Plane Crashes, Wildfires, War: Processing Grief in a World of Constant Crises

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks Christiane. David Kessler, thanks so much for talking with us once again.

 

DAVID KESSLER: So glad to be with you, Michel.

 

MARTIN: You know, you’re considered one of the foremost experts on grief and grieving. What are you seeing at the moment? I mean, I know what I’m seeing. I’m seeing, you know, airline disasters, you know, wildfires, floods, you know, an election season that for some people was, well, for everybody it was exhausting, but for some people it was traumatic. What are you seeing around the issue that you’ve worked on for so much of your adult life?

 

KESSLER: Well, I’m seeing such a tension right now between individual grief and collective grief. You know, there’s that saying about, put your own oxygen mask on first. Well, the plane feels like it’s on fire. So how do we take care of ourselves hoping to get our grief witnessed and seen by others when they’re overwhelmed with so much pain already in the world?

 

MARTIN: I mean, what are you seeing with the people that you’re working with?

 

KESSLER: mainly who I see is I see individual people who are in our groups as well as the therapists who are treating people throughout the world. And they’re telling me people are coming in feeling like the world doesn’t have time for their own pain. That they’re dealing with their mother, their father, their spouse, their child, their sibling who died, or a home loss, or all the other things that are happening. And the world is moving so fast and so quickly that your news from last night is old news today.

 

MARTIN: Can I ask you – maybe I should have asked this first. How do you define grief?

 

KESSLER: I think of grief as always a change we didn’t want. So that means it’s obviously about death, but it’s also about so many other things, whether it’s a home loss, an airplane crash, so many of the disasters, things that happen in the world, and maybe it’s how you perceive our government going. There’s all these types of grief that all live together in this world and sometimes in a pretty clunky fashion.

 

MARTIN: You recently contributed to a piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “Why We Are Getting Worse At Grieving.” Why do you say we’re getting worse at grieving?

 

KESSLER: Well, a lot of what I’m teaching is what our great grandparents knew: how to take time for their grief. In our modern world, we feel so much pressure to get to the next moment, do the next thing, be so productive. And grief has a much longer shadow. You know, we often think about grief as like the TV episodes we see. Episode one, someone dies. Episode two, you deal with it. Episode three, you get back to life. And grief is much more messy in real life and is much longer.

 

MARTIN: You’ve, you have said that “we live in a grief illiterate world.” Why do you say that and why do you think that is?

 

KESSLER: Well, we have sanitized grief and loss and death in our world. You know, there was a time in the forties when death moved into the hospital, grief moved into the funeral home. Even like if you have a front door that’s from a house in the forties, it’s wider because the casket used to be in your front room. And we used to call, if you think about it, your grandparents, great-grandparents may have called it the parlor. And what happened to the parlor? It left the home and it became the funeral parlor. And we said, your front room should not be for the dying. It should be a living room. So we are all about life now, and we feel like it may be bad luck or the evil eye to think about death before we need to. I tell people, unfortunately, the death rate is a hundred percent. You know, it’s going to come to all of our worlds someday. And we prepare for everything except grief.

 

MARTIN: But don’t you – forgive me for asking it this way, but could some of that be just the way our workplaces function? I mean, there are places where you don’t have bereavement leave. Or if you, maybe it’s a day. And it has to be like a close relative, like a mother or a father or a God forbid, you know, a child. But an aunt who may have helped raise you, a grandparent who may have helped raise you, a best friend, that doesn’t even qualify. And I just wonder if some of it’s just it’s not understood to be something that you need to take time for. That’s private. You do that on your own time.

 

KESSLER: Well, think about that, ’cause I do a lot of work with organizations and companies. It takes probably over 500 hours to deal with the death of a loved one. And we think ‘oh, you’re going to neatly make a call in your lunch hour.’ And in the old days, the thought was, in the workplace, don’t bring your personal life to work. Well, the world has gotten complex when a loved one dies. We’ve got estates, we’ve got calls, we’ve got death certificates, all these things. The funeral doesn’t neatly coincide with the death in three days for your leave. So all of this in a movement now where we’re kind of saying to folks, bring your whole self to work, but wait a minute, isn’t part of the grief my whole self? So there’s a lot of work being done now on grief in the workplace, employers trying to figure out how to manage it well and be there. And one of the things I teach companies is we’re always talking about employee engagement. When someone has a death, a loss, how you engage with them creates so much loyalty. We remember how our company was there for us when our loved one died or wasn’t there for us.

 

MARTIN: I’m speaking to you from Washington DC where – I’m sure you’re following this – that the president and his kind of designated representative, Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest people, is laying people off. I mean, there are people who are overseas who are doing assignments that they were sent to by our government who are now being told, oh, actually nevermind. Come home. Take your kids outta school. You don’t have a job. I’m just sort of – I am struck by how contrary that is to what people expect from the modern workplace, and yet this is sort of being celebrated in some quarters. I’m curious just from your standpoint of a person who is expert in the ways in which human beings function, how, what do you make of that?

 

KESSLER: Well, it certainly is going to cause a lot of folks to feel complicated grief. Because on one hand, you know, we have a collective grief that half the country, maybe even more than half, said they wanted changes. And they wanted these changes to come about. And now that the changes are coming about, it’s getting more personal, it’s affecting people and our lives in ways we didn’t think. Oh, I know someone who’s lost their job. Are we going to have a post office? And all of that creates so much uncertainty and grief and uncertainty is a terrible mixture.

 

MARTIN: Terrible for what?

 

KESSLER: I think for all of us because we’re, we want safety in our world. We want order. I mean, if anything, grief is disorder. And when we have so much disorder in the world, it’s hard for our mind to make sense of it. And so that’s, it’s kind of also where we started this idea of the mixing of this collective grief that’s going on and the individual lives that are being touched and some of them destroyed and lost, and us trying to find our way. And if you’re not affected, you are watching it. And I would think many people are dealing with even what we call vicarious grief and trauma. That you’re just seeing so much pain in the world these days. And a lot of us aren’t prepared for it. I think certainly the young people are not prepared for this kind of collective grief we’re feeling and going into.

 

MARTIN: And what about these regional disasters that you may have seen on television or on your social media, but you haven’t experienced yourself? Like the wildfires in LA. Certainly terrifying, but even parts of LA weren’t affected. and then you see, you know, before that we had the floods. You know, there were floods in parts of the south. And there is this ongoing war in Ukraine, started by Russia. It has to be said. And we’re seeing the devastation that that has brought. And I wonder, even if you aren’t sort of directly affected by that, do you, I wonder if you feel that. If you are a reasonably sensitive person or if you are engaged with the news in any way, would you feel grief in response to that?

 

KESSLER: Yeah, it’s interesting. Social media has become the new town square. And one of the concepts is we need our grief witnessed. We want others to see our pain. And so that’s why you are looking at social media these days and people are showing you their house that’s been destroyed or the floods or you know, all the different tragedies that are happening ’cause we want others to know. And we’re all in different places.People often don’t realize we even have stages in disasters. That we went through the heroic phase where the, here in Los Angeles, the firefighters were there and they were putting out our fires and doing the best they could. We’re now in the honeymoon period where, oh, there’s gonna be FEMA and there’s GoFundMe and there’s this and there’s that. There’s so many things to help. And we’re going to move into the next phase where we’ll realize, wait, I’m not eligible for that? Oh, I’ve reached the max on that? And after we realize the limitations, we’re not going to build back as well and as quickly as we thought. That’s when the grief is going to set in. And that happens all around where the grief often comes when the world and the news has moved on.

 

MARTIN: So David, you know, we’re living in an increasingly secular world. A lot of people don’t consider themselves connected to faith traditions or they’ve made a conscious choice to disengage from them. Does that make it harder?

 

KESSLER: It does. And it, from a practical sense that a lot of times your grief support in your community was in your church, was in your synagogue, was in your place of worship. And so we don’t have those places to rely on. Also, many times, rituals that were in our religion brought us comfort. And I think we’re having defined ways to have rituals outside of our religion if that isn’t resonating for us. And yet so many people do find comfort in those religious aspects and spirituality. I think there is something about gathering.

Now the interesting thing is now many of us are gathering online, but there is something about gathering around the grief because the grief is part of the love and it does feel very sacred, and it does connect us in a way that feels somewhat spiritual.

 

MARTIN: We said earlier in this conversation that you said that, you know, we’re kind of illiterate at grief. Do you ever worry that we get tapped out on grief.

 

KESSLER: I do worry that we get grief fatigue. You know, it’s just how many things can I deal with? And then going back to the individual, wait a minute, I’ve had this loss, and Michel, I want to tell you about it. And you’re like, David, I can’t take another thing going on. And some of us are already empty from just dealing with Covid and all the other things in the world. So we are coming to this moment with an empty tank, having to deal with more grief fatigue.

 

MARTIN: Well, what do you recommend? I bet there are people saying, I feel cheated in a way because no one has seen the pain that I’m in. And I’m guessing there are other people who maybe even the same person who can say, well, I can’t be present for this person because I’m already dealing with my own stuff. And it leaves everybody feeling bruised and unheard. And what are your thoughts about that? How should we, how should we face this moment?

 

KESSLER: Well, I think one of the things is to realize, first of all, the grief is real. We need to name it. And it’s exhausting. And to know we’ve got grief brain, we’ve got mental exhaustion from all of that. The other thing is grief needs dedicated time. It doesn’t need a lot, but it needs dedicated time.

Michel, can we take five minutes just to talk about my dad? Can we, can we take five minutes just to talk about – I know you don’t want to talk about what’s going on in the world, but just five, I mean, can we – find those little pockets, even sometimes for our own grief. Can we just make our shower, maybe in the morning, our safe grief space?

The other thing I teach people is to be careful where and how you tell your story. Some of us have really nice curated social media where everyone’s really validating and there for us. For others, putting your grief out on your social media can be a dangerous thing.

The other thing is, you have to take care of ourselves during this time and set boundaries. You know, I’m gonna only watch these three new shows. I’m gonna remember to have fun. I’m going to take time for myself in these ways.

And I think the other thing we have to become good at is supporting others. That means when you tell me about your grief, for me not to respond with, oh, well, did you hear about that grief? Instead to just listen to you for a few moments. And I always tell people, don’t start a sentence with at least. Well, at least they died quickly. Or at least you don’t have this going on. Rather to see people and be with them.

 

MARTIN: Do, do you feel we could, could we be better? Do you think people can be better at this?

 

KESSLER: Absolutely. one of the things that is my most visited on my own website, is literally the best and worst things to say to people in grief. We don’t know what to say to people in grief. And we often make the mistake of ‘I just won’t say nothing ’cause I don’t want to do it wrong.’ And that’s really bad in itself.

And here’s the thing. People don’t need fixing ’cause they’re not broken. They’re in grief. They don’t need a solution. We just need to say ‘I don’t have the right words, but I’m going to be here with you as you walk through the grief of your home, your loved one, the world, you’re not walking alone.’ //

And I always teach people in grief, I know you have that one person. You tried to talk to them, it didn’t work out. You tried to talk to that, your sister, your aunt, your best friend. It didn’t work out. Stop going to them with your grief. They can still be your wonderful sister. But no matter how many times you walk up and down the aisle of a hardware store, you’ll never find milk <laugh>. If your sister’s grief illiterate, then you need to choose someone else who speaks grief.

 

MARTIN: Well, David Kessler, thanks so much for talking with us today.

 

KESSLER: Thank you so much.

And I always tell people, you know, our tendency is to run from grief, ’cause it’s the pain we wanna run from. But what we run from pursues us and what we face transforms us. 

MARTIN: Thank you.