Introduction and Welcome to the Workshop

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 707

Margi Dehlin [00:00:04] There is a golden picture frame hanging upon empty wall Haunting the hollow of

John Dehlin [00:00:15] my brain Painting pictures while we run

Emily Celis [00:00:22] underneath the dying light My braided hair

John Dehlin [00:00:28] comes all undone chasing hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Story, Mormon Transitions Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. I'm joined by the lovely Margi Dehlin.

Guest 2 [00:00:41] Hello everyone, lovely Margi Delin.

John Dehlin [00:00:44] It's good to have you, sweetie. It is March 7, 2017, and we are doing another live podcast. Now, as we mentioned last time, we've been doing this podcast as a part of the Mormon Transitions brand. As we mentioned, we have received some feedback that that brand is causing some confusion because there are people who are believing and active in the church that don't consider themselves transitioning and we want them to feel like this is for them. And then there's people who have left the church who no longer think of themselves as transitioning, but who definitely are valuing just this general content that we're providing. So what we asked our listeners last week was to give us feedback on whether we should continue the Mormon Transitions brand or just fold these into Mormon Stories and have it be kind of an integrated product. So there'll be Mormon Stories podcasts just on people's stories, some on church history stuff, and then some on just sort of health and well being. So today we're going to be broadcasting this as part of the Mormon Stories brand. If you guys hate that, those of you who love the Mormon Transition stuff, please let us know because this is the direction we're moving. Unless we get feedback otherwise. Those of you on Mormon Stories, if you like the idea of us just folding this in, we want to hear that feedback too. Or if you don't like that, give us feedback. So enough of that. We are so super excited for today's topic, and it's a bit of a sober topic. It's an important topic and it's one of the most common ones that comes up for people once their orthodox religious worldview falls apart. And this applies to unorthodox, believing members. This applies to people questioning, and it applies to people who have left Mormonism or religion altogether. The topic is around navigating loss and death, and we're going to get into that in just a second. But we do have a few announcements to make. So our next Healing and Growth retreat, we can call it that, or Mormon Transitions Retreat, whatever we want to call it, is this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, March 10th through 12th. It's going to be amazing. It's in Salt Lake City. We have a Great venue. It's pretty much full. There are a few openings left if somebody really wants to come, but I consider it a full event. And we're going to be talking about understanding a faith transition, understanding the holes that develop once a transition happens. We're going to be talking about secular spirituality, healthy communication with believing family and friends. We're going to be talking about healthy relationships, intimacy, emotional intimacy. So many great topics. Attachment. It's just going to be an amazing event. So if any of you want to try and sneak in, we, mormontransitions.org events is where you can read about it. Join up. We're always looking for panelists, especially active believing members or unorthodox attending members. So please email us right now ormondstoriesmail.com if you want to participate as a panelist. Other than that, I think we're ready to roll. You ready to roll, sweetie?

Guest 2 [00:03:55] Yep.

Margi Dehlin [00:03:56] Let's do it.

Navigating Loss and Death During Religious Transition

John Dehlin [00:03:56] Okay. So this topic is a sensitive one, and it very much strikes home for both me and Margi. The topic is again, dealing with navigating loss and death during or after a religious transition. And it's home for me because my sister Gina, oldest sister, 50, she was 60 years old last year. She was diagnosed with colon cancer in October of last year, and she died in December of last year. So we had about two months with Gina from the time we knew she was dying to the time she died. And that was. That was a significant event in our lives. And honestly, I've had grandparents die, but there were grandparents that we didn't live close to, we didn't grow up with. We just saw him a few times in my upbringing. But I, you know, and I had a roommate die from BYU and a few other people in my life die, but never someone as close as a sister. Also last year, a really close aunt of mine died. So that hits really close tone for me. Margi, talk about your year last year.

Guest 2 [00:05:11] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [00:05:12] So in November, I lost my dad. I'm gonna probably cry all over again. True to form, for him, it was a longer goodbye. He was diagnosed with Lewy Body disease, which is kind of a cross between both Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's. So we spent a lot of time caring for him. My mom as a nurse and a lot of my siblings, actually. So he was at home for the full duration. A true family effort. So, yes. So that is still quite fresh in my mind as well. So we come bringing that to the, to the discussion.

John Dehlin [00:05:57] Yeah. And it's been a heavy. It's a heavy Year in the Delin family. But it's an important opportunity to talk about something that means a lot to a lot of people. And we're also not the experts. Today, we've brought on a couple panelists, kind of special guests to really talk us through so these issues from. From a professional standpoint. So we have Emily Sellis. Emily, is that how you pronounce your last name? I'm sorry, I should have asked you beforehand.

Guest 2 [00:06:27] That's right, yeah. Selles.

John Dehlin [00:06:28] Okay, we have Emily Sellis. And we have Amy Heffernan. And Amy. Emily, why don't you start and introduce yourself, talk about your background, and then Amy will have you introduce yourself as well.

Guest 2 [00:06:44] Hi, I'm Emily Selles, and I just wanted to say thank you so much, you guys, already, for sharing such personal stories. I think this is a really very heartfelt topic. I think that everyone, no one else gets to escape this. And so I really appreciate you guys being so willing, when it's so fresh to talk about these things. I'm Emily Selles. I live in Orange County, California. I'm a pre licensed marriage and family therapist and professional clinical counselor, pre license, meaning I'm just about done with that whole licensure process. And I was raised Mormon, born and raised, seventh generation, actually, in my family, so come from a very long line of Mormonism. And talking about loss and death, you know, that in and of itself is a huge loss in my life. And that started for me back in the late 90s, kind of before the whole open stories and Mormon stories and everything came about. And I was reintroduced to that kind of later on through my brother when he was going through some of his stuff. And so that's kind of where I am. I really transitioned out in the early 2000s, and something that I really, really enjoy doing is helping others to do so. And that's become an important and integral part of my practice and something that I get a lot of satisfaction out of. Being able to help someone walk through that, wherever they end up on the other side is up to them, of course, but. And it's just neat what you guys have done to help the community. So thank you guys for your service.

John Dehlin [00:08:16] Thanks, Emily. And we have a listener named Gracie who says Emily, exclamation point. I'm assuming you know who that is.

Guest 2 [00:08:25] She was at the workshop with us, so it's pretty neat.

John Dehlin [00:08:29] Hi, Gracie. I totally remember Gracie as well. All right, so welcome, Emily. So glad you're with us. Glad you could join us.

Guest 2 [00:08:36] Thank you so much.

John Dehlin [00:08:37] Amy, tell us about you yes.

Emily Celis [00:08:40] Hello. I am Amy Heffernan. I have been a long time Mormon Stories listener. Way back John and I met, we just figured out maybe 2006 at a Sunstone conference. There was like 20 people in the room. So we are big fans. My family is big fans and we've been listening forever. I grew up with real liberal Mormon parents, so I have kind of a unique Mormon story. I am a marriage. A marriage and family therapist. I work in Redmond, Washington. So like Microsoft land over there in Washington. And then I am like just a sniff away from getting my sex therapy certification. So have two more supervision hours and then I will be applying.

John Dehlin [00:09:29] Excellent. Well, Amy, we are so happy to have you here.

Emily Celis [00:09:33] Yep, I'm excited. I have lots. Like, I kind of feel that if you're a therapist, you can't escape dealing with people with grief and loss. It's threaded through everything that anybody comes with.

Defining Grief and Its Many Forms

John Dehlin [00:09:45] Yeah. And honestly, there are going to be people who are thinking, I haven't had a really close one die. But I would say, and this may be repeating something you guys have already said, but going through a faith transition is in and of itself, I think, comparable in many ways to losing a loved one, terms of grieving and loss. So I think these principles apply whether or not you've had someone actually die. I think it can apply to a divorce. I think it can apply to faith crisis and death and other sorts of things.

Margi Dehlin [00:10:17] Yeah.

Emily Celis [00:10:18] Sickness is a big one. If you have a loved one that is your caregiving for. You know, my mom has had Ms. For a long time, so it doesn't look like a death of a parent, but it feels like we've been grieving her for a long time. Like when you lose a pet, there's just so many, so many ways that people feel grief, you know, so it's true.

Margi Dehlin [00:10:36] It feels like life offers you plenty of opportunities to kind of practice the loss, right?

John Dehlin [00:10:43] Yep, absolutely.

Emily Celis [00:10:44] That grief, the master teacher. I say.

John Dehlin [00:10:47] Oh, wow. Okay, good. Well, I'm excited.

Emily Celis [00:10:49] I'm excited too.

Guest 2 [00:10:50] So

John Dehlin [00:10:53] I should also mention that this is only part one of a two part series. At least a two part series. We may do more, but please know that we're not going to cover all of grieving in an hour and a half. But what we do promise is what we want to encourage our listeners to do who are live is to please post comments and questions to our Facebook page. Actually, not to our Facebook page, but to the video that you can see streaming. And we will try and incorporate your comments or questions into this live Discussion. And if we're not able to cover them this time, Shandy's gonna save those to our show notes and we're gonna use them in a future episode. So please, please do post your comments and questions as we go along. The reason why we do this live is to allow it to be interactive, and I think that just makes it more fun and interesting. So, having said that, Deborah Edwards writes, my husband was diagnosed with cancer just five weeks after he left the church and died nine months later. So double sense of loss, loss of faith, and loss of husband. Thank you for sharing something so personal, Deborah. So nice that you can, that you can join us on such a sensitive topic. So. All right. Also, Patricia writes that she lost her grandparents six years ago. They helped raise her and it's been terrible for her. She misses them. So, so glad. Thank you for sharing that. That as well, Patricia. Okay, so, Emily, I think what we'd like to do, you provided us with a really good outline, and the first thing you have on your outline is defining grief and loss. So we're going to have you do that. And Amy, we're just going to invite you to jump in whenever you're comfortable, just like a familiar conversation.

Emily Celis [00:12:39] Sounds great.

John Dehlin [00:12:41] Okay, Emily, take us through how you define grief and loss.

Guest 2 [00:12:45] Yeah, and I do want to hear from everyone else, too, how you guys define it, because that's the thing about grief is that it is not one specific way or one specific thing, but the way that I really liked to hear it defined was to talk about grief being a connection that's lost. And so as you guys were already saying that that connection can be to people, it can be to places, it can be the things you know. So that's kind of the connection, is the piece that is the important part and what kind of creates this grief process. And, and I've also liked how people coin it where they say there's a difference between grief and mourning. And grief is that really personal experience that we all feel and a lot of times that we can't even share with other people. And that's more what the mourning is. The mourning is what externally people see that you go through. And so it's interesting to kind of separate those two and to see that grief, you know, is such a private and internal process that we're all allowed to have in whatever way we need to have that. But another, another quote was from Holly Prigersen. She's from Harvard Medical School, and she said that the basic core of grief is wanting what you can no longer have. And I think that this touches on. And we'll probably get into this later, but some of these existential ideas in this world that we all have of. Of kind of having to deal with these losses, having to deal with death, having to deal with the ultimates in life that we all have to face. So, yeah, that's kind of how I wanted to define it, but I'd love to hear from you guys how you define it as. Well, kind of get some other voices on here.

Margi Dehlin [00:14:24] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:14:25] Amy, how about you?

Emily Celis [00:14:29] Grief is weird. That's how I would define it.

Guest 2 [00:14:36] Like, I.

Emily Celis [00:14:36] Like we've just kind of said it isn't always just this easy, tangible, like, oh, a person dies or my pet dies. It could be a lot of different things. Loss of faith, a change in relationship. Whether it's divorce or when couples go through a faith transition, there's deeply a grief of maybe mixed faith relationships.

Guest 2 [00:14:58] Right.

Emily Celis [00:14:59] So I would define grief as just a deep, universal sadness of missing a person or a thing that's been important to you.

John Dehlin [00:15:11] Excellent.

Margi Dehlin [00:15:14] I love both of those. I feel like they capture it. One thing that's been interesting for me amidst grief and just kind of being alive is you can mourn a time, too. You can mourn a time. I remember the first time I brought home a baby from the hospital and I had another child. And I remember looking at the older one and really feeling like, wow, you're so big, and where did that time go? Or even that there, I just find it wise. And also, I don't know, it can feel also like a challenge. How much loss, it abounds, the human experience. If you're really connecting to your life in a really. I feel like an awake way. And it goes both ways. I think there's loss and birth. Things are also being born all the time, oftentimes out of loss, too. But anyway, I loved both of your definitions that way.

John Dehlin [00:16:17] Beautiful. Okay, so, Emily, one of the most common frameworks, and it's an empirically validated or supported framework for dealing with grief and loss, is the Kubler Ross model. Do you mind taking us through that a little bit and talking about the stages of grief?

The Stages of Grief: An Overview

Guest 2 [00:16:36] Yeah, no, I think that's important. And I. You know, the first time I heard about these stages of grief was for me, in a personal loss that I experienced was when I was a young 13 years old. I lost my mother. And I remember hearing about these, you know. You know, you try and kind of grasp onto something. You try and figure out what. What to do. And, you know, the adults kind of telling you, this is what you do. You go through these five stages of grief. And so learning about those, and we're going to kind of go through those a little bit. But I think it's important to help others understand or to kind of expand the understanding or awareness of this model is that it's not linear. It doesn't have to go in order. It doesn't have to be done in a certain way. Maybe some people won't go through all of these stages. And so, again, just kind of really grasping and holding on to that fact that grief is a unique experience that we each get to define for ourselves. And I think that's really important because a lot of times comparison can kind of come into play. Like, oh, look at so and so, they're getting over this so easy, or so and so is so strong. And I, you know, I should be able to do it like them. And so to really take ownership of this process for yourself and honor sacred space for yourself, whatever it is, and that there's no loss too small to go through the grieving process for. You know, like Amy was saying, you know, some people might think losing a pet is not a big deal, but losing a pet for someone else can be the most horrible and devastating loss that they go through. So, yeah, just keeping that in mind, and please jump in wherever you guys want to with these different stages. So the first stage is denial. The reason denial is put first in this Kubler Ross model is because this is usually the human response to try and make sense of something, to try and to not fall apart and dissolve in that process. Right. Initially, the denial is what happens to kind of help create some space for survivorship in this process, depending on how deep that that loss is. And so that's denial. And shock can come as part of that. And there's not just one word that describes it. Right? So denial, shock, if you guys have any other words you want to put in there, but then anger is the next stage. And that is an interesting part of the process. And I say interesting because we're here talking about kind of Mormon stories, Mormon transitions, and I think anger sometimes, at least for me, in my experience as a woman being raised in the church, anger was not really a safe or okay emotion for me to experience. Growing up, I was supposed to be kind, loving, charitable, all these things. I was not supposed to be angry. And so that can be kind of a confusing part of the process. But what I liked about how to kind of look at what anger means or what it is, is that what anger does is that in this sea of grief that we get washed into, it can feel like we're in this dark storm, the waves are taking us over, we have no footing. And then all of a sudden the feeling will arise in us of anger at something, maybe someone, a lost time, a lost person, a lost experience or a memory. And anger can sometimes build a bridge for us to kind of get back into more of a reality based structure in our lives, to kind of start creating a structure for us to begin healing. So that's a really important part of the process.

Personal Experiences with Denial and Anger

John Dehlin [00:20:08] Let me pause you for a second, Emily. Did you, Margi, and I don't mean to make you like a subject, but did you experience denial with your dad? Does that stage resonate with you?

Margi Dehlin [00:20:23] I experienced and I do think it's different to how the circumstances around the loss. So I do feel like the thing with my dad was we all knew where his train was headed, right. And we were all on it for

John Dehlin [00:20:37] he was sick for nine, 10 years. Is that right?

Margi Dehlin [00:20:40] Yes. And there were also physical signs at the end where it was a little, it was quite easy to read. We had been prepared. But shock, I'd always thought shock. So that is something I did experience. And I always thought it was like shock, like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that happened. But for me it was actual physical shock. Like I was nauseated all the time, I had headaches, I had a difficult time sleeping. It was very much a physical, emotional response to what was going on. Even though I expected he would die that day. And that was surprising to me. Just, it really was like a sea of this physicality, this, that kind of came over me. And it lasted for a time. I would say that sort of shock at least a couple weeks of where I would turn on the water to wash dishes and I would walk. All of a sudden a thought would come to me and I would go and start the laundry and I would literally come back 30 minutes later with the water on. And so my brain just really was having a difficult time focusing and doing kind of basic things. So that was interesting to me. I'd always thought shock in the way of like, oh, how shocking. I'm so surprised.

Guest 2 [00:22:01] It was so. But it really was a physical, like

Margi Dehlin [00:22:04] my body went into shock around the, the, the death of my dad.

John Dehlin [00:22:10] So I could definitely relate to that. When I'm thinking about my sister, in some ways I'm, I feel like I'm still in shock. Like, you know, it's been a few months and I still not really cried about it or sobbed about it. And I think I've been just kind of numb, honestly. And part of that is the fact that Gina and I would talk, you know, once. Once or twice a year on the phone, but we weren't like in each other's lives all the time. And so it kind of doesn't feel real. Like I don't know that I fully processed it because I saw her in October, we all flew out to see her. And that's like a really recent time to see her. And I don't see her all that often. So I don't think I've fully. I don't think I fully. I think I'm still probably in shock a bit about it. Naomi, you're shaking your head. Why is that?

Emily Celis [00:23:12] I think that when someone's not in your daily life regularly, it's easy to just kind of believe that maybe everything's okay, you know, like, oh, yeah, when I go visit her next, she'll be there in like the months, a year you see each other. So sometimes when you have kind of like rich, I call them, like rituals or anniversaries of things that you would normally see her and then she's not there. And that might be the place where you kind of process what that means, that she's gone, you know?

John Dehlin [00:23:39] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Emily, did you have something to say about that? Shock or denial or.

Guest 2 [00:23:46] Yeah, no, I think that, you know, what I shared with my experience about my mom, you know, as a 13 year old, a lot of times children don't really have the words to grieve or kind of connect to. And so for me, I felt like my grieving process definitely, you know, has been kind of lifelong in a sense. And so the times when, for example, I got married is when I would really, oh, I wish mom was here. You know, I really wish that I could have her here with me. And so those become more poignant, you know, or the birth of my first child. You know, those are like these really big life things where it kind of comes. All comes together, that moment of real presence and real mindfulness about the loss. And a lot of times I think. And again, this is like existentially we defend against these losses because it feels like it's going to kind of make us fall apart. And so that's. It's normal to do that. And it's also self protective in a sense that you will be able to deal with it in the time that you're supposed to deal with it in. And when You're. And when you're ready for it, and you'll be able to create more space as, you know, kind of intuitively when you're ready to deal with these things. And that's, again, kind of going back to that unique process and being able to trust and be able to have faith that you can get through to the other side, you know, that hope and healing is possible, peace again is possible, and to be able to know that that's part of it, that hope and that faith. And sometimes, you know, I say this to my clients a lot. Sometimes you kind of have to borrow my hope, you know, that this is. Sometimes you might not feel that. And so you can borrow my hope and my belief that things can be better for you.

John Dehlin [00:25:17] Great. And just because you've covered two of the. Two of the steps, and I agree, these are not linear. They can happen simultaneously, right?

Guest 2 [00:25:28] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:29] Yeah. So they're not linear and they're not exclusive, I guess, mutually exclusive. Did you. Have you been through anger with your dad?

Grief Through the Lens of Faith Crisis

Margi Dehlin [00:25:39] I think if I. The way that I feel like I went through the anger, kind of part of it, and what I like about the Kubler Ross kind of paradigm, actually, for me was it prepared me to feel a lot of things and to have it not all make sense. And I think that's super helpful going into it, versus necessarily a staged process. It's just, you know, this idea of I'm going to be receptive to all the emotions I have, and it's going to be my charge to feel them and just process them as they come. And I think that's a really powerful thing about the model. I did feel some anger about my dad's suffering. So that. That was something that I feel like I did process, but I had also processed all along. But seeing him kind of suffer for that extent and for that amount of time was. Was. But I didn't. I didn't. Anger wasn't where I. That was. What would I say? It was not as much a part of my grieving process. I would say.

John Dehlin [00:26:51] Can I. Can I bring up something that just occurred to me?

Guest 2 [00:26:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:26:55] So those of you who've seen Margi's interview that we did on Mormon stories and Mormon transitions, she talked a lot about her religious beliefs now. And Margi, basically you said something to the effect of you're not super invested in beliefs anymore, just in general. And so that would mean that even a belief in God or in Jesus or the resurrection, you're just not really focused on that. They're not really important to you. Is that fair to say?

Margi Dehlin [00:27:22] What I would say is I don't find. It's not where I focus because I don't feel like it informs my behavior. It doesn't really change the way I being present and living by values. So, yes, that's probably pretty fair.

John Dehlin [00:27:38] And the reason why I mentioned that in the context of anger is because I do remember maybe me or other family members mentioning to you at times something to the effect of, you know, making. And we don't intend to mock, but sort of the comment about, you know, whether or not God's hand was in your father's passing or, you know, the sorts of reassurances that someone might receive in a religious context about, like, heavenly Father took them or heavenly Father needed them, or you're okay because you have the belief in the afterlife. And I remember that not bringing out anger in you because you didn't have those beliefs anymore. But I'm wondering if you had had those beliefs, if those types of responses would have made you angry. And then Amy and Emily, I think both of you have responses to that as well. But I remember you kind of laughing that off, but almost in a charged way, as if those responses probably would have made you angry if you had beliefs. Does that make sense? Do you resonate at all with what I'm saying?

Margi Dehlin [00:28:48] Yeah, and I love that it's in our Emily's kind of list of things to kind of how to navigate, maybe how to connect. I think it's difficult in our culture. I don't think that death is something we're particularly practiced at talking about. I mean, really, we lock away people

Guest 2 [00:29:06] as they get older.

Margi Dehlin [00:29:07] They're kind of isolated from us. And so it's not something that I think. So I do feel like people are struggling to kind of what to say or to connect. It reminds me of a movie called Rabbit Hole with Nicole Kidman where she loses her son and she's in a group, and someone in that sort of support group says to her, you know, well, God just needed another angel. And she says, it's God, after all. He could make another angel. You know, no need to take my child. And so, yeah, I do think that is kind of part of that sort of grief, that your world view or your beliefs come into the forefront sometimes in situations like that with emotion. And that's probably part of it. So discussing maybe, you know, things that we can say in grief that really are comforting and that really are connecting to this universal thing that we will all experience is like a Great topic. I'm excited to talk about today for that reason.

John Dehlin [00:30:12] Amy, you're nodding a lot. Tell us what you're. What you're thinking.

Emily Celis [00:30:15] I'm such, like, an active listener.

John Dehlin [00:30:17] I love it.

Emily Celis [00:30:20] Yes, Mark, Yes. You know, I think what I love about this model, and I mean, of course there's criticism. I mean, in the grief community, there's criticism about the model, too. But what I do appreciate is the fact that it kind of lets people not look at themselves in a judgmental way with whatever feelings come up.

Guest 2 [00:30:37] Right.

Emily Celis [00:30:38] And I think that's the hardest part, is that sometimes when you're in grief, things you feel like you're kind of going crazy, you know, like that deep. Like how you were talking about, you just, like, left the sink on. Right?

Guest 2 [00:30:49] Right.

Emily Celis [00:30:49] You're probably somebody that never does that.

Guest 2 [00:30:51] Right.

Emily Celis [00:30:51] And so you're doing. You do things out of character for yourself. Right. And it's easy to kind of feel critical of that at times. Or you look at somebody else in your family that might be having a different response, and you think, maybe I should be that. Or you look at somebody else that might have a similar situation, and you think maybe they're doing grief the right way. There's no right way to do it.

Margi Dehlin [00:31:15] Right.

Guest 2 [00:31:15] And when you.

Emily Celis [00:31:16] When you approach yourself with a critical, judgmental eye about how your grief is doing it, you're gonna be in trouble. You know, you're gonna just be in trouble. So what I love about just the grief topic in general is that all feelings are okay. And I always tell people this. Beautiful. I say feelings aren't permanent.

Guest 2 [00:31:35] Right.

Emily Celis [00:31:36] You. It will change. It will be different. You'll be angry, you'll be shocked. You'll be crying in a ball, you know, and it went. And life happens. You know, life happens and things move forward. And if you had a crystal ball, it would be wonderful to see what it would look like in five years. When you're in that deep, deep sorrow, it's so hard to believe that it's not going to feel any different than what you're feeling currently.

Guest 2 [00:32:02] Right.

Emily Celis [00:32:03] So I also am excited about talking about what. How to talk about it and how to make more space for it in your life, how to, like, face it instead of turning away from it.

John Dehlin [00:32:12] Right.

Guest 2 [00:32:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:32:15] Thank you, Amy. Emily, you'll be pleased to know that Jeff, your brother, has joined us.

Guest 2 [00:32:22] Hi, Jeff.

John Dehlin [00:32:24] And it's a sobering comment. He writes, after my mom died, which is your mom, too, I often felt completely devoid of any feeling. And that made me feel like Something was very wrong with me. Likely denial. Emily, I don't want to put you in the position of having to sort of like, provide counseling to your brother, but do you have a response to that, or would you rather pass that one to Amy?

Guest 2 [00:32:50] What an interesting concept to be talking to my brother about this. It's so interesting. Yeah. No, I think that. Is that. Is that denial? I think that it is.

John Dehlin [00:33:00] Is it denial or is it that different people process things in different ways and that some people don't get emotional about these sorts of things?

Guest 2 [00:33:08] Right. And then that's the idea, like shock. What Margi was saying is her word that makes sense to her. I think we all kind of have a different devoid. I think that's a great word, you know, that makes sense to him. And so kind of having those words. I think the Kubler Ross, she just kind of created a framework of, you know, it comes down to semantics sometimes, but a framework of what was naturally occurring or what was witnessed would naturally occur. And so. But yeah, no experiencing that. I mean, that. That numbness or that, you know, feeling like that void there, that not being able to kind of touch it because it touches us all in such a personal way that there's no. No one can tell us when it's okay to start feeling that or when it's okay, you know, when you need to turn it off. You know, you'll have some people say, stop breathing. Stop crying already. Well, you know, if you've got a thousand tears to cry, you're not going to stop at 500. So who are they to tell you that? And so it's hard to turn off those voices, to not allow those voices in. But, yeah, no, that. That feeling of, you know, I don't think I really dealt with my mother's death for years and years. I didn't know how. I didn't have the tools. I didn't have the life experience that I don't know what my reasons were. But what's important is that I got around to it, you know, Love it.

John Dehlin [00:34:27] Yeah. Jeff says counsel away. She does it all the time. Anyway, A couple other quick things. Dorian Nielsen. I grew up with Dorian. She says I didn't experience denial with my husband's terminal cancer diagnosis, but lots of family members did. And yes, Dorian, I remember when I believe it's Kyle. When Kyle passed away. That was sad for many of us. I'm sad I never got to meet him. Sue Bergen writes a practical suggestion. When you're in raw grief, drive extra carefully. You're not all there. And accidents are more likely. I've seen this many times in my work as a hospice chaplain and bereavement counselor. That's super interesting. Go ahead.

Margi Dehlin [00:35:17] One thing I was thinking about also, just as we were talking was when I am feeling particularly sad or low, reframing or changing the way I think about the loss of my dad has been really helpful. So oftentimes when I'm feeling really sad or really missing him, I'll think, well, this is really. This feeling I'm having is really a tribute to the love I had. And the depth of my pain really tells me how deeply I was touched by his life. And for some reason, that makes me just feel. Feel good kind of thinking about it in those terms as well as just in terms of feeling really grateful to have known a love like that, a life like that, that it would be. It is expected to mourn it fully,

Guest 2 [00:36:19] to really, really feel it. So, yeah, I wanted to just respond to that. Margi, too. I mean, in. And again, this touches on the not comparing losses. Right. I could sit here and say, I just recently lost my dog that I'd had for almost 15 years. Right. And I could say, but my dog is not as big of a loss as your dad. I'm not going to do that. Right. Modeling. But I felt like I did that, too. I really was able to, as she was near the end of her life, to really, like, be intentional about how I was losing that connection and losing that love and being able to find some peace in that, that the tears represent the love for the connection that I had with her. So it is. It brings a comfort. It brings kind of a. It helps it make sense. Right. Because as humans, we're always trying to make sense of everything. And so that being able to make that connection made sense for me, too, doesn't mean that it would make sense for everybody. But, yeah, I could really hear what you were saying on that. Thank you.

Emily Celis [00:37:21] Can I add something, please? Okay. You know the part in Inside out where she realizes that, like, the sadness and the joy go together? She's like, down in the dark and she's like, swipey between the memories, you know, and she's like, wait, I was so sad because whatever happened with, like, the hockey game and then her parents were loving her. Do you know that part?

Margi Dehlin [00:37:41] I love that part.

Emily Celis [00:37:41] So I love that part, too. Okay. And this idea about that balancing the joy and sorrow in your life. Right. Any grief that I go back to personally to look at in myself, it's because they Both exist at the same time. You know that hippie book from the 70s called the Prophet?

Margi Dehlin [00:37:59] Yeah.

Emily Celis [00:37:59] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [00:37:59] Okay.

Emily Celis [00:38:00] There's. He has a chapter in there about joy and sorrow. Maybe I'll. Maybe I'll send you the. I think about it all the time and it says like when one's asleep with you in your bed, the other one's waiting for you. It's poetic. I can't even do it justice. I'll mess it up. So I'll just send it. You could post it in the comments or something. But is it those. That idea of how we balance that in our life, you know how you said like that, said that deep sadness that you feel is because you felt joy at one point with it and that the coexistence of both of those feelings.

Margi Dehlin [00:38:33] That's right, right. And how they help really enhance and co create one another and that allows you to feel, I feel like a sense of gratitude for even when you're suffering, you know, you can still feel a sense of gratitude for the whole.

Emily Celis [00:38:51] Absolutely. Oh yeah, go ahead.

Margi Dehlin [00:38:54] Sorry.

Guest 2 [00:38:55] Oh, I was just going to say too. Going along with that too. I think sometimes that we're afraid to kind of touch these really deep places in ourselves that feel painful, but almost in kind of going into those really deep holes, so to speak, with grief and with loss, I mean, I think it also heightens our ability to experience that joy. You know, it kind of like you're saying they go hand in hand. And I think the deeper we allow ourselves to enter into those feelings, the more greater joy that we are able to experience. On the flip side of that polarity.

Margi Dehlin [00:39:29] I love that and I also love the idea that what we don't shine a light on and it tends to live in the dark in us anyway and just it kind of drives us on an unconscious level. And so we're actually really. It helps our experience, I feel like to go ahead and when we're ready to try and shine light on those griefs as well, because I think, I don't know, it's part of my experience when I've seen people who, who've had a lot of grief that you can see compounded grief where oftentimes they haven't mourned the losses in due time. And then you have a loss come and it's like 10 times that loss because it brings up all these other losses. And I just feel like we really deserve to have that space to really fully mourn that it makes our lives better and our love and our time here better. When we can do that.

Emily Celis [00:40:35] Yes. Old grief, new grief triggers old grief.

Guest 2 [00:40:40] Right, right.

Emily Celis [00:40:41] And so sometimes you're like, I don't know why I'm a puddle of mess because of this thing that happened that seems insignificant. But a lot of times that feeling that you kind of sometimes want to protect against, it's uncomfortable. You don't want to feel sad. That's not a good feeling to feel. And so I'm just going to not let myself feel that. And then something happens that makes you feel that, and then it's like, here

Guest 2 [00:41:03] it triggers it all, actually.

Emily Celis [00:41:06] Face and embrace this feeling that needs to be attended to.

Margi Dehlin [00:41:10] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:41:11] Yeah. Jeff writes again. He apologizes for writing so much, but he says over 20 years after his mom's death, he still finds himself in situations that trigger uncontrolled emotion. Like watching a movie about death where he unable to leave a theater because he can't stop crying. And he says he takes that as a sign that he's repressing things way too much. It's funny because when you, when I asked you about Jeff and whether or not he's repressing, I wanted to say what a therapist friend told me, which is that everyone grieves differently and maybe some people just don't cry or don't sob as much, and that's just not the way that they experience grief. But Jeff is self diagnosing himself as repressing. So. So, you know, you know, your brother,

Guest 2 [00:41:56] Emily, you know, and I think it's. It is interesting, like I was saying, having that space, right, the unique experience that you have and that we have this trust or this faith in ourselves that we can, we can deal with it and that we'll deal with it in, in time, in due time, you know, when we're supposed to deal with it. And so sometimes just even having that little feeling of like, huh, I'm feeling. I'm wondering if I'm repressing this, you know, or whatever that the feeling is, you know, I wonder what this anger is or I wonder what this is. Kind of Just getting curious about that and kind of following that down. I haven't seen the movie the Rabbit Hole, but I'm thinking, follow it down the rabbit hole. Because that's, that's the thing is we have so many defenses against these feelings because they are so big, they are so scary and overwhelming. And it takes a lot of courage to do that, to go into something so unknown and to say, I'm going to touch this really painful place, not knowing what's going to happen. And it can really feel like it's going to take us down. Amy, do you have anything to say to that? I know you probably experienced that a lot with clients, too. You know, that. Just that helping. I think you mentioned it earlier, kind of helping people face these things or being able to walk into them.

Emily Celis [00:43:10] Yeah. Some people don't want to feel sad.

Guest 2 [00:43:15] Right.

Emily Celis [00:43:15] Like, I think that we're afraid. We're afraid of what if we feel like that forever?

Guest 2 [00:43:20] Right.

Emily Celis [00:43:21] And so it's just kind of. I would rather not think about it. I'm just going to compartmentalize it, put it away. Because if I have to feel it, it's going to be too big to have to feel. Right. And again, I just say feelings aren't permanent.

Guest 2 [00:43:33] Right.

Emily Celis [00:43:34] Like, it will. Like, it will. It will bring life. And like I said, grief is the master teacher. You will learn so much from the pain and sadness, even though you're like, I wish this never happened. Right. Most of the time you're not. Like, I'm so grateful that I lost my faith in the religion of my youth that I identify as, and I don't know who I am without Mormonism, or that my partner, my husband, or my spouse left me for someone, or, you know, just like, there's so many things that it's just painful, and it's like, who wants to feel that that is the part of life that is hard? And it will also teach you deeply about who you are as a person.

Guest 2 [00:44:12] Right.

Margi Dehlin [00:44:13] So true.

Guest 2 [00:44:14] Yeah, I know. I think that. I was just gonna say one quick thing. Sorry, John, but that, you know, kind of in that unknown place that we get into with a Mormon transition, you know, kind of getting into this, like, real scary place of that loss of, like, what do I have to hold on to or what do I believe in? I think we talked about that a little bit earlier. There's just that. What. What do I have to hold on to? And then the idea of the knowledge that grief always works, right? Like, the only way out is through. That's the only way. I mean, we can keep avoiding, repressing, pushing it away, getting ourselves busy with a million other tasks, but the only way out is through. And then it gets to become a lot of work, having to repress things or having to push them away. It becomes this kind of barrier that we have between ourselves and living a fully present life.

Margi Dehlin [00:45:03] It is so true. There's a quote, I think, that I've heard that grief will take its due, and I really believe that. I feel like it will Come in its own way and in its own time. But grief will take its due. And I do also feel like it's hard work. It is actual hard work to grieve, it is tiring, it is exhausting, it takes energy and I feel, I love the emphasis being on that. It's a personal journey that everyone takes and there's many ways to do it, probably as people. But I remember waking up the morning after my dad died and just thinking, I'm gonna do this work. And really I started meditating. Then I went for a walk that morning in a canyon. But really deciding I'm going to grieve every day, I'm going to sit. And I think it's because I could feel it sort of overcome me. I was kind of in that feeling like a wave where you have to

Guest 2 [00:46:09] ride it, you can fight it, but it's going to be worse if you do.

Margi Dehlin [00:46:13] And I just thought, I'm creating a space, I'm going to just.

Guest 2 [00:46:16] And I did.

Margi Dehlin [00:46:16] I wept for like those grief meditations for weeks. I would just sit and sob, but

Guest 2 [00:46:24] it was actually really helpful. I feel like it created a place

Margi Dehlin [00:46:28] and a time to do so. And then I was able to get up and make breakfast and, you know, go on with my day. And that's not to say I didn't feel grief during the day, but it did provide this sort of container, if you will, in a space where I had an expectation that it would be active, that I was going to have to work at it and work through it a bit.

John Dehlin [00:46:52] And that was super, you know. Yes, I have a PhD in psychology. No, I didn't receive a lot of training in grief counseling and I thought it was super bold when we meditate every morning, or at least Margi meditates every morning, and I do sometimes. And she would intentionally grieve every morning and every morning she would start crying. And I was like, what are you doing? You know, my non psychologist mind was thinking every morning you're gonna cry during your meditation. And then I realized that by intentionally going into the grief that it shows you're not scared of it, it shows you're owning, makes it so that you can sort of be on top of it instead of it necessarily smashing you, you know, out of the blue during different parts of your day. And it was an incredibly inspirational, powerful and effective thing to behold that you did well.

Guest 2 [00:47:55] Thank you. That's really inspiring, Margi. I think that that takes a lot of courage to step into those really difficult places and to not know how is that going to feel. What is it going to feel like? How long is this going to last? Is this gonna screw up the rest of my day? Am I gonna be able to be present for my family? I mean, there's all these things, these unknowns that can stop us from going there to those painful places that we all have kind of waiting for us. It is that sober topic. It's kind of a, you know, half as glass, full way to look at things. But it's our truth, right? It's our truth that we all have to experience that. Man, that is a lot of courage. And it sounds like it was a really healing experience on top of that.

Margi Dehlin [00:48:39] Surprisingly, it doesn't sound like a really lovely idea in the time, but. And it wasn't mine. I had read it in a book. I have a source, some sources at the end, but I had just read it in a book. The idea of going to meet your lost loved one and talking with them, go to a place that is a happy memory for you and you go and you meet them there. You just kind of see what kind of comes up or. And it really was. It really was a helpful thing. Not my idea. But surprisingly, really quick.

John Dehlin [00:49:13] Oh, Amy, you wanted to jump in really quick.

Emily Celis [00:49:16] I was just gonna say, my dad, who lost his dad in the year 2000, will often say to me, I took a walk with my dad today and talked to him, you know, creating a space to say, I'm gonna make time for my soul to feel that person.

John Dehlin [00:49:31] Right.

Margi Dehlin [00:49:32] That is so what it is.

Emily Celis [00:49:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:49:35] Emily, did you have a quick response to Margi's comment?

Guest 2 [00:49:38] Well, I was just gonna kind of bring up the idea, John, that you were saying that you kind of were witnessing this with your. Without your psychologist hat on, right. To say, look at this person who I love so much and how much pain this is causing her. And it's almost that human nature that we have to want to stop it. Right. We want to fix it, we want to make it better. We don't want to see them hurting. And I think is. We'll kind of talk about a little bit more later. But that the beautiful work that Brene Brown does on empathy, you know, to be able to say, well, this is actually part of your experience, John, to witness this grief that Margi's going through and to be able to, you know, to. For you to have to make space for it too. So it's not only the loss that people are directly experiencing, but it's the lives that it touches on the outside as well,

Margi Dehlin [00:50:26] really Good point.

Guest 2 [00:50:27] Yeah, beautiful.

John Dehlin [00:50:28] I'm just gonna. Since we're going through the Kubler Ross model, I'm gonna bring it back to that for just a second. We had left off on stage two, which is anger. I just wanted to throw my own anger experience in there. So after I had found out my sister had two months or less to live, we were all planning a family event out to spend time with her, and my dad and I were, you know, just having a bit of a disagreement on what would be best for Gina and what would make sense. And we were driving to the airport and we got in like the biggest shouting match we've probably ever gotten in. And my mother in law was there too, and stepmother, sorry. And it was horrendous. And it's weird because I, you know, again, I've spent six, eight years learning about this kind of stuff, but I, at the time, if you had asked me, I would have said, this has nothing to do with my grieving. My dad's being a jerk and I'm being mistreated and I'm. And I lashed out and we had this awful shame shouting match on the way to the airport. And looking back, how could it not have been connected to my just finding out, both for me and my dad, that my sister and his oldest daughter were dying? And how could it not have been exactly that? And it's not that there aren't other issues, but it's weird sometimes. And this is again, talking about emotions and specifically anger. We don't always know why we're feeling what we're feeling, and we don't always even know what we're feeling or we're not fully conscious of it. And I just. That took me by surprise. And I think of myself as semi aware of what I'm feeling. And it was also sort of paralleled by a comment that I saw on the Facebook page, which is another one of our listeners who basically writes something similar, which is. Bruce writes, I had an angry outburst with my parents in their home over my unbelief. So in this case, the topic was about unbelief, but there was an outbreak. And Bruce writes that this was three months prior to his excommunication, four months and a few days prior to his mom's death due to a cascade of strokes. And I just say, watch out for anger, because we don't. We might even think, I'm not angry about them dying. But then we'll have these angry outbursts that seem unrelated and I just wonder if they're related.

Margi Dehlin [00:53:26] And do you ever feel. I'm curious for both of you. Do you ever feel like anger is. It's more easily accessed and it's also more socially acceptable almost for. As I've seen it a lot in the males in my life in grieving, that they sometimes go more to anger. Anger first before really processing is really. It's pain. But this is the way that it's gonna come out for now. What do you guys say to that? What do you. What's your experience?

Emily Celis [00:54:00] I think on. On individuals, people are comfortable in one feeling, right? Like I always say, mad, glad, sad, scared are kind of the four feelings that you can compartment.

John Dehlin [00:54:09] Wait, mad, glad, sad and scared.

Emily Celis [00:54:14] The first three rhyme. The last one is scared. Right?

John Dehlin [00:54:16] Okay.

Emily Celis [00:54:17] And so if I'm feeling out of sorts, I'm like, what's going on? Am I mad, glad, sad or scared? Right. It's easy to do. With my kids. It's easy to do. That's good, right? I will credit my professor from master's program.

John Dehlin [00:54:29] And are you saying that there's a value in noting what the. What the emotion is and sort of naming it?

Emily Celis [00:54:36] I think identifying emotions is like Feelings 101. I feel bad, right? And I think people. Each individual person has one of the feelings that they're more easy to just sit in, right? Like you might have a friend that just. She's. She can cry. Like my cute sister, she's. If she's watching, we always tease her because she just like gets teary a lot, right? So she's really comfortable in sadness, right. It's not intimidating for her. I think men stereotypically. I hate stereotyping, but a little bit it's socially constructed for them to be more okay showing angry feelings. Whereas women are like, gotta be nice. You gotta. You know, they kind of just. With how society raises men and women, men can be more comfortable in anger, right? But I think of that scene in Still Magnolias, Remember when she's there, like in the. Does anybody watch Still Magnolia? I keep referencing movies here, but she's just so angry. Do you remember the mom's just so angry about her daughter dying.

Margi Dehlin [00:55:33] Yes.

Emily Celis [00:55:34] And then her friends, like, hit her. Hit the one that they always tease. Like, it's such, like a real feeling that gets kind of stuffed, right? The anger for some people, right? It gets kind of stuck a little bit. But I think it's. It's real and it just needs to be again. You gotta go through it. You gotta go through it. It's not gonna be permanent. Right? But you. But Being able to just identify. I feel angry. I feel mad right now. Right. Because you scratch a little bit of anger, and underneath it is sadness.

John Dehlin [00:56:03] Absolutely.

Margi Dehlin [00:56:04] And even acknowledging sometimes I feel like anger makes you feel empowered, whereas sadness sometimes can make you feel disempowered. Like, I don't know. So I wonder sometimes if it can help someone kind of feel Anyway. Emily, what were you gonna say?

Guest 2 [00:56:22] Yeah, no, I think exactly with that. And I love what you guys are all saying. Like, Amy is saying, some people feel more comfortable in other emotions and some people don't. Like I was saying earlier, anger has never been something I feel totally comfortable with at. On the exterior. Right. A word that I would use more is, like, irritated, annoyed. And so it's helpful. There's, like, a feelings wheel that has, like, those central feelings, and then it has all these other ideas to kind of help someone who's maybe trying to go through Feelings 101. I love that. To kind of help be able to identify and be able to put a finger on something, because that's bringing your awareness up. But, yeah, no anger. I mean, the way that I've always worked with clients, because I think people a lot of times do tend to flip into that a lot easier. It's a way that we kind of are maybe socialized to deal with things, if it's even on our own. We're, like, angry at something that's not going right or anything like that. And anger is a secondary emotion. So there's primary emotions and then secondary emotions. And so you want to get to the primary emotion kind of what's underneath that. So it's almost kind of like, okay, well, I'm feeling angry. What's kind of underneath that? And that's more the underbelly, like, the soft underbelly of feelings, which is more vulnerable and more difficult to get into those things. So, like, you're saying, it feels like you may be weaker, but sometimes weakness can be, like, mixed up with. Yeah, with vulnerability. But it's not being weak to be vulnerable. Right.

Margi Dehlin [00:57:49] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:57:50] Great. Okay, let's go on to the third stage of grief. What comes after denial? Shock. Denial and anger. And Emily. Oh, go ahead.

Guest 2 [00:58:06] Oh, yeah, go ahead.

John Dehlin [00:58:08] No, I think you're muted for a second, but I can hear you now.

Guest 2 [00:58:11] You can. Okay, great. Yeah. So we'll talk about bargaining next. That's. And again, these don't have to go in a certain order. These are just kind of what is conceptualized as the way things kind of end up happening. It's not necessarily anything that was created to deal with it. This is what naturally occurs. So bargaining can sometimes happen before a loss, after a loss. And what this is, is when you try and kind of make deals and try and, like, come up. Well, like, for example, if someone that you love is. Is dying, you'd say, just save this person and take me instead. Or if I promise that I'm never gonna get mad at my children again, don't do this. You know, so sometimes this will happen with. With God. If people are coming from kind of a. Of that kind of a framework that they're going to be trying to make deals with kind of a higher power or the powers that be to help give some control in their life, this is a part where they're trying to gain some kind of control. So any of you guys want to comment about the bargaining or experiences or maybe client experiences, anything?

Bargaining as Part of Grief and Transition

John Dehlin [00:59:19] I can just say, let's just move from the death and dying to the faith crisis subject for a second. I know that after I experienced the shock and the anger and the grief of losing my faith, I didn't want to leave the church because I loved it so much and in some ways still do. And so what you saw for me from 2000, 2001, all the way through 2015.

Guest 2 [00:59:50] Yeah, that's so true, babe, was me

John Dehlin [00:59:52] bargaining with the church and with my reality to try and find some progressive or nuanced or activist sort of perspective on Mormonism that would. That allowed me to avoid the reality that I actually didn't believe it was true anymore. And again, that's. I'm not saying that for everyone. That's denial or bargaining, because some people can, I think, come to peace with that as it relates to the church. But for me, it was very important that the church either be true or not at the end of the day, mostly because the church claims to be true and can harm people in such significant ways. And so many people's engagement with the church is based on its being true or not. And so for me, it was a matter of integrity, where I wasn't okay with the church claiming it was true, and I didn't believe it was, but I didn't want to let it go. So all those people who were with me during the stale DS years, just sort of the progressive Terrell Givens, Fiona Givens years, that was bargaining for me.

Emily Celis [01:01:04] I think it's interesting as an outsider looking into your experience, right, Because I've been a listener to the podcast and things like that, and like, sometimes Scott, my husband and I, but we're both listeners. So I would be like John's kind of in an angrier stage. Just his questions he asked people. And it's like you did that in a real public way, which is I think brave and raw and puts you up for criticism, obviously from the world that is watching you. But I think that's a hard process to have to go through. Right. And with clients, I mean, I see I have probably, you know, half my couch is faith crisis Mormons like couples that are dealing with the mixed issues about and the grief that comes from one person not believing anymore and how that relationship changes and how what you once were in the same agreement or connection on related to faith related to Mormonism specifically. And that grief that happens and there is anger. There's all of those things that can come from the sadness of that relationship ending. Right. But also trusting the fact that it's a process. Right. Like just as like John de Lynn on Mormon Stories was a process to watch individually, there's a process to be to be watched between couples and on an individual level. And again, not coming at yourself with judgment about what that's going to feel like.

Margi Dehlin [01:02:28] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:02:28] Was bargaining part of your either faith crisis thing or your dad's passing or do you not connect as much with that?

Margi Dehlin [01:02:37] I'm wondering if for bargaining part of the issue was I was not we were at a place where I was not trying to control outcome. I think he the suffering was so great that I wasn't trying to and

John Dehlin [01:02:54] it's a terminal diagnosis, at least Lewy Body is. So you know it's right.

Margi Dehlin [01:03:00] And I'm wondering if that's part of it, if maybe another part is too that I I'm not sure I have a belief set of someone being able to come in and where I would believe that I could bargain even that that's the way things work. And so that might have impeded why that wasn't part of my my process.

John Dehlin [01:03:21] I wonder if and I could think of like Mormons trying to get priesthood blessings to heal terminal illness or praying with God to fix, you know, to take away this disease. I wonder if there's an association between when it comes to death and dying, between religiosity and bargaining versus an atheist or an agnostic that's like two months to live. Emily, have you seen that at all or do you think that's even a fair association to make?

Guest 2 [01:03:55] Sorry, can you say the question again? So I'm just clear on what specifically?

John Dehlin [01:03:58] I'm just if there's possibly a positive association between a Correlation between bargaining and religious belief. So if you believe in a God, you're more likely to try and bargain, get a priesthood blessing, say a bunch of prayers, act really righteously to try and take away this diagnosis that for a. A person who really valued science would say they're probably gonna die soon, and that's probably time to get ready for that, you know?

Guest 2 [01:04:26] Yeah, no, I definitely think that that could be. And I think it's, you know, because there. There are those beliefs. I know, Margi, you were talking earlier about, you know, your. Your beliefs and, and I think the fact that if they don't have the specific belief that they're trying to fit their experiences into, then, then, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But if I have an experience, if I have a belief that saying God heals, miracles are possible, why not this miracle? Right. Why not me? Or why? You know, that brings up those why me? Questions. And, and so, absolutely, I think that there would be a correlation between that because we always try and fit our life experiences into our belief systems.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:08] As for bargaining during the transitioning away from Mormonism, I would say that was totally part of my process. Think that is perfectionism. I was. It was like a shield. I was trying to kind of wear. To protect me from suffering. Honestly, if I'm virtuous enough, if I'm doing all the right things, that maybe I can get through somehow unscathed. So that would.

Guest 2 [01:05:35] Yeah, yeah. And that also brings up a point I wanted to make too, is that guilt is oftentimes part of bargaining. Right. So, gosh, if only I read my scriptures more, if I was just more faithful, if I spent more time in this way, you know, and that's such an. Such a big part of a faith crisis or transition is examining yourself in that way. Gosh, if I could just let this stuff go, if I didn't care so much about these things that I found out, or if I can turn a blind eye to them and just, you know, just keep pushing ahead. There's all these things that we try and do, and, and guilt is unfortunately a big player in that.

John Dehlin [01:06:13] Amy, you were going to say something.

Emily Celis [01:06:15] Yeah, I have two examples. When my mom first had symptoms of ms, she got a priesthood blessing that had said that she was going to be okay, and then she wasn't diagnosed for a few years, and then she got diagnosed and she had to kind of make meaning about what happened there. Like, why didn't that priesthood blessing work in my favor? Because now I have Ms. Right. And so kind of that, like Negotiating. Did I do something wrong? Did I not?

Guest 2 [01:06:40] Right.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:42] And.

Emily Celis [01:06:42] And then the second part is someone saying to her after she was. That she got really, really sick in 1988 is when she got diagnosed, and she was super sick. She had just had my brother who was five months old, and one. Somebody had said to her in her. In her ward, well, if you would have had more family home evenings, maybe this wouldn't have happened to you. Right. And she just was kind of like,

Guest 2 [01:07:03] are you crazy, woman?

Emily Celis [01:07:04] You know, just like, that's not. That's not how this whole big thing works. Right. And she was able to do that. But it was. It was such an interesting, you know, examination on what goes on in people's minds when sad things happen to people. Right. And so when you connect being religious, doing things, prayers, doing family, home, eating more, not being a liberal Mormon, you know, like, for my parents at least, that was maybe kind of the perception of them. That's hard to kind of, like, wrestle. Right. The other thing, too, I mean, with any gay Mormon story that you hear, it's that I'm gonna bargain with God out. If I am on my knees Mormon praying, maybe I can not be gay. Right. Like, and the guilt and the shame and the grief that they feel around being gay and Mormon, and what that means that you. I don't know, one story that I can't think of, one person's story that I haven't heard that that didn't go on.

Guest 2 [01:07:57] Right.

Emily Celis [01:07:58] When struggling with that gay Mormon issue. So, so true. Yeah, it's real. The bargaining is real.

Guest 2 [01:08:03] Yep.

Community, Podcasts, and Grieving Together

John Dehlin [01:08:04] To bring in more listener comments. We're so grateful for the listeners who have responded. Jeff is really active on this one. But Jeff writes how. How helpful it was for him to listen to podcasts over the weeks that he was experiencing his grief. He said it helped him process things both intellectually and emotionally, sort of on what he describes as a fast track. And that's a really interesting dynamic that I'm curious to get people's feedback on. Whether it's death or a faith crisis or whatever. It seems like stories are really powerful and that when people listen to. You know, I just keep wondering, why is Mormon stories getting more Downloads than ever 12 years in? Because so many people go through the faith crisis and then leave and they're done, and they're done with religion or they figure things out. But I think there's so much power in hearing other people talk about their stories, and I could. I could give my own theories as to why that is so helpful. To people who are grieving. But Emily. And Emily, why don't you guys give us your theory on why listening to podcasts, why listening to stories can. Can really help people process their grief.

Guest 2 [01:09:22] I'll jump in there. And Amy, you jump in, too. But there's a theory for psychotherapy called narrative therapy. And what that kind of the basis to that is that you have a story to your life. You have these stories that you tell yourself and the way that you kind of expected your whole life to go. And with narrative therapy, what you're kind of trying to do is to almost experientially help them to look inside and to create a new story for themselves, a new framework for them to look at. And so to me, as you're framing it this way, that makes a lot of sense, that as they're hearing all these different stories from so many courageous people that are coming forward and sharing these intimate, vulnerable places inside of themselves that they're able to pick and choose. Okay, that fits. That doesn't fit. That feels good. Yes. I resound with that. And then create that unique experience that they want to then integrate into their own lives. So that, to me, is kind of how I look at that from a, you know, therapeutic standpoint.

John Dehlin [01:10:20] So it sounds like you're saying in part, stories help us reframe what we're experiencing and maybe new and more constructive ways. Is that part of it?

Guest 2 [01:10:30] Yeah. And it also gives us kind of different models to look at other than the models that we were raised in or the models of the people in the church. Because as you're trying to create a different way of being, it gives you something to hold on to and say, yeah, I like that reflection. They don't like how it feels. Let me try this.

John Dehlin [01:10:46] You know, instead of like, I'm alone or I'm broken or I'm defective or I'm weak, or in the case of death, I'm never going to see him again. This is terrible. Life has no meaning or purpose. You can hear stories and get new perspectives or frames to think about and process these events.

Guest 2 [01:11:07] Amy, I was just going to say, especially even, you know, as we're talking about death like this. Like, when you get to this place of, I don't know what I believe anymore, are we gonna go to the kingdoms? You know, the three kingdoms, or what's the afterlife gonna be like? Am I gonna see these people again? These are huge, you know, existential issues that we all have to deal with, because even the religions that say they know don't Know, we don't. We don't know. And so, yeah, it's really hard to get to that place to be able to say, I can. I can look at this, and to have someone else say, this is what I believe. And then I might as a listener say, oh, that's no way. I would never believe that. Or I would never be atheist, or I would never be this. And then you find yourself on your path later on. Maybe you are atheist and that's okay, or maybe you decide not to be after a while. That's okay. I mean, it's. Again, it's your unique experience. And I think that's what the stories help with, Amy.

Emily Celis [01:12:04] I think that we are wired for connection. I think that is who we are as humans.

Guest 2 [01:12:09] Right.

Emily Celis [01:12:09] And I think hearing stories and telling stories is how we connect.

Margi Dehlin [01:12:14] Right.

Emily Celis [01:12:14] And so there's actually a really great TED talk called the Cure for Grief. It was last year. I forget. It's like Nancy something. She's Irish, I think, but she talked about this idea about telling stories and helping cure your grief and working through grief. Right. And I just think. I mean, I can't even. Creating a tribe, right. Like, I think of times when I've had grief and on a family level, going to funerals. Like, I think about going to my grandma's funeral and having our whole tribe there to say, this is who she was. Right. It's important to be with people that understand what that feels like. Right. So creating a tribe, telling story, finding connection. I think that's what's so important.

John Dehlin [01:13:00] Love it. Another listener, Cameron, writes, when he went through his faith crisis, he binge listened to Mormon Stories episodes. At the time, he felt incredibly alone, and it was therapeutic to hear other people share similar experiences to what he was going through. It helped him know that regardless of the outcome, he would make it through because all of these other people survived it. And so. Thank you, Cameron. We love when listeners are writing in comments and questions. There isn't a podcast called Death Stories or Morning Stories. I think that would be interesting. What if, like, 100 people who experienced the death of a loved one or a pet or whatever were able to just tell their stories of how they. How they grieved? And I wonder how effective that would be for those types of people.

Emily Celis [01:13:46] Well, I have, like, when I was in my master's program for marriage and family therapy, they made us go on this retreat where it was just called a grief retreat, where we all just sat together to tell our grief story.

Guest 2 [01:13:57] Right.

Emily Celis [01:13:58] Because everybody has one. And it was like, like, to me, that was like the best weekend workshop ever. You know, like somebody else might be

Guest 2 [01:14:05] like, why are we doing this?

Emily Celis [01:14:07] So excited to be able to like go to a place and honor it.

Guest 2 [01:14:10] Right.

Emily Celis [01:14:11] And kind of that idea of like, make like your meditations making space to be able to say, this is a big feeling that I have in my life.

Guest 2 [01:14:18] Right.

Emily Celis [01:14:19] And I need to attend to it and not. And not just ignore it. So I do. There are places where people go and

Guest 2 [01:14:25] do that and I think it's cool.

Emily Celis [01:14:26] I wish that, you know, I wish there were more community around grief. We don't do it very well in America.

John Dehlin [01:14:32] Yeah. And, and I do think, and we'll talk about this more, but in Mormonism, so many members are so quick to jump to, you'll see them again. Aren't you glad you have the gospel time to move on? And there's even this sense of like, don't be too sad because we've got this consolation that we're all going to be together in the afterlife. And if you're sad, it's going to make me start being sad. And I don't want to be sad. So get over your grieving quick because that's what the plan of salvation is about. And we'll talk about that. We'll talk about that when we get into more details. But I want to try and finish these stages of grief. Emily, so what's next? What comes after bargaining?

Depression as a Stage of Grief

Guest 2 [01:15:12] After bargaining comes depression. Okay, so the thing that people don't want to talk about or actually really experience and want to push away with a ten foot pole, but it's that depression kind of just that really deep and dark depression that can, that can occur and you know, for everyone, it can last a different amount of time. For, you know, in the dsm, major depressive disorder is if you're experiencing certain depressive symptoms for more than two weeks. And so you think, oh, well, maybe I have experienced major depression. Right. I mean, there's kind of these ideas and I don't mean to bring up the DSM as far as a labeling tool necessarily, because sometimes that can be misread. I mean, the reason I think that that's important is because it gives us information about how to work with people. But there's certainly stigma with all of that. So. But depression is the thing is that is one of the stages that is part of this. And I don't know if there's a lot to say about that other than kind of what we've already been talking about. Just that Huge sea of emotion that kind of. Sometimes we can get stuck in, but it's certainly part of the process.

John Dehlin [01:16:22] Yeah. Why don't you tell us some of the. I can do it, but why don't one of you tell us some of the main symptoms of depression just so someone can identify if they're experiencing it.

Guest 2 [01:16:33] Yeah. Amy, jump in here with me too. I'm, like, trying to think of the acronym from graduating.

John Dehlin [01:16:38] I've heard SIGICAPS is what I've heard, but. Amy, what have you heard?

Emily Celis [01:16:44] So there's sleep.

John Dehlin [01:16:45] There's disturbances in sleep. Yeah, that's either sleeping too much or sleeping too little. There's eating. Either eating too much or eating too little. There's loss of energy. There's loss of sex drive. There's lots of interest in things that normally bring you interest, Isolation, feelings of sadness. Obviously deep feelings of sadness. What are any other ones that I'm missing?

Emily Celis [01:17:11] Was that an affirmative that you were using?

Margi Dehlin [01:17:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:17:14] Seeking caps is one that my. My advisor, Dave.

Guest 2 [01:17:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:17:19] Yeah. Shared with me. Yeah.

Guest 2 [01:17:22] I can't think of any other. Any other. Of the symptoms right now, but. Yeah, I mean, those kind of. Those cover.

John Dehlin [01:17:29] It kind of slows you down. Hopelessness, a sense of hopelessness. There could also be confusion or disorientation. Just kind of like. Just a foggy, cloudy mind. Right.

Guest 2 [01:17:43] Yeah. Sometimes without. Without a lot of sleep. Sometimes people can even experience psychosis with depression. I mean, on severe things. I mean, because of different. Different avenues, that's pretty rare.

John Dehlin [01:17:58] And I think it's important to differentiate between sort of biological, chemical depression that's chronic and persistent, that maybe you're born with a disposition to have and sort of situational depression. And when it comes to situational depression, I saw a really good article recently that I posted to Facebook which basically says there is a biological and a psychological purpose for depression. Amy, do you want to tell us what you suspect that might be? And then Emily, you and I can jump in if. Amy, if we have other ideas.

Emily Celis [01:18:32] So question. There's a biological and psychological purpose.

John Dehlin [01:18:36] Yeah. Why do we get depressed?

Emily Celis [01:18:38] Why do we get depressed?

John Dehlin [01:18:40] Is there a. Is there a positive purpose to depression

Emily Celis [01:18:44] that you know of clinical depression or just situational depression?

John Dehlin [01:18:49] Situational depression, I think.

Emily Celis [01:18:51] Yeah. Maybe it's that idea of like, making you face it, making you live into it.

John Dehlin [01:18:55] Exactly.

Emily Celis [01:18:56] Is that the right answer?

John Dehlin [01:18:57] I don't want to talk like that.

Guest 2 [01:18:59] That's a great answer. No, I think that's great. I would. I would add to that also, too, is. I think it's Something that motivates us to move somewhere differently. I know it doesn't sound motivating because you get kind of stuck in this place. A lot of times you don't have any energy to do anything. But just as other emotions kind of inform us that, I think it also is something that can inform us to just say, what's the underbelly of this? What's the shadow side of this? And knowing that you're not certainly in joy and kind of saying, well, this is something that I can now move from here to there. Does that. Does that feel like.

John Dehlin [01:19:37] Yeah, go ahead.

Margi Dehlin [01:19:39] I love it as sort of this place that you go deeper, it kind of drives you deeper by the nature of slowing you up. And for me, and everyone's different, but I feel like around my father's death, there was this flurry of activity. There are people coming in town, and we're all. The children spoke for five minutes. So you're preparing and a million decisions to be made and gathering, and it's exhausting. And I found I was kind of manic. There was a manic energy to it in the beginning. And then it's like this settling. It's just the energy settles. It's quiet. My energy completely dropped, and it almost felt like my body taking care of itself, like, saying, okay, now. Now it's. It's your time to actually slow up, take a look at these things, you know, and so I kind of like it from that. That type of perspective. And then just saying, you know, people do get stuck there. And sometimes I do. Like, there was a. There's been a flow for me, which doesn't mean it makes sense. Like, my emotions have definitely been everywhere, but I do. There's like a movement right where I feel like there's something to getting stuck. And I think if you get stuck in sort of the depression part, to me, it kind of signals. Like, there's probably a lot there. There may be a lot there for you that's really difficult for you to process all at once where it might make sense to have someone help you. You go through all those things that have been shelved or coming up or. Anyway, those are just. That's just my idea.

Guest 2 [01:21:29] Yeah, I think that's how you were saying earlier that sometimes. And, Amy, you were saying this, too, about how it's like the compounded grief or, like, sometimes little things that happen that you don't feel like you'd normally have that response to. All of a sudden you are having a huge response to. And. And that doesn't mean that, you know, that there's anything wrong with you. It just means like, this is something I need to pay attention to. You know, this is something that I need to. And same with the depression. This is something I need to pay attention to. How can I care for myself in this time? This is, you know, it's time for me to slow down. It's time for me to look within and introspect to see how I'm going to get out of this place. Right. Because no one wants to stay there. We don't want to stay there and be there for forever because it's a really also very painful place to be. And I think that's sometimes where therapy, one of the places where therapy can come in and be really helpful to say, maybe it's too hard to get all these people that you know really closely. You know, you can have your friends and your support network, but maybe it's too hard because of their experience with that thing or that person or whatever it is. So it's a place where you can kind of honor your space of what you need to walk through.

Margi Dehlin [01:22:38] Yeah, so true.

John Dehlin [01:22:40] Jamie writes for Mormons, sometimes sadness is a sign of a lack of faith. And I think that's. I'm just, I'm going to read just a few comments, but that was just Jamie adding on to this idea that sometimes, maybe in a religious context, we don't always handle grief well. Gracie adds, sometimes if you're sad, you really don't truly believe. So I think that's, that's something similar. Crystal writes depression and sadness is sort of the necessary catharsis of sadness before letting go and moving forward towards acceptance. So I'm guessing that's going to be the fifth stage in the Kubler Ross model. But Crystal's ahead of us. She's basically saying depression is the, is the impetus for acceptance. And she basically uses a nice metaphor, which is depression is the winter before the spring. And Crystal, we love that. We love that comparison. Lance says, my dad announced that he was gay at the age of 56. Two years later was diagnosed with leukemia. He talks about how crushing that was and how it was one of the hardest things for him to deal with because of how he treated him during those years. Assuming Lance was a believer, judging his dad for being gay, then having the dad die and experienced a lot of regrets. So, yeah, sometimes we can handle things and bring, maybe bring some depression on to ourselves. Not with any fault of anyone, just sort of like situationally it can bring a lot of anger and sadness. So, Lance, your question deserves some more treatment, but I did want to throw that in as well. So, yeah, lots of good comments about depression and sadness. And yeah, Amy, that's what I was thinking was just that it slows you down. It targets you on the issue. It gives you a chance to simplify, as Margi said, and to really help you focus, to heal, to nurture, and to sort of regroup emotionally. And then once you've really processed it, it's sort of like pointing you to processing it. And that sets you up for, I think, the final stage. Amy, it sounds like you want to comment before we bring Emily on talking about the last stage.

Moving Toward Acceptance

Emily Celis [01:25:03] Yeah, just the one last thing that I want to say in terms of that is that grief will find a way out, right. And there's a time and a season for everything. And so it's okay to be sad for a while, Right. And I got great advice once because the adrenaline that you're talking about, that gets you through the funeral, that gets you to like make all the arrange that are required specifically to death, right. Sometimes you have this initial adrenaline that just kind of pushes you through. And somebody had said to me, when you're dealing with friends or clients that have like maybe lost a child or death or whatever, check in with them like two or three months after, Right? Because that's when they're really going through their process of grief, right. People show up so well in those first, you know, the first crisis moments, Right. But sometimes that sadness comes in later, you know, and so nice to remember to check in on people at that point.

Margi Dehlin [01:25:59] And one thing that I remember from that time, I'm not sure I'm necessarily out of that time, but I. One thing that I remember feeling at sort of a peak was I just felt free to cancel or really look at my life and simplify. And I gave myself that permission to say, I'm going to minimize anything right now, that just looking at it feels taxing or feels like something. And, you know, we can only do that to, you know, so much. But with the things I could, I did. And then if I could amp up, if there were things that really felt good to me, didn't matter if it was like food or getting outside or watching a movie or a massage, it doesn't really matter. But for that time, it was just anything that seemed pleasurable, it was a yes. It was just an outright chocolate. Let's do it, right?

John Dehlin [01:26:58] Dark chocolate covered orange creams were a yes. Is that right?

Margi Dehlin [01:27:02] They're still a yes. Anyway, and I do think that's a. That helped me for that kind of span of time. And it's something I'm still doing, to be honest with you.

Guest 2 [01:27:12] It's just.

Margi Dehlin [01:27:12] I have this awareness that it's okay for pleasure. It's okay to feel this sense for things that feel good to me right now and to try and kind of narrow in on things that aren't necessary, that cause me extra stress.

Guest 2 [01:27:28] Amy, I really love how you were talking about checking in with your. Your loved ones, you know, like a few months later, you know, because I think there is this. This lack of understanding or acceptance or empathy for grief and how it is something that's just kind of all over the place. And it's just going to be in our lives from here. From the time we're born until the time we die, we are going to be experiencing loss. And so to have more acceptance and understanding of that leading into acceptance as the final stage. Right. But just to be able to step into that with someone again. And we'll talk about that a little while, too, about what do you say to people, you know, and maybe that's a part of the reason why we don't do that. We think, okay, we've got them all kind of tidied up. They're over here and they're grieving. They're gonna deal with it. And we don't know how to do it. We don't know how to help them. And so I think there are lots of ways that we can help. Be more present or be more authentic with people and just really be there for them.

Margi Dehlin [01:28:26] Yeah.

Guest 2 [01:28:28] But that final stage, if it's okay, we can go into that, is acceptance. And so acceptance can. And I really want to hear your guys's opinions on this, and I. Because I think we need to reframe this one. Acceptance doesn't mean that you're ever okay with that loss or that you're like, okay, I'm okay now. It's never going to be okay. These losses are now part of your. The fabric of your life. They're painful parts. And it's not something that is ever going to be okay that you lost someone that you loved or that you're not experiencing them in your life or that you don't have that connection anymore. And so that's an important part of acceptance. It's just getting to this place where you can now learn how to live life differently, accepting that life is different. The reality of the fact that life has changed forever for you and how to move around and walk around in that life and how it feels differently and accepting how it feels differently. I think that's what's an important takeaway for that, for that stage. And it is important to say that even someone. Let's say someone's springboarding, setting up for the perfect spike from depression into acceptance, it would be great. But sometimes you don't. You go right back into anger. Right. Or you go right back into denial. And that's, again, the fluidity of these. I think sometimes, as coming from the Mormon tradition, that we like to have things all, you know, tidied up in a box, and this is what we believe. This is what happens. This is how it's going to be. And I think it's human nature, too. I don't think it just comes from tradition. But, yeah, to keep that in mind, too, that it's not like, okay, I've gone through these stages. I'm in acceptance. Okay, now here comes denial again. What's going on with that? Why am I here? And this is so frustrating.

The Grief Bag Illustration and Acceptance

John Dehlin [01:30:11] So, yeah, talk about the little purse cartoon that you shared.

Margi Dehlin [01:30:17] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:30:18] And about how over time, sort of the evolution of grief.

Margi Dehlin [01:30:24] There's an illustrator, her name is Mary Andrew M A R I Andrew. She's on Instagram, and she did a picture around grief. And I really liked it. And the idea was that, you know, grief isn't something that goes away, but it does become easier to carry. And she illustrated it by, in the beginning, this big, huge bag, difficult to lug, really heavy and imposing. And that's what it feels like. And then it moves to a large suitcase. You can carry it. It's really, really heavy. And then at the end, it's a purse that you wear on the side. I kind of liked that. I liked this idea that it's with you no matter what you carry it. It's changed your world. It's changed you as a human being. But it can get a little bit easier to carry with you as you go.

Guest 2 [01:31:23] Yeah, I just. I think that's a wonderful picture to have, you know, to face that. It's interesting because as you were saying that I had this kind of feeling rise up in me where I was like, almost like that anger place where I'm like, but I don't want to carry that suitcase. I don't want to carry that big bag. You know, And I think, you know, we can all have these reactions, and I certainly have. But again, it's like, we do have to carry it, and it's. And sometimes we need other People to help us carry it. We don't have to carry it alone. Right, right.

Margi Dehlin [01:31:57] And the carrying also is that reminder of that person. It's like, no matter what, it's sort of that connection to that person, to that period in time, to the relationship, you know? And in that way, it can feel like a constant connecting or almost even an honoring, you know?

Guest 2 [01:32:19] Yeah. That is such, like. That is such the loving. Like the ultimate loving place to be in. And I think that's. That is what makes it so beautiful. I think I mentioned I was able to touch into that place with the loss of my pet, my dog. And I certainly have other experiences where I, you know, even with what my brother was saying before, like, I pushed it away, pushed it away. And it's. It's that kind of denial. I don't want to deal with this. And it's. It's too painful. And it does. It just comes and goes in these. In these waves.

John Dehlin [01:32:51] Amy, what does acceptance mean for you in the context of loss and grieving?

Emily Celis [01:32:55] Well, I think I feel like it's really complicated because I've had a lot of people that have had significant loss as they move towards this stage, are afraid of it because laughter returning or menial stuff happening. They feel guilty.

John Dehlin [01:33:13] They think it's like dishonoring.

Emily Celis [01:33:16] And it's that fear of the farther away that I get from this pain, the farther away I get from that person.

John Dehlin [01:33:22] You may forget them, right? You may.

Guest 2 [01:33:24] I think that's the fear.

Emily Celis [01:33:25] You know what I mean? I love the personality. That's beautiful.

Guest 2 [01:33:28] Right.

Emily Celis [01:33:29] Just it's always going to be with you. But I think sometimes people feel guilty for moving into the acceptance phase sometimes. Right. And it could sometimes take years. Right. Like, people can be in any stage for a long time. And again, like, you just. It is what it is for you.

Guest 2 [01:33:45] Right.

Emily Celis [01:33:46] There's a man named Albert Hubbard. He's. He's a. I think, early 1900s.

John Dehlin [01:33:52] L. Ron Hubbard. No.

Emily Celis [01:33:57] He said the cure for grief is motion. Right? Motion, Motion, motion. And you were talking about the flow, like, moving into things. Right. And it's important to have acceptance sometimes. And it's okay to then go back when you have certain events happen later in your life that bring up all that stuff again. Right. So, yeah, like, the model is great and stuff, but it does change. It's not like you then arrive at acceptance, and then it's like.

Guest 2 [01:34:24] Like, I have arrived. My grief is done.

Margi Dehlin [01:34:26] Right.

Emily Celis [01:34:27] But it's.

Margi Dehlin [01:34:27] It.

Emily Celis [01:34:28] I think it's an important face to feel that motion. Right. That that motion for what that grief means. Right.

Margi Dehlin [01:34:35] Interesting.

Emily Celis [01:34:35] And so. So it's. I think acceptance is complicated. It's a complicated phase to be. And also people think if maybe something like, maybe they've been sexually abused and they've got grief about that moving into an acceptance is forgiveness of that person.

Guest 2 [01:34:49] Right, Right.

Emily Celis [01:34:50] Or like, so your husband or spouse has an affair on you. Acceptance means that you forgive that person. So it gets a little complicated with acceptance, meaning forgiveness when you've been violated. Right. And you have grief because of a violation.

Margi Dehlin [01:35:04] Right.

Emily Celis [01:35:04] So, but I don't think that then it's the end. Right. So I think acceptance and feeling moments of like, this is going to be okay. And I can, like people can laugh and not feel guilty. And you think, oh, like I've. I have filled peace. It's not as raw as it once was.

John Dehlin [01:35:26] Yeah. A couple things from the comments section. It looks like Shandy's posted the illustration that Margi talked about with the grief bags. We'll put these in the show notes as well. But thanks, Shandy, for grabbing that. Crystal writes on acceptance. She writes, it took a long time to accept my brother was gone. But reaching acceptance allowed me to treasure what we had shared and how I now would cherish every relationship and try to not take them for granted when I had exhausted the thoughts of what I'd never get to experience with him or what my kids wouldn't get to experience. So in that case, it sounds like for Crystal, part of it is learning from the experience, getting meaning from it. Part of acceptance for her was extracting some meaning. Now she writes, I remember with gratitude all we shared, all I learned. And it actually makes what I share with my family in memories of him even sweeter and more intention, more intentional, to strengthen what we still get to do together now. So part of that is making meaning out of the death. I think for all sorts of loss and grieving and sad things, there's a value in finding meaning in it. But it also sounds like she's at peace with happy memories. And I think that's a beautiful thought. So, Crystal, thanks for sharing that. That is really nice. Tracy writes, it was the kindness of friends three to six months after the loss of her fiance that made it possible for her to be able to move forward. Please know it is during that time the constant phone calls stop, the list of things that had to be completed had been checked off, and the person left alone in this world is really lost and sad. Really. We don't remember the rush of meals and being surrounded during those first few months, it's that friendship offers later that make it possible to learn and live and laugh again. So that's an interesting point. Tracy's saying, don't just think if you've delivered that early casserole, you've supported your friend in grief. Sometimes it's those enduring displays of care and concern after the fact that that helps people move towards acceptance. Emily and Amy, anything you want to add to those comments?

Guest 2 [01:37:47] Yeah, kind of where my mind was going with that. I mean, I think when you lose someone that you love, I mean, you do. We tend to. Our memory tends to kind of hold on to the positives. Right. But I think that it's important to talk about the fact that sometimes people don't remember the positives. Or maybe it's a loss that was a very painful loss, like maybe the loss of a marriage due to infidelity or something like that, where you've got a lot of anger towards the person with the loss. Right. And so. Or maybe someone that died, how could they leave me? How could they do those things? And that, that's, you know, also part of it, then, to know that there, you know, that might be part of your place of healing, to get to a place where you are able to look at the positives and see some of those things. And it might not. It might be that you just really have to work on resolving the anger and kind of coming to a place where you're just not having to experience that. So I just wanted to point that out for those that kind of get stuck in that angry place or kind of like feeling guilty even for being angry at someone who's died, it's normal to feel that way.

Margi Dehlin [01:38:50] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:38:51] With all the funerals and, Amy, I'll pull you in right after. With all the funerals I've attended, I've just noticed that no matter how much of a scoundrel the person was who passes away, these funerals only talk about the positive. And I'm guessing that there's some limitation in that, because if the person who died, you know, we've talked about death as if it's the passing of someone we really love and care about and who meant so much to us. Sometimes the person who dies, or if it's a faith crisis and it's the church, sometimes that thing that is lost or that person lost could have been really awful to us. And if we're not willing to also really look at and understand the pain that the person or the institution have caused us, we don't Learn from it. We don't sort of process it to the point where we can then accept what happened. And so I guess it's a good reminder not just to process. Not just process the good, but also to process the difficult and the painful and the bad. That. That's also part of healing, that allows and facilitates acceptance. Later. Amy, jump in, and then we'll go back to Emily. Yeah,

Emily Celis [01:40:05] I agree. I think it's important to sometimes ask people, how do you feel today? Right. I know from my mom, like, when she was going through her Ms. Diagnosis, she read the part in Job where his friends just came and sat with him. And when her friends did that, just came and they didn't try to give platitudes. It was just, damn it all the hell. You got Ms. You know, just kind of just being in the pain with people. I think we're gonna talk about this later. Right.

John Dehlin [01:40:34] Next, part two. Part two.

Guest 2 [01:40:37] Okay.

Emily Celis [01:40:37] I won't get ahead of myself, but it's hard to know what to say to people.

Guest 2 [01:40:40] Right.

Emily Celis [01:40:41] And.

John Dehlin [01:40:41] Yeah.

Emily Celis [01:40:41] And so I'll look forward to talking about that.

John Dehlin [01:40:45] Okay.

Guest 2 [01:40:45] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:40:46] Emily, did you have something to follow on that comment?

Guest 2 [01:40:50] Just the idea what you were bringing up, John was really great about that. We do have to learn how to hold these emotions that are conflicting. Kind of learn how to hold that in the same space. And that. That's really confusing sometimes. You know, it is really confusing. And I think that that's also necessary to be able to say, I can feel angry and I can feel grateful, and how to reconcile that.

John Dehlin [01:41:15] Yeah. Beautiful. Well, we're definitely bumping up against the end of the show. I'm going to Emily and Amy. I'm going to ask you guys to maybe prepare a closing comment or two for this episode. We want to remind both of you and listeners that in two weeks, we're going to continue this discussion on loss and grief because of the retreats this weekend. We need a week to decompress after that. So we're gonna. We're not gonna do another live show until two weeks from now. And while Emily and Amy are preparing and Margi are preparing, some closing thoughts. I'm just gonna share a few closing comments. Gracie writes as we listen about acceptance. It just hit me that maybe when we transition out of the church, for those of us who have, our family members always have to go through these steps. And that's a really insightful point for Gracie. It's so easy for those of us who have left the church to marinate in our own pain and Sadness, we realize that we're causing loss and even death spiritually or metaphorically for believers. That Gracie, super insightful and thoughtful comment. You must have gone to a Mormon transitions workshop or retreat at some point. No, I'm just kidding. You're wise and insightful in and of yourself, but it was so fun to meet you in Anaheim. Pat writes, conflicting feelings are very confusing to work through. That is so true. And let's see. Will writes, I left the church due to intense sexual shaming regarding porn and masturbation as a teenager. He carried that into adulthood. One of the most profound moments of his transition was when he realized that he was carrying around this massive reservoir of grief. Grief for a lost childhood of happiness. Grief for years without self esteem. Grief for feeling like a disappointment to God, parents, family, ancestors, etc. Finally rejected the idea that he had to carry around this massive reservoir of grief for his sexual imperfection and because carrying around was necessary for redemption or forgiveness. When he threw that out, he was able to see a future for his life without feeling crushed by that reservoir. It was the first time since he was 14 that he could imagine a life with happiness and peace untainted by shame. That is so good. Jill wants to put in a plug for utilizing hospice if available. I'm sure Sue Bergen would agree as well. And then a few other people just write, thank you. Jeff had to bail, but he said thanks for covering this subject. These comments keep moving. So I'm reading one and then it moves. Jeff says thanks for covering this subject. You did a great job. Especially his wise sister Emily. He says he had to leave but he enjoyed it all. And Joseph also writes, your panelists were super insightful. Thanks for the insight on therapy and depression and recovery. So those are some of the final discussions. Crystal writes, beautiful discussion. Why don't we go ahead and to close, have each of you share some closing thoughts. Amy, do you mind going first and sharing some closing thoughts or perspective?

Closing Reflections on Grief, Humor, and Courage

Emily Celis [01:44:27] No, I don't mind at all. I would say my final like what I would wish for the stages of grief. I wish if I could add a magical one, it would be humor. Nice because I just think that it just is important. It's like life is hard, right? And when you use humor it really can help you remember. Like oh yeah, there's still joy here.

John Dehlin [01:44:52] Are you allowed to be have fun and laugh when someone's died? You know, isn't that disrespectful?

Emily Celis [01:44:57] Yeah. Or I remember my mom, when my mom was really sick, my dad would tease her all the time, like in a loving way. And it was a heavy thing. Like she, she was really sick. She's been sick. She's. We have had a long, stretched out grief with my mom. It's body changing, you know, and my parents have been a great model for me of keeping laughter there because sometimes it's just painful and it's hard and it's. It's sad that life throws you really, really hard things, whether it's divorce, whether your pet dies, whether you have to transition out of Mormonism, whatever it is just to keep laughing. Right. And like I said earlier, grief is the master teacher. It will push you to a more mature place. It will push you to a better self.

John Dehlin [01:45:41] Beautiful. Amy, if someone wants to seek out your services, how do they find you?

Emily Celis [01:45:46] They just go to my website, amy

John Dehlin [01:45:48] heffernan.com a I M E E H E F F E R N A N We'll ask Shandy to include those in the show notes. Excellent. Emily, what are some closing thoughts or perspective?

Guest 2 [01:46:01] I just think that anyone who's willing to touch this subject and to move toward it rather than push it away is very courageous. And, and so I think that to just honor where you're at, I think it's so important to remember that it's such a unique process and that there's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with your experience. And just to be able to give yourself some grace and some understanding for how difficult this process is. And something that is shared across the board, such as my life, it touches your lives. It touches everybody. And just, you know, if you can't find that hope that healing can happen or that there is a place where you can feel respite from this, I think that just to find someone who you can, who you can kind of lean on them for a little while. It's a heavy topic. And I love what Amy said about humor, you know, because to remember we do have that little laughter inside of us that can really. A whole different way of looking at things. That was beautiful. Thanks.

John Dehlin [01:47:07] Love it. Emily, we really appreciate you preparing this outline, a framework. We've got so much more to discuss, but today's been wonderful. Emily, real quick, if someone wants to pursue your services, how do they get ahold of you? Or is that even possible?

Guest 2 [01:47:21] Yeah, no, I've got like a private practice type setting. It's through a community agency. I'm here in Santa Ana. It's like on the border of Tustin. And you can find me On Facebook. I've got my Facebook page there. Emily Sellis, C E L I S. Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:47:41] And your website, theopendoorcenter.org okay, excellent. In Orange, in Orange County.

Guest 2 [01:47:51] Thank you guys so much for having me on. I really enjoyed this time together.

John Dehlin [01:47:54] Yeah, it's been wonderful.

Emily Celis [01:47:55] Yeah, it was really fun to be here.

John Dehlin [01:47:57] Margi, any closing thoughts? Perspective?

Margi Dehlin [01:48:00] Oh, I just appreciate so much what Emily and Amy and you have shared today and you. And okay. And. But I was gonna say something came up for me, Amy, when you were talking about humor, it was a huge part of what my dad, I feel like, offered my mother. And it was, it just came. A story came to me right after we had the memorial service for my dad.

Guest 2 [01:48:24] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:48:25] So there's a picture of my mom and dad laughing together that I keep on my desk.

John Dehlin [01:48:30] I'll keep it up here as you talk.

Margi Dehlin [01:48:32] As we were leaving the memorial service, I noticed my mom was pulling away in her car alone to go to the place where we were going to have our meal. And so I quickly went over to her car thinking that I would drive over with her. And as I got close to the car, my dad was cremated, put in a box. My mom wants to be cremated. And then added to their ashes put together. But I noticed that she had put the box on the seat next to her and buckled him in. So when I went to sit, she said, oh, will and I will be driving over to. And it was just such a lovely. It really felt like an honoring of their relationship of really what they were together. So she was driving with my dad over to the. And so I just love that.

Emily Celis [01:49:24] That's so sweet.

John Dehlin [01:49:26] And here's a picture of, here's a picture of Margi on the wedding day with her sweet dad. You wanted to share that, right?

Margi Dehlin [01:49:36] Well, I was going to bring up just the idea that oftentimes I, I miss the way my dad looked at me. He just looked at me. And so I feel really lucky to have that picture is how he used to look at me. So

John Dehlin [01:49:50] isn't she a sweetheart? So. Yes, Amy. Thank you, Emily. Thank you, Martin. Thank you, listeners. Thank you. We are really grateful for everyone who commented or wrote in. If you want to ask questions or share experiences for the next episode, you can email mormonstoriesmail.com and share questions or experiences. We'll do our best to cover them in the show. We're really grateful for those who contributed today that really meant a lot to us. We had a really active, engaged contributions from our live listeners. We want our listeners, asynchronous listeners who listen to the podcast to feel comfortable commenting on the on the blog or on the Facebook video that's shared. We always love people contributing and please email us. We want to thank Shandy Hill, who's sort of our producer, along with Amy Grubbs, who's our director of operations for the Open Stories Foundation. They always make this possible. And most importantly, we can't ever end an episode without thanking those who donate to Mormon Stories and Mormon Transitions and the Open Stories Foundation. If you love these programs, if you find value for them, please just consider a monthly donation. $10 $20 a month, $100 a month, whatever you can afford. That money goes to a nonprofit that is focused on supporting people healing and growing in their faith transitions and afterwards. And your money will be used very well to alleviate suffering, to promote healing and growth, to save marriages, to help heal depression and anxiety, and to help people find community and joy after difficult struggles. So thanks to everyone who makes this possible. Emily and Amy, we're going to see you guys in two weeks. Hopefully two weeks.

Emily Celis [01:51:43] See you soon.

John Dehlin [01:51:44] And listeners, we'll see you guys in two weeks. And please check us out at Mormon Stories and Mormon Transitions. In the meantime, we'll have lots more there.

Margi Dehlin [01:51:52] Thank you everyone.

John Dehlin [01:51:53] Take care everybody.

Margi Dehlin [01:51:59] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Transitions Podcast. Mormon Transitions Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. Please check us out at mormontransitions.org or on YouTube at YouTube.com mormontransitions to provide feedback or to participate on the podcast. Please email us@mormontransitionsmail.com Music for today's episode was generously provided by Hive Riot. Check them out@hive riot.com.

Part Two: Recap and Coping Strategies

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 708

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support. The kindly light amid encircling gloom

Margi Dehlin [00:00:43] Lead

Guest 3 [00:00:43] thou me on the night is dark

Emily Celis [00:00:48] and I am far from home.

John Dehlin [00:00:53] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Delinquent. I am here with my lovely, wonderful wife, Margi.

Margi Dehlin [00:01:05] Thanks, babe.

John Dehlin [00:01:05] Welcome, sweetie.

Margi Dehlin [00:01:06] Yeah, happy to be here.

John Dehlin [00:01:07] It's good to see you today. The date is March 21, 2017 and we are going to be covering part two of our discussion on grief and loss. So we are really excited about that. But before we jump in, we always have a few announcements to make, so I'll make them. We have an upcoming workshop in Fort Collins, Colorado, May 4th and 5th. Those workshops are dedicated to healthy marriages, healthy relationships, communicating with believing family and friends, positive mental health, raising children. They're very highly rated and people love them. We've got a great venue in Fort Collins, so if anyone wants to come, Please register@mormontransitions.org events. In addition, we have an upcoming Our next upcoming retreat is June 23rd through 25th. You can register again@mormontransitions.org events. That one again will be in the Salt Lake area and those retreats are wonderful. We just had one and what'd you think?

Margi Dehlin [00:02:12] Oh, I thought it was beautiful.

John Dehlin [00:02:14] Yeah?

Margi Dehlin [00:02:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:02:16] So please check those out if you'd like. A couple other announcements. We're looking for a web designer to help us redesign MormonStories.org, the OSF website and and maybe some of the other websites. It's a contractor position. If any of you know a really good web designer who specializes in WordPress specifically, then please email your resume to openstoriesfoundationmail.com and we would love to consider you. Please send references so we can see some of the websites you've designed. That would be really helpful. We are looking for always people to participate in our panels who are active believing members. So if you want to appear on a future Mormon Stories podcast event, please email us@mormonstoriesmail.com we would love that. And always please know that if you enjoy these programs, they only exist because people are willing to donate. So please consider donating to MormonStories.org, mormonTransitions.org, whatever you're comfortable donating to OpenStoriesFoundation.org because 10 or 20 or $30 a month can make this possible, can keep it alive. So those are our announcements for today. And now we're going to jump into our actual program. So today we have back two wonderful guests and we're going to ask them again to introduce themselves really quickly. We'll start with Amy. Why don't, Amy, you introduce yourself this time. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Guest 3 [00:04:02] Hi, I am from Seattle. I am a marriage and family therapist in a private practice at Redmond, Washington. I see couples. I just finished all my hours for my sex therapy certification. So I just need to apply for my sex therapy certification and I'm done.

Margi Dehlin [00:04:18] So. All right, congratulations.

Guest 3 [00:04:20] Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:04:22] And we'll make sure and mention how people can get ahold of you at the end.

Guest 3 [00:04:25] Sounds good.

John Dehlin [00:04:25] Thanks for joining us, Amy. We love having you.

Guest 3 [00:04:27] Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:04:28] Emily Sellis, please introduce yourself again to our listeners.

Emily Celis [00:04:32] Hi, I'm Emily Sellis and I'm located in Orange County, California. I am a marriage and family therapist and professional clinical counselor, registered intern. So I'm just getting ready to take my final licensing exam and I also offer life coaching through my personal business is called Sage Wellness Center. So that's also something I'm able to do. Love working with individuals, couples, families, and especially around these faith crises and transitions. It's a real specialty. I really enjoy the population. So thanks for having me back, you guys. It's great to be here with you.

John Dehlin [00:05:07] So glad to have you, Emily. And we'll see if your brother Jeff joins us again like last time.

Emily Celis [00:05:12] Right. Bring it on.

John Dehlin [00:05:13] Bring it on, Jeff. Alright, so last time we met, we talked pretty intensely about death and grief and loss. Margi talked about the passing of her father. I talked about the recent passing of my sister Amy and Emily, each of you talked about respective losses that you've experienced. We had a lot of great questions. Emily, would you mind just, you know, I think most of our focus was on the stages of grief. We don't want to really dive back into that, but can you just remind us what the main stages of grief are really quickly?

Emily Celis [00:05:50] Yeah, absolutely. Just a quick recap on that was that we talked about the Kubler Ross model for the stages of grief and just kind of went over some misconceptions that, you know, even I had as a therapist coming through all this, that they have to happen linearly. But those stages were the denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. That's what we went over last time and just discussed about how it's kind of just a huge sea of emotions that we kind of work through. So, yeah, that's what we covered last time. It was a great discussion.

Margi Dehlin [00:06:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:06:23] Anything you remember from our discussion last time? I remember the little purses or the suitcases.

Margi Dehlin [00:06:29] Oh, right, right. But it gets easier to. It's always with you, but hopefully in time, gets a little bit easier to carry.

John Dehlin [00:06:36] Yeah. And I think it's really important to note that these things happen in waves and stages, and you're never quite over the anger or the grief. Maybe it can diminish over time sometimes, but it can always come back. All right, so with that, we have a lot of wonderful topics to cover this time, and we want to invite listeners to share questions and comments. And we've had several people email their questions and comments. So with that, we are ready to go ahead and dive in. Let's begin with a discussion. Emily, one of the things that you wrote from last time were just some general ideas for coping with grief and loss. And, Amy, we want to get your thoughts in here as well. But, Emily, why don't you share with us a bit some of the ideas you have just about coping with the grief and the loss that comes.

Emily Celis [00:07:35] Yeah, no, And I would love, Margi, for you to chime in, too, because I think one of the beautiful things that you said last time was about how you were intentionally grieving the loss of your father. And I thought that that was just a really neat way to approach it, where you kind of created that sacred space. And so I, for one, I thought that was a really beautiful way to approach that. And if you want to say anything more about that, you're welcome to. Okay.

Margi Dehlin [00:08:03] Thank you. Do you want me to now?

Emily Celis [00:08:05] Yeah, if you'd like to. Or I can just keep going on my list, too.

Margi Dehlin [00:08:10] So why don't we have you start and then if there is a. I can do it either way, I can do it when you are done. Yeah, we will start with you.

Emily Celis [00:08:17] Yeah. So no, so that I just wanted to say it was beautiful. And then also therapy is a really great place, I think. I mean, Amy, you probably would agree, too. It is just sometimes we do get lost in that sea of emotions, and it is helpful to have kind of an anchor that you can come back to time and time again to be able to just be accepted for wherever you are in that loss. And then sometimes I think it's. It's nice to have something out of the ordinary. I know, Amy, last time you talked about humor, and I thought that's such a beautiful thing to be able to do that in a way that makes sense and is helpful to keep things light. I think it's also neat to be able to access those emotions. I know we talked last time about several of the listeners who were saying that sometimes it's hard to connect with the emotion about it or kind of repressing or am I in this stage or where am I? And so I thought, you know, going into kind of the more artistic ways to experience it, maybe through music. And again, that's kind of intentional where you're actually listening to music with the thought of that loss that you're experiencing, whether it's a person, place or thing. And movies can also be an amazing way to do that. You know, just being out in nature can be a really quiet and peaceful place and way to do that. Dance therapy, if you just, you know, by yourself or with friends, you know, you just kind of unwind. But I think getting into those senses that we all have, those, those. Those five senses that we have, that. That allows us to really kind of get in touch with our human. Our humanness. So that's kind of what I wanted to throw out there.

Margi Dehlin [00:09:51] Beautiful.

John Dehlin [00:09:53] So dancing, movies, getting in touch, music, getting in touch with your senses.

Emily Celis [00:10:00] Journaling is another great one too.

Margi Dehlin [00:10:03] Yeah, I actually remember reading about that amidst the loss of my dad. Just I remember reading that something happens when you actually write it down in your brain. It's actually quite different than just thinking about it and it's really helpful for people. So

Emily Celis [00:10:23] there's a neat thing too with like dominant hand versus non dominant hand journaling, where you can also do this kind of a journaling exercise where you can kind of write in the. In one part of yourself and then you. In your dominant hand you write and then you respond to those things with your non dominant hand, which is kind of an interesting take on it makes you really slow down, obviously, because you don't write normally with that hand. And it allows for this kind of right brain, left brain kind of crossover to happen. It's a very interesting experience. So, yeah, different parts of yourself kind of integrating those parts.

Margi Dehlin [00:11:00] Yeah, I really like that idea.

John Dehlin [00:11:02] Amy, what would you add about coping?

Guest 3 [00:11:03] Yeah, I always say grief finds a way out. Right. And so being intentional about how you're doing it and how you're coping isn't really important because, I mean, you can look at like, you know, if addictions sometimes are created from a deep sorrow. Right. And so being careful about choosing healthy ways for you to be able to cope. Right. So everything that Emily has said, running, I think finding something that is moving your body, like dancing, kind of all that kinetic kind of movement is also really good. But being intentional about finding what works for you to be able to say, I'm going to address this grief. I'm not just going to like stuff it because it will find a darker way out if you don't face it. I think one of my favorite things that we talked about is saying the only way is through with grief. And sometimes just having intentionality about moving through your grief is very important.

Margi Dehlin [00:12:04] Yeah. Yep. I can totally see.

John Dehlin [00:12:08] Love it. So, Emily, one really powerful thing that you wanted to share today was a video from Brene Brown on empathy versus sympathy. Do you want to set up this video before we share it?

Empathy Versus Sympathy in Supporting the Grieving

Emily Celis [00:12:27] Yeah, no, I thought it's really important to bring this in. It's a real quick clip. But the thing with grief is that it's not something that we have to go through alone. It's something that maybe at times we want to experience alone. But no matter where we go or how we run, we are social group of people. And so eventually there is that connection. And sometimes just that connection with other people can be painful because we don't know what they're gonna say. We don't know how they're going to respond. We don't know how we're feeling going into those relationships that are still alive. And so I thought this clip was really a helpful way to kind of dive into that topic of what to say, what not to say to people who are grieving. So we can start with this if you guys are able to share that on your screen.

John Dehlin [00:13:12] Okay, so we're going to do something a little bit technical. We're going to switch a couple wires and then share the screen and hopefully this is going to work. So give us just one second. Margi's going to switch it and I will share the screen. And you guys tell us if this is working. Give us a thumbs up if you can hear it. Okay, working.

▶ Video Clip 1

Video Clip 1 [00:13:42] So what is empathy and why is it very different than sympathy? Empathy fuels connection. Sympathy drives disconnection. Empathy. It's very interesting. Teresa Wiseman is a nursing scholar who studied professions, very diverse professions, where empathy is relevant, and came up with four qualities of empathy. Perspective taking, the ability to take the perspective of another person or Recognize their perspective as their truth. Staying out of judgment. Not easy when you enjoy it as much as most of us do. Recognizing emotion in other people and then communicating that. Empathy is feeling with people. And to me, I always think of empathy as this kind of sacred space when someone's kind of in a deep hole and they shout out from the bottom and they say, I'm stuck. It's dark. I'm overwhelmed. And then we look and we say, hey, I'm down. I know what it's like down here. And you're not alone. Sympathy is. Ooh, it's bad, huh?

Video Clip 1 [00:14:52] No.

Video Clip 1 [00:14:53] You want a sandwich?

Video Clip 1 [00:14:56] Empathy is a choice, and it's a

Video Clip 1 [00:14:58] vulnerable choice, because in order to connect

Video Clip 1 [00:15:00] with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling. Rarely, if ever, does an empathic response begin with, at least I had a. Yeah, and we do it all the time. Because you know what? Someone just shared something with us. It's incredibly painful, and we're trying to silver lining it. I don't think that's a verb, but I'm using it as one. We're trying to put the silver lining around it. So I had a miscarriage. At least you know you can get pregnant. I think my marriage is falling apart. At least you have a marriage. John's getting kicked out of school. At least Sarah is an A student. But one of the things we do sometimes in the face of very difficult conversations is we try to make things better. If I share something with you that's very difficult, I'd rather you say, I don't even know what to say right now. I'm just so glad you told me. Because the truth is, rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection.

What to Say and Not Say to Someone in Grief

John Dehlin [00:16:25] All right, so that was wonderful. Does someone want to recap? I'll stop sharing the screen really quick. Emily, will you. Do you mind recapping kind of those final words from what we heard in that video?

Emily Celis [00:16:40] Yeah, I thought it was really neat when she was. That part where it said that you have to reach inside of yourself to find something that kind of matches that. So that's what makes empathy a lot more difficult than sympathy. Because a lot of times all of us are kind of defending against our own difficult experiences that maybe we're not ready or wanting or willing to deal with. And so to really, like, tune into that empathy with another person requires this kind of joining in a sense where you're able to kind of tap into that human part of yourself that feels pain and just be there with them. So I thought that was a really neat part. And then also just the part that empathy fuels connection and that sympathy fuels disconnection. And I think that sometimes it comes from a place of not knowing what else to do or not knowing what else to say. The sympathy does, you know, trying to just bring. Bring dinner or kind of do all these things. I think we talked about last time where, Amy, you made the great point of, you know, what about three months later or six months later, you know, when all the dinners stop and then the pain is still there because that loss is always going to be there in that person's life. And so that was just a neat part as far as the connection piece, which is so important for all of us to connect and to be able to know how to support each other in an authentic and genuine way. So. But, Amy, maybe you want to add more to that or what you took from that or your.

Guest 3 [00:18:05] I love this video. I'm like a total Brene Brown groupie, right? I'm like, I'll join the ranks of all the Brene Brown fans. But I love that. That kind of idea of feeling with people, right? I love that clip because it's just that, like, oh, do you want a sandwich? You know, I think the fact is, and I think we should talk about this later, is that it's clumsy. Sometimes you get clumsy about what to say to people in grief, right? And it's hard. The hard things that people are experiencing sometimes you just don't know what to say, right? And you're gonna mess up. You're just gonna. You're gonna mess up. But the idea of, like, trying to get down with people and say, I want to fill with you, of course you can still have boundaries. It's not like you have to fix it for them, but, like, being able to just say, I get that this is hard. I'm so sorry. And I love. I love the part where they just hug in the. In the video clip and they just said, I don't even know what to say. But I'm just so glad I told you, right? Like, that kind of stuff is just simple. And you're like, oh, I just should have said that. Like, I can think of times when I've.

Guest [00:19:07] What.

Guest 3 [00:19:07] I've said clumsy things to people, right? And you don't know either around fertility or death or something. You just are like, I'm an extrovert. So, like, all of the words just fill out of my mouth sometimes. And so just being able to remember, sometimes you can just be simple, you know? Stay out of judgment. I think she talks about perspective taking, staying out of judgment and recognizing feelings and communicating them to the person.

John Dehlin [00:19:32] So let's. Oh, go ahead.

Margi Dehlin [00:19:33] I was just thinking, that's so true. And when I was thinking back on, oh, different acts that really comforted me or made me feel less alone, one huge thing that I really didn't anticipate was just people that showed up for my dad's memorial service. I think, you know, the people you know or the people that you connect with that actually stop their lives. And they didn't. They just loved me. They didn't even know my dad, but attended as support to me. It meant a lot to me that they would actually show. It was almost like a reverence for his life that it affected you. And I can acknowledge that and stop my life a bit. But to kind of show up for this thing. So that was one thing and didn't even involve words or what they had to say so much, but just their presence being there. And then when you were talking, it was reminding me of, oh, Krista Tippett did an interview, and I think words are a part of it. But I love this focus on connection because sometimes words, you know, it's what's behind, of course, and what people feel from us. And I remember her talking about a guy that suffered was an interview she did. And I know the man suffered from depression and he was saying what made a difference in his depression, that he was beyond words with people. He was really. And you had this friend that just showed up and rubbed his feet. It was actually touch. Rubbed his feet same time every week, just would show up. Didn't make him talk, didn't ask him questions, didn't. But just shared space, you know, and had an act of love. And so sometimes I think we forget that in this, you know, in our really trying to package things or make things okay for people that we love, that our presence can go a long way, you know, and doing those things, getting outside words and just a simple, like, I'm really sorry and really looking in the eyes and really, you know, providing physical comfort can go a long way.

John Dehlin [00:21:41] I love it. We have a few comments in from listeners just to include them. Jose Lopez writes, hey, guys. Supporting you all the way here from San Antonio, Texas. That's nice. Clark is responding about grief finding its way out, as you said, Amy, he writes, so true. For me, as much as I tried to suppress it, it always came back up to the surface. And that's so true. Listeners, please keep your comments and questions Coming. So we touched on this really briefly last time, but we have here as a topic, best and worst things to say to someone in grief. Maybe let's start. And we've started to talk about this, but let's just kind of directly talk about the Mormon context. Amy, we'll start with you this time. Are there some classic things that Mormons maybe feel pulled to say or post Mormons that maybe aren't super useful or helpful? And then alternatively, are there. We'll talk about better things to say. So, Amy, you go first, then Emily.

Guest 3 [00:22:47] Okay. A couple years ago, we were in a sacrament meeting and I'm obviously an active listener. People on the podcast can't listen, but I'm like a head nodder. And like, oh, yeah, there was this high councilman that was up there talking about his, like, sister in law that had died. And he said, do you want to know where her husband was the day after, after she died of cancer? And it was like, I was just like waiting. Like, he's like, he was there teaching gospel doctrine. He was exactly where he was supposed to be. And I, like, wanted to, like, get up and be like, don't listen to that. You know, just this idea of, like, we just keep working hard and we keep moving forward and not even giving sometimes space to just grieve, right? Just to like, don't come to church

Emily Celis [00:23:30] the day after your wife dies.

Guest 3 [00:23:31] You don't need, you know, just if

Emily Celis [00:23:33] you want to, if that feels good to you.

Guest 3 [00:23:35] But creating an expectation that we aren't sad because we know that we're going to be with them again is actually. There's no real research in when they really, like, dig, dig into, like, looking at how people react to grief that are religious people. It doesn't necessarily. A belief in an afterlife doesn't necessarily make the grief any better. So that's interesting to me. So this idea of, like, you don't need to be sad because you're going to see them again, I think is a big theme.

John Dehlin [00:24:05] Mm, yeah. Just to follow up on that, a close loved one died a few years back, and it was the child of a close family member. And I remember people in the ward, or at least one person in the ward, telling my family member, the parent of the child who's died, I just received an impression that, you know, that your child is okay and that they're exactly where they should be. And I just wondered why. Why is somebody else sort of some random member of the ward receiving that inspiration, you know, when it would be the parents who Would, would maybe be most likely to be worthy or to need that inspiration. And is it even our place to claim that we're receiving direct revelation or visitation from a past loved one and to kind of put that on someone who's grieving? I guess everybody can do and say what they want, but I just wonder, is that how God works? That you know, that if my child dies, somebody else is going to be told that they're okay, but I can't be told? How do we even know that that's true? I mean, I think people offer it with good intention, but yeah, I don't know. Do you guys have a response to that?

Emily Celis [00:25:35] I guess I could respond to that. I mean, my own personal experience of losing my mom when I was 13, I think I talked about that last time and just kind of the experience of other people saying, you know, she's in a better place or, you know, or whatever they were feeling. I do remember and I hope it's all right if I say this, but my sister in law, Amy, would have kind of a spiritual connection with, you know, kind of knowing that she was there, kind of that kind of a comment. And to me that felt comforting to have her say those things, you know, that that was her experience. But I think, John, you're right, that maybe some people might not find that or it might begin that process of kind of anger of why am I not receiving this comfort or this confirmation that my child is okay or that so and so is okay. And so it is. It is hard to get into that kind of place where you don't really know what people's reactions or response are going to be because you don't even know that. They don't even know their feelings might fluctuate 10 times in a minute because of what they're going through. And so just to be in tune with kind of where they're at or be cautious or aware of what you do say or check that out with them and allow yourself to be clumsy, to be there, but also be curious about how that is falling on their, on their experience and how they're dealing with that rather than putting it on them. Right. So that's kind of how I would respond to that because to me it was comforting to hear some of those things. I do remember later thinking, why didn't I have that experience? Why couldn't I have had that? But you know, it is, it is just what it is.

Margi Dehlin [00:27:09] And I really do love the point that Amy was making too in that even with the belief of an afterlife and it kind of working a certain way. There's still loss. There's still, you know, you can believe all that is true, and still that idea that you don't have to grieve somehow. You know, I remember we have a good friend on our street, and when she lost her husband, I remember her talking about how people would say, well, isn't it great that, you know, you have an eternal marriage and that you'll see him in the afterlife? And she was like, it's awesome. And I'm gonna miss him for, like, the Next, you know, 40 years I have on this planet without him. So can I have that? Can you give me that, please? That space to feel that? And so I think that's a very real thing to recognize that, you know, even with an afterlife plan, there is still grief and mourning to be done.

John Dehlin [00:28:06] Some have even implied that if you had a true faith and commitment to the gospel and the plan of salvation, you wouldn't need to grieve very long, because grieving is almost implying a lack of faith in the plan of salvation, and I think that's harmful. Tracy writes, never ever tell them it's time to move on or ask them to move on. When my fiance died, my parents lovingly told me I needed to move on. I didn't want to move on, wasn't ready to move on, and found an escape. In very unhealthy choices. You'll never know what's going on in the person who is grieving. Tell them it's time to move on. Telling them it's time to move on can be disastrous for the grieving person. What do you guys think about that? As mental health professionals, the idea that Tracy went to some unhealthy choices of self medication as an assistant versus facing the grieving, is that reasonable, that if somebody's trying to avoid the grieving that they would turn to self medication?

Emily Celis [00:29:10] I absolutely believe that. I worked in addiction for many years and saw the effects of unhealed trauma or unhealed grief from that trauma. So I absolutely think that's possible. I mean, I think it becomes kind of a little bit mechanical sometimes when you think, oh, coping skills or coping mechanisms, I got to use these coping skills. But the reality is that there's kind of a buffer against feeling those emotions, of not allowing yourself to feel those emotions. And unfortunately, it's part of the human condition that emotions are there for a reason, to give us information about what we need to do, where we need to go, and how we need to grow and evolve. So yeah, there can be the opposite of that. Kind of what happens when you don't.

John Dehlin [00:29:57] Anything you want to add, Amy?

Guest 3 [00:29:59] Yeah, I just, I also worked at a drug rehab for pregnant or parenting women. So they were like, you know, women that were using heroin and then got pregnant and then the CPS put them into the, you know, for various reasons they were in the rehab center. So I always say it works to, you know, drugs, alcohol, they all work to numb feelings out. Right. And like, I'm not. There's no judgment in that. But it will work to not have to fill sometimes. Right. And when, sometimes you hear people's stories of trauma, like Emily said, you're like, well, no wonder you drink. No wonder you drink till you pass out, you know, and you blackout, you know, because it like you don't want to feel and it is scary to feel. It's a vulnerable experience to have to do it. So I absolutely can understand why people can lean on that. Right. But if it gets to, I would say out of control behaviors, that's when I would just worry to say, hey, are you really looking at what's going on here versus just trying to numb out?

Emily Celis [00:31:02] So important.

Margi Dehlin [00:31:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:03] And it's almost like well intended members of the church are probably feeling distressed because if, if maybe one benefit a religious doctrine provides is it assuages the fear of death that they think, you know, well, my loved ones may die, but it's okay. I have the plan of salvation. But as soon as the neighbor down the street, his award member has someone die and they're really grieving, they're probably thinking, wait a minute, religion's supposed to be there for us, to comfort us, and this person isn't comforted. Come on, guys, get with the program because you're, you're making me concerned that my coping mechanism isn't going to be there for me when I need it. So it's almost a way for those who aren't experiencing grief to sort of minimize the pain and fear that they might be feeling or the discomfort by telling others they need to kind of get over it. I think it's natural, but I think maybe it's not healthy.

Margi Dehlin [00:32:00] Yeah, I really relate to that insight that if there was a single intention behind this really strange idea to just sit with the. And make time and space for it every day, it was that. It was that I really thought if I don't shine light on this, I really feel like it will live in the dark and it will, it will live in my unconscious. I just won't be Aware of it, but it will sneak up on me in some way or affect the way I'm living in some way. So I'd much rather just shine a light on it, let it show up and do the work and process, and hopefully there will be some gifts there. And I do think as you're grieving, it's helpful at different times to pause and really think about healthy versus unhealthy coping. Coping that treats you well, that really, I feel like, connects you with your own life and with yourself, versus unhealthy coping, which takes you away from yourself, takes you away from your life and makes you more disconnected. Because, you know, at best, I think we all deserve that healthy kind of coping.

Guest 3 [00:33:09] We deserve to be good to ourselves.

Margi Dehlin [00:33:11] Yes.

Emily Celis [00:33:12] Right.

Guest 3 [00:33:13] And that's a perfect way to put it. Is that, am I doing something that's going to be grounding me in my best self, or is this something that's just helping me run away from the feelings that I have? I also think that sometimes, John, to your point, is that sometimes we feel so uncomfortable that we don't know what to say, that we do these just kind of platitudes around death and grief, you know, And I think it's just smart, like a good note to self, like, just don't say anything to people that are grieving about, like, what is heaven gonna be like? Or it's just like good. Good manners to just say, I'm gonna let them have their own process around it, you know, I remember my grandma, she was pretty passionate about this issue. And she used to say when she had heard somebody at a funeral talking about that, these two little kids to the kids who parents had died and said, you know, like, heavenly Father had work for your father to do in heaven, right? And. And she said, oh, she said, I just hated to hear that because he had work to do here. And it just is sad. Bad things happen. Bad things happen and people die. And it's not because Heavenly Father or heaven or God or whatever is going on up there wanted your dad more than you needed your dad, you know? So I think we just got to be really careful on how we present stuff like what heaven is. It is. It's so mysterious about what is going to happen after we die, right? So to put easy platitudes because we feel uncomfortable about their pain, that we have to be mature to say, I can't fix their pain. This is part of the sadness of life, and I don't need to fix it. Boundaries, right? It's just saying, like, this isn't mine to own. Their grief is their grief. My grief is my grief. We all have different feelings, but don't put the platitudes on what is happening in the afterlife. I just think it's a landfill of trouble.

Margi Dehlin [00:35:10] It's so true. And I do think, you know, yes, it's. It is present in the religious context. It's also true in our cultural context that we are generally uncomfortable around death. And I remember feeling hit by that, getting the text from my mom to come over, because I really, in my mind was thinking, okay, do I have my children come or do I not?

John Dehlin [00:35:35] Like, this is when your dad was his last day of life, that I

Margi Dehlin [00:35:39] really thought, is this something I protect my children from, or is this something that I actually choose to share? And it allowed me to see sort of, I don't know, my own discomfort, if you will, about this process that was now kind of at our.

John Dehlin [00:35:54] Tell them what you decided.

Margi Dehlin [00:35:57] I think I touched on it in the last podcast, but in the end, we decided to have our. Our children come. And I remember, oh, it's just, you know, my oldest daughter, it's one of her biggest fears is death. And I didn't require anyone to come. I just told them what was happening and told them that, you know, they could come. And within that, like each of my children, what was most interesting is it was this opportunity to see them, you know, and to see my oldest daughter honor my dad. For her, it was uncomfortable to stay in the room, so she left and she played the piano. My dad played the piano so beautifully, and she went out and she started playing all the music that she associated with him in the family room so we could hear it in the bedroom. And then, you know, my younger daughter, Maya, ended up FaceTiming us and really talking to my mom, New Jersey, because she couldn't be there. And we gave her time with both

Emily Celis [00:36:55] my mom and my dad, and she

Margi Dehlin [00:36:56] was able to say what she wanted to say to my dad. And then my younger daughter was just with me all the way, just in bed, talking to him, singing to him. Just wouldn't leave him rubbing his feet. And then my son kind of ebbing in and out and allowing him space to go skateboard and be 13 and

Emily Celis [00:37:14] kind of process it the way he needed to.

Margi Dehlin [00:37:16] But in the end, I asked them, you know, how was that? You know, do you regret that you were there?

Emily Celis [00:37:23] Were you. Do you regret. Was it.

Margi Dehlin [00:37:25] Is it hard for you to process the fact that someone. You saw someone's last breath? And I think Unilaterally.

Emily Celis [00:37:32] They have all said that they were really, really glad that they were there.

John Dehlin [00:37:39] Yeah, it's beautiful. Thank you, sweetie. Just really quickly to include some listener comments, shout out to Kimberly Anderson. Hey, Kimberly. She writes, the plan of salvation can be very dismissive of immediate pain, anger, suffering, and any specific issues that may be controversial surrounding a loved one's death. Lisa writes, actions sometimes speak louder than words. Just a hug can say more than what comes from our words. And let's use that to transition to the question of what we should say or do. We've talked about it briefly, but let's just summarize again. Emily, why don't you start? If we're not to talk to them about get over it or hey, plan of salvation or hey, they're okay, I got that confirmation. What can we say or do?

Emily Celis [00:38:28] Great question. I think, you know, if we're not. If we're gonna do verbals rather than non verbals, what we've been talking about. You can say something like, I'm so sorry for your loss. You could say, I wish I had the right words, but just know that I care. And I've got some of these off of Grief dot com. That's a great resource for where to go for some other. For some other ideas. You can say, I don't know how you feel. You know, because we don't. We may say that, oh, I know, I know how you feel, but we really don't. Every person's experience is unique. So you can say, I don't know how you feel, but I'm here to help in any way I can. You can talk about your favorite memories of their loved one in a very genuine and compassionate way. You know, my favorite memory of so and so is this. You and your loved ones will be in my thoughts and prayers. I'm usually up early. I'm usually up late. Please feel free to contact me if you need anything. You can give a hug like we were just saying. You can say nothing. Just be with the person like we've been talking about. Just kind of that presence I thought Margi brought up was a great point. Which just being present with someone and we all need help at times like this. So I'm here. So those are just some ideas of things that you could say to someone if you're going to be saying something rather than just being there.

Guest 3 [00:39:54] Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna promote this book that are looking.

Emily Celis [00:39:59] Okay.

Guest 3 [00:39:59] And for people that are listening, it says there is no good card for this. What to say and do when Life is scary, awful, and unfair to people you love. It's by Kelsey Crow. She has a PhD in Emily McDowell. So this is not a sponsored ad, but I say that. So I have loved Emily McDowell's art. She has a website and she's got these. She has a line of empathy cards. And they are so wonderful and so much heart and funny and just.

Emily Celis [00:40:27] It's the best.

Guest 3 [00:40:28] Okay, but this book came out maybe like a month or two ago, and it is. It is a delight and gives so many good advice on how to. So much good advice on what to say to people, how to have empathy. But this is one of my favorite things. It says if you take one thing away from this book, it should be this. If you're choosing between saying something and saying nothing, you're almost always better off saying something. Okay, so like, Margi, you said it was just people showing up, right? It is hard to know what to say. We don't know what to say. But oftentimes you'll. You'll like. I mean, I can think of times where I think, oh, why didn't I step out of my life and just do something for that person that I knew was grieving or had a hard thing going on, right? Like, life is busy. It's difficult, but just being able to say something right, and you're gonna mess up. This is hard for everybody to know how to. What to say. But this book gives tons of great input on how to approach grief and how to approach people around grief. Even with. Even when I was reading it, it was helping with my. My own grief that I might be sitting with, you know, so shout out for this book. Go flood Amazon and get it.

Emily Celis [00:41:43] Okay? It's.

Guest 3 [00:41:45] There's tons of great art. It's easy to read. I have it in my waiting room at my office because I think this is a universal thing of everybody has hard stuff, right? And how to show up. How to show up for people is, I think, an art.

Margi Dehlin [00:41:59] Love that. Love that. And I remember reading on one, it was on some type of grief website that Face to Face affects us for some reason more deeply than like online, though do it in whatever form you can manage. But I remember really, and really feeling that actually in my relationships with people that how people responded face to face. It was something that was really important and not being hesitant too, as the person who is grieving to like I remember at one point, I tend to. I tend to cry more at night. I think it's because I'm quieter or with my thoughts or I become More vulnerable, I think, at night, for some reason. And I remember telling John at one point something about nighttime. And I remember for the next, like, span of time, anytime in the middle of the night, John would move. He just check. Are you okay? Are you crying? Are you? And so I think that's super important as well. Like, if you're. If you have close relationships, don't hesitate. If there's something that would help you to be able to ask for it, ask for those things that you need,

Emily Celis [00:43:19] because the people who really love you, they want to give you, you know, the comfort that would feel best for you.

Margi Dehlin [00:43:26] So little small things like that. And then I have a weekly running date with a friend, an exercise. And I remember she is also a therapist, but I remember at that time, for several, several weeks, she actually worked with my dad. She spoke at my dad's funeral or memorial service. But I remember her saying, you know, let's just. Why don't you just tell me what's on your mind, how you're processing things now? Why don't you tell me, you know, what you're loving about your dad, you know, today, what you're missing about your dad today. That goes a long way. Goes just a really. And it's not complicated.

Emily Celis [00:44:02] You know, I think that that takes a lot of courage for people to do that. And I think that, like, you're saying that kind of authentic, like, eye to eye, eyeball to eyeball kind of conversation. It does. It takes courage sometimes. I don't know what it is about our culture where we kind of tend to avert our eyes or kind of move away from people who are in pain, but it is what happens. I think there's some really beautiful cultural, kind of celebratory experiences of life where people really take an intentional period of grieving across culture. And I think we can learn something from that in our Western society to really intentionally do that and to be with people and allow them that sobbing openly in public, if that's what it is, or, you know, in the quiet, you know, room of their house. So just, I think that's beautiful, to remind ourselves to have the courage to do that rather than step away and think, oh, all these reasons why they need their space and why I shouldn't bother them and why I shouldn't upset the apple cart whatnot, you know, but reasons why you should step up to them and say something like Amy said, whether it's just that presence or saying a verbal affirmation or any of these things we're talking about, I Just want

John Dehlin [00:45:18] to share a quick experience. When my nephew died, my nephew George died, my cousin Brett adopted a practice that I think comes out of Judaism called sitting shiva. Is that right? Is that what it's called? Did I pronounce it right? Okay, so basically what happened was the weekend. I believe it was the weekend or a day or two after his son passed away, he just opened his house up to his closest family and friends, and we all brought food, and we all came over, and for a full day, we just sat around and reminisced about George. Some of George's high school friends came and put together a photo album of their best memories of George. Music was played, people cried, people laughed, people told funny stories. And we just kind of sat there for a full day and just kind of grieved and celebrated together. And it was such a more powerful and beautiful experience than just showing up in the cultural hall. You know, sitting in the chapel for two hours, having funeral potatoes, and then going home, you know, it was really beautiful. And so that's a practice that I strongly recommend to anyone who might consider it, even if it doesn't come from Mormonism.

Emily Celis [00:46:41] I think that's so great to take more time with that. I think there's a movie about it I wish I could remember. It's kind of a comedy movie about where they are doing that process. And some of the family members are like, oh, gosh, here we go again. We have to do this for how long? But I remember it was a great movie. If I think of it all, I'll have to mention it, but it's neat to see that process where you do get more than just two hours, plus the burial, to honor someone in a real open way.

Margi Dehlin [00:47:07] And I think there is that. It surprised me. I think I tend to be kind of introverted, but there is an equal energy to kind of wanting to, what would I say? Process alone. Having alone time and space to do that. But then also this huge draw to be with people who knew your loved one and to share memories. And one of the things I loved that we did the night before the memorial service for. It was for the kids, but adults were there too, was had them. It was almost like a testimony meeting, but it was sharing memories of Papa, things they wanted to remember about Papa. And what happens when there's that space and collectively you, you know, share. I just think it becomes more powerful than just a, you know, the individual memories. It becomes something bigger.

Guest 3 [00:48:03] Yeah, my grandma's funeral they had before they closed the casket, we were able to all the grandkids. So there's. She had nine children and then all the grandkids. It was kind of a moment for the grandkids to everybody kind of share something. And we were able to put stuff in the casket that we wanted. And it was like. I still remember. So my cousin. My grandma makes really, the best homemade rolls ever. She's, like, classic for it, Right. Every good Mormon grandma has, you know, their homemade roll recipe. Right. I think my grandma's one, you know, and my cousin was talking about, you know, the weekend before the funeral, she was. She was rolling out the rolls because she was making rolls for something. And she said it was as if I was doing a sacrament to my grandma. Every Thanksgiving, I get teary about it, but so every time I roll out my grandma's rolls, like, it is almost as if she's, like, part of me doing it, because I know that she did it generation after generation. And even though I think as a culture, we have a hard time knowing how to show up, but every single time we've had funerals and they're all of a sudden, for these gigantic families, the release of society has put on an amazing spread of food. And it's their act of kindness. And I want to honor that. Right. Like, it's amazing that they can pull it together, you know? And I think that's the Relief Society sisters, as a collective group, saying, we're going to feed these people in Greece, and so nothing tastes better than funeral potatoes. John.

John Dehlin [00:49:40] Agreed. Agreed.

Guest 3 [00:49:42] So I think that culturally, that's how. How. That's how we've kind of created a way of honoring that is like, we're gonna provide food and sustenance for people that are kind of grieving. And I think it's sweet, you know, But I do feel like, to Margi, what you said is having, like, a collective moment of remembrance of them, I think is so important, you know, and

Margi Dehlin [00:50:09] having said that, just to add. Cause I love when you shared about you know, rolling out the dough and feeling. That's been one of the most personally healing, connecting things for me now is I fight to do the dishes every night because it reminds me of my dad. He always did the dishes. And so these things that you remember. I play classical music. I always put my kids to bed and do that nightly ritual that he used to do with us. And it's the way that I honor him, and I still remember him and I connect with him now. So I love the collective, and I also love the closeness that I feel to him and I'm just, I'm kind of aware of how I'm jumping at those things that I remember him doing as a way to say, you live through me now. I'm doing it, you know, and thinking of you as I do it.

John Dehlin [00:51:08] Yeah, beautiful. And yes, funeral potatoes are amazing. So we don't mean to discount them or the lovely acts of service from ward members. Kimberly reminds us, however she writes over the past year, we, and I think is we. She means the Mama Dragons. Shout out to the Mama Dragons. Amazing mamas of LGBT children. Within Mormonism, we have had a few opportunities to arrange a continual support of love and strength and actual visits to a few women families. Kimberly has been told by several people that the visits a week, a month, several months after the funeral are more important than the days following a loved one's death. We talked about this last time. It is easy to forget and move on within our own very busy lives, but to remember and reach out in small ways in an ongoing manner and means a tremendous amount to these people that are grieving every day of their life for their loss. That's a great reminder, Kimberly. I'm also going to add a listener wrote in, Gina wrote, speaking of books, Amy, you mentioned a book you loved. Gina wrote, I have a comment for an upcoming episode. One book that was extremely helpful and meaningful to her as her father in law passed away was When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. The author, now deceased, was a neurosurgeon diagnosed with stage four cancer at the age of 36. He writes of what makes life worth living in the face of death. It was very poignant for her interfaith transition. Love the podcast. So thank you Gina for sharing. That's another resource to add to our show. Notes. Well, let's take a few. Write in questions or comments from our listeners. Carrie writes, I lost my mother. I was am completely devastated. We were so close. Based on events that impacted my faith transition over the last couple of years and helping to care for my mother, I went from quote, struggling, inactive member, quote unquote, to questioning if I will ever see her again. There are moments when that thought is just too much to bear. What is your advice, Emily? Why don't you take that one first? What's your advice to Carrie, who is struggling to wonder whether she will ever see her mom again?

Grief, Faith Loss, and Existential Questions

Emily Celis [00:53:31] These are such difficult questions and my heart just goes out to everyone. And this is not just a Mormon thing. You know, I think that this is a universal life thing. We all struggle with that. I mean, even when we think we know or we thought we knew when we were active Mormons. Even when faced with those deaths, you still have those moments of it really testing your faith. And so, you know, me, I'm transitioned out of the. Out of the church. I'm not part of it, but it is something I see all the time with clients, is them grappling with these kinds of questions about life. And I mean, the way that made a lot of sense to me as I was kind of going through my personal faith transition, these kinds of questions were everything to me, the foundation of life, really. These questions about death and where we go. And I mean, I was faced with that from a young age. So it just became part of my outlook on life. And I think that what helped me kind of make sense of that was to study existentialism. And I know that was part of what I wanted to bring into the. To the topic today, to talk about existentialism, because it deals with that a lot of those unknowns that we all have to face. And in facing those unknown questions, it allows us to experience life and we can get into that a little bit more. But I just wanted to kind of touch on that as far as how to deal with those. Those uncertainties. Well, we all have to deal with these uncertainties.

John Dehlin [00:55:05] So what does existentialism have to say for Kerry's question and concern?

Emily Celis [00:55:12] Existentialism? The parts that I wanted to touch on with that is the fact that we have four ultimate concerns in life, and this death being one of them, is the unknown. And I think maybe not what existentialism would say, but what I would kind of interject here is that we have to first take just a huge deep breath and try and get comfortable with this space that we have of not knowing, just taking that breath, and just being able to surrender a little bit into that. And just I wish that I could offer this magical answer that would make that pain go away. But again, we're not trying to avoid pain. We're trying to go through pain to make ourselves feel into an evolved person or to a person that can integrate these experiences that we have in our lives to help us grow. And so that, you know, dealing with death, Irvin Yalom, he's someone that I just love as far as existentialism goes. And, you know, the thing that he says is that the possibility of that just absolutely cannot be ignored and that existence cannot be postponed. So the idea of grappling with this idea of death that we all have to grapple with, it's always rumbling beneath the surface of our life is that this is what allows us to drink from the cup of life more fully when we allow ourselves to really face this. So what are your guys thoughts on this? I don't want to go off on too long of a tangent with this. I just. I love this theory and I could

Guest 3 [00:56:46] go on, but I just.

John Dehlin [00:56:47] I just want to. It sounds like, Emily, what you're doing is trying to practice what we're recommending to our listeners, which is, let's not try and console Carrie or give her some quick fix or pithy response. You're basically saying that somehow there's power in just being there and accepting the fact that life is impermanent and we all die and there's no getting around it and there's no running away from it, and we should just sit there and kind of acknowledge that and fully feel it. Amy, what would you. What would you add?

Guest 3 [00:57:23] I'm going to add a quote from Gildner Radner. I think I might have brought it up last night.

John Dehlin [00:57:27] Rosanna. Rosanna. Dana. Saturday Night Live original cast Gene Wilder's wife. Sorry.

Guest 3 [00:57:34] Died of cancer.

John Dehlin [00:57:35] Showing my age.

Guest 3 [00:57:36] Okay. So she said, I love this. And she says, I wanted a perfect ending. Now, I've learned the hard way that some poems don't rhyme and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moments and making the best of it without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity. So I. It is a mystery, you know, and we've all got to kind of sit with that ambiguity. And I think that takes some maturity to just not know sometimes.

John Dehlin [00:58:15] Is it delicious or is it awful or terrifying?

Guest 3 [00:58:18] I think it depends on the moment. Sometimes it will feel like the most painful thing.

Emily Celis [00:58:24] Right.

Guest 3 [00:58:26] And sometimes you'll have hope and sometimes there'll be light in your day and sometimes you'll want to stay in bed and cry all day and you won't be able to move, you know, and just take one step, one step at a time.

John Dehlin [00:58:45] Yeah, I like what Margi talked about last time, which is just one thing we can do once we marinate and sit in the. In the loss and the impermanence of life is to channel that, to try to fully appreciate the life that we do have now and the loved ones that do remain. Not to try and do that, to numb the pain or the grieving or to dismiss it or to in any way negate it. But that is a side effect of acknowledging impermanence is just maybe realizing that that can give us a greater value for the life we do have. Now.

Guest 3 [00:59:30] The power of now.

John Dehlin [00:59:31] The power of now. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:59:33] Yeah. One thing I was thinking, reading the Question is just, you know, one of the recurring things, I do think this is where we hit up against mystery and the unknown. And I feel you, Carrie. That's what I would say. I think, for one thing that came to my mind is give voice to it. You're talking about really struggling with. And I remember going on walks by myself particularly, but it still comes up for me where I just kind of look around and I think, and I really say it like, where did you go, dad?

Emily Celis [01:00:11] Where are you?

Margi Dehlin [01:00:12] You know, and I give voice to that, and I allow it to live in me. That sense of not knowing where he went. How could someone who was that large to me in life and his love, that large, you know, and his goodness, that. That huge, just be gone from view, Be gone from. And I think that's an important part of grieving, honestly, is to. Is to allow yourself to really put into words what that mystery and loss feels like for you. And then I was just gonna say the other side to that is amidst that loss, I decided in those moments to. I framed a practice of gratitude around my dad, and I started saying all the things I was really grateful for that I was missing. So it was like it started in pain, and I'm feeling all this loss and sadness. And then I would sit down and say, what is it that I really. What are the gifts of him that I'm missing right now? And I would write them. And then what ended up happening was I felt filled by those things. I felt filled by those gifts that I was staring on the page, and they didn't feel lost at all. They felt very much part of the world that I was living in. And that was an interesting thing to have happened. And maybe that's something to kind of try is to look at loss and then to switch it to, like, gifts or the things that brought you or. And write them down and see if that happens for you. See if those are things that people love about you or that's what you love about the world, or some of the things that the ways that you approach are actually, you know, your mother. You know, that things that your mother brought to you, and there can be connection and some comfort in that.

Listener Questions: Children, Death, and the Afterlife

John Dehlin [01:02:06] Margi, Corrine, one of our listeners asked if it wasn't too painful for you to share how you're coping with the loss of your father. I think you've shared a Few things with us. Is there anything else you wanted to share? You brought some visuals. Oh, was that part of this question for you?

Margi Dehlin [01:02:20] No, it was part. It was. Oh, I feel like I've shared a lot actually on the podcast about it.

John Dehlin [01:02:27] So Corinne, thank you for asking. And Margi, thank you for sharing.

Margi Dehlin [01:02:31] Yeah, I would just say grief is a moment to moment, day by day process. And my approach is to try and just be as open and present to the process as possible. And that's my goal. That's what I'm trying to do.

Emily Celis [01:02:49] Emily, I just wanted to jump in there because you've said this so beautifully, Margi, about how. And Amy too, just like rolling the dough out or washing the dishes, you know, these kind of rituals or these acts that you go through that makes you feel connected to, you know, the people that you've lost. And I think that that kind of jumping ahead. I wanted to talk later on and we'll probably get there, but about Joseph Campbell, who is just a great mythologist and storyteller and philosopher and all these things.

John Dehlin [01:03:20] Go ahead and talk about him.

Emily Celis [01:03:21] Yeah, what he talked about. One of the parts that I wanted to talk about is just what's coming up organically with the conversation with regard to how, you know this belief in eternity. Well, eternity is happening right now and it's living on through these people in those moments that you share with the washing of the dishes, that's that, that experience of your loved one living on through you or rolling out the dough. And so that is kind of a way that intimates this immortality that we all long for or desire. And so that to ask people to look into those ways that you can still feel connected to someone who has passed and that the memory of them does live on and that you can keep them in your life in those ways. So that's just one, one piece that I wanted to connect there.

John Dehlin [01:04:13] Love it.

Margi Dehlin [01:04:13] So true.

John Dehlin [01:04:16] Wow. One of our listeners, Elsa, writes a really interesting comment observation. She writes another aspect of this grappling with the idea of death when we transition out of Mormonism is having to re mourn. And I think this applies to people who become more liberal or progressive Mormons too. And they, they realize that maybe they're less certain about what they thought they were certain about. But she writes, sometimes we have to remorn the deaths of loved ones we experienced as, as orthodox believing Mormons. So she writes, I lost my brother to an accidental overdose and had comforted myself with, quote, visions of him as a missionary in the temple. But after transitioning the comfort was gone and his death was just a dumb mistake. Have you seen people like me who have to remorn deaths they experienced as a true believing orthodox Mormon? Emily or Amy, how about you, Amy? Have you heard of that before or is that a new one to you?

Guest 3 [01:05:16] That is not new. I mean, not that specific example.

John Dehlin [01:05:20] But just let me ask, why can't she just keep believing in her vision in the temple? I know you can't speak for her, but speak for those who you're familiar with, why they would maybe necessarily not just stick with the temple vision or the spiritual confirmation they received as a true believer. Why might they feel the need to not stick with that?

Guest 3 [01:05:43] Because maybe they don't believe in the temple anymore, right? I mean, sometimes when you've, like, constructed ideas about the afterlife, I mean, you know, it's pretty specific, you know, in Mormon doctrine about, you know, plan of salvation. Then we go to spirit prison and then there's the three kingdoms, you know what I mean? Like that it's pretty laid out, you know, and so when you have a change of, like, what does that framework mean when I don't believe it anymore, like, and having to kind of reconstruct, it's like, kind of like you have to first deconstruct everything, then kind of build it back up. And that is a hard process to do when something has given you a lot of comfort, like I do. I have a lot of hope. I still hold a lot of hope for myself. Like, that my soul's eternal, right? I'm gonna hold on to that. Do I know? I don't know. I really hope. I really hope that, like, that there's. There's something to my soul, right? And. And so you have to. So each person has to create meaning of like when they've had a loss of faith or become more progressive or change their ideas about what the temple might mean or what the kingdoms might mean. You kind of have to reconstruct. And it feels sad because there's something nice in the certainty. It's comforting, you know, it's like answers. And when you don't, when it's harder to be an ambiguity sometimes than to be in the solid answer.

John Dehlin [01:07:11] So I guess, I mean, I'm not saying you're saying this to Elsa necessarily, but, you know, one thought that occurs is for doubting or even disbelieving sort of Mormons and post Mormons to say, if it comforts you to believe in an afterlife, why don't you keep believing in it? There's nothing to say you have to get rid of that belief and quote, throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Guest 3 [01:07:35] Right.

John Dehlin [01:07:36] How about you, Emily? Are you comfortable sharing your thoughts about the afterlife and how, how you might process Elsa's question?

Emily Celis [01:07:47] Yeah. No. I think it gives this opportunity for us to really start seeking some of those answers. I think for me, I, and everyone's experience is different. You know, some people decide to have complete non belief and for me, I really decided to start seeking out answers to a place where I could get comfortable with it and deciding to try and do classes on spiritual development or trying to, trying to continue to pray even if it wasn't the same way that I was taught how to pray. Trying to deepen that, you know, connection with the non physical world, you know, kind of through even metaphysical or, you know, just other spiritual leaders or other spiritual ways of healing and different kind of things that I think is such a huge, exciting, never ending place to go. I get excited about it and I work with a lot of people that are looking at spirituality in a lot of different ways and some because of their Mormon, you know, faith transition or crisis and others just because that's what they're doing. So for me that, that brought comfort. And the more that I did that, the more I was able to get comfortable with the not knowing, right? The more that I reached out for that, that I don't know and I'm just curious and I just, I want to know. I don't know now, right? Nobody knows now. But I feel very confident and comfortable with being in a not knowing place, to be in an ambiguous place. I'm not saying that I'm, I'm not ever in a place that feels uncomfortable. Absolutely not. I still go through all these human things that we all come up against when we're really faced with those experiences. Experiences. But I think the more that I've tried to get into the unknown, the more I've become more comfortable with that.

John Dehlin [01:09:40] Paul, a listener asks, what do you tell your children now about life after death? Three kingdoms. Three kingdoms of heaven. Is there a heaven? Will we all be together after we die? Or is it just the end? How do you, what would you guys

Guest 3 [01:09:57] say

John Dehlin [01:09:59] on how to talk to kids about this?

Emily Celis [01:10:03] I'll jump in there, I think, because I kind of have a different experience with how being raised in the church, how I was talked about all the three kingdoms of heaven and how things work. And then for me, as I've gone through having children of my own and I have a 4 year old who we Experienced the death of our dog and who had been around ever since he was little. And so it was really interesting to get to that place of really humility to, you know, as a parent, it feels so good to know, right? It feels so good to know. And then to tell your children, similar to that, to the idea of the church knowing and telling us as the children, there's just that comfort and to again, be able to be comfortable with not knowing and letting go of that control of knowing or trying to control their experience of knowing and to just say, these are the things that mommy believes, you know, these are some of the things that I have. And sometimes we just don't know the answers to things. And that's laying a framework for my, for my child who's old enough to somewhat understand, you know, not a teenager by any means, but to meet him where he's at and to be able to create space for him to come up with his own, his own beliefs and his own ideologies and continuing to shape that as he grows, grows up. So that's just my personal experience and what I, what I would kind of throw out there.

Margi Dehlin [01:11:33] I love that.

John Dehlin [01:11:36] How about you, Amy?

Guest 3 [01:11:38] I think that we don't give kids enough credit sometimes is like, I don't. I think I'm just gonna tell my kids exactly the same thing that I would tell any adult of just, we don't know. It's just really sad right now. And I mean, if I'm talking about like heaven and afterlife, I think I'm just gonna kind of take that same approach with my kids. Like my 4 year old, he's now 5, but he's kind of in this like obsessed with death mode, right? So he keeps saying, dad, I don't, I don't, I don't ever want you to die and I don't want to grow up. And you know, he's kind of in this thing. So for us it's more about how do we just help our kids be okay with the ambiguity too. Just as I'm trying to help myself with it and help clients with it, I'm gonna do the same thing for my kids of just saying, I don't

Emily Celis [01:12:27] have the answers for you.

Guest 3 [01:12:30] This is all kind of, you know, and just kind of saying, I hope, I hope, I hope a lot of things, you know, I hope it doesn't just go to black.

Emily Celis [01:12:38] Yep.

Guest 3 [01:12:39] I really hope that. I hope it doesn't. And I can say that to them and be okay with not having like, I, it's one of my Friends said that a therapist told him, you don't have to nail the landing when you have to tell your kids hard things conversation that you're always going to keep having with them. And so this like death and life and sex and all the hard conversations that you're going to have with your kids is like. It's a continual conversation. It's not just one conversation.

Margi Dehlin [01:13:08] I couldn't agree more.

Emily Celis [01:13:09] I love that.

Guest 3 [01:13:10] To say I have to say the right thing when they ask me. It's like it's okay to see that, to show your kids that you don't know, you know.

Margi Dehlin [01:13:18] I agree. I love the idea, too, of being able to ask them how they're feeling and what they're thinking at the time and giving them space to kind of process. I love that as well. And I also think, you know, childhood provides plenty of loss opportunities for kids, and it's not just death. I remember for each of my children, particularly my girls, and I'm curious if I'll see it some with Winston. But that kind of bridge from childhood to adolescent, that was something that they were very aware of, feeling like they were leaving their childhood behind, that sort of innocence, who they felt like they could be as girls and females and then moving into this sort of adolescent

Emily Celis [01:14:04] body that felt foreign.

Margi Dehlin [01:14:06] And I just think, boy, this comes up a lot loss. And I think it's all pertinent. It's all practice for, you know, there are smaller losses and bigger ones. And so I really love the idea of just what you're talking about. Numerous conversations and allowing space for kids to be able to. To acknowledge that part of life that comes to us all regardless. Were you going to say something?

Guest 3 [01:14:33] Yeah, I think it's a natural reaction as parents to want to protect your children. Right. And to want to, like, sweep the path and make it okay and make them not have loss and not have feel pain. But like Glennon Milton Doyle, she just wrote a really great article this month on the Oprah Magazine. Everyone should. Maybe Shanda, you can link it if you can. She was talking about how sometimes it's. What we need to do as parents is to be able to point our kids in the right direction, to learn how to be resilient. And that means they're going to have loss and it means that they're not always going to have the answers and that hard things happen.

Emily Celis [01:15:08] Right.

Guest 3 [01:15:09] Whether it's divorce, whether it's death, whether it's getting bullied at school, like, how do we help our kids through resiliency? So that they can forge the path ahead of them. And I think sometimes we want to be able to say, here's the answers. Don't be sad if something is sad because we're going to be in heaven together. You know what I mean? And it's like sometimes those answers, you know, we don't always have to have the answers. So amen what you just said.

Margi Dehlin [01:15:38] So true that resilience. And I also love the idea. What I love about resilience, Christian Moore. Right. Is the idea that, you know, resilience is like a muscle and we, we strengthen it as we use it. And so I just love that sort of growth. If you have that growth mindset is that. That's what I mean. There are opportunities, I guess I'd say, for resilience that are inherent to life that can be seized upon.

Emily Celis [01:16:04] Yeah, I think this is a great conversation because I think we're talking about with that, you know, the parenting again, kind of bringing it full circle back to that empathy of even sitting. So as parents, we have that struggle, right, of wanting to be able to tell our kids everything about life and how it goes. And then the struggle of saying that this is the reality of all the ambiguity and then the empathy of really actually sitting there and allowing your child to have that, you know, that huge tantrum or that big cry while they deal with all those uncertainties that taps into sometimes as a parent, our own uncertainties, and sometimes wanting to stop that from happening and make it all okay and, you know, just being willing to allow that. I use hand in hand parenting or parenting by connection, which is. And use that with some clients, too. And that's also kind of talks about those same kinds of things about allowing children to kind of have their experiences and not trying to fix everything for them. It's a disservice in a lot of ways to try and fix it for them. But to be able to stand beside them and to be truly empathic to their experiences is what allows them to learn what life is really made of.

Margi Dehlin [01:17:14] So true. I love that. And I find time and time again at our retreats, I end up bringing up this Brene Brown, I read an interview with her where someone was asking her something that concerned her or something that she saw that was. And I remember her talking about what concerns me most is this idea that she teaches, I guess, graduate level classes at a university in Texas. And she was saying repeatedly, I see graduate students who have never had to go through anything difficult or challenging. And so it's this idea that our children Will like life. It's not a matter of if, it's when. And this idea of having, you know, as parents, instead of it trying to create this alternate universe where there is no pain and suffering, which would be exhausting and would not help them in any way, but saying, we're gonna get you a really great tool bag of coping skills and we're gonna add a backpack, hopefully of some navigation skills for you so that when it comes, you know, you see what during your youth and growing up, you had these hard things and you learned a couple things or two and you learned what coping skills really work well for you and how to navigate when you're feeling overwhelmed. And so that when you're out and mom and dad aren't here, you know you've got them all, they're already within you and you're all ready. So I like that as a better paradigm.

Emily Celis [01:18:40] Absolutely. No, that's great. I actually remember having that experience when I was in my graduate program. You know, a lot of self reflective, you know, exercises and papers and remembering that there were people in my classes that said, I don't know, I just haven't really gone through anything hard. And I'm like, what planet did you grow up on? I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah,

John Dehlin [01:19:04] I love this. Another one of our listeners writes Gillian is their name. And this is a practical question. How is the best way to deal with believing family members when you lose a loved one? Suggestions on funeral program. Parentheses compromise of an orthodox Mormon service versus not. Yeah, so this is classic. Do we have the funeral in the Mormon chapel or not? Do we have the bishop preside or not? Usually the majority of the family members are going to be believing. So should the non believer or the questioner, the doubter, make a big stir and stand true to their convictions or just roll over and let the family, the believers, take over? That's a really sensitive issue. Do either of you have experience in that particular question of Gillian's?

Navigating Funerals and Family with Differing Beliefs

Guest 3 [01:20:05] So I'm confused.

Emily Celis [01:20:06] Who's the.

Guest 3 [01:20:07] Is the person that died?

John Dehlin [01:20:08] I'm guessing Jillian is not no longer orthodox or believing, but she, if it's a. She has lots of believing family members that are. And the question is, when a loved one dies, how do you navigate catering to the needs of believers versus non believers?

Guest 3 [01:20:29] Yeah, I guess I would think about the desire of the person that died. Right. Like every time I have a C section because I have C sections for my babies, I like Write like the 2 days before I write this email to my like My A team. And I say, okay, everyone, like, if I die, like, we're not having it in a Mormon church because my best friend has a potty mouth and she's gonna say the F word at my funeral. You know what I mean? Like, and I want certain music to be played. Like, I don't think. I don't think I want a Mormon funeral. Right. And so I've made it really clear to the people in my life. Like, I. Sorry, it might be a little harder for you because you're gonna have to figure out a different place to do it. But, like, this is the. What I desire. Right. But I would hope that you can be mindful of, like, you know, if I had somebody in my life die that was a believing Mormon, absolutely, I would want them to have a Mormon funeral, you know, because that's probably what they would want. And so I think it's being important to be mindful of the person that is dying and what their wishes would be.

Guest [01:21:29] Mm.

Guest 3 [01:21:30] That's my only practical tip, I guess.

Margi Dehlin [01:21:32] It's a great one.

John Dehlin [01:21:34] Emily, what were you gonna.

Emily Celis [01:21:35] Yeah, no, I think it's. These are tough topics, you know, because sometimes you don't really know until you're in the middle of it. And then you could. I could see how that could easily turn into a really heated conversation. And I think, you know, as I, you know, I haven't worked with clients on this exact scenario, but what oftentimes happens between believing and non believing people is kind of a death, sorry, defining kind of the boundaries between those relationships and what people are comfortable with. And so it's almost like you have to be, with all of the grief and everything going on, you have to be a little bit more assertive maybe than you normally would to be able to get your wishes across. If you feel that you feel very strongly about a certain way that it should be. And so just kind of be prepared to reassert yourself, you know, that whole with assertive skills, you know, being a broken record, you can do it respectfully, but, you know, to be able to make sure that you do have what you think that person would want, or if it's, you know, yourself. I'm not sure what the exact situation is, but if there's a strong belief in there to not. To not shy away from really at least trying to have your voice be heard, and if it doesn't end up the way you want, at least you have that knowledge that you asserted yourself and you did what you could to have, you know, your wishes be known. So, yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to that kind of being able to be assertive and in a loving and compassionate way. You know, defining the boundaries between. Yes, I understand that you don't respect the fact that I'm not part of the church anymore or that I am part of the church still if there are those disagreements. But being able to find some common ground or even getting someone to help mediate those conversations if needed, because it's a very difficult subject, especially when you're right in the middle of it. Trying to figure out funeral plans can be really challenging without all of those things in the mix of it.

Guest 3 [01:23:27] Which is a good reminder to say, like, talk to people about what you want. Right. Like, it's a hard conversation to talk about end of life stuff.

Emily Celis [01:23:36] Right.

Guest 3 [01:23:37] But hopefully people that are really close to, you know, what your desires are.

Emily Celis [01:23:41] Yep.

Guest [01:23:41] Yeah.

Guest 3 [01:23:42] And it's. So it's just a good reminder. Sometimes accidental death or surprise death probably could create more issues around this that's like, oh, what did the person want? We didn't really know, and where were they at in their belief? Who knows? You know, if there's ambiguity, it makes it harder to know what to do. But hopefully, you know, especially if someone's, you know, that someone's gonna be dying, I would hope that. That even though you kind of don't want to talk about the death might be on the table, it's important to kind of face some of those conversations to say, what do you want for your funeral services? What do you, you know, what do you hope for? What song do you want? Who do you want to have? Speak? Where do you want to have it? Do you want to be cremated or have it be in a casket and have it be buried? You know, so there's like all kinds of end of life stuff that is hard to talk about, but I think it's absolutely necessary to really have those conversations.

John Dehlin [01:24:31] Yeah. Figure that stuff out while you're living. Everybody. A couple examples from my life. When my sister died in December. You know, Gina just loved the church. She was as orthodox in her beliefs as they come. And I can't imagine having a funeral anywhere else but in her homeward chapel in Cary, Illinois. And I think it's in Cary or somewhere close by. But what I, you know, but maybe two of her three children aren't active in the church. And what I thought was really lovely was that they. I mean, it wasn't lovely that they had me speak. But on the one hand, on the one hand, they had Gina's funeral in a Mormon chapel. On the other hand, they had an excommunicated. Her excommunicated brother be the main speaker. And I was really touched that her husband and children chose me. And I tried really hard. For me, of course, that was a bit of a challenge to think about. What am I going to say? All these believers are here, and I don't want to hurt people's feelings. So what I focused on was just how much, you know, my fond memories of Gina. And I did talk about how much she loved the church and how much the church meant to her and how much her church members meant to her, because that was Gina.

Margi Dehlin [01:25:59] It was part of her.

John Dehlin [01:26:00] And I felt okay about that. I didn't feel insulting or, you know, demeaning to me as a non believer. It just felt like a way to celebrate Gina. I was really touched by what your mom chose in your dad's funeral because, you know, I think the church meant a lot to Margi's parents. However, I think five of five of the six children in Margi's family are no longer attending church. And there are a lot of friends and community members who weren't Mormon. And I thought it was a really lovely decision of Margi's mom to hold the funeral. Not in a chapel. They did have a bishop conduct, but they. But they had it in a mortuary. And I thought it was beautiful. Didn't you?

Margi Dehlin [01:26:52] I did. I think it's a great example of sort of an honoring, of the blended nature of it. And it is a very tricky situation in that I find a memorial service, a blend of, like, it's very public, it's sort of representing the person to the public. And then it can also feel really personal to the people who are, you know, in attendance and clearly the family and immediate sort of loved ones. And so there is a little bit of a, I think, a trickiness to that. But I thought she did a great job in that. It really was kind of a blend. I found. We. What she wanted to be able to do is have the freedom to do what she wanted. And that's what the independent place, this memorial kind of service allowed for her. So we were able to shine a big picture of my dad on the wall. We were able to play James Taylor and John Denver songs that he used to play when we were little for the whole, like, kind of beginning part. We were able to have my daughter sing a James Taylor song and project that up on the wall while she's playing the guitar. We were allowed to have

Guest [01:28:06] there Was

Margi Dehlin [01:28:07] just, I think, a freedom and honoring that went with that where she didn't have to be concerned. And then she also was able to blend things. She chose a hymn, I think it was like for the Beauty of the Earth, which is very much my dad prayers. And so it was this great blend of sort of showing. I think she did leave. Her final remarks were kind of a testimony and kind of a. Of her belief and that. And so anyway, I think it was a great example of sort of. I wonder if I should show the program.

John Dehlin [01:28:40] Yeah, please.

Emily Celis [01:28:41] How do I do?

Margi Dehlin [01:28:42] I just show it like. So this is what the program looked like. It's my dad. And that is a poem, part of a poem that his mother wrote. And then on the inside, it kind of looks like that where it shows the kind of musical numbers she had public, like people who had worked with my dad. That's the remarks. Each child spoke for five minutes. You can see one hymn. And then on the back, looks like the greatest joy of life is to love and be loved. And so anyway, an idea for a blend. One thing I would add, it's almost kind of. It's almost similar to something like a baptism or a kind of mixed faith where you go through an ordinance where you may feel differently about the ordinance. And one thing I would just suggest is one thing I do regularly, still is sometimes I'll pull out, recognize that it's an afternoon, probably the memorial service. And it does feel kind of grounding and important, that act of coming together. But the grieving process is long and that you can empower yourself to remember and to honor in the way you want and need for all the days after that. And so I empower you to do that and pull out letters and photos and things that mementos, things that, you know, mean something to you. For every race I ran, my dad would clip out the newspaper clipping, write the name of the newspaper and the date of my race, and just, you know, going through and knowing that he took the time to be that detailed about those things. But allow yourself that and know that you'll have that, you'll have that, that time for yourself where you get to create the type of ultimate memorial for your loved one that you would want.

John Dehlin [01:30:45] Elsa writes something beautiful. She writes, I think we as orthodox Mormons get shame for being sad about the loss of a loved one. Funerals are often missionary efforts, and the plan of happiness leaves little room for ugly, gritty grief. Leaving made me feel the grief I had kept frozen. And it sounds like from the podcast so far, feeling that grief allows us to process through. I ended up holding a private memorial for my brother. So this is sort of a creative thing. She did a private memorial. Only me and one other person was there. I wrote all the things I loved about him and all my regrets in our relationship on a balloon. This may sound corny, but it helped to mourn away. To mourn away from believing members. I love that idea of creativity. I'm going to just add, and this is something that I did when I found out recently that Grant Palmer was within a year of dying. I decided to hold a service celebrating him before he died. Why wait to say all these beautiful things about this person until after they're dead? And we had this lovely service honoring Grant Palmer before he died. I think that's a great way. Kimberly writes that she's worried that maybe her funeral wishes won't be honored after she dies. So she's thinking about having her final wishes tattooed down the length of her torso or forearm. I'll add. So that's a creative way to make sure you're no mistaking your wishes are honored. You can put on your forehead if you want. Kimberly, that's also an idea. Okay. Amy or Emily, anything? You guys want to jump in here or should we? Okay. So there is one really deep kind of question that was asked that's probably. Probably pretty heavy. So Caitlin writes and get ready for a heavy one, guys. I found out last night that my life has been cut by about 15 years, maybe more, maybe less, allowing me time to live into my late 50s and 60s. I'm devastated by this even though it is years away. She goes on to write that she's afraid of dying but doesn't believe in God, wants her to be an afterlife, but doesn't believe in heaven and hell. She it's he or she is a pre med student and is thinking about starting med school in one to two years. And I think Caitlin is concerned about the time and the dedication of going to med school, what that might involve. They're very passionate about medical school, but at the same time wondering if that's the best way to use their time, if their life is going to be possibly shortened. So the final part of the question is he or she doesn't want to do it if it's going to take away time from family. I wish I had more time with my future kids. I don't have any yet. How do you deal with the afterlife? Any advice on how to cope or make the most out of every day so that's a pretty intense question from Caitlin. A lot of pressure there about how to live now, knowing that the end is sooner than they would have thought. Emily, what would you say to Caitlin?

Fear of Death and Finding Meaning Without Religion

Emily Celis [01:34:13] Oh, man, I'm feeling this one real heavy in my heart as you read that, John. And I think what flashed in my mind was this movie that I saw. And again, sometimes it's easier to experience things in this way, but it was arrival. Now, a lot of people, I don't know if everyone has seen that. I thought I was going in to see a movie about aliens, which it is, but gosh, that movie left me sobbing in the movie theater. I thought it was so poignant. About this idea that we're talking about today, where we are faced with this choice or this opportunity to continue to move through life in a very whole hearted way, even knowing that we're going to face these unavoidable difficulties and whether we're going to still reach out and connect with someone or love someone wholeheartedly or go after those things that bring you so much joy, passion in your life. And so that is what I would say is, in the words of Joseph Campbell, the follow your bliss. And because that's what brings you into your experience of life to the fullest. And those are such hard. It's not an easy do this and then everything follows. It's a difficult thing to figure out day in and day out. I think you said in there, I don't want to spend these hours studying. I mean, it is a commitment. And you're faced with this, you know, this resource of time that is running out. And essentially we all are faced with that and whether or not we're going to close that gap and really face it in the way that you're having to face it. Caitlin. That. That is all of our choice. You could choose to face that or you could choose not to face that. And it's a very brave and courageous thing to face that. And to say now, really, what am I gonna do? How am I gonna, you know, the Shawshank Redemption. I don't know why I'm having all these thoughts of sayings and things, but they reverberate in my mind. But either get busy living or get busy dying, right? That's what we all have the choice to do. And so my heart is with you. That's heavy.

John Dehlin [01:36:35] Beautiful. Thank you, Emily. Amy.

Guest 3 [01:36:38] Oh, I just got chills when Emily was talking about that. That is. That's hard to know what the best course of your life is. And I think she's the only one that can answer that question for herself, it's like, dig deep and say, you know, do I want to do I want to be able to have a passion and a career and do that? I. You can have both. I think you can still have family and still do a career. I don't think they're accepted, exclusive. I think you could probably do both. But, you know, she's the only one that can answer, is this. Is this really what I want to put my energy for? And I guess the last part of her question was, how do I kind of live in the moment? How do I do it? And I think that's a challenge for all of us is to say, how do we just be present and feel the wind and take moments where you can be with people that you love and be in relationship, you know, so. Oh, that's a hard one. That's hard.

Margi Dehlin [01:37:44] It is a hard one. What would you say, babe?

John Dehlin [01:37:49] It's gonna differ. As you guys say, it's gonna differ with everybody. And this isn't advice pushing Caitlin in one direction or another. I do remember contemplating my PhD when I was 40, thinking, you know, by the time I'm done, I'll be close to 50. And I remember someone saying to me, you can be 50 with a PhD or 50 without a PhD. And that's not to trivialize the amount of effort that goes into a medical degree. And to say that that means Caitlin should do it. It's just to say that for me, I really loved the process of getting my PhD and it was a huge sacrifice for the family. But Margi says, and the kids say that in some ways it helped make me a better person, a bit more thoughtful, a bit more sensitive, a bit more introspective about myself. And I plan on a good 10 or 20 years of really making a difference. It's not going to be a full career of a psychologist, but I think it's going to. It's going to enhance my remaining days. And most of all, like you said, Amy, I just kind of loved. I loved it. I loved learning, I loved the research. I loved the clinical aspects. I loved developing that expertise. And I feel like it's helped me be a better husband and father and counselor and podcaster. So that's what worked for me. But Caitlin, I'm not saying that's the right choice for you. Maybe your path is different. That's just my reflection.

Margi Dehlin [01:39:32] I think this question is so heart wrenching because I think on a level, it really points to what it means to Be human, that we actually all walk with this every day. We all walk with a friend. Fragility of our own lives. Our mortalities are. And this is a reminder. And you've received actual information, I think that now brings you to this really, this feeling of a decided place where your life isn't what you envisioned that it would be. And I think that's a really, really. It's a tough thing and I really feel for it. I guess the only. I have just a couple things that come to my mind. The first thing is just the idea of maybe, maybe this journey begins now. Into yourself. Kind of like Amy was saying, where now you can give yourself just unabashed permission to really look at what you want your life to look like, what makes you happy. And here's what I'd say about that. It's. For me, the process is the end. So I don't love living for end results. I believe in the process actually being the important part. So if the process of giving, of getting a PhD sounds, you know, beautiful and something that would be enrich you and excite you and connect you to your own life, then I think that sounds beautiful. But that would be something that I would ask myself is just if I'm going to connect to my own process of myself and my life, would this enhance that? Would that, would this give to that or not give to that? Because we're all so different. And you know, I was even thinking with John and I, if you asked us like what really like the what a beautiful life would look like for us, we would have really different answers because John is very on the go, high energy, so extroverted, you know, very activist minded. And I'm like, oh, I'd love to read a book underneath the tree and really hear the birds and feel the wind. And that would be just the best today, you know, not that I don't have that sensibility of like clearly giving back and feeling for people's suffering, but I'm just saying how that's lived or what we need on a daily basis to feel a connection with ourselves and our own lives can look very different. And maybe this can be the. Not that you need permission, but this can give you an amped up version of, you know, you do whatever feels good to you and really make it yours.

John Dehlin [01:42:21] Caitlin's joined us live, by the way, and she says thank you. She also just wanted to clarify that she definitely thinks that you can do both family and med school. She's just concerned about med school being so time consuming. I Think that's realistic. If you have 10 years to go, that's a very different thing than if you have 30 in terms of the commitment of med school. I do like what you said, Amy, about if it's your bliss, if you would love going to med school, that's different than if you would hate it and find it grueling. That's one thing to consider. But, Caitlin, thanks for writing in your email and for joining us live. Tracy writes, I want to live my life the way my dog does. Head out, window, tail wagging. I like that.

Margi Dehlin [01:43:10] Dogs have a lot to teach us.

John Dehlin [01:43:12] We have a lot to learn from dogs. Okay, this may be a bit of a repeat, but Kate writes in how do We Deal with the. With the loss of the fact that I used to believe that we would be reunited, and now since leaving the church, I feel more scared and lost. So, Amy, why don't you go first on that one? What does someone do if they feel scared and lost?

Guest 3 [01:43:37] I think. I think that is a really real feeling for a lot of people that leave the church or leave Christianity or leave any sort of religion context. Right. Is that you then have to have everything back on the table to think about.

Emily Celis [01:43:53] What, what do I believe?

Guest 3 [01:43:54] What do I hope to believe? How do I reconstruct my worldview around the purpose of life and what the meaning maybe is after life? Or does it have an effect after life? But she feels more scared, right? That's what she says. And I would tell her, like I said in the last podcast, is that feelings aren't permanent. So you probably feel scared right now and just let yourself feel scared for a while. Like, what makes you scared? Like, unpack that. What do you feel like? Does it scare you to have it go to black? Does it scare you to, like, not have your soul exist anymore? Like, what specifically is scary to you? Right. And so that's why, like Emily said, sometimes coping with, you know, grief is good to go to a therapist, because it's that neutral space to say, I'm just gonna kind of dump everything out. And I always tell people that therapy is like, I'm gonna just help you get emotionally organized. That's kind of that process of saying, I feel scared, and I don't know why, but I want to unpack it. So I would just say, what was the. What was the writer's name?

Margi Dehlin [01:44:56] Kate.

John Dehlin [01:44:57] Kate.

Guest 3 [01:44:57] I would say Kate, like, unpack. You're scared. You know, kind of figure out what. What is that about? Where can you find hope again? What would make you feel hopeful? And then kind of referencing what we said earlier is that, like, you don't have to throw everything out. It might not look exactly in the Mormon framework, but there's probably certain things that really can connect to your soul about what might. What might work for you to feel about the afterlife, you know, so you don't need to be afraid of.

Guest [01:45:29] You're scared.

Guest 3 [01:45:30] Just own it. It's not going to be there forever. I think feelings evolve and things change. And as you. Sometimes I think early in the process of maybe, you know, kind of like transitioning out of the church or it's just. It's kind of scary and it's unstable ground and it feels. It feels really unsettling for a lot of people and just be patient with the process.

John Dehlin [01:45:55] So if you feel scared and lost. Feel scared and lost.

Guest 3 [01:45:59] Exactly. And that. And don't judge yourself for feeling scared and lost. You can feel it like, yep, you. You've gone from a very black and white worldview to like an unknown worldview. And that feels jarring, that feels scary, that feels unsettling, that feels uncertain. And that's okay.

Guest [01:46:20] Yeah.

Guest 3 [01:46:21] And it's not going to probably be that way forever. So be patient. Don't judge your process. Just live into it. So that's my.

John Dehlin [01:46:31] It's possible that by living into it, you don't experience it as long as you might by trying to avoid it. Emily?

Emily Celis [01:46:41] No, I just. I think that's so great, Amy. I think really just validating what your experience is, that this is completely normal. I think it's the beautiful thing about what John, what you and Margi do with Open Stories foundation and everyone else, that helps everyone. There is to be that space to connect to where there are people that are going through these same things. You're not alone. And that is something that really stood out, was salient for me as I went through my faith transition is because I did very much feel alone. This was before Facebook date myself, but it was before Facebook and it was before there was other people doing this. It was before anyone else that I had even known had done it. So the fact that you can reach out and connect. A lot of times we find ourselves wanting to withdraw, isolate, and just to remember that human connection can do a lot. And so to reach out and to make those connections with people that can start to create these other bridges into something that creates meaning for you. And it's that Phoenix rising from the ashes thing. I mean, you're in the middle of it. That's right. Horrible place to be. And Gosh, when Phoenix rises up. It's amazing.

John Dehlin [01:47:57] I love it. A couple more quick comments from our listeners. Stephanie writes, I think she's referring back to Caitlin. Unfortunately, going through med school and residency will take you away from family. As a young physician, I know it breaks families up. Many doctors wouldn't repeat the experience that they kill themselves almost daily. It's really tragic. So a vote from Stephanie, who's done med school, Caitlin, to be careful. You know, you can always be a nurse and maybe or a physician's assistant. I don't know if that's any better, but just brainstorming with you here, Caitlin, but thanks.

Emily Celis [01:48:35] I'm alive.

John Dehlin [01:48:36] Thanks to Stephanie for her feedback. Caitlin, feel free to contact Stephanie if you have any questions. Her. Her Facebook information is right there in the thread. Kimberly's asking if Margi is Buddhist now because Kimberly says you're. You're reciting many Buddhist mantras that sound familiar. Are you Buddhist, Margi? Kimberly wants to know.

Margi Dehlin [01:48:57] I like Buddhism. I embrace. I like the way it makes me think. I definitely love secular Buddhism. Some of the principles there, just because I find. Yeah, I definitely find them comforting. I don't know that I would identify myself as something like that, but I

John Dehlin [01:49:18] would say because it has religious connotations, maybe.

Emily Celis [01:49:21] Well.

John Dehlin [01:49:22] Or just because you're not big on identity label.

Margi Dehlin [01:49:24] Yeah, it's like the belief thing.

John Dehlin [01:49:26] Even Buddhism says to stay away from

Margi Dehlin [01:49:27] labels, but I like a lot about it.

John Dehlin [01:49:31] Shout out to Noel Rochetta, Secular Buddhism dot com. It's a fabulous podcast.

Margi Dehlin [01:49:37] We love it.

John Dehlin [01:49:37] As it relates to death. I think Buddhism has a great approach. The founding principle of Buddhism is life is suffering. And that may seem like a really sad, miserable premise for a philosophy, but the truth is there's a lot of healing and peace in starting with that expectation. Because instead of expecting that life is going to be always joyful, which inevitably leads to disappointment and what Buddhism would call suffering or attachment. Starting out with the expectation that life is going to be suffering not only leaves you pleasantly surprised when it's not suffering, but it also makes the suffering feel a bit less personal when it happens because you're expecting it and because you know it's universal and it happens to everyone. So thanks, Kimberly, for a reminder about Buddhism. Sophia writes, we are never promised another day. My brother died at 40 of a heart attack. And that's true. You know, in some ways, Caitlin's question applies to all of us because we think we may have 10 or 20 or 30 years, but we could all die tomorrow. We could all die tomorrow. So Sophia writes, I learned from this experience that living in the moment is so important. At the end of my life, whatever age I am, if I can look back and see that I live my life in a way that seems good to me, I'm okay. I'm not afraid to die. If there's an afterlife, great. If not, that's fine, too. And that's a really beautiful example of acceptance. And I think it's very consistent with Buddhism, which is just acceptance leads to a lot greater outcomes in terms of mental health than does resistance or attachment.

Emily Celis [01:51:24] Right.

Margi Dehlin [01:51:24] It reminds me of the scientist that you. I think you posted it to your Facebook where he was talking about not believing in an afterlife.

John Dehlin [01:51:32] And Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Margi Dehlin [01:51:33] Right. Do you remember the essence of that quote?

John Dehlin [01:51:35] No.

Margi Dehlin [01:51:35] About how well it gives power to his life now?

John Dehlin [01:51:40] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:51:41] Basically is that idea that not believing

John Dehlin [01:51:43] in afterlife, he lives brings more power to each day because it may be all you get. So use that, you know, acknowledgement that there may not be an afterlife as a force and as a power to make every day as meaningful as possible. Because we all think we'll live for 100 years, but as recent events remind us, you know, you could get a diagnosis in November and die in December.

Margi Dehlin [01:52:13] And, you know, our brains are such tricky things. I just find it so interesting how diluted I can be sometimes where we acclimate to our situation. So, for example, with my children and being a mom and raising children, I just never really thought it would ever end. Like, I think, you know, it does. But not until my first two actually left home was I like, oh, like. And now it makes me want to dig in really deep with my final two, you know, and because I get it. I get that it's finite and it informs the way now that I spend my time and what kind of attention I give when they're in the room with me. And the same is true with my dad's death, that there was something. We get that it's here, it's around us. But until it really affected me in a personal way, it just wasn't real to me. And now in the face of that, I look at my children and I think, that will be me at some point. That will be me and them. And so what that's informing now is I'm laying it all on the table. All the love, all the joy, all my attention. Because now I have experienced the fact that on some level it ends, you know, And I still feel like there's a gift or an opportunity in being able to See that from that scope. And that doesn't mean I don't have hope that, you know, things may be different in it as far as after we die, I just don't know. So I'll live what I know for sure.

Final Thoughts and Closing Reflections

John Dehlin [01:53:50] So we're kind of reaching the end of this, of this episode. Amy and then Emily, if you guys don't mind, would you mind sharing with us a final thought and information on how listeners can contact you if they want to procure your services?

Emily Celis [01:54:08] Sure, I'll go ahead. I just, I really appreciate being on here with you guys. I think these are, gosh, we put everything aside and this is what life is all about. I mean, kind of looking at, to me, I just find such great satisfaction out of looking at these, you know, the ultimate concerns of life. And I think that's one thing that has been such a big part of my journey personally going through my faith crisis is kind of coming to the other side of that, to where this, where I can say that, to where I can say this is a joyful, exciting, fun thing for me to be able to do, where I was filled with fear and darkness before, you know, a really difficult time. And so I am going to share with you guys. I actually didn't realize I had this with me, but it's a book that my husband made for me of my memory book of my mom. And I'm going to see if I can show you guys one of these quotes that is by Joseph Campbell.

Guest [01:54:58] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:54:59] Do you want me to read it?

Emily Celis [01:55:01] Yeah, if you can read it, that'd be great.

John Dehlin [01:55:03] You must give up the life you planned. I'm going to pause. Oh, when I talk, it goes away.

Emily Celis [01:55:10] Okay, sorry. I can read it. It says you must give up the life you planned in order to live the life that is waiting for you. Yeah, that just really. It's all this comes together and gosh, we could talk about it for days and days, but it all does come down to these simple things of living mindfully of what are we putting our attention on? How are we living with intention? What are we doing to fulfill all these things that we'd hoped for in the day to day moments rather than waiting for them to happen. And I just. It's something we all have to keep working for. It's not something I've arrived at. It's something that I keep working on and reminding myself to keep working on. And so that's kind of what I wanted to say in closing and just thanks again for. Let me come and chat with you. Guys, for a little bit. It was so great meeting you too, Amy. And if anyone wants to get in touch with me, you can get in touch with me through my Facebook page or you can find me@the OpenDoorCenter.org so thanks so much, you guys.

John Dehlin [01:56:12] Thanks, Emily.

Margi Dehlin [01:56:14] We sure appreciate it.

Emily Celis [01:56:16] Amy.

Guest 3 [01:56:17] Yeah, I just love. I loved these conversations because, I mean, I just think it really is something that affects everyone, is this idea of grief and death and life and relationships and how we have significance to the people that we've loved and honor them and changes in life in the unexpected ways. And so I just. It's. It definitely grief pushes you to different places in your life than you expected. And I think that. I think kind of like themes of what we've talked about is like saying being comfortable with the unknown, being okay with the ambiguity, being okay with your process, being okay with other people's grief process, not judging people, recognizing feelings and communicating those, being empathetic towards people. I think all of those things, like, push us to be the best versions of ourselves. And I think grief, like I said, is the master teacher. You just learn so much from it. And so what a treat to be able to kind of talk about this with everybody. I've loved. I've, like, you know, gotten Terri since the two weeks ago when we've done it. I've thought multiple times about our conversation, and so hopefully it's touched and been edifying for people that have, like, been listening out there in the world, you know, and just. I've really appreciated it. So thank you for that. You can just find me@amy heffernan.com a

John Dehlin [01:57:42] I m e E H E F F E R N A N Yep.

Guest 3 [01:57:45] My last name sounds like a sneeze, you know?

John Dehlin [01:57:51] All right, thanks, Amy.

Emily Celis [01:57:52] Thank you.

Margi Dehlin [01:57:53] I sure appreciate you.

John Dehlin [01:57:55] Anything you want to add?

Margi Dehlin [01:57:56] I don't know. I kind of think I've been feeling pretty okay. How about you?

John Dehlin [01:58:02] Well, you were fabulous, babe.

Margi Dehlin [01:58:05] Everyone was fabulous.

John Dehlin [01:58:06] All right, well, thanks for joining us, sweetie. It's always good to have you.

Emily Celis [01:58:11] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:58:11] Thanks to everyone.

John Dehlin [01:58:12] Hey, a listener asked if. If it offends you when I call you sweetie. So do you want to go on the record?

Margi Dehlin [01:58:19] I love it when you call me sweetie. We are completely corny like that, where I'm like, I call them sugar, sham, and honey. Like, yeah, we do that. So.

John Dehlin [01:58:30] So don't worry. Don't worry, listeners. She likes it, but I'm a little

Margi Dehlin [01:58:33] less comfortable on air, so I don't do it as much on air.

John Dehlin [01:58:39] We want to thank Amy Grubbs, who's the Director of Operations for the osf. She keeps the OSF alive along with our board of directors and donors. If you love these episodes, if you find value in them, please do donate. 10 or $20 a month can really keep this alive versus not. We're really grateful for Shandy Hill. Shandy has been a wonderful support in making these episodes possible, organizing things, tracking comments, putting together the show notes both before and after. Shandi, we couldn't do it without you as well. So we want to. And most. And last but not least, we just want to thank all of our listeners who provide both online comments and questions, but also those who email their comments and questions in. Please keep those coming. You can send them to mormonstoriesmail.com mormontransitionsmail.com wherever you're comfortable. We will use those. If you have ideas for future topics, if you have ideas for future guests, if you have questions, please share them and we'll make them happen. So that wraps up another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. We love you guys. We're grateful. Thanks again, Amy and Emily and Margi. Yes, thank you guys and please join us again soon, everybody.

Margi Dehlin [02:00:00] Thanks everyone. Take care.

John Dehlin [02:00:07] Thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org music for this episode was provided by the Lower Lights. When with the wounded heart, anger or

Emily Celis [02:00:37] mouth,

John Dehlin [02:00:41] I draw myself apart, searching my soul.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.