Over the years, I have developed a favorite tradition in the Unlocking Your Story workshops by inviting guest authors to visit the groups. I love cheerleading writers and their new books as they make their way into the world, and it's also a way to cultivate community, as I enjoy inviting back workshop alums for these events.
This fall we have two incredible women visiting the groups, both of whom have written books on the topic of grief and loss—a theme for the times, to be sure.
Hope Edelman, author eight nonfiction books including the #1 New York Times bestseller Motherless Daughters, is also a certified Martha Beck Life Coach specializing in grief, early loss, and creativity. She runs workshops and retreats to help motherless women revisit and reassess their early losses. Hope's new book, The Aftergrief, launches next week and explores what loss looks like 10, 20 or 30 years later.
Hope and I spoke at length about how to think about grief, especially against the backdrop of Covid-19. She shared her thoughts on how shifting our perspectives about our losses can help us grow, and how writing can be a great tool for this.
Barbara Abercrombie, also visiting this fall, is a longtime, beloved teacher at UCLA Extension Writers' Program, whose book The Language of Loss is coming out in November. Stay tuned for an interview with her next month!
Photo: Hannah Kozak.
Hope Edelman is the author of eight nonfiction books, including the bestsellers Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers, and the memoir The Possibility of Everything. Her work has received a New York Times notable book of the year designation and a Pushcart Prize for creative nonfiction. She is also certified as a Martha Beck Certified Life Coach, and facilitates Motherless Daughters retreats and workshops all over the world. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Iowa City.
Her new book, The AfterGrief, explains that the death of a loved one isn’t something most of us get over, get past, put down, or move beyond. With guidance for reframing a story of loss, finding equilibrium within it, and even experiencing renewed growth and purpose in its wake, Hope demonstrates that though grief is a lifelong process, it doesn’t have to be a lifelong struggle.
KARIN: Congratulations, Hope! I know your new book took a while to birth.
HOPE: Thank you. It was four years in the making, which is a very long time, but it took me that long to do all the research I felt thoroughly conceptualized and articulated this way of thinking about grief. It just took that long to really know what I wanted to say. It takes as long as it takes.
KARIN: So, is the book much different than the way you originally pitched it?
HOPE: Yeah, very different.
KARIN: What did you know at the beginning, and what did you discover as you went along
HOPE: The book went through several iterations.
When I first started working on it, I was going to write kind of an all-purpose book about grief. I look back now at that proposal, and I was emphasizing post traumatic growth—looking at the positive outcomes of grief once we allow ourselves to grieve and the reasons why we may not have been able to grieve, especially if we were young when a loss occurred.
As I started doing interviews and talking with more people, I became so intrigued and dismayed by how many adults who were bereaved as children, who lost a parent or a sibling or a close friend, and didn't get support and all the ways that that was showing up in their lives later. So, the second iteration of the book was very much about adults bereaved as children.
Also, the 2016 election happened a few months after I sold my proposal. I started thinking about cultural responses to grief in a different way because half the country, as far as I could see, was in mourning, and portions of the other half were just saying, “You lost, get over it.” There was a sense of just get on with things, let go and move on, deal with it. That was so reminiscent of how many of these adults were told to cope with their grief when they were younger. It was an old school message, but it was pervasive in the culture for a couple of months. I mean, I saw it everywhere on social media and it really made me rethink what I wanted to write about and what was important to write about, and did the world really need another book about grief that talks about the long-term positive outcomes? There's so much already written about posttraumatic growth.
Then I started studying narrative therapy and doing more research and leading retreats. I saw that a lot of the long-term lingering effects were similar, regardless of what the age was at time of loss. As I got deeper into that research, I realized that what I was discovering was applicable to a much wider portion of the population, which was anyone who had a major loss in the past. What does that long arc of loss look like?
So, the third iteration of the book really became looking at the long arc of loss and what a major loss is bound to look like 5, 10, 20, 30 years later, and how it will recur. Grief will recur, but I didn't want to call it grief because it isn't the same thing that you feel in the first year or two after someone dies, when you're making all the adjustments and adaptations simultaneously with trying to figure out how to live in the world without this person and missing them and having the physical absence. What shows up 10, 20 years later, is really something very different, but I didn't know what to call it.
I was thinking what comes after grief? Then I realized, we're just going to call it The Aftergrief, because that is, I think, the phase of it. We've all been conditioned to think about five stages of grief. The bereavement world doesn't think in those terms anymore, but the general public very much does. Kübler-Ross's stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I think Kubler-Ross was a brilliant mind, but her work got co-opted in the direction that I don't think she ever intended for it to go in. She did a lot of good in the culture by getting people talking about death and loss, but when those five stages started being applied to bereavement, things really went awry culturally, I believe.
KARIN: Didn’t Kübler-Ross intend for her work to be applied to someone who is dying?
HOPE: Yeah, that's exactly right. Terminally ill patients. Those were the stages that she observed people going through as they came to terms with the imminent end of their own lives. Then it got applied to bereavement.
In my experience—and I've been doing this work now for more than 25 years primarily with women who've lost their mothers, but also with any adults who were bereaved as children, and also having the experience of having lost family members and close friends as an adult, and helping others navigate their losses as a grief coach—I believe that people really only care about two stages of grief: the stage where you feel really bad and the stage where you start feeling better.
I think of that as grief and the after grief. Grief is that stage where you feel really bad. You're dealing with sorrow and distress and despair and all of the physical symptoms of grief. Then the after grief is when you start feeling better and feeling that you've got the inner resolve and resilience and fortitude to move forward in your life. You'll miss that person and hopefully you'll find ways to carry them forward with you, but you can do it. For everyone, that transition is different. There's no morning where you wake up and say, “I'm in the after grief.” That doesn't happen.
KARIN: Is it common to transition back and forth between the two?
HOPE: Oh yeah, you can. In fact, there is a name for that. It's called the dual process model of bereavement. It was developed by two Dutch psychologists who observed in widows that it would move back and forth between focusing on the loss and focusing on the practicalities of life. They called it an oscillation.
Some people make that transition in a very discreet way. Some just feel it coming on gradually. Some can pinpoint the morning that they wake up and feel that this is the first morning I've woken up and feel a sense of hope about the future. For others it's a slower process.
We phase into it a year after the loss, two years after the loss, six months after the loss. It depends on so many factors, including the relationship you had with that person, how dependent you were on your interactions with them, your temperament, your prior losses that you may or may not have had. And then I think it extends to the rest of your life. Because aspects of that loss may recur or bubble up for you. I think that the cultural message has been that if, 10 years after your mom or your dad or your sibling died, you reach a life transition and you powerfully miss them, that your grief was somehow incomplete. In fact, that was the belief in the psychoanalytic literature well into the '70s and '80s. I think the word that was used was unresolved or incomplete grief.
KARIN: Wow, that's amazing.
HOPE: Right. Whereas the number of people that I've encountered who say, “20 years after the loss, my first child was born and I found myself missing my mom or my dad all over again. Or 10 years after the loss, on my wedding day, I couldn't stop crying because I missed my sibling so much and wished that they were there.” I don't think that should be pathologized. I think it's actually a normative response. I don't like using the word normal because who's normal? What's normal, right? We're all so complex. But if I just look at it in terms of inductive reasoning, given how many people that have told me this story, I think it is on the scale of normative responses.
Now, if you're so crippled that you don't feel like you need to cancel your wedding because you can't show up, that's different.
KARIN: Right.
HOPE: That's an extreme response. But I have plenty of friends who say, “I had a big response as I approached and reached the age my parents were when they died.” That's a huge transition. I find that to be actually a really normative response, and so I'm looking to put this book out in the world so we start a conversation that validates and normalizes those responses.
KARIN: Is this relationship to grief unique to Western culture? Did you look at other cultures?
HOPE: I did. There's a whole chapter on that. It's that important, because grief is culturally relative. And this is something that we weren't really talking about much in the '90s when I first wrote Motherless Daughters. At that time, I was really focusing very much on, “Let’s look at all the common denominators because women feel so isolated; they want to know that others out there feel the same way. So, I'm going to look at the parts of this experience that transcends culture, race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic background.” But now there's a lot more appreciation for how all of those factors can determine a grief response.
I went deep into looking at how other cultures respond to grief and death because their belief systems tend to infuse death rituals and mourning practices, including, how long will you commemorate your dead? We look at Asian cultures that do ancestor worship or Latino cultures that come together every year for the Day of the Dead.
But yes, Western culture has done a particularly crappy job in helping us adjust to the loss of a loved one. It didn't used to be that way. What's remarkable, Karin, is that it's been just the past hundred years. One of the things that changed mourning practices in Western culture was the flu pandemic of 1918-19. And the fact that we are 100 years later experiencing something so similar is really serendipitous. I won't say coincidental, I think serendipitous.
KARIN: What happened 100 years ago?
HOPE: Three things happened in quick succession.
1914 to 1918 was World War I, which was the first technological warfare where lots of people died at once. For the first time, lots of people were dying far from home, so you couldn't bury your dead. They often had to be buried where they died.
So people didn't have graves to visit or funerals. That really was difficult because Victorian mourning practices tended to be elaborate, particularly in the UK and the Commonwealth, but also somewhat in the United States. We had very elaborately prescribed rituals for what to do after someone died and how long it lasts and mourning dress and how you decorated your house and there were social rules and what the women wore and for how long depended on who died. This all was also an effect of Queen Victoria, but mourning was a very social activity.
And then in 1917, Sigmund Freud published the paper Mourning and Melancholia, and the psychoanalysts began thinking and researching grief as an individual internal process. We were also shifting from romanticism to modernism as a cultural movement and that was really important, too.
The third thing that happened was the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, right on the heels of World War I. So many people died between the war and the flu pandemic that the culture just couldn't keep up with those mourning rituals, because we were mourning two and three people at once. Sometimes a whole family would die from the pandemic and we couldn't gather for big funerals, and mourning periods would have overlapped, and people just started thinking of mourning as something now you do privately or alone, which I think really screwed us up because we're a tribal species. I don't think we were meant to have these intense, really painful emotions by ourselves and have to figure out how to get through them on our own and be told that if we didn't do it properly, that we were unresolved or incomplete. I mean, that really messed up the way we think about grief.
So now, 100 years later, we have not just the opportunity to hold onto what we have, which is minimal by comparison, but to improve upon it. I see some hopeful glimpses into that, that people aren't willing to just let go of funerals. That they're trying to create virtual memorials and the internet is a place where we can share our stories.
KARIN: I just recently attended an online memorial for a friend and was reminded of how important funerals are, even in this virtual form.
HOPE: Absolutely. Funerals, memorial services and particularly eulogies are some of the last social experiences that we have connected to losing someone where a community of mourners will come together and share their stories and comfort each other. Because think about it… after the funeral, or the wake if you're Catholic, or the Shiva if you're Jewish, what do we have? Then the families just have to do it themselves from that point forward. So if we lose that, then we're losing any kind of social interaction around our grief and any opportunity for culturally prescribed social support. It's critically important that we hold onto that somehow, and the internet, fortunately, has allowed us to do that.
KARIN: When you say, “I see hopeful glimpses?” is that what you're referring to?
HOPE: Yes. I'm part of a taskforce—a virtual funeral taskforce—which is made up of about 90 bereavement professionals. It's authors, activists and academics and people in the field who were meeting online through the first month of the COVID epidemic to share our different initiatives and try to cross pollinate and help each other, help the culture adapt to this new reality, be it temporary or parts of it permanent.
These virtual memorials allow people from out of state to attend. It used to be, if you couldn't get on an airplane on short notice, you couldn't take part in the service. But now people can and I think that's something we may not want to let go of. In the future, I hope we will see hybrids where we can gather socially again and people can come together and have the comfort of hugs and handshakes, but we can also livestream these events so that people from out of town who can't travel for physical or financial reasons can still be part of the day.
KARIN: Just to extend the COVID conversation, it is my understanding that the grief we're experiencing now is re-triggering old losses for many people.
HOPE: Yeah, that's exactly right.
I write about what I call new grief, old grief, and new old grief, and I'll just briefly explain what each of them is.
‘New grief’ is when you've just lost somebody and a lot of the response that you're having is related to that person's suffering and the loss of that relationship in the physical world—any sadness, anger, guilt, whatever emotions you're feeling around that loss. I call that new grief, the freshly acute phase. The shock, the numbness, the despair, the sleeplessness, all of that new grief.
‘Old grief’ is what I call a loss from the past that resurfaces in the present. That's what's getting re-triggered for a lot of people with COVID, and it's getting retriggered for all different reasons. It might be that you didn't get to say goodbye to a loved one who died in the past and now you're reading about all these families that can't be with their loved one when they die. It may be that you lost someone very suddenly and the fear of COVID coming on and taking a life very quickly is triggering some of those emotions.
Old grief may be triggered by a loss in the present, too. If you've lost someone freshly to COVID—or any other cause—and you're feeling new grief around that, it may re-trigger old grief from the past that you weren't able to process at the time because you either developmentally weren't mature enough or there was too much else going on or you didn't have support, didn't feel safe.
What I call ‘new old grief’ is when you experience your old loss in a new way, and that typically happens when you reach a milestone in your life that requires you to revisit that loss and see it differently—like a wedding or parenthood or divorce, for example. It also can be an age correspondence event where you turn the age someone was when they died or your child turns the age you were when somebody died. You're experiencing that old loss in a new way.
KARIN: Is that new way typically positive or could it go either way?
HOPE: It can go either way, but it typically has elements of both in my experience. There may be a renewed sadness; let's say for example, my mom was 42 when she died. So when I turned 42, I felt powerfully sad because I realized how young it was and how much she had missed out on. But I also felt this renewed gratitude for being here and being alive and getting to be 43 and 44 and 45. So you can have both of those experiences at once. They don't have to cancel each other out.
KARIN: Your book is described as showing us how shifting perspectives of grief can help us grow. How can we shift our perspective and can writing be a tool?
HOPE: Yeah, absolutely. I think of those shifts happening when we are willing to revisit and revise our stories. By revisit, I mean go back and look at the same set of facts. They probably don't look the same way they did when you experienced the loss, right?
I mean, I was 17 when my mom died. While I was writing this book, I unearthed a box of interviews and notes from Motherless Daughters, which I wrote in the early 1990s. In there I found a typed version of my story of my mother's death—five or six pages that I'd typed up when I was in my late 20s. I read this and I thought, “Wow, this is an artifact. This is an example of my story in motion because that's not the way I was telling the story at 17, and it's definitely not the way I'm telling the story now. This is a whole different version.”
So I could see the evolution of my relationship to the same set of facts, and that's what we're doing in the memoir workshop. We are encouraging people to go back. When you write the story of your life, you're revisiting the events and you're creating an artistic representation of them. But then your workshop cohorts are asking questions, and they're challenging you to really think about your interpretation of those events and articulate them in a way that offers something to your readers. So, I think of the memoir workshop as almost the best and purest example of revisiting and revising our stories. I think that's why we see such remarkable change in some of the students or some of the writers in the workshop because we're watching them develop new relationships with their stories, and that's how I think growth occurs.
I think what we're also seeing, and I was just thinking about this the other day, Karin, is that because of the cultural messages we have about grief and because there's such a cultural imperative to let go and move on and get over it, we're not always good at finding ways of maintaining relationships with our loved ones who died and finding ways for them to walk forward with us.
When we're writing a memoir about a loss, about someone we loved who has died, we are spending time with them again. If you're writing the book, you might be spending a couple of years with them again, and that often feels good to have them back, right? To have their presence surrounding us, which is why sometimes it's hard to finish those books. We have to be prepared that we're not letting go of them. I think there needs to be rituals for us, honestly, to let go of the shaping of that story and figure out how now we're going to carry these people forward differently.
You, like I do, I'm sure, have students who have been working on their books forever. Sometimes I wonder, is it because it feels so good to be in the presence of that person that they're writing about? How can we help them as instructors to find new and different ways to maintain that connection, but be able to bring the book to its conclusion and put it out into the world?
KARIN: Wow, I've never thought about that.
HOPE: No, me neither. That's the first time I've really articulated it that way.
KARIN: What about the students who are writing about loss and the painful parts?
HOPE: Well, that's hard, because it can reactivate trauma in their lives or in the classroom. Then we have to know when to gently encourage them to also have professional support while they're writing the book, because that's out of our wheelhouse and we shouldn't try to be their therapist in addition to their writing coach.
KARIN: Right.
HOPE: They may come with the impulse because they know that they need to start externalizing this. They can't keep it private and in silence anymore, but they may not be prepared for what starting to tell that story is going to involve. I mean, they might have flashbacks and recover memories that they haven't had before, and we want to make sure that they are emotionally protected and not in any danger, right?
Do you know the work of James Pennebaker?
KARIN: Yes, I have his books.
HOPE: Yeah, he's great. I figured you would.
Sometimes we have to assess, are you stable enough to tell this story now? I've actually had in the past a student or two where I've suggested that it might be really good for you to process this with a professional first, instead of trying to process it initially on the page. If you have extreme abuse in the past, for example, and memories are being recovered, I don't think it's advisable to try to heal yourself through just writing the story. I think you really need some professional assistance in order to cope with what might be coming up.
But what we do know, and from Pennebaker's work, is that expressive writing is the combination of writing about your thoughts and your feelings. If you're just venting your emotions on the page, it doesn't seem to have a beneficial effect. In fact, sometimes it makes you feel worse. If you're just writing at the surface, what you think about what happened and the episodic events, it's not really that beneficial either.
But it's that marriage of narration and reflection that makes a memoir really work, that also helps the writer heal. So, if we're seeing someone just venting their emotions on the page, we can guide them toward putting more of the episodic narrative through line in there so that they can work with both, and learn how to interpolate one with the other.
If we see somebody just writing the episodic version of events, which I find is more common in my workshop, the difficult first draft—this happened, that happened, this happened, that happened—then you start asking them questions about, “well, how were you feeling when this happened? What do you think about this?” Get them to integrate their thoughts and their feelings. Then I think we're really helping them heal in a way that writing becomes the catalyst, maybe not the end product.
KARIN: Thank you so much, Hope! This has been such a fascinating and enlightening conversation.
To get a sneak peek of The AfterGrief, to be released in October 2020, click here!
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To learn more about Hope Edelman, visit her site.
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