Ep. 241 - Shelby Forsythia "Grief, Healing, and the Stories We Carry" (Part 1)

[00:00:00] Teach what I refer to as a lifelong griever model, which is once you see grief, once you experience grief, you cannot unsee it. You cannot unknow it. In my online course, Life After Loss Academy, we literally call it wearing grief glasses, where there's like glasses super glued to your face for the rest of your life because now you have this knowing that anything can happen to anyone at any time for any reason. And you see not just the grief in your personal connections and in your own life, but you see the grief in the larger world.

[00:00:30] You see the grief of war. You see the grief of politics. You see the grief of social housing. You see the grief of food insecurity. You see the large griefs and the small griefs like you just can't unsee or unknow the reality of grief in your life.

[00:00:44] John Williamson Welcome back to The Deconstructionist Podcast. It's a place where we explore faith, doubt, theology, culture, history, and all the complicated human stuff in between. I'm your host, John Williamson.

[00:01:00] John Williamson Today we're joined by author, grief guide, and speaker Shelby Forsythia to talk about her brand new book and the ways grief has a way of reshaping not just our lives, but our identities, our relationships, and sometimes even the stories we tell ourselves about God, meaning, and healing. John Williamson One of the things I appreciated about Shelby's work is that she approaches grief honestly, not with cliches, not with easy answers, but with the understanding that loss changes us.

[00:01:29] And pretending otherwise usually just makes people feel more isolated. And honestly, if you've been around this podcast long enough, you know that's kind of our thing too. John Williamson So in part one of this conversation we talk about the heart behind the new book, the myths we inherit about grief and recovery, why people often feel pressure to move on before they're ready, and how grief can sometimes become a doorway into deeper self-understanding and compassion.

[00:01:58] John Williamson Also, quick reminder before we jump in, we recently relaunched our Patreon. And honestly, we're really excited about what it's becoming, along with old favorites like full ad-free episodes and bonus content. We're now adding new incentives, exclusive educational content and video versions of interviews, because apparently for whatever reason, even when guests and I aren't in the same room, people still enjoy watching two humans stare into webcams and talk about existential crisis for half an hour. Or an hour and a half, whatever it is.

[00:02:29] So if you'd like to support the show, help us continue creating independent content and get access to all that extra material, you can check it out over on our Patreon. And the link is in the show notes. Your support genuinely helps keep things going. So really appreciate it. And at the very least, if you can't do that or if it's not of interest, that's fine. If you can leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, that just helps us get out there. So appreciate that.

[00:02:59] And now, without further ado, here is part one of my conversation with Shelby Freakin Forsythia. Shelby Forsythia All right. Welcome to the The Deconstructionists. I have with me today, my guest is Shelby Forsythia. And you have a new book out called, Of Course I'm Here Right Now, Three Actual Helpful Things to Say to Someone Grieving.

[00:03:28] Thank you so much for coming on today. Shelby Forsythia I am so grateful to be here. Thank you. Absolutely. And grief is something that we've covered before that I'm a huge proponent of covering because, you know, as we'll talk about throughout the interview, specifically as a Christian community, which obviously both of us come from that background, we do a pretty terrible job at supporting others in their grief.

[00:03:52] So before we dive into that, though, tell folks a little bit about your background and then we'll get into, you know, ultimately what inspired you to write this book. Yes, absolutely. The short story all happened when I experienced what I refer to jokingly as the four years of hell, which was basically four years of back-to-back losses. These happened when I was in college. It had nothing to do with college, but I happened to be in college the time when this was happening.

[00:04:17] And I didn't necessarily, I think as a lot of grieving people do, put the pieces together that these were all loss events until I looked back at them later. But now that I do, older, hindsight's 20-20, I noticed, wow, I lost a whole lot of a lot just within a four-year time span. It kicked off with my dad losing his job in our family, which kind of put us in financial instability for the first time. A non-death loss, but a loss all the same. Then I came out of the closet as a queer person in the South.

[00:04:45] I grew up in North Carolina, so that was like kind of accepted, but really kind of not, especially through the lens of growing up in a church-going family that did not believe that queer people could get into heaven. And so that was the source of a lot of grief and arguments in my family. And then my dad got diagnosed with two brain aneurysms, one on either side of his head, that were threatening to burst.

[00:05:06] And it was the first time, I was 19 years old when that happened, and it was the first time I remember sitting with my dad on the couch, watching him reckon with whether or not he was actually going to go through with surgery. He was understandably terrified that like, surgeons are going to go in and cut open your skull and dig around in your brain. And you may or may not be yourself on the other side of that. And he's like, I don't know if I'm going to have this. And as a daughter, I was watching him in real time decide whether to live or die.

[00:05:34] Basically, he ended up going through with it to enormous brain surgeries and recoveries that involved meal trains and carpools to Duke University Hospital and people checking in on us all the time. We get out of the weeds of that. He goes into recovery. And just a few months later, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. And so our whole entire family, my mom, my dad, my sister and I were flung into the meal trains and the medical updates and the surgeries and the chemo and radiation, the story of that, the existence of that all over again.

[00:06:03] And my mom's cancer went into remission in January 20. Around the end of that year, her cancer came back. And doctors told us December 19, 2023. They're like, we have done so many surgeries. We've done everything we can do. We can buy you time, but we can no longer buy you a cure. This is what you will die from, basically. And so my family called in hospice and hospice said, you have about six weeks to six months to say your goodbyes, to wrap up your life based on what we've seen before, basically.

[00:06:33] And she died in seven days on the day after Christmas, which was her favorite holiday. And I was 21 at the time. And the visual I use often is that the floor fell out from under me. But then the rug and then the foundation of the house and then the ground and then the center of the earth and then everything that held the earth into place. And so it was like everything that foundationally held my life to be true, to be real, to be what I knew it to be, ceased to exist the moment she died.

[00:07:01] And I speak so differently about this now than I did when it first happened. Like I've lived through this for almost 13 years now and I'm able to wrap so much language around it. But at the time, it was truly the most devastating thing that had ever happened to me. And it really, we'll talk about God later, of course, but I grieved my mother, but I also grieved my sense of a home on earth, my relationship to God, hope for reconciliation, because we were not in a good place by the time that she died.

[00:07:30] I grieved what the future was supposed to look like, who I was as a person. Can I still call myself her daughter? Like there were so many things that I grieved in addition to her death. And it really just absolutely ripped me to shreds is how I came to know grief in my life. I still refer to it as the first and the worst. The thing that got me into grief work didn't happen until two, three years later, because I followed society's dictions of if you suppress your grief, if you just stay busy, you will be magically healed. And I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working.

[00:07:59] And I had moved to Chicago from North Carolina and I had gone into a coffee shop where I hung my purse on the back of a chair, which I now know not to do. And someone stole my wallet. It was not a violent situation. It was not someone came up to me. I was not mugged, but they slipped their hand into my bag, stole my wallet and walked away, taking thousands of dollars, my social security card, my ID. I just applied for a job, all these things with them.

[00:08:23] And that single moment, having something so precious and crucial to my life stolen from me, it was like a trapdoor right into my mother's death. And for the first time, I really let all of my grief for her out. I was like screaming, I was wailing. I went back home to my apartment. I turned on screamo music. I was pounding the floor. I can't believe somebody didn't call the police because I was living in like a big apartment complex in Chicago.

[00:08:46] And after that incident of like allowing the grief to come out, I heard this voice in my head. It was like a divine something. And it said, you just gave yourself permission to grieve. And I was like, permission to grieve. I was like, what is what is that? What does that mean? What is it? And that single like lightning bolt moment jumpstarted my what does it mean to give yourself permission to grieve journey. And I read books. I listened to podcasts. I got certifications.

[00:09:16] I started speaking about grief first on my personal pages and then on public spaces online. And people are like, you should do something with this. And the short story of that is that has 10 years later turned into multiple podcasts, now three books, a coaching practice, an online community where we support each other through grief all over the world. And truly a existence that is defined by how do we make the world, specifically the words we use, better to people who are grieving in our midst.

[00:09:46] Because if we are blessed to live long enough, we will also experience some kind of major loss. And that is how I got here in a nutshell. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And I did not think we would have that sort of thing in common when we kicked off this podcast. But yeah, I also lost my mother to cancer as well three years ago. And it was sounds like it was similar in the sense that we were not expecting it and it happened very quickly.

[00:10:14] And so I often wrestle with that. Like, would it have been better for her to have been able to fight it longer? And so that way I had time to sort of mentally prepare myself or was it better to just have it be quick if that was the ultimate outcome anyway and have her not suffer and just deal with it? You know, and it's like you can never know. Right. But I completely hear you when you say like, you know, my mom for us was, you know, my brother referred to her as the glue of the family.

[00:10:45] You know, she held everything together. And without her around, immediately there was this massive void where my North Star, my stability was gone. And in my 40s at that point, you know, I was like, I'm not ready for this yet. Like, I'm not prepared for this. Right. Yes, there is no I think you can anticipate grief. I think you can anticipate death. I don't know that you can ever fully prepare for it. And that is one of its curses realities.

[00:11:13] I don't know if you want to call it a curse, actually, and put that negative slant on it. But you can know it's coming. You will never know what it's actually going to be like until you're inside of it. Absolutely. Yeah. So the book, again, I cannot say enough good things. We desperately need more content like this out in the universe because I think, and, you know, we can get into this. I blame a lot on the generations prior. Yeah, sure. Mental health in general.

[00:11:43] And then we can even break it down between men and women in the ways that that was sort of taught to us growing up. You know, I often talk about in the podcast about how even as a male, fortunately, I grew up with parents who were very pro counseling and therapy. So they normalized it pretty early on. But that doesn't mean that I knew how to access feelings and speak about them openly. It was behavior that I had to learn, you know, or things that I had to learn later in life.

[00:12:09] So, again, you know, work that you're doing, you know, work like now I'm drawing a blank here, but it's okay that you're not okay. Megan Devine. Yes. Megan Devine. Yeah. Your friend. So good. So good. And definitely, I think, is helping to turn that tide and to teach people that, you know, grief is not something that you just are suddenly one day you're over it, you know. And, you know, well, it's been two weeks, you know, because that's the way we were taught. It's like, well, you've had two weeks to grieve.

[00:12:37] Now, like, let's let's get over it and quit crying, you know. Yes. So you talk about the philosophy of grief in the book. You describe grief as something that people remain in relationship with, which, by the way, I love for life. How does that idea challenge the common cultural narrative that I was sort of hinting at just now that we should eventually just move on? Yeah, this is a big thing. I appreciate that you already brought in gender and the generations before, because this is something I talk about a fair bit in the book.

[00:13:05] But as a terrible result of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, just put all those flavors together. What you get is a society or a culture that believes it's possible to take emotional experiences and compress them into tasks on a to do list that you can check off or get over or arrive at an end point of. And then you're done. And then you don't think about it anymore. And then it's not a problem in your life. And then it doesn't pop up at the grocery store when you least expect it or what have you.

[00:13:33] And so I challenge the societal model of grief as an obstacle in your life, something to get over or something to push through or forge through. Teach what I refer to as a lifelong griever model, which is once you see grief, once you experience grief, you cannot unsee it. You cannot unknow it.

[00:13:57] In my online course, Life After Loss Academy, we literally call it wearing grief glasses, where there's like glasses super glued to your face for the rest of your life because now you have this knowing that anything can happen to anyone at any time for any reason. And you see not just the grief in your personal connections and in your own life, but you see the grief in the larger world. You see the grief of war. You see the grief of politics. You see the grief of social housing. You see the grief of food insecurity.

[00:14:26] You see the large griefs and the small griefs. Like you just can't unsee or unknow the reality of grief in your life. And so if that is true, if A, then B. If you know grief to be true as a constant of being alive, then you are in some kind of relationship with it forever. I think where a lot of people screw up in understanding this is I'm saying you're going to be suffering forever or that you're going to be sad forever or that you're going to be in despair or hopelessness or trapped in some kind of pain forever. And that's not what I'm saying.

[00:14:55] I'm just saying grief exists and you exist forever into the future. That is what's happening. Grief can also look like nostalgia or meaning making or finding purpose or carrying on tradition or learning from elders or learning from younger generations who do not or were not taught to grieve in the same way that you were. And so grief is so many more things than just deep pain and mourning.

[00:15:20] And to be in a relationship with grief in the rest of your life, that looks like growing with grief or growing alongside grief as opposed to getting over it. And that is something that literally is at the bedrock of everything I do and teach. Yeah, that's that's such an important distinction, too, because I feel that in my lived experience where every day gets a little bit easier.

[00:15:44] You know, obviously, in the aftermath of my mom's passing and the weeks that followed, I was a hot mess. Like, I'm not going to lie. You know, I I wept in ways I've never wept before. I think I ran out of tears because I was dehydrated by that point, you know. And and, you know, as time went on, it slowly got a little easier and easier. And now I can talk about it without falling apart completely. Although the longer I talk about it, that, you know, no guarantees. Yeah, it's still sad.

[00:16:14] You know, it's still it's still hurts. But I find now that I'm doing more things like, you know, how do I keep her memory alive? You know, and and part of the way that I do that is through honoring some of the traditions and things that she taught me, you know, and carrying that on with my daughter. You know, her one and only granddaughter and saying, you know, this is what grandma taught me, you know, just to make sure she knows where that came from. And so I completely agree with it's something that never quite leaves you, but it changes. It evolves over time. Yeah, correct.

[00:16:44] There's a there's a saying that says grief doesn't get better, just gets different. And I think that's sort of a warped hope that a lot of grievers are wanting to hear, whether after the death of a loved one or a divorce or a major diagnosis. It's like you're going to remember this forever. The impact will be lasting. But what will change is how you feel about it, how you carry it, how it shows up in your life. Like there's so many aspects of it that are different. Its presence is the same. That is the constant. But the thing that's different is everything around it.

[00:17:13] And some of those things, to your point, are things that you have control over. How do you want to remember them? How often do you talk about them? In which ways? With which people? In what instances? Do you wear their clothing? Do you carry lessons from the relationship forward? Do you honor your body in a different way in the case of like a diagnosis or like a geographic move where your body is not tethered to home anymore? As a grief event, there's so many ways that things like autonomy can appear again in grief.

[00:17:40] And especially in seasons where you feel like loss has taken everything from you. There is a kind of weird hope that creeps in when you're like, oh, grief will stick around. But the circumstances surrounding it will be different. And that I have some say over. Yeah, absolutely. We touched on this a little bit, but I would love for you to go into it a little bit more. Why do you think modern culture struggles so much with sitting with someone else's pain? Because I think that our instinct is we find that very uncomfortable.

[00:18:09] You know, it's like, ooh, someone else is grieving like, oh, I don't want to I don't want to be next to that. Like, why is that? I think a lot of people there's a few different reasons. I'll kind of try and remember as many as I can and do them in order. But I think a big one is that people don't sit with it in themselves really ever or not often. And so they don't know how to be with it in other people. That's just. I don't break down into tears often. So how do I be next to somebody who is breaking down into tears?

[00:18:39] Another example or instance of that is something that's very much come up in the last several years of sort of privatizing or like institutionalizing comfort care or grief care is like, I'm not a therapist. I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a counselor. I do not know. I don't have the tools. I am not enough to simply be with someone who's grieving. What if they say this? What if they do that? What if they express this belief or this desire? And I don't know how to respond to that.

[00:19:05] And so there's a fair bit of I am missing an education of some kind to be a comforting person. And then the other part of it, too, is I think that some people genuinely believe because of the society that we live in, productivity, hustle, culture, things like that. Grief is slow. Grief is boring. Grief is unpredictable. Grief is messy. Grief is ugly. Grief is not. This is so capitalistic. Grief ain't marketable.

[00:19:30] It's not anything that, this is the awful, like, shitty capitalist in me, but, like, in the eyes of society, the story is grief contributes nothing. So why bother? Or why stop for that? It's like the Good Samaritan story. It's like, why stop on the side of the road for that? They're not doing anything. They're not contributing anything. They're not granting or giving me anything. And to be in need and to have needs is an inherently human thing.

[00:20:01] But the society that we have built and a lot of how some factions of Christianity operate today is this, like, you must be contributing to this in order for it to be valuable. And grief is inherently something that needs, something that needs to be served or accompanied. It requires energy from you. You're not necessarily putting energy out in grief, especially in the early days, especially in deep suffering. Those are just a few reasons, but I'm not qualified. I've never sat with my own grief, so I don't know what to do with it.

[00:20:29] And we live in a society that doesn't value grief inherently. So why, why pause for it? Yeah. I mean, I would argue with those that say it has nothing to offer because some of the best songs out there are the same. Hell yeah. There's a market there. I love a good sad song, man. I want to touch on something that you said just now, and that is, I think, another aspect of it where I think when we ask ourselves the question, well, I'm not qualified. I don't know what to say.

[00:20:58] It's this assumption that something needs to be said, that we have to have the answer for our friend or our loved one that's grieving. And sometimes it's shutting up and just saying, man, that sucks, or just giving them a hug is all they really want. But like we have this sort of inherent desire to be the one to solve that person's problems. Mm-hmm. Yes, I literally just talked about this on another podcast this morning, but like grief is not a, it's not a fixable condition.

[00:21:27] It's, it's not a, your role is not the savior. Your role is not the, the rescuer or the superhero who like swoops in and it's like suddenly they're not grieving. That's, that's literally impossible. Yeah. I'm getting ready to give a talk on this book and I'm like, not only can you not save your person from your grief, you probably can't. Like it, like it's not humanly possible to save them from their, their grief. And a lot of people, yes, you're correct.

[00:21:53] They want something to do and they want something to say because they want to feel like they're helping. They want to feel like they're contributing. But I think what we need to learn to shift as a society of, of people who want to support and who want to comfort and who don't want our friendships to be broken as a result of grief is shift our priority from saving or fixing or making feel better or cheerleading as Megan Devine would put it. And into accompanying or validating or coming alongside. So, so many grieving people.

[00:22:23] I, I lurk a lot in the Reddit forums of grief support on the internet, just as a secret person. And so many people say, I just wish people would show up for me. I just wish they would be there. I just, I just wish they would check in. And I think that's too vague for a lot of comforters and supporters. This is not a criticism of grievers, but the re one of the biggest reasons I wrote this book is because people do want words to say. They do want scripts for showing up. They do want activities to do together.

[00:22:51] And they know that things like God never gives you more than you can handle or everything happens for a reason or my condolences with no other follow up. They know that those things are unhelpful, but they're like, so what do I do instead? And this is the book for what to do instead. That also covertly insists that you not show up to save, but that you show up to support instead. Because that's two totally different energies to approach someone who is suffering from.

[00:23:19] Does God have a face? Does he have a body? If he does, does he know that I'm alive? Does she care that I doubt?

[00:23:48] Does she care that I fear something to?

[00:24:27] If God has a face, his face must look like yours. Did God kill his kid? Did he have to have?

[00:25:21] It's not real.

[00:25:53] Has a face, her face must look like yours. Like a Tina, an Ahmed or Mildred. Russ and his husband, Gus and their children.

[00:26:20] A face like a Kim, a Ted or Tyrone. A Lucy born with an extra chromosome. A woman who is in a stronger age and the children. She weirdly has laughed at her, her shoulders, and she wears a marriage. She was thin and she worked on her lips for another. She was thin and she made aส вед. She made a mule and she moved on to her dad and she found her like her father. And I think she killed her and she's a woman who wasn't doing that.