Grief in Context

Grief in Context

In this episode Lisa reflects on loss that isn't death, the disappointments, broken promises, and unmet needs that shape us long before we have language for them. Drawing on a story from her coach Billy Soule about imagining his mother's childhood losses, she revisits her own experience at a Hoffman Institute retreat years ago, where she was asked to imagine her way into the early lives of the parental figures who raised her. What opened there, and the conversations it later made possible with her mother, became a turning point in how she understands inheritance, blame, and the resources our caretakers had — or didn't have — to give. Lisa moves into the larger question the episode keeps circling: mothers mother in a context. So do all of us. The contempt so often directed at mothers, the isolation of grievers waiting to "get better" for everyone else, and the coping we do alone are symptoms of a culture that pushes grief to the fringes rather than holding it in common. Grief, she suggests, is one of the most universal human experiences and one of the most abandoned. This episode is an invitation to bring it back into the circle, where it can do what it's meant to do: humanize, integrate, and make whole.

Welcoming What Is

Lisa returns to the question she's been turning over for a few episodes now — the relationship between healing, wholeness, and being human — and finds her way into it through her own preparation for her oldest son's wedding. What surfaces is an identity she'd been quietly carrying since her divorce: that she'd forfeited the right to claim "mom." Working the thought through Byron Katie's inquiry, she arrives at a simple turnaround — without her, there is no wedding, no son, no day. She was chosen for this. From there the reflection opens outward. If to grieve is to love, then grief is what makes space for everything — the loss, the longing, the parts of ourselves we'd rather not claim. Lisa names the parallel between our cultural refusal of grief and the disintegration we see around us, and closes with an invitation to step outside the impulse to fix or advise, and instead to ask: may I sit, may I listen, may I be with?

Gardens and Grief

In this episode, Lisa reflects on the surprising parallels between gardening and grieving and what her first sprouting bell pepper seeds taught her about wholeness. Drawing on the wisdom of "lazy gardener" Ann (a Tennessee gardener Lisa has been learning from), she explores how plants grow more robust root systems when they're stripped back, not in spite of the loss but because of it. The metaphor opens into a deeper meditation on grief as a force that disrupts unnatural patterns, breaks hearts open the way seeds must crack to sprout, and ultimately humanizes us by returning us to our interconnectedness with each other and the world. Lisa also shares a vulnerable personal discovery: a pattern of reaching for old comforts (specifically, food) whenever she steps into a new, more visible identity. She offers a gentle practice she's been working with — pausing for just two minutes in the moments she'd normally leave herself — as a way of honoring the tender in-between space where one self is dying and another is emerging. Join Lisa as she invites listeners to consider their own questions: Where do your losses connect to your root system? If grief is love, how is that true in your life? For Further Reflection: What connections do you see between human and heal, between being humanized and being made whole? Where in your own life have those words pointed to the same thing? Think of a time you were stripped of something precious. Looking back now, can you see where new roots grew? What in you became more connected, more alive, because of that loss — not in spite of it? If grief is love, where is that true in your life right now? What are you grieving that you wouldn't grieve if you didn't love? Lisa describes catching herself at the refrigerator and saying, this is where I normally leave; I'm going to stay with you for two minutes. Where in your own life do you tend to leave yourself? What might it look like to stay, just briefly, just gently? Is there a new identity sprouting in you right now — something tender, unfamiliar, not yet stable? What would it mean to tend it the way you'd tend a seedling: a little water, not too much sun, patience with how small it still looks?

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

Gifts of Grief

Grief gives gifts. If that’s true, it opens up a conversation that asks what are the gifts that grief has given me.  The first gift that comes to mind is that my life is more than this body. Before Chip died, I’d lost several loved ones including my grandparents and sister.  It was different with Chip because I stayed in conversation with him.  I wrote to him at the end of each work day and after a while it was like he was writing back. I could sense his presence.  Two weeks after he passed a friend insisted I go to the doctor because she was afraid of the toll his absence was taking on my health. As I waited in the exam room, one of our songs came on and I felt his arms holding me while I rocked and cried in his embrace. Sometimes while helping others through their grief journey, I sense the presence of their loved ones joining us and I’ve even encountered their person(s) when I’m alone. These experiences  soften my attachment to life in this body while expanding my connection to all living things. Past. Present. Future. As if the skin separating me from another dissolves.  I’m more curious. More open. More grateful.  The less attached I am to my body, the more brave I am and bravery feels important to me now.  Click here for a more intimate listen to the gifts I have received through grieving.