Grief Humanizes

Lisa reflects on a question that's been sitting with her: What if we renamed this podcast? From Grief Heals to Grief Humanizes because maybe that's the truer thing grief does.

She traces the thread from her peepaw's death by suicide when she was 13 (and how quickly life moved on around her, and within her) through her divorce after 23 years of marriage — the moment she first became "ripe," as she puts it, to actually enter grief. What the divorce took wasn't just a relationship; it was a whole stack of identity cards she'd been carrying: wife, mother, life coach, Christian, pastor. Stripped of all of them, she found herself face to face with something she'd long questioned about herself: whether she actually knew how to love, whether she was even real.

She also shares what spurred her to record this particular morning: waking up covered in hives after breaking weeks of clean eating, looking at herself in the mirror, and, instead of panic, feeling something close to joy. Her body said no. And she laughed. Because that's a relationship.

Along the way, Lisa touches on:

• Growing up in a colonized, industrialized world that treats people as commodities and how that gets internalized
• Why grief is such a powerful disruptor of the numbing strategies that "work, until they don't"
• The obsession with being "one of the good ones" and how that very obsession keeps harmful structures in place
• What it means to contribute to our collective humanity, not just personal healing
• A closing reference to Pádraig Ó Tuama's poem The Facts of Life: that the structures that constrict us may not be permanently constraining

Currently reading: The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee