Your Grief, Your Way: A New Book on Navigating Life After the Death of a Loved One

[00:00:00] So there was a lot of self. Discipline that came into the picture, but there was also a lot of like self reckoning that came in when writing a book in the middle of a pandemic, when literally the whole world is grieving. Yeah. And I myself am experiencing a lot of financial, emotional, physical, spiritual instability as a result of the pandemic too.

So it was a very, very wild time to be writing a book about grief, because literally the whole world wasn’t, is. Continuing to grieve.

Welcome to the Awkward Podcast. I’m here today with Shelby Foria. And Shelby has been on the podcast before. She wrote the book Permission to Grieve, and that’s what I interviewed Shelby about the first time. And just about grieving cuz it was at the same time I was going through some grief of my own, having lost my former husband and my kid’s dad to cancer.

And now you’ve come out with a new book or you’re getting ready to come out with a new book called Your [00:01:00] Grief Your Way. And I wanted to just learn from you some of the challenges you faced in, uh, writing this book. How it was to write a book, how your griefs coming along. Just, you know, get an update on, on how you’re doing.

Um, so I’m so glad you’re here, Shelby. I’m so excited to be here. And it’s ironic or kind of strange to say that I’m excited to be here and talking about grief. Yeah. Because I think people think, well, it is a, a very heavy or dark or emotional subject, and so it’s not something that, It comes up in conversation all the time, but it’s the world that I live in.

So essentially the very short story of this book is that Permission to Grief was self-published in September of last year. And unbeknownst to me, I have a very dear friend who works with Penguin Random House, and they were looking for somebody to write a day by day book for grief that’s not religious.

There’s a lot of religious books out there about grief. That was full of practical guidance and exercises and comforting words for people who can do grief or need grief work in little tiny snippets every single day. [00:02:00] And so essentially, I got asked to do this project in January of this year, in 2020.

Wrote the book in two months between March and May of 2020, which is of course in the middle of the Coronavirus Pandemic. And now it’s coming out in September of 2020. It’s kind of, um, an experiment that Penguin Random House is doing with. One subset of its imprints of how fast can we get a book idea into the world?

Because most books take anywhere from two to three years from idea to production to actually get out into the world. And so it’s like, how can we expedite this process? And so it’s like I took the process of writing Permission to Grieve and literally packed it into about 90 days. How did you do that?

Like, so Permission to Grieve. You self-published that on Amazon or where I did? Mm-hmm. On Amazon. Amazon Audible published it took you, took you about a year to write it. And then now you wrote this book in like two months. It’s coming out like nine months after you were asked to write it. So yes. Did you guys have to do to shorten the timeframe?

I think a lot of it was just moving up deadlines for me [00:03:00] because I am pretty accountable to other people. If they need something from me, I’m like, okay, if you ask, if you tell me when you need it by, I will crunch to get it by that time. The other thing too that was convenient and inconvenient simultaneously is that I lost my jobs, my day jobs as a result of Covid 19.

And so the only thing that I was doing was writing this grief book. That being said, it made it a lot more emotionally heavy and very intense of a process cuz I didn’t have like a day job to kind of balance the practice of very introspective. Writing. So it wasn’t like I was going out into the world having adventures out there, getting inspiration and then going home to write.

It was like I would just wake up and write and then go to sleep and then do it again the next day. So there was a lot of self. Discipline that came into the picture. But there was also a lot of like self reckoning that came in when writing a book in the middle of a pandemic, when literally the whole world is grieving.

Yeah. And I myself am experiencing a lot of financial, emotional, physical, spiritual instability as a result of the pandemic too. So it was a very, very wild time to be writing a book about [00:04:00] grief because literally the whole world wasn’t, is continuing to grieve. Wow. Yeah. And when you talk about grief, you don’t necessarily mean grieving just, I mean, not just, but grieving somebody who passed away.

You talk about grief as a change in the way things used to be. Well, right, and for what it’s worth, people picking up the book, your Grief Your Way will find the most help if they have lost a loved one. Okay? So if you’re suffering a loss due to death, that is the target audience. Hate to say aug audience demographic.

Yeah. For your grief, your way is how to live your life after a loved one has died. And it’s 366 days of practical wisdom, inspiring quotes, guidance, and exercises that have worked for me and my clients and their grief. Yes, as I define grief in my work, I work with clients who’ve lost a loved one, but I’ve also walked with people through divorce, through massive physical moves from one geographical location to another.

Financial changes falling out from religion, faith, spirituality coming out of the closet. And so grief is essentially a. Any collection of emotions that occurs when [00:05:00] what was happening either changes or ends permanently. And then you agreed, like you said, you had covid, you lost your job, you know, all these other losses.

In addition to probably having to think a lot about the time you lost your mom in 2013. Yeah. And so she was very heavy on my mind too, in terms of, well, if she was alive right now, how would she even be responding to a global pandemic? Where would she be? What role would she play in the grand scheme of all of this?

And then recalling where I was, the day that she died, what my life was like, the months after she died, and really speaking to that girl and that person as I was writing Your grief Your Way, right? Because that’s who the book is for somebody who’s going through mm-hmm. Like my daughter. Or my son, you know, just lost their dad in December.

So I still tell Anna. Shelby’s offered to coach you. I’ll go out. But you know, if you’re a parent, your kids like to do things their own way, but she knows you’re there and she knows that this book is coming out, so I’m sure she’ll Yes. Well, and [00:06:00] what’s neat about a book, and I don’t know if there are people out there listening who have published books or would like to publish books, but it’s a really low touch way for people to get to know you and your voice and your work without having to drop.

Like buku dollars on one-on-one work. Mm-hmm. And so if you’re considering writing a book, I just say, do it because it has opened doors for me that I would never have been able to open myself or that was the story I was telling myself. And to have words on a page and to have them printed and bound and you’re able to hold them in your hand and give them to other people and say, this is what I’m about.

It really helps people understand like, okay, yes, either I wanna go deeper with this or I wanna recommend it to somebody else, or, uh, not for me right now, but I’m sure I can revisit this in the future. So it’s, it’s. A wonderful experience to actually be first an author of my own making through self-publishing, and now through the more traditional or um, conventional route of.

Of publishing through a big publishing house. Yeah. That’s so, so excited for you. So you sent me a, an advanced copy of the book and I Yes. Didn’t have time to read it all over the weekend, but I scroll through [00:07:00] it and looks like you’ve got a daily guide. Each day there’s a little bit, there’s like a quote or a message and then you write something about it.

And sometimes you give an an exercise. Do you wanna give an example of. One or two of ’em, or? Oh, sure. One of my favorite ones is actually, there are a couple of days that remain consistent each calendar year, so things like Valentine’s Day or Halloween. And one of my favorite tips is the day before Halloween, so October 30th, there’s an entry about.

An exercise where you ask friends and family if there’s going to be something scary, you’re going to be something triggering at an event you’re going to. So unbeknownst to a lot of like quote unquote normal people, non-g grievers, Halloween is a really triggery time for grief because people are literally decorating their yards with.

Coffins with nooses, with skeletons, with these things that can provoke or invoke grief emotions when grieving people are not really prepared for it. So you invite somebody to go trick or treating with you, yeah, let’s go walk the neighborhood, see the decorations, blah, blah, blah. Not knowing that the way somebody’s [00:08:00] loved one died or watching them be buried was a triggering or heavy experience for them.

And so for a grieving person to say, Hey, Are the Richardsons doing that thing with their yard this year that they did last year that was real scary or had coffins involved or had nooses hanging from trees? Because if so, I’m gonna opt out this year. I will hand out candy at the door. I will go to the, the church picnic and do candied apples or kind of whatever another ritual is that would be suitable, but to kind of safeguard and self guard by asking if there’s gonna be triggers at an event that you know might include.

Include them, or are we gonna watch that scary movie again this year? Or what’s going to happen in advance so I can protect myself from being surprised by grief for caught off guard. I can see how you wouldn’t plan for that. I wouldn’t plan for that in advance. You wouldn’t even think that something.

You’re just not, you’re thinking of Halloween, how it used to be kind of right, and then you have a lot more triggers now. I didn’t think about that, Chris. Yeah, it kind of depends on, on where you are in the world, what your neighborhood layout is like, how your loved one died, the [00:09:00] images that you keep with you.

So for me, coffins and caskets aren’t very heavy images to be reckoned with. Minor things like. The word cancer or like watching movies where someone dies of cancer. And so I even ask my friends, I’m like, does anybody die in this movie? Cuz like, I need to know how, if they die and then of what? Right. Um, to know whether or not I can emotionally take it.

Because sometimes, and I think a lot of graves will resonate with this, it’s just too close to home. Yeah. At least this year. And that’s a thing I mentioned too in the book is like, if you need to opt out this year and you can revisit it again next year, you’re not opting out of Halloween forever, you can definitely.

Go some kind of alternative route with how you choose to participate in Halloween, or you can opt out for just a year, but it’s like a way to really kind of put some cushion around your. Your heart at a time when you can be really, really tender and not even know it because there’s so many grief triggers that jump out at you at the grocery store, at Target, or even when you’re driving on the interstate that you don’t expect.

It’s like when you can kind of expect and prepare for them. It’s one way you can really love yourself in grief that’s small and free, which is really nice. Oh, that’s true. [00:10:00] When you say you also provide like messages of, of comfort, meditations, journaling prompts, did journaling help you a lot for your grief?

Yeah, I think because I struggle to read a lot after my mom died. That’s why these entries are so short. They’re usually under 200 words for each day, because reading after grief is monstrous, but I could write, and so it was like, okay, I can’t really consume much of anything, but I can output quite a bit.

And so I struggled to free write. At first after my mom died. And so this is actually one of the exercises I included in your grief, your ways to try writing letters to your loved one. And so instead of journaling about, here’s my day and here’s what I’m thinking about, I would say, dear mom, I met this guy at work and I really have a crush on him, and I think I’m worried about this X, Y, and Z.

And so I would report the details of my life as if I was speaking to her. And then gradually, I don’t even know when I stopped writing to her and started writing as myself, but it’s kind of a crutch that got me into journaling is pretending I was updating her on my life. And then it progressed into [00:11:00] just.

Journaling is a practice. That’s awesome. So your grief your way, why’d you title it? Oh, that was actually not my choice. That was, that was creative choice on the part of Penguin Random House. But I know that they chose it because they really wanted to drive home this notion that, Everybody experiences loss, but how you recover from it is a personal decision.

And within your personal power, like you decide how you want to come back from your grief. Because one of the most dangerous things I think working in the grief space is when somebody comes in and says, this is the way, right? This is the way you get through your grief. This is the way that you solve the problem.

You’ll feel better in a year. It’s a magic pill. It’s the snake oil, it’s, it’s all of these like guarantees. If I can save you from whatever you’re feeling, if you just do this. And what I’ve learned from working with grieving people for over. Gosh, like four years now, is that nobody returns to their life again, the same way.

Everybody has not only different childhoods and backstories, but they’ve lost a different person, or they’re experiencing a different grief or they fear [00:12:00] different things about the future for their life. Of course, there’s common threads because there always are. And everyone who’s ever lived will grieve.

So like those are all rock foundation truths. And simultaneously we are also different in our relationships to grief and what we were taught about it are so different. Even at the very beginning of the book, the introductory paragraph, there’s like a little letter from me about how to use this book. I’m like, if it works for you, great.

If it doesn’t, chuck it out the window and wait for the next day. Read the next day. See if that resonates with you in some other kind of way. Because you’re not obligated to treat this as the Bible. This is very much, what are those chapter books where you can literally. Play as you go or decide the ending of a book.

I used to read so many of them as a kid, and it’s like, if you want the story to go this way, flip to page 59. If you want it to go this way. Flip to page 94. And this is not one of those kinds of books, but um, it’s very much choose your own adventure. That’s the phrase I was looking for, where if a day doesn’t resonate with you, say, that doesn’t resonate for me with my grief.

And even then you’ve learned something about how you’d like to come back from your loss. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Who designed? [00:13:00] I liked the, um, I mean, I don’t know if the actual book’s gonna look this way, but the paper that you sent, you know, the, the soft copy that you sent me had some, it looked like clouds or something like that, the design of the book.

Did you design that or did Yes. Oh, I wish I did. That was not me either. The perk of, of working with a, a large publishing house is that, aside from. The written content. I don’t do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of the graphics or the interior layout or things like that. So whereas I did all of that for permission to grieve, with the exception of the inside layout, I outsourced that I did the cover design and so much else with regard to promoting the book, penguin Random House took the reins on that as well.

So if, I believe, if you look on the inside, the copyright page will tell you who designed the cover of the book because I do want them to get credit. But I do not know off the top of my head. But I agree that it’s beautiful and it’s just abstract enough that it’s like, It doesn’t fall into the typical sunshine, rainbows, butterflies of grief, which a lot of grief books do.

It’s like inspirational hope and blah, blah blah. And I’m like, it’s not that. It’s a little more, I love that you say clouds cuz I see [00:14:00] plants, I see flowers and organic shapes. But yes, something very natural, more comforting. It’s, um, relax. It makes you feel a little bit relaxed, I think. I think it lets you know that you’re in good hands.

Yeah. And that’s something that’s really important for a grief book to do. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. So it comes out September 29th? Yes. So in just a couple of weeks here, I pre-ordered it and I’m encouraging people to pre-order it because one of the most people, I think, People who are buying books perceive authors pushing pre-ordering books as making more money.

But when in reality, pre-ordering books helps us as authors let the publishing industry know that people want more books like this, it helps increase demand, especially in that first week or so that the book is out. So if there’s this much demand in advance for book about grief, the publishing industry says, Oh, we should be publishing more books about grief because demand is so high and it’s a really tremendous way, almost like a vote like politically, but it’s a vote for, yes, I want more books like this to exist in the world.

Well, to me, I’m kind of thinking that, you know, [00:15:00] this one, like you said, is more intended for people who’ve lost a loved one, and then you have a definition of grief that covers more than just. More than that. It covers like when you lose your job or you know, anytime that you’re not going back to something the way it was before.

So actually I see another book coming outta you. Oh, I’ve got about eight more ideas on a rotating lazy Susan in my head. Good, good, good. And they’re all in progress. And the wonderful thing about this project with Penguin Random House is it’s kind of my audition. I’m not participating in this book writing process as a traditional author would.

This is not your standard kind of book deal, but the intent is that it will lead to something like that. So how well your grief your way does is determinant about whether or not people resonate with the type of grief work that I offer and want more books about grief written by me in the world. And so it’s gonna be a really cool experiment.

Kind of a test. Yeah. Audition is my favorite word to use so far to see how this will go because I think we do need more books that are. Tiny, tiny snippets of [00:16:00] you’re gonna make it out of this alive. And that’s the thing that I really needed to hear after my mom died. Maybe not explicitly in those words, but all is not lost.

And you’re going to make it out of this alive. You’re gonna make it. And like you said, I think people too. Many people have a shorter attention span. I think it’s just the internet. Our lives are so busy, so short little snippets to read make you feel like you accomplished something and it’s really helpful.

Totally. Well, and there’s a practice that I teach, I teach an online course called Life After Loss Academy, and in week two we talk about building trust in the world. Again, because you really can’t work on your grief until you feel safe enough to do so. And there’s an exercise. Called taking back 1% of your day and 1% of your day approximately.

If you sleep about eight hours a night is 10 minutes. And so if you can read one of these passages, I mean in less than 60 seconds, probably if you read as fast as I do, but then kind of sit with it and absorb it for the other nine. It’s like there I had control or some semblance of safety, peace, comfort, encouragement for 10 [00:17:00] minutes of my day.

It’s like I’m taking a little bit of my power back in life after loss, the thing that has literally ripped out the foundations from underneath me, I can now start to build them back in, and so it helps. I think give some kind of consistency or like a ritual that carries through for a full year. And it doesn’t have to be the first year.

I’ll tell this too. It doesn’t have to be the first year after your loved one died. It’s very much wherever you are in your grief, you can start on September 29th. Yeah. And go through the whole year. So it’s not, it’s not. Uh, segmented in any way where you need to start at the beginning and go all the way through to the end.

It’s also not designed for the day after your loved one dies too. A year from then, it is anytime after you’ve lost somebody to death and you’d like to, to walk along for a year, or if you just wanna keep it on a shelf and, and do that fun game where you flip open to a page and just take it as the fortune cookie message that you need for the day.

Yeah, screw the dates and just take the wisdom as it comes. So you’ve written two books. What are the biggest challenges you see that, or that you had to overcome in, in writing a book? That’s one question. And I guess another question is, what made you feel like you [00:18:00] were good enough to write a book? That’s probably the harder question of the two.

Um, people think, well, I don’t have anything to say. Gosh, a lot of people have lost their mom. Why should I write a book? What made you feel good enough? Start with that. I think I have two answers to this. I think I always knew I was going to be a writer, but I didn’t know what I was gonna write about. So I had dreams when I was five of publishing books, but I didn’t know what the topic would be.

And so something innately is like, I was born to do this. I have a purpose to do this. I’ve been carrying this dream with me for a long time. But then the second thing I’ll say is that I was. Listening to a course or a podcast, something, I gained some piece of information along the way, probably within the last seven years or so.

That said, you don’t have to know everything. You don’t have to be an expert in whatever you’re talking about. You just have to know 10% more than the average person does about something. Because if you, if you come into some to somebody and start talking about grief as from an expert level, it’s like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

I need you to define this term, this term, this term. Put structure around this and [00:19:00] make sure I know what you’re talking about when you say X, Y, Z. Whereas if you say, Hey, I remember being where you are, and here’s how I got just a little bit further down the road is a lot more helpful because it’s like you can still reach back and have some memories and some recall of what that place and space looked like and then be able to kind of walk them forward with you.

And so I was like, okay. Every time I sit down to write, I’m like, I don’t have to know everything. I just have to know 10% more. And so there’s not this. Striving perfectionism of I need to do enough research and have enough data and have enough stories and have enough proof to show that I know what I’m talking about.

And in the grief space too, I tell people all the time, there’s a medical disclaimer in the front of this book too. I’m not a psychologist or a grief counselor. I can’t diagnose you or medicate you. My biggest. Criteria beyond all the grief training that I’ve done in other areas is the fact that my mother died.

And so like the thing that qualifies me to talk about this is not a degree or a license or the ability to prescribe you medication, it’s the fact that this happened in my life and I’m still here. And so when I remind [00:20:00] myself of those things and then you only have to know 10% more, it’s like, okay, I can take off that cloak of you are not enough.

How dare who are you qualified to talk on this X, Y, Z? And the other thing too is that I think I had this fear when I first started writing permission to grieve that the whole world was gonna agree, read my book, and have something to say about it. When in reality I believe over the course of its lifetime, permission to Grieve is almost a year old now.

Under a thousand people have purchased copies of this book. And that’s not to rag on myself in terms of sales, but I’m like the people who are looking for a book like this will find it. Yeah, they’ll want it and they will obtain it to hold in their hands. And it’s not like the whole world is looking at me with a magnifying glass.

It’s like the people who are seeking out this information are the ones giving me feedback on it. And so I don’t have to worry about a late night talk show host picking it up and being like, why did you write this piece of garbage? Because they’re probably never gonna read it. But the people who are looking for permission to grieve or exercises about grief or Googling these search terms that are specifically looking for the thing that I’m creating, They’re the ones that are gonna find it.

And so when they give me feedback, I’m [00:21:00] like, I know it’s coming from a place of a person who genuinely cares because they are where I was. And so there’s this leveling of the playing field that happens where it’s like, it’s not like Oprah’s gonna come in and be like, why’d you write this piece of garbage?

Oh, you never know. She’ll come in. You never know. It could get passed along to Oprah one of these days, which like, knock on wood, that would be amazing. But when I take the pressure of everybody’s eyeballs off of what I’m creating too, and just have like, what if I just wrote this a for the grieving person that I was and for the other grieving people that I know.

It takes off. So much of writing is not about actually writing. It’s about taking off these layers of pressure that I put upon myself to. Right. And so when I finally sit down to write, I’m like, okay, how can I make myself as light as possible? That being said, I think your first question was like, what logistically is the hardest part of writing?

Yeah. The first, before, before we go into that, I wanted to say too, I just wanna point out. People who, just because you’ve written two books doesn’t mean you’re not afraid or doesn’t very far from it, or doesn’t mean you don’t feel good enough, or doesn’t mean you second guess yourself. And that’s the point.

Cause [00:22:00] we all do. And we just figure out how to keep going, right? Yes. And I’ve also given myself permission to write another book. It’s like, I think people feel an enormous amount of pressure to fit everything they ever have to say into one product. And I’m like, oh, no, no, I can have that idea and have that collection of thoughts and go out into the world and then I can have another one.

And that goes out to the world. And then as the ideas come, they can be separate entities as opposed to, I must create my manifesto. It has to be, and deliver it to the mass. Yeah. And everything’s gotta be in there or else it’s not good enough, then you’ll never publish a dang book. Right. And it isn’t it funny that like, I don’t know why I’ve mentioned the Bible so much on this call because it’s not, I’m not religious, but like even the Bible is incomplete.

There are pieces of it that were left out and discovered much later that aren’t included now. And so it’s like it’s. Funny that we consider that a like complete piece of work and information, and even that has pieces and chunks that are missing or other books that have been discovered or these things like that.

And so it’s like permission to let the thing be imperfect or incomplete, and that in and of itself is a kind of [00:23:00] completeness and allowing that to go set it free into the world. All right, so the logistics. Logistically the hardest piece of writing is actually sitting down and doing the writing cuz it’s fun to think about writing.

It’s fun to think about, you know, the outline of the book and what the graphics I’m gonna make on Instagram to sell it. And creating a community around it and hearing feedback from people. And you know, all the five star reviews on Amazon, this other stuff. But to actually sit down and write the thing, it’s like, oh, you gotta put your button in the chair.

You gotta turn the computer on. You’ve gotta set a timer or however you structure your writing day, and you have to crank out. Within the case of this book, because I had a timeline of about two months to write it, a word count deadline every day. And so to get behind was to mean I would add more to my plate tomorrow, which I did on some days.

And, uh, Some days were harder than others. Some days I was like, I am pulling out all of my teeth as I’m writing right now and staying up into all hours of the night. And other days I was like, look, here’s all these ideas on one sheet together. Now how do I translate them into [00:24:00] paragraphs? And I think that’s part of it.

I think part of writing too is acknowledging the cyclical nature of the beast. So to expect that you are a perfect computation machine and can sit out and crank out lines of code or information every time you sit down to write is. Flawed. And so I’ve had to unlearn that story for myself too, is that I’m supposed to be able to crank out perfect pieces of writing every time I put my butt in the chair.

So I did have days where I shut my computer early and my roommate and I would watch something on Netflix and I’d go to bed and I said, I try again tomorrow. And then I had other days where I, um, pop up standing desks that I’d put on my back porch because we were in quarantine, so we couldn’t really go anywhere cuz I usually write in coffee shops and things like that.

So I popped this little standing desk on the back porch and I would sit out there for six or seven hours and blow through my writing deadlines. Yeah. And so it was amazing to be the person who was writing, but then kind of have another self who was watching myself writing and notice. Oh, interesting. The human struggles to write on the weekends or, oh, isn’t it interesting that when it rains, all she [00:25:00] wants to do is take a nap and not really write a nap?

Or the earlier we wake up, waking up at 4:00 AM we get a lot more writing done. Before 10. It’s like my power hours. And so it’s just been fascinating to study myself as a writer while I’m writing. Yeah, that’s pretty cool. Um, in a mastermind and we’re writing a book, um, that’s supposed to come out on self-published on Amazon in February.

Oh, cool. I have a deadline to write three chapters by one October. And I like what you said about Yeah, it’s fun to just think about it. I’m gonna, I’ve been thinking about my chapters. I’ve got a title yesterday I was supposed to outline and I hadn’t done that yet. So this week I’m gonna get going. I’ve blocked off time cause I like to have time to reread it.

You’ve gotta massage it the first. Mm-hmm. You know, thing that you write isn’t gonna, do you write, so you write on your computer, you type it or do you hand write it? I kind of, I do a mix of both. So when I’m. When I’m scheming structure and form and like, okay, what is the shape of the elephant in the room that I’m trying to describe?

I get these big sheets of newsprint from [00:26:00] like Michael’s or BL or another art store. They’re like 18 by 24, and I’ll tape them up all over my walls and have this big fat sharpie and be like, here’s the beginning. Here’s the structure. Here’s what I know about this. And then I’ll come in a post-it notes and kind of.

Everybody gets their own pieces of information underneath it. I did this, especially with permission to grieve, and then when I’m ready to write, it’s like, I’ll take all of that and I’ll sh funnel it down into some semblance of an outline, and then that’s where the bones of the thing become flesh in words.

But yeah, with, with your grief your way, it was a little bit different because essentially all I need, all I needed to put it lightly Yeah. Was 50,000 words. 366 different pieces of information, and they kind of had to pair with each other in some way. So it alternates with a quote and a and commentary about the quote and a practical exercise.

And so they go in pairs. And so whatever 366 is divided by two. It’s like I had to think of that many pieces of information or that many topics to find quotes for, to speak on, to develop exercises for. And so that one [00:27:00] was a bit of a different beast, but I kind of did the same thing where I dumped all my favorite quotes about grief and loss and all the exercises I’ve ever done.

With my clients and in some of my courses, and even with myself and my grief, and I was like, okay, how can these two be married? And I would kind of try and Frankenstein knit them together as the book went along. So I suppose every book has a different structure and form to it, but the first thing I definitely do is kind of like when you shake water outta your head, it’s like, how much information do I know about this and how can I get it onto paper as quickly as possible?

And then we’ll put some kind of form around it. Yeah. Right. So I see you’ve got that sign behind you that says, coming back. You wanna talk about that? Oh, sure. So coming back is the name of my podcast. Mm-hmm. Coming Back, conversations on Life After Loss, and they’re these really beautiful interviews with people who have come back from things.

That they thought they couldn’t. So death of a loved one is probably our most prevalent conversation, especially right now in the time of covid. But I’ve done interviews too on divorce or diagnoses that people have come [00:28:00] back from, and it’s like, how do you live your life when the funeral is over? After the divorce is final, after the diagnosis has been made, it’s like, how do you return to your life now that the very worst thing has happened?

And very similarly to what we were talking about, it’s like everybody experiences grief. There’s this huge arc of yes, this is a universal experience, and yet in every single interview I’ve ever done, everybody comes back. In a different way. And so some people go to the gym, some people see therapists, some people start journaling.

Some people write their own books. Some people treat it as a research project. Some people develop a nonprofit or go on a cruise or, and it, it’s wild to see how many different ways we invent to. Return to ourselves and return to our lives again after the worst has happened. And I love doing the show because I, I come in knowing kind of what the framework of the story will be, but the conversation always goes in some way that I don’t expect.

And we get to touch on a theme related to grief that I would never have expected. Mm-hmm. So it’s really lovely and, um, [00:29:00] I’ve been doing it for almost four years now. Yeah. If you ever want me to be a guest, I don’t know if you’ve ever interviewed somebody who lost their former husband, that was their kid’s dad, and uh, that’s my story and.

You know, he was verbally abusive and everything, but I helped take care of him while he was sick. And then how did I get through through that? Because I’ve run into a few people who’ve, you know, had their ex-husband pass away and it’s like, you know, everyone approaches it differently. So if you ever Yes, on there, I’ll talk about it.

Totally. Well, and it’s like what do you do with resentment and how do you care? Take while there’s baggage of the past. Mm-hmm. And especially when you have children, it’s like, how do I support them in their grief when they’ve lost a father, when I lost a person who was not so good to me? Yeah. Um, yeah, there are some very resty.

Questions in that, so Totally. I’m like, whenever we’re done, let’s book time for you to come on coming back and tell your story. Because I told a story that was similar to that in the very first season of coming back, or a woman lost her business and her [00:30:00] partner because he was abusive and she was essentially stranded in another country by herself and had to rebuild her life after that experience.

But I haven’t had a conversation to the best of my. Knowledge like that. Yet most of the conversations we have on coming back are people losing people they very dearly love. And so to talk about complicated grief and complicated death where like the story is more than, I really, really loved you and you died, which is part of my story too.

My mom and I, she kind of died when we were in the middle of a fight about the person that I was becoming in the world. And so my grief in and of itself is complicated. And so things like. Resentment and anger and what do I do with the twistedness? Even though the conversation from their side of it is over cause they’re dead.

Right? It’s like, how do I reckon with that for the rest of my life? Yeah, there’s a lot of knots and darkness and I have a great respect for people who are grieving people that they, I’m gonna use a term less than loved. Like less than loved ones. Because there’s so much more at play than I loved them and they died.

[00:31:00] It was like there was, we had a history. Yeah. And I’m gonna cry a little bit cause I, you know, I, I, I hired a counselor and she’s had me do this meditation, like clearing my arc lines and stuff, and I’m like, It. Why am I crying about Bruce every time I, I choose this meditation? You know, what is it? Because it’s not like, it’s not like I want him back so that I can get back together with him, but I’m very sad that he died.

And I think part of it too is I pro I probably never took the time to grieve the divorce. Which was about, mm-hmm. Just 20 years ago, I was just too busy as a single parent and everything. I just had to keep going. So anyway. Yeah, it is complicated. So be happy to talk about it. Totally. Well, and oftentimes those things can come together.

It’s like death brings up all the other things you kind of forgot to grieve. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and it’s like, oh crap. Yeah. It’s like, not only do I get hit with this, and I have to grieve this, it’s almost like a, your to-do list just gets longer. It’s like, no, I gotta, oh my God, am I not done grieving this thing yet?[00:32:00] 

Cry.

I know. Yeah. So, all right. And you also do coaching? I do. And I don’t officially call it coaching again because I’m not, I’m not a licensed mental health professional and I’m not a licensed coach either. I call it grief guidance cuz what I really wanted in the aftermath of my mom’s death was a guide. So I didn’t want somebody to.

Make me a better person in my loss. I wanted somebody to help me have a better life with grief, and that’s what I really help people do. So if you’re looking for freedom from pain and greater peace of mind in the aftermath of life after loss, so whether that’s mental health, Tools or like exercises to help you reframe the stories you have about grief or like practical exercises, like rituals that I can help create together so there’s some stability or safety or security back in your life.

Again, that’s a great deal of what I do as well as just offering this space for people to come in and be like, this week I’m terribly anxious about this, or I’m super angry about this, and oftentimes I know that. The space that I [00:33:00] offer is the only, or one of few spaces where they’re allowed to just have emotions about a thing that is happening free from judgment about, wait, why don’t you wanna get back with your husband?

Or like, why haven’t you grieved the divorce yet? Like without that judgment tone that comes in even from ourselves too. And so I can help grieving people interrupt their own voices of judgment, and then I will not provide one either. And so it’s a really beautiful space to be like, whatever you got, your grief is welcome here.

However it decides to show up. And often people think. Both with therapy and with grief guidance. Both people think you show up and you just cry and cry and cry, and cry and cry, but grief is so much more than just sad. And I find myself with my clients doing a lot more laughing because grief can be annoying and pesky and pop up in the most random of places.

Or when we notice we’re doing patterns over and over again or that they’ve repeated in other places of our life, were like, dang it Good. Yeah. And so there’s so much more room to. To have a full emotional relationship with grief than just let’s sit in the dark with our boxes of Kleenex and respectively cry together.

[00:34:00] Yes. So that’s something I offer too. And then something new, newer that’s come along is interactive, like online courses. This has been a result of the Age of Covid for sure. But I teach a 12 week online course called Life After Loss Academy that just started the last group in 2020, just started a couple weeks ago.

And that goes through almost the holiday season. We’re letting everybody off for Thanksgiving and beyond. Um, hoping to do it again in 2021. And then there are kind of like one day or three day workshops that I’m doing over Zoom as well, because it’s a really neat way to get a bunch of grieving people in a quote unquote room together without us being a in direct physical contact.

But also so that we can branch griefs literally across the world, across the nation, and types of grief too. And so we get to not only learn to honor our own grief in those spaces, but to honor the very different and similar griefs of others. I think that you’re also teaching people. Guiding people and enabling them to be able to guide people that come into their lives too.

So what you’re doing is spreading. It’s neat. I have [00:35:00] clients who tell me like, I can’t thank you enough because the words that we used in our last session, just finding words for grief is so powerful too, because it feels like such an emotional experience. It’s like I don’t have vocabulary for this yet.

And I had a client come to me maybe two weeks ago and she sent me a screenshot of a text that she had with a friend, and she was like, because I’ve worked with you, I had the words. To be able to say, it makes sense that you’re feeling this way right now, or of course this would be upsetting to you after a divorce or after losing a baby or after a relationship followed.

I don’t remember what the grief was that her friend was experiencing, but she was like, I have the words now. And even to feel equipped in that way, yeah, is tremendously powerful. Well, thank you so much. Is there a question that I didn’t ask that you think I should have asked or anything else that you wanna put out there to the Onward podcast listeners?

I don’t think so. I’m tremendously stoked for your grief, your way to be a part of the world pre-ordered if you haven’t already. It’s something that’s really great to share with hospitals, religious organizations, church groups, book clubs, anybody who works with the [00:36:00] public social workers, therapists. Et cetera.

It’s a really good resource for them to have on their shelves as well, or for you to request at a local library because there is definitely somebody in your community who’s grieving. That being said too, I’ve freed my whole calendar for the next couple of months to do interviews about your grief your way.

So if there’s anyone listening who’d like to get in touch about an interview too, I’m [email protected] or just Shelby for cynthia.com and that’s where you can also find the book podcast. Guidance online events. Literally everything that I do is housed there. Mm-hmm. Okay. Like the link to pre-orders there too.

Totally. Okay. And you don’t have to support Amazon as well? A couple of my, um, yeah, friends are like, I don’t wanna support Amazon. Where do I go? It’s on IndieBound, Barnes and Noble and on Audible too. If you like to listen to audio books. I’m reading it in my voice. You can hear it in this lovely drone right now.

Yes. Yes. So you’re good to hear the book. Have a good way. I think you have a nice voice and you have a good way of explaining things, so Yeah. That’s awesome. So it’s there too wherever you, wherever you buy books and your local bookstore should be able to get it as well. [00:37:00] All right. I’ll put the link in the show notes too.

Yay. Thank you. Thank you so much, Emily. In the first interview that I did with Shelby back in January, she talked about the unexpected death of her mother in 2013 and how she became a student of grief and she set out on a lifetime mission to explore the off, misunderstood human experience of a loss. And through her books, her podcast and her live events, she helps grieving people reclaim their power and peace of mind after devastating loss.

So Shelby started her podcast in 2017, and then she released her first self-published book in 2019. And then just this January, she was offered a book deal for her second book, which we discussed. And that was from Penguin Random House. And now her book is getting ready to come out her second book. It’s gonna be released on September 29th.

[00:38:00] However, you can go ahead to her website and pre-order it. So now her lifetime dream of becoming a writer is coming true right in front of her eyes. And I am not surprised. Every time I talk with Shelby, I’m impressed and I always learn from her. One of the things that stands out to me about this interview is what it takes to keep pushing forward, to keep moving onward, even when you are afraid.

You know, I asked Shelby, do you get afraid or do you get nervous about publishing a book? Or do you get thoughts of, am I really good enough to publish a book? And we talked about that. And Shelby’s not alone. I feel afraid. I feel afraid just about every day. Every day I do something that makes me nervous or I’m not so sure I can do it, or will I be good enough, but I just keep plugging away and I’ve watched on the other hand, so many [00:39:00] people pursue a passion, pursue a dream, and then kind of give up.

They’re not consistent. They don’t keep pushing forward in the face of fear. They’re afraid of being judged, and they just kind of back down. Don’t let fear stop you from doing what you love to do. If you’re seeking support in this area, I highly recommend you join the Onward Movement. The Onward Movement seeks to inspire you and at least 10,000 others to bravely embrace authenticity, to release the fear of judgment, and pursue your dreams with confidence.

It’s a compassionate community and it’s a safe place to connect and engage with others. And I provide access to tools, resources, and support. For every step along your journey, check it out. Just go to Facebook groups and search on Onward movement. Or take a look in the show notes and I provided a link as of the day, I’m recording this [00:40:00] August 31st.

We have about 976 members in the Onward movement. It’s growing every day. I expect we’ll be over a thousand by the end of the week, and I hope that you are one of those new joinees if you haven’t joined already. Thank you for listening today. Have a great week everybody.