110. Why Grief – like Love – is Forever with Marisa Renee Lee

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They stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

Hello, lovebugs.

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

Really grateful that you came back to visit us for the next hour.

We recently did an episode with our dear friend, Dr.

Brene Brown, and she talked to us about the power of normalization.

She was telling us a story about

helping an aging, sick parent.

And she was talking to us about how she talked about that process to her own children.

And she said that one night she sat them down and she said, it's wonderful.

It's beautiful.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

And sometimes I find myself just wishing it would be over.

And she

talked about telling her children that truth of that feeling that she had every once in a while with her mother and called it normalization.

And I thought, God, what a beautiful thing to do for someone else, just tell them the whole truth.

about what an experience is like for you so that in the future, when they have that experience and they have those feelings, no matter how dark or weird or unacceptable they are, they will know they are acceptable.

So they won't have shame added to an already extremely difficult experience.

Normalization is,

the more I think about it, I just think it might be the most powerful tool we can use to help each other navigate the human experience.

And that's what we're trying to do here.

So today we're going to do that with grief.

Pod squatters have been asking for an episode about grief for a very long time.

I get it.

I want to know how to grieve right.

I want to know how to crush grieving.

Okay.

Tell myself there's a way.

There's a way to be so ready for it that we can just beat it completely.

But I knew we were ready to finally do this episode when I read Marissa Renee Lee's book, Grief is Love.

So Marissa really

normalizes grief for the world.

She doesn't present it prescriptively or make any promises.

She just

paints it as a beautiful picture.

And really, she teaches us that we can't prepare for it because to prepare is to control.

And love can't be controlled.

So neither can grief.

Because as she tells us and teaches us through her work, grief is love.

They're just different words to say the same thing.

So even if we can't prepare for it, we can be together in it.

That's what we're going to do today.

Welcome, Marissa.

Yay.

Thank you so much for having me.

I am really excited for this conversation.

I know we're going to hit on a bunch of messy, complicated, hard things, and I just think it's so important.

So thank you both for making space for this conversation.

Absolutely.

And I'm going to introduce you formally to the pod squad.

Marissa Renee Lee is a grief advocate, entrepreneur, and author of Grief is Love.

The loss of her mother, and after years of dealing with infertility, loss of a much-wanted pregnancy transformed her life.

Her grief led her to question what healing requires outside of the limited roadmap offered by our society.

Marissa's book utilizes research-based approaches to navigate the complicated and challenging emotions we face when experiencing loss, offering unique insights for women and Black communities.

She's a former appointee of the Obama White House, the Harvard graduate, an avid home cook, and lives in the DC area with her husband, Matt, their newborn son, Bennett, and their dog, Sadie.

Marissa, when your beloved mother, Lisa, got sick with MS,

you were 13.

Your young life was turned around instantly because your mother mother was such a beautiful caretaker.

And suddenly you were in a caretaking role.

And then at 22, when you should have been celebrating your senior week at Harvard,

your mother was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer.

So can you take us back to that moment when you were in that doctor's office and you heard the words and what happened inside of you?

It is one of those life-changing moments that you just never forget.

And I knew that reading about that moment was going to be one of the really hard parts of the book for my father.

What happened is we knew that my mom was really sick.

She had MS, but there was something, there was something going on, you know, that senior year in college.

She was constantly in and out of the hospital, lots of pain, and she was never a complainer.

So we knew that something was up.

And I remember walking home from a babysitting job on campus, And she called me and a doctor, an orthopedic doctor who was a family friend, had found some lesions on her spine.

And in that moment, I thought, oh, that's got to be something very serious and really bad.

And so I made plans to leave school a few days before graduation and head home to New York to be with my mom and dad as they found out what was wrong.

And we found ourselves in a small oncologist's office in Fishville, New York.

And I remember standing there, you know, furiously taking notes by hand because this was 2005.

And

the doctor put his hand on her left breast.

And then he took like a some sort of doctor's ruler type thing and he measured it.

And then he took her hand and said, can you feel that?

And she said, yes.

And I knew in that moment when she said yes, that meant that whatever was found in her bones was also in her breast, which to me said stage four cancer of some kind.

And that was the diagnosis.

It was stage four breast cancer, a death sentence.

And

I felt

my life completely change.

And I just, any sense of stability that I had about, you know, life and my future, especially given I'm days away from graduating, trying to figure out what's, what's next for me, what might my career look like, where am I headed?

And now

my mom is dying.

And

I know you know a thing or two about control.

I shut down.

Friends were calling and checking up on me, wanting to know what's going on with mom.

How is she doing?

How are you doing?

I completely ignored everyone.

and i drove myself that night to barnes and noble and decided i was going to immerse myself in the research and the literature if my mom was going to die from cancer it was going to be as good as it could be for her you know i was going to know every statistic i was going to understand every data point i was going to know everything about the latest treatments and the best diet and everything to do because i wanted her to be as supported as possible.

In that moment, I did not think about support for myself.

I couldn't deal with feelings.

I could only take action.

That was my solution, the research.

And then I put all of my research notes and next steps in a color-coded binder.

And that was how I coped.

You said that when that happened, you gave yourself permission to not to fall apart, but to soldier on.

When we talk about grief, that is sort of the

cultural idea that we're going to, we're going to soldier on through it.

is that marissa that the more i read your work i thought is it the actual opposite of that imagery because what it feels like your work says to us is in that moment what we have to do is surrender to whatever grief has for us but instead we have the soldier metaphor and soldiers don't surrender i mean you're right I lead the book with this chapter on permission because the thing that I didn't give myself permission to do was permission to grieve, permission to be a mess, even just for a couple of hours or a couple of days.

I didn't allow myself that space.

I only allowed myself to worry about my mom, to be focused on what I could do to help my mom.

You know, even I remember telling her that she didn't have to come to graduation.

Like that was, that was where I was.

I couldn't face my own feelings because I believed that they would overwhelm me.

And I now know from the research and years of being in and out of therapy that when we

actually do surrender to our feelings, when we name them either internally to ourselves, write them out, share them with a friend, like that is actually when they become easier to deal with.

And so I encourage other people to do that, but like I couldn't do it.

I didn't feel comfortable enough.

I didn't feel safe enough.

And I was a kid who was really worried about her mom.

Yeah.

There's no way to crush grief.

There's no way to

do it right, right?

If so, your binder would have done it.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

But

you do identify

some gifts that we can give ourselves as we enter into grief.

They're almost like superpowers to claim or just like the first one you just identified as

permission.

You say healing starts when we give ourselves permission to grieve.

You describe it as a hall pass.

If you, if you had gotten, had, could do it over again and you had gotten this information from your mom about your mom,

you would have given yourself a huge hall pass.

Talk to us.

Why do we need that hall pass when we enter into grief?

And what is the hall pass permission to do?

The permission piece, I think, is very important because so often when we have emotions that are more challenging, that that is how I'm framing them is challenging, but we tend to frame them as negative.

We don't give ourselves permission to just to feel them, to be with them, to express them.

We need to let ourselves do that.

And in this case, obviously, I'm very focused on grief, but a part of grief is often obviously feelings of sadness, anger, frustration, disappointment, et cetera.

And the thing that makes all of those things harder to deal with is when we don't give ourselves permission to express or experience them.

When we try to instead ignore or suppress our feelings, that's actually what keeps us stuck.

and often leads to other challenges.

And that's part of why, frankly, I think right now

we need a plan as a country to give people permission to grieve, given where we are after the last two and a half years of this global pandemic.

The other thing that I felt was really important to me that I wasn't able to fully access was a sense of safety.

I think that grief requires a degree of vulnerability.

You can give yourself permission to grieve, but then you need spaces and places and people where you feel comfortable expressing that grief.

And I think it's really hard to feel comfortable being emotionally vulnerable if you don't feel safe.

So I think safety is a really important part of the equation and one that we don't often pay enough attention to.

I think you also need to give yourself permission to ask for help,

whether it is help that you pay for in the form of therapy or counseling or a support group that you join, whether virtual or in person,

or just family and friends who you can reach out to when you're having a hard time.

People who you can say, like, you know, look, for me, it's February.

My friends call it, fuck you, February.

My mom died on the 28th and her birthday is on the 18th.

So like the lead up is weird and I just feel like crabby and a bit off.

And then the 10 days in between are an unpredictable mess.

I might be fine.

I might be anxious.

I might be angry.

I might start crying for no apparent reason at all other than I miss my mom who's been dead for 14 years.

And so, you know, having a group of people who are ready to send the supportive text or send a bunch of cupcakes or whatever it is just makes dealing with the grief so much easier.

And then

you have to get comfortable with the concept of grace, which is something that I hadn't thought of a lot.

But when I sat down to write this book and really think about

what has enabled me to live with this loss, grace is a big part of the equation.

As far as I can tell, grief is forever.

I don't know that there will ever be a day where I stop thinking about or missing or longing for my mom.

And so because grief is forever and because grief is also highly unpredictable, I have to be prepared to regularly extend grace to myself and also to extend it to other people who deserve it when they don't show up the way that I expect them to.

Those tools that you just gave, the first one you said, an actual permission slip.

I think that that is

such a tangible thing that people can take into their lives you discuss how you wrote an email to all the people that were reaching out to you they're trying to support you but it isn't exactly what you needed in that moment and you wrote to everyone and said listen i'm not writing any of you back but i still want you to write to me i still want you to reach out and invite me to things but i need you to expect that i'm not going to write you back right now I'm not going to be able to reciprocate, but I feel you.

And I think that's so important.

When I was going through my divorce, I remember right after my friends were trying to support me.

And they, so they planned this girl's trip of us.

And it was the night before.

They were already on the way to the trip.

And I said, I'm, I'm not going to that.

Like, I

can't, I can't do it.

And it ended up being

even more suffering on top of the grief because they were so upset.

But we were all young.

We didn't know.

But I think just giving yourself that permission slip and preemptively telling people who don't understand, this is what you can expect of me.

What do you need permission to do?

What does it look like to manifest grief in the world?

So I think you need permission, first and foremost, frankly, to be kind of a shit friend.

Yes.

Grief is so intense and painful.

And like I said before, unpredictable.

Like the biggest thing for me when I sent that email, I needed them to know that my inability to be the person that they had come to expect me to be was just a part of my life at that time.

And I needed them to be okay with it so that I wasn't both like trying to manage all of these emotions that I wasn't even half the time giving myself permission to feel while also managing my job while also helping my father care for my dying mother, while also trying to maintain these expectations for normal friendship.

There were times when I needed that break and that escape from the heaviness and the intensity of my life back then.

But there were also times when I would make plans to meet someone for drinks or dinner or whatever.

And right before I would, I would melt down and realize like I couldn't stop crying.

So like I couldn't actually take a shower and get dressed and like go meet someone and have a conversation.

So like permission to just to let go of the expectations that you have for yourself.

And for me, it was about friendship, but it can also be about work.

It can be about how you show up as a parent because when grief arrives, it takes over

and you are not in charge.

And I think permission to just let grief lead sometimes is a big, big, big part of the healing process.

I know from my experience not giving myself permission in those early years that it can be really damaging.

It made my anxiety a lot worse for sure.

Lack of ability to sleep, feeling that like intense physical anxiety, knowing that with each night that passed, I was a day closer to my mom dying.

It was not healthy at all.

So you just have to permission for your personality and your expectations and your standards to disappear.

Let it all go.

And let grief

guide you.

Surrender to this other energy.

And when people are looking at the griever, because you're talking about the griever, it's important for the person who is looking at the griever to understand deeply that there is a takeover and there is no such thing as grief etiquette.

That person is not going to be following a set of grieving etiquette.

Absolutely not.

And if you are the supporter, what do I do?

How do I show up?

How do I support someone?

And I'm currently supporting someone who's dealing with grief and it's hard.

It is not this thing that is just limited to the time around when someone dies.

We have this image of grief that is so closely connected to the time of death.

You think about all the TV shows and movies where everyone's in black at the funeral and then we're moving on to the next scene like five minutes later.

And that's what we've come to understand grief as.

And that is wrong.

Grief is the repeated experience of learning to live in the midst of a significant loss.

You are doing that that learning before the death, after the death, weeks, months, years, decades later.

I struggled with Mother's Day this year.

It was my first Mother's Day as a mom, which is awesome, but I also don't have my mom to share in this experience that made it really hard.

I lost it before a book event the Saturday of Mother's Day weekend, and my husband really didn't know what to do.

So just made me take a a long hot shower and was like, we're going to be a little bit late for the event, but like, it's going to be okay.

And he just supported me through it by just being kind and gentle and not being like, you have to get your shit together, basically.

And so I think if you are someone who's trying to support someone, be prepared to show up over and over and over again.

The fact that my friends have named February and that it's a thing that like we are all in on and that they are a part of even all these years later, like that is how you show people that you really love them, like continuing to show up.

And if you are someone who doesn't know what to say, someone just lost someone or, you know, perhaps is dealing with the lead up to losing someone they love.

I am telling you it is less about what you say

and more about what you do and just how you treat them.

Because there's nothing that you're going to say that is going to be the perfect thing.

Nothing will give them enough comfort, but showing up in a way that is authentic to them and or to your relationship with them is what matters.

When we lost our pregnancy, one of my really good friends, she and I, we love cheese.

Like cheese has been a big part of our relationship.

And she sent a box of gourmet cheese and like stuff to go with it from Murray's cheese shop in the West Village.

And when I got that package, like I felt so seen because it wasn't about this horrible loss that I hadn't even still processed.

It was about Marissa.

Show up in a way that reminds people who they are in their core.

That's a good tip.

She stepped outside of grief etiquette.

Like grief etiquette says, send the flowers, send the da da da da da da da da da da da da.

No, but she stepped outside of flowers and like thought about you.

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What is an example of thinking of something you expected

a way you thought grief was supposed to go compared to what it was?

I did all of my grief research.

I was reading Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's On Death and Dying months before my mom died.

I sat with my mom and put together a spreadsheet of all of her last wishes, what she wanted for her funeral, and what she wanted to do with some of her things.

I did all of the stuff I could to prepare.

And I really thought that that was going to be my saving grace.

My dad was the one who was praying for some kind of a miracle until the day that she died.

Whereas I was the one that was like, mom's going to die.

We need to make a plan.

We need to be honest about this and just like do what we have to do to make it as easy on her and as easy on us as possible.

All practical, no feelings.

And so I thought that meant that when she did die, like I was going to be better off.

Like it wasn't going to be as hard for me because I did the work.

And then it happened

and I was lost.

You mentioned this a little bit in your conversation with Liz Gilbert.

Like I didn't realize that when my mom died, I became a different person.

Like, whether I wanted to or not, I was no longer Marissa, who she was on February 28th at 5.36 p.m.

Like when the clock turned and she was pronounced dead, I became Marissa who no longer has her mom in this world.

That's just a different person.

That for me was like the first biggest shock.

And then I was shocked to struggle struggle so much with work.

Like I've always been like a very career-oriented, let's get it done type person.

And I went back to work two weeks after we buried my mom.

Every morning I could get up, get myself ready, put on the makeup, get on a subway.

And then when I would go to walk up the steps at the subway station and go to walk the two blocks to my office, I would start having a panic attack, like

debilitating, heart racing.

Am I going to be able to not start crying?

Like, I feel like I can barely breathe.

And I could make it to the building and I would hide in the basement and have this panic attack every morning for months after my mom died.

And I only know that it went on for months because the same girl who sent the cheese when we lost our pregnancy was my colleague at the time at the bank.

And she would come down every morning.

She would grab a Xanax from my desk and bring me a latte and a cookie.

That's how I started my day for months and acted like it was the most normal thing in the world.

And

it is normal in the sense that grief can show up certainly as anxiety, depression, and lots of other manifestations.

It was a shock to me because I really thought I was going to be okay.

But what I know now

is that you have to redefine what okay

is

after loss.

And I think that so much of your work gives that permission to redefine okay.

What you referenced before about the permission, even the permission goes both ways.

I mean, you in your work give permission for other people to not know what to do, to not know what to say, like to just show up with whatever love they have and that that's going to be enough.

Like your friends who came over the night you lost the pregnancy, they didn't have any magic words.

They just watched TV with you and that's what you needed.

Yes.

And permission to know that grief is forever and it's going to show up even in your joy.

And even in sometimes your most joyful moments, grief will be right there,

dovetailed with your joy.

One story that you told just absolutely wrecked me

and made me understand.

And that was Napkin Gate.

Can you please, can you tell the story of Napkin Gate?

Because it's so poignant and it's hilarious.

When you lose someone you love, you can't help but think about the obvious things that they are going to miss, right?

Like they're not going to be there for the graduation, for the big job, the wedding, the baby.

What you fail to consider is all of the other things that are associated with those things where like you will miss your person so much more.

And so in my case, I started planning my wedding and I love parties.

I love hosting.

If you want to have a party, if you need a recipe, if you're trying to figure out how to thoughtfully gather people, like I am your girl and I am that person because of my mom.

I have all these vivid memories of being in my parents' like tiny house in upstate New York, like in the kitchen, trying out recipes with her for Christmas or making one of those

one of those 4th of July cakes with the whipped cream and the berries and the shape of the American flat.

I love that stuff.

And that's just a huge part of who I am.

And so with the wedding, it was like, okay, like every single detail is going to be impeccable and perfect and just like scream love and happiness and joy and be super authentic to the two of us.

And my husband, on the other hand, had three requests.

He wanted a roast pig at some point.

He wanted vintage china plates for the tables.

And he said he didn't want any Kanye West music.

Just to give you context on the extent that he like cared about those details.

He was a man before his time.

Yeah, he really, he really was.

He really was.

I got like really into

personalized perfect invitations with a vintage map of the Hudson Valley.

And then I got into finding all of these beautiful rentals and, you know, the perfect venue that was also a nonprofit.

So we were giving back to the community at the same, you know, crushing wedding planning, crushing, crushing.

Oh, yeah.

And then I was so proud of myself.

I'd I'd bring him these things and he's like, okay, like, but like clearly didn't give a shit.

And then finally, I realized that we could purchase the napkins for like the wedding instead of renting them.

And it would both save us money and it would be less wasteful.

I don't know what I thought we were going to do with 150 of these napkins.

I did the same thing, Marissa.

I know.

I'm still using them.

You know, I was like,

okay, see, so like somebody would use them.

Okay.

So I was very proud of myself and I I presented this to Matt, this whole plan.

So excited.

And he was like, okay.

And his lack of enthusiasm, oh my God, it pissed me.

I just like walked away.

I was so mad.

I remember going up to the guest room in our house at the time and just seething.

And then I ended up crying because I realized it wasn't him that I was mad at.

Like, yes, I wanted him to be more enthusiastic about all of these awesome things I was doing for our wedding, but he's not that guy because the person who would have that enthusiasm, who would be like that in the weeds in every single detail with me, was dead.

Yes.

And she was the person who like taught me to care about those details.

Those details are how we show people that we love them by like putting thought and attention and care into the little things.

And it broke.

my heart.

You said no one else was going to care half as much as my mother would care about the little details surrounding our wedding.

Of course, I felt her absence most acutely in the details she had raised me to care about.

She taught me that that is where love lives, in the little things that make the big things extra special.

That was such a beautiful portrait because it seems that like...

The little things is also where our love lives for people.

That our people being part of the little things is what makes the big things extra special the grief is maybe most acutely in those little things

because

because that's where love lives and yeah so of course your mom is going to be the only one to care about the napkins and of course in that moment you feel her biggest loss because plenty of people are excited about your wedding but only one person was going to be excited about your napkins yes

i remember mom saying that like

when her mom died, she realized, you know, she might get a call from me telling a story about the kids, about my kids.

And she realized that's where the chain ends now, because I can't call my mom and tell her the story about your kids.

She just would feel herself reaching for the phone.

And then, oh yeah.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

I did that all the time.

My mom, I was expected whenever I was traveling

to check in and like let her know that I made it somewhere safely.

And the number of times on work trips and friend trips after she died, where I would pick up my phone and be like, oh, right.

Like, you can't, you can't do that anymore.

I don't think, unfortunately, we fully grasp all that we've lost when we lose someone we love until they're gone.

At the end of the day, like, these are the people that make up the details of our lives.

Is there any such thing after your first deep grief?

Is there pure joy anymore?

The example you just gave of your first Mother's Day, after the journey you have gone through to become a mother, your first Mother's Day, the highest, high, the most joyful joy, but the most joyful joys are now pierced

because of loss.

It's this idea we have of brutiful, like now the most beautiful things also make you think of the most brutal loss.

Everything will be both now.

Yeah.

I think about like when you work in the White House, you get to do a departure family photo with the president, or at least in the Obama White House.

Bringing my fiancé and I brought my cousin and her husband and my godson and my father.

And

hearing my father like talk to President Obama and like have that moment, especially obviously as a black family, and hearing him fumble a little bit.

And I knew in that moment walking in to the Oval that he was, he wasn't fumbling his words because he was nervous about meeting Barack Obama.

Like I knew he was fumbling his words because he missed my mom.

And it's a place where obviously she would have loved to be as well.

The love that we share with people is something that leaves a permanent imprint on our brains.

And so it's not about getting over it.

It's about learning to live with it.

And that's technically technically called the continuing bonds theory, which argues that the best way for us to live with loss is to find a way to continue our relationship with the deceased.

I definitely talk to my mom sometimes.

I make an intentional effort to include her in our family and to share her with Matt and now with Bennett.

We kicked off pub week for Grief is Love by giving Bennett his first pancakes.

Pancakes were my mom's thing.

Sunday mornings before church, she would make us pancakes like pretty religiously, even when she was sick.

We wanted to find our own way to include her in this special week.

There was a lot of joy there.

And that's the thing about grief.

It doesn't always show up as sadness and wailing and depression.

Sometimes it's just love and peace and inclusion.

I want my husband and my son to know my mother.

My husband and my son will know my mother, actually.

Yes, I love that.

I had a question about the continuing bonds theory of attachment that you talk about in the book, because I was amazed to read

that the creator of the hospice movement, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, she taught us all the five stages of grief.

What we learned from you is that those five stages describe not a person who is grieving a loss, but uniquely a person who is in the process of facing the end of their own life.

So, those where we expect to get through our five stages, which obviously are non-linear, to the place of acceptance, does not apply to people who are grieving.

No.

And so, you talk about a different way through this theory of attachment that love, like grief, neither are to be conquered or controlled.

They're just something to be integrated into our lives.

Can you tell us about that light bulb moment with you and Trayvon Martin's mother, where you kind of saw that clearly for the first time?

Yeah.

So on the five stages, when you hear stages, like you think about it like AA, you have one step and you complete it and then the next step, or you know, the milestones and developmental stages that I'm seeing my son go through, like very lately.

As video

stage, leveling up, leveling up.

Yeah.

And then at the end, you're all good and you're healed and you're happy.

And the end, that wasn't wasn't the basis of her research.

Like her research really was for people who are dying themselves.

And I just think it's so important for us to let go of that framework because it's caused a lot of people, myself included, a lot of pain.

To your point, Amanda, the critical turning point was not just believing for myself that I wasn't going to get over it because I knew I knew deeply after the pregnancy loss that this whole getting over it thing was bullshit.

It was, gosh, almost exactly two years ago that I was in conversation with Trayvon Martin's mother, and it was in the wake of George Floyd's murder.

I did a series of conversations on Black grief and healing and joy, this woman, reliving her own tragedy and her own pain, doing what she can to highlight the injustices that happened to Black people in this country, and also taking it a step further and doing what she can to support the families who were suffering that summer, George Floyd's family, Breonna Taylor's family.

And I was just,

I mean, truly blown away and in awe of her, given all that she's lost.

I was asking her about

why she is showing up for the rest of us.

I couldn't understand why.

And she said,

I feel like it is the right thing to do to help these people with their grief because I know it.

I've been there.

And I know

that not only do I still love my son, but I know my son still loves me.

And when she used the present tense, like it was one of those life-changing things for me, because that's why.

you don't get over it.

And that's why you don't move on, because not only do you still love them, but they also still love you.

And so I thought, if I can still continue to access in the present tense, my mom's love,

why do I also feel so much pain associated with grief?

And that's when I came upon the idea that love is both feeling and action.

Like the people you love, you feel love for them, but you also do things to act on that love, to like care for them.

And they do those things in return.

And when we lose the people we love,

we lose their ability to act on that love that they have for us.

And that is where the pain comes in.

Like the pain of grief is the pain of unrequited, unconditional love.

And that is what those of us who've experienced loss, like that pain is something that you just have to learn to live with.

That, the correlation between grief as unrequited love, loving someone who is not there to love you back.

It was such a beautiful parallel you made to being a black woman in America and having unrequited love for a country

that does not love you back.

And I think that brings us to

a very interesting part of your work, which is that

in America, as a black woman, practically speaking, is truly grieving a privilege.

Like who gets to grieve

in this country?

You said vulnerability requires a sense of safety that is not equally distributed in our society.

Some people are too busy, too female, too poor, too black for vulnerability.

If day-to-day living feels like a battle, grieving seems like a a luxury.

And in fact, when your mom died, you had to go continue going to work versus 11 years later, when you had the security and had built your career and really could tap out of life for a hot minute to truly grieve.

Who gets to grieve?

And what if you feel like you can't let things fall apart?

Yeah.

When we lost our pregnancy in 2019, I shared and I got a lot of compliments around vulnerability and it made me feel really uncomfortable and I couldn't figure out why.

And it took the process of writing this book to figure out that I don't want to be complimented for being vulnerable because I think when it comes to the type of vulnerability that I was displaying, the comfort in sharing our story, being able to take some time off from work and really process the loss, like I recognize that as a privilege.

Healing shouldn't be a privilege.

But we know in this country that continues to worship capitalism and white supremacy, that healing is a privilege, physical and emotional healing for that matter.

And so I think for people who are trying to figure out how to deal with grief and don't have the practical safety or security or access to the things that can help with grief, like

good mental health care, good physical health care, access to child care, paid time off from work.

I think it is really important to try and find a way to create your own, even if it's just a small, safe space, to let yourself grieve and to let yourself fall apart.

Maybe it's conversations that you have with only one person in your life.

Maybe it's a trusted faith leader.

Like maybe it's when you do have a brief, even if it's only a 15-minute break from work, like you hide somewhere and let yourself cry.

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One of the ways that grief manifested for you that I thought was incredibly generous for you to share and normalize

is

anger and rage.

And you were generous enough to even share

that that even shows up as rage to the beloved who died.

And we recently had on the podcast a psychoanalyst, Dr.

Galit Atlas.

She talked about how the death of a parent is always experienced as an abandonment, even if they didn't want to go.

And you were speaking about the anger that you felt towards your mom for leaving and to your surviving dad who couldn't replace her.

And we we know that your sister was not able to help because of what she is going through in her mental health challenges.

The anger towards your beloved as a reasonable response to grief is

going to release so many people from shame.

Can you talk about that?

I am generally known, I would say, as like a happy, positive, pleasant, like fun to be around person.

I don't think honestly there's anyone in my personal life or professional life for that matter who would describe me as angry or like as an angry person.

I didn't even think about anger or like being mad at my mom like ever.

And then I was in this I was in this therapy session that included some like hypnotherapy type stuff.

I felt this like heaviness, like kind of like exhaustion, but I knew I wasn't tired.

Couldn't figure it out, couldn't put my finger on it.

And I'm in this therapy session, and she's like, We're gonna keep going.

We're gonna keep going.

What does it really feel like?

And I was like, It's heavy, but it's also like, like, hot.

I was like, Oh, like, maybe I'm angry.

I was like, Is this possible?

Like, that's a really good thing.

What is this strange new emotion?

I was like, That's weird.

Um, and as we continued the conversation and went deeper, I realized I was fucking pissed.

Like, I wasn't just like a little bit angry, I was overwhelmed with rage that I hadn't, I don't even want to say that I hadn't acknowledged because like I truly,

I didn't, I didn't think it was there.

It wasn't something that I was like trying to hide from.

It wasn't even on my radar.

I realized like I was mad at my mom for dying and for leaving me with my dad and my sister, both of whom, especially right after her death, like I felt some responsibility to help care for and like didn't have the capacity to do it.

I was mad that she wasn't there when we lost our pregnancy.

I was mad that we lost our pregnancy.

My mom died.

Is that not enough?

Like, should I not be entitled after years of IVF and trying to find black donor eggs and getting injected with all sorts of stuff?

Like, don't I deserve my baby?

And I was mad that my mom wasn't there to comfort us when we lost the pregnancy.

And then I was mad that she wasn't there to help us as we try to navigate.

life in a global pandemic where my husband's working on the front lines and we're trying to prepare for an adoption.

Like I was so, so mad.

And then I was guilt ridden.

Like, how could I be mad at my perfect mom?

Like this woman who loved so deeply.

How could I be mad at her?

I am a terrible person.

And when I realized I was angry and had a separate conversation with the person who helped with the research for the book and learned that anger, to your point, Amanda, is a very, very normal response for bereaved children.

I was like, okay, like, I have to unpack this.

I have to figure it out.

And I realized that the people who we love the most are also the people who we are most often like called to forgive and who we most often need to forgive us.

And so I thought, if love doesn't end with death, why should forgiveness?

And like when I think about my mom and the person that she was, like, she wouldn't want me carrying around

anything that was making my life harder.

And so I decided that forgiveness, like love, doesn't end with death.

And so I wrote, I wrote her a letter

and detailed all of the reasons why I was mad, just really being upset that like she wasn't here with me to help me, to guide me, to support me through these various life challenges.

And I asked for her forgiveness for being angry.

And I wrote in the letter that I knew that she forgave me and like would never be mad at me and wouldn't want me to feel guilty anymore.

That's beautiful.

And I let it go.

That's beautiful.

You talk a lot about one of the permissions being asking for help.

And you talk about that beautifully with friends.

But one of the things I loved is

you teach us about grief partners, that you had a grief partner in Matt, in your husband, about your mother's death, and that he was a particular kind of grief partner.

So we can have a grief partner who is like our steady rock because we are grieving.

But that person, that sort of grief partner is not the kind of partner that is actually experiencing viscerally the grief we are.

So they can be your rock, your support.

But then.

Matt transformed into a different sort of grief partner for you after your pregnancy loss because

that was as much of a loss for him as it was for you.

You were in the grief together.

So now he's a grief partner B,

right?

Less of a rock and more of a

raging river as you were of loss.

Can you talk to us about the difference in grief partners and how hard that was to have a grief partner who is grieving just as much as you are?

Because that's so many of our listeners are going to have loss that is being experienced.

they've lost their person and they're suffering that loss with their other person.

Yeah.

and then they're disconnected from their person because you're grieving at different levels and in different ways and so now yeah like you wanted to go to the or he there was a party and matt wanted to go like needed yeah it was in the wake of the loss of the pregnancy and matt was feeling like a need for connection with other human beings a distraction whatever you were like absolutely not

So how do you not judge each other's needs?

How do you make it through that with a partner?

Grief support, even if you're not grieving like a loss together, having someone in your life, your life partner, spouse, best friend, figure out how to be a grief partner to you, like that in and of itself is hard.

And I think because we had that as like a big part of the foundation of our relationship.

Matt figuring out how to navigate February, Matt trying to figure out how to help me bring joy back into Christmas after my mom died.

Figure out like how to best communicate with each other and like how he can best support me and like what I need in terms of support.

Like all of that, I think laid the foundation for

us to be able to grieve the same thing

together and separately

relatively well.

We both took the loss like very hard.

You know, this was our last chance and it didn't work out.

I was so confident, and I am the girl who always has the backup plan, but I didn't have a plan because I was so sure after all of this time and money and effort and suffering that this was our shot.

And then our shot didn't materialize.

The day we got the call from our doctor that, yes, I had been briefly pregnant, but no longer was, Matt immediately fell apart.

Like he gave himself permission to be a mess.

I

left him

crying on the stairs at our house.

And I put on my shoes and I drove to Walgreens

because I was confident that the doctor had just messed up my blood test results with someone else's.

Waiting in line at Walgreens.

It was like the longest time to check out with these freaking pregnancy tests.

I remember thinking, I really feel sad for this other woman.

And I hoped that she had, I hoped that she had backup embryos because we did not.

Oh man,

got in the car, I drove home.

And when it was negative, I was in shock.

It was such a mess.

And

I knew,

I knew early on, just from knowing him and

supporting him through his own challenges, like we were going to need very different things.

At that point, I was comfortable enough with grief to know that boundaries are a very important part of the equation.

And I tried as much as possible to be intentional about mine and to like encourage Matt to be intentional about his.

And we both had our own therapists.

I wasn't really doing a ton of the grieving because

I was trying to fix it.

Whereas Matt like let himself grieve and

moved through the worst of it and the hardest parts of it before I did.

Months later, it's Christmas time.

And

he's like, okay, like, we need to start getting organized.

And I was like, get organized for what?

What are you talking about?

He's like, well, we're going to adopt, right?

And I was still thinking maybe there was a chance.

We were in the car driving up to New York for the holidays.

And I said, I think you are getting frustrated with me.

I said, it feels like you are not able to have as much empathy for me as I need because you don't understand why I'm still so sad.

And thankfully, I married someone who is reflective and he said, you know what, you're right.

I don't get it.

I feel like we just need to like get going here.

And I was like, yeah, I get that, but I'm still struggling.

I believe that that is the right path for us.

But until I've had more time to process and just like room to be sad and also to get my health back on track physically.

I can't do that yet.

I'm not ready.

Like I need more time to just be sad.

And having that conversation then gave us both permission to do what we needed and to be in different places and to be okay with that.

And so we committed, let's check in regularly, but without

checking in every day.

We needed to put boundaries around holding the grief together at the same time because we weren't in the same place and

we were able to do it.

It was really hard.

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Marissa, when you said, I was too busy trying to fix it to grieve, I think with people who are trying to support people who are grieving, so often they either A, try to fix it, try to make it better for you, or B, think there's no fucking way I can do anything to fix this.

So I'm going to retreat because I can't touch that.

I can't talk about it.

It's too much.

You talk about some things that people did for you

that felt like really showing up.

You talk about how people who put in their phones your mother's death day, your mother's birthday, people who bring her up in conversations with you, who remember when good things are happening to you, to ask.

how much you miss your mom right now.

And that felt like love to you.

How do people who are trying to support someone grieving know what that individual

person

needs?

Because for me, when you say boundaries around grief, I have someone who's grieving very deeply right now.

I don't know in what moments they want to just be normal and just not talk about that thing or whether I'm ignoring it too much when I should be bringing it to them.

Yeah, so one thing I will say that comes up a lot in my conversations with fellow grievers

is

people are often afraid that by mentioning the person you're going to make it harder or make it more sad but when you are in it

like

you're never not

thinking about them they're never far from your brain whether you're preparing to lose someone you love or someone you love has passed away.

There has never been a time when

someone else, and I'm 14 and a half years in, when someone else has brought up my mom,

that it hasn't felt good.

It's something that is just like so meaningful after you've lost someone because

you often feel like the world has forgotten them.

I don't get to hear my mom's name very much.

And even though it's not like I never called her Lisa, obviously she was my mom.

But I heard her name, you know, over and over and over again for the first 25 years of my life.

And then she dies and you don't, you don't really hear it anymore.

And so I don't think it's ever a bad thing.

If you're really unsure, though, one thing that I learned, if you're unsure, text.

Because people can do what they want with a text message.

They can respond however they need to.

Maybe you will send that text and it's on a day when they really needed to be reminded of

something about their person that you mentioned, or they really needed to be checked in on.

Or maybe they're having a great day and something joyful and wonderful has happened and they weren't necessarily thinking about their person, but you mentioning it made them remember, oh yeah, this person would love to be here too.

And like that feels nice sometimes.

Grief isn't just the, I'm a puddle on the floor crying mess.

Like, yes, I've done that many times.

I'm a big proponent of crying in the shower in particular.

Like, you can cry and be a mess and get yourself cleaned up all at the same time.

So efficient.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's so efficient.

And like water is like very much for me, like where I find my mom.

So it's like efficient, it's comforting, like it's starting over again.

Really just be a mess.

Yes.

But sometimes grief is, you know, being with my childhood best friend who was really close to my mom, who's now my son's godmother, and knowing that like she's also being mindful of keeping my mom alive for this child, like and being grateful for that.

It's not just one thing.

Whatever it is for you,

like that's okay.

There's nothing wrong with you.

That's so beautiful.

You just said, send a text.

We can do that, everybody.

Send a text.

I happen to love the texts that also say, no need to respond.

Yes.

I am a big text with a disclaimer.

Yes.

And also, not in the category of nots.

I feel like universally we can accept the idea that we're not going to text people who are grieving and say, let me know how I can help.

Let me know what I can do for you.

That's what we're never, ever going to do again.

We're not going to get it.

We're just going to do a thing.

Maybe that thing goes in the trash.

Maybe that thing, it doesn't matter, but we're not going to ask anything.

And I just want to say that.

Because that gives a grieving person more work.

Yes.

Yeah.

Like, don't do that.

We're also not going to shame anyone who's grieving.

No.

I've had some experiences where people that I love during a divorce

told me that they were upset that I did not disseminate the information to them.

quicker and in a different order of, and that's just a really amazing thing to do.

Do not do that.

No, no shame, shame, no judgment.

I definitely, I mean, I know that shame is something that held me back.

And I will never forget what it felt like to have someone say to me, you told your mom that you were going to be okay.

And like, you're still not okay.

Like she would be worried about you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I will never, I will never forget that.

Do not make someone feel worse than they're already feeling about themselves.

And let's end with this.

You said this that I thought was so beautiful.

You said, when I find myself longing for my mother, when all I want is to put my head in her lap and have her rub my back and tell me everything will be okay,

I have to ask myself, what is it that I'm truly longing for?

Is it comfort, consolation, a loving touch?

I let the answer guide me towards what I can provide for myself.

And I give permission to access it.

That feels

real and true and doable.

doable.

You said, I need to rebuild the pillar of love that she provided.

Can you, as a next right thing, grief is love and it's a longing, a constant longing for a thing

that can never be filled the same way.

But what I hear you saying in this work is that it can be filled maybe a different way.

When I feel that way, I really, I just, I close my eyes.

I take a deep breath and I think about, okay, like what, what do you really need?

You know, after a conversation like this, like, I would love to be able to pick up the phone and call my mom, but I know I can't do that.

But I can go downstairs and talk to my best friend.

Anytime I'm sick, I want my mom.

And I know, I know I can't have her.

So it's, do you need to cancel some of your calls this afternoon and take a nap?

Because I know the things that she would tell me to do.

Yeah.

Take care of yourself.

What are you doing?

Slow down.

That was a big one with her.

Like, slow down.

This week, i had a chance to spend a half a day at a silent retreat which six weeks into book tour it was something that i very much needed i sat there thinking about

what's next

because for me i have had these these three things in my head for such a long time like business, book, and baby.

Like I knew I would start my own business.

I knew that I would write a book about grief.

And I knew that I was meant to be a mom.

And now

I, for the first time in my life, I have all of those things.

And because of how my brain is wired, I can't help but think of what's next.

And instead, what I heard coming back was rest.

I needed that time

in silence

to be with myself and to also think about like my mom and what she would be telling me.

She wouldn't be telling me to figure out what is my next big project.

Like she's telling me to like go take a nap yeah or like sit in front of the tv for a while or just you know hang out with my husband and my son and just be

um and so i think i think being really intentional about

what we are longing for and how our people cared for us

it helps us live with the loss because it ultimately gives us the tools that we need to really care for ourselves.

Oh, so good, Marissa.

It's the proof of your theory.

It's the proof of that love is continuous because she is still speaking to you and telling you exactly what you need as sure as if you would have picked up the telephone.

Oh, yeah.

So interesting and beautiful.

Marissa, thank you so much.

The rest of you,

we can do hard things

like

surrender, I guess, to love and to grief, which Marissa has proven to us us are the exact same damn thing.

We'll see you next time when we can do hard things.

I give you Tish Melton and Brandy Carlisle.

I walked through fire, I came out the other side.

I chased desire,

I made sure I got what's mine.

And I continue

to believe

that I'm the one for me.

And because I'm mine,

I walk the line.

Cause we're adventurers, and heartbreaks are map.

A final destination

we lack.

We've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find

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I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start.

I'm not the problem,

sometimes things fall apart

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people are free

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Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on that

A final destination

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We stopped asking directions

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We'll finally find our way back home.

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This world adventures and heartbreaks on that

We might get lost, but we're okay with that.

We've stopped asking directions

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We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

brings.

We can do hard

things.

Yeah, we can do hard things.

Yeah, we

can do hard

things.

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