Grief Growers,
I am really thrilled today to introduce you to Gary Shockley,
Who wrote the children's grief book called My Heart Sings a Sad Song.
And I think for as much as children are a part of the grief space and there are institutions and organizations set up to help children grieve,
So many times it comes down to the stories that we read to them at night and the small ways that we connect with them through visuals and stories.
So Gary,
Welcome to the show and tell us a little bit about your lost story and or what got you into the arena of grief.
Sure,
Shelby,
Thank you again for having me on your show.
This is awesome.
I've been so excited and it's good to finally be here.
Yeah,
My story,
You know,
Like every human being on the planet right now,
We're all experiencing loss and stacked losses with this global pandemic.
But to be human means to lose and to lose means to grieve.
And I was no exception to that rule growing up as a child.
There was a period in my life back in the mid 90s,
And my wife and I were just reflecting on this,
When we had just this inordinate amount of death in our family.
My wife's mother died of a recurrent of breast cancer at age 59.
A year later,
Her father learned that he had stage four pancreatic cancer and died in between that period of time.
We lost both of my wife's paternal and maternal grandparents and a favorite uncle.
And all of this within like three years.
And our sons were very little,
They were six and three years old.
And we lived about four hours away from our immediate family.
And every time we would get on the turnpike,
Which they hated in Pennsylvania,
To drive back east,
As soon as we told them we were going on a trip,
Their response was,
Who died now?
Yeah.
You know,
Because it was just,
It became so commonplace.
And I think when grief hit me,
Hit us,
In that kind of rapid succession,
We never found ourselves,
Or when death hit,
We never found ourselves having the space that we needed to grieve one loss before we encountered another.
And I personally found coming through that,
Even though most of it was on my wife's side of the family,
I was very,
Very close to them,
Deeply in love with her mother.
She was just a sweetheart.
And it finally,
Several years after that,
All happened,
Then my mother developed lung cancer,
Very rare form,
Traveling back and forth to visit with her,
Spent the last two weeks of her life in the hospital,
Sleeping on a cot at her bedside and was with her when she took her last breath.
So mom died,
And it was coming out of her death,
That all of the other ones just all of a sudden hit me like,
Like a bulldozer.
And I didn't at first understand what was happening.
I found myself sinking into a very deep depression.
I remember sitting on the front steps of our house and I looking up at the sky feeling as though I was being pulled into a hole darker than the dark night sky.
And the sides of the hole were slippery,
And I couldn't get a handhold.
And I just found myself just being drawn down into this black,
Dark space.
And I've studied psychology,
I have degrees in counseling,
And I realized what was going on and actually sought help and went into therapy for about two years to deal with that stuff and a lot of other things.
And the turning point for me in it,
Because my therapist,
I learned that I was an artist and very expressive in creative arts,
And recommended to me a wonderful book called The Artist Way.
I'm sure you've heard of it by Julie Cameron.
And I just dove into it as part of my homework for my therapy in the morning pages,
First thing in the morning,
And found in that experience that it just uncorked all of the grieving work that needed to be done in me,
And kind of set me on a path toward healing and wholeness and enhanced my curiosity about this thing called death and dying,
This reality for all of us on the planet and what it means to grieve well.
That led me into a field as a hospice chaplain.
I felt drawn toward officially working with people as my life,
My life's work,
Helping them to navigate the process of dying,
And then providing grieving care to those who remain behind to help them through that.
And it was out of that,
That I became very aware of the children in my care as an interfaith chaplain,
Who were the forgotten mourners in all of this,
Conversations that were had in the room when the children were shushed aside or sent in another space to either play games or be occupied by somebody else or watch TV,
While the adults talked about what it means to grieve and what it means to commemorate a loved one moving towards celebration and funeral services and things.
And then I'd get parents saying,
I don't know what to do with my children because they don't seem to know how to handle this.
Make a long story short,
That's how this book got born.
I started looking for resources,
Didn't find any that I found,
Again,
That were open enough in an interfaith environment that they weren't tilted toward one religion or spectrum or another.
I wanted to create something that every single person can find their way into no matter what their religious background,
Ethnic background,
Cultural background.
The reason I went with rabbits in this book was to neutralize all of that so that no one felt excluded.
I'll take a breath and let you ask me another question because I could keep going.
I love this story,
Too,
Because something that immediately struck me about you telling it is your role in all of this as the quiet observer of who's getting left out,
Who's not included,
Who is on the sidelines of this experience,
Who really needs to be,
I get this verbiage of folded inward and brought back into the circle.
I think so often children are left on the outskirts of grief.
Just like the rest of us,
They have so many questions and things they want to understand and grief that they want to express as well.
I'm drawing up this very distinct memory from when my grandfather died in fifth grade.
I believe this was the first funeral I ever went to in my life.
It was held in a local church slash recreation hall.
The memorial and the funeral happened in the recreation hall,
But there was a separate room off to the side for all the kids.
There was bracelet making and a big whiteboard and all these activities.
I remember thinking,
Am I supposed to be sad or am I supposed to do a craft?
I just didn't have a perception of what I was supposed to be doing in that moment.
Even when I would go into the area where the funeral was held and I saw my grandfather and was standing near my mother,
There were many conversations where my ears were literally covered by one of my parents because what was being spoken about was not for children's ears or at least that was the perception that I had.
So to do work and produce work that draws children back into a conversation about grief I think is really sacred and really powerful.
I love also,
And this is where I want to go with the next question,
This goal of making it applicable regardless of religious or spiritual beliefs because I think a lot exists for some religious and spiritual beliefs and then there's kind of a dearth for just kind of non-denominational grief work,
Non-God related grief work.
Right,
Right.
Yeah.
It's all spiritual.
I think we are spiritual people aside from our religious convictions or our religious alignments.
My basic assumption about people is that we are spirited.
It's that part of us that makes us uniquely who we are.
It's the laugh that we remember from our loved ones when they die.
It's the winking eyes and the little pranks and the funsters.
It's that special thing about a person that's just important.
I'm of the Christian faith tradition and when I created this book I had some folks who pushed me a little bit and said,
Well,
It doesn't really talk about heaven and it really doesn't talk about,
It doesn't have any scripture.
They were a little disheartened when I told them,
I said,
Yeah,
All of that is intentional because that becomes very exclusionary.
What this book does is it says to folks in the back,
There's a guide for adults who are working with children who grieve,
That find a way to fold in your particular spiritual traditions in your conversations and in your way of working through this,
Whatever that is.
One of my closest friends is a hospice doctor that I worked with,
A young doctor from India.
She's Buddhist.
We have the greatest conversations about things like this.
She's one of the endorsers of it because early on when I wrote the storyline,
I ran a lot of this by her and said,
How does this impact you?
People who have no faith tradition,
Do you see yourself in this?
Is this something that would be helpful?
There's a lot of stuff out there for kids,
So I'm not saying this is the only thing out there,
But I think it honors the sense of there are no easy answers.
We can't dismiss children with platitudes.
Cute little sayings have their place,
But not when we're helping children to grieve.
This is my opportunity to get on that platform to say,
I think there is a healthier way of approaching this.
Something that can lead to something else,
It's almost foundational and then conversation can open from there.
I think so often the question that parents and caregivers have is how do I start talking to my kids about grief?
What do I say?
This happens with adult grief,
Adult to adult.
Especially with parents who are teaching their kids about grief or introducing the subject of death or missing somebody for the first time and how do I identify that feeling and explain to my kids what it is and let them know it's okay.
Having that as an avenue.
I want to go back in your timeline a little bit and talk about how you kind of self-guided art therapyed with the help of a therapist your way into writing and illustrating a children's book because one of my first glances at my heart sings a sad song is who illustrated it and it's also you.
Something special happens.
I illustrated my own first book,
Permission to Grief.
Something special happens when we are the person with the words and we are also the person with the images.
I wonder if you can speak to your relationship to grief and art together.
Yeah,
Well thank you.
They have been integral in my life.
Art has been a constant companion from as long as I can remember.
All of my stuff gets worked out in art.
I've got a studio in the third floor of the house that I live in.
I call it my fortress of solitude.
That brings me joy.
I love that.
It's funny because my wife,
She'll open the door and she'll say,
I'm coming up.
And then she kind of tiptoes up the steps as if she's walking in this very sacred space because she knows how important it is to me and she knows the work that happens in my soul in this space as I'm creating.
And so for me,
I've got a book I'm working on right now and I just laugh myself silly and I've actually cried when I've created some of the characters.
And that was true in this book where I had to be able to feel the emotion of the characters as I drew them as they're talking and they're freely expressing their feelings and their questions without any kind of judgment from anyone else.
And the other people in the book are giving them the space,
They're holding space with them to allow them to do that,
Which is just beautiful.
And so writing and illustrating as you've experienced yourself,
Shelby,
Is one where you're kind of matching right and left brain together.
You're bringing the whole of who you are to the moment.
And the expression becomes fully articulated in terms of words,
Visual and cognitive kinds of things.
It's a neat experience.
I've illustrated books for other people and I got to tell you,
It's not nearly as meaningful for me.
It's a lot of work.
When I've illustrated books for other authors,
I like doing it.
It's hard to climb in somebody else's head and paint what's there.
And it's just a lot of work.
This is just pure joy.
And I think that shines through also in the book is when you can tell like a compatible marriage has been achieved,
The marriage of the right brain and the left brain.
It's like,
Yes,
I know exactly what you're talking about.
And there's something that translates across the page when that happens too.
And I think that's just,
I think that's really lovely when those two come together and you can really feel it in a book.
Yeah,
I agree.
Yeah,
I agree.
I think the next place I wouldn't go is your work as a hospice chaplain and what it's like to be the person in the room for whom the grief is not directly happening to.
But I guess using your verbiage,
The space holder or holding space for the people in the room.
And I wonder how holding space for other people,
Your work as a hospice chaplain may have,
And this is a leading question,
Helped you learn to hold space for yourself.
Because it sounds like so much of the grief you experienced before got you to a place where okay,
I'm entering grief as a field.
And I wonder if any of that started working backwards in your timeline of now I know how to hold space for that person who was grieving,
That former version of myself.
That is a great question.
That's what,
That's when you give me something to reflect on.
I think I can answer it,
But I love that holding space for myself.
You know,
The most beautiful work I've ever been invited into has been working in hospice and the most difficult,
Challenging work I've ever been invited into has been hospice work.
I would tend to maybe three deaths a day.
I was an inpatient unit chaplain.
There were two hospice houses where we had the worst of the worst cases that couldn't be cared for at home or a hospital or a skilled facility.
And so they came to us in their last days.
And so it was dire.
And it felt at times like I worked in a death machine.
We're talking hundreds of deaths that I tended to in persons and families in a year.
And then offering bereavement care,
You know,
After the fact.
And I think I found in that,
I remember as a hospice chaplain stepping in the room and struggling to find my place in it,
My physical place,
As well as my spiritual place in the room.
Yes.
Yeah.
Do I sit in the chair?
Am I next to the bed?
Should I be near the door?
Oh my gosh,
I never thought about that,
But you're right.
Do I say something or do I just like not speak?
Do I put my arm around them or do I give them the space to just be there?
When I was doing my clinical internship at a trauma one center in Charlotte,
And that was by far the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life,
Was in the emergency department when I was on call and they were 30 hour on call shifts.
And I was there and back and forth in the ED and the rest of the hospital,
But the ED all the time.
And it was so hard with a fast moving team of persons who were literally trying to save lives to find my physical location in the room.
I don't know that I ever really figured that out and what my role was in the room because there was never a chance for me to reach in and touch the patient or do anything because of everybody else doing their stuff.
And I finally had to be content to say,
I got to accept the fact that in some cosmic way that I don't understand,
My being here matters.
My just being in the room matters.
And Shelby,
I still don't fully understand that.
I think we can be incarnational.
I think God in whatever way we understand and express divinity or Godness,
That there is an incarnation of that in us so that wherever we are,
That is also fully present.
And I just had to accept that that was okay.
I didn't have the magic words.
I couldn't stop someone from dying.
I couldn't ease the pain of the families as they were experiencing the loss.
And I carried that home every single day.
I had a supervisor who was really good at helping me to unpack it to the point where I could express my own grief.
I could cry openly.
And I had to learn how to let people go then.
So we had a fire pit in our backyard and once a week,
We'd build a fire and I would gather sticks from the woods behind our house and I would hold these little sticks and I would name the person out loud and I would break the stick and I would throw it in the fire and I would just offer it up so that I had some sense of completion or some sense of what's the word I'm looking for.
Oh well,
The sense that I need to let that go now.
I can't carry all of these people and all of these faces of death with me and be with the next person.
I just can't.
I'm not designed to do that.
So I need to offer them up and I need to let them go and release them.
The hardest person I find doing this with is myself.
And you hit the nail right on the head.
I am hardest on myself.
I feel like I ought to be able to come back from a grief experience or come back from a loss,
Multiple losses like I'm experiencing in COVID-19,
That I ought to be able to somehow skirt around the loss and the grief work that I need to be doing so that I can keep doing my stuff for other people.
And are you familiar with the feeling wheel,
Feeling wheels that are out on the market at all?
I've seen a few where it's like a pie chart with like six dominant emotions,
But then each of the six are divided into ten more.
I love that.
I created a feeling chart,
What I call feeling your feels chart that goes along with this book using the bunny's images where children can point to a bunny's face and be able to identify their primary feeling and then with an adult to help them talk about what does it like to feel that way.
I guess one of the ways that I'm kind of working through my own grief work and holding space for myself is to identify my primary emotion,
Which lately has been anger.
It's just been angry.
Facebook doesn't help that,
By the way.
Nope.
In no universe,
Unfortunately.
Newscasts don't help that.
And as I take a walk around the block,
I do my own self-talk of like,
Okay,
You're feeling angry,
But what's underneath that?
And what's underneath that is fear.
And what's that all about?
Well,
I'm fearful.
I'm fearful for my elder father.
I'm fearful for my children and my grandchildren.
I'm fearful for the people that I care about,
What's going to happen to them in COVID-19.
I've had this blasted virus.
I hope I have immunity,
But for us to be able to identify where we are in our own grief work is just so important.
And I'm glad you asked that question.
Like I said,
I'm going to be noodling on that for a while.
Well,
And I think it's a process that so many people who are grieving are always trying to do is how do I see myself in the midst of all of this,
Because I'm seeing everything that's happening around me and I'm processing all this new information and I'm trying to identify all these new emotions,
Whether you have access to a feeling wheel or not.
And in that,
There's a lot of self-research,
But is the research sinking in as true witnessing and like being there for yourself as you're experiencing all of this?
And so it's a bit of a practice to learn to hold space for yourself.
And it's not something that society teaches.
And so we kind of crash course ourselves into making it happen.
And hopefully we do,
We don't live in denial or somehow stuff it for the next event that'll trigger it again.
I think for me,
And this might be a question for anybody else who's listening to the podcast,
What it comes down to for me is this question that I'm asking myself today is who am I now?
Who am I now that I'm not who I was?
Who am I now that I'm not who I was?
That's a brain twister right there.
Maybe that question is creating the space for me to really not rush through it to find the answer or a solution or to make it all go away,
But to live with it for a while.
Who am I now that I'm not who I was?
Yes.
I teach a course called Life After Loss Academy that's all online.
So we've been doing it even now in the midst of quarantine.
And there's a whole series of three weeks about releasing the old you and then embracing the new you and taking an identity inventory of who are you becoming now.
And there's this tool that we talk about called the friendly anthropologist,
Where we look at ourselves as if we're studying our own actions.
And instead of saying,
That's bad,
That's good,
That's awful,
I'm not who I used to be,
I can't believe this is my life now,
Everything that's kind of loaded with some kind of imagery,
I'll ask my students to just say,
Oh,
Isn't that interesting?
Oh,
The human can't be in the grocery store for more than 20 minutes without freaking out.
Isn't that interesting?
And kind of see ourselves in this very neutral,
Very friendly kind of way.
And there we can allow ourselves to decide if that's how we would like to continue or if we'd like to make that something different.
But without,
You know,
The weight of judgment,
Because grief's already so heavy,
Carry around as is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I like that sense of,
I've studied mindfulness,
I use it in my practice around the sense of the thinking self and the observing self.
Yes,
I love that where I can step outside to say,
Oh,
That's,
You know,
That feels like this or to be able to identify it without personifying it to the point where I have to carry it around.
But I can feel it but allow it to go through me.
But that observing self,
I love that,
You know,
Isn't it interesting,
This behavior that I'm seeing even in my own self and in the people around me?
Sometimes I just pretend I'm watching myself on TV.
I'm like,
Man,
This series is real long.
You bring popcorn and a soft drink or anything like that?
I'm the one who sneaks in the box as a candy that I get from the dollar store.
Yeah,
I think I want to go all the way back to the story that you opened with where you and your family and your two sons were getting under the turnpike in Pennsylvania.
And every time you would the question was who died?
And I wonder what you and your wife taught your kids about grief to be true and or how you decided as a couple,
What are we going to,
How are we going to roll this out?
This is essential human information,
But how are we going to relay it to our kids?
Yeah.
You know,
I'm not sure we did it with any great intentionality.
I think we kind of wandered into it and then and it found our way and a united force to try and do this in a reasonable fashion.
We've never sugar coated or glossed over death as talking about sleep or,
You know,
They're gone or they're sleeping or they're in heaven now or those kinds of things.
Because death is very real.
When our kids were little,
They had pets,
Gerbils and things like that that died.
And so they had they had their first death experiences were with pets.
And so we had little commemorative moments with those pets and talked about what they meant to us.
You know,
They were curious about well,
What caused them to die?
And understanding is one of the one of the four stages of helping children deal with grief is to deal with death is to help them in their understanding.
And to be able to talk about,
I think with our sons we talked about well,
You know,
It was cancer and cancer is this thing that kind of grows abnormally inside of us and it causes the healthy organs to not function well and,
You know,
Try to talk about the physical aspects that led to death and when somebody that we love dies,
They're not breathing anymore,
Their heart isn't beating anymore,
They're not eating anymore.
You know,
All those things that we see are very much part of life have stopped.
And then we could because of our faith context talk about what happens to the spiritedness of the person.
And both my mother and father in law were outdoorsy kind of people they my father in law loved owls and wild birds and they liked wildflowers and mushrooms and so we took walks,
They took walks with our sons and our eldest son has a tattoo of an owl in a tree on his arm and he got this maybe several years ago because it reminded him of his grandfather whom he called T-Paul,
His fondest memories even as a young child was doing nature things and so now whenever they're out in nature they'll call and say,
Hey I came home from work and there was a golden eagle flying around our property in Colorado and I think it was T-Paul coming back to or he was just kind of watching over or there's this sense about him with us.
Now they don't they know that there was a death that T-Paul's body is gone and they were able to see that with their own eyes but they also understood that there is another dimension there's a part of us that is enduring we don't know all the details about it but there is a sense that the energy of this person that we loved is still around us at least in our hearts and our own memories.
So I think we did a pretty good job of helping them to work through that.
Neither of us were very shy about it if that makes sense.
Yeah and I think it sounds like there's a permission for it to keep showing up as opposed to the death talk being a one and done conversation I'm drawing parallels to the sex talk being a one and done conversation but allowing grief to continue showing up for it to be literally tattooed onto your body for phone calls and texts to still happen of the eagles are showing up the owls are showing up I think they're here right now because this is something that my family and I continue but we find pennies everywhere especially while traveling and so we're all convinced that it's my mother you know keeping us safe as we move around in the world and go places or make big decisions I often find piles and piles of change for about two weeks before I make a really big decision so it's really funny to just put those things together and then to be able to reach out to my family members and friends who know that that's the language that I continue to speak and allowing permission for that to keep appearing and be folded into like the story of your family.
And I like that the permission I like that word and I like those links that when I think those are wholly acceptable to have links that the things that link us back to our loved ones who have died and not good to the point of believing that our loved one is the penny but that the penny points us you know they're reminders for us of that I think that's that's special it's interesting with our sons too my wife and I both talk about our own deaths someday very frilly with our kids to the point where first they'd cover their ears we don't want to hear about that la la la la we didn't do that when they were little but now that you know they're in their 20s it's a little bit easier to talk about it but it's like well you know we're getting older and and we know that life and death are co-mingled as part of the human experience so you know when we die we'd like you to have this or this is what we're we're really interested in in terms of where our ashes could be placed in natural places that we love or that kind of thing because we when we do die we don't want it to be such a shock that we never talked about it with our kids so it's this taboo subject but there'll be a sense of celebration in the sense that our lives continue on through the stories that we tell and the way that we raise them I think that's really important our culture our death culture in this society is awful I think we're getting better at it I think I don't know how old you are but my guess you're significantly younger than I am but when I think of you know the millennials and generation z you know the younger generations are much more open to conversations about death than my generation and certainly my parents or grandparents it was a taboo subject in a lot of ways which didn't didn't help us at all if we don't talk to our children about death if they don't have any understanding of it and when they do experience it with people who are very close to them and eventually themselves it could be potentially a crisis without some framework that helps them to find their way through it and to see how this is a part of life right and I feel as if in the past it was almost a shame to die like it shamed your family if you died I'm like it's a failure you mean that thing you always do you mean that thing that all of us are gonna do yes it was like a yeah it was almost a failure or and some of us still have this language especially in the medical profession of if somebody if a patient dies especially we have failed them in some way if we can't cure their cancer if the heart disease is terminal if they have an autoimmune disorder that's going to go on forever and ever until they die there's almost this idea of we weren't able to fix and so it was a failure yeah there's a refusal to acknowledge that death is inevitable right and that's the thing that I found healthy about hospice and hospice can be controversial in some people's minds and I understand that but hospice is one organization that accepts that death is actually a success a peaceful pain pain-free predominantly pain-free peaceful death is is a successful thing not having someone die in horrible pain and out of their minds so what I liked about hospice was that sense that death is okay and I really did learn from an experience there are a lot of things in life that are way worse than death a lot of things yeah yeah and just even going all the way back to my heart sings a sad song it's like a mournful embracing of what will naturally happen to all of us inevitably invariably yeah it's this grief is normal it's natural it's human it's enfolded in the experience of being alive is also the experience of one day dying right and it's okay that this happened and it's okay that you're sad that it happened it makes sense and and and you know the way I ended this book was I could have just called this my heart sings a song but I didn't want I did not want to cover up sadness and make it a fun-loving little pretty book on the front cover that you know denies the fact that it's going to be a book that deals with a pretty serious subject and the sense in the story is that life comes full circle where there is death and life and death and life and death and life it's a recycling kind of of energy of sorts that yes in the midst of the pain of death and grief there still can be joy and celebration we get to the point of commemorating our loved ones whether it's finding pennies you know and picking them up and smiling or a hawk or an eagle that's circling our house and reminding us of someone we love and so this this book ends with us with a song of remembrance the song full of love a song that will celebrate you and it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a happy song because songs can be sad even in songs that are focused on love and celebration can still have this kind of mournfulness about it but also the sense of hopefulness about it and I think that more than anything else in life there is this sense of hope that my life and my journey my gifts to the world will have some sense of permanence for someone that it that I matter and what I've done has mattered and hopefully it has impacted the world in a positive way and that's something truly worth celebrating you know yeah and Gary I think that's the perfect place to let people know where they can find My Heart Sings a Sad Song and how they can be in touch with you as well well thank you yeah aside from Amazon and Barnes and Noble's and those kinds of places you can buy it anywhere anybody sells a book the keep in touch place for me and this has been very very special is if people go to my website which is Hopespring one word hopespring.
Biz the website will give information a little bit about who I am and they can read they can see a trailer video about the book they can order it from me and in the order they can specify whom they would like it to be personally signed to and it gives me an opportunity to make contact with people and I'm getting I've made friends all over the world already in this book and people who write to me to talk about its impact or folks who will write adults a lot of adults Shelby will write to say I've never really grieved so-and-so a person that I loved and this book has opened up the possibility of even me doing that as I'm reading it to my child and they'll pour out their hearts and tell their stories and then I can write back to them and I love that to me it's a gift that I get back so I would be delighted to sign a book for one of your one or many of your listeners as a result of this conversation and I think that they'll find it helpful in a place where they can they can sit and find space yes and that goes back to what we were talking about earlier where we learn to make space for ourselves to or hold space for ourselves so even the adults are like oh I'm holding space for my child and I'm also somehow holding space for myself as well yeah there's a kind of magic in that that's beautiful oh wonderful well Gary thank you so much for coming on coming back today this has been so soothing that's the word I want to use it's just been a pleasure to listen to you tell your story and hear more about my heart sings a sad song
