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94. Staying In The Moment-With Emma Payne
85 Plays3 years ago
Emma Payne is the Founder & CEO of Grief Coach, a secure, private and easy way to get meaningful grief support when someone dies.
Emma is a seasoned technology entrepreneur, MIT graduate, and award-winning change-agent, who started building online communities before Netscape was born. Her 25 year career leading online and mobile projects has included building tools to register young people to vote, creating online networks of support for families facing health challenges, and launching North America’s first online crisis intervention line. She also founded a scrappy, action-oriented, national non-profit focused on women & technology, that broke boundaries and developed leaders for 17 years.
Grief Coach combines Emma's passion for mobile technology and engagement, with her deep commitment to giving people the confidence and tools they need to support each other through grief. She knows that, while nothing makes grief go away, supporting someone through loss is powerful and transformative for the supporter, and alters the trajectory for the grieving person too.
Contact Emma Payne: https://grief.coach/who-we-are/emma-payne/
Grief Coach discount for listeners: https://grief.coach/gggpodcast
Contact Kendra Rinaldi to be a guest or for coaching: http://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com
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Transcript
Embracing Small Moments Through Grief
00:00:01
Speaker
I wouldn't give up the experience of understanding deeply what pain is, what healing can feel like, how resilient we can be, how to find joy in tiny things that I used to not even notice. And I definitely, when I never had, I don't know, this is kind of weird, but when my kids were little or having a tantrum or screaming in the bathtub or something, I didn't,
00:00:31
Speaker
I really, I just appreciated every minute of it. I think it made me deeply appreciate being a mom, a 99.9% of the time I could stay like just right there in the moment with them. You know, I loved it. We would do like imagination stories and this, that and the other. And just to be so in the moment, I think was a gift that grief gave me.
Introduction to the Podcast and Host
00:01:03
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between podcast. This podcast is about exploring the grief that occurs at different times in our lives in which we have had major changes and transitions that literally shake us to the core and make us experience grief.
00:01:26
Speaker
I created this podcast for people to feel a little less hopeless and alone in their own grief process as they hear the stories of others who have had similar journeys. I'm Kendra Rinaldi, your host. Now, let's dive right in to today's episode.
Meet Emma Payne: Tech Innovator in Grief Support
00:01:50
Speaker
Thank you for tuning in. Today, we will be listening to Emma Payne's story. Emma is the founder and CEO of Grief Coach. It's a website that supports people in their grief journey. She has started as an entrepreneur in technology. She's an MIT graduate and then now has combined her two passions
00:02:15
Speaker
of technology as well as grief support with what she does. So we'll be learning and hearing more about her story. So welcome, Emma. Thanks for having me. Nice to be here. Thank you for joining.
00:02:30
Speaker
As I shared here, I just said a little bit of snippets there about you, but I will be learning just as the listeners are as we go along here. So tell me where you live and a little bit about your family and then how you got into studying and MIT and that line of work. So start with the family and where you live and then we'll go from there.
00:02:53
Speaker
Well, I'm on the West Coast with my teenagers in Seattle and MIT. Yeah, that was a trip. It was just as hard as everybody says it would be. I was the only person in my program, I believe, who wasn't already an engineer. So it was very, very
00:03:18
Speaker
difficult, but I survived that. Yeah, you're here. Or are we talking about, is that maybe what the grief experience was? No, that came later. It was not like the surviving being an MIT. No. No. I'm sure that was a big shift too. Did you grow up in Seattle?
00:03:44
Speaker
No, I've lived all over the place. I was born in England when I was a baby. My parents moved to Zambia, then Algeria, then back to England, then immigrated to Canada. So I was a kid who moved around.
00:03:57
Speaker
A lot. Yeah. Wow. That always intrigues me, and I ask this to other people in terms of the moving, because for some people, they live in one place for so many years, and then they move, and then there's definitely a big shift. I know that was for me when I moved to the States initially, because I came when I was 18, and then from there on, then I started moving every five to six years, pretty much changing States.
00:04:22
Speaker
But for somebody that's grown up that way in moving, do you feel that transitions, like moves, are just easier for you in general because it's something you're just used to doing?
Global Upbringing and Co-parenting Challenges
00:04:34
Speaker
If you'd asked me that question two years ago, I would have said yes, absolutely. I'm just sort of good at it and I can manage the upheaval pretty well.
00:04:46
Speaker
Um, but today I would give you a different answer because the whole, you know, now I have teenagers. Um, the pandemic is really, really difficult for us in lots of ways. Um, online school co-parenting across a closed border. I mean, so now I'm sort of feeling the opposite. I am feeling some degree of envy for people who really feel grounded and at home in one place. And I have, um,
00:05:15
Speaker
people scattered across a lot of places. And that's really hard with the pandemic, right? Because you just haven't been able to see and get the support from the people that we wanted. Such a good point and insight on that. It's true. We don't have anybody where we live either. And the border-wise, I also have a... When you said border is the children's parent in...
00:05:40
Speaker
Canada. Yeah. So my brother recently moved to Canada and then my in-laws live in Colombia. And so land wise, like the only ones we could like just drive to see were the ones that live in Florida. So, um, so, but yeah, I think that's just a bit difficult. And I think, um, I mean, I just read that 25% of Americans moved last year or something like that. So it's, I'm not alone. I think that a lot of people who had been more
00:06:11
Speaker
nomadic with their choices really. Yeah, really realized that that they needed to be as close as possible to the people that support and love them. So it's been
Inspiration Behind Grief Coach: A Personal Story
00:06:23
Speaker
it's been a it's been a time.
00:06:28
Speaker
It's it's definitely been unique I'll be if FYI of the listeners end up hearing like like sound of the background It's ended up being that the lawn mowing people My lawn right now, so it so if you if you see me mute am I just know that it's so that it doesn't end up picking up as much so But anyway, thank you for for sharing that so your teenagers are how old now I have teenagers as well How old are your teenagers 13 and 15?
00:06:57
Speaker
Oh, we have close, mine are 13 and 14. My 15 year old only became 15 about.
00:07:03
Speaker
three weeks ago, so yeah, or four weeks later. Yeah, so it's definitely different. I've loved it so far. For me, it's been a good experience so far with teenagers, but I don't see them or talk to them as much. I was telling them this morning to my son, because my dog is the only one that lets me hug her and cuddle her, and I was telling him, I'm like,
00:07:31
Speaker
She's the only one that lets me kiss her and take pictures of her and everything. Nobody else lets me do that anymore. Yeah, true. It's a change. It is a change. Okay, so you studied at MIT. You studied technology.
00:07:46
Speaker
So how long did you work in that field? And then you started then developing different apps and things like that or different. So tell us about that journey and how that then took you into now the area of the grief coach website.
How Grief Coach Supports Through Texts
00:08:02
Speaker
Sure. So I have been working in technology for about, I don't know, 25 years by the time I started grief coach. I started my first web company before Netscape existed.
00:08:17
Speaker
And so I was very, very early into web. And I had spent decades developing all kinds of mobile and online applications for things like getting young people registered to vote. I founded an organization that was all about getting women into technology and ran that for three years. It went on for 17 years before it was acquired. So I was really proud of that work.
00:08:46
Speaker
technology career. But I also had spent about 10 years working as a volunteer and off the side of my desk and sometimes a few consulting projects in grief and loss, particularly around suicide prevention, crisis intervention, things like that.
00:09:05
Speaker
So in 2015, my friend died and he was the best friend and also second cousin of my first husband who had died by suicide 10 years earlier. So when my friend died, he had asked me to speak at his funeral and I said, yes, of course I would. But after he died, I was really nervous about that because it did mean flying across the country and seeing a lot of people who I hadn't heard from when my first husband died.
00:09:33
Speaker
Um, and that was nerve wracking. So, but in the end, I feel like that was a real gift from my friend because I spent 72 hours starting with the minute I sat down in the pew.
00:09:45
Speaker
with people saying, oh my goodness, you're Emma, you're Barry's widow, I'm so sorry I didn't reach out, I didn't know what to say, I didn't know anyone who died before, then so much time passed and I was embarrassed that I hadn't reached out. You know, essentially people have genuinely had cared about me, but they just didn't know what to do. And so on my plane ride home from the funeral and
00:10:07
Speaker
you know, again, by this point, I'd spent 20 something years building mobile and online platforms. So on my plane ride home, I just thought, this is so silly. Like I spent 10 years not hearing from people and that was really hard, but a hundred people spent 10 years feeling bad about that, genuinely feeling ashamed, guilty, sad, unsure, all of that, you know,
00:10:36
Speaker
So I just thought, okay, well, if we can use our phones for every other thing, we must be able to use it for grief support too.
Real-life Impact of Grief Coach
00:10:45
Speaker
So I basically used my plane ride to map out all of grief coach as a text messaging platform. And I thought that by the time we landed at SeaTac, I would get online and I would see that it existed already, you know, but then we landed and I got onto wifi and I saw there was nothing. There were not grief apps.
00:11:05
Speaker
There was no text support. There was not.
00:11:08
Speaker
anything out there like that. I was shocked, actually. So that's when I... So it was built based out of a need, what you realized there was a need. And if you would have had even that 10 years prior, right, when you were going through even your own grief process, so you built it out of that need. Yeah. And I wanted to build something that was support for the greever, but that also was support for the friends and family who wanted to help
00:11:37
Speaker
and didn't know how. And now, you know, six years later, I'm certain that that's really where a lot of the magic happens. We're never going to have enough therapists. And even if we did, not everybody can afford $150 an hour for therapy, and not everybody wants that kind of experience. And we're never going to have enough support groups in every possible location. And even if we did, a lot of people don't want to.
00:12:06
Speaker
share their story with a room full of strangers. But I have not met anybody, not one single person who doesn't want their husband, best friend, sister to understand a bit more of what they're going through and to be patient and supportive. Everybody wants that. So I think that the way that we send text messages to
00:12:27
Speaker
the greever and to their people is pretty cool. So tell me how, walk us through that a little bit then. So when somebody signs up for grief coach, let's say I am a friend, like I'm just the supporting person of a greever and I signed up and I signed up for a grief coach.
00:12:45
Speaker
What kind of text messages would I get that would help me then guide me as to how it is I support my friend? And do you select if you're the greever or is it like you select what type of texting you're going to get? Yeah, exactly. Yep, exactly right. So we have hundreds of expert contributors.
00:13:05
Speaker
with a real depth of wisdom in some of them stillbirth, some of them suicide, some of them sibling loss, parent loss, losing your mother when you are a mother, all kinds of expertise. And we create a whole network of messages that are customized based on cause of death, relationship, age. We have a teen series, for example, and a series for people who are widowed young and so on. So it takes about five minutes to sign up.
00:13:35
Speaker
you share as much or as little as you want to about your loss or your friend's loss, and your texts start right away for you and the supporter. So if you're the supporter, you're going to get, you know, here's a one minute video about things that your friend who just had a stillbirth might be experiencing. Here's a resource site, here's a tip, all the different ways that we're gonna
00:14:00
Speaker
help you help her. But then at the same time, she is getting her own messages about a stillbirth loss in this example and so on. I use this example a lot because one of our very first subscribers was a woman whose baby was stillborn, first child, and she, I describe her as deeply grieving.
00:14:26
Speaker
but also really feeling alone, almost like preoccupied with how alone she felt, which I now realize is very, very, very common, right? So she was saying things like, my husband, my husband's drinking too much and he won't even talk about the baby. My best friend flew across the country to be with me, but she just left because she said she doesn't know how to be with me when I'm like this. So there she is with the nursery all decorated and expecting to have time off work, but instead she's really alone.
00:14:57
Speaker
So she bought a subscription to grief coach. She filled in her information, takes five minutes, and she added in her husband and her best friend so that she would get messages for her own grief, but that her best friend or husband would also get texts and suggestions. And like two days later, we got a message back from that best friend, the one who got on the plane. And she said, thank you so much for understanding. This is hard for me too. I don't know what to do.
00:15:24
Speaker
And that's the experience that I had at the church, right? Where people were like, I don't know what to do. So people are usually so grateful and relieved when someone just gives them a little bit of comfort and confidence about how to proceed. Because everybody knows that just sending someone a bunch of flowers or putting a note on Facebook is not as much as they want to do for their grieving person.
00:15:53
Speaker
In my experience, people are good and we really want to help. We just honestly don't, we just honestly and truly are fearful and don't know how. So the messages we send are very, I mean, they're texts, right? So it's quite short. It's not a lot to read or process. It's tips, reminders, tomorrow would have been, you know, the birthday, things like that. We had a woman named Rachel who, um,
00:16:23
Speaker
posted on Twitter, she has signed out for a subscription. And she said, you know, thank you for the messages you've been sending since my mom died. It's really helping me. But I really want to thank you for the messages you're sending my husband, because he's being more patient with me now. And he is like, Oh, thank you so much. I never I had no idea tomorrow would have been her mom's birthday. Right? Yeah, I mean, I'm just using that as an example from all of the people.
00:16:49
Speaker
The supporter is like, oh, thank you. I didn't know that. I didn't add that to my calendar. Now I know that that's going to be a tough week for that person. So let me kind of check in on them more frequently because it may be a tough week or day because that special day is coming up. That's so good because you can add a whole bunch of network. And in the same subscription, you can add all these within that same subscription. That's all included.
00:17:16
Speaker
I'll include one subscription includes messages for up to five people. Usually that's the greever and up to four friends and family. You don't have to we have sometimes where it's just the supporters like we had a woman who's so there was this group of girlfriends, they've known each other forever. And their friend's daughter died by suicide. And it was just tragic. And you know, it was just
00:17:41
Speaker
devastated, couldn't get out of bed. And so the girlfriends signed up themselves and for a whole year they got suggestions about how to help their friend. They never even told the friend about it.
00:17:51
Speaker
It was just for them. How do you support someone after suicide loss? What are things that we can do because we love her? That is so needed. It's interesting because those are some of the calls I get more frequently. It's not as much that I get from friends that are actually grieving that call me, but it's the ones that are the friends of friends that have lost somebody, that they're like, I don't, Kendra, what do I tell them?
00:18:17
Speaker
I had a friend that said, can you meet with myself and this other friend? We're trying to support our friend and we don't know how. So it is definitely something that is needed. And like you said, people want to help.
00:18:33
Speaker
and be there but don't know how. I can even say that even personally as somebody that's been through grief myself so many times that sometimes I even don't even know what is the right way of serving that particular person, you know, even though I've been through it myself because everybody's so unique and what they may need is different than maybe what you needed yourself, you know. But having these kind of resources and tips is so helpful.
00:18:59
Speaker
So, for the listeners, as you're listening to this, make sure to check in the show notes because Emma's given us a code for you to get a discount. So, just make sure to check that out and click on there if you feel that this could be something that, and I'm saying it now before we end because in case people don't end up listening to the end, I want to make sure you check the show notes. You can get $10 off. Yeah, and you can use the subscription.
00:19:27
Speaker
for yourself, or you can use the same code to buy it as a gift. People do that as well. It's a very thoughtful, um, sympathy gift. It's really like, it's, you know, at the beginning people said, Oh my gosh, your job must be so depressing. I'm like, no, it's, it's the opposite because people die. But, and that we can't, that's always going to be what we can change is if we're going to
00:19:55
Speaker
learn all of us how to be there for each other. And so the gratitude that comes into my inbox is really quite amazing. And some of the situations, you know, some of the people are in, in the depths of grief, but they're still so grateful that someone has heard them or someone is helping their mom understand
00:20:15
Speaker
know how to support a grieving teenager because the grieving teenager is like I don't know what to say I don't know people want to help but I don't know it's not my job to help other people help me so we do that work for them and people are so
00:20:31
Speaker
Gracious and courageous. That's wonderful. Now, take us then a little into your own journey then, because so then 2005 approximately then is when your husband Barry.
Personal Grief Journey: Coping with Loss
00:20:47
Speaker
Yeah, so he died by suicide. I was 19 when I met him, 26 when I married him and 31 when he died. So it was my whole
00:21:01
Speaker
life really, you know, my whole 20s were with him the first serious relationship I'd had. We were young when we met, he was 33 when he died. It was the first person I had ever known to die by suicide and I was completely and utterly destroyed.
00:21:26
Speaker
So I remember. I'm so young. So that's like, not like young, it's like super young, ultra young widow with the 20, you know, you were, you were 31, right? 31. And yeah. And no one, the two of you didn't have children in your relationship. No. And that I was sad about for the first few years, but now I understand that that's
00:21:53
Speaker
So wisdom behind it. So then you mentioned how some of these then friends didn't know how to support you. So what did you use as your grieving tools then? Your friends didn't know how to reach out? Was your family around? Yeah, I mean, I was extraordinarily lucky and blessed.
00:22:21
Speaker
And this is the thing that I've written about and talked about a lot. I was very lucky. I was in the slim percentage of people that had resources available, and it still was brutal. And when we look around now at people that don't even get a few days off work when a child dies, I mean, we have legislation in front of that the US is considering right now about legislating five days of bereavement leave. And so I've been part of that work
00:22:51
Speaker
ever more in DC, like trying to make basic supports and it's scalable. Right. Like scalable, available, thoughtful support available for as many people as possible because I was very lucky. I was living in the UK. What Barry and I were living in the UK when he died. I moved back to Canada and my girlfriends.
00:23:19
Speaker
you know, found me a place to stay, poured me into the backseat of a car and drove me to this counseling place. They'd found that gave me free one-on-one support specific to suicide grief for like three years. For every Wednesday, I just like collapsed into this therapist office. And I feel that it was life-changing.
00:23:44
Speaker
that experience and how lucky I was. I couldn't afford it. I had an amazing person who I'd worked with in the past who gave me a job that I could do flexibly. And if I needed to go and cry in the bathroom, that's what was going to happen. So I mean, my sister moved across the country to live with me and her boyfriend came too. So I had family, I had incredible girlfriends.
00:24:13
Speaker
with me, I had a flexible work situation. So the experience of the people in the other city where the husband had grown up, it was harder for them because they weren't right there in the same city as me trying to, you know, it was shocking for them. Here it is, like their high school friend has like died by suicide. I mean, it was an extraordinary
00:24:40
Speaker
thing for everybody. So I understood. And I think this is a big part of why grief coach is special to me, because we have to come in on the side of the supporters. Every time I see like, oh, top 10 things never to say to someone who's grieving, I think this is not helping, we're just scare people that they might say the wrong thing. And then they won't say anything.
00:25:04
Speaker
Correct. It's better to say something even if it's the wrong thing. Yeah, then do not say it. We send texts to people, all sorts of things to support them in that. Don't worry if you fumble or say the wrong thing. Your friend's not even going to remember what you said. They're just going to remember that you tried. That's it. Don't feel as if you have to cheer someone up. You cannot cheer her up. Her husband just died. If she cries, consider it a compliment. Just really try to bolster people's understanding because
00:25:35
Speaker
This is what I learned at the funeral, right? That people were good. They wanted to help. They didn't know how. And we're not born knowing how to do this. And we've become so distant from death and grief that we've just, no one shows us.
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's a taboo topic, right? It's like until we normalize a conversation about death, the fact like we're fine with the fact of knowing somebody's going to be born and the day they're going to be born and this and that, but the fact of the death component, which is also a certainty, it's more certain than even birth.
00:26:15
Speaker
Right. It's true. Because birth, you don't know that. Well, yeah, the same. Like you can't even know the dates. You can't know the dates also when you're leaving this body, but still. No, but it's a certainty. One of our expert contributors is a woman named Dora Carpenter. And she says, you know, we teach people how to evacuate the building if there's an earthquake, because that might happen.
00:26:45
Speaker
But we don't teach people what to say to someone who's grieving, which will definitely happen many, many times. So we just don't do it. And that's, I think, why people are just really grateful for our texts. It's just like, here, you don't have to read a textbook.
00:27:09
Speaker
or sent in room with strangers or anything, we're just going to basically deliver the best wisdom that we can find from hundreds and hundreds of experts around the world. And we're going to send it to your phone in your language.
00:27:20
Speaker
all year long, personalized based on the laws and people are like, oh, thank you. Now that you're saying this, actually, let's talk about that language and because it's text, which countries do you serve? So we are global with languages. Uh-huh. Yeah. So we're delivering texts globally with a few, uh, exceptions. New Zealand, we are struggling with, but mostly we deliver anywhere in the world. So we have subscribers and, um,
00:27:48
Speaker
Mexico, South Africa, El Salvador, US, Canada, Australia, all over. We're now delivering in English, Spanish, Hmong, Tagalog, because we launched a big series for clinicians and people working in healthcare. A huge portion of that are from the Philippines, so we're really pleased with that. That was really a nice thing.
00:28:16
Speaker
We're very proud of that launch. Polish, what am I forgetting? I think that's all right now and we're adding lots of new ones, yeah. Wonderful. But it's available globally in England. You can get it in any of those languages anywhere in the world.
00:28:35
Speaker
That is wonderful. And then the texting, there's no extra fee for the texting service internationally or anything like that. It's just the same amount. Yeah, it's the same price. That is wonderful. What a wonderful service and the fact that somebody can receive it in their native tongue.
Launching Grief Coach Amidst a Tech Career
00:28:55
Speaker
I think it's nice. We've been launching, like 2021, we launched different languages. We launched a new service.
00:29:05
Speaker
text channel with working again with experts around caregiving. So depending what cause of death you put, we ask you, were you a caregiver to that person? Because then there's all the grief there of like, survivor skill, all this different things. So a caregiver series, a veterans series. Yeah, like our, our body of tech support now is really
00:29:31
Speaker
Beautiful, I think. It is beautiful. And this all started from going to your friend's funeral in 2015. This idea came out in the airplane. You're jotting this down. So then from that, from that kind of coming through you onto a paper, then to developing, how long was that process? Yeah. So I basically took a third of my salary.
00:30:01
Speaker
took, I was working as an executive in a technology company. So I just took the third of my salary for a couple of years and used that to actually build the platform. So I was lucky that I had a good job then and had talked to my CEO about it. So he knew
00:30:19
Speaker
what I was working on. So yeah, so I spent a couple years getting it all totally built and ready. And then I didn't quit my job until it launched, which was February 2019. So as we went live, I quit my full time job and have been doing this ever since. And it's been, of course, I had no idea that was going to be a global pandemic a year later. So we had just the first of 2019, we were doing consumer subscriptions, people
00:30:48
Speaker
find us on Instagram, sign up, give subscriptions. That fall, we had started to build packages for hospices. So in the US, hospices are required to provide 13 months of bereavement care. We realized this really amazing, easy, cheap way for them to support all the families in their care. So we had just launched that, and then COVID hit. And then everything had to pause while we added a new cause of death to the system, which I never
00:31:18
Speaker
never imagined doing that march. And then of course, healthcare was just upside down. We started getting packages of subscriptions purchased by, you know, there was like a police department in Florida who was trying to support their own employees, a flooring company where the vice president died, and they wanted to support all the colleagues as well as his family.
00:31:43
Speaker
hospices started coming on board, children's hospitals that have bereavement teams, because the need like, I mean, Kendra, you know this, like the need is so immense. Yes. We're talking like one in four American workers right now are grieving a recent loss.
00:32:06
Speaker
And we know we have all the data that tells us, and this is just talking about one country. And we have all the data that tells us that when we're grieving, we're at increased risk for anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and behaviors. Life expectancy reduces for parents who lose a child. You're at risk for lost wages, sleeplessness, substance use. I mean, bereavement is hard. It's hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard.
00:32:35
Speaker
But when we're supported in our grief, all of those negative outcomes are reduced. So it's like, here's this incredible, vast need. At the same time, we have wisdom, wisdom, wisdom. Like now I work with hospice bereavement managers, all kinds of experts, psychiatrists. We know how to help when someone is grieving. So we have all this world of wisdom, we have this,
00:33:04
Speaker
immense need. And I really see grief coaches just one way of connecting those two things, take the wisdom, put it into people's hands, literally, when they need it. And when people are supported, they're less at risk for all the things that often accompany grief.
00:33:22
Speaker
You mentioned so many different things here that I want to just talk a little bit about. Let's start with the fact of having to add then COVID as the reason of death right to that. So when somebody then is supporting someone that that was the cause then, is that like a whole even other
00:33:45
Speaker
chapter per se of the you know how you have the teen support that this is this particular cause of death have a whole other layer with it because of the even the trauma that they're still living with in our world that is still kind of being faced and remembering that reason. So we originally launched the series in March of 2020.
00:34:09
Speaker
and worked with Virginia Mason's grief services team because they were early, because some of the very first deaths in the country were in Seattle in February. So they were already seeing the particular challenges that survivors of a co-people who had lost on top of it were experiencing. So stigma, frustration with the policy, seeing it in the news constantly, friends that wouldn't wear masks. Meanwhile, they
00:34:38
Speaker
person had just died, not being able to have a funeral, not even seeing the person at the end. So all of this, all of this that we started trying to build text messages and supports around, again, for the greever, but also for the people around them to say, you know, what they were, what was being learned early on. And then in the year and a half since then, we've added lots more, lots more to that series.
00:35:06
Speaker
We get quite a lot of COVID deaths by grief coach. We also get a lot of child loss, people losing a parent young, suicides. I know yesterday the woman that signed up her son died. It was a homicide. I think that we get a lot of what we call out of order losses. You know, the more stigma, the more trauma, the more alone a person feels, the more they're looking for.
00:35:36
Speaker
different ways of getting support and feeling less alone. Like my mission in life. And what I wrote on the plane was that no one should ever grieve alone. Yes. And we can make that happen if we all learn how to support each other. Yes. And that's the thing. It's like the knowing that there's these tools, first of all, because that's the thing. A lot of us, when we're in the middle and thick of grief, we don't even sometimes know that there are tools out there. No, I could not read
00:36:06
Speaker
even a paragraph of a book for a year after my husband died. I couldn't read. I couldn't take anything in. Right. Right. That is not unique. Yeah. So it's that you're not sometimes even in that place of even wanting to even know what you're supposed to do in that moment yourself. So the part of the others around you kind of knowing is.
00:36:26
Speaker
What how to support you in that moment of grief is not listeners can't see your hands, right? I was doing it too. I'm like all around Okay, if the listeners the ones that know me that are listening to this they know that yes, I talked with my
00:36:44
Speaker
It is really challenging for me not to talk. So yes, I was moving my arms around saying like everyone around you. That was the description of my movements. Yeah, if I had video, then they'd know. But that is what I do think is the magic of what we're doing. I really do. I'm proud of the grief support we send. I'm thrilled when someone feels that the messages we're sending them are helping them with their grief. But I feel
00:37:13
Speaker
really, really good when I hear that supporter or the person saying how a supporter is a better help. Because, I mean, although we use technology to deliver the tips, ultimately, our goal is for people to get support from the people around them in the real world, and to connect in the way that we want to, because that's, that's how we navigate grief. Yes, connected with the people around us, you know, not, not
00:37:43
Speaker
through technology.
00:37:45
Speaker
Right. It's pretty clear what people want, and they want that connection, understanding. They need connection. It's connection. For the people around them. It's connection, yeah. The nonprofit that I volunteer with as well, it's that. It's that connection, connecting with others that have gone through a similar experience. People are there with others that are living the same thing, similar to you being able to receive that type of support for three years when you were in Canada.
00:38:13
Speaker
by an individual. There's group settings as well like that that people can get that are free. So that's one layer. Then there's these layers of texting coaching tips. Then there's layers of podcasts. There's layers of books out there. Depending on the person, everybody can get a multifaceted approach
00:38:40
Speaker
to support their grief. And then of course comes the family, the friends, all these other people that are there to help you. We had like a really cool story about, I think it was in May of this year, a woman named Anne renewed her subscription and she had already renewed it.
00:39:00
Speaker
once. So she was basically beginning her third year of getting texts, which was a huge thing for us because we had only launched that many times that long ago. So I pinged her, which I don't normally reach out to subscribers, but I was like, hi, I just saw that you were new for third year. Like, that's so awesome. If you'd be willing to chat with me, I'd love to hear hear about your experience. And she agreed.
00:39:26
Speaker
So her name is Anne. She's in her 20s. And she grew up on top of living on top of a funeral home. Her dad was a funeral director. And her mom was worked in hospice. And her sister was like a bereavement counselor. Unbelievable, right?
00:39:45
Speaker
That's crazy. Sorry. I'm like, I'm commenting here with my head because as you can hear, the lawnmower, like next to her mowing right next to me the second. That is great. So all these funeral homes. Yeah, her dad's a funeral home. I worked in hospice under sister's grief and counseling. And so when she was in her 20s, her sister died. And she lived in rural Pennsylvania, small town Pennsylvania. And she said to me, I knew exactly what kind of grief support is available in my town.
00:40:15
Speaker
I grew up with that. I see the brochures that my dad delivers to people's mailboxes and so on. She said that she knew that that was not what she wanted, and so she found BriefCoach on Instagram and signed up. She added in a friend who's a friend of her sister's who was also going to get those supporter texts that we've been talking about. She said that early on, we sent a text which had
00:40:44
Speaker
a link to a TED talk by a woman named Nora McInerney. And so, and- You move forward, you don't move on from your grief, move forward with it. So we sent Nora's TED talk to Anne, who's there grieving alone in rural Pennsylvania in her like mid 20s, right? And she had never heard of Nora's work before, but she felt like really a connection to the TED talk. And so she decided to buy Nora's book. So she bought Nora's book,
00:41:14
Speaker
And then she said, oh, that's all sleeping at me. So she bought Nora's book.
00:41:20
Speaker
And then Nora wrote two more books and she bought those books too. And she was saying- Go tell Nora you need that referral for those two books, three books that she bought because of that TED Talk you sent her. But it's so cool to your point what you're saying about how people use different things. Different things work for different people and different mediums at different times. So it was really amazing. I think that we, like this morning,
00:41:46
Speaker
I heard back from one of our subscribers who said, Oh my gosh, thank you for this text. It really resonated with me. And that was a text that was crafted by another one of our contributors. Her name is Lucinda Kosa and she is well known for her work around millennials and caregiving. So we sent a resource to someone who is grieving the loss of someone who they were a caregiver to with that wisdom. She's like, Oh, thank you. This really touched me. Right.
00:42:11
Speaker
And Anne is saying, hey, that TED Talk particularly resonated and it led me to this book. And now I've renewed my subscription three times and the friend still always wants to be part of it. Everyone finds their way with different kinds of content. And now I'm the one using my hands. Yeah. There you go. Do you also have Italian in you? Is that why? Because that's why I talk with my hands.
00:42:33
Speaker
That is just amazing because you're not only sending the text, but you're also then offering these other channels for them to get further support. Like you said, that TED Talk video, then from there, if that ends up speaking to that person, like you said, then this person ended up buying the book and then
00:42:51
Speaker
another one and another one. Yeah, you just kind of get an idea of more tools that can be used. And it's so interesting that this person, even though she'd grown up with this type of knowledge of what was out there for support, that she knew that that didn't speak to her for her grief.
00:43:17
Speaker
and that she needed something different. So yeah, that's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that and all these different journals.
Creative Expression in Grief Healing
00:43:28
Speaker
Yes, thank you. Now, what other things for you, back to for your own grief journey, aside from the
00:43:37
Speaker
therapy that you went to for those three years. What other tools did you find helpful back when it was early on in your grief? So, I mean, as I said, I had an amazing sister, Hannah, who came and lived with me and I had two girlfriends, Shannon and Allison, who were incredible. So I had people to cry with. I had expert support from the therapist that I had.
00:44:07
Speaker
I had an understanding job. I did find creative expression for me was important. So I wrote songs, I would play like loud music with my band and like, try and just like, let it out. You know, I think that that was healing for me. I needed to just sort of
00:44:31
Speaker
scream, yell, express. I had a lot of feelings bottled up. I spent a whole year after very died thinking of myself almost as a murderer, you know. So just anger, guilt, rage, shame, all of it needed to come, needed to come out. So creative expression was really, I think, very healthy and healing for me. And also just being able to share with a few people around me. Yeah.
00:44:57
Speaker
Now, how did you translate having learned that into then your parenting? Having lived through grief, your children, of course, they never met your first husband because that's not who they knew.
00:45:16
Speaker
Have you shared, for example, that experience with them now that they're teens about your grief journey and been open with them about all these different emotions? Does that make sense what I'm saying? How did that translate into your interpersonal relationships aside from, of course, it impacting what you do now for a living, but how did it impact you?
00:45:43
Speaker
It's hard to say because I don't know what I would have been like. I do know that when I was pregnant with my first child, I think the answer is that it permeates everything.
00:45:58
Speaker
Because it just made me like so I mean, I think I was an empathetic person before and parenting already kind of blows your heart into pieces and you feel like your heart's living out your side, your body. And there wasn't that much of a gap between Barry, you know, from Barry's death until my first child was born was five years. So the grief was still very much with me and heavy for me. So I don't know.
00:46:29
Speaker
And I'll never know, but I think that loss was very profound as an experience and not one I would actually change. I mean, of course I would bring Barry back, but I wouldn't give up the experience of understanding deeply what pain is, what healing can feel like, how resilient we can be, how to find joy in tiny things that I used to not even notice.
00:46:59
Speaker
And I definitely, when I never had, I don't know, this is kind of weird, but when my kids were little or having a tantrum or screaming in the bathtub or something, I didn't, I really, I, I just appreciated every minute of it. I think it made me deeply appreciate being a mom and 99.9% of the time I could stay like just right there in the moment with them. You know, I loved it.
00:47:29
Speaker
We would do like imagination stories and this, that and the other. And just to be so in the moment, I think was a gift that grief gave me. Yeah. So beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. And I don't think anyone's ever asked me that before, you know, I do a lot of interviews and I don't think anyone's ever asked me that before.
00:47:53
Speaker
So now I will have to think about it. Well, I feel honored that that was the first time that you heard it. As I told you when we were starting this that I don't prepare what I'm going to ask. It just kind of comes from whatever I'm receiving. It's a great question. So I thank you for being vulnerable and sharing that because
00:48:19
Speaker
It is so true. It does kind of crack you open to just another another level, you know, like it it's and you're right. It's not like you want to say that you're glad that this person died in your life, but it's that if they hadn't, you wouldn't be who you are now if that experience had not happened. And so it's very, very grounding and powerful in a way, right. And and
00:48:49
Speaker
It gives me a kind of like confidence. Like I can get through things. I don't, I really, really do not. Like there's like this leak in my ceiling a couple of years ago and it turned into this huge thing. Like they were tearing off the sizes, this huge square of stuff. I had just launched like grief coach. I didn't have like money for it. People around me were like, oh my gosh, this is terrible. I'm like, what, what? I don't even notice. I don't care.
00:49:16
Speaker
I just couldn't make myself care about the hole in my ceiling that was getting bigger and bigger like this huge square was cut out and everything was tarped all around and I just didn't care.
00:49:28
Speaker
Because it's like spending life in perspective. Yeah, it's putting life in perspective, the priorities of what really is important for you, like you said, even with the kids having a tantrum. I can't say that I was like you, even though I had already experienced grief prior to being a mom. I can't say that. I'm probably making myself sound better than it really was in retrospect.
00:49:50
Speaker
I can't say that I was like, oh, yay, they're having a tantrum. I'm present. I can't say that was my case. But not a hundred percent. But no, it just, again, it just, it shifts for everybody differently, right? Grief shifts each of us differently. I see people so stuck all the time, you know, because the tile is chipped in the shower or I just
00:50:20
Speaker
like, we're all gonna die, right? Yeah, we're here now. And we're not always going to be here and healthy with each other. So that is a real gift.
Global Reach and Accessibility of Grief Coach
00:50:31
Speaker
And now I have the gift of working in bereavement, bereavement managers at hospices, all the people I work with are the same, grounded, present, happy,
00:50:45
Speaker
thoughtful, that's what I mean, there's all this wisdom, we have the wisdom. And it's interesting to think of text messaging as a way to transfer wisdom, but I actually think it can because it's small amounts for a long time, right? It's not, it's not like knowledge sharing, where I'm just going to like, tell you something, and you're suddenly going to know it. It's
00:51:08
Speaker
Wisdom over time. Little doses. Yeah. Little doses. Do they get it once a week? It's at least twice a week. Minimum twice a week, extra on anniversary dates, special holidays. If you tell us that Rosh Hashanah is important to you, then you'll get messed around with that. The anniversary of the death, the person's birthday, what would have been your wedding anniversary if you lost a partner. So it's a minimum twice a week for each of the five people in the subscription.
00:51:35
Speaker
That is wonderful. That's five people. That's five people in one subscription. That's amazing. That's amazing. And it's a great deal, by the way, too, for a year subscription. So you guys can check it out. Way less than an hour's therapy, right? For you and for friends and family to get support from like
00:51:56
Speaker
a network of experts for a year. So that's my goal, is to keep it affordable. It costs money. Every time we deliver, we're charged by character, by translation. So just trying to keep it affordable and available for everybody.
Conclusion: Sharing Stories and Offering Support
00:52:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's like a service. It's a way of serving. It's a way of serving people. So thank you for doing that. And it's grief.coach.com. Is that correct? No, just grief.coach. Grief.coach. Grief.coach. And if you go to grief.coach and use the code
00:52:26
Speaker
GGG podcast, you will get $10 off, or you can just go to grief.coach.gg podcast. Yeah, that's what we, the GGG, the grief, gratitude and great. We made it simpler for y'all, GGG podcast. And again, the link will be, and I'm doing my finger here with the pointing down as I'm here with my hands talking. The link will be below. And thank you again, Emma, for doing that, for the listening. Yeah, you're welcome. I hope that it's helpful for people.
00:52:55
Speaker
Well, you're helping already so many people, but I know even where to direct now others when they contact me of saying, what do I do for my friend and having this as a tool that they can access for themselves to know what to say to their friends. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Is there anything I did not ask that you still want to share?
00:53:18
Speaker
I don't think so. You asked lots of questions. No, I'm good. It was a pleasure. Thanks for the questions. And you've given me something to think about in terms of the parenting piece for sure. It's definitely, actually my friend, my girlfriend just said like last week, and this is one of the girlfriends, Shannon, who was really part of my early journey, but I was talking about how
00:53:46
Speaker
I always said back then in my 30s as a new widow, I was like, I'm not going to let this define me. I'm not going to be one of those people that spends all their time talking about grief forever and ever. And here I am like 20 years later. But she says, Shannon said, she's like, yeah, but it doesn't define you. It's not all that you are. It's like, okay, yeah, you're right. But it is at the same time it does.
00:54:10
Speaker
fuel me and it has impacted for sure the way that I parent and the way that I do everything. It's different of it being like something we use as a crutch, you know, than something that we use as a launching pad to help others. That's the difference. Yeah. So for you, your experience became a launching pad for you to impact other people's lives rather than it becoming
00:54:34
Speaker
a crutch, you know, what was me kind of component, it became of empowering others in their journey. So that's, that's, I think, the difference in terms of, of how how it is defining your life, but just in a different
00:54:50
Speaker
in a different way. That's how I feel, at least from my experience as well. And I feel a responsibility to do that. I feel like we don't go through things just to go through things. We go through things in order to learn from them and then help others as well. If not, then it's kind of was for granted. My experience is one for granted. So thank you once again, Emma. Yeah, thank you very much for having me, Kendra. It was a pleasure.
00:55:22
Speaker
Thank you again so much for choosing to listen today. I hope that you can take away a few nuggets from today's episode that can bring you comfort in your times of grief. If so, it would mean so much to me if you would rate and comment on this episode. And if you feel inspired in some way to share it with someone who may need to hear this, please do so.
00:55:51
Speaker
Also, if you or someone you know has a story of grief and gratitude that should be shared so that others can be inspired as well, please reach out to me. And thanks once again for tuning into Grief Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.