The Good Goodbye With Dr. Gladys Ato

Welcome to Coming Back.

I'm so excited to have you here today to talk about not just your new book but your grief journey as it has transformed your life so far and all the things that you've said goodbye to and how that has transformed your life.

So Gladys,

If you could,

Can you start us off with your loss story or your experience with loss in your lifetime?

Sure.

You know,

It's interesting because as I look back at my life I feel like loss is something that has been weaved in all throughout my entire life,

Starting with the first time that I went through a personal loss with my godmother dying when I was a little girl and the most transformative loss that I went through being the death of my mother when I was 28 years old in 2003.

And the death of my mom was such an impactful experience not only because she was my mommy and I really think that there is something very profound about losing your mother but also the way that we lost her.

She died from a brain aneurysm so on a Thursday we were all here in San Francisco it was the first time that I was getting to display my art to the world.

I'd drawn my entire life I also dabbled in painting but I was almost a closet artist and it was a chance to actually get out of the closet and showcase my work.

My mom was there,

My dad was there,

My family,

My friends were there and my mom had been planning a trip to Mexico around Christmas and we said you can't be gone for Christmas mommy we have to spend the holidays together and she said well now you'll know what it's like to not have me around anymore.

And I remember hearing that anymore and thinking well that's a little odd but just went along with dinner and the next morning she died from a brain aneurysm so it was very devastating and also at the same time incredibly transformative in terms of the path that my life ended up being on afterwards.

Oh my gosh I just got chills as you were telling that story because it seems like the first thing that came to my mind was did she have some kind of inner knowing that this was happening or conscious knowing or was this all subconscious and I don't I don't know how better to phrase that but she know this was coming?

You know it I've wondered when we you know when I get together with my family and we talk about my mom little stories start to come out my aunts sharing how earlier that same year my mom had gone to my grandmother and asked her for forgiveness where there was an annual mass that my family held where a priest from Mexico that was part of the family my mom was from Mexico they would he would come to California and all my family members would convene together and I have 50 first cousins so my my Mexican side of my family is humongous not 15 but 15 at 5-0 it's huge so whenever this priest would come there were guaranteed 150 to 200 people at minimum there to to be part of this Mass and the priest had asked is anyone here ready to die like you're not afraid to die and my mom raised her hand very boldly like proud I'm not afraid to die I'm read you know not from a place of I'm ready to end my life because I'm miserable but more of no fear around it and it is interesting that all of that happened within the year before she passed and it did it does make me wonder and believe that we do have an inner knowing although our consciousness our mind might not put the link together in a way that we are saying to ourselves okay I'm gonna die on November 7th right or I've got a month left but rather it's just maybe in knowing that our time is coming and unconsciously we end up preparing for it in ways that might not make sense to to others I'm interested because you've mentioned a mass a priest and the question are you ready to die so I'm kind of curious what your upbringing was like in terms of talking about death and loss and and preparing to die and whether or not it was an open place for conversation in your household or whether it was all kind of religious leaning and you had to do X Y & Z before you died or more how did you grow up thinking about death grief loss getting to say goodbye kind of that whole entire conversation well my father was very matter-of-fact about death so it was actually a conversation that he would bring up very factually almost like he was talking about these are bananas these are apples these are oranges you die right and experience was really one that's shaped by his own life so he had worked he's from Peru so I'm Peruvian Mexican and he had worked in a hospital where he was dealing with cadavers on a regular basis and so he saw death in a very concrete way and he brought that understanding to our upbringing and so my sister and I grew up with the messages of understanding that we're all gonna die that death is not something that we should be afraid of that it's just a body and he would even go as far as breaking down you know what happens to your body after you pass away so in some ways we could we could understand death in terms of a very concrete format but then there was also the spiritual part of it and that's where religion definitely played in and it we were grew up with those stories that you do good here on earth and if you do good you go to heaven if you don't you go to hell and although that wasn't really reinforced in my home it was definitely a part of the message that I received when I went to school when I was a little girl so I went to a Catholic school from fourth grade until eighth grade and we just got those messages all the time so Catholic guilt is very real it's very strong and alive and it led to this feeling of really wanting you to do our best in life to make the most of it but what it also did for me personally was instill a little bit of fear because if as a girl when you're growing up you take things so literally and that kind of message could easily be translated into if I do anything wrong I might go to hell and it can become a fear-based belief so I actually remember in high school being very afraid of anybody in my family dying so much so that when I would drive home from high school and I would remember myself saying dear Lord Jesus if anybody in my family is going to go please take all of us and no one has to suffer and this would be a regular prayer that I would say every week and I can't explain why or how that started other than believing that there was an underlying level of fear around our sense of safety and sense of protection in the world in general and for my family and this is something that I didn't share with with my parents so this is actually I think this is probably the first time I'm sharing it out loud in public which is such a beautiful way to do things right if we're gonna tell somebody you might as well tell the whole world Subscribe to that school of thought as well.

So yeah it was really fascinating to witness myself having such deep worry about losing anyone in my family.

So I'm interested now you said that your godmother died when you were younger and then your mom died when you were 28 were you afraid for either of them or for yourself after that happened?

No when my godmother died I was super close to her she was in some ways my angel my guardian angel I feel like here on earth and when she died it I remember it being incredibly devastating I think it was around 10 years old at the time and going to her funeral at the at the church I remember believing that everyone in that church was playing a really cruel joke on me I remember going up to her casket and seeing her body and saying to her this isn't real you're alive I see you breathing I mean I was staring at her I'm like I know you're alive I see you have life still in you and then turning around to face a congregation and just thinking this is all a horrible joke and it wasn't anything that led to me feeling like somehow I I was next or I was afraid for my own self and same thing with my mother I think after she died again the devastation of losing a mom is so deep and everything uncoiled for me it really led to more of a deeper groundedness in my own truth rather than leading me to be even more fearful but it took a long time because as I mentioned earlier in high school I really did have that just that generalized fear of something's gonna happen to our family and if it does and let us let God take all of us away that was more around the pain of suffering and people being left behind and me not being able to fix the pain more than feeling any kind of worry about my own livelihood if that makes sense yes yes it does how fear changes and transmute with time absolutely as somebody else who has experienced the death of a mother I am very very familiar with this is the first time I've actually heard anybody use this phrase but with uncoiling and have everything just kind of literally spiral apart just absolutely out of control this is gonna be a really big question and I know we can't possibly have time in one podcast to answer it but what happened to you after your mom died I fell apart there are two things that happened to me after my mom died it is the the complete falling apart right the the uncoiling and everything seeming to just fall out of my hands and that literally did happen when I got to the hospital and I walked into the waiting room and so many people were there already and my dad said the Lord giveth and the Lord take it's me huh and I broke down and somebody handed me a glass of water and I remember hope standing in the middle of that room holding the glass of water trying to understand what happened but then noticing how badly my hand was trembling and just saying let it go just let it go like I can't hold this cup of it but you have to hold a cup of but I can't hold it anymore I just need to let go my mother's death for me was so powerful because I had such an unexpected experience at her funeral and we actually buried her at the cemetery and I talked about this in my book it's the this incredible moment that I give full credit to her I believe that it was a gift that she gave me of experiencing the most profound love and joy that I ever have had in this lifetime what I share in the book and how I describe this to people is that I was infused with her spirit and I had this huge outpouring of love just my heart expanding and bursting open and I blurted out to my father mommy is so happy right now because I knew she was I knew her spirit was fine I knew this was the right thing for her I knew that she was meant to leave this earth at that time and it was the best thing for my family as well and that she was fine that she wasn't suffering that she was dancing and she was celebrating and to feel all of that in my own body in the midst of the most deep profound grief that I've ever had was so shocking that number one I obviously never forgot it but secondly it taught me that it is possible to accept and feel celebration and joy in the midst of grief and pain and that is a big principle that has formed the foundation of my book where I now try to show people that it is possible to grieve and celebrate at the same time and that acceptance does not have to wait until the very end but rather we can start with acceptance in our journeys and our grieving process can unfold with more ease and when I say easy I when I say ease I do not mean easy and I know that people often connect those two what I mean by ease is that you let go of some of the struggle that happens when you're holding on to what's already changed and by releasing that let that metaphor right of holding that cup and just letting it go and letting yourself uncoil you actually surrender into the process of grieving in a way that doesn't require as much struggle but it does mean you're then now in the you're in the pool of grief and as we know that is there's so many layers to that that can be very devastating but like I experienced can be very joyful and then you just pendulum just keep swinging back and forth until you find that place of integration yes there's absolutely this fear of going deeper I don't know if I'm ready I don't know if I can I don't know if I'll come out alive and the words let go release surrender seem to have so much behind them because there's this question of well what happens when I what happens when I know what happens when I release what happens when I surrender and there's absolutely no surety in any of that and it's absolutely mind-blowing because the only answer that I've ever been able to come up with with surrender is you will go deeper whether it's deeper pain whether it's deeper joy something deeper is going to happen you quit living this surface level of resistance and you start getting into the grit of your emotions and that pool of grief in the space of darkness but at the same time there's this I I like to call it the divine dichotomy of this infinite joy and like visitation of this presence that that you felt at the funeral heck how can I be in the darkest place and be on the tallest mountain at the same time and I think grief is this experience of learning to hold both of these things in your hand and still be alive it's really wild so I love thank you for sharing that story with us that's just wicked cool and that's not even like a great enough phrase to describe it I just think it's so incredible I started tear up a little bit over here but I know this is seems like a really good doorway to start opening up into your book but I kind of want to do some some backstory first about how it got created because I know you have some history with coaching with personal growth with becoming a doctor and all these things that kind of build up to writing the good goodbye so how did your journey start there as educating yourself to educate others on emotions on our mental health and our ways of moving about in the world and then how did that lead you to to write something as transformational as a book called the good goodbye yeah so that actually started before my mom died I I knew in high school that I wanted to be a psychologist and a big motivation that I had was really trying to understand why people suffered that was really reflective both of my own childhood where I did suffer a lot I had a pretty traumatic childhood and a part of that trauma also came from just having a really hard experience at school where I was bullied for a big chunk of my education and that that bullying for me really shaped me and you know actually now that I'm saying it out loud it probably was connected to that you know that fear around death if you look at it very primally it's you don't feel safe when you are being ostracized and you are literally being abused by your peers and you don't feel like you're accepted and you belong that really can bring up those primal fears around being isolated and outcast and rejected and unloved so a lot of that influenced my desire to go into psychology and basically understand my own pain and I know a lot of people in the healing arts do enter that you know we call ourselves the the wounded healers because we want to make sense of the world and for me it was an interesting journey to just go into this this profession and find that I had a lot of talents to be able to dive deep with my clients and experience with them something these epiphanies that for sometimes for the first time they hadn't been able to get to so many of my clients being able to reveal to me things that they had never shared with another soul in their entire life I found the work satisfying but at the same time I also knew that it wasn't fulfilling me and the personality that I had so the other part of Gladys is very organized and driven to success and very high achieving and wanting to see successes happen quickly like like every day you know for me if I could eat empty my email inbox that was a success and if I could create a spreadsheet that would help organize systems and processes for an organization that was a success and as a psychologist with a private practice you can't necessarily you didn't have those kinds of opportunities so there was a point in my career where I decided to go into academia mainly to keep my feet wet in public speaking and public speaking is one of my biggest passions ever and I ended up as a professor and much to my surprise that ended up becoming my career for almost 15 years where I took on various different roles ranging from academic advisor department chair of undergraduate studies and then in my last position I was the CEO and president of the National Hispanic University in the Bay Area here in California so yeah it was pretty incredible thank you it was it was very surprising and even to say it now I'm still surprised that that is the journey that I took but clearly I was being called to show up and be of service in ways that I didn't think I could but I learned that whole process that I I'm here to be a leader I'm here to shepherd communities through times of change and interestingly when I looked back at my career I had this experience with my mother right where I the devastation of losing her but this profound miracle that I experienced at her funeral and feeling that joy it became a personal philosophy for me as to how I would deal with change and loss so anytime there were relationship breakups or even like a job layoff or losing friends I would just remember that that I had the choice to make that experience what I just referred to as a good goodbye and I think we've all heard the term you know I'm not somebody that coined the term but it stuck with me and I thought okay I can make this a good experience and then professionally I ended up in so many situations where I had to manage large-scale crises and move communities through these different changes that would involve loss and so one good example was this last position at the National Hispanic University they had been open for 34 years and they were a tiny little University the founder dr.

Roberto Cruz founded the university with a mission to make it the University that Latinos can go to to get a great education so they were the first four-year accredited University in the United States dedicated to Latinos and as a Latina I thought this is perfect for me I really want to give to this community so I started there as the Provost and five months later I was promoted to president and then a month after that my first board meeting is when we learned that there was serious consideration being given to the vitality of the school they had had a lot of financial difficulties over those 34 years and they were having to take another really real hard look at the future of this University and within a matter of months they did make the decision to close the school down so here I was new to the University and now my mandate was to close the school down and shepherd over a thousand people from you know students to employees to community leaders and members through this process of saying goodbye to the school and I remember at a meeting with the community I said I don't I don't know how to do this I don't have a manual for how to navigate this situation in my desk but what I do know is how to have a good goodbye and that became me bringing in a personal philosophy because it was truly the only thing I knew how to do and bring it in to become a strategic initiative for how we close the school down so at that point in 2015 is when we close the school down and throughout that it was about almost like a two-year journey of closing the school's doors I was able to witness the community responding positively to this notion of a good goodbye and my leadership team and I creating strategies and initiatives to be able to give everyone a good goodbye experience and the term caught on so I was able to use my experiences professionally and combine it with the research that's out there on transitions and change and loss and even change leadership and change management and be able to interview folks survey people and use all of that to create an approach a five pillar approach that gives people tools for dealing with change and loss differently that was a beautiful synopsis and such a cool picture of how this came to be I'm already sensing a little bit of similarity and maybe you can steer me in the same direction or in another direction between your book the good goodbye and on death and dying which also contains the five stages quote-unquote stages of grief where acceptance is one of them and this is a big thing that's misconstrued in the grief community because people think you move literally through stages whereas you kind of just float in between a bunch of different buckets but I don't think Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and her co-author had vocabulary for that back in the day so there's a lot of misconception surrounding this concept but but when she talks about acceptance and this is actually one of my favorite books on on death dying grief and grieving is acceptance is not I'm okay with this my life is perfect now it's this is happening what do I do next and I think that's really powerful so can you give us maybe some clues or some hints at what the other four pillars are in your book sure well and I'm so glad you brought that up because I do speak about it in my book as well is that the the way that we took the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's model really spoke to the fact that we were needing something to make sense of how we grieve so I do think that there's something powerful in that but as you mentioned we think that acceptance means it's all complete we understand it it's integrated we accept it we we almost condone it and it's so opposite from what it is so I share in my book that acceptance simply means recognizing what's in front of you without trying to change it that's it what a beautiful definition I love it yeah thank you it's not it's not the whole package it's not the whole enchilada it really is this is what's happening in front of me period and when you can sit in that space long enough and not flood it with your judgments about it your opinions your shoulds or should nots or the what-ifs you start to experience something very profound which is the ability to then understand what's happening for you and understanding is a second pillar so with understanding it's really the the reflective process of okay how am I feeling about this which does require self-awareness and so that's a whole other process that people need to get to in terms of development but it gives you a chance to just say okay how do I want to get through this and understanding becomes this bridge that you start building from where you are to where you want to be and in that process of building the bridge and then walking through it is where you can start to experience things that will help you heal like gratitude and with gratitude it's where you start to see that what's happening for you might actually be full of blessings that you can have appreciation for your experience that's a form of gratitude right to be able to say I'm feeling angry as hell but I'm so glad that I can acknowledge my anger and make room for it that's that's a form of gratitude that you're expressing towards your own self when you can get to more gratitude towards yourself it naturally leads you to have more gratitude towards others in the situation that you're going through and that can help we lead into the next pillar which is forgiveness but one thing I do explain in the book is that the reason I didn't call these steps is because I wanted to get away from people thinking that it was linear and I call them pillars because you truly can start anywhere but if people want to think linearly it's just please try to start with acceptance right and then find your own path through these different pillars from understanding gratitude forgiveness and ultimately you will get to a place where then you can say goodbye so the last pillar is saying goodbye and that is really recognizing that even though you might have already lost someone or something you get to choose you get to stand in your full power and turn back to it and release it through your own goodbye and that can be a ritual as simple as lighting a candle writing a letter and burning it or something more elaborate to really honor that it's a rite of passage and that's something that I want people to really walk away with is that any time we go through a change or transition we are going through a loss so that you can move through this very intentionally in a way that you desire and really come out on the end being able to close that chapter in a way that feels right for you but most importantly integrate the experience into where you're heading as the next chapter unfolds I like that a lot because I feel like grief is day by day minute by minute hour by hour and everybody does cope differently with what comes up some people are our anger base some people are sadness or depression based some people do what the grief recovery method calls short-term energy relieving behaviors where they go shopping or zone out with TV or do food or booze or sex or whatever I'm kind of just navigating your own way through but making sure you start with this is what's happening and end with goodbye I'm wondering what are some tools or maybe some perspectives that you have that make this goodbye which is sometimes forced on us especially with death of loved ones or with divorce or with diagnosis how do we make goodbye either less unpleasant or more pleasant I don't know that it can be less unpleasant but I love the more may adding adding the pleasant tree within it right because we we do get focused so overly focused on goodbyes being negative and this is something that I break down in my book is that the collective stories that we have around goodbyes in humanity are not serving us well so if you if you think about some of the common phrases that people say around goodbyes like what what you know what comes up when you think of goodbyes oh I hate goodbyes I don't do goodbyes goodbyes make me sad I don't say goodbyes I don't believe in that I prefer to see hurting is such sweet sorrow totally you know but maybe I mean I actually like that one because if you look at sweet and sorrow they seem contradictory but that actually is such a poetic way to describe what goodbyes can be right so but it sounds very cliche right we're over it like we knew we need new what are those called colloquialisms or metaphors yes to just talk about goodbyes and this is where you know the good goodbye for me really it's stuck and it's it's sticking with people is that there is goodness in it and I think some tools to help people understand that for me really relate back to my belief that everything that happens in our life is all meant for our highest good everything every single thing even the worst experiences that we can fathom they're all happening to help us evolve and help us grow into our highest form self-expression and we get to choose what we do with those moments and it's hard for us when we're in the midst of deep pain and grief for example you know my mom dying from a brain aneurysm I didn't choose that I would never choose that in my entire life right I and having her ripped away from me so suddenly where you know Thursday I see her and less than 24 hours she's dead that kind of experience in the moment there is no way you could have convinced me that that was for my highest good I would have said screw you you know I I don't believe in that whoever thinks that's for my highest good like they're they're not a part of my life but if I look at what I accomplished as a result of this and November 7th with my mom's 14th year death anniversary and I was having lunch with my sister and I was saying to her you know I miss mommy and she said what do you miss about her I go I miss the fact that I can't hug her and see her and touch her and celebrate this moment with her I said but at the same time I also know that none of this would have happened if she was still alive I wouldn't have written a book I wouldn't have developed the good goodbye approach I wouldn't have gone on the academic path that I did nothing would have unfolded the way that it did had she stayed alive and when you recognize that the universe God spirit Buddha whatever you believe in is actually on your side and sometimes intervenes with these big losses to take you into a different direction because maybe that's the only way that you would have moved or budged from where you thought you wanted to go you can start to appreciate that okay there there actually is something good for me here and how do I soften into the goodness so that I can use that to help me as I continue to grieve with it what I've lost and no longer have Wow what a gift yeah I love it I've got one last question for you today and then we'll wrap up and tell everybody where they can find you but I would like to know what you are currently saying goodbye to oh that's great and I look around in my living room I am saying goodbye to so much of my furniture and I don't want to make light of it I'm actually gonna explain it because I've been paying close attention this past year I have cleaned out my closet close to ten times and I'm not a pack rat I'm hyper organized but there has been a deep desire for me to clean out and to just have the most essential things that just light my heart up the most right so I want space I want to clear out it's a space it's if you were to see me right now I'm literally moving my hands like make more room I need openness I need just more around me of nothing and so I'm saying goodbye to a lot of my furniture which I'm attached to because I love collecting beautiful things but a friend of mine and I he's actually going through the same process so we've been helping each other get rid of the things that we love we can have more room and he said Gladys you know part of what I observed from you is that you're saying goodbye to a part of yourself and and I looked at him I'm like no I don't need to say goodbye to any parts I mean what are you talking about he goes well there's you know the old Gladys beforehand you were in in a corporate career for 15 years you were definitely burned out I was burned out since 2010 I was dealing with these large-scale crises that definitely when you're dealing with crises in and out every single day in high-pressure position burnout is not just a guarantee but your whole nervous system is just shot right and since 2010 dealing with that and then 2015 having a closed down the university you know obviously my career did not get easier but recovering from all of that meant that I had to look at how how Gladys had evolved and Gladys was a stress case Gladys was very tense and walking around the world very much just what's the problem let's fix it let's move on to the next thing and when I ended my job there I had to take a lot of time to heal and here we are in 2017 getting ready to go into 2018 and I feel like I'm finally understanding that I am saying goodbye to an old way of living that sustained me for close to two decades that served me very well I have a very accomplished portfolio professional experiences I'm the first in my family to be a college graduate to be a doctor let alone the president of a university but the toll it took on me was pretty severe and I got disconnected from my joy and so being able to honor that part of Gladys that worked her ass off that showed up 2,

000 percent to lead communities for change that was tense and stressed out all the time she's she's she can take a rest right like I've really given her permission to lay down that's what I would say I'm saying goodbye to and I think an element of that is letting go of the furniture pieces that maybe were part of my past that I mean I had some pieces that I've had for a long time because they had such emotional value but I can let them go as they also release that part of Gladys from needing to constantly be on guard I'm getting this mental phrase in my head of and now it's time to breathe