Thoughts On: Grief

From Cheryl Strayed to Emma Gannon, here are some interview excerpts that helped further my understanding of grief

Photo by Jun on Unsplash

Welcome to Thoughts On, a series of bite-sized, soul-nourishing insights from our time’s greatest heart-centered minds. Culled from my interview series, these are the can’t-miss excerpts on grief that left me irrevocably changed.

Saying yes

“The loss I experienced completely changed the way I live. We really do only have this time to live and I personally feel this compulsion to encourage people to consider this. In part my brand Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books, Moms Don't Have Time To Grieve, Moms Don’t Have Time To Do This, That, And The Other Thing is a joke because we're all so crazy busy, but it's also that we really do not all have all the time in the world and now's the time to act. I make decisions differently now; I can be more spontaneous. I'm much more: yes, and I'll figure it out later. I never used to be that way.”

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Zibby Owens

[read Zibby’s full interview]

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Telling the whole truth

“When I was writing the first draft of Wild and I wrote that I swallowed a handful of my mom's ashes, I remember getting up from my computer because it was as if I been electrocuted. My first thought was, I'm going have to take that line out. It's too much. It revealed too primal a self. It seemed taboo. Whenever I feel that way about a sentence, soon thereafter, I’ll think no, that's exactly the sentence I was writing toward. I have to leave that in. So many people around the world have spoken to me about that sentence because they related to it. It was such a teacher for me: all those things that we think are too much are the things that art and literature are about. Our mission here is to tell not the truth, but to tell the whole truth.”

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Cheryl Strayed

[read Cheryl’s full interview]

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How grief uncovers grief

“There’s an essay by Cheryl Strayed called Heroin/e where she writes about how when someone dies, they tell you about the grief of the loss but they don't tell you about the griefs that loss will uncover. In 2013 my brother passed away, and it was a huge loss for me, he was my Superman. In my mother's grief, she turned her back on me. She and I have always had a difficult relationship. But when Carlos died, and she turned her back on me, it amplified the grief. There was no running away from it anymore. And because I am who I am, I threw myself into literature about strained mother-daughter relationships, and found work on the mother wound.”

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Vanessa Mártir

[read Vanessa’s full interview]

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Parts of us die

“When you go through a massive inner change it’s so intense that a part of us must be dying. We outgrow ourselves, and then we have to say goodbye to them. The part of me that was clinging to this performance Emma, she had to die. Now I've stepped into this 2.0 version of myself, which is amazing. But something had to fade away for that to happen.”

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Emma Gannon

[read Emma’s full interview]

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Feeling vs hiding

“It took me a long time to learn how to actually grieve. How to not let the anxiety or the regret take the focus away from the deep sadness that I had to feel. 

A lot of it was trying to accept what wasn't my fault. And to identify the things that I tend to hide in instead of feeling the pain: work, my anxiety. My mind would spin, and I'd focus on what I wished I’d done differently. That’s a kind of avoidance. But the thing about grief is there's no escaping that pain, and whether you want to let yourself feel it or not, eventually it's going to push through.”

— Nicole Chung [read Nicole’s full interview]