our life, at least once. And for many of us these losses will be spread out giving us time to process and grieve in between.

Chris: 0:54

But what if the losses roll in one after another in quick succession? How do we grieve if we keep getting hit by one death after another, as was the case with today's guest, Jeanette Koncikowski, from Buffalo, New York,

Jeanette: 1:06

You know, the ways I picked apart each relationship saying I didn't do enough for this person in their lifetime, I really just kind of took on the cumulative of guilt and the weight of that. And also at the same time, I think I internalised it as a sense of abandonment, like people were leaving me and I couldn't stop that. And I didn't know why.

Chris: 1:26

The experience of going through multiple losses is known as cumulative grief. And Jeanette had what she hopes were the worst years of her life experiencing five big losses over four years.

Claire : 1:38

In 2010 she lost a pregnancy in her second term. Then in 2012. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer and died later that year. In 2013, her best friend died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 37. And in 2014, she lost her grandma and then her husband of 21 years to epilepsy, leaving her widowed at just 36.

Chris: 1:58

Plus many other losses mixed in like losing a job she'd been in for 15 years.

Jeanette: 2:03

The cumulative impact work that came later with a different therapist that was specialised in trauma. And that work really unpacked a lot of the beliefs I had about myself that had formed because of these losses, like the belief I didn't get to be happy, like the belief that, you know, if I got too close to people, I would lose them. Like the belief that if you no good things happen in my life, there will be a catastrophe that followed.

Claire : 2:29

Jeanette shares the benefits of the counselling she received, how she changed unhealthy beliefs that had been formed or maybe even strengthened through her trauma, and how sometimes you have to allow the pain in even deeper before you can start to move forward again.

Jeanette: 2:43

People that have been through loss often will talk about how if you can lean into the discomfort of it if you can lean into the pain, if you can not numb it and avoid it and drug it away or sex it away or drink it away. That when you really let yourself feel that right, the pain can break you open and breaking open, you can heal.

Chris: 3:03

There's a lot of goodness in this conversation which we know you'll benefit from. So let's get it underway.

Jeanette: 3:11

My name is Jeanette Koncikowski. I am located just south of Buffalo, New York in the United States. I am a author, a writer and a nonprofit management professional. I run my own consulting company, helping other nonprofits do community building. And I'm here today to talk about multiple losses and kind of the way that having multiple various types of losses can can transform you.

Claire : 3:37

And thank you for coming back again, because we've had you on before chatting about parenting as a widowed parent. But this time you're coming on to talk about the more personal losses you've gone through which was being widowed, but also a number of other losses as well. So why don't you just tell us what it was and who it was that you lost and what that timeframe was?

Jeanette: 3:54

Sure. So we're going back to 2010 to 2014 were some pretty awful years in my life, I hope and pray those are the worst years of my life. It kind of bookend it really for me with with my family. I lost a pregnancy in my second term in the fall of 2010. The anniversary of my of my baby's loss was a few days ago, went through that and was just kind of starting to come around from that experience. When my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the spring of 2011. And I caregiver for her with my family until she passed away in July 2012. And the same week my mother died my husband was diagnosed with epilepsy. And then I spent the next 15 months kind of going through that experience with him. And during that time in 2013, my one of my best friends suddenly passed away. And then my husband died from a rare condition and epilepsy known as sudden unexplained death and epilepsy and I October 2014. And also my grandmother died in January 2014. And I think because grandma was the only one that was kind of a natural expected death at her age that I sometimes overlook that, but, you know, there were five very big losses for me in a four year period. And it took a lot of time to unpack the cumulative weight of all of that pain,

Chris: 5:22

Is that something that you get to share occasionally with that sort of four year period and, and what might be the typical response if you meet colleagues or people for the first time and explain to them what that period was like?

Jeanette: 5:34

It's not something that I necessarily just bring up without there being a reason to but you know, people that are close to me, will hear me talk about how, you know, there's certain times a year when I call it my high season of grief, and I'm in it right now. And that runs kind of from July, which is the the anniversary of my mom's death until the end of October when my husband died. And in all of this loss also happened to fall within those months from July, August, September, October. So this period of time here in the late summer, and early fall, for me, is always kind of, you know, a little extra sensitive. And so I'll recognise Now, sometimes when I'm feeling, you know, a little creepy that I have to tell people like, Oh, I'm a little extra right now. Because this is this is a tough time a year for me this is when things come back up for me. And I think people that know me and you know, have met me in context, like professional context, it was, it was a while before anyone that I worked with, found out that I had been, they knew I had lost my husband, but they didn't know about all these other losses. And I think there is always a little bit of this, like, how are you still standing kind of experience that people have when you go into it? And there's so much to go into that it's, you know, I just kind of like glide over, like, oh, this happened in this timeframe. And I'm okay now. It's, it's like this uncomfortable acknowledgment of like, Yes, I'm really, really terrible stuff happened. And I've rebuilt my life. And I'm okay. Now, you don't have to worry about me now. But I appreciate the concern. And I think those that are closest to me, you know, it's it's difficult on people, when you've gone through a lot of loss, even any one of those losses, you know, people I'm sure you both know this from doing the interviews, people treat people that are grieving differently. And so there have been people that have come into my life who have been absolutely amazing. And then there are people that were very close to me in that period of time, that are no longer in my life, because they couldn't handle who i Who i became through these experiences. So it really varies based on the relationships.

Claire : 7:36

This is a very broad question, but my gut feeling is wanting to ask - what is it like? Because some of us go through an individual bereavement, you know, maybe one every few years or something like that. But to actually have that we're snowballing of grief. Are you just kind of just dealing with one and then getting through it? And then oh, here comes another one. And then you switch into dealing with that instead? Or is it just just getting bigger and bigger as one big hole?

Jeanette: 7:59

I think it's both. It's a both. And so when you're in it, it very much felt like I was just moving through crisis after crisis after crisis in my life, like there was no respite. I had never had a very personal depression myself, my husband had always struggled with depression, but I had never had a serious depression until I lost the baby. And I had a lot of guilt about it. Because it was an unplanned pregnancy. It was my third child. And I had a one year old, I was not expecting to get pregnant again. And so I wasn't sure I had wanted to be pregnant. And then, you know, we decided to continue with the pregnancy. And I have this experience of the day we went in for the ultrasound to determine the baby's sex. You know, there was the baby, and I felt so much joy. And then 30 seconds later, they said they there was no more heartbeat. And we ended up having to have the DNC, because my body wouldn't naturally expel the miscarriage after two weeks, on our eighth wedding anniversary, and so it's just like, you know, we went through that, and I went into a really deep depression. And I felt like I was just kind of coming around that spring, and I was just getting my head back above water. And I was just starting to feel hopeful about life again, when my mother's cancer came back, and then it moved right into caring for her. And my friend when she died, that was obviously very unexpected. She was 37. And she died of a heart attack. And so that just that loss after these other two losses really just put me into a place of contemplating what I'm doing with my life. And seeing someone my own age, you know, lying in a in a coffin at the wake. It was just more than I can handle. It was the loss of her. I think that really undid me, in my mental health a lot more than the two prior because I felt like I had been preparing for my mother's death over that 18 months like we knew it was inevitable and it was coming. So then to lose my friend on top of that, I mean, these were the two women that were two of the people closest to me in my entire life and it'll lose them both kind of back to back like that really just shook everything in my life, my marriage was not in a good place, my husband and I actually separated after the death of my friend about a month later I left. And, you know, the stress of caregiving for him and his illness and the way that that played out all happening at the same time. I look back on that time a lot. And I think, you know, if any one of those losses hadn't happened, like, if just if it had been one less than it was, then maybe, you know, our marriage would have would have made it better than it did. But there's also this part of me now, that's done a lot of healing that can look back and say, This is how it was supposed to happen. Because if we hadn't separate it, we wouldn't have done the work to get back together and emotionally to heal and to start to heal before he died. And so, you know, when you take the sum total of it all and looking back at the way everything played out, I think it was meant to be the way it was meant to be. But in it, it very much felt like I was just gasping for breath, every single time I came up something else tragic happened. And I had just really found my footing. And my husband had found his footing, we were we were living apart. He lived in a apartment two blocks from us, from my children and I and we were separated, but we had not divorced, we were going to marriage counselling. We were trying to figure out all of this, you know that we were dealing with an incredible amount of stress with young children. In the home, we had a five year old four year old at the time and eight year old. And so then when he died, just at the cusp of feeling like things were riding in our life, it really just, it did a number on me, you know, I would say for the first two years after that every day was just trying to survive, and whether I was going to be, you know, emotionally and mentally, okay. And my, my mental health, my children's mental health became the thing that, that I focused on most during that time, and everything else had a weight in my life.

Claire : 11:59

We've recently done an interview about disenfranchised grief. And it strikes me that the first three losses there that you're talking about, we'd all qualify for this sort of grief that it's hard to grieve in some ways, because some people would wonder if you had a claim on it, you know, when you've when you've already got children, and then you lose another child, or when you lose a husband that you're separated from even though you're trying to pull that back together again, and then you lose a best friend, which you know, there's family grieving, so obviously, it's like, how much claim do I have on the grief for this person? And did that complicate it do you think because they weren't easy?

Jeanette: 12:30

Yeah, that complicated it. There were a lot of things that complicated. I also, I'm a survivor of child abuse. And so I had Child Trauma in my background. And that complicated it, because it you know, the way that I've responded to these adult losses was very much a feeling of blame. And of myself, like I had done something to deserve this. And it was it became very personalised for me in almost this way is like I had some kind of control over the universe, right? Like, what had I done to deserve to be hurt so much, and to lose so many people I loved and I really went through for the first two years after Mark died, my husband died, it was very much a blame game of like, I should have done better by all of these people. And that would have should have could have of how I could have intervened or fix the relationships and you know, the ways I picked apart each relationship saying I didn't do enough for this person in their lifetime, I really just kind of took on the cumulative guilt and the weight of that. And also at the same time, I think I internalised it as a sense of abandonment, like people were leaving me in my life. And I couldn't stop that. And I didn't know why. I didn't know what was wrong with me that made me be the kind of person like not like any of these people had a choice for how they died. Right? I mean, no one, no one actually chose to leave me but it felt like that. And I think that was really hard in the beginning to reconcile. And so I had a lot of guilt. I had a lot of shame, particularly about our marriage, you know, and most people didn't know we had separated that year. So you know, when they came to his wake, you know, I, I now am comfortable saying I'm a widow, right? We weren't divorced. We actually were in marriage counselling and working through it. And I think there's this expectation for widow people that like you have to put them on a pedestal and everything had to be perfect and you have to protect you know, this idea of your marriage is perfection at all cost when you've lost someone because you're protecting kind of their reputation after they're gone. And I think we do an injustice to ourselves into into our loved ones when we act like we are all angels and that we're not human. And so that's some of the that bigger picture piece you asked about earlier. You know for me, it really wasn't until the last few years now I'm it'll be nine years since since I lost mark in October. It's taken Mi nine year. So it was just in the last few years in year seven and nine, where I really did the therapy, the work in therapy to unpack the weight and the totality of these losses, because it, what it also was for me is that the people that I lost, particularly mark and my friend, you know, were also my chosen family, they were kind of the people that became my adult family. And so to feel like I was losing my mother, and my baby, and then my chosen family and my friend, and in my husband it, that was my support system. And so it was also like learning to rebuild a support system, it was learning to have to count on new people, you know, I think a lot like, what if my mother had been alive? When Mark died? How would she have cared for me, you know, or if my friend had been there, what would she have done to support me when he died? And to not have those people and to have to look for other people to fill those roles? You know, I did, but it made the loss more poignant, because I knew they weren't there. And I knew the ways that they would have supported me in that.

Claire : 16:02

Is there like a risk then that you start to kind of numb yourself when you have so many losses in a row and think you know, what, I'm not gonna deal with this, is there a temptation to somehow push it down and not face it?

Jeanette: 16:13

I think I dealt with what I could deal with, in the beginning, I was in therapy, right at the start of all this, actually, when I, when I suffered a miscarriage, I went back to therapy. And so I was working with a therapist, over the years that followed, as everyone kind of, you know, was dying. And in this, I was in this crisis place. But that was, you know, therapy, where she was just kind of rolling with me from like, event to event and helping me process that event and deal with like the day to day coping, the cumulative impact work that came later, with a different therapist that was specialised in trauma. And that work really unpacked a lot of beliefs I had about myself that had formed because of these losses, like the belief, I didn't get to be happy, like the belief that, you know, if I got too close to people, I would lose them, like the belief that if you know, good things happen in my life, there would be a catastrophe that followed, because in some of these cases, you know, it was there was a really good thing that happened. And then once I accepted that good thing in my life, that's when the tragedy happened. And so there kind of became this pairing in my mind of like, I don't deserve good things, and I won't have good things. Or if I do have good things, then then, you know, surely another loss will come. And that got really, really complicated when COVID hit because I was just finally, like rebounding and rebuilding my life. And I was in a really good place in 2021, COVID hit, and this fear that now I could lose everyone again, and have no control over death, again, really, you know, kind of reset the clock for me in terms of having to reprocess what had happened,

Chris: 17:48

When you've gone through the different types of loss that we're talking about. And then you talk about being in a really good place. How do you know what a really good place is and it feel secure enough in that place to be able to say this is a really good place?

Jeanette: 18:05

That's a great question. I think for me, you know, I was so focused on taking care of everyone else in the beginning, that primarily my children after my husband died, that my life whittled down to taking care of them and meeting their needs. And so I wasn't as focused on my own needs. And I didn't know, I didn't know what I really needed. I knew that I needed to be safe. I knew I needed to have people help me and be able to depend on people. But it almost became like, hyper independent, like, don't get too close to me, I'm okay, I can do this by myself. Because I can attach to another person. And at the same time, I met a man and I fell in love. That kinda like complicated of like, you know, I want to reach for you, I want you in my life. But this fear, like the post traumatic stress was really real for me. And this fear of like, if I attached myself to him, What if something happened to him? And, and so we had a couple kind of deal with that. And, you know, thank God for lots of really good therapists. And thank God, I have resources to go to a lot of good therapy, because I don't think I could have done this work as well on my own. So when I look back and say, Well, what made it? How did I know I was rebuilding? He was because I was doing things like being able to communicate with my partner, being able to have healthy boundaries in this relationship that I didn't have in my marriage, being able to deal with confrontation with family and friends and be like, You know what, I can't go to your wedding because it's going to be a trigger for me and I need like, I just can't right now I need some peace in my life, and I love you, and I would love to celebrate you in another way. But like, I can't do this for me. And I'm going to take that claim that space instead of you know, old me that would have just pushed through it and been in the bathroom at a church somewhere sobbing. And so it was kind of learning to accept myself as I was in stead of this vision of who I was supposed to be like, I could just be the superhero that pushed through all this pain, and was unbreakable. And that wasn't true. And the more I leaned into the pain and the more I leaned into how terrible this all felt, in that, my life, the life I had before was gone, that I really did have to feel like, you know, kind of the phoenix rising from the ashes and needing to burn everything down to start over. I did I moved, I moved nine months after my husband died. Not that far, but enough to feel like I was getting a fresh start. And two years after that, I got laid off from my job, which was unexpected, just as I was turning 40. And so I had to, you know, I had this other loss of like, my career, what was I going to do now at 40. And that allowed me an opportunity to do some really amazing work in the community, what came from that, and, and it was working within a community of people, including starting a grief programme that really helped me be able to heal and be able to see a different way of being in the world a softer way of being in the world than than I previously had. I think I was very ambitious before. And I was very kind of hyper focused on getting to the next step of my life, you know, like, Okay, here's the marriage, here's the children, here's the career. And now it's really been a much softer view on life and what success looks like on any day.

Chris: 21:23

Can we just focus for a moment on the loss of the job? Because, you know, when you compare it to what we've been talking about, so far, you know, almost pales into insignificance. But it's very significant for others that haven't experienced all the different things that you have, when you lost your job. Was that a small thing? Or was it still a big deal? You know, was the comparison with how I felt previously? Was it a drop in the ocean? Was it more...

Jeanette: 21:49

It felt like a drop in the ocean after everything else. So I kind of took it in like a well, I know how to adapt to change. That's all my life has been for the last two years. So I'm going to trust that I will figure this out. I think, you know, the loss of the job came at the same time, actually, my boyfriend lost his job. And so we had been together two or three years at that point. He's also a widower. And so there was this kind of moment of like, do we trust each other enough to move forward together? Like, is this an opportunity where you know, we neither one of us can now pay our mortgage? Immediately? Should we consider moving in together? And so there was this, it felt less significant than the other losses to me. But it was still scary, because it opened up all these other possibilities, like, do I want to move in with this man and take this relationship forward? Can I trust him with my children, you know, it kind of snowballed into the rest of the loss that way having to kind of come forward and make a decision, you know, do we want to leave the area, I had been offered to move my job to Albany, New York, which was five hours away, where I knew nobody, and I just didn't want to start my kids over again. So there were still decisions that were similar to the kind I had been making. But overall, it definitely, it felt different. I think the thing that felt the same, though, was the loss of the relationships, I had worked with people for 15 years at that point, these were my friends, these were people that were also chosen family. And so to have to now part, you know, I know I wasn't losing them to death, but it was like, I'm not going to see you every day, I'm not going to have my support system here every day. And I was really successful in my job. And I think, that had given me throughout all of this other period of loss, it was the one place I felt like I was still successful, is everything else in my life was falling apart, work was steady. And so then for work to not be steady, it just added another, you know, another kind of force change.

Chris: 23:46

With all those questions that you were having to make choices over about relocating, moving, restarting working, money, mortgage, etc. Where were you on the scale of 'fun adventure' through to 'I could do without this'.

Jeanette: 24:01

I was definitely on the 'I could do without any of this'. But I think one of the things that so I do coaching now for whatever people and one of the things that we talk a lot about I talk a lot about with my clients is these decisions, right? When you're when you've gone through loss, particularly if the loss of a spouse where you've had a partner, maybe to depend on my husband and I were together since we were 15. So we had 21 year, so even when we were fighting, you know, we would still make adult decisions together, you had another person to bouncing off of, I didn't really know how to adult without him. And so finding myself widowed at 36 and having to suddenly make all of these decisions, you know, I don't even know what he would want for services. So like from the moment he died, I had to make new decisions alone. That was really hard. And I think that as I got some experience and learn to trust my own intuition, instead of what people would expect me to do, that helps me really transformed the last two, I think people that have been through loss often will talk about how if you can lean into the discomfort of it, if you can lean into the pain, if you can not numb it and avoid it and drag it away, or sex it away or drink it away, that when you really let yourself feel that, right, the pain can break you open, and in breaking open, you can heal, and you can move forward. And maybe it's a very, very different life than the one you had planned. But it can still be a really beautiful life. And so I think for me, it was very much just a like, I don't want to do any of this, but I have no control over this. And that was a lot of the things I had to deal with around my mental health. Because my whole life, I've had anxiety, I want it control. No, I craved control. And all of a sudden, the universe over and over again was saying you have no control, you have no control, you have no control. So learning to accept that, instead of fight, it really shifted for me. When I started to feel like I was healing and it took about 18 months after my husband died. I think there was a period where I was like, who's dying next, who's dying next, what horrible thing is going to happen next, and once time kind of stabilised it, I could catch my breath and say, Okay, I'm here, I'm accepting universe, what you're sending me, you know, help me figure out what's next.

Claire : 26:18

One of the things we chat to all our guests about is their relationship with the question 'why?' And whether they've asked that when they've got stuck in it, whether they've changed it or move past it. And I feel like, you know, looking back at your your journey, it could be a constant 'why?' and then 'why? why?!' like it just keeps coming back? Because it's like, I can't believe this is getting worse. What is your relationship with that word? What does that look like through your journey?

Jeanette: 26:42

Yeah, I think in the beginning, you know, there was very much a sense that I must have done something to deserve this. Right? The Why was me that maybe it wasn't a past life? I don't know. But like, Why was I losing the people that I loved most? And why why did it happen so quickly, one after the other? And why was I supposed to go on without them. And I think that it was there and and accompany me and I tried to just push that down. But that was the guilt that crept in. That was the shame that crept in. And it wasn't until I did this last go around of therapy with a trauma specialist where we were really able to answer that there was no answer to the why there is no answer to the why it is what it is right. And, and I had no control over what happened. And so to surrender to being powerless, I think, is really hard as a human being when you know, we kind of see life as a fight against death. I don't know if it's any better in the UK. But in the US people are so averse to death, we don't see death as something that is a natural part of life, we see it as something that you struggle against a new fight against, and you don't give into. And so it was almost like if I accepted these losses, and if I accepted that I had no control, then somehow I was saying something about, you know, the value of my life, I had a really hard time doing kind of even traditional trauma therapy, things like EMDR, eye movement, rapid Association and desensitisation. That's a technique that's used a lot with trauma survivors didn't work for me. I had too many types of trauma to, to unpack. But we did do some work that worked for me. And in working with a really skilled therapist, I was able to surrender all of the sense of control that I had, and to accept what had happened and accept the weight of it. I went into trauma therapy, and I was like, you know, I just need to talk about COVID and my anxiety and like, I've done all this other therapy on these losses, I'm fine. But you know, I just need someone that has this background. And, you know, the therapist is building this timeline with me on my life and my trauma. And she's like, Oh, so this is this is nothing. Hmm. And I was like, Yeah, you know, I've, I've dealt with it, it's fine. She was like, I think actually, we're gonna do more than a couple of sessions of therapy here. You know, and, and I think once I trusted her, and I found a wonderful person that I trusted, once I trusted her, I was able to really surrender and say to her, I don't know why this happened. And I'm afraid it's going to happen again. And I'm afraid it's something that I've done to bring this on myself. It certainly changed my relationship spiritually with God. I went, as many people do through a period where I was really angry at God and really angry at the universe or whatever the higher power is, you know, that I think that's part of accepting, you don't have control. I have been an atheist and an agnostic and fallen Catholic for most of my adult life. And so I didn't believe in things and then suddenly I lost all these people. And I wanted to know where they went. And I wanted to know that there was an afterlife, and I needed to know that they were somewhere safe after here. And so that I you know, explored that as part of the why of like, where did they go and why. Why why are they not here? And then where are they and that was kind of a natural piece that followed the why for me was rebuilding my spiritual sense of self.

Claire : 30:02

So interesting. I had a completely different question planned. But that's just really fascinating because I hear so many people talk about suffering as if it would naturally push people away from the belief of any kind of God or religion. Because it's like, Well, how could there possibly be? So it's so interesting that having been through that much suffering, you went from not believing to actually I want to know more about this.

Jeanette: 30:23

Right? I really became a seeker and I, in my research, so I, the last time we talked right, it was about widow parenting, because I've been running a bit of a parents group for seven years now. And I've just finished a memoir about widow parenting, because there's not a lot out there. In terms of support for people. I think we're getting better at it. You know, there's an amazing number of new podcasts out there and new memoirs and things like that. But I was really curious, the researcher in me of like, what two people and have gone through loss of a loved one? How does that affect their spiritual beliefs. And when I interviewed so I've interviewed over three dozen widowed parents. And it was almost a reverse for every one of them. If they were someone that was very faithful before the loss, they kind of went through a period of pushing God away and pushing away their beliefs and questioning their beliefs, not going to services, kinds of things like that. And if they were people like me that were completely like agnostic, atheist, you know, none of that is for me. They went the other way, and started seeking God and seeking faith. And it almost just seemed like, regardless of who you were, you were going to do the opposite of what you had been doing. Because I think that loss does catalyse this desire to do one or the other, right? Either push it away, or pull into it for answers, because we're looking for that answer to the why.

Chris: 31:43

Reminds me of The Simpsons Movie, have you seen the Simpsons Movie? Many years ago.

Jeanette: 31:47

Many years ago.

Chris: 31:49

There's a brilliant scene where the dome was coming down over Springfield in the state of panic.

Claire : 31:54

World's ending.

Chris: 31:54

Then the camera shows the pub and the church side by side and groups of people run out of both, and then swap over. And the church congregation runs into the pub and the pub goers go into the church.

Jeanette: 32:06

Yeah, I mean, I think it you know very much was like that for me of I went after, after my friend died, it took so it was three losses. Before I went back to church, you know, I did go to my mother's funeral because I knew she would want me to do that. So I went into church for her. But it was after my friend's death that I returned to church for myself, and started started asking those questions. And you know, over the years that shifted, I still consider myself to be a person of faith now, but I'm, I'm not seeking it through organised religion. And I think that that's been part of the healing journey for me has been tuning into the spiritual piece of me that I didn't think I had in me anymore. Just when

Claire : 32:43

If you look back now, for people who are maybe going through it or have been through something not similar, but you know, have had multiple losses, do you feel like you've grieved them individually now? Each one for what it was? Or is that not really possible?

Jeanette: 32:57

So I ended up doing a year and a half of intensive trauma therapy, including a few full days live like a retreat style trauma therapy, for the reason that it was, according to my therapist, very important for me to do both, that I had to individually grieve each loss and spend time on each loss. And then I needed to grieve the cumulative total of what I had lost. And the way I did that, through ritual and meaning making was very different for each loss. But part of why it ended up kind of being this full circle process for me to heal was having to do both of those things. Because even in you know, I thought I had healed the pain from the miscarriage. But when I really went back into that, right, like losing your mother and losing a child, within six months of each other, a year of each other, what did that mean for the way I acted as a mother now, so it raises new questions each time you go through these losses, and each one kind of compounds it right, losing my friend and reflecting on the ways that I was not a good friend made me really act differently with the friends that I have now in the way that I want to be with people. Same thing in my marriage, you know, I've been remarried since 2020. And the way I am in this relationship is wholly different than the way I behaved in my first marriage because I took the lessons that I learned from both the loss of my marriage, and then the coming back together of that relationship and then the loss of my husband to kind of apply to how I want to be in this relationship today. So it absolutely had to be done in a way that was like each loss and then the cumulative losses together. Like I said, when I started therapy, I thought I had grieved each loss and then it was in kind of, you know, they'll talk about trauma therapy as like an onion right, you have to peel away these layers and then there's just a new layer and then a new layer until you get down to the core. And getting down to the core took me not only through those adult losses, but to the childhood losses to and to the childhood trauma and like all of it had to be dealt with in pieces and and holistically in order for me to feel like I really was recovered from what what these experiences were which is not to say in any way I think I'm like, perfect and never going to, you know, do anything wrong anymore, or misstep in a relationship. But to just even get to a place where my anxiety was no longer running the show, but I'm running the show. You know, that took a lot of work and a lot of money.

Chris: 35:15

How did you know that you'd got to the core of the onion, and there wasn't another layer to come? Was that your knowing? Or were you told that by the expert?

Jeanette: 35:24

That was definitely my knowing the expert has always said to me, I will know what I need. And then I have to trust myself and that it's my story. And it's my work. I just reached out to said, expert for the first time into yours, because I'm featuring, you know, the story in my in my memoir, and I wanted to make sure she was comfortable with it. And I wrote in the email, I'm sure you're gonna say that I can just trust myself. And I know what I know. And she wrote back like, yeah, yeah, you do, you can trust yourself, like, this is your work. I was just along for the ride. And so for me, it was really, it was knowing that I had done it all that I was not leaving any stone kind of untouched. Within that core of the onion, if you will, if there was a stone in there, I had, I had uncovered them all and peeled away the layers. And it was time to rest. And like I said, that took me almost two full years of therapy this time around after having done previously for years, a couple years before that. So I like to think of myself as a therapy veteran, I've done. I've done a lot of it over the years.

Chris: 36:21

You're talking to us in the UK, and we don't really do therapists, we don't really do therapy, we still have generations that would look down on sort of counselling or pastoral support as being a little bit mumbo jumbo, what might you say to somebody who would say I can do this on my own, I need to do on my own?

Jeanette: 36:37

I would say that we are as humans and interdependent species, and this level of pain you can't do on your own. And we're not meant to do on our own that we are not meant to live all alone in it's not you know, survival of the fittest is, is a myth that we need. We need other human beings and we need people that that can help us. And, you know, I didn't grow up in a home that supportive counselling. Nobody took me to therapy when I was a kid, it wasn't something in the 80s in the US, but anybody was doing. So it's not like my parents are different than anyone else, which is not what we did. I sought it out for myself when I started college, because I knew what I was going through then was more than I could handle. And so I that is another place where I've always trust my own intuition, and have come back to and, you know, I think therapy is hard, right? We can get people aren't really good therapists sometimes. And it's like dating, like, if it's not a good match, you need to just cut it loose and let it go and move on and look for your person. But when you find your person, and if you can open yourself up and really trust that person and they've earned your trust, then I think you can do some really deep work together. And that that, at least for me, I had to do that work, I had to be able to concentrate on myself. Because all the rest of the time, I was concentrating on the kids and taking care of everything. And I was you know, also a boss and I was, you know, living this life where like I was in control. But inside I felt like I was falling apart all the time. And I needed to be able to reconcile those two things.

Claire : 38:05

It's a heartbreaking situation, like you said, you had the resources to do it. And I've heard you talk about acknowledging that not everybody can do that. And it's it's such a sad situation that some people find it harder to get that kind of help. But you know, I would say for people listening who might be a bit like, oh, well, that's alright for some people because they can afford it. I think there are a lot of things we can cut back on in life and you know, therapy costs money, but if you're eating out and having meals, it's not going to be a lot more than other things. I think it's it's just shows you with your story, the priority it should take and how important it is, if you can find the resources to do it to to help you get through. Because when you look at the amount of sessions that you've had, when you're talking about over years, it just shows you you know how complicated grief is how much unpicking it needs with somebody else. And the thought of someone trying to do that on their own is quite frightening, really, cuz I can't help but think it must end up going somewhere unhealthy.

Jeanette: 38:58

Yeah, I mean, what, what isn't felt as transmuted? Right? So when we don't, when we don't heal and healing can look like different things for different people. Not everyone can afford therapy therapy in the US because a managed care is ridiculously expensive. Even with co pays, most people can't afford it. Or if you're getting therapy for managed care, maybe it's not, you know, the top quality therapist that like my private pay therapy was, but it was also something that I prioritised was mine and my children's mental health. So lots of other things like they didn't. I'm in a community where kids do lots of sports and things like that. And parents pay a lot of money. I know. You lost your dad, we're going to therapy. That's what you're gonna have one other thing you know, my kids did gymnastics and music and they went to therapy and that was the first two years after their dad died. That's all we did. We also found free support groups through our community bereavement centre. I, you know, reached out online to support groups that were free to access on Facebook. The organisation I ended up running after I left my job I started a community based grief programme there To provide kind of community based spaces for healing that, you know, these are not formal therapy. But it's a place to come together with other people. A lot of people get that from their religious beliefs or their faith services. So there are resources you can find that are no cost or low cost, but it's about what you bring to it in the work you're willing to put into it. You can find student therapists that often can also be great. And, you know, I was a person that prejudge them, I had a very young therapist taking care of my child. And I went and said, you know, to her supervisor, well, this is not what I asked for, I want the best of the best. She, she was like, weren't you a therapist or 23? Like dammit, yes, yes, I was, you know, I was seeing clients when I was straight out of grad school. So sometimes we have to get past our own stuff and our own biases, and tap into what is available to us and trust that, that this can work if we let it.

Claire : 40:54

So at what point did you because you know, like we spoke about last time I spoke to you, you're so kind and generous and passionate about helping other people. So you have to have a bit of reserve in the tank to be able to then give out and support others, which is incredible, after what you've been through that even in this short period of time, since you're, you're able to do that already. So at what point did you think I've got something here that I can actually help others as well?

Jeanette: 41:18

Thank you for those kind words, I think it was. So it really came from a selfish starting place. I started with a parent project in 2016. Because I couldn't find other young widow people that connected to what it was like to raise grieving children, there was a local support group, but almost everyone in that group, with the exception of three people, including myself were 65. And above. And seniors have very different needs when they're widowed than young people do, right? Like they're worried about who's going to take them to the doctor, and who's going to help them as they age. And I'm like, I can't even go to a meeting if I can't get child care. So I really started with a parent project out of my own kind of selfish desire to find people like me that were going through the same thing. And I started as an online support group, because I didn't have time, I don't have time to really go to, you know, my kids and I were going to therapy, one or the other of us three nights a week, I didn't have time to add a support group into that. So the online group became this place where I could find people like me. And I was very, very blessed my first few weeks of being widow that the person that brought me to that original local meetup group, even though I didn't fit into the group long term, she was another widow person. And she reached out to me, and she spent hours on the phone with me, helping me telling me I could get I could do this, I could go forward, I could, you know, rebuild my life when I was just absolutely devastated. And it was really her kindness that I think of whenever I want to pay it forward now, right? Like it was given to me. And so it's really important to me, to be able to pay that forward and to give back. And I think people that are grieving often feel so alone, and they feel so hurt, and they feel so isolated. And there was so much of that period of my life where I felt so terribly isolated from everyone from my friends, from my family from God. And so I want it as I was coming through it and transforming, it was really important for me to hold on to the two things. One was finding purpose, there had to be a reason to go through this kind of pain and that there must be a purpose on the other side of it, and define community. And so purpose and community are the two things that I held on to of like the things that would help me get to the other side of this that would help me cross the bridge to what I call my second life. And so when I talk with people now that are grieving, those are the things that I put forward, its purpose and its community.

Chris: 43:40

Within that this podcast, we want to share many stories like yours, but to explore where and how hope can exist. And whether hope can be found through or in every type of loss. So what or where did hope feature and regaining hope in others or in a future?

Jeanette: 44:03

That's a great question. I had someone that follows me on Twitter the other day asked me where you find hope that it's been six and a half months for them, and they're so bitter. And I said, Of course you are like how can you not be better you're six and a half months out from the death of your wife, right? Like hope is a ways away when you're that new into the loss. For me, it wasn't until probably 18 months in after marks death that I started to feel some kind of hope for a future. And I think that really came first from just surviving like to be able to see that I was still standing. I mentioned my husband and I had been together since we were 15. I had this core belief that I could not survive without him that he was someone that had protected me as a child that he was someone that took care of me that he was someone that helped me kind of build a new life and so I had always believed that something had happened to him. I wouldn't be okay. And I was okay. Psychologically it took a toll on my body more than anything the stress but it psychologically I was okay. And so I think that, you know, as I recalibrate it, even though I was in deep pain, I hadn't broken completely, I had been able to trust my decision making, I had been able to trust my intellect when I went emotionally offline my intelligence state, and that helped me do things like find really good therapists for people, even when I was in shock. And so those kinds of things like looking for those little nuggets of hope, kind of cumulate it right. So just like the losses, cumulated, finding these little pockets of hope, you know, I could do this, I could find the right person to help us I could find the new job, I moved the house, like all those little things started to build to a place where I was like, I can have a future now. And it's very, very different than the one I thought it was going to be. And there was loss in that, right, that's a secondary loss. Like you have to grieve the future you expect it to have. And in getting through that. And, you know, certainly falling in love, again, helped. But I also really just think it was an internal process of trusting myself in learning that I had all the tools within me to get through this, that it didn't have to come from someone else that I could do this. That is what gave me hope and pull me through

Chris: 46:12

The final question, then, Jeanette, we've reached that time, really lovely to be able to have this conversation with you. So thank you for sharing all that you have. I mean, we've scratched the surface, haven't we really years and years of work? To pick one thing to end this episode? What's your Herman?

Jeanette: 46:27

It's my favourite two phrases, purpose and community, that when you find your purpose, you can pay it forward, in that it's best done not alone, but in community that those are the ways we heal is finding those things that we can share from our journey and pay it forward to help other people.

Claire : 46:45

Paying it forward. That's a concept of the very heart of what humans are intended to be something healthy, we've nurtured and we can now share with others, to help them through the tough times and know that they're not alone. And if you have no idea what a Herman is, head over to the sign at y.com/herman.

Chris: 47:01

Thanks, Jeanette for this valuable honest conversation, you can visit her website if you'd like to find out more about her www.thrivecommunityconsulting.com Or her widowed Parent Project Facebook group, we'll put a link to that in the show notes, or find her on X - @widowedPP.

Claire : 47:16

I still prefer'Twitter'. For more about Chris and who we are and why we're doing this podcast, check out the www.thesilentwhy.com where you can search our episodes, find them by topic, search our blog or support the show financially, which I kind of rely on to keep going.

Chris: 47:30

You can also follow us on social media @thesilentwhypod which is definitely worth doing now because Claire's got some exciting new things on the way, hinted at in the update episode two weeks ago.

Claire : 47:42

We're finishing this episode with a quote from Meg Donohue."Grief, I believe is cumulative. Each experience of loss shaping the size and scope of the next. Each loss holding reverberations of the losses a person has experienced over a lifetime. The pain of grief is real, but it's also an echo and an aftershock. The spirits of past emotions rising up to grip your hand again. Examine one loss and you're likely to find another inside of it. And then another inside of that one. All that grief repeating like a set of Russian nesting dolls."

Chris: 48:16

Well, that makes me feel better.