Episode One Transcript: Defining Grief in America
Amy S. Choi:
This is a project of The Mash-Up Americans.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Welcome to Grief, Collected, where we explore how grief moves through our bodies, our families, and our communities, and why we need to feel it all in order to transform our future.
Amy S. Choi:
Today we're talking to the grief and resilience researchers, Natalia Skritskaya and George Bonanno to define grief and its impact on all of us.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Hi, I'm Rebecca Lehrer.
Amy S. Choi:
And I'm Amy S. Choi. And we are The Mash-Up Americans.
Rebecca Lehrer:
We are The Mash-Up Americans. I'm going to have to sing everything right now.
Amy S. Choi:
I know. You're so excited, you're so excited to be back. It's just-
Rebecca Lehrer:
I miss these people, I miss this space with you. I mean, we're together all the time, but to actually get to have these conversations that feel so urgent for us, which is cool.
Amy S. Choi:
Should we tell them what happened this morning? Which is that, you guys, I think I might have a bald spot.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Is it stress related? I don't know, but we're going to investigate.
Amy S. Choi:
Is it the fact that we have survived a global pandemic, a worldwide catastrophic event in history? Is that possible?
Rebecca Lehrer:
It's possible. The combination of energies that we've had, let's say approximately started in 2016, don't want to name names but seems like around that time, but has continued to pace and increased in intensity in this period, which is the all-caps scream texting, the primal screaming into, as my wonderful niece, Amy's daughter, into a pillow, just like hers is usually full of joy, but sometimes it's something else. And that kind of like mine is also screenshotting things that I read in the news and then writing LOL on it and sending it to Amy. And so, I mean, there's a lot of energy to sort of this screaming and feeling like, "Ah, it's a lot. There has been a lot happening." And one of those things has been a catastrophic mass death event.
Amy S. Choi:
15 million people have died in the first two years of the pandemic according to the World's Health Organization. And yes, my friends, this is the kind of factoid I have in my back pocket because I am a delight. I just like to tell people that and remind them.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yeah. And I think that’s why we're here, there's a lot of reasons. One is we needed this, we needed to have a conversation with you all about grief because we have been looking around helplessly because that is sort of the feeling that we've had or sort of disbelief, I think, about how little acknowledgement about the level of grief that is happening in this country and in the world. But if we talk about at a community level, let alone everything else that happens in our lives, because being alive means confronting and dealing with grieving and death. It's happening just because we're alive, and then it's also happening because there's a mass death event.
Amy S. Choi:
And also, it's going to happen whether we acknowledge it or not. And I think with something that we have been, I don't know, in the helpless looking around, we're also like, "Wait, but we're also supposed to just keep going."
Rebecca Lehrer:
Oh, wow.
Amy S. Choi:
There was a disruption for a moment. And then the dream after the disruption seemed to have been to go back to exactly where we were before. This is not a novel observation, but one that continues to astound me that we're like, "Oh, all of the things in the world prove to be almost broken," but I think the most achievable goal that we can reach for is to get back to that state of almost brokenness and just keep going, and going, and going, and doing, and doing, and doing, and always looking forward. That has just been astonishing. And I guess this is how we've always lived our lives, except something about this moment has been like, "Oh, we're not going to keep going, are we?"
Rebecca Lehrer:
And then it turns out we may. I think this American pathology, and we are Mash-Ups, but we are Mash-Up Americans. I think we are of this place and we have inherited this feeling of you've got to move forward and you got to achieve the next thing. And-
Amy S. Choi:
If you're going to grieve, if you got to do it right. You have five stages, you need to check off each box. And because we're mash-ups, we want to get an A, okay?
Rebecca Lehrer:
Oh, we love to get an A. Yes, we do.
Amy S. Choi:
Also, you guys, it turns out that's all basura.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Don't get them started on Kubler-Ross. No, but I think this American pathology that has come into stark relief and not just about grieving the loss of people, but actually taking any moment to think about any kind of grief, and loss, and repair, thinking about reparations and police violence, and so much more about the way we process history or don't, if you will, or think of ourselves as a historical or somehow existing outside of any other context, at this moment, particularly I think COVID has prompted us to have a conversation with you all and with some extraordinary experts about grief. And as Mash-Ups, and we all have so much grief inherent to the definition of mash-ups is that we have some de-contextualization or separation or loss from culture. And yes, there's all opportunities and dreams, but also loss and it's really given us perspective.
Amy S. Choi:
Okay. Here is a whopper of a quote that has been making us think through this whole process. Pauline Boss, a pioneering psychologist and professor at the University of Minnesota said of America, "We are a nation founded on unresolved grief."
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yeah. And we've known this, right, Amy? Like in our bones, we've known this is true but never had words for it. We know what the stakes are personally if we don't move through our grief and try to understand it. And what the pandemic has made us question is, what are the stakes for all of us if we don't understand our grief? What are the stakes for our families and our communities and our countries if we don't metabolize what is happening in our bodies and minds? And what are the opportunities for all of us when we do?
Amy S. Choi:
This is what we're going to do over the course of the next five episodes. In this episode today, we're going to define grief with the researchers and psychologists, George Bonanno and Natalia Skritskaya. So we're going to get our base-level understanding, and because we're mash-ups and because this is what we do, we're going to look at some of its roots in our families with Linda Thai. And then next, Rebecca, we're going to see how it presents in our bodies.
Rebecca Lehrer:
With the author of The Anatomy of Grief, Dorothy Holinger, did you know that grief literally changes your brain? Something about the amygdala and the cerebral cortex. We're going to get into it with a real scientist. We're also going to grapple with collective and community grief with Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. And ultimately we're getting into how do we envision a new way forward with our grief and let that grief be a gift to us. So we're going to dream our future with the incomparable dream boat, adrienne maree brown.
Amy S. Choi:
It's just our guiding light for all of these things, everything. And in between each episode we'll have special ways for you to get out of your heads because we're going to be probably way in our heads in these episodes and into our bodies. We are so excited.
So today, given that grieving people are everywhere and we are all grieving, we want to start at the beginning. What is grief and are we going to be okay? This is an essential question for us. Are we going to be okay? So we're going to talk to two leading experts today, Dr. Natalia Skritskaya and Dr. George Bonanno, both hailing from Rebecca's ancestral educational lands of Columbia University.
Rebecca Lehrer:
My God, I've never felt Columbia pride like I have in this series. So to start us off, we want to get a clear definition of grief. So we reached out to Dr. Natalia Skritskaya, who is a clinical psychologist and a founding researcher of Columbia Center for Prolonged Grief.
Natalia Skritskaya:
Grief is a response to a meaningful loss, but given that it's a simple definition, it doesn't mean grief is simple. It doesn't mean grief is just sadness, it's actually a very complex and multifaceted response, which is unique to every person and every loss. Part of it is our infinite variability as humans. Each of us has a unique genetic makeup, probably nobody had exactly the same experience. And then if you talk about loss of a relationship, you have one unique person with their history and biology, and another person, and then their interaction. Dr. Zuker, he's also at Columbia, he studies perception and he made an interesting comment that in our perception, even at basics, like you take several people and you get them to kind of calibrate the color of yellow, for example, for each person, that calibration will be slightly different.
So each person views that color in a slightly different way, and yet we kind of agree enough there is some overlap to call it yellow. And that's how we operate. Even though each of our experiences, even at the perceptual level is different, slightly different, I think that metaphor applies to grief too. Grief is a whole body response, it's not just thoughts, it's not just emotions. And it can be a whole mix of emotions, not just sadness, as I said. It could be anger, bitterness, anxiety, yearning, shame. And they change, it's not a static experience, it fluctuates, it evolves over time, it changes depending on our environment. But there is also an important physiological component, and of course cultural, societal component too. But with all the uniqueness, with all the kind of idiosyncratic experience of grief, also from my research from other colleagues' research, we know that there are really important commonalities that seem to be universal to all humans. The role of our biology related to close relationships, how they are impacting us. Another expression we say, grief is the form of love. Grief is the form love takes when someone we love dies.
Amy S. Choi:
Dr. Skritskaya helped us find a definition of grief that grief is a part of life, grief is love, but when we're in it feels so intense and so overwhelming, which is why we need to talk to an expert about whether or not we will be okay. TLDR, we will. Yay.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Woo-hoo.
Amy S. Choi:
Just in case you were worried.
Rebecca Lehrer:
We will be okay. Probably. Dr. George Bonanno is a professor of clinical psychology and the chair of the Department of Counseling and clinical Psychology at Columbia University's Teachers College. He is the head of The Loss Trauma and Emotion Lab at Columbia University. For the past 25 years, he has pioneered research in the nature of resilience and context of loss and trauma, he's our guy. His books include The End of Trauma, How the New Science of Resilience is Changing How We Think About PTSD, and The Other Side Of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. George has also written beautifully about his grief for his father who died when George was young and who he learned to speak to while grieving for him. In our research for this series, we found George's work mentioned everywhere, so we knew we had to speak to him.
Amy S. Choi:
George, we have been diving into your work. And one of the key takeaways for us has been that in our study of grief and following your deep, deep, deep decades of research in grief is that grief is just a part of life that everyone grieves, everyone at some point in their life will be bereaved. And that that oscillation of grief and joy is really what the makeup of our existence is here on earth. And importantly as you talk about resilience, that most of us will not be hobbled by grief, that most of us are going to be okay even after super traumatic events. And that has just been in this moment in time in 2022, extremely reassuring in a way that not that many things are, that not that many things seem to be reliable right now, that is very reassuring to us.
George Bonanno:
Well, that's very true. I mean, grief has always been and always will be a part of the human experience. And it's kind of amazing in a way that for a period in our history really the last century or so, we kind of lost track of that idea and we began to think of grief as a profoundly overwhelming experience that was in a sense unfortunate that it would befall a person. We lost awareness of the fact that people have been dealing with this since the beginning of time and dealing with it. It is painful, no doubt about it that it's painful, but we do get through these things and in a way we can enrich ourselves by these experiences if we look at them in the right way.
Rebecca Lehrer:
People experience so many emotions when grieving. What can anger and sadness do for us as grievers after a loss versus say fear or anxiety?
George Bonanno:
Well, there are a lot of different ideas about emotions right now and there's a lot of debate about emotions because emotions have to do with how we see the world. My wonderful colleague, Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's a neuroscientist had put it, you feel what your brain thinks is happening. A lot has to do with how you're perceiving the world. And probably the most dominant ideas about emotion is that they're functional, they do something, we have them for a reason, we've evolved the ability to have these feelings. A lot of the things that go on in our body don't require us to even be aware of them at all, but the fact that we become aware of things means it must have some purpose.
One of my favorite examples is temperature. Our bodies regulate our temperatures perfectly without our even knowing it, but we've become aware of our body temperature because it's just evolutionarily adapted. We can regulate ourselves really well if we know we're hot, we're warm, we can then do something that's really, in terms of the cost of running a body, it's very inexpensive for us to think about it and do something.
Rebecca Lehrer:
We're climate efficient, we got it figured out.
George Bonanno:
We are very much so.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yeah.
George Bonanno:
Yeah, we are a long ways in the making. So the emotions we have are all, we can think of them as functional in certain ways and they can be functional or not functional depending on the context. So anger is very much about being prepared, in a sense, to defend yourself or feeling that there's been some injustice or something is gotten in your way and blocking you. And when you feel anger, you begin to prepare actually to do something about it. And that may be useful in some context. During bereavement, I think it's often not useful because there's not much we can do about losses, they've happened. And anger may be temporarily useful, but I think over the long term it's not a very useful emotion during bereavement.
Fear is very useful when we're confronted with life-threatening danger, but in a bereavement situation, that's typically not the case as well, so fear is probably not very useful during bereavement. Sadness on the other hand is enormously useful, which is why we typically feel so sad during bereavement. And there's been a lot of really interesting work and insights about sadness. Sadness is when we turn inward and we in a sense takes stock of what we've loss. We kind of do a recalibration in our brain, we no longer have this thing, this piece of our identity that we thought we had, but that we've relied on. Even when we didn't have it in the physical presence, when we think about a loved one, even when that loved one is not physically present, we would still have them in our heads.
When that person is gone physically, they'll no longer be in the world. We then have to somehow reconcile that in our brains. We have to come to terms with the fact that we're not going to see that person, so we really kind of have to recalibrate and think it through. And when we become sad, we are turning inward. We're not paying attention to the world around us so much and we're turning inward. And we're doing that, we're engaging in that process. And so, I mean, that's very useful. But interestingly, the human mind and body are quite remarkable when you look closely. At the same time we feel sad, we also have evolved the ability to look sad in a way that other humans realize. And that tells other humans that we are turned inward, we are not paying attention, we're feeling lousy. And that facial expression of being sad actually invokes in other people's sympathy and people want to take care of us. And that works out very nicely.
Amy S. Choi:
In your book you talk about symptoms of grief. Are these all symptoms of grief or what are the symptoms of grief?
George Bonanno:
No, emotions are emotions. We have them all the time and they're very short-term, emotions don't last very long. One interesting thing about emotions is that we tend to think they last longer than they do and we tend to think when we're experiencing them that they'll last forever. So when we're feeling bad, when we're feeling sad, when we're feeling angry, it feels like we are going to be in that state for a long time. And the same thing with feeling joy and other positive emotions, we tend to assume we're going to feel that way for a long time, but those are ephemeral as well. So emotions are very short-term, they're in the moment kind of reactions and they tell us things, they influence other people.
The so-called symptoms of grief, I mean, symptoms is kind of a dicey word because symptoms, it comes to mean pieces of a disease, and I think that's one of the reasons it's a problematic word. So there are different aspects, if I may use a different word, there are different aspects of what we would say grief is, which involve the sad emotion, which involves actually a reduction in what, for lack of a better word, we call arousal, the level of activation in your body. So when you're confronted with a dangerous situation, you're more aroused, your body's ramping up to take care of something. When you lose something, when you're feeling sad, your body or level of arousal decreases, it's kind of a more sedated state because as I mentioned before, you're turning inward. And there tends to be a focus on what is missing, what that piece of yourself that's missing, so there's a lot of activation in the brain on the reward system. So all those things are happening simultaneously.
And what's really interesting about these experiences, they're very short-term and I think we've got it in our heads, this happened, I think, in the 19th century and continued on into the 20th century, where we began to think of grief as this long process that we must go through. But in fact, in animals we see this and we've seen it in humans through time, that it's relatively a short process. It's an efficient process, if I can use that kind of word. It's a little bit inappropriate of a word, but we grieve intently, but for a relatively short period of time, usually. So that doesn't mean we never think about the person again or the thing we lost, but for the most part it happens within say a few weeks period, kind of a relatively short term.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Could you describe what that sort of transition moment from the acute grief period looks like when people start to emerge from that, or is it waking up or what is that? Are they more aroused? What are some of the things that are happening in their bodies in your studies that you have observed?
George Bonanno:
You used the word at the beginning, oscillation. And oscillation is a very interesting word because it describes how we experience grief or how grief plays out, we cycle through all the time. One of the poets of grief is the writer C. S. Lewis. He's famous for a lot of his writings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and the other things he's done, and his essays. But he wrote a really wonderful book about grief called A Grief Observed. And he described grief as like being in the trenches in World War I, that was his reference point, that was at the time in which he lived. Being in the trenches in World War I, seeing a plane fly over that could drop bombs and it would maybe drop some bombs and then fly off and circle around and come back. And that's what grief felt like for him, as this cyclical oscillation.
And he also described the other aspect of your question. He really grieved for a long period of time, he had a rough time when his wife died, he was very close to her and he had a very rough time. For many, many months, he was suffering. And he described when it began to end. And the way he talked about it was as if he'd felt he'd lost his wife twice, he'd lost her physically, but he also lost her in terms of her memory. He couldn't quite remember her, he couldn't evoke her presence anymore. And when he began to recover, he described having a full night's sleep for the first time in a long time. And then he realized he was also now remembering his wife again, so he was having that back. And we've actually looked at this in our research and we found this to be true, that people who get over the losses relatively efficiently, quickly, what we call a resilient trajectory, people who are able to function pretty well, even though they're suffering early on, but they're basically able to function, and sleep, and concentrate.
Those people are also able to evoke the memories of the deceased person for comfort, but when people struggle as C. S. Lewis did, when they struggle for a longer period of time, when they begin to recover and move back to how they used to be functioning, then they too are able to evoke the memory for comfort. So there's one of the key elements of what happens when people come out of grief, if you will. That's not the best way to describe it, when people are no longer in that intense phase of grieving, they then have that person's memory again. The person is once alive again in their minds.
Amy S. Choi:
It's such a powerful visual image and metaphor that you reference C. S. Lewis of the war plane circling around and then being temporarily out of harm's way, and then the risk again of the bomb dropping. And I think this period that we're living in, and maybe it's just us and maybe it's because we're American and we think everything is just happening for the first time, but it truly feels like, "Okay, here's one plane and it's circling in and out. And then, oh God, here comes another plane. And it's circling in and out." And it's just like compounding layers, and layers, and layers of things that feel like grief or that we're grieving, especially if we look at grief again in that more expansive definition of not just about bereavement but about a loss of something to our identity.
George Bonanno:
It's interesting because I think there is a bit of a conflation between what's happening in the world and how much we pay attention to it. And this is, I think, a big issue that's emerging only in the last decade or so, that we are constantly reminded of things going on in the world, constantly receiving inputs about the state of the world and the bad things that happen, typically bad things that happen. I mean, one of the reasons why... I've thought about this a lot in my other work on trauma, why we now seem so convinced. It seems that the common perception most people have is that they're traumatized in some way, and you could say they're grieving in some way. And I've wondered about that for some time now, how has this come about? And I think one of the reasons is that there are bad things that happen to us and the reactions that we can have are also kind of frightening, the symptomatic reactions people have that suggest we can be really hurting, we can be suffering a lot right now.
And that's frightening. But at the same time, our brains are wired to perceive danger and threat. We know this is pretty clear that we are detection machines, we need to know when there are bad things happening. And I think all of this is now being, I would say, exploited, for lack of a better word, by the various media, we have these media devices in our pockets, in our purses, wherever we have them constantly, that we are constantly being reminded of how bad things are. And so I mean, that's a new state of affairs. And I think we're still trying to figure that out. I do believe, because I'm an optimist, I do believe that we are going to learn how to manage this eventually, we'll begin to figure this out, but it really is a part of our time.
So bad things are happening and there are some very serious things happening with climate change, and gun violence, and political turmoil. But I think partly those things have also fed them or been fed by our tendency to focus on threat. So the political dangers we are confronted with right now are in part the product of the fact that we can be exploited this way. And that's a difficult thing though to untangle.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I think it's fascinating to think about the impact that has, what you said, the conflation of kind of our lizard brains. Our brains are figuring out, like knowing that there's danger, but with the amount of media we're taking in, which we are not currently equipped to do maybe, in our brains. I'm not.
George Bonanno:
Yeah, I don't think we're quite equipped for it yet. And we are in our infancy in all this and we're learning, but I think it's one of the ways that we will move forward as a human species is we'll adapt to this and we'll figure out some way to... Life has been very difficult for a long time. I mean, when we think about all the dangers and turmoils of our world right now, all we have to do is go back about 500 years, place ourself in that world. And it was a tougher life, it was a very tough life. People didn't live nearly as long and people died of all kinds of horrible things. I had an acute appendicitis last year and I barely got squeaked by that one because I was in a rural area when it happened. And I thought to myself, "If this were 200 years, I would be dead right now because nobody would know what to do." First of all, they would've been cutting me open without anesthesia or any kind of antibiotics and I probably would not have survived it. And so that's a sobering thought.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I mean, I have terrible eyesight. And I was joking about how-
Amy S. Choi:
She would not survive the apocalypse if the apocalypse happened.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I mean, [inaudible 00:29:27] this idiot and then I would just have been somehow institutionalized because I couldn't do anything.
Amy S. Choi:
Well, that's why I got LASIK. This is my protective measure against the apocalypse.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I hoard cash, she does that. We can talk about in your trauma response lab.
Amy S. Choi:
I guess we're super curious as people who are, we're both first-generation American, we grew up here, have a very American point of view, and we're also very curious about is the experience of grief, our experience of grief, a uniquely American one? And what do our cultural norms, how do they shape what American grief is and is that different from other places? We're going to be really curious about your thoughts on that. Our researcher was looking at bereavement policies around the world, like corporate bereavement policies. And it was almost like you know how the US always tanks when it comes to maternity or familial leave? We have none, right? We're the only industrialized nation that gives no support or government support or leave to mothers or fathers or parents.
And it's virtually the same for bereavement, that we just pretend that this is a thing that doesn't happen. And again, it's just like forward movement, we're inventing it as we go. And that's a beautiful thing about being American is that we're not, in some ways quite as mired in the mythos of the past and this way of doing things, but also the constant pushing forward, is that doing us a disservice? So we would like to know your point of view on if there is, and what would be an American experience of grief versus other cultures?
George Bonanno:
Well, you've put your finger on, I think, some key points. On the one hand, if we look at grief rituals and grief practices all around the world, there are some very clear differences. But at the core, most of these rituals are actually quite similar. And I think they're very similar to what we do here in the US as well, they have a couple key pieces. One is that they tend to memorialize the person that was lost, so we tell stories, we get together and we think about the person, reminisce. And that is a very important function during bereavement in that it creates a kind of summary of a person's life that we can take forward. And it allows us to have an image of the person that essentially we can live with and hold onto. And remember, it's simplified, it's a condensing of their entire life and all the memories.
It's also generous, we tend to not be too critical with the person that we carry forward. And we actually have done some research on this, looking at how people thought about their marriages when they're married, how people remember their marriages after their partner or spouse or partner died. And we repeated that a few times over time. And we looked at different types of grieving experience, people who are struggling, people who grieved pretty minimally. And what we found was that everybody did more or less the same thing, everybody improved the memory a little bit after the person was gone.
Amy S. Choi:
Well, thank God.
George Bonanno:
They idealized it to some extent. And it makes perfect sense because it's something we want to be able to remember what was good about a person. It's not very useful if we're remembering only how bad something was. So that's one aspect of it. And the other aspect is grief rituals all around the world also bring people together, they remind the person that lost a loved one, that all these other people lost that person as well. And they all are here, they're all together. And in a sense, it's saying, "You are alive and you are still part of this community of people who all knew that person and know you." And that's a very, I think, powerful ceremonial piece that's shared I think all around the world. So that said, so then on the one hand, there are these similarities across the world, there are lots of differences also. And there is that element of how efficiently and quickly we tend to do things here and how minimally we allow ourselves time to take a break, essentially.
Now, it's a little difficult to speak of what American anything is like because of the differences in this country. But on the whole, it is true though. And if we go to other countries, other countries do take more breaks, they take longer periods of time off, they don't typically drive themselves so much as we do in this country. So I think we could probably give ourselves a little bit more slack during bereavement as well than we do. On the other hand, and again, back and forth on this is that many people find it very useful and very helpful to continue working and continue doing the things that are crucial to their identity because it kind of reminds them, "I've lost this person, I have lost this piece of my identity, it was wrapped up in that person, but I'm still me and I still do these other things that are a big part of my life and I'm going to keep doing those things." So there's some comfort in that as well.
Amy S. Choi:
I think also, we're so kind of like mastery-oriented that we also want to make sure that we do grief right. And I think that's part of this whole trajectory that has been so revealing, and in some ways challenging, about even though we, like I believe so much in resilience in that thinking about your work, George, that like, "Oh, but this isn't what I thought grief was. I thought grief was this. And so I want to do that the right way." And actually maybe there's not exactly a right way and also maybe that's okay, but everything in me is oriented towards being like, there must be rules to grief and if it feels bad, then we got to do it different.
And I think what we're getting out of this or that Americans are bad at this, is other cultures must be better because there's other containers or different sort of communal events. And I think the process of reading your work and having these conversations with other experts is just like, "Oh no, it's just all, a lot of it is messy and horrible and that's okay, but ultimately that's also just part of life and that it goes."
George Bonanno:
Yeah, we're very independent, accomplishment-oriented in this country. And we do have a kind of dependence on experts, so we seek expert advice, I think very readily here. And we sometimes are led astray.
Amy S. Choi:
I mean, look at us. We're like, we got you into a studio when we're doing this now.
George Bonanno:
Yeah. And the classic example are the stages of grief, which has been around for a long time and is very popular, but there's absolutely no credibility at all, it's not real. And I think that it's a story that maybe comforts a lot of people, but it's also a story that confuses a lot of people because they may not experience it and then they think they're doing something wrong because the expert advice seems to tell them they need to go through the stages of grief.
Amy S. Choi:
Do you have a favored grief ritual?
George Bonanno:
That's a wonderful question. It depends on the kind of grief or whatever I would be grieving. Probably it would involve something solitary, some time to reflect and maybe to think about the thing that was lost.
Amy S. Choi:
Do you still talk to your dad?
George Bonanno:
Yes, I do. I do sometimes. Yeah, because life goes on and life changes. And one understands things one didn't understand when one was young. I was a pain in the ass when I was young. I know that now.
Amy S. Choi:
You're apologizing?
George Bonanno:
Well, not apologizing, but I think there would be a different conversation that we would have now if my father were alive than the imaginary conversation that I had 20 years ago. And I do those conversations sometimes, yeah.
Amy S. Choi:
And speaking of conversations, what do you hope for the conversation about grief going forward?
George Bonanno:
I think I would hope that people would trust their own intuition more about how to cope with things. We didn't talk about this at all today, but a lot of my work right now is about what I call flexibility, regulatory flexibility, flexibility in how we regulate ourselves. And almost all difficult events require that we really think through a little bit what's happening to us and what we really need to do. And I think this doesn't involve experts, this is what we know we can do and what we decide what's happening to us, "What is it that I'm going through and what do I need to do to get past it? And I will get past it, so what do I need to do?" And I think that's a kind of a conversation, an honest conversation we can have with ourselves that doesn't involve a prescription from a so-called expert, because I'm apparently an expert, but there are many, many, the world is flooded with experts these days. We don't need more.
Rebecca Lehrer:
We need to trust ourselves.
George Bonanno:
Yes, we need to trust ourselves. Yeah.
Amy S. Choi:
Well, with that vote of confidence, thank you so much, George.
George Bonanno:
My pleasure.
Rebecca Lehrer:
We're taking away we are resilient, life is hard, but we will probably be okay.
Amy S. Choi:
Probably. I'm really going to hold on to that probably in a maniacal way, that six months timeframe. It's going to be really important to me.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yeah, this is the problem for two model minorities is the thing is this is why people were crazy with Kübler-Ross. Oh, now we know it's six months to a year. Perfect. We can do that.
Amy S. Choi:
I can check that box. I'm going to get an A.
Rebecca Lehrer:
But I do think it was something really interesting for us both, right? When we were reading George's book, the first feeling we had was sort of like a defensiveness about how resilient we are and then an openness to it and how that felt. I don't know about you, but for me, that was my big revelation in that book. Like, "Oh, right, this is grieving is living, grieving is life, grieving is love. And it's the nature of being alive." And the reality is that in any given point in time, many people around you are grieving and they are still alive, and therefore we must be resilient. I don't know, some kind of Hegelian dialectic, something I learned at Columbia.
Amy S. Choi:
Well, yeah. I mean, I think that idea that our world would collapse if we weren't resilient, and it actually does not mean that people are burying something, although certainly there are like, as we'll learn in upcoming conversations, there are healthier expressions of grief than others. But that we all go through this and so the world moves on and we move on with it and we have beautiful lives with it. So even though it was challenging sometimes to read the book, it was very eyeopening. And I am just very, very grateful. Thank you to George Bonanno and Natalia Skritskaya for being here with us.
Everybody please go to griefcollected.com for more. We created a beautiful website for this podcast, which has so many incredible resources, readings, playlists, other fun stuff. And yes, I just said grief could be fun. Maybe not grief, but being in community with all of us. We would love to see you there.
Rebecca Lehrer:
In a few days you'll have a new experience in your feed from us, songs to meditate on. And next week we speak to Linda Thai, a social worker whose research and practice focus on ancestral grief.
Linda Thai:
I don't believe there's a working definition of ancestral grief. I believe in reclaiming what it is that's knocking beneath the surface at my soul's door. And what knocks at the soul's door for many of us is the grief that our ancestors weren't able to experience and move through as a result of their circumstances.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Get ready.
Amy S. Choi:
Ooh, Get Ready.
Grief, Collected is a production of The Mash-Up Americans. Executive produced by Amy S. Choi and Rebecca Lehrer. Senior editor and producer is Sara Pelligrini. Development producer is Dupe Oyebolu. Production manager, Shelby Sandlin. Original music composed by The Brothers Tang. Sound Design support by Pedro Rafael Rosado. Website designed by VOKSEE. Grief, Collected is supported in part by a grant from The Pop Culture Collaborative. Please make sure to follow and share this show with all of your friends. Ciao.