Sneaky Grief with Lisa Keefauver

Social worker Lisa Keefauver was just 40 years old when her husband died from cancer in her arms. She has since become an outspoken grief activist, helping people identify, understand, live with, and talk about their grief through her book and podcast, "Grief Is a Sneaky Bitch." Lisa tells Sarah why scuba diving is a metaphor for life, how to metabolize your grief over a lifetime, and what to do when grief catches you off guard in the most unexpected moments.

You can find more information on Lisa's work at www.lisakeefauver.com

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Lisa Keefauver: Every time I showed up in a public space “fine” — I'm using that in air quotes — there was always this pull to scream from the bottom of my soul, “I'm fine in this moment and I'm absolutely completely wrecked.”

[00:00:20] Sarah Cavanaugh: Welcome to Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about death, dying, grief — all parts of life. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and my guest today is Lisa Keefauver. As you'll hear with Lisa, it's not only what she says, it's how she says it. She's on a mission to change the way we talk about grief and loss. Lisa's a social worker and a self-described grief activist who helps people navigate death with honesty, humor, and humanity. She became a widow when she was only in her forties. And now hosts her own podcast, “Grief Is a Sneaky Bitch,” and has written [00:01:00] a book by the same name. We talked about the origins of her signature phrase, how it's possible to be both fine and completely wrecked in the same moment, and why grief can cause you to be unrecognizable even to yourself. But also — how to find your way back.

Right out of the gate, I wanna say, when I opened your book and there was a picture of you as a young diver, I was super excited because I'm also a scuba diver. Tell me a little bit about what you learned in scuba diving.

[00:01:34] Lisa Keefauver: I understood early on the sort of wisdom of the instructions of diving. The instruction was dive in, breathe deep. But there's a third part to that instruction that I didn't really understand until the worst thing happened to me, which is buddy breathe when necessary. And for those of you who are not scuba divers, buddy breathing is just simply this reminder that you never dive [00:02:00] alone. You'll always dive with a dive buddy. And that when you're underwaters things can happen, including your air running out. And so sometimes we need to share our air with other people. We also need to know how to communicate that we need it and signal for it. So that motto, dive in, breathe deep, and buddy breathe when necessary, was in the back of my mind. But what happens when we don't jump into the water, when we're shoved into the deep waters? That might be a death loss. That might be a critical. Diagnoses. Could be a divorce, it could be a trauma or an injury. It could be the death of a dream. Then what do we do? And so many of us, not just us scuba divers, really haven't learned the part where we need to ask for and receive help from others. That's so critical to how we navigate, you know, the darkest times of our lives.

[00:02:54] Sarah Cavanaugh: I think a lot of people have trouble asking for help. You know, there are a few people who find it easy, but I certainly don't.[00:03:00]

[00:03:00] Lisa Keefauver: I don't either. And I think when it comes to saying things like, I'm not good at asking for help or I'm not good at receiving help, I offer you this reframe, which is: I don't have a lot of practice asking for help. I don't have a lot of practice receiving help. Our words matter. They make worlds. And so when we say something over and over again, even as casually — I'm not picking on you, Sarah, 'cause I've said it too, we all say it. And when we say something casually like, I'm not good at this, well that's a pretty all or nothing black or white statement, which leaves no room for the actual complexity of our lives. It’s that I don't have a lot of practice.

[00:03:37] Sarah Cavanaugh: The title of your book and your podcast, Grief Is a Sneaky Bitch — it's provocative, it's disarming. How did you come up with it and how do people usually respond? Because the people that I've told what book I'm reading, it's kind of one or the other.

[00:03:52] Lisa Keefauver: The backstory of it, beesides that I've always loved a judicious use of cussing in my life since I was a teen, [00:04:00] really came from a conversation I had. So my husband died when I was 40. He was 44. It was after a year and a half being misdiagnosed. They finally ran the scan to find out he had a grapefruit size brain tumor, and he died in my arms two and a half weeks later. So needless to say, nobody around me had understood widowhood or partner loss, and I was maybe a year and change out and I was with a new friend at a party. And she was somebody who had experienced the stillbirth of her son, so she understood grief. She was somebody I could be honest with about my grief. I'm at a party and I'm actually laughing, which we could talk about later, and then also feeling guilty for laughing and how weird it was. And I reached in my purse and I had a printed out picture of Eric, which I didn't usually carry around pictures. I reached in, pulled out this picture of Eric and I and burst into tears in front of all my new friends slash strangers, and I locked eyes with my friend Autumn, and we sort of ushered into the other room and I was just ugly, snotty, heaving, crying, as it were. [00:05:00] And I just looked at her and said, grief is such a sneaky bitch. And then that sort of became our tagline with each other over the years. And when I knew that I was gonna shift my work as a social worker to specialize in grief and launch my company, Reimagining Grief and the podcast — because I had said that to enough people, I thought, this is it. Ninety nine percent of my experience with people have been like, yes, yes, yes. But the reason I like it, because I love language and linguistics, and as you said, it's provocative, is there's a double meaning to grief is a sneaky bitch. The first is grief is a sneaky bitch, meaning it's inherently messy and non-linear and it comes in waves and it's reignited by new losses or struggles that we face, et cetera. But that is in complete contrast to the cultural story, which is you can only experience grief if someone dies. You move through the [00:06:00] five stages of grief, like some sort of to-do list. Maybe you seek a therapist or talk to other people so that you don't get your grief on your friends, and then voila, you know, in a year you're done,

[00:06:10] Sarah Cavanaugh: Or in a week and you go back to work.

[00:06:10] Lisa Keefauver: Or in a week or a month, depending on, yeah, I was called back to work two weeks after my husband died and I was at the bedside of my friend Joe when he died. I had to go back into work that day. In my estimation, so much of our unnecessary suffering in grief is the gap between the story we're told about grief and the lived experience that most of us have with grief, and that gap is where we suffer. So grief is a sneaky bitch is cheeky. I've had rabbis come on my show and tell me it was the best name of a podcast ever. But again, I think it's because there's a knowingness to it, and I definitely had a person or two say to me like, oh, maybe you should change it. And I just, no, I'm not interested. It means something to me. It means something to people. My whole sort of undercurrent of my work as a [00:07:00] speaker, as a thinker, as a grief activist, as a writer, is pushing back against the harmful cultural narratives that seep their way into us. Not just in grief, by the way, but in all domains.

[00:07:11] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah, I think we're kindred spirits in that way Trying to really change the narrative around death and end of life because I think, you know, we're constantly intellectualizing it and saying, from a practical standpoint, in this society, this is how it should go. Tell me, how do you define grief?

[00:07:30] Lisa Keefauver: Yeah. Well, grief is another one that I think is a little tricky. I offer up this metaphor that I think has come in handy for a lot of people. Our lives are filled with millions of experiences. We are storytelling creatures and a death loss, a profound loss — it's akin to the manuscript of our lives being torn to shreds. And then handed back to us with no instructions on how to rewrite or live our lives. And grief is the response, and grieving is the action, is what we're doing. People often say they're unmoored, [00:08:00] ungrounded, untethered. All of that is because we live in story. That's how humans operate. And when we experience a profound loss, a fundamental part of our story is shredded, and we're having to sort of reorient and rewrite and pivot. That's true by the way, when great new changes happen too, not just losses, but for sure in grief. But there's a lot of practical things we need to understand about grief. Grief impacts our cognitive, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual well being. We know that there's a cognitive impairment in the brain. We know our immunity is lowered. We know our risk of heart disease and heart attack is higher. We know people experience profound secondary losses because of the friendships and relationships that end because people don't know how to show up. Grief can bring anger and resentment and frustration, longing, despair, hopelessness. It's not just sad. And those things can cycle through in the matter of minutes or hours. We can hold multiple emotions at [00:09:00] once.

[00:09:00] Sarah Cavanaugh: And joy.

[00:09:01] Lisa Keefauver: And joy! We can have grief and joy. I mean, I just launched with an incredible artist, a brand new line of empathy cards, grief cards. One of the ones I really wanted to have on there is a message that says, you can be grateful for what you have and grieving what you lost.

[00:09:18] Sarah Cavanaugh: And I think from a very young age, we're taught a certain thing of whether it be about death of a family member or about how they grieve following that loss. That really imprints on you, and I think you ask in the book as I do in my own course, what was your first experience and how did that play out? In my own case, there was no talk of the person who was gone. There was no grieving. But I don't hold it against them because there was no language for it. And I think that's where you and I have so much to talk about because I love language. I love how we come up with the stories of our lives, but also how we change them and how we evolve these stories. And you are a narrative therapist.

[00:09:59] Lisa Keefauver: I [00:10:00] don't carry licensure anymore, but yes, I'm a narrative therapy trained social worker. So narrative therapy and narrative identity is crucial to how I work with people.

[00:10:10] Sarah Cavanaugh: Can you define what that is for us?

[00:10:11] Lisa Keefauver: So part of what the narrative approach is, is to ask people, like I did to you earlier about the word practice, to sort of interrogate, what are the words you're using and the stories that you're telling? Are they your stories? Are they somebody else's stories? Like maybe a family member or culture? Is the story serving you? Is it limiting you? Is it keeping you stuck, or is it opening up possibilities? These are really curious questions. A narrative approach really helps people see themselves as in relationship to the issue at hand, which is how I think about grief. I think we're in relationship with grief. If you think about the fact that you're in a relationship with grief versus thinking, I am grief, or even not —

[00:10:55] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. Or you don't wanna be codependent with grief.

[00:10:56] Lisa Keefauver: You know, you said earlier like it's not intellectual, and I wrote in the book, [00:11:00] I've said this many times, believe me, if you could intellectualize your way out of grief, I would've done it. That is my jam. But you can't. It's really much more about being curious, about noticing with a lot of self-compassion. It's a lot of mindfulness practices. For so much of our grief, we don't have answers.

[00:11:19] Sarah Cavanaugh: Your career went from studying narrative therapy to what you call a grief activist. I love that term.

[00:11:26] Lisa Keefauver: It wasn't until my husband died and I was required to return to work two weeks later, surrounded by amazing social workers who I'm still friends with today, and who I love, that I really recognized even in the helping professions we have completely misunderstood the expansiveness and the pervasiveness of grief in our lives. So that planted the seed to doing what I'm doing now. I did another dive in, breathe deep and moved to Austin, Texas and helped co-found a nonprofit that helped cancer patients. I was doing a lot of public speaking, radio and tv, and [00:12:00] I had a health scare, a different one than the one I went through recently, which turned out to be manageable and doable. But what I recognized in that time was how could I have had all this personal experience with loss, professional experience with loss, and not do something with it? And so when I recovered from that illness and found my bearings again, much to the chagrin of everybody else in my life, don't do this at home kids, I quit my job and said, I'm creating a company focused on grief. You can imagine there was a lot of crickets in the room.

[00:12:30] Sarah Cavanaugh: Just like saying you're gonna be an artist.

[00:12:31] Lisa Keefauver: They're like, oh Lord. And also like, isn't this gonna make you so sad and blah, blah blah. But you know, we need to change the conversation. And the reason activist, I toyed around with it for a while. You know, a lot of people try to put the label grief expert. I don't like that label. What I felt very strongly about my particular contribution to the growing grief conversations that we're having in this country is a kind of rallying cry, a kind of activism, a kind of [00:13:00] bringing to light the issues at hand. That's what activists do. They kind of push back against the cultural norms or the policies or the language of how we speak about things.

[00:13:18] Sarah Cavanaugh: So you lost Eric, your husband to brain cancer in 2011. What surprised you about your own grief following Eric's death?

[00:13:29] Lisa Keefauver: How much time do we have? There's so many things I didn't understand then, one of which was the cognitive impact of grief. One of the first surprises was just how mentally exhausted I was. And then I think the other was just the way in which well-meaning people really felt so uncomfortable or would try to fix my pain. There were some people who were able to [00:14:00] hold my pain and to not fix me, but just how many people thought that grief was a problem to be solved, and that if I just went to enough therapy, if I just said my daily gratitudes, if I just focused on my daughter — my daughter was seven. So I was all of a sudden also an only parent and the only breadwinner and you know, an only parent to a grieving child who was adopted, so also who had already experienced profound loss in her life prior to the death of my husband. I didn't understand how easily it can impact relationships and other friendships and the kind of profound losses that you can experience as a wake of that because people just don't know how to hold your pain. And then I guess I would say too, the way I could have a good moment or a good hour and then seemingly out of nowhere, the rug be pulled out from under me. And then I would feel guilty that I had a good minute or a good hour. [00:15:00] It's never away from your mind, ever. You know, I would be at a party and maybe even enjoying myself, which was an incredible thing. You couldn't have told me — I didn't understand how planes were flying and cars were working when they peeled me out of his hospital bed. So the fact that I was at a party laughing and … but I never laughed for long without looking around the room and always thinking, what were his friends thinking about the fact that I was laughing? And what did they not understand, and that they were gonna now think, oh, Lisa's okay now. Every time I showed up in a public space “fine” — I'm using that in air quotes — there was always this pull to scream from the bottom of my soul, “I'm fine in this moment, and I'm absolutely completely wrecked.”

[00:15:45] Sarah Cavanaugh: I usually say fine is a four letter word that starts with F

[00:15:49] Lisa Keefauver: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:15:51] Sarah Cavanaugh: And you write about feeling like this is a parallel universe you're living in, and that's what you're describing after Eric's death. It's like you're in it, but you're not in it, [00:16:00] and you're watching yourself, and you're watching other people's reactions, and how you wanted people to pay attention to you, but also just don't look at me at the same time.

[00:16:09] Lisa Keefauver: I think I said in the book, I wish I had a T-shirt or a name tag that said like, pay attention to me but also fuck off. Because there is that pull of like, I need you to pay attention. You don't understand how devastating it is, but also like I can't handle the gaze, especially the attention that came with either pity, which is very different than empathy people, or the attention that came from trying to cheer you up or fix the problem. So you're like living in this parallel world, you're looking through the veil. I was never not aware how other people were receiving me.

[00:16:41] Sarah Cavanaugh: The phrase, time heals all wounds. I think that when I talk about losing someone to death, you're living with that for the rest of your life. My mother died 23 years ago. I still have grief around that. Although it's different, it metabolizes differently and we're all taught to believe that, oh, just [00:17:00] wait a little while and it'll be fine. And you mentioned that earlier, but what does time have to do with grief?

[00:17:06] Lisa Keefauver: What's your mom's name? Do you wanna share it with me?

Sarah Cavanaugh: Jane.

Lisa Keefauver: Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. 23 years later. It was 14 years ago this summer that Eric passed, and that's so surreal to me. It feels like forever ago and yesterday. I'll say this in a few ways. Time does matter in that you can't hurry through metabolizing your grief in the first three months because that's what you gotta do. You need the holidays to come and go, the birthdays to come and go, the ceremonies, the events, the day-to-day minutiae of your life, you get sick, et cetera. You need just the lived experience that happens in the wake of time after the death of someone you love. But time is not enough. It's necessary not sufficient, meaning if we just allow time to pass and we don't turn towards our grief, we don't learn how to carry the weight, we don't have ritual, we don't tend to our physical and cognitive and spiritual wellbeing. [00:18:00] We don't turn towards purpose and meaning. We don't engage in building this continuing story of our lives. Well, then we're gonna just be surviving. There's no healing in that. So I think time heals all wounds acts as if, first of all, that it's just so easy to bear the weight of profound grief, which it is not. It's the most difficult though natural thing that we do. But also that there isn't work to be done. To do that metabolizing, to build the musculature to carry the weight of grief, to build our capacity to regulate our nervous system when the stress of grief is overwhelming us, to increase our capacity to ask for the buddy breathing, to ask for help and receive help. That's all active, even if it's passive, meaning getting sleep by the way, which is one of the best things you can do for yourself, especially in early grief, right? Grief is not meant to be navigated alone. So that's another thing that [00:19:00] time heals all wounds does is, it puts it on the griever to just like, don't worry. Just sit there and let time pass and we don't have any responsibility as your community, and you don't have any responsibility as the person moving through it.

[00:19:15] Sarah Cavanaugh: There's a great chapter in your book, uh, people say stupid shit. Yeah. Uh, so, so what stupid shit have you said and what stupid shit was said to you? Is there any way to avoid saying stupid shit? And maybe an example of something that someone said that was really life giving.

[00:19:34] Lisa Keefauver: All of the above. Okay. I'm just trying to think of which order First, let me start with the thing that people are probably mostly curious about. You're gonna say stupid shit sometimes. You're gonna get it wrong. So don't let that keep you from showing up anyways. My grief support motto is show up, shut up and listen, and keep showing up. People say to me, I didn't wanna say the wrong thing, I didn't wanna make them think about them. I didn't wanna, so I didn't show up. But I wanna tell you, [00:20:00] when you don't show up, that’s saying something. When you don't show up, you're saying, your pain scares me. I don't recognize you. I don't know how to be around you. Actually, there's not a lot of things to say. It's much more about your energy, your presence, and your engagement, and your consistency of showing up again. So to the things that people said to me as I'm in the hospital taking my 44-year-old husband off life support, after I brought my seven-year-old to say goodbye to her dad, one of his friends came up to me and said, don't worry, Lisa, he's gonna be in a better place soon. I still can't believe to this day I didn't punch him in the face, which I did not, but I thought about it. People said to me at his memorial service, don't worry, you're young, you'll find love again. A few years later, I was on a double date with somebody new, ugh. And somehow my person who had introduced us said, oh yeah, Lisa's husband died of a, of brain cancer. And this guy said, oh, my ex-wife had a brain tumor too. It's just like my ex-wife, [00:21:00] except she had surgery and actually she's fine now. Those are just some examples. The shoulds, the instructions, you should do this, you shouldn't do this. Any sentence that starts with, at least, because it negates. At least says you're not allowed to feel grief. You know, at least they're not suffering anymore.

[00:21:14] Sarah Cavanaugh: Do you feel like you can sense if people are showing up for you and they're just saying the wrong things, versus completely shutting you down and I'm afraid of you? There's a real difference in energy, because I can misspeak, but my intention comes across, versus saying something that's like, oh, I don't want anything to do with this.

[00:21:33] Lisa Keefauver: I think having the right intention, meaning checking your energy at the door and coming in with that care and that you're not fixing is important. If you say something that's harmful to the griever and they correct you, consider yourself lucky because they trust you enough and believe in your intention enough to know that you meant well but that was harmful. If they don't say anything to you, that doesn't mean that you haven't caused harm. That might mean, as I say in my other chapter, you know, you can [00:22:00] decide what to do when people say stupid shit. You can tell them off, ignore them, or teach them, or correct them. I don't think, 'cause I sound like an angry person here, that people are out here maliciously saying these cliches. Those people learn those cliches because that's the culture we lived in. Because people probably said that to them or in their family of origin, or that's what they say on TV and movies. So we can all just say, yep, we didn't know better, but now we do. And so now what? So now what I say is just naming how hard it is. I say, I see you. I hear you. I'm holding you in my heart. We might say to somebody, I hate that this happened to you, or I can imagine this is so hard and so much to carry.

[00:22:43] Sarah Cavanaugh: You're validating them.

[00:22:44] Lisa Keefauver: Your only job is to walk alongside, accompany, and validate. But I don't know somebody who's experienced a profound death, the death of a child, the death of a partner, even the death of a parent, and who hasn't thought or felt, I don't know how I'm going to [00:23:00] live without my person. What if you said, that makes a lot of sense. This person was so important in your life and so intertwined in your life. I can imagine it feels impossible to figure out how you're gonna do that.

[00:23:15] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. You're reminding me my father said that when my mother died,

[00:23:19] Lisa Keefauver: Oh

[00:23:20] Sarah Cavanaugh: And this was way back before we were all talking about this.

[00:23:23] Lisa Keefauver: Yeah. That's amazing. Way to go, dad.

[00:23:33] Sarah Cavanaugh: Let's talk about complicated feelings surrounding grief. Is it always about grieving the person who died? And what else do we grieve when we lose someone?

[00:23:43] Lisa Keefauver: I think grief is inherently complex in a way. It's simple in that it comes natural, that every single one of us will do it. But it's complicated in that it comes into conflict with the systems we inhabit and the culture we live in. Like if we didn't have to partake in capitalism, we could move through our grief in a more natural, less [00:24:00] complicated way. That's one piece I would say. Maybe we have complicated feelings because we were in an estranged relationship with that person. Or maybe we feel complicated because we don't feel as sad as we think we quote unquote “should feel.” And also most of us don't have a real emotional literacy. We don't have a lot of practice being with lots of different emotions at once. Again, because we live in a sort of toxic positive culture. So it feels really complicated when you feel sad and angry and also relieved at the same time. That's messy. That feels messy. It's valid, and it's true, but it feels messy. And you ask, what other kinds of things do we grieve when someone we love dies? We grieve our identity. That's a big one. I just am recognizing your tenderness to this Sarah and to people who are listening maybe who've lost a mother. You know, I remember thinking like I was an employee, a mom, a friend, a scuba diver, an athlete. I'm all the things, but it's like, who am I if [00:25:00] I'm not a wife anymore? I remember working with a woman who'd lost her parents, like within three months of each other, and she said, I'm not a daughter anymore. And you can claim that you are like, I can still claim that I'm a wife. It's not about what you're not allowed to do. It's about grappling with, how can I still be in relationship with these people, with my memories, with my stories, but they're not here? And so my role as daughter, my role as wife, my role as parent, my role as friend is torn from me in this way. So we lose that. We lose other relationships. Can't tell you how many people I work with, and I've experienced this myself, the people they thought were gonna show up for them didn't.

[00:25:43] Sarah Cavanaugh: It really is interesting to see who shows up. And I will say on the personal side, I was diagnosed with cancer and I have surgery on Wednesday this week.

[00:25:54] Lisa Keefauver: Oh.

[00:25:55] Sarah Cavanaugh: I was really actually so excited about talking to you, talking to [00:26:00] another survivor because I consider myself even before treatment to be surviving this.

[00:26:05] Lisa Keefauver: Yes.

[00:26:06] Sarah Cavanaugh: As you were talking about how people show up for you, it really hit me: how much energy am I gonna spend taking care of other people's feelings?

[00:26:15] Lisa Keefauver: Your point is really valuable. Showing up is also about making sure that we are mirroring and we are the container for that person. Now, it doesn't mean you need to be stoic. You can shed a tear. You can say, I'm really sorry this is happening to you, or it has happened to you. I can imagine you're scared, but just make sure you're always turning the focus around to and following the lead of the person who's at the center of whatever that loss is. And boy, does cancer come with all kinds of losses that we don't talk about. We have to get more versed on how we show up, and I hope that you're having people show up for you because one of the things I think people misunderstand, Sarah, about all kinds of grief is how isolating grief feels inherently. Because you [00:27:00] don't recognize yourself, you don't recognize the ground beneath you. You don't have your identity, you don't have your familiar habits, and everything is new. You're learning how to do new things. You're taking care of insurance and paperwork and bills, and then when the people that you love don't show up, it's a compounding loss and it's sort of a wound to the isolation that is already being experienced by the griever. So show up, send a card, write a text. Put that person's death anniversary or diagnosis anniversary in your calendar so you remember to show up. If it's a death loss and they lost a child, make sure you're ready to show up for them around Mother's Day or Father's Day. We gotta show up. We don't have to say a lot.

[00:27:41] Sarah Cavanaugh: I love that.

[00:27:42] Lisa Keefauver: Yeah. What are you noticing about loss as it relates to your cancer diagnosis? Sorry to turn it around. I can't help it.

[00:27:47] Sarah Cavanaugh: I was just thinking of the way you were talking about unfamiliar landscapes and it's like a new map of your life. And you're looking at the map and you don't really know where the trails are. You know what's [00:28:00] startling to me is how many people that I know have experienced cancer and not talked about it. And these are people I'm close to that I thought, how did I not know? You think about your mortality a whole lot more when it's present in this kind of a diagnosis. So this question came up for me. If you were to wave a magic wand, what one thing might you change about how we handle grief in this culture?

[00:28:29] Lisa Keefauver: Oooh. It is such a good question, and you're really pushing me to the edge with only choosing one thing. When I think most about how I would like for us to change how we respond to grief is exactly that: how we respond. We need to hold space and bear witness. We need more time, we need more leave. We need to not pathologize it as a problem to be solved. Like all those other things kind of ripple off of this notion [00:29:00] that if we just paused and we were a witness, a sacred witness, to the grief that someone was experiencing — not only would that nurture and make the griever feel more held and more capable to travel this journey to metabolize their grief, but also showing up for a griever isn't just a one-way gift. It's like a calling to our soul in a way. That first shift in the way we think about it is showing up, holding space, and bearing witness.

[00:29:34] Sarah Cavanaugh: So when you faced your own mortality with your cancer diagnosis, how did it change the way you feel about your own death? Can you talk about it with your daughter?

[00:29:46] Lisa Keefauver: Oh yeah, it was a real shock. I mean, it wasn't really a shock because I had found the lump and gone to five different doctors who all dismissed me until finally 14 months later they bothered to do a biopsy to find out, oops, it had been triple [00:30:00] positive breast cancer all along. So in that way it didn't surprise me. But otherwise I was healthy, and fit, and eat healthy, and do all the things you're supposed to be doing. So I think it caused me to really grapple with how I'm showing up for other people. I know that's gonna sound weird, but let me name that. At the time that I got diagnosed with cancer, it was soon after my daughter transitioned to college and she was going through her own very hard thing, a different hard thing. And recognizing that I was her only surviving parent and that she didn't have siblings really caused me to think about, how am I showing up in my day-to-day life for my people? You know, it's kind of, it's a Mary Oliver moment, like what are you doing with this one wild and precious life that you have? But I think it really caused me to slow down even more than when my husband died. I made a very strict decision at the beginning of my cancer diagnosis also because I'm a public figure, so people would know me. I went on interviewing on my podcast with my bald head and everything. [00:31:00] But I made a decision early on: I am going to accept all offers of help. I had just moved to this area. I didn't have friends here. Podcast listeners found out, so people were like knitting me caps and mailing them to me to cover my bald head and knitting me blankets. And they'd ask for my mailing address and I would just say, yes, please send it to me. Which is not something, you know, usually I'd be like, no, I'm fine. It's okay. I let people help me and it was so beautiful. Dacher Keltner talks about the power of awe, and the moral beauty of others is one of the sources of awe. And I experienced that profoundly as I navigated this treatment.

[00:31:41] Sarah Cavanaugh: Are there still parts of grieving that are hard for you to talk about?

[00:31:46] Lisa Keefauver: My initial instinct is no, only because I'm an unusual person in that I've made it my job to be very public about my grief and my losses. So my first sort of [00:32:00] instinct is no. And yet as you ask that question, I'm thinking about the ways it can be still 14 years later, minute to minute, I can have memories that bring me profound sweetness and joy. I can look at his picture and just smile. He had a great smile. He was a gorgeous man. He was so attentive. And maybe look at that same picture an hour later and be on the floor sobbing. It's the both/and, even all these years later. I talk to him a lot more than I did early on. I bring his presence into my life much more. But I think because I am a public figure and I do want to, and believe that we can live a thriving life, even in the wake of devastating loss, I believe that. I know that to be true, but I think that's the part for me that can be hard still.

[00:32:56] Sarah Cavanaugh: I think your daughter is a lucky woman,

[00:32:59] Lisa Keefauver: Thank you. Yeah, [00:33:00] she's a woman now, which is crazy to me. She's 21, which, hello? How did that happen?

[00:33:04] Sarah Cavanaugh: And are you able to talk about all of these things with her?

[00:33:07] Lisa Keefauver: I am, and she can talk to me about him and, you know, and I try to fill her in on the stories because of course she was so young. And he was sort of not himself for the year before he died because the brain tumor had really shifted who he was as a human. The thing I wanna say, not specifically about my daughter, but I think it's an example for maybe your listeners is — we both are grieving the same death but we are experiencing very different grief. Not just because she's grieving a dad and I'm grieving a husband, but also because of her history with grief, and my history with grief, because her identity story and my identity story, her coping strategy and my coping strategies, do you see what I'm saying? Like how she was approaching grief as a seven-year-old, then a 14-year-old, and then a 21-year-old, and how I was, are very different. And so sometimes I will be honest in that we clashed with each other, [00:34:00] which happens all the time. We have different grieving styles because she was much more of an introverted inner griever. And I was definitely a more extroverted public griever, and I don't mean public out in the world, but just crying in front of her or just talking about him. And so we really had to negotiate over the years what was helpful to each other, what was off limits or not off limits in terms of with each other. And I had to learn that like obviously, because she's my daughter anyways, but even if she was a sibling, sometimes we have to take our grief elsewhere. Not everybody's able to hold it. So I certainly talk about it. She knows about the work that I do. We talk about Eric often. Especially on, you know, she just graduated from college and how proud he would've been, and he would've been the loudest screaming dad in the stadium. So we talk about him and invoke him more, and the older she gets, the more comfortable she is, I think, talking about him and asking for the memories. But I just admit that, or share that as [00:35:00] I'm a quote unquote “grief activist and somebody who knows how to do this,” and I've gotten it wrong so many times in conversation with my daughter, Even though we're grieving a death of the same person, our grief is different, And one style or strategy isn't better or worse, but they're different. But a lot of conflict happens in family systems because we put our grief expectations on other people.

[00:35:24] Sarah Cavanaugh: So what does a peaceful exit mean to you?

[00:35:27] Lisa Keefauver: I think a peaceful exit is about having been and being able, even till the end to show up and be seen as I am without pretense. To show up and have agency to the degree that I can in my life. And to have lived a life of meaning and connection and humanity. I wanna be surrounded by the people I love. I don't want to be fighting till the bitter end, that is not of interest to me. So my [00:36:00] answer to the question, if we could do one thing in our culture to respond to grief differently, would be a similar answer to this, which is to hold space and to bear witness and to be present.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Cavanaugh. You can find us on Instagram at apeacefulexit and on YouTube at Peaceful Exit Podcast. To learn more about this podcast and my work, please visit peacefulexit.net. You can also send us an email and let us know what you thought of this episode, or share an idea for a new episode. We're at peacefulexitpodcast@gmail.com. Our senior producer is Julie Kanfer, and our sound engineer is Jason Gambrell. Additional support from Cindy Gal and Ciara Austin. I have an amazing team. Original music provided by Ricardo Russell.Please make sure to follow us on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, and rate and review us wherever you listen. It really makes a difference. And please tell your friends about Peaceful Exit. As always, thank you for listening