Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Why Closure is a Myth: The Philosophy of Grief and Relearning How to Live with Thomas Attig
0 Plays2 seconds ago
THOMAS ATTIG holds BA and PhD degrees from Northwestern University and Washington University in St. Louis. At Bowling Green State University, while Chair, he and his colleagues established the world’s first PhD Program in Applied Philosophy. A Fellow of the International Work Group on Death, Dying, and Bereavement, he has received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Death Education from the International Network on Personal Meaning, Death Educator and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Association for Death Education and Counseling, and the Robert Fulton Founder’s Award from the Center for Death Education and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse.
Get in touch with Thomas Attig https://griefsheart.com/?i=1
Contact Kendra Rinaldi and sign up for the newsletter https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com/
Show Highlights
- An Early Exposure to Death: Thomas shares how growing up in a large family in Illinois, where his mother actively read letters detailing the passing of relatives and took him to sit with dying family members in the hospital, uniquely set him up to be comfortable with the uncomfortable reality of death.
- Becoming a "One-Man Band" in Grief Studies: How Thomas shifted from studying math to applied philosophy, ultimately creating and teaching a comprehensive university course on death and dying that went beyond mere clinical or ethical issues.
- Grieving as "Relearning the World": Thomas reveals why traditional models like the "stages of grief" often fall short for the bereaved, proposing instead that grieving is an active, ongoing process of relearning how to live in a world that is completely changed by loss.
- Wisdom vs. Science: Discussing his 2025 book, Seeking Wisdom in Death's Shadows, Thomas explains why caregiving for grieving souls should focus on seeking individual wisdom rather than relying solely on "evidence-based" scientific predictability, because every soul and every loss is entirely unique.
- The Myth of Closure: We discuss why treating grief as a "problem to be solved" is a mistake, and why aspiring for closure is silly because relearning how to live is a lifelong, ongoing project.
- Defining the Vocabulary of Loss: Thomas breaks down the distinct differences between bereavement (the state of being deprived), grieving (the involuntary reactions and our deliberate responses), and mourning (traditional or culturally defined practices).
- Embracing "Sorrow-Friendly Practices": Exploring his book Catching Your Breath in Grief, Thomas encourages grievers to stop suppressing their emotions. He shares practical ways to attend to your soul’s pain, including journaling, exploring the arts, leaning into faith, and taking extraordinary experiences—like feeling a loved one speak to you—seriously.
- The Price of Love: Thomas beautifully reads a passage from his book reminding us that the pain of missing someone is the inevitable companion to the joy of sharing life with them, and that avoiding love out of fear of sorrow would cost us everything.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Grief Practices
00:00:00
Speaker
these sorrow-friendly practices are things like going to a counselor or finding a friend to just talk through this stuff with together, keeping a journal if you're kind of shy about doing things like that, or writing little poems or memos to yourself of one sort or another, telling little stories, gathering, harvesting stories about this person and your life with him or her.
00:00:29
Speaker
Welcome to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray-In-Between podcast. I'm your host, Kendra Rinaldi. This is a space to explore the full spectrum of grief, from the kind that comes with death to the kind that shows up in life's many transitions.
00:00:46
Speaker
Through stories and conversations, we remind each other that we're not alone. Your journey matters, and here we're figuring it out together. Let's dive right in to today's episode.
00:01:07
Speaker
you
00:01:11
Speaker
Let's start with a quick disclaimer. This podcast includes personal stories and perspectives on topics like grief, health, and mental wellness. The views expressed by guests are their own and may reflect individual experiences that are not meant as medical advice.
00:01:28
Speaker
As the host, I hold space for diverse voices, but that does not mean I endorse every viewpoint shared. Please listen with care and take what resonates with you.
00:01:40
Speaker
Thank you all for joining us today. Today, we have Thomas Attig. He is an applied philosopher and a leading voice in grief studies. His work offers a revolutionary approach focusing on grieving as a relearning how to live in the world.
00:01:59
Speaker
He is the author of How We Grieve and the new collection that he has called Seeking Wisdom in Death's Shadows. Welcome, Thomas.
00:02:12
Speaker
Wonderful to be here. Thanks for asking. think I'm glad that you are here. And I know you have a lot of other accolades that we could kind of go into as we start chatting and learning more about your life and how you ended up in this space. You've been given a lot of different honors throughout your lifetime. And I'm very excited to get to learn more about you and your work. So Thomas, I like to start off usually getting to know a little bit more about my guests. And one of the ways I do that is by asking, and where did you grow up and where do you live now? You've shared with me, you live in Victoria, Canada, but can you tell us about your upbringing, please?
00:02:55
Speaker
Yes.
Thomas Attig's Background and Philosophy
00:02:56
Speaker
I was born and raised in Wheaton, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago about 25 miles west.
00:03:07
Speaker
um My mother was one of nine children. My father was one of 10. My dad was 18 years older than my mother.
00:03:18
Speaker
um He was born and raised in Iowa. He was born in 1896. His father was born in 1859. That's my grandfather was born the year before the Civil War began.
00:03:35
Speaker
So really spread out. And my mother was the first child born in the U.S. Her parents came from Germany. They had four children while they were there.
00:03:49
Speaker
She was the fifth child and the first one born and the States. um Let me tell you just a little bit about how mom had some influence on me.
00:04:02
Speaker
Given the large families and given lack of ease in traveling and so on, when people started dying in my father's family,
00:04:16
Speaker
lots of cousins and eventually aunts and uncles and so on. Letters would come in and inform and explain what happened about how Uncle Ed died or Uncle Arnold died or Aunt Myra died or or whatever.
00:04:37
Speaker
And they would go into detail about what happened. And instead of just keeping it between her and my father, she read these letters out loud.
00:04:48
Speaker
So from the time i was four or five years old, i was very much familiar with details of sometimes terrible ways of dying and witnessing the sadness in my family. And if anybody got sick, and especially if they were terminally ill and so on, in my mother's family, mom would take me to the hospital.
00:05:15
Speaker
And I would sit through an afternoon or an evening or an all day in a hospital room with someone who's dying and not communicating very well. So it became very familiar. I remember talking to my editor for my first book and I explained this to her and she said she had hardly ever heard the word death.
00:05:40
Speaker
while she was growing up at all and no one had died and she hadn't witnessed anything and she hadn't heard any details. I think I was just sort of set up to be comfortable with what usually makes people very uncomfortable.
00:05:56
Speaker
I have vivid memories of attending my Aunt Katie, my Uncle Omar's wife.
00:06:07
Speaker
um She was my favorite aunt. And she died in central Illinois and we went to her funeral. and that was my first exposure there. I remember colorful funerals.
00:06:21
Speaker
Um, I had a very colorful uncle Arnold, um, who could barely stay with anybody more than four or five weeks. And then he had to move somewhere else. Uh, uh, he was in some ways kind of disgusting in some ways, kind of delightful, uh, uh, and entertaining.
00:06:40
Speaker
And he told lies. He told big lies. i mean, he he made things up about things that he'd accomplished. I think he gave Trump lessons later. I'm not sure. Anyway, um when he died, we went to his funeral. I was sitting next to my mother and this minister starts talking about the old Adam and the new Adam and stuff that was just bizarre theology and so on. I tugged at my mother's sleeve. He was I thought we were here to remember Uncle Arnold. Why isn't she talking about him? Who's this Adam fellow? And so on. And oh my childhood was full of experiences like that.
00:07:25
Speaker
I cannot say that I was in any way disposed to work in a death and dying area. I could tell you what happened in my schooling that sort of moved me in that direction, if you'd like.
00:07:39
Speaker
Yes, I would love that. i Before, I want to touch on what you just said, that your editor was shocked at the fact that you had been exposed so early on to these conversations. And I'm wondering if part of it is also generational too of certain things that were really just part of, it was normal at certain times to talk more about these things about death. And and and all of a sudden it became more of a taboo because nowadays it is definitely more taboo to talk about death. And sometimes parents shield their children so much
00:08:17
Speaker
talking about anything, right? And they say they went to sleep. They're not very upfront instead of saying they died, right? They used words that are not clear. It creates confusion. So would you say that generation-wise that also it has become even a little bit more of the issue?
00:08:38
Speaker
It used to be that when people were prepared for burial, um their bodies were at home. and they call them funeral parlors because prior to their existence, which was about World War one um people came to people's homes to view the person who died, and sometimes even ceremonies were held there where they were brought from the home to the family church for a ceremony and so on. And what happened in part
00:09:16
Speaker
in the 20th century, starting about the 20s or so, people bought large houses and established funeral parlors. So there's a big house that could be used by lot and by families that have small houses where it's not possible to come and and view and and so on.
00:09:37
Speaker
And eventually, people who were dying were more and more sequestered in hospitals and so on, where previously more of their dying time was home time as well. So it became very unfamiliar.
00:09:56
Speaker
Just if you have a really small two bedroom or one bedroom home, you're not going to have crowds coming in to view a person in the family who died.
00:10:08
Speaker
Very nice that this guy down the block has several rooms in this larger home, calls it a funeral parlor, and eventually his business gets so big that they start making buildings that are standalone for funerals and so on. So I don't think people were necessarily averse to spreading the word or exposing people, but things got moved out of the house.
00:10:35
Speaker
and that made it harder harder for it to be familiar.
00:10:41
Speaker
I've known a lot of funeral directors, very interesting people. I have to mention one thing in my family, just the letters come in and so on. I i met a cousin.
00:10:54
Speaker
What was his name? There were so many cousins. There were 40 cousins. so um He worked on a farm. He came to visit us once.
00:11:05
Speaker
and his arm had been partially cut off in a combine accident. And that was shocking, but we spent an evening with him.
00:11:19
Speaker
I got used to the idea that you can be injured seriously and and so on. A few years later, he died in a combine accident. He was combined to death.
00:11:30
Speaker
Very few people are exposed to that sort of thing when they're a young child. But here was mom and she would talk about all of it. If I had any questions, she answered my questions. So that was a setup that my editor gave away.
00:11:47
Speaker
It's quite uncommon. Yes. Yes. No, but it is so necessary, I think, even just nowadays for us to return more to that, to the the real, like the truth of what it is that's happening. ah And as parents, to be transparent with their kids in a way that is answering the questions that they have, you know, very clearly without, ah i mean, not you don't have to necessarily go so much into every single detail depending on the age of the child, but it just, it will shift and change the way that they feel themselves about death. We feel that it's going to make them even be more scared of it. and
00:12:32
Speaker
But if you just know it's part of life's process, I think it actually, makes you less afraid. I think from a quite early age, i was very clear that you don't get out of this life alive. All right. That's just part of what it is. And you hope that you have a fairly long life or at least a good life, even if it's short.
00:12:59
Speaker
um I was going to tell you about going off to school. I i was very good in school at math.
Transition from Math to Philosophy and Teaching on Death
00:13:08
Speaker
In fact, I had perfect scores on standard tests and and so on. So I thought when I went off to college, I knew I wanted to be a teacher. My favorite people were teachers.
00:13:19
Speaker
My older brother was a teacher. I want to teach. I started taking advanced math at the university and I watched my teachers and I did not want to be any one of them.
00:13:33
Speaker
They were not impressive. And then I began to think, if you're a teacher, don't you have to teach the same problems every year? Especially, say if you're teaching in high school, imagine teaching classes full of trigonometry students and only three or four of them care.
00:13:54
Speaker
And you're doing the same problems every year. over Is that going to be a stimulating career? And I looked at my brother and my brother was a history teacher at a very good high school in California.
00:14:07
Speaker
And he was having interesting discussions about all kinds of things. He was drawing out students into deep thinking about wonderful things to think about. And I thought, maybe the humanities.
00:14:21
Speaker
So my second year, I took English and English. philosophy and history. And I said, I'm going to go with what I do well with and like.
00:14:35
Speaker
It has to be both. Okay. And it turned out that philosophy was it. So I got myself trained to do philosophy. and I became interested in something called phenomena phenomenology and existentialism.
00:14:52
Speaker
Existentialism is a cluster of philosophers who are seeking wisdom for living a finite life um meaningfully.
00:15:06
Speaker
And phenomenologists are people who study ways of describing and interpreting human experience. put those two together and you have something that was very interesting for me.
00:15:21
Speaker
I went off to graduate school and i was studying with one of the leaders in that field. And he said, lot of people are arguing about whether this kind of philosophy is even possible.
00:15:36
Speaker
Don't be one of those, be one who does it. And we need more people who describe experiences because we need to understand experiences better if we're gonna live better and more wisely.
00:15:49
Speaker
So that was in my head. um My dad died oh when I was in, I think the second year of graduate school.
00:16:00
Speaker
And he died of a series of strokes over a period period of a five or six years. had visited him several times. i went back for his funeral. it was about a 300 mile drive.
00:16:13
Speaker
a friend drove with me. That was good. um I didn't have a chance to say goodbye to dad, but the last time I'd been there, we said goodbye to each other and we knew we weren't going to see each other again.
00:16:28
Speaker
oh I had that experience and I was driving back to St. Louis from Chicago. And as I was driving, I felt like I would really like to talk to somebody about this experience.
00:16:44
Speaker
And I kind of went over the roster of my philosophy professors. And with some of them, I was probably unfair because I didn't know them well. But the summary view when I got back was, these people are not people I feel comfortable going in and talking with.
00:17:05
Speaker
I wanna be a different kind of philosopher. I wanna be someone who, if someone's in a hurting place, they want they want to come and be with me and tell me their sorrows and just puzzle together about what's just happened and what it means and how to live in the wake of what's happened.
00:17:27
Speaker
So I had that seminal experience. I went off to teach I went to a university where they were founding a new College of Health and Human Services with nursing programs, social work, child and family development, gerontology.
00:17:46
Speaker
And I'd been teaching existentialism and phenomenology and ethics for a while. And I thought, you in this new college, some of my colleagues are going to teach medical ethics, philosophy of law, environmental ethics, and so on.
00:18:01
Speaker
I could teach a course on death and dying. And I thought it would be ethical issues in death and dying. Yeah. As I had six months or so to get ready to teach the course, it occurred to me that the students I was going to be teaching wouldn't be so much interested in ethical issues. They would come up, but not all that often.
00:18:22
Speaker
They would be afraid to go into a room where someone's dying. They wouldn't know what to say to someone one who's grieving. That's not home territory for them. And I thought, I'm going to become an intellectual one-man band. I don't know of any philosophers who are talking about this kind of stuff.
00:18:40
Speaker
but one man you're yeah You're the one-man band class. again So i've I've got to read psychology and sociology and maybe some history and some literature, read poetry, whatever, and so on, and put together a course where we've got materials that we can chew on together.
00:18:58
Speaker
went a number years i went on for a number of years and the demand for the course kept getting bigger. So it got out of control. I had to teach a number of my colleagues how to teach the course.
00:19:13
Speaker
um And i got to a point where I have been regularly asking students to respond to exercises. And one of the exercises was describe your three most important loss experiences in your life.
00:19:35
Speaker
And if you haven't lost three people, you don't necessarily have to talk about someone's dying. If you have lost them, write those, but just write about losses.
00:19:47
Speaker
And no one mentioned people oh phases or stages of dying. ah grief of grief, the stages of grief.
00:19:59
Speaker
Yeah, what what they talked about was a difficult place in the home. They didn't know how to go into the room or a conversation with somebody they didn't know how to have.
00:20:10
Speaker
or um some project that they'd undertaken that didn't seem to make much sense anymore, now that moms died or dads died or my brothers died or my best friends died.
00:20:24
Speaker
And i I began thinking about what they were telling me, and eventually I wrote a an early article on grieving as a process of relearning how to live in the world.
00:20:37
Speaker
And I tried it out on my students and they all went, that's it. Not that other stuff, not the stuff we read in the little textbook that you had us looking at and so on.
00:20:48
Speaker
That's what it's all about. um My father died. That was hard. One of the hardest things was talking to grandma. how wrote is She's now a woman who's lost her son.
00:21:02
Speaker
I don't know how to talk to her. And the world is full of things that can be challenging for some people or entirely indifferent for other people. They don't have those experiences at all.
00:21:16
Speaker
But the scope of it became clearer. It's it's not just little corners of the world. Your whole life is different. Um, your daily life can't be the same sometimes because somebody lives with you, isn't there anymore.
00:21:32
Speaker
um your social life is very complicated. You don't know how to be with someone who's grieving, but grieving in a different way. um your, your physical surroundings, uh, can be quite different for you to, engage with.
00:21:50
Speaker
Um, Even walking downtown, you maybe had a special way of going downtown. You take that walk now without the person who died?
00:22:02
Speaker
What's it like sitting in church without this person by your side? um It became a career for me, for one. um i was invited to go back to the place where I did my graduate work, and I decided to make a real essay out of this way of thinking.
00:22:22
Speaker
And I had an old professor who was a colleague of the fellow who taught me phenomenology and existentialism. And I gave his talk and afterwards, Carl was his name, came up to me and said, i was a colleague for Herbert for 25 30 years.
00:22:46
Speaker
um You taught me in that talk more than I learned from those 30 years of talking technically technically to Herbert and so on. And then it really came home to me My training in philosophy is what set me up to be able to do what I did and what I have been doing.
00:23:07
Speaker
Now, that's background enough, I think. is I love it. No, because all of this is so full of so many nuances and information that you just shared, because what you talked about your students and really needing what what they were needing is what ended up helping you develop what they were searching. So a lot of times we keep on using the same resources, the same material without really exploring what are people really needing in their grief and going in that angle. And in that same way, when we interact with grievers, approaching each one
00:23:53
Speaker
as individuals with their own ways of feeling. And there's not just one one one way, there's not one size fits all for everyone. So in this in this book that you've written, ah this collection of stories,
00:24:10
Speaker
What did you, did you go? Cause I have not read it yet. Did you go into the cultural ways as well of grieving? Can you tell us more about this work of the, or your last book?
00:24:26
Speaker
It's a collection of, um, things starting in the 1980s, actually. when I wrote the grieving as relearning the world, um,
00:24:40
Speaker
And there are 14 pieces that were previously published. um And when you publish as an academic, smaller pieces or essays, they tend to go in anthologies or journals that very few people have access to.
00:24:58
Speaker
And very few people learn that you have written them. It sort of counts to help you get tenure and promotions and a little bit of reputation among your fellow philosophers and academics, but it doesn't reach outside of those circles very well.
00:25:16
Speaker
So for most readers, the earlier stuff that is in here, even fellow professionals, this stuff is new because they never found it.
00:25:27
Speaker
And then I wrote nine new things to go with those 14. So then what it does in in part, it's like a, intellectual autobiography.
00:25:39
Speaker
How did my thinking develop over the years? I started here and there are about four essays, the one I just mentioned, and one about grief and personal integrity, and one about coping with mortality as a grieving process.
00:25:56
Speaker
and one about the importance of recognizing that grieving is an active process.
Exploring the Nature of Self and Grieving
00:26:02
Speaker
Those were seminal ideas. I'm recognized for those.
00:26:06
Speaker
um
00:26:09
Speaker
There's one guy who's who's really doing the job, and he's a smart man, and he's all over the place, and he edits journals, and he does various things, and so on. I've spoken with him recently. We met in the and um He just startled me one day as we were conversing and they were visiting here for a while.
00:26:32
Speaker
He called me his teacher and I thought, you're the guy who took it on the road.
00:26:39
Speaker
And he's developed and refined things and I've developed and refined things through the years. So what you get in the book is what's the nature of grieving?
00:26:50
Speaker
you get in the book, what's the nature of studying about and learning about and thinking about and developing ideas about grief and loss.
00:27:02
Speaker
oh Philosopher, seeker of wisdom, as opposed to scientist, seeker of scientific understandings. um It's about
00:27:14
Speaker
what are we as the selves that We are. what what What enables us to do what has to be done when you're making the kind of adjustment that grieving requires?
00:27:27
Speaker
Are we just egos who solve problems and take control of things and try to manipulate things and so on? There must be something more to us than that.
00:27:39
Speaker
oh We love one another. We care deeply about things and traditions and cultures. um We struggle to become more, become better, contend with suffering and hardship and overcome, to rise above the worst of life and reach for the best of life, um we probably have souls and spirits. Let's talk about what they are.
00:28:12
Speaker
And my understanding of those things grew and grew. In the 2000s, I was invited to replace a faculty member and dear friend who had died at another university in Canada. And I taught online for about 10 years.
00:28:33
Speaker
And I was supposed to teach about ethics and spirituality at the end of life. And the spirituality felt strange to me until as I was doing it, I realized that as I was understanding souls and spirits, that's the spirituality within us that transcends our egos and makes up for the deficiencies of our egos and so on. So the book contains accounts of my coming to understand better and better who we are and what we are what we're capable of and
00:29:13
Speaker
then it also contains wow reflections on, excuse me, on caring for grieving souls and spirits.
00:29:25
Speaker
And it's different from medical care. And it's much more personal and individual. um There's an interesting piece there.
00:29:39
Speaker
These days, within all kinds of institutions, especially caregiving institutions, there is insistence on evidence-based practice. And the attempt is to make caregiving more scientific and predictable and so on and so on.
00:29:59
Speaker
And i talk about seeking wisdom as opposed to seeking scientific evidence because individual wisdom wisdom pertains to individual matters.
00:30:13
Speaker
Individual souls and spirits are quite different and unique, and you need to develop understandings of how to listen to a story and pick out the details that matter and support people in dealing with the uniqueness of their experience rather than how they're like everybody else.
00:30:35
Speaker
So, Seeking wisdom, it turns out to be what you do when you're a philosopher. If you're going to be thinking about grief and loss, wisdom is the product you want to give to other people or share with other people or talk about with other people.
00:30:53
Speaker
How do I, given who I am, with this kind of experience that's unlike anybody else's experience of of its kind, How do I go on What do I need? How do I think it through? How how do we together puzzle about this?
00:31:11
Speaker
And it's not about, this is another thing that's in the book. It's not about solving problems. It's about seeking wisdom. It's about contending with mysteries. Problems can be solved, managed, controlled,
00:31:25
Speaker
ticked off the list because you're finished with it, and so on. Mysteries are constants in your life, like life itself, or love, or the depth of your soul and spirit, or finiteness, or any number of other things.
00:31:45
Speaker
We meet with, we contend with what they're showing us now, and we move on. Later they show us other faces and we have to do it again. and they never stop showing us new faces and we never finish with them.
00:32:03
Speaker
So if the big aspiration is how do I learn to live meaningfully and with integrity, that's a lifetime project as opposed to a problem solving challenge.
00:32:17
Speaker
All right? yeah And if grieving is relearning how to live. it doesn't end any more than learning how to live in the first place.
00:32:31
Speaker
And you never finish with it. So closure, silly thing to aspire to. You want closure on learning how to live your life?
00:32:42
Speaker
Nah. And forever, there will be moments when I'll do a little bit more learning of what it means not to have my father in my life and what it means to be able to remember my father and still be moved by him in certain ways or in new life circumstances to find myself being moved by or appreciating my mother in ways that I didn't so much when she was alive.
00:33:11
Speaker
That's how it works. It's ongoing. And if you're a wisdom seeker as opposed to a science pursuer, you get yourself
00:33:22
Speaker
wiser about how to pursue wisdom, not necessarily get it, but pursue it. I love it. I love so many things. Yeah, I know you said so many things and I'm really curious to
Integrating Grief with Daily Life and Wisdom
00:33:34
Speaker
read it. So many things that I have ah some questions about and just some thoughts, but with that of the learning, relearning how to live with grief, I recently did like even just a a free event online for people just to talk about this. How do we integrate grief and gratitude into our life in this in in this new version of who we are and living with those two and knowing that they are just part of...
00:34:04
Speaker
who we are now and like And we're constantly in a flow of grief in our life. There's always something that's ending and something that's beginning, always. It's constant cycle, right? So as human beings, because we we grieve not only when somebody has died, we grieve when a part of us has died or a time period in our life has ended. Absolutely. There's so many different griefs that occur, So learning that that is just part of living. And as you said, living in our life is just beautiful. So that that I love that you said that.
00:34:43
Speaker
Hi, I just wanted to take a quick pause and ask that if this episode is speaking to you, I'd love for you to subscribe to my newsletter. Just go to my website, Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between, and you will be receiving some of my newsletters I send every probably couple of weeks.
00:35:05
Speaker
Also, if someone has popped into your mind and you feel that this is something that would resonate with, please send them this episode right now because it may just be what they needed to hear.
00:35:21
Speaker
Now, let's get back to the show. I have a question regarding your understanding about grief and then the ah grief or grieving and then mourning.
00:35:34
Speaker
and The two words, because I know that for me, I have a definition for each that that I apply, but I'm curious as to your perception or understanding of these two words that sometimes we use interchangeably, but that mean different things. Grieving and mourning, right?
00:35:56
Speaker
Correct. Yes.
00:36:01
Speaker
There are places in my writings where I've talked about those. The phenomena are these. There's dying and our mortality sets us up so we're all going to do that.
00:36:18
Speaker
And when we have died and someone survives us who cares about us, there is bereavement, which is the state of being deprived of their presence.
00:36:33
Speaker
It's ah it's a state and it and It refers to deprivation. And it goes back to farmland talk and so on, where you bring in the stuff and the field is deprived of its contents.
00:36:50
Speaker
Sometimes people talk about bereavement as if it is grieving. No. Grieving is two things. Grieving is reacting to what has happened.
00:37:02
Speaker
Feelings, thoughts, um Differences in your bodies, different effects on your spirituality and dispositions toward the world and so on come over you.
00:37:18
Speaker
Suffering comes over you. um the The anguish of being separated comes over you. That's grief reaction. It's like when somebody hits you on the knee and your leg goes blank.
00:37:35
Speaker
That's a reaction. You don't have control over reactions. They just come over you.
00:37:44
Speaker
Grieving response, on the other hand, is what we do deliberately or semi-deliberately. But we take initiatives in
00:37:57
Speaker
on the other side of reactions. We respond to our reactions and ultimately we're responding to the changes that have happened in your world now that this person isn't here anymore.
00:38:11
Speaker
um Traditionally, when people have talked about mourning, they have been referring to traditional practices in response to what has happened.
00:38:31
Speaker
In the literature on grief and loss, It's all over. i don't I'm not really too comfortable in using the word morning, but if I was if i would be pressed, I would say that morning is a limited range of a small variety of responses, typically cultural culturally defined responses. so This is the way we do it in this village or in this family or in this culture or in this country.
00:39:05
Speaker
and has to do with ritual and ceremony very commonly, um or practices like saying the Kaddish every year on the anniversary. That's a that's a ritual, that's a practice.
00:39:25
Speaker
Or and some in some cultures, they don't do this much anymore, but you know wearing black for a year, that's mourning. That's mourning practice. And i think of grieving response as just far broader than those limited, traditional or traditionally defined kinds of practices, things to do to mark what's happened or to help you organize around it or to feel um comfortable in a framework that you don't feel isolated and alone, you and the others.
00:40:01
Speaker
And before you, all those others have done this and you feel part of something larger when you think of yourself as mourning, i think.
00:40:13
Speaker
Thank you for yeah for sharing because it is different how everybody perceives it. Like the way that I see mourning is like the action that we could even choose, whether it's a ritual or even something that is unique to myself as to how I want to move the grief through me, whether it's through journaling, whether it's through walking. So And the way that I word mourning for myself and like for my clients is usually like, what are things that are in your control as to how you express your grief? Because a lot of times the grief is just going to occur, right? When we just cry, out just like what you said, it's the reaction. But the mourning, I feel that it's those little parts of the grief that we do have some control over, over something that we have no control. So I like to like empower people as to you, you have some aspects that are, that you can control and others that you can't. So the ones that you can gather any tools that can help you with that process of the uncontrollable emotions, right?
00:41:20
Speaker
What you're doing is perfectly sensible. I'll mention another thing that's yeah in the book. When I was, when I was doing the course,
00:41:33
Speaker
online, I wound up starting to write another little book. And i've I've never written up in the same way that I'll i'll tell you in ah in a little while.
00:41:45
Speaker
um I wrote a heart-to-heart book for bereaved people. And in in one way, i it was tailored There's nothing longer in the book than a short page.
00:42:03
Speaker
I'll actually show you what it looks like.
00:42:07
Speaker
This is a book that I give to grieving people. It's called Catching Your Breath in Grief. Yeah, I was just gonna read it out loud since the people that- Catching Your Breath in Grief. Breath in Grief. Uh-huh. And grace shall lead you home. Love the title.
00:42:24
Speaker
And inside, It looks like this. Every page has a photograph on it and couple of paragraphs.
00:42:38
Speaker
And
00:42:42
Speaker
some of them are attractive and some of them are quite so attractive. That's attractive.
00:42:50
Speaker
The one on the left is being hopeful. The one on the right is reviving ego. And it just goes like that. And it has just so the listeners can hear it's right now the ones you just showed me are pictures of flowers. One has like purple and one's like a yeah picture. And then underneath is the writings.
00:43:08
Speaker
and And I want to link it with what you were just talking about. Morning and these things that you can do. um I talk quite a bit in here about what I call sorrow friendly practices.
Coping Practices and the Coexistence of Emotions
00:43:24
Speaker
um Things that you can do to attend to the things that are bubbling up the reactions that are there. People tend to want to just suppress those, get away from them, maybe medicate to make them stop.
00:43:42
Speaker
um Let's just talk about them as emotions for a while. um I don't think emotions um want to be expressed.
00:43:54
Speaker
I think They want to be attended to and understood. And sorrow-friendly practices can help you pay attention to this stuff that's crying out in you for, listen to me.
00:44:13
Speaker
I have in mind your soul's pain. And I've got some ideas of what you need in your soul. I've got in mind your spirit's pain.
00:44:24
Speaker
And i've I've got some thoughts about what might help your spirit. I understand your ego's pain. It feels like you can't do anything. You have no control over anything. You're useless. You've been stupid. You thought you were Superman and now you're this whimpering,
00:44:42
Speaker
fellow who doesn't know where to go and doesn't know what to do, you stupid little ego and so on. That's what you're thinking. I'm still here and I have things in mind for you that you can do if you listen to me.
00:44:55
Speaker
You can still do all of the everyday problem solving. You can still keep a checkbook. You can still do thousands of things that by habit, you know how to do them.
00:45:08
Speaker
Don't be afraid, but just don't think you're invulnerable Nothing bad can happen to you because you're such a good, wonderful person. And so on just get over the stupidity of your illusions about yourself and being much larger and more important than you really are.
00:45:27
Speaker
But you are significant and you know how to live in this world and you know how to get yourself fed and clothed and slept so you can do the other things that you really care about even more.
00:45:39
Speaker
This is your soul talking. um you care deeply about this person who just died. Fortunately, i want to tell you, if you listen to me, you can continue loving after they die, loving them after they die.
00:45:55
Speaker
This is a big bit of news for you. um And all those other people who are still alive that you really still care about, but you're so preoccupied with this grief that you're not doing well very well attending to them.
00:46:09
Speaker
Maybe you could do Maybe what you could do is grab a hold of a book like this and read it as a family. We just had a cousin in our family, my wife's side of the family, die.
00:46:22
Speaker
And we went to a kind of family gathering afterwards. I brought a copy of that book for every immediate survivor, the brothers, sisters, children, and so on.
00:46:35
Speaker
And after we got home, a couple of days after we got a phone call, and the fellow's brother's family decided that they were going to read this book together and sit and talk about it like a page at a time.
00:46:51
Speaker
I've known families who have done this in um
00:46:58
Speaker
palliative care units and hospices. oh I remember once I was just thrilled a minister friend of mine was working as a chaplain in the hospice And she came to me and she said, I walked down the hall today and I heard a lot of conversation in this one room with this dying man. And I just peeked in.
00:47:16
Speaker
They were reading their book to each other. um mean, that's the kind of thing that people can do. Anyway, these sorrow-friendly practices are things like going to a counselor or finding a friend to just talk through this stuff with together. Keeping a journal if you're kind of shy about doing things like that, or writing little poems or memos to yourself of one sort or another, telling little stories, gathering, harvesting stories about this person and your life with him or her.
00:47:49
Speaker
um You can do meditation on your emotions. You can follow various religious practices. You can,
00:48:00
Speaker
um just kind of retreat into silence and let the silence speak to you. You can do things with prayer. You can do things with ceremony and ritual. You can do things with the arts. You can produce art. You can consume art. You can learn to appreciate arts that you haven't appreciated before. You can You can take seriously extraordinary experiences, like experiences where you think you heard a voice or where you think you thought during the night you were spoken to by the person who died.
00:48:39
Speaker
um Take seriously those experiences. They're not threatening. They're not out to hurt you. They're reaching out to speak to you. ah In the new book, I've got about 20 on sorrow-friendly practices where I deliberately describe them and tell people how to do things with them that are helpful.
00:49:04
Speaker
Embracing your faith. And um I'm not too keen on people subscribing to a list of propositions and saying, yes, they're true. I'm talking about ways of finding that you can trust your life and the the world around you and you can be loyal to what still works and you can seek it out.
00:49:29
Speaker
You can maintain commitments that are meaningful to you and were possibly meaningful to the person who died, um which is part of keeping your love for them alive and so on That's a long way of saying that there's quite a bit of substance in mourning.
00:49:49
Speaker
And i I take myself as speaking to what you were talking about. I love it because everything you said, it's not about suppressing. It's really, and I love that you call it sorrow-friendly practices because it is it's it's okay to embrace those moments in which you do want to sit down, like even choosing like a playlist that's going to make you like, I'm like, i I'm going to actually listen to music that is going to embrace the fact that this is how I feel right now and allow it to flow because it'd be, that is a way of paying attention to that emotion and not ignoring it. Like you said, like, like they're there, like little kids kind of saying, hi, mommy, mommy, mommy, look at me. Right. Right.
00:50:36
Speaker
right Yes. I would like to do something if you would let me do it. Yes. There's a passage in here. Please read it. This is in the catch. This is catching your breath. Yeah, this is in catching your breath and grief.
00:50:50
Speaker
And I'd like you to see the the visual. Okay. So this one is, which kind of bird is this one? This is a white. Well, this is a huge bird up in the Northwest.
00:51:03
Speaker
I don't know. It's a huge white bird. And the title is Being Grateful, which is part of my podcast. So yes, please read it.
00:51:14
Speaker
You might wind up wanting to do something with this this thing at some point. I don't know. And I would give you permission. You breathe most deeply into life when you accept heartache as the price of love.
00:51:30
Speaker
You wouldn't hurt so much had you not been given a unique place in the great web of life, a life to live, soul and spirit with which to live it, and the privilege of loving and being loved by the one that you grieve.
00:51:49
Speaker
The pain of missing him or her is an inevitable companion to the joy of his or her sharing life with you.
00:52:01
Speaker
Avoiding love out of fear of sorrow would have cost you all that you miss. And allowing fear to control you as you enter the next chapters of life would cost you all that you still have.
00:52:16
Speaker
When you realize your good fortune in having your loved one in your life, an amazing grace assures you that courage, hope, and joy outweigh fear, despair, and sorrow.
00:52:33
Speaker
You live more fully when you are grateful.
00:52:38
Speaker
It's beautiful. Thank you so much. So much. It's such a it's a beautiful book to even have because it has so many pictures, you know, how people call it coffee books. It it is literally something that could just be out in your home.
00:52:55
Speaker
Right up there. And then in those moments in which you're sitting at the, end you know, like you said, you could be sitting in the living room with your family and just opening and just to one space and see what shows up.
00:53:05
Speaker
So this one, that one was released when? When did you release Catching Your Breath? Well, that one, the first first iteration of it was 2012. And it's it's available at Amazon along with the other book. redid it.
00:53:19
Speaker
i reded it I didn't change really the substance of it, but some of the formatting of it in 2019. So it's been out there for a while. Thank you. And so again, and that's that's catching your breath when you're grieving. And then the most recent one is Seeking Wisdom and Death's Shadows, yeah Collected Writings on How We Grieve. And that one was released in 2025.
00:53:44
Speaker
Thomas, it's just been such a joy to get to talk to you. And I want to make sure, again, people know that they can read get all these books on Amazon or can they find them also in their local bookstore or is Amazon the best way? Unfortunately, um the Seeking Wisdom book and the How We Grieve book from long long ago and the Heart of Grief book All three of them are published by Oxford University Press.
00:54:13
Speaker
And oh though they are very friendly books and many more purchase them than academic readers,
00:54:26
Speaker
bookstores aren't accustomed to carrying academic books. So Amazon is one oh going directly to Oxford University Press.
00:54:38
Speaker
just online, you'll get there and you'll find it. They've published something like 50,000 books. So they're a big time publisher. yes yeah um either Either place works. If you go to Amazon, I see they've got them set up. So all four of the books I just mentioned or to be found in the same place. in fact So we just even just search your name, Thomas Attig, and then all of them would come out. And I'll make sure to link that at the bottom. The books are friendly too, right? Yes, yes.
00:55:11
Speaker
Thomas, i before we wrap up, I like to make sure to ask the following question. Is there anything you'd like to share with the listeners that I might have not asked you during this interview?
00:55:26
Speaker
yeah All you can do in an interview like this is a kind of a sampling. um I'm not, well, I think you can get a sense that I'm pretty clear.
00:55:37
Speaker
one The writing is the same. Something happened to me when I was a graduate student. I was studying with a guy who did this European phenomenology existentialism stuff.
00:55:51
Speaker
He had no colleagues who were doing the same thing. So when we yeah had to put together um ah dissertation committee of three or four professors who would follow along with my study, read it and understand it, I had to learn to speak in plain English rather than in the technical vocabulary in the area where I was studying, or they wouldn't have understood my thing and they wouldn't have wouldn't have approved my dissertation. So I actually wrote a dissertation. It's 320 pages long. I invite no one to read it. But there was in the phenomenology part of it, I was explaining phenomenology.
00:56:35
Speaker
And there was a singular example that I wrote about all the way through the book. And it was on the phenomenology of seeing a tree in the yard that should be cut down.
00:56:50
Speaker
i mean, it was that plain. And I explained it all with that example. And there was no one who didn't understand what I was talking about. And the technical vocabulary got itself explained.
00:57:04
Speaker
and In my history of teaching and mingling with professionals in far broader fields than philosophy, you know palliative care physicians and psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists and so on,
00:57:22
Speaker
My voice is known, one, as the voice of a wisdom seeker, and two, as an incredibly clear voice. Yes. And I do want to say that because it is true. In philosophy, a lot of times we can go into all these things that then it's hard to grasp. But everything that you've said in this conversation is easy to digest. and i And if that same way as your books, then it's just very that's word relatable. Relatable.
00:57:49
Speaker
Relatable. This doing podcast that I'm doing, I'm sure is reaching the kind of audience I want to reach. Someone who's interested in a podcast like your podcast should be interested in the book oh that I've written. And if this can help us get these people together with those things, i I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Oh, it was a pleasure. Thank you. I love being able to talk about these topics and with someone that knows so much as you have learned through all these years and that you keep on teaching and sharing. I am just grateful to have had you in my podcast and get to
Conclusion and Listener Invitation
00:58:28
Speaker
learn from you. So thank you again, Thomas.
00:58:39
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.
00:58:52
Speaker
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.
00:59:08
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.
00:59:21
Speaker
And thanks once again for tuning in to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray In Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.