Finding Your Breath in the Midst of Grief

 Learn how mindfulness and community help us navigate the experience of grief 

Grief can be a very lonely time for many people. We may feel like we do not want people around or just do not have the energy to talk. On the other hand, many people do not know how to manage being around a person who is grieving. This week we talk about the things you can do, alone, to find your healing path through grief. https://bit.ly/3ZFyX1u

In this Episode:

• 01:27 - Road Trip: Pennsylvania and Shoofly Pie
• 02:29 - The Modern Loss Handbook
• 04:08 - Mindfulness in the Midst of Grief
• 11:12 - Discussion: The Value of Friends "Just Sitting With Us"
• 13:27 - Freud: Mourning is a Natural Transformation Process after Loss
• 15:15 - Outro

Related Content:

• S3E38: Navigating Grief and Healing from Loss – with Dr. Ken Doka
• S4E28: Healing the Broken Pieces – Applying the Art of Kintsugi to Grief
• S3E20: Riding the Wave: Navigating the Second Year of Grief
• S2E6: The “Stages” of Grief
• S1E12: Traumatic Grief
• S1E11: Grief

#grief #griefjourney #mindfulness #supportgroups #grounding #loss #stagesofgrief #healing

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:27 Road Trip: Pennsylvania and Shoofly Pie
• 2:29 The Modern Loss Handbook
• 4:08 Mindfulness in the Midst of Grief
• 11:12 Discussion: The Value of Friends “Just Sitting With Us”
• 13:27 Freud: Mourning is a Natural Transformation Process after Loss
• 15:15 Outro

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Everyone Dies, the podcast where we talk about serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement. I'm Marianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner, and I use my experience from working as a nurse for 47 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life. And I'm Charlie Navarette, an actor in New York City, and here to offer an every person viewpoint to our podcast.

We are both here because we believe that the more you know, the better prepared you are to make difficult decisions in a crisis. Also, this podcast does not provide medical nor legal advice. Please listen to the complete disclosure at the end of the recording.

Welcome to this week's show. We're so glad to have you join Charlie and me for the next hour as we talk about learning to breathe again after the death of a loved one. This podcast is a combination of education and entertainment.

Sometimes Charlie and I are the only ones entertained, but that's okay. Our main topic is in the second half, so you can fast-forward to that razzmatazz free zone if you'd like. In the first half, Charlie has our recipe of the week and a book about grief to share with you.

In the second half, I'm going to share with you some thoughts about how to deal with death of someone you care about. And in the third half, Charlie has his perspective on grief from our good friend Sigmund Freud. In our first half, we are tripping out on the road to Pennsylvania whose state amphibian is known as the snot otter.

William Penn's founding of Pennsylvania as an experiment in religious tolerance drew the Amish across the Atlantic in the hopes of escaping the persecution they were facing in Europe. Pennsylvania is famous for Dutch country, the oldest continuous Amish community in the United States. Known primarily for their dedication to simple living, strict religious principles, and not using modern technology, the Amish are also known for their baked goods.

Amish bakers use homegrown ingredients, making everything from scratch. Shoofly pie, a breakfast pie, has a gooey molasses bottom layer, a cake-like center, and is topped with a delicious layer of crumbs. Shoofly pie is very popular throughout Dutch country, and will bring a sweetness to your next funeral lunch.

Moving on, we have a book to share with you this week. Rebecca Sofer's The Modern Lost Handbook, An Interactive Guide to Moving Through Grief and Building Your Resilience. This book is about removing the stigma and awkwardness of grief while focusing on our capacity for resilience and finding meaning.

In this interactive guide, the author offers candid, practical, and witty advice for confronting a future without your person, honoring their memory, dealing with trigger days, managing your professional life, and navigating new and existing relationships. You'll find no worn-out platitudes or empty assurances here. With prompts, creative projects, innovative rituals, the therapeutic-based exercises, and more, this is the place to explore the messy, long arc of loss on your own timeline and without judgment.

Please go to our webpage for this week's recipe for Shoofly pie and additional resources for this program. Everyone Dies is offered at no cost, but is not free to produce. Can we count on you to contribute? Your tax-deductible gift will go directly to supporting our nonprofit journalism so that we can remain accessible to everyone.

You can also donate at www.everyonedies.org. That's every, the number one, dies, dot org. Or at our site on Patreon under Everyone Dies. Marianne? Thanks, Charlie.

Our second half was written by Susan Peterson, a fan of the show, who wrote and said, I have something I want to say. Would I be able to do that? And I said, well, send it to me. Let me see.

And she wrote a nice piece about finding breath after the break, mindfulness in the midst of grief. So if any of our other listeners have anything they want to contribute, you can send it to us at mail, m-a-i-l, at everyonedies.org. So this is by Susan Peterson. There's a particular kind of silence that follows loss.

It doesn't always come right away. Sometimes it creeps in after the casseroles have cooled and the sympathy cards are neatly stacked on the kitchen counter. It's the hush between sobs, vacuum after the noise of the full house fades, and you're left alone with absence.

In that kind of silence, the mind gets loud. And for many, the idea of mindfulness feels both laughably out of reach and desperately needed. But what if mindfulness isn't a fix for grief but a companion? Grief isn't something you solve, and mindfulness doesn't ask you to.

One of the first things you learn when you practice mindfulness is how to sit with comfort without rushing to escape it. That's a hard task when your chest feels like it's caving in, but grief demands presence. When you lean into mindfulness, you begin to see that there's a kind of quiet and courage in just being with the pain without trying to rearrange it or rename it.

You learn that surviving the moment is enough. No gold stars, no spiritual enlightenment, just breath. In the chaos that follows loss, your days can start to feel like they've lost their skeleton.

Time stretches and bends in unfamiliar ways. Morning tea, a walk at the same hour, a five-minute breathing practice can become quiet anchors. These routines don't erase pain, but they create a scaffolding around it, giving your mind and body a predictable space to land.

You begin to remember that there's still rhythm, even in the aftermath of rupture. It's easy to lose your perspective when grief paints everything in shadow, but mindfulness can gently tilt your focus toward what still glows. Even in sorrow, there are flickers of light, a kind word, a quiet moment, the feeling of sun on your skin, and mindfulness helps you notice them without demanding that you feel better.

By embracing the present moment without judgment, you create a space for a more positive and balanced mindset. That doesn't mean ignoring the pain. It means allowing your heart to hold both the ache and the beauty without needing to choose between them.

Grief has a physicality to it, and mindfulness practices that center of the body, like yoga, body scans, or even gentle stretching, can help you tune into the truth. Sometimes the mind is too raw, too splintered to carry the full weight of loss. The body, though, doesn't lie.

It knows where the sorrow lives. Mindfulness invites you to notice how grief sits in your shoulders or your jaw and offers you the gentlest nudges to meet yourself there. That somatic awareness is not about control, but recognition.

There's a quiet tyranny in the cultural scripts around grief. What it should look like, how long it should last, who gets to be broken, and for how long. Mindfulness challenges that by encouraging non-judgmental awareness.

When you're not labeling your experience as too much or not enough, you start to see grief for what it is. Chaotic, inconsistent, deeply personal. And with that shift, you create a space for your own story to unfold without the pressure to perform resilience.

You remember that healing isn't linear, and that's okay. When the emotional waves get too high, the senses can become your lifeline. Grounding techniques rooted in mindfulness, like noticing five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, pull you out of the mental spiral and into the now.

It doesn't erase the ache, but it breaks its hold on your nervous system. In those moments, even the texture of a blanket or the smell of coffee can feel like reminders that the world still exists, and you're a part of it. Sometimes that's the closest thing to relief.

Mindfulness doesn't always happen in solitude. Brief groups that incorporate mindful listening or even quiet companionship can be unexpectedly healing. In those rooms, you don't need to explain yourself or manage someone else's discomfort.

Sometimes just breathing next to another person who gets it is enough. It's in that shared silence that you realize that you're not alone as you as you feel. It's in that shared silence that you realize that you're not as alone as you feel, and that presence, raw, unscripted, and real, is a form of connection too often overlooked in the frenzy of comfort giving.

You don't meditate your way out of grief. You don't breathe it away or transcend it through sheer awareness, but mindfulness offers you something subtler, a place to be honest, to unravel without fear, to sit in the thick of sorrow and still sense that there is something unbroken inside you. Grief asks you to feel everything, and mindfulness helps you to stay just long enough to know you won't drown in it.

You don't have to be okay. You just have to show up, and breath by breath, moment by moment, that's what healing starts to look like. So, Charlie, have any thoughts about that essay? Yeah, I was remembering, you know, many of our longtime listeners know my son Michael was murdered five years ago now as of this podcast.

It was during the time of COVID, and I was house-sitting in this beautiful old carriage house, and to your point about mindfulness, Marianne, I didn't realize, in the back of the house, the wall, if you will, is floor-to-ceiling windows, and I didn't realize for a while that just sitting at the table with the sunlight coming in, that was my mindfulness, if you will, that I was just like there in the moment, nothing else was going on, and like I said, I didn't realize at first just the comfort of just sitting in that sunlight, just that light just engulfing me. Friends would come over, and I only said yes to a couple of friends, but as you were saying about having people around that they don't necessarily have to say anything, and that's what my friends did. They came over, you know, bring a sandwich or something, and just sit there, and then that's it, just say nothing, just let me be.

It was nice to have, you know, someone around without having to, oh, I need to, you know, get coffee for people or do this or that. No, it was none of that. It was just simply just sat there.

They sat there. There was no conversation. It was nice to have someone in the house, so I did that with a couple of friends.

Yeah, but yeah, but for me, it was that sunlight. I mean, it's just, yeah, just a sun just enveloping me, you know, in its own warmth, if you will. Mm-hmm.

So, yeah. It's like, remember Desiderata, what peace there may be in silence. Yes, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. Third half, not everything Sigmund Freud wrote resonates in today's modern society, but he did say that grief is not a problem or a pathology, but rather a normal human process. In his book, Mourning and Melancholia, he wrote, it is also well worth notice that although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment.

He contrasts mourning with melancholia, now called depression, which he sees as a pathology that does require intervention. Mourning, on the other hand, he describes as a natural transformational process after loss. For the last 50 years, mental health and grief experts have been trying to help people understand that grief is not something we need to heal from.

Rather, grief is the healing. David Kessler wrote, there is wonder in the power of grief. We don't appreciate its healing powers, yet they are extraordinary and wondrous.

It is just as amazing as the physical healing that occurs after a car accident or major surgery. Grief transforms the broken, wounded soul, a soul that no longer wants to get up in the morning, a soul that can find no reason for living, a soul that has suffered an unbelievable loss. Grief alone has the power to heal.

And that's it for this week's episode. Please stay tuned for the continuing saga of Everyone Dies, and thank you for listening. This is Charlie Navarrete, and from artist Salvador Dali, I do not believe in my death.

And I'm Marian Matzo, and we'll see you next week. Remember, every day is a gift. This podcast does not provide medical advice.

All discussion on this podcast, such as treatments, dosages, outcomes, charts, patient profiles, advice, messages, and any other discussion are for informational purposes only and are not a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment. Always seek the advice of your primary care practitioner or other qualified health providers with any questions that you may have regarding your health. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard from this podcast.

If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately. Everyone Dies does not recommend or endorse any specific tests, practitioners, products, procedures, opinions, or other information that may be mentioned in this podcast. Reliance on any information provided in this podcast by persons appearing on this podcast at the invitation of Everyone Dies or by other members is solely at your own risk.