Cole: This idea of keeping your grief moving is a simple practice that can help keep you connected to yourself, so that you don't end up self-forgetting or completely pushing away and trying to avoid and ignore this very big change that has happened in your life. You're not going to find a new normal if you freeze and don't do anything. You have to have one foot in front of the other at whatever pace that you go. You just need to keep moving.

Sarah: Welcome to Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about death, dying, grief, and also life. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and my guest today is Cole Imperi. She's a thanatologist, which is someone who studies death, dying, grief, loss, and bereavement. She's also the author of a book, "A Guide to Grief," written for tweens and teens, and she's well known for her TED Talk, “Shadow Loss,” which is a term she coined that we'll define later. In this conversation, Cole and I explore the six categories of grief, what it means to keep your grief moving, and why she believes our culture doesn't actually have a taboo around death, but around grief.

Welcome to Peaceful Exit.

[00:01:12] Cole: Hi, I'm very excited to be here today.

Sarah: And I hear that you are a botanist. I'm super excited to hear about hummingbird and butterfly gardens.

Cole: Yes. Yes. So at this part of my thanatological career, I'm a professional horticulturalist, and I have a unique specialization in hummingbirds. For a lot of people, hummingbirds are a sign from lost loved ones, from loved ones who have passed on. Depending on where you are in the world, it may be a cardinal or some other bird, but it's really, really common for hummingbirds. And I manage and maintain a hummingbird program at a world-renowned botanical garden here in Los Angeles. And one of the most common things that happens to me in my shifts is, uh, we have guests that come and visit our hummingbird gazebo, and they're actually coming to nurture their grief, to spend time with someone that they've lost through the presence of these wonderful, feathered creatures that seem to help make grief a little bit more manageable.

[00:02:15] Sarah:What a beautiful story. So is there like a enclosure where the hummingbirds are, or is it out in the open?

[00:02:20] Cole:Nope, it's out in the open. So there's a very large gazebo and then a surrounding garden area. And when I started maintaining that particular area, we only had, uh, I don't know, probably a population of a few dozen hummingbirds. And now we have hundreds.

[00:02:39] Sarah: I wanna come see your hummingbird garden. That sounds incredible. So you're a thanatologist, which is a word many listeners have probably never heard before. Can you define it for us and talk about what you do as a thanatologist?

[00:02:48] Cole:Sure. I have three different thanatological credentials, and thanatology is the study of death, dying, grief, loss, and bereavement. You know, you can intersect death or grief with just about anything, and you'll probably find a thanatologist there at that intersection that is specializing in it. I describe it like a backpack, because most people are something else first. For example, you may be a physician who deals with cancer in your patients. You may study and become a thanatologist because you want to be better at managing the death, dying, grief, and loss aspects of what your patients are navigating. For me, I've had a little bit of a unique pathway in thanatology. My career started about 2006. Oh gosh, so we're like 20 years in. And my work with thanatology has taken me around the world and has had me in a bunch of different roles.

Sarah: Were you always interested in this field?

[00:03:44] Cole: No. Um, and that's also a little bit different. I never would've wanted to work with death and dying when I, you know, I was like, "That doesn't sound fun. I'd rather be a party planner or something with sequins," you know? Like, give me glitter! And it, to be honest, it really just kept following me and showing up for me. I was very conflicted about it in my late 20s. Early in my career I felt a little bit trapped by it, it's difficult subject matter, and you are constantly exposed to lots of pain and suffering and difficulty and hurt and transformation. And it takes a lot of personal work and personal structure to be able to work in and around that over a long period of time. But I turned 40, and I'm still in thanatology and I still love it, and I have found a way that it lives within me.

[00:04:38] Sarah: One of my guests was talking about how he seeks out adventure to kind of balance what you have to hold when you're in this field. Is there something you do to help yourself?

[00:04:52] Cole: I focus a lot on, how do I make the intangible tangible? So for me, I turned to the outdoors, to nature, to sort of make the invisibility of my work into something tangible because gardens are places that are constantly dying and constantly being reborn, and that's actually what grief and loss are for humans on an individual level. Every time we have a loss, a part of us dies, a part of our life dies, and then we grieve, and the process of grieving is actually the process of getting seeds started in the ground. I think that is what has allowed me to continue in my work for as long as I have.

[00:05:32] Sarah: I was able to read your book, "A Guide to Grief," and I loved the metaphor of the seed for our tweens and teens. Talk a little bit about that seed metaphor 'cause I have tweens in my life who are grieving.

[00:05:46] Cole: My book, "A Guide to Grief," is written for 10 to 14-year-olds, and that's a really tricky age to write anything for for all kinds of reasons. But also because every tween is going to be attached to adults somewhere along, along the line. And a lot of times we adults also don't have education or information that's modern or science-based around, what is grief and loss? Think about it like it's a seed that you're given. And you might choose to keep that seed in a seed packet, just there waiting for - until you're ready to plant it. And you as the gardener, you are the difference between if something is just buried and left or if you're planting it with the hope of growth. Because we plant things in the ground, and then we're paying attention to what that seed needs to grow. We know it needs some light. We know it needs some soil. We know it needs some water. We know we need to check on it. And that's also sort of what the process is like with our grief. I describe it as we need to keep our grief moving. And so some days you need to keep your grief moving by going for a walk and putting your phone down, or you need to keep your grief moving by binging whatever TV show on on the TV all night long. Sometimes you need to go to the doctor. Sometimes you gotta pay your bills. That's all part of keeping your grief moving. It's that pattern, that behavior of checking in, and it's an ordinary process. But the ordinary is what is the doorway to the magnificent, to transformation, to peace, and towards finding whatever your new normal is.

[00:07:19] Sarah: I'm kind of chuckling 'cause I feel like I should give you a disclaimer right now to our listeners, that we are not suggesting your tweens stay up all night binge-watching their favorite program. I'm switching gears here just a sec, kinda pulling back a little bit because I loved your book, I wanna talk more about that. You said that we don't have a taboo around death but a taboo around grief.

[00:07:39] Cole: Most of our pop culture is very all about the death. Our news headlines leads with stories of who died, right? We talk about deaths, it's in our TV shows and our movies. It's even in commercials. We don't have a problem with death because it's everywhere, and it's part of what entertains us. Death becomes a waypoint also for historical retellings, part of how history is documented. But we tend to look away when the grief shows up, because that is not as easy to comprehend and understand as death. We understand what death is. Somebody stops living. But grief is more complicated because we don't grieve the same way, and we don't know what to say, and we don't know how to respond, and we don't know if it's okay if we show up or how. So my opinion as a thanatologist is that we don't really have a taboo with death at all. The taboo is around grief, because that's actually where the discomfort comes from, the avoidance comes from, the fear. And grief is where sometimes we get lost, Death in some ways is more tangible because it has edges. It has starts and stops, and we can get factual information about it, but grief is not the same, and so that's why I think there's a natural tendency to avoid it.

[00:09:02] Sarah:Yeah. In digging in around the fear of death, oftentimes I find people are afraid of pain more than they're afraid of dying.

[00:09:09] Cole: Yup. Afraid of pain, the unknown, just not - you know, something you've never done before.

[00:09:13] Sarah: And it might be grief around losing your mobility, your ability to function, your sort of anticipating death versus the actual death. So you think grief is scarier than death for people?

[00:09:22] Cole: Oh, absolutely, because you can't fit it in a box. And there's no start date, and there's no stop date. Grief culturally is not something that we have a consistent sort of support mechanism around. So for example, when there's a death loss, a death loss is when a human or animal that we love dies. For humans, it's normal and expected that we're gonna have a funeral. We're gonna have a designated time that we show up, and we can cry, and we see each other grieve, and the witnessing happens. That's built in. That's baked in. But what if you are grieving a shadow loss, which is the death of something and not someone? Like, that could be that you got fired and you lost your job and you are grieving that because that job was much more to you than just a clock in and clock out. Or what if you're grieving a medical diagnosis? When I was in my early 20s, I was diagnosed as infertile, and I grieved, and there was no funeral for that. There was no place that I could go to have my grief witnessed. And modern research, modern grief science, it's very clear. What is so important for grievers is that their grief is socially validated by others, and that comes from our family, that comes from our friends, that comes from any instance where you're talking about what you're grieving and the person you're talking to validates you and supports you and doesn't say, “Oh, you're infertile? Yeah, but nobody died." That kind of thing. That is not socially validating, and that's really harmful to our mental health.

Sarah: When someone is grieving, it can be so hard, often impossible to see the forest for the trees. How can people try to find value in the pain they feel when they grieve?

Cole: That question is something that I have wavered around in my own thanatological work over the last however many years. And I'll tell you what I waver between. Sometimes I waver between, the value of your pain is - it may not have value for you personally, and I think that's okay. And I think it's something that you can have conflicted feelings about and feel like you can't manage. The other side of that coin is that pain is, some would argue, the point of being human. All the pain and the difficulty is what, as time goes on, helps us really connect with what is joyful, what is happy, what is positive. You cannot live a whole life without experiencing pain and expect to be happy. And I think pain is a critical part of the process of becoming a person that you like.

[00:12:01] Sarah:You're perhaps best known for coining the term shadow loss. Explain what it is. I know you've mentioned it. I love language, and so we talk about words on this podcast quite a bit. So why is naming it so profoundly useful for you?

[00:12:17] Cole: Oh, yes. I love language too, and the term shadow loss, it refers to a loss in life, not of life. So it can be things like divorce or a medical diagnosis or a dream that dies. And what's different about shadow loss and why it fills a gap for people is it is a non-clinical term. That means you cannot be diagnosed with it. It's only something that you can claim for yourself. And this is something that's really important for grievers and people navigating life after a loss, is being able to claim it or not. So for example, you could have two different people getting a divorce, but one person would say, "Ugh, my divorce was a shadow loss. I'm grieving the death of my marriage. I'm grieving the loss of my spouse's family. I'm grieving the loss of holidays. You know, Christmas will never be the same again." But then you could have somebody else who's like,"No, I'm not grieving. My divorce is not a shadow loss." Since I coined that word over a decade ago, it's appeared in usage without me pushing it or anything in, like, 30 different countries and multiple languages. So it's hopped out of English as well. And part of why I think that's happened is because being able to take a complex loss experience, a shadow loss, and being able to just save all that emotional labor and time is tremendously important to a griever. And I learned this firsthand. This word was developed because I needed it. I had been, um, the victim of an assault, and I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder six months after the event. And one of the things that I learned that contributed to the development of PTSD within myself was the fact that I had to retell the trauma to friends and family and coworkers, because nobody died and they didn't understand why I was so affected by this, why I was grieving. And so for me, this word was what I needed.

[00:14:22] Sarah: It sounds like you've really metabolized the grief from that attack in a way that language has helped you get there.

[00:14:28] Cole: Yes. Having the right words really makes a difference. That's why I think sometimes, people they'll be, you know, 10, 15 years into trying to figure out a medical diagnosis, and it is really powerful when people get an actual medical diagnosis because then the unknown is now known. It's upsetting to have any chronic illness or condition, but if you know what it is, then you've got next steps, and that's why I think language is so important is it suddenly puts you on a path that has a name and a label, and now you can communicate to other people to get down that path safely.

[00:15:03] Sarah:Yeah. I remember many years ago when my mother was diagnosed with cancer, they could not figure out what kind of cancer, so there was no name for it, and it really caused the family so much anxiety not knowing what it was, and the doctors didn't know how to treat it, and it's complicated when there's no language around it.

[00:15:21] Cole: It is. It is. And it's so wild too when you just think about the gap between this unknown and discomfort, and some comfort and being known, is a word. I often describe, I work with a lot of clinical professionals and academics. I myself am not a clinician, but this is the thing that I talk to them a lot about, 'cause I'm like, "You know, are you giving your patients and clients non-clinical plain language in addition to the diagnostic terms and criteria?" Because knowledge is power, vocabulary is really important and helpful and words, in my opinion, are a form of medicine. They can be healing.

[00:15:32] Sarah: Words as a form of medicine. [CI: Absolutely] you will be quoted. You said that sometimes a person grieves a shadow loss harder than the death of a parent. Why do you think we resist giving ourselves permission to fully grieve these sorts of losses?

[00:16:13] Cole: It's one of the most common messages that I've gotten into my website over the last 10 plus years is, I will get people who fill out my contact form. And they're very conflicted because their dog died, for example, and they are grieving that dog more than they grieve their own mother. And they feel guilt, and they feel shame because society raises us all, the culture raises us all, to be like, you know, you grieve these things the most, and there's an order of operations. And it's really confusing when that's not true for you in real life. And I will always respond with, "But is it true for you? Then I believe you, and I don't judge you for it." You don't actually get a choice in how deeply connected you are to something. And when those losses show up, sometimes the big awakening is us realizing, oh my gosh, I didn't realize that I was not this close to that person, or that you were. And grief is often the thing that contributes to an individual down the long, lifelong journey of coming to accept what is true about you

[00:17:27] Sarah: Do you think our culture's shifting? Do you think we're starting to accept shadow loss as a feature of our everyday lives?

[00:17:35] Cole:Absolutely. Fifteen years ago, there were not prevalent things out there like death cafes or death over dinner. Have you heard about the wind phones that originated in Japan and have come over to the US and Canada? There is grief yoga every Sunday in downtown LA. So we have more instances of grief in public and not just at cemeteries.

Sarah: Say more about wind phones

Cole: Yes. So this originated out of Japan, and there is a website that you can go to to see if there's a wind phone near you. And usually you'll have an individual on private property where they will acquire some sort of old telephone, maybe like an old payphone or something, and they'll set up a space. And what you can do is you can come there, pick up the phone, and have a conversation with your deceased loved one. Now, the phone is not working. Nothing is recorded. It is a private space to be able to keep your grief moving, is how I would describe it.And I think it's beautiful. Humans will never stop trying to connect with and maintain relationships with their loved ones. Sometimes they do it through hummingbirds, and sometimes they do it through wind phones, and I wholeheartedly approve of any method that makes sense for you.

Sarah: Well, in your book, "A Guide to Grief," you explain that grief is not a feeling like sad, happy, hopeless, and joyful, but rather a process. Why is this an important distinction, and would it be easier if grief was just a feeling?

[00:19:26] Cole: Twenty, 30, 40-plus years ago, the sort of scientific understanding of grief was that it was sort of an emotional state,you could argue that grief was a synonym for sad, or depressed, or deeply wrecked. But now, modern science, we now know that grief is a response to loss, and there are six different categories where you will have signs of grief show up. The reason why this is really important is because it helps us get better at seeing what our grief looks like and helps us get better at seeing what it looks like in other people. Fifteen years ago, I was speaking at a retirement community and everybody lined up at the end, and I noticed there was one woman who kept moving to the very back of the line. So she finally got to me, the last person, and she said, "I need to tell you something because my entire life has just changed." And she said, "You have permission to tell people about this." So, this woman in the 1950s, she had three kids at home, and her husband was the town attorney. She lived in a little town in Ohio that had, like, one stoplight, and she was the third, fourth generation, so lived there her whole life. Her whole family lived there. Her sister died, and it was the day of the funeral. She got the kids up, made them breakfast, sent them off to school. Husband went to work. They met at the church for the funeral and then drove to the cemetery, buried her sister. Husband went back to work, she gets in her car to go home, and she got lost. She got lost in her one-stoplight town that she grew up in, that her parents grew up in, that her grandparents grew up in. So she stopped at the gas station, she had to call her husband and say, "I don't know how to get home." And he's like, "What? You're crazy. What is wrong with you?" So he's ticked off. And so she said the rest of her life, there was always this dark cloud attached to her name in town about the day that she lost her marbles. And she realized after my talk and hearing, learning about modern grief science, that she was a griever who favored one of these categories in particular, which is cognitive. So the six categories that you will have signs of your grief in, you're gonna favor a few of the categories, and they are emotional, spiritual, social, physical, cognitive, and behavioral. So sometimes when people are grieving, you may not be an emotional griever. I'm an example of that, I'm not really very emotional. Cognitive stuff will show up. You might put your keys in the refrigerator, or you might leave your purse behind, and you never do that. Well, that's what happened to this woman, and so she learned this information, was immediately able to identify her own lived experience, and it gave her a gigantic sense of peace because now she knew nothing was actually wrong with her. She was grieving. But because at the time we only taught that grief was sadness, she had no way to even look for it. And that, to this day, this makes me emotional every time I tell it, because this woman was in her 90s and had suffered because of this her entire life. And this is why education about death, dying, grief, and loss is actually really important. It can free people from generations of pain

[00:22:17] Sarah: It also speaks to the fact that labeling someone can be so damaging.

[00:22:23] Cole: And then you start to internalize that and you're like, "Well, maybe I have lost my marbles," right? You know, you start to believe the stories that other people tell you about yourself.

[00:22:30] Sarah:Let's go over those six categories or symptoms of grief. You said physical, emotional, spiritual, social, cognitive, behavioral.

[00:22:38] Cole: What do you think you are? Do you think you favor a category?

[00:22:42] Sarah: Oh, good question. I think I'm in a little bit of all of them.

[00:22:43] Cole: Yep. Mm-hmm. Well, it's normal throughout your life. Like, think about how you grieved when you were a teenager versus now. It's very normal to see shifts in yourself for how you grieved different points of, of your life. And that can also, is why it's sometimes tricky, because sometimes we're grieving in kind of a new way for us because it's another loss and it's five years later. And that can be what makes grief complex because it's not neat and tidy. It doesn't show up the same exact way every single time. But physical, I think, is a really important category to talk about because most people don't realize that you can actually have physical symptoms. So for example, my lower back when I'm grieving - I'm a physical griever. My lower back goes out, I bloat, and I have horrifically chapped lips that I cannot get unchapped every time without fail. I've lost my sister, I've lost lots of family members, and every time the chapped lips show up. But I didn't know chapped lips were a documented evidence of grief until probably 2015.

[00:23:48] Sarah: Are there other physical symptoms? I didn't know about the chapped lips. Are there others?

[00:23:53] Cole:There's more than 50 that have been connected to this. Most people will experience digestive upset, um, or heartburn, things like that. The Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation's website has a really nice accessible list of physical symptoms of grief that are very common. But I also tell people that, you know, it's the body that you're living in. Ao if you hear this information and you're thinking, "Oh," then it probably is. Part of the, quote-unquote, "work" of grief is having to pay attention to yourself, which is sometimes the very thing that we don't want to do when we're grieving because it seems like a lot, but physical symptoms are really, really common.

[00:24:30] Sarah:Talk a little bit about how spiritual grief might manifest

[00:24:34] Cole: I am a clinically trained chaplain, and this is one of the things that all chaplains are taught. Most chaplains end up doing a lot of grief counseling because losses are often the trigger for pain around, "Why am I here? Is God real? If God is benevolent, then why did XYZ happen?" This is also called existential pain, the pain of existence. It's these really big, painful, deep questions that are not neat and tidy, and that usually don't end up with an answer that makes you feel better. Answers to these big, spiritual, faith-based questions can often be uncomfortable. They're not like comfy blankets, and it's very difficult navigating these spiritual questions on top of navigating life after loss. I don't know if it's helpful to hear this, but it's very common.

[00:25:32] Sarah: I would imagine the category of social grief would just be, "I wanna crawl under my bed covers and never come out."

[00:25:41] Cole: Many people will notice shifts in their social needs. Some people will find that they become more introverted, or perhaps all of a sudden they're social butterflies. There are quite a number of people who, they're grieving but all of a sudden they wanna go to every event, they wanna go out to eat, they wanna try new restaurants, they wanna start new classes or take new things, and they wanna be around people. And the opposite is also. I think the thing that is most helpful for people to know is that just a shift in what is normal for you socially is normal after a loss. And that's because grief shows up to help you, but grief is a response to loss. And grief is a form of stress, and stress is anything that is taking resources from your body and your brain. And it takes work, it takes energy, it takes emotional energy, it takes cognitive ability to grieve. We have an increase of usage on all of our resources. We've gotta make adjustments somewhere. And so sometimes we pull back on social commitments because we cannot have more inputs there. But we're all wired differently, and some of us feel relief when we're around other people and around other people's energy, but you can also have the very opposite experience.

[00:26:57] Sarah:Mary Frances O'Connor just came out with “The Grieving Body.” [CI: Yes] It's a fabulous, her research is wonderful. You told us a beautiful story about cognitive grief, where the woman was lost in her own town. What about behavioral?

[00:27:11] Cole:Probably the best example of a behavioral shift has to do with your sleeping patterns, and this often surprises people in some ways. You may suddenly be waking up at the same odd time in the middle of the night. Like, you're up from 2:22 AM to 4:46 like clockwork, and you're kind of doing that weeks on end. There's a really beautiful cultural tradition or belief around that. If you're grieving, if you're an active griever, and you're waking up in that same range every night, what you can do is embrace that as a great grieving silence. Some people have developed really beautiful middle-of-the-night grieving practices where they get up and they write in their journal, or they get up and they read the Bible, or they get up and they color, or they get up and they sit by the fireplace and look out the window. And so sometimes those middle-of-the-night wake-ups that don't normally happen for you can also be opportunities for you to discover maybe a little tiny slice of something a little special that can come as part of your grief experience

[00:28:11] Sarah:Yeah, I love how you frame that. They say that the distance between us and the other side is thinner -

[00:28:17] Cole: Yup. Yup, about 4:00 AM. That's when the veil is thinnest, as they say. Yes.

[00:28:22] Sarah: So in "A Guide to Grief," you offer advice for how readers can keep their grief moving. Why is it important to you to include these tips, and what does it mean to keep grief moving?

[00:28:34] Cole: The idea is that you want to have a positive relationship with your grief, but that takes work. So how do you do that? By keeping your grief moving. And this is a way that helps in most people's brains, because then they're like, "Okay, keeping my grief moving." And so I tell people, get up every day and say, "Okay. Good morning, self. Good morning, grief. What do you need today?" Listen to it. It might tell you, "You know what? We need to have a nice bath. We need to do an everything shower today." This idea of keeping your grief moving is a simple practice that can help keep you connected to yourself so that you don't end up self-forgetting or completely pushing away and trying to avoid and ignore this very big change that has happened in your life. You're not going to find new normal if you freeze and don't do anything. You have to have one foot in front of the other at whatever pace that you go. You just need to keep moving.

[00:29:26] Sarah:Your upcoming book is called “Grief Is the Way Home.” What do you mean by that, and why is grief a homecoming of sorts?

[00:29:34] Cole: I view loss as this force that takes us out of what we knew as home. It changes the fabric of our life. A person is gone, or a big part of our life is gone, or a, a tragedy happens. And so loss is the disruptive force, and home is where we should find peace, right? And grief is what shows up to help us get to that next home, in whatever form it looks like and wherever it's located. And that is why the book is named that, because I believe that's the most essential sort of component for the way that I try to teach and talk about death, dying, grief, and loss, and I think it makes sense to people, right? Everybody understands what home is, um, whether or not you feel like you have a home right now that you like or you don't or you're working towards building the home that you wanna have.

[00:30:28] Sarah: Is there a death loss in your life that has changed the way you work in the world?

[00:30:34] Cole: My sister Christina died, and I will share part of why that was so impactful was because she was my half-sister. And her death deeply impacted my work and perspective on people who have some layer of complexity to losses. I refer to Christina as my sister. I don't feel the need to say, "Oh, she's my half-sister, she's not like a whole sister." But when she died, I was very often met with people saying, "Oh, well, she was your half-sister, so you're not grieving as much." And she was the sibling that I had sort of a deepest layer of connection to. She and I both were these sort of like kitchen, baking, taking care of family. We loved genealogy. We loved knowing where we came from, and that's gone. Losing a sibling is really complex because you're losing somebody that knew you in every form that you have been. My sister is always present in my mind's eye in the work that I do. I'm desperately sad that she is gone, but she is a really important relationship presently for me, especially as I am about to become the age that she was when she died. I guess I just want to share this because I'd like to just speak for a minute to sibling loss. It's very complex. It's very impactful. I don't know if you've lost a sibling or any of your listeners have, but that is a loss that really forms and shapes you moving forward.

Sarah: What does a peaceful exit mean to you?

Cole: That makes me think of the term a good death, which I don't like, which might surprise people. The reason I don't like a good death is because death is not something we have control over. We often die the way that we lived. A peaceful exit to me, hopefully one without medical intervention. Hopefully one by a window with hummingbirds and beagles in my bed. That is bliss. That's how I would love to be able to go out.