grief touches us at some point in our life tonight we will not only talk about grief and loss but we also be talking about recovery and i hope we have three very special women with us tonight who are willing to share their experiences with us if i can be honest i think what you guys are doing is incredibly brave and your willingness to be vulnerable i experience can be very instructive so thank you so much for being here and let me introduce you to these three wonderful women immediately to my left is anne marie mahoney she is a resident of belmont here and she holds a master's degree in pastoral ministry and a postmaster certificate in spiritual formation from boston college she has studied death grief and trauma through the school of theology and ministry their past in college a one of the really great things she does now is a creative group bereavement program that utilizes the healing powers of both scripture our music literature film and writing in addressing people and in their grief and l apologize for that and she is the founder of hopeful connections which is a nonprofit that helps connect families with the resources available that are in massachusetts to support them around pregnancy loss and early infant death thank you so much for being here on review tonight's us gosh and as i said will focus around both the experience of loss and grief and what you found that was helpful in that experience what led to healing what led to recovery and why don't you again sure thank you very much my story begins in march of two thousand and nine with the death of my mother and she died just a few weeks after two of my children who are army officers had returned from a fifteen month deployment in mosul my son just becoming engaged my mother had been ill and she passed away the very beginning of march a month later to the day my husband was diagnosed with alzheimer's disease he passed away in november of two thousand and ten and from there we just kept going with death my husband's brother and his wife both passed away rather suddenly i lost a very dear friend and i lost the husbands of three good friends of mine so in the out and then finally story doesn't end but it it comes to at least a little bit of a halt  in december of two thousand and twelve with the death of my dad so in the space of less than four years i lost really most of the significant members of my family which is very traumatic and it it got to be you know how do i get out of bed every morning on the lighter side of the family joke after a while was don't send the black suit to the cleaners because you're going to need it the hardest loss to deal with was my husband's because that's your whole world and he died young he died in a way that you know no one should at that age and all of a sudden there i was in my late fifty's a widow yes my children were grown up so i wasn't worried about small children but still it radically changes your life i was working as director of religious education in catholic parish i am a pastoral sosia with the archdiocese of boston and i enjoyed that work but what i found was that after all of this loss i just didn't have the energy to continue to do that and so i as as reverends our own indicated have a master's degree in pastoral ministry i went back to boston very slowly you know i did some courses and made some contacts and i started putting together what i call a creative bereavement program this program is not for people with immediate loss but it's for people who might be a year or two past the loss of the death of a loved one the desk the dust has settled a little bit and they have the opportunity to sit back and say ok now what and i'm hoping through my program that people will have the tools to say now what what comes next eventually i left working full time in parishes i do some freelance work now i continue to do secular programs in parishes but i really i'm putting a lot of my energy into this creative bereavement if you asked me you know what supported me through that particularly through those four years i mean because there was just a whole swaths of time that i don't remember anything you know i'm lucky i got to work i got to work dressed reasonably well i ate sort of and i remembered to feed the cat i think the what kept me going was my friends have written here in my notes you know what helped friends friends friends i just have amazing group of friends in so many different venues and they were just very very supportive of me and then as the husbands of some of those friends also passed away also relatively young  five of us formed a widows group and that was enormously supportive as well because it was people that you felt safe with and people that you could talk about buying a headstone or dealing with a life insurance or should i sell my house or what about the family business so that was enormously supportive as well i think that what i learned in the experience is balance that one has to have the balance between quiet grieving and your own personal time and personal space but in addition to that the very hard work of getting out there and forming a new life of writing a new story for your own personal life story which is radically changed by the deaths of these people i learned in my classes that people fall into two different categories when it comes to grief and loss intuitive grievers and instrumental grievers i'm a little bit of both  and so because i like to get out there and do something that's what led me to do this creative bereavement program and just doing that helped a lot forming this little widow's group helped a lot and then making the effort to get out there and stay connected with friends and stay you know into some activities and whatnot and then of course my family have four children now i have a grandchild which is very exciting and that keeps you going to and that you know they're wonderful but to also be aware that they're grieving as well and that they have experienced all of these losses as well with that i'll stop there and she will come back some of the stuff like thank you helen you be willing to share some years ago my father when i was fifteen my mother about twenty years ago at this point so the the three daughters together and of the three of us i used to say i have one sister that was always happy one sister that was always depressed and i was the one in the middle and my sister who was depressed was what basically had in the end heritage some of the mental illness that runs in my family i lucked out she did not and so essentially for the last forty years i've been talking to her on a weekly basis basically trying to talk her out of suicide and two thousand and thirteen the summer of two thousand and thirteen actually and july second i got a phone call from florida my sister lives in point i we were having my husband i had someone over for dinner i excused myself from the table and got a plane ticket and went down and was there in the house the day after my sister being mentally ill and is it a slightly different subject but she should not have been able to get a gun but she did and she put that gun in her mouth and herself and so i went into the house and basically had to sort of help with her getting everything together and you know it was me and her ex husband who basically had to sort of gather her things and and and take care of it all and it was my husband and my son who really wanted to come down and i said no please don't  talk about wanting to have a little bit of alone time i was the one that cleaned up after the gunshot and and i have to say that that it was probably a very good and healing experience for me in an odd way because i didn't get to see her i didn't get to say goodbye but i got to be with her what was left of her and i know that sounds odd and maybe a little crazy i'm an artist so you know we can talk it up to that to i don't know but it was devastating and and  in any case when i got to the house it was it was it was really a shock and and  she had the foil on the windows and and someone had come and left the house because she was afraid she'd been haunted and i mean it was really kind of like a of a scene out of the movie and so i went home it's a couple of years now and being an artist i've been an artist for forty years and never going anywhere without my camera i took photographs when i walked into that house i wanted to preserve what was left of her and so i did and i have a project that i'm i'm calling aftermath actually someone used that word when when the program started but and i guess for me it was it's it's trying to make something out of what was to me a terrible loss of number one but also just the sense of of her lost life and what what torture she went through all those years and what was it for and so to me doing this project is a way of making sense of it for me and making a record of it because she's gone and in a in a funny way it is it it's a way of keeping her with me and me and making her part of something larger than just herself if that makes any sense and also for other people to understand and to see what i saw and to feel what i felt as a way of maybe being helpful to someone else it certainly has cathartic for me and i'm so you know i could have joined a group on's on suicide i could have done you know some other things that i have the training that you have i don't  have that kind of background so i'm doing what i can do i'm also after her death i started a blog i have a web site helen morrison come and i started a blog in which i'm telling the entire family story our childhood it's not centered on my sister debbie but it's about how this all came to be and and it's it's also a way of  and again then thank you both for your willingness to be open and vulnerable before difficult topics and so some are why don't you tell us a bit about your experience a little bit different than the to him before me i didn't have much loss in my life i'm very fortunate to have you know my parents are alive my i've lost grandparents one hundred  eleven my husband and i lost our son and i was in my second trimester of a pregnancy and so it was a little bit complicated because it was one of those moments where you  when reaching out and how you're going to handle pregnancy loss or loss of a baby that nobody knows about is very complicated so my husband and i had to when we lost our son jude we did choose to name him which is something that many parents around miscarriage or pregnancy loss don't even know the sex of their child so we were fortunate and knowing that he was a boy and that we decided to name him and we had to make decisions as a family my husband and i had a three year old son at the time who knew we were pregnant so it was important for us to make a decision on how we were going to handle a pregnancy loss in our life when no one really knew we were really pregnant we were very secretive about our pregnancy it was like a family affair you know so when we lost jude we decided it was the first time as a married couple that we had to make a decision about how we're both going to handle this and how we both grieve and what is going to be appropriate for both of us so we actually were in  on the same page with wanting to honor our son and to name him and to tell our son jack about jude and that he was part of our family and and we need shows to that and tell people that we were pregnant and it's kind of an awkward conversation with people i'm pregnant and i lost a baby is a not an easy thing to open up about with other families and people in general i think losing children it's so taboo to talk about grief and loss in general and then when it's a child i find that people are even more uncomfortable with the conversation so we we did make that decision and i think what was hardest about my husband i were on the same page about how we're going to handle this life and but not all the supports in our in our extended life were including when we had asked certain doctors or you know hospitals for how they didn't have resources at hand for us so that was very complicated and and many people in there you know when we lost the baby a lot of what we heard as we you know walked out of the house floor through you know nurses nursing staff and who were all wonderful to us but they were very everyone wants to move you along so it's very much like ok you're going to have another baby someday and you can have a nother pregnancy and you can you know you have an angel now and all those words which are meant to be comforting but at the time i wanted to grieve the loss of my son and that was very important to me so it was i knew all those things but i wanted them to honor the life that i did i did have  and and so that's i think when i realize that society doesn't do that it's not you know it's very and even i was a couple that first are people that i think i'm weird that i talk about my son who they've never met you know and  was that was a real challenge for us and but we both agreed that that was something we were going to do and so right away after our lost my husband i am a counselor by nature and educator  by vocation and so i said you know i'm going to need some help through this and he recognized that i had been you know we're both changed and so if i don't speak about this with people in our family and our friends and i'm different now so they need to understand that i'm different and if they net or knew that we were pregnant and they never knew we lost this they wonder why more is different so so i felt like it was important for them to understand us and what we're going through and to share our experience and and once we started doing that  once i started sharing with people what had happened and i went to work and i you know would tell a friend at work what happened or a colleague and most of the women i work with mostly women and so they would immediately start crying and  many of them and i realized it wasn't for sympathy but it was embassy and it was not about my loss and it was about theirs and then they would open up and tell me their story about how they miscarried or they had a set of twins thirty years ago that they still think about or they had recently had a loss and didn't know that they you know never told anybody and so that's when it really became clear to me as to why this happened  and that my husband and i then decided i remember distinctly going home two weeks after this loss and saying i need to do something to help other people through this this is not no woman should feel as alone as i felt no family no father no child should feel that they can speak about this so my husband i found a support group for me so i went because when your husband tells you to go to a support group you go so he found he had to search through support networks and you had to actually go into a hospital website and really kind of search for the support groups and so you know when you  pregnancy loss in massachusetts nothing really was coming up you know with a listing and what we found was that there were a lot of resources out there there are you know there are hospitals that are doing really wonderful things that are nonprofits that are running really great bereavement groups and but however they're hard to find last you work with somebody who's actually giving you those resources right there so what we found was that they were all separated and we decided that we were going to collate all the information and mainstream it for massachusetts so we started hopeful connections so our last was in december and our web site went live in february and my husband is like i will build the website if you find the information and so i connected with some really amazing grief counselors and genetic counselors an o b g y n that would help me and social workers and all these different hospitals that i called were fabulous and so they were willing to share all their information with me and then we created the website helpful connections dot com so now when you google pregnancy loss in massachusetts connections web page pops up it's one of the first web pages that pops up now and it lists all of the support groups that are in massachusetts and anybody who has a specializes in counseling families around pregnancy loss and grief counseling because it's very different than just generic counseling and so i feel like the grief there is no end so learning how to weave it into your life is really important and and helping so i find that when i when you when there are specific cancers that have the background in grief and loss it's definitely more helpful than just going to somebody on your insurance and really finding that is is hard especially around pregnancy loss and early infant death so now we have it all and so we're proud of that and so now we've overage really our mission was that if we can help one family then it's enough so like the story of the starfish you know the you know a little boy's on the beach and he's picking up a starfish and throwing them into the sea and someone says there are thousands of starfish on this beach and how can you make a difference and he throws the starfish into the ocean and says it made a difference to that one and so our symbol is the star and and so that's in honor of our son jude and he inspired it all i feel like this little boy who you know has made more of an impact on the world that i think i have so you know just by his brief life and so  that's really how we initially started to to make a meaning out of this loss and to find hope and so you know it's not ironic it's called hopeful connections and i found that when i connected with other women with other families who had experienced this and sharing those stories was really helpful for me so that i could start healing and it's nice to hear from somebody else that just getting up and going to work is just enough and i found friends and and family members who are really i find it so important that you know they understand that even though it's been two or three years we just had our three year anniversary that it's still  it's different but it's still important and it's still there and you know i think about my son every day and i think our mission now is to sort of educate more society people who work with  families around loss through hospitals and training that it is so important to validate that grief not to say it's ok and you know i all i wanted was someone to say it's ok to be sad and i was fortunate i had a maternal fetal medicine specialist who said to me you need to grieve you need to cry and i was like thank you so because everyone else was telling me to move along you know move past it and just go and and i was like but i'm pained so and so that's how that's my story yet i find often people wanting to move you along so to speak comes from a place of their own discomfort with their grief and wanting to get out of that space sooner and size airlie their advice to you so much as it is their their own felt need to be out of this uncomfortable situation that which actually brings me to i noticed a thread in each of your stories which is of course about the support networks you know and you know i how i'm thinking of your your husband and your and your son yes that wanted to come down yeah and so somebody here  had a lot i do as a minister a lot is to be with people and their grief and but how can we be good as a support network to other people or coping with grief like maybe an experience you had someone who did something right and then what were the things that just weren't helpful you know i try to avoid the platitudes especially as a pastor you want to be careful about saying things like you know god needed another angel you want  honor people's grief and loss one of the things that that happened to me was because my sister was so ill one of the things that she did in her in her illness was to sort of keep everyone very separate so i never met her friends her friends never met me she really had a need to sort of keep everyone separate and when she passed away i had a service for her we were not a religious family but we had we had a service we really needed to get together and i met all of these people who loved her and knew her and understood how sick she was  and grieve for her like i did and one of the wonderful things that has come of it is that they've stayed in touch and a number of them wrote me the anniversary of of my sister's death to say i'm thinking of you and and to sort of recognize that that would be a hard day for me and and and and they've called and sort of checked in and said how are you doing and that's been so wonderful that's meant so much to me so that's one thing that people can do i think it's very difficult to address someone's loss in terms of you know i know how you feel well probably you do maybe you'd maybe you do maybe you don't but but to say i know that this is hard and i recognize that that's such a lovely thing it just that was very positive for me i agree and i think one of the themes of the that is running through here as you mentioned is this idea that other people need you to move on i hate that term move on i've found that the people who kept you know always you have to move on you know  people would ask me well are you going to sell the house or are you going to do this you're going to do that you know and i just want to scream like i can barely get up in the morning i can't think of how all of that stuff but the idea that there is no end to the grief that it's always there it just changes in that you learn how to deal with it better i think that losing my train of thought here is what happens and you  the idea that rather than forcing people to work on allow them at their own pace to let go and when i i do bereavement i compare those two concepts it's not about moving on it's about letting go what are you willing to let go of and on what timetable and right you know the idea is that there there is no prescribed timetable you know six months a year two years ok it's over we're moving on you know no there are the triggers there are all of the things that do you remember i too found that friends who would call me on the anniversary i had the wife of a college classmate of my husband's that i had met maybe twice at reunions she called me every couple of weeks the whole sourced year after he died she was just wonderful she would just call and talk how's it going with the kids you know what are you doing this week she was great and this was someone i barely knew and yet i got so that i waited for her to call because she became a safe person i could talk to who wasn't in my immediate circle you know who was just going to be a good listener for me and i think that's and wasn't expecting you to move on no yeah it wasn't at all you know now i think it's impossible to move on i think that eventually things change things improve but i don't know whether moving on is is the term that you really need to use or that it's useful because you don't want to do away think of him every day i don't my sister every day i'm sure you think of your husband every day this never never goes away it's how you how you live your life with that and and like you said you're a different person now it does change you it does change  you a couple things that really helped me was and i think i learned you know i learned all the mistakes i made price understanding grief is is the people that really companion me through my grief and there's like you know they allowed me to talk about him any time i wanted to and then they would ask about jude and they would speak of him a name  think a lot of people feel like if i bring it up i'm going to make you sad while i'm already thinking about it so i think that was the best advice somebody had given me when you know a friend of my lost a child it was and it's like she's already you can't make me sad you know you're not going to make things worse it's only in fact if i cry when you say his name it's probably because i'm just so happy that somebody is thinking about him and honoring him and want to talk to me about him and so you know i don't think i've ever been sad when someone's mentioned him and i think people tend to want to say something but think it's going to set me off and and that's just not true you know you're already set off so you know those people that are willing to sort of be a companion through my ups and downs  were where the ones that i really am so grateful for and who are willing to you know for pregnancy loss especially in that first year so many people always ask me what should i do my friend just lost a baby and i said remember the due date and send a card on due date because we actually i actually had a prayer service for jude in june when he was supposed to be born if you had gone full term it would have been june and that's what i needed at that time like in december i wasn't ready and in june i needed you know the women in my life to sit with me and to have a prayer service for him and so that's what we chose to do and to find ways my husband wanted to have a mass said for him and that's what we did for my husband you know so it was how you know i think that's the other thing  grief is that you have to you have if you're married in terms of my my experience it was because we had lost a baby together and my grief and his grief are very different and men are totally lost in pregnancy loss there's nobody is helping them and everyone's calling my husband to see how i'm doing and no one's really calling and seeing how he's doing so i think that's a whole other issue of among screamers i think that men are supposed to you know just get the shaft a little bit in terms of the support but those people that did ask him he remembers and those people who remember they do date and remember the day that he was born which we call his angel day you know that was you know his those are the people that those that's my was my advice to people is you know find that out and send a card it's not going to make them sad they're remembering you know and it can be at any moment it doesn't have to be on it even on an anniversary but just that i'm thinking about you and your husband are thinking about you and your son or so and those are things i think i was afraid to do before i really experience last year i was always afraid of those things too i'm going to play the english student for a moment ok that's excellent people who do them make such huge difference and so that that that considerate and present you know and not necessarily trying to make you feel better so much as be along and in the story and when i start i mentioned how a lot of people want you to move on for their own comfort and the people it's the people who are able to stay in that space with you and be uncomfortable with you  tend to be the companions we are heading into christmas and i know that some of my colleagues hold like blue  they have like a service that's because the christmas services are always so joyous the kids dress up in costumes and using the carols and there's really not a place in the that's really appropriate you know it sometimes there's pastoral prayers but people feel hadn't heard it named that way until this year and a bunch of my colleagues around the country are doing it and that's a very tough time and i meant for pay that i had to for the next season was i heard about it too late to do one this season but  when it's specifically talk about the holidays i think the problem is the memories you know you have so many memories with that loved one of whatever you and your family did and i think particularly the first year it's just get through it without being the downer so i think it's incumbent sometimes on the person who's had the loss to to make that extra effort i'm not saying it's going to be successful and i'm not saying that you're singing joyfully you know at the christmas church service but to be aware that this is a joyous time and to try to take strength and comfort from that then as as the years go by i think what i've learned is that whatever rituals or activities you did with the loved ones you whatever it is your parents your husband your child your sister that's over and so now you have an opportunity to make new memories and to do maybe new rituals or new traditions or whatever and while that's a very difficult transition what i found particularly with my own children is it's a welcome transition they're looking to me for the khloe that it's ok to do something different we're not going to cook this anymore this is what dad liked nobody else here like this we're not going to cook is that ok you know those kinds of things and so and it but it takes a while it's not something you're go do right off the bat but to create new memories a new traditions a new rituals is a hopeful you've used the word hope many times is a hopeful positive thing to do but it's not easy yeah i know my mother she calls the saturday after christmas festival this because she studies a point we can all be in her house on christmas morning opening you know we're all adults now we have our own families i she lives in california in los angeles and i'm a pastor so obviously i'm doing  christmas service and but i feel i fly home as soon as i can and usually that saturday afterwards all the kids spend the night and while it wasn't a definite it was kind of the this last of a ritual right  think although death is the common theme across here and it sent tends to be the most powerful there's other divorce right there there's a there's other powerful times you know if when you're experiencing recent grief and loss it's not  the physical death and the physical absence of somebody i also feel that it's are very important for me now to i don't know how to express this but to live the life that she didn't live and to enjoy the things that she doesn't get to enjoy now and to be the person that that can sort of bring that that happiness to other  people and i think that that's really helpful on the holidays to sort of use that as a as a way of because i think it's difficult sometimes to be mindful that other people are happy and so you you owe them to to be to to allow them that happiness that perhaps it's also a way of coping with it just just to sort of do things in their  honor and also just you know the organisation that you started in that and the one that and that you the ones that you are involved in that's all a very very healing things to do is to give something back i mean i do it my way which is different wonderful but it's you know and i think that all of us when when when and when things are really hard it's it's a really healing thing to find something to give somewhere else and if you can connect that with your loved one or your your situation that's a great thing one of the things that so my losses  so you know it was december eighth which i also firmly believe was a for a reason if you're catholic you know it's a holy day so for for us and that was always like this you know the first year was the hardest you know and then christmas  being you know a hard time for us and it you know everything is centered around a baby born so that was difficult that first year but evans also about waiting and hope and so what it's actually a really beautiful time to sort of reflect on loss and what you know where you are in life you know so and what you're hoping for and waiting for you know to bring to you so we actually decided hopeful connections started a candle project and you know love this because my work at a school in my art students they hand paint votive candles for families who have had lost so a family can request or somebody very close for a family  receive a candle to be the light during the holiday season to remember that loss or that person in some you know positive way and we've sent them you know some people requests of them for people that aren't devious you know and i knew that and ready to send them and  i always mail them around it jude's birthdays so it's his gift you know that was like that's the way we honor that but it's also been pretty amazing to be able to you know be able to give somebody else a routine or ritual during this time so that they can like that candle and remember that person and maybe bags bringing them some sort of comfort or something to do were during that time to kind of place that energy and that and that hope so so that's something that use them to really share and understand that grief is part of life and that they are going to share that in their they're going to a lot of the mother as well right now it's back to us and saying what it meant to them bob but i always find that like finding something in the something like i'm this is what we're doing for jude my son actually asked me one year why don't we have a stocking for him mom and i was like you're absolutely right you're for years old and you're smarter than i am because i didn't want him to be sad and he was like my mom he's part of our family and i was like right and i shouldn't be embarrassed if people walk into my house and wonder why that's there because then they'll be ok talking about it and i've had to learn that but so i find it helpful as long as i'm comfortable it's something that everybody else around me th here in the studio i want to make sure if there's any questions that those get addressed and if not i've got one more and  is maybe an odd question but you know there's some obvious things that are unhelpful when you're dealing with grief you know alcohol you know drugs self destructive behaviors you know there's some the some of those traps i think because you hear that you know the idea of you have a drink you know where i have to say i'm sort of a night person and so without somebody else they're saying you know it's really time to come to bed i would stay up half the night part of it was being alone all of a son for the first time in the house it was a huge transition for me and then it was just you know i don't feel like going to bed and so i watch a lot of very weird television and i don't know if that self destructive or not a reruns of law and order i mean yeah other than that i don't know i mean i think you know i started to find comfort in things you know i said the music was important to me one of my daughter's well that the kids the the night that he died sat down and they compiled a list of music and they quickly one or two of them put together c d s and that music was played throughout my husband's wake and it was all songs and stuff that meant something to him or that meant something to  or you know were reflective of him or whatever and then because he died on november first that christmas one of the daughters took all of that music added some more stuff to it and made three c d s element for each member of the family each of the siblings and for me and a little votive candle and so i would play those over i mean i just would play them over and over again but it gave me so much comfort that it reminded me of so many little pieces of our lives together and it was important to me that the kids had chosen some of them because clearly those songs were important to them about their father so you know i tried to take comfort in the little things i would say though in terms of bad behavior  bad eating really bad eating when i came home from really horrible eating and i got over that but and stay on that thing you know your feelings that i did i did it was awful  and yeah yeah one of the things that i think i learned the expression be gentle with yourself i never really understood that and till i wasn't gentle with myself when i would judge my own grieving so i would be like mad at myself for still being sad or mad at myself for still crying or hiding that and hiding that you know and i would hide in the bathroom and i would cry in the bathroom or you know i'm in the shower and not actually and being mad like just not allowing myself now i understand what it means to be gentle with yourself and to not judge your feelings then just let yourself feel and let yourself whatever you need is what you need and and i kind of felt like i should be there this nobody wants to hear me anymore so i'm just go like being by myself and that was really not to not healthy for me because i'm not an introvert that's not where i get my i get my energy from people all so i needed to start and i'm not really good at asking for help because i'm a helper you know i'm a counselor by nature so i just was like you know i had to start to recognize that i needed to ask people in my life to be there for me which was a really hard thing for me to do and so that was not healthy so i had to really reach out and and even for my husband you know there are statistics out there when you lose a child with marriage and you know it was really a mother and for us to communicate and we didn't there was a couple months there where it was not we weren't communicating as well as we could have been it reached a head and then we really are not communicating we have to you know and and he's an introvert by nature and i'm an extrovert and is there so it was a hard i had to recognize his grief make these mistakes and it's ok to have made these mistakes they're not you're not there's no such thing as good perfectly and and we all succumb to some self destructive behaviors especially in a difficult time and i find so often it's the soft criticism of putting yourself on a timeline or feeling like you need to be stronger than this or you need to be better than this that can be the most destructive i learned very early in the ministry while yes there are lots of people who do need to learn compassion and empathy and gaining those skills towards others there are also a lot of people that if they were half as compassionate to themselves as they were to other people would be much much happier that the piece that they never learned was how to be compassionate to themselves and so i often try to take that that piece when jesus is asked what's the most important thing is as well to love god to love your neighbor as yourself as yourself pieces and make any sense if you don't love yourself there's a joke that a sadist is a masochist who follows the golden rule that you have to love yourself  and then we often are so uncomfortable talking about taking care of ourselves and that tends to be kind of a third rail and our in our culture that when you know it's almost a badge of honor to be busy or stressed out or and to take care of yourself and show compassion and yourself there is another piece and i see when we were talking earlier outside before we started that nobody talks about and that you don't know about into your in the middle of it and that's bureaucracies and that's the paperwork around whatever your loss has been whether it's medical bills or life insurance policies or pensions or banks  worst where everybody else is regulations and rules starts to dictate your life and in many ways just so exacerbate the grieving you know i found it stunning that when you called a life insurance company by definition they're dealing with death every day that's their business and they were surprised that someone had died and just were sold on able to be sympathetic you know with that death they were those kinds of things i think really in the first full year drove me out of my mind yeah yeah i'm recalling some very very vividly having some recollection of sister killed herself i had no idea that when i i had to go to the police department to collect her things that were with her when she died and they arrived to me in an evidence bag and with a yellow tape across it and  i had to go to homicide for it and it's not something you're prepared for i mean who who who can prepare for that and it is it's a they they should they should transfer those things would do a bag that doesn't have that on their i mean it's just shocking it's really shocking and it's not that they you know and anywhere along the way they mean you will that this is what they do every day right and they're not looking at it that way at all it's just part of their regulated rules and regulations and what it can be very very disturbing and very very you know i find compassion for yourself compassion for those who may not be able to be present and you need and diggs giving for those who are at your very helpful tools when you when you're coping with loss we're at the end of our time so i just want to thank all three of you for the wonderful candid conversation your willingness to open up there can be touched like a stigma around things related to death and loss and to be able to come and talk