you don't get over the loss of someone who's died. You have to change in response to what's happened in your life. How many of you think you will ever stop missing a person who died in your life? If you don't know what to say, better than running away because you can't think of the magic words to say. A very easy thing to say is Hello and welcome to awake at the wheel. So today we are joined by applied philosopher Thomas Attig who is here to discuss the deeply human experience of grief, resilience, and how loss can transform the way that we understand ourselves and the world around us. Welcome, Thomas. It's great to be here. And thanks for asking me. Of course. So tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your professional background. I started teaching philosophy at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, long ago and far away. And I had been trained as a phenomenologist, a philosopher who learns techniques for describing and interpreting a broad range of human experiences and existentialism. Philosophers interested in exploring ways of living a meaningful, finite life, one that ends and does. And I began teaching what I was trained to teach and some ethics courses, and I'd been teaching for a couple of years there, and they invented or established a new College of Health and Human Services featuring courses in nursing, social work, gerontology, child and family development. And I thought, given what students had expressed interest in, in the courses I'd been teaching, that they could use a death and dying course. And a lot of my colleagues were teaching things like medical ethics, business ethics, philosophy of law, application of philosophy. So I thought I didn't know anybody else teaching a course under, Death and Dying who was a philosopher. But I could try it. I proposed it, they said, yeah, go ahead and do it. Originally I thought, well, we could do some ethics classes, related to death and dying. And then I started to work for my students who would be doing or preparing themselves to do would rarely involve ethical issues. But all of them would have to go into rooms where someone was dying or where a family was grieving. And most of them would be very uncomfortable, in doing, and I better prepare them to do the kind of work they're going to do related to death and dying. So I set them up to do a lot of self-reflective exercises. And one of the exercises I asked them to do was to, write a short essay about their three most important loss experiences. Hopefully, they had deaths to write about. But if they didn't, other losses were due to get at a lot of what we were going to get at in the course. They wrote hundreds of these things over a few years. None of them ever spoke of five stages of dying or grieving. Neither one. And they they focused on how their world was quite different. This person having died. And, I'll just give you some examples. There was. Well, there were several who talked about what are we going to do with the things left in the closet and in their room? How are we gonna eat at night with, an empty space at the table? Some wrote about, we didn't know where the money was going to come from, who was the breadwinner, and now he's not there. Mom was in a panic. Another wrote about. How do I speak with my grandmother. My father just died, and I just realized now she lost her son. I'm used to talking to grandma, but not about this. How am I going to do it? It was a real problem for me. People talked about not wanting to go to church where people seemed not to be very supportive. They talked about how their, their friends, people that they thought they could count on or kind of ran away from them and they didn't know what to say or how to help them. So they just kind of disappeared. The most dramatic one that I had was a young fellow, probably in his early 20s. He went into the living room of his home, and his father had a gun in his hand and was thinking of killing himself. And his story was rustling the gun out of his father's hand and saving his life. Well, that that was the kind of variety of things I was getting. And after a while, I saw you folks are dealing with major changes in your life is going to be different, and you're recognizing all of that, and you're puzzled about how to go from here to there. What if I told you that to me? It sounds like you're talking about grieving. It was not just an emotional moment that you sort of lived beyond, but your life was changing in a radical way. And what you were challenged to do was learn how to live in a world changed profoundly by a loss. And we all went, that's it. Yeah. You might be the first guy who's understanding what I'm going through. And I started writing and this is me introduced in a real short capsule. I started writing essays in the 1980s, and in the 1990s, I proposed to Oxford that they let me write a book called How We Grieve: Re-Learning the World. And they did. And then a few years later, I wrote one called The Heart of Grief, death, and the search for Lasting Love, acknowledging that so many of the people that I taught to almost everyone, unless they had a really bad relationship with the person who died, they wonder, how can I love someone who isn't here anymore? And finally, recently, that's why we're here now. Because this book was published Seeking Wisdom in Death Shadows. And it's not only about grief, but it's primarily about grief, but the shadows of death or our own mortality. Bereavement, death. Dying, witnessing, dying. And and grief or coming to terms with what's happened. And, it's sort of like an intellectual, intellectual autobiography. It's sort of the evolution of my thinking through 3 or 4 decades, pretty seriously, about death and dying. And that's who I am. Which for today's purpose was amazing. I could tell you about growing up in two very large families. My dad was one of ten. My mom was one of nine. When I started reading letters about us in the family when I was 5 or 6, and she read them out loud to the whole family. So I got very used to death and dying in those families. And a lot of people didn't. I didn't intend ever to write and teach about death and die. I was going to do mathematics, but eventually it came to the course that I just described for you. Yeah. And it's so interesting what you say. And, you know, in our clinical practices, we sadly deal with grief, in many different scopes, on a regular basis with our clients. But, I think it is one of the not I think it is one of the most universally experienced things. And yet, people struggle so profoundly with it. And it's something that is so, infrequently spoken about. So I'm excited for us to talk more about your work, your findings, and perhaps a perspective that you've taken that might differ from traditional, grief work, like you mentioned, the the five stages of grieving. I presume that your work maybe departs from that a bit. I, I think it's misconceived as applying to grief at all it plot. It applies pretty well to the initial population that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who came up with the five stages, had in mind. She had been working with dying people. And when people are dying, we've gotten word from, physicians, and the like about what they'd think is going to happen given the illness or condition. That they have. And there's a lot of ambiguity and a lot of uncertainty, afoot. Maybe it's not reading the results, right. Maybe he doesn't know what he's talking about. Maybe I'll be the exception rather than the rule. So that's working toward denial. They tell me it's this way, and I'm going to live like it's not this way. Until something really convinces me otherwise. And, people can get second and third opinions and start confirming themselves. And then there's a second ego reaction. Denial is fight or flight. All right. And it's I'm going to fly from this. All right. And anger is I'm going to fight. And if I'm angry enough, I can control, as in a world happen. And then it keeps getting worse. And then you go into a third phase, which is bargaining. Maybe there's a way I can change myself or change how I'm living, or can another doctor, or get another opinion or whatever, and find someone who tells me that I'm really not in for this. And when all three of those fight or flight defenses, fail, the fourth goal phase is depression. Pardon my foreign language. Oh, shit. This isn't working. Oh, right. Everything I'm used to trying with problems is not working. I'm. Looks like I'm really dying. And then they get to what they call acceptance. Yeah, I'm definitely on my way to being here. No more. Now, when someone has actually died and the body is missing, we're there. You're in the church, you're in the funeral home. You're in the viewing room for the first time, or you've been brought in and into the room where they've been living their last days, and they've just died. And the nurses are with you, and the doctor's with you. And sorry about what's happened here. Will take care of you in every way we can. We'll call the funeral home for you, etc., etc. when you've got a dead body, there's no ambiguity. You are seriously troubled. If you try to die, deny it. All right, when you're facing it, when you kind of touch it, when you can kiss it, when you can look and see what has happened. But you know, and you might be angry, but it it would be kind of unusual. You probably tend to be thankful that these people are being quiet and gentle with you, and they want to help you as much as you want to be helped. There's nothing to bargain bargain with. You can't, undo a reality that is staring you in the face. You might experience some depression. You're probably just going to cry and weep. And it wouldn't be like, what a psychologist is looking for when they're looking for a diagnosis of diagnosable depression. And acceptance is sort of what you do very reluctantly, almost from the first minute on. So it just doesn't apply to, when people are grieving, relearning how the world be challenged to shape your life differently, your everyday life being a challenge to enter unanticipated next chapters in your life where a major character is going to be missing and you don't know quite how you're going to go about living in those days without him or her. That captures the existential phenomenologist in me says this is a pretty good description. And, when I came out with it, at first I was capturing a phrase a man named Colin Murray Parkes had used, and he wrote about a paragraph or so about relearning the world. I just developed that idea, in spades. And it was called by some, this could be a revolutionary change in how we think about grief at the time. And, it's one of the views that's still standing, and widely respected and widely used on. I've seen an awful lot of counselors who tell me that the book is how We Grieve is on their shelves. It's right there over the missing. There it is. Yeah. So I feel good about what I've done, and I, I've not felt that I had to take anything back. I've been defending those fighting for about 40 years. So. So you mentioned, that a big revolutionary piece of your work is that perhaps traditional grief work doesn't look at, adjusting to the way the world around us changes in the way that we proceed in the world changes. So what are people often missing in that respect? What are they missing? Yeah. So like what? What either does traditional grief work, miss, or the individual is going through the grief. Then. How are they missing the mark with that? Well, the, the traditional five phases, rarely, if ever, describe any experience. Anybody has, that's all they're missing. They're missing the whole story that, I'm in the process of telling you and your audience, it's as if they never listen to someone. Well, I mean, a lot of what happens with, with grief in this world is the professionals aren't particularly well trained, and they're among the people who want to get out of the room as fast as they can. Or they don't go into the room if they haven't been directly taking care of the people who are in there after someone has died. And I think there's a general, view of grieving as the bad stuff that comes over you when someone has died. The tears, catching your breath, feeling lightheaded like you can hardly stand. You haven't got the strength to go on. You wish it would all go away? And it just beats on you. And that's all the grief is. It's. It's the hurt. It's the pain is the sorrow. And people give bad advice by saying, take all those bad feelings that you have and express them and expressing them until you feel like you don't need to express them anymore, and you'll be over it and you can go on. Yeah. No, you don't get over the loss of someone who's died. You have to change in response to what's happened in your life. Psychologists, you goes through a moment, distinguish between reactions. That's sort of what happens to us physically, psychologically, emotionally when someone dies. And responses reactions are passive. We feel helpless. We feel powerless. Choiceless. It just comes over us. There are aspects of our experiences that are like that, including loss, experiences, but there's also responding, which is when we engage actively with what's happened to us, we make choices. We decide we'll go in this way as opposed to that, or we'll talk to a lot of people, or we will retreat from talking to people because it's too hard. We'll feed ourselves or we'll let somebody else feed us. Will, welcome people into the room? We're telling you, you really want to be alone. That's beginning to make choices, and you have bigger choices about how you're going to reshape your daily life, and how are you going to redirect where you go into your future. And a lot of people think there's nothing attractive available anymore. These poor people have lost and their experience ends with the horrors of loss, of feeling as if you've been deprived from in the word. Bereavement means deprivation. All right. And what you do you feel depressed or, and, bereaved and deprived for a while, and eventually you get over it somehow and go on living. Just a week account of what happens with what people are asked to do or required to do if they're going to reshape their lives. And I want to highlight something really important that you said earlier, and I think that it ties into the larger message that you're, portraying here, that I think in large part, part of society's hesitation, fear, stigma surrounding death and dying likely comes from, fear of having to encounter what they perceive as only those negative feelings and experiences and so on, largely ignoring, oddly enough, some of the good things that can come out of that grief experience. I think that, if you only look at reactions, it's just dark. It's the shadows. It's the hard place where you can't imagine what to do. Yeah. And people welcome in our prepared really be in hopeful experience. They want to see some kind of hope that's possible in these dark times. And light thinking offers that. And if you stop at the five phases where you're done grieving when you reach acceptance. Yes, he's really dying and that's it. That's you know. Just your hands and move on. Yeah. It's just not what the end of it is. So what can you be hopeful about? Well, living well again with people who survive with you, who are still people that you cherish, in your life. I mean, if, say, you're a father with, three children and your wife dies, it's horrible. But your life didn't end, and you have responsibilities for those three kids, and you want to be a good father for those three kids. And you want to be able to help them be hopeful and happy and loving, in the days they'll be with you. That's where Hope resides in the good stuff you still have, and the good stuff that you could fold in as you reshape and reintroduce new elements in your life. Suppose you're you have to sell your house because you don't have the means to keep making the payments, and you have to move your family into a smaller home you can have happiness in. That's, well, they're home you can be hopeful about, you can be working toward that. We're going here and we're going to feel miserable for the rest of our lives because dad isn't here. Yeah. It's not. And message you want to give to your children. Okay. You want to say this is going to be hard and we're all hurting. You know, hug you, and I hope you hug me and we'll talk about, and do everything we can to get used to our not being here. We will not forget her. We'll tell stories about her. We'll smile again and laugh with her again. Watch the movies that she likes to watch, and so on. And we're going to do something. No, just all of us. Not with one miracle. And this isn't just theoretical. Right? And or. And I'm sure you've seen this many times too, that like. Yeah, in the midst of the grief, it it feels awful and it feels hopeless. But I've had the privilege of seeing people through years later in their grief journey and the changes they've made in their lives and the resilience that they were able to develop, the overcoming of the adversity and so on. And these are, again, all the really positive things that can come out of, you know, the worst times in people's lives. Well, we've got a lot of freedom and we've got a lot of ability. Let me just work with a hypothesis or two. Yeah. Let's let's do that. I think a big thing that we can be hopeful about. And the second book that I wrote was looking for Lasting Love. Well, how can you love someone in separation is a kind of a big question. How can I love her if she's not alive and breathing in the next room? And so on. And imagine that we were in an auditorium, and I'm standing up in the front of the room and you're talking to me on stage. And I turned to the audience, and they're listening out there. So that's where the audience is today. How many of your listeners, if I, if I had a live crowd, I'd ask people to raise their hands. Okay. How many of you who are listening today? Okay, we're in the audience. If we imagine one by one far as you're going, raise your hand if you think when you left them and came to be here where we are today. They stop loving it. Nobody would raise their hand. All. No. It's more important here. How many of you who are here now know that when you left all of them, you stopped loving all of them? How many of you stop loving you? All the people you left behind? You've just told me that you are separated from all of these people that you love in your life, and you don't stop loving them when you're separated. Why would that have to be any different when they don't? Well, how do we love them when they're not? When they're not around? Well, they're not around now. How do we love. How are you loving the people you love behind right now? Is there anybody in the room who is remembering the. Can you remember their name? Can you remember and say the words, I love them while you're doing it? Okay. How do you do it? Sort of. More generally, do you ever talk about them when you're not with them? Do you ever remember them fondly? You ever kind of laugh with them when you think of the funny thing he or she said or did the last time you were at the do you ever feel inspired by them when they're not with you? Sure, we are going to feel like you learned some important life lessons when you're not with them. Sure. Do you remember the funny thing they said the last time they were falling? Sure. Have they ever fed you? Were they ever close to. Where were they ever taken care of? You? When you're sick, have they ever come to visit you when you were troubled? Have you ever had a meaningful conversation that you can remember with family? I think the general retort to that would be, but the finality of death, I think, is what trips people up. Yes, but what is it about the finality of it? No, finality of it is you won't have any new experiences with them. And you, how many of you? Let's put it this way. How many of you think you will ever stop missing a person who died in your life? Nobody raises hell. I'll never stop missing and I'll miss her the day I die, right? How many of you think you're going to stop loving them somewhere along the line? In the next years to come? No one thinks they're going to stop loving them. All right, so much for closure and grief. A lot of contemporary thought is work toward closure, work toward shutting off the relationship. There were people who were advised that, Sigmund Freud came pretty close. Complete dick effects. Take the emotional target out of remembering the person. And so on. Nobody's willing to do that. Nobody wants to do that, and nobody will be forced to do what are required to do it. Looking for closure. A lot of people out there who are counseling people who are grieving say that's what you need to do. Why you can have the benefits of all that remembering all that inspiration, all that appreciation and gratitude for what you have been given that you still have from the person who died. I think that's a better message to give to people that work really hard on expressing everything that's bad. And when you're tired of expressing, you'll be done with grief. And that's kind of the traditional view that gets given to people. And that's that's terrible. And we have this incredible capacity not only to react, but to respond and to respond in meaningful ways. I wrote a whole book called How the Heart of Grief, and it's filled with, I think, 82 concrete stories of how people can do lovely things, feel loved by people who have died. And it's they're pretty much the same things that the that you can right here in a studio. When you think about people who are somewhere else now, you can do to feel loved and and be loving in response to the life that's ended. And that's perfectly compatible with pangs of sorrow coming over you when they don't. And then you kind of know they'll eventually you can cry your cry, your tears, that you need to cry now and appreciate what you're still appreciating and look for. How is it that about this aspect of what I really love? This person? I can still interact in a different way that doesn't require, their physical presence in my life. And, that's a good message, I think. Now, I've just been reading some things, and, someone wrote a review of the book I just wrote here. And they, they seem to have trouble in my kind of emphasizing the positive things about relationships. I'm not naive. I think anything that's bad in a relationship can be re experienced after a person has died. And highlights. Or horrors that, have traumatized people. All right. And psychologists have plenty to do to help people disentangle from bad aspects of religious relationships. After a person has died, it's a little harder that you can't talk to them and interact with them personally, and so on. But, the relationships I'm talking about are the full range of experiences that people have with people they think of as they love, who have died. And most loving relationships are multifaceted, and some of the facets will grip you in ways that will blind you to the good that you're still holding on to. And if you can't talk to yourself, you can go to a mutual help group. If it's a really they've been they've abused you, but you still want to love your father in some way. Psychologist can help people find the good stuff to hold onto and help them let go of the bad stuff. And some of it can be traumatizing. And very few people that I know of are very good at getting past traumas in their lives by themselves. And thank God people are trained to help people with that kind of challenge in their relationship. And I think in some cases, relationships have been so bad. People have wanted to be loved by their father their whole lives, and then it seems like they never have been. If you can help them to find just a grain of. There was a time when you were three months old and he actually fed you himself. And then he threw you in the corner. Remember the feeding? He had that look in his eyes just for that moment. And we got to help you let go of all the rest so you can say he wanted me. And then I showed up and he didn't want me anymore. He wanted me. Help me get to that point, and I won't make it the center of my life. But it'll be a crumb that I can hold on to so I can let go of me, angry at him as as much as I have been, you know, the like, which is what traumatized just do on my understanding anyway. And or and I'm wondering if you can talk a bit more about, like, practically speaking, what that would look like in therapy and specifically holding on to the positives. It, like Tom described. Well, I mean, it's a blend, I think, of philosophical, practical, pragmatic, you know, reality based, approaches, which is, you know, I always tell people, you know, whether you're working with someone who's alive, you know, who you still engaging with or someone you've lost, or I say, you actually have to sort of disinter all the emotions and recognize that they can both be true. So the most common thing, as you're saying, for example, if you have anger at somebody, you know, or resentment or hurt or something, you know, that's one emotional pathway. And then a lot of people when they, you know, they they express it, they experience it, they kind of ping pong between that. And then they feel guilty, you know, oh my gosh, now I'm speaking poorly, you know, ill of the dead or something like that. And they, you know, and then they're bouncing back and forth between these different emotions. So I help people kind of process each of them separately. Okay. And I say the goal is when you can process them separately and, you know, give each of them their full weight. Yes, your father did this or your mother did that and so on. And then, you know, so not denying it because a lot of people, they think it's a zero sum game. I have to suppress one in order to experience the other. I say, no, no, you can experience both the both. But you've got to be able to integrate them, synthesize them, rather than ping pong in between the two of them. So in therapy, whether you know, doing talk therapy or what there's called emotion focus therapy where we really disentangle those emotions and again, really process them without, you know, and letting somebody know it is okay, even if it's a loss, someone you've lost, it's okay to recognize the negative, because if you try to deny it and you only try to focus on the positive that there's something in the back of your mind, that unconscious is something that's just telling you that something's wrong. Something's off. I'm distorting reality. You may not consciously be aware of it, but you feel it. You feel when you're not doing justice to your experience. So in therapy, like I said, is trying to process all of these different things and then being able to integrate them and then finding practically how do I go about, you know, living my life after the loss of a loved one. And I'm going to say I can answer it myself, but I'm going to ask, you, Tom, one of the, you know, and I'll say, well, I say to patients afterwards, but if someone came to you and said, but I feel that moving forward is dishonoring, but, you know, the person I loved, okay. Whether it's just being happy for the first time or whether it's finding another partner after having lost a partner and so on, what would you to say to somebody who says, you know, I just can't move forward because I don't want to dishonor them in that way? I've met grief groups where they've evolved together to be sad together, to do honor to the people who have died. And I offered them ideas about moving forward. Hopefully, unfolding other aspects of, experiencing the person who's died. And it's very sad that they thought that would be dishonoring, Michaela at least one thought. I'm going to tell you a story in a little while about blending, but, my thought was, I think if you ask people gently to think about what would those people want you to do with their memory? Most of them would say he'd want me to go on living and being the best me that I can be, because he loved me. And that would that would work for me. For some, relationship might be tangled up enough that that's that's easy. And you have to work some more. But I think that's ultimately what kind of what you're going after. Your mother didn't stop loving you because she was going to die. And she didn't. She never wanted you to be an unhappy boy or an unhappy girl. In the days and years after she died, what they really want is for you to remember them in some loving way and be grateful for something that they did or said, and that you're hanging onto it and and keeping them in their hearts and so on is really what they had in mind. But the disentangling can be tough. Here's the story. I was giving a talk one night and they had a mixed group. I can't even remember who was brought into the room, but there was this man who came up to me at a kind of a break time, and you said, I want to tell you something that I've experienced. My I had a great son, and a couple of years ago, he killed himself. It was very. It wasn't accidental. It's very clear. He took steps to deliberately. And his wife and I was mad, and I was furious, and my heart was just broken. And I saw, I loved him. Well, how could you do that? And how could he do that to me? And then I saw a couple of big talks, and then we'll get to the climax talk. He had to be hurting terribly in some way, or he wouldn't have chosen to do what he did. Usually when my son is hurting, I feel sorry for him, and I want to help him. I can't help it. But as I think of my relationship with my son and raising children in general, none of them are ever perfect and I don't have to love everything that they've done. Minor infraction on up to really big time. I can love my son and not love everything he did. In fact, I can hate something that he did but still love him. And how many people have children in prisons or incarcerated for some reason or another? They invented somebody else, hurt them terribly. I take offense at what they did to, but I still love my son, who's in prison for another ten years, and I'm going to go keep visiting him in the like. The idea that this is the balance you were talking about, you can love somebody, but not everything that they did and where that idea that you're supposed to love everything that they do comes from, most of us have an idea that our everybody we love is fallible, and they can make mistakes and they can do things, but aren't so nice. And I hope it's not you about if it is you, you still work your way through to forgiving them for that thing, and you don't demand that they beg for the forgiveness. You just give it. Because it's easier to live in a forgiving, problematic relationship and one that's still knowing you, true and the like. And I take it that's the kind of thing that you were talking about. It was a big lesson for me, and it seems so simple when you think about when you want somebody, you don't love everything that they do, and sometimes it can be offensive or harmful to you or to others, but if it's your kid, if it's your dad, if it's your mom, if it's your brother, you go out of the way to take all of them and say, this is a person I deeply care about, and I'm not gonna stop doing that. And if anybody asks me about killing themselves, I'm going to recommend in the strongest terms, don't do it. People that will survive. You are going to be in a lot of pain if you intend to hurt them. Well, you have to live with it. But really don't do it. And you could, you can, you can say that if I, if my son spoke to me, I would have told them in the strongest terms, do not do this. I will restrain you. I if I can, but after the fact, part of who he was was he was a person who was hurting bad enough that he decided he had to be dead. So Tom, interestingly, and maybe I'm reading this wrong, but I'm hearing some like religious underpinnings maybe in your view of grief and maybe part of your conceptualize ation of it. Am I seeing that correctly or no, I. I'm marginally religious. I'm spiritual, I think. I think we're on the edge of my spirituality. Yeah. That's, that's that's kind of what I'm hearing. And I think that's, that's really cool. And I think relevant as well to perhaps what helps some people process grief. Yeah, I've seen differently than other. Groups are having meaningful experiences. Yeah. No matter where they are and what they're going through and holding on to anger is not nearly the kind of meaning I want to live with. I want to be in a place where I'm understanding people having really difficult times in their lives, and sometimes doing things that that I hope I would never do because of the pain that they bring into other people's lives, especially people that they love, and so on. But, I don't think, I don't, I don't play into some of the religious accounts of people's was supposedly being perfect. I think being forgiving, honestly, forgiving is a good way to be. Yeah, because otherwise you're carrying baggage that's just pounding away inside of you. And, life is too short. I'm only 80, so, I don't I don't have time for that religious life. That's true. I'll be 81. Next Saturday, July 4th. Amazing. Happy birthday. Thank you. Okay. Well, so one thing, because we always, you know, again, we're looking at, kind of a blending of philosophical, existential, but also practical, matter. So a quick question for you. So, I've been asked this many times in the media and I always say the same thing. I say, there's no one right way to grieve. There's no one right way to support people who are grieving. I say, but there's lots of wrong ways. So one of the wrong ways, you know, when you're trying to support someone, let's just look at the supporting side, which is, you know, saying something that comes across as a cliche, trite, you know, like just so that it just, it almost. Yeah. You know, it just doesn't resonate at all. It's almost offensive. So I'm just wondering, so for someone who wants to support someone who is grieving and you don't know where they're at, you just see that they're so lost, they're in the midst of bereavement. What would you say to somebody would be the best way for them to be a support to someone in that state? I'm where. I think I'm going to tell you two quick stories. A woman used to come with her husband to my classes. They founded a mutual support group for bereaved parents. They had a three year old daughter. On Fridays, she fell off the swing in the backyard. Went to the hospital on Monday. She died. Turned out she had an undetected incipient illness in our brain. And the fall precipitated the thing moving fast. So she went to the funeral, and she's climbing the stairs, and the pastor's there, and the door, and he holds out his hand and shakes her hand and wraps his other hand on top of hers. Congratulations, he said. What, you have an angel in heaven, she said. If I could have mustered the faith, I would have punched his lights out on the spot. All right. She was not happy with that response. She was presuming all kinds of things about where she was, right. Later in the week, she got a phone call back, living at home with her other child and with her husband, and she gets a phone call from a woman who lives down the block. And the woman said, I know you really don't know me. We've passed and your little girl has come down and played in my yard quite a bit, and you've kind of come and started the friends who watch and play. But we've never really introduced ourselves and so on. But I understand that she, And I don't know what to say to you, except I can tell you I took a lot of photographs. And if you would like to come and have tea or coffee with me, we could look through the photos together. Would you like to do that? She scrambled down to that woman's house. However, I think in general, if there's some kind thing you can do or offer, that's a reasonable response. If you don't know what to say, better than running away because you can't think of the magic words to say. A very easy thing to say is not helpful. I don't know what to say to you. I know you've had a terrible experience. I care, and then you kind of hang in there and see where they want to take her. Maybe. Let's look, let's go sit down. I'll tell you about my daughter a little bit. Libero response or I really don't feel like talking now, but I appreciate what you have to say. Would it be okay if I call you, that's the kind of thing. If if you really don't know what to say, don't try to say something. No thank you. You're going to do magic. You're not. Yeah. Yeah. And that's an that's an easy one. Don't wrestle with. I don't know what to say, so I care, but I really don't know what to say. Yeah. And let it go from there. Yeah. And then you don't try to walk away. Yeah. Yeah. And they stand together in silence. Exactly. Just know that to do something that you really feel motivated to do and good things happen. But magic words, especially make it better. Words aren't available. Get over it or let that go. Right. That makes sense. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So, Tom, how do our listeners find your decades of work? Like, this has been such a lovely conversation. And again, like we talked about from the beginning of the episode, it's something that I think is stigmatized and not talked about enough. And, and, and very few people are equipped to deal with the realities of grief. But again, I think your decades of work do lay out some things that people can do. So how do people find you? Several things. All the books are available from Amazon, which is where a lot of people find them. I would prefer and suggest that you, if you're really interested, go to Oxford University Press and enter with the title of the book Seeking Wisdom and Death Shadows. You'll be taken to a page where you can see a full description of a table of contents. Sample chapter. You'll decide whether it's really of interest to you. If it is, you can push a little button saying you want to order it, and you'll be taken to a page, where you can buy 1 or 100,000. I think that will be good. Maybe a couple of shiploads of if you're really generous. But most of the time, I guess we can start there. There's a place where you can enter a promotion code, and you'll get a 30% discount. So a $35 U.S book would cost you 24, 95 or thereabouts. Put in “AUFLY30” 5 letters, two numbers, AUFLY30. When you put that in, however many books you want will be marked down to the $25 number and buy the books and they'll be sent to you. Amazing. And the other? The others are also available from, from Oxford. If you wanted to buy a bunch, yeah. I think Oxford's the best way to go if you want a one to break on that one. So I think I'll leave it at that. Okay. There. The editor of Death Studies, this man named Bob Niemeyer, calls the book a masterpiece. I wept when he told me that. That's a that's wonderful. Yeah. Is is known worldwide. And we had him here this last summer, with his new wife and, a couple of times he he called me his teacher, and I said, Bob, I've. I've heard you call me somebody you haven't heard before. Do you think of me that way? You bet. So that's testimonial enough. Wow. Yeah. Amazing. Well, Tom, thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today and share your wisdom with our listeners. It's been really been wonderful. Let me let me just add one more thing. I see that you've got specialization and trauma, and so on. I've got a couple of friends, named Terry Randall and Ted Robinson. And, I'm hoping that, you know, the work of both of those folks. Trauma is amazingly complicated, and challenging and too widespread. For decency sake. Well, I it's one of the hardest things to disentangle yourselves from. And if you're having a success with that, I just admire what you're doing. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay, well, and on that hopeful note, until next time, keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel.