A Guide to Living Fully After Loss | Spotlight Convo

Check out our offerings & partners: 

• Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
• Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

photo credits: Karen Pride, Ira James Photography

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Episode Transcript:

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] So how do we find meaning when it feels like everything is falling apart? When faced with profound loss? Whether a home, a human, a pet, even just your sense of peace and stability. Most of us, we try to rush through or avoid the pain. But what if those moments of deep grief could actually open us to a richer, more meaningful way of living? Today’s episode brings together three remarkable guides who offer wisdom for life’s most challenging transitions. My guests are death doula Alua Arthur, whose work explores how facing mortality can transform our lives. Grief therapists Claire Bidwell Smith, who brings both professional expertise and personal experience to help us understand Grief’s transformative potential. And speaker and community builder Cyndie Spiegel, who discovered profound wisdom about finding moments of lightness and joy while facing devastating losses during the pandemic. You’ll learn why avoiding grief may prevent deeper healing, how to create meaningful rituals around loss and ways to hold both joy and sorrow as essential parts of being human, even at times where it feels like they’re not accessible. Together, these three wisdom keepers offer a refreshing perspective on how we might approach life’s challenges with greater awareness, authenticity, and even glimpses of light in the darkness. So excited to share this spotlight conversation with you! I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:30] Our first guest today is Alua Arthur, a death doula, recovering attorney, and founder of Going with Grace, an organization that trains death doulas and helps people navigate end of life planning. Through her work, Alua supports people in finding peace with mortality so they can live more presently. Her book, briefly, Perfectly Human Making an Authentic Life By Getting Real About the End, explores how confronting death can lead to a more meaningful life. Alua brings deep wisdom an unexpected lightness to one of life’s most challenging topics, and offers a fresh perspective on how getting comfortable with death can help us craft lives of greater purpose and joy. Here’s Alua as we had this conversation. The professional work that you do is as a death doula, and we’ll go into what that is. And but this is not how you started into your early professional life of contribution. You were in the world of law, in legal aid, and you made this pretty profound pivot into what you’re doing now, which really raises my curiosity about what happened that sort of led to this really big transition.

Alua Arthur: [00:02:32] Depression happened. Being uncertain about what I was here for or what my life was about, what the point of any of this was. That’s what happened. I’d been practicing law for almost a decade at Legal Aid, and for all intents and purposes, it’s work that should have brought me profound meaning and purpose in my life. But I still felt really adrift. And it worked. Real number, I’d say, on my spirit and certainly on my mental health, and I was diagnosed with a clinical depression. And during that time, I went to Cuba, where I met a fellow traveler on a bus. And we started talking a lot about life and death. And I thought, wow, one day everybody’s gonna die, I’m gonna die. These people on this bus are gonna die. She’s gonna die. And I started to wonder if whether or not the life that I had led thus far would have been good enough for me. If the depression is what killed me. And the answer was a resounding no. And through viewing my self on my deathbed, through the lens of my mortality, was I able to start realizing that I needed to make a massive shift?

Jonathan Fields: [00:03:36] I’m curious because I think a lot of people are familiar with with the word hospice and hospice care and hospice nurses and and sort of like that modality. But probably not a lot of folks are familiar with the concept of death doula. So I guess, you know, the bigger question is what exactly are we talking about when we talk about a death doula? And then what’s the process of actually stepping into that path?

Alua Arthur: [00:04:00] A death doula is someone who does all of the holistic, non-medical, non-medical care and support of the dying person and their circle of support through the process. We can also support people when they are healthy in completing some comprehensive end of life plans. And so when I say the dying person, I’m talking about just somebody who has some awareness that death will eventually occur. So not just the people that have an illness that is going to end their lives, but rather anybody who has started to think about death in some capacity. I learned how to do this work well, for starters, after I came back from Cuba, my brother in law got sick about six months after I came back from Cuba. So I was deep still in like reading all the books and talking to anybody who did anything death related. And he got ill. He had Burkitt’s lymphoma stage four and four months after he was diagnosed, they couldn’t treat him anymore. It’s a really short amount of time. Not enough time to get your head around the fact that your brother in law, who you’re close to, who I was close to, was going to die for sure. And when? When we learned that they weren’t going to treat him, I went to New York, where he and my sister and my niece were, and I got to be with him for the last two months of his life. And I essentially served as a death doula for the first time without knowing what it was or what death doulas did, which is I served as part of the larger circles of care around him.

Alua Arthur: [00:05:26] He was at the center, moving toward his death with my sister holding his hand, his parents around him, my parents around him, his friends, his family in another circle, people in circles going all the way outward. And so to serve as a death doula, to serve as one of those circles of support around the dying person. That means I ran a lot of errands, compiled questions I would ask if they understood everything the doctor said when the doctor left the room. I researched everything. What do we do about his ashes? How do we figure out his will? What should we do with these leftover medications? How do we talk to a four year old about death? I researched, I asked questions, I was present, I stood with them. I had my own grief to deal with, but at the time, I was just trying to be useful somehow. If I did this part of it, then my sister could just be with her husband. If I, you know, picked his parents up from the airport, they wouldn’t have to worry about that. They could just think about their son. I took as much of the burden off of them so that they could be with what they needed to be with. And so that’s essentially what a death doula does.

Alua Arthur: [00:06:31] After his death, I was thrown into the frenzy of grief. And in my frenzy, I read some more, I researched some more. I cried a lot. I roamed around the world a bit, trying to trying to make sense of a world where the sun still came up when somebody who I cared for deeply had died. And if you know grief, you know what I’m talking about. I used that time to start looking at the ills in the world, the ills, the places where and where. There’s not a lot of support. And that was a big one. It was huge for me at the time. But also intellectually, I understood tens of thousands, 100, 150,000 people were dying at the same time that Peter was on the same day Peter died and most probably didn’t have support. And so I wanted to do that for other people. I started looking at the ways in which we could provide support. You know, if there was somebody I could have called in the midst of it, somebody who could make sense of what looked like Greek, that I was reading, trying to understand what to do with hospital medication. Um, somebody who could answer these questions, I would have given them anything. I would have been so grateful. A lot of hugs, but also money. Help me please. Um. And I couldn’t find anybody, you know, So I built a practice that looked like what I needed and it worked.

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:52] There’s so many questions there because this first experience for you was, was it, you know, a high speed and immersive learning process, but also it was your own process of loss, like your personal process, your own process and experience of grief. So I’m curious that you go through this. You see the value of what you’ve just been through and the knowledge that you’ve accumulated. But again, it’s associated with profound pain. And yet there was an impulse in you that said, I want to keep stepping back, stepping back into this sphere, like into this experience, not in the context of people in my own life. I’m curious, was there a concern at all that you, by keeping continuing to step into that, almost like keep retraumatizing yourself or re-experiencing your own grief? Because I would imagine it’s hard to step into that context and not in some way, shape or form feel connected to the people who are part of it.

Alua Arthur: [00:08:45] It can be. It can be incredibly triggering. I’ll tell you what, Jonathan. I’m hardwired for service, I believe. And for meet your needs, but also meet the needs of the people around you. And being in legal aid for as long as I was, I had to learn how to start separating myself from the experience of my clients, which was supportive. So that it’s much easier for me to do. Now, don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean that I can walk in their cold hard, see them as clients, and then walk out and not be changed. I grieve a lot. I cry a lot. I think about Peter all the time. I think about the experience that we had. And yet I’ve also learned how to identify my experiences my own and recognize the things that I’m carrying for other people that don’t belong to me to carry so I can share it with them for a while. And at some point I put it down because it’s not mine, which makes it possible to keep doing this work. I think if I kept piling it on, eventually it would take me down. But I’ve learned how to separate my experience from the experience of the other so that I can be effective.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:49] Do you have your own rituals or practices that help you with that process of of laying it down?

Alua Arthur: [00:09:55] Yeah, so many of them. For starters, one of the things that I do all the time, and it does not sound like a ritual until I realized how ritualistically I did it, is I eat a lot of kettle potato chips, salt and vinegar. Listen, I would find myself coming in from seeing a client go straight to the pantry and get the potato chips. Maybe some emotional eating, perhaps. But also, I think, like the sharpness of the vinegar, the the salt, the crunch, the fat. Something about it really soothes me. And I feel really alive. I’m chewing, I’m eating. It reminds me that not only am I still fully in this body and still very much here, but that I still have agency to put the chip in my mouth, to chew it up, to swallow it, etc.. It grounds me. It gets me present. It reminds me that this is mine. And this is what I have to carry on. I bathe, I take a bath often, sometimes a shower, but also to wash off what doesn’t belong to me. Um, one. One tool I use is when I am crossing into the threshold of a home where somebody is dying. I will put my hand on the door jamb to mark the crossing of a threshold, and then on my way back, I cross it again so that the person who went in obviously will be changed by everything that occurred there. But I must leave what was there there. Otherwise it can get heavy. But this work I don’t find heavy. I find it full and dense, but it doesn’t weigh on me like a brick.

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:26] Yeah, no, that makes sense. I want to talk a little bit about what we get wrong about the experience of death and dying, and also how to maybe make some changes there. But before we get there, one of the things that I think is just a curiosity as well, is this notion of, we don’t even talk about this before we even get to what to do or not to do, or what’s good and what’s what’s working, what’s not. It’s like we don’t even engage in this conversation. Like, this is taboo to even talk about the fact that there’s this thing that unites every single person who has ever been born. This is the one thing we will all experience like in a shared way. And yet we want nothing to do with the thought of it or the conversation around it. Take me into this a bit because you’ve been around it so much. And what’s your thinking on this?

Alua Arthur: [00:12:15] First of all, I’m as stunned as you are. Maybe even more so. It is the actual only thing. The only thing you know. Not everybody breathes air like we do. Not everybody’s liver cleans their blood like it’s the only thing that all of our bodies will do at some point. I understand the fear. I understand the resistance based on fear. I understand the The desire to not touch it because of fear. What I struggle with is the fact that we pretend it’s not happening at all, or that it doesn’t happen when, even if I cannot acknowledge the fact that I will die, I can’t acknowledge that some of the people in my life will, and that one day I’m going to have to deal with that. You know, I think the fear, the fear of the unknown is a big one, a big part of the reason why we fear death. But also, I think we fear talking about it, is that it evidences to others that perhaps we don’t have any control. And most of us are walking around earth like we got everything under control. But I don’t know anything that’s going on. I’m just doing my best minute by minute, you know? So even acknowledging that we will die, acknowledging that we have no, no control over when, where, how is difficult. Acknowledging that we don’t have any control over the body. Our bodies are fragile and they are vulnerable. And just a nick of a rusty blade can turn a healthy person into a corpse.

Alua Arthur: [00:13:34] Just like that. It’s terrifying. We feel powerful in these bodies than they are to some great extent, but they’re also very fragile. That makes us uncomfortable, but I think most of anything is the egoic sense of self, which places me at the center of everybody’s story and granted, granted. Science says I am the center of the universe, and I’m pretty cool. Maybe I am the center of the universe, but at the same time, there are 8 billion other stories happening concurrently to mine, you know, and all in the history of time, a whole bunch more. 100 and 210 billion. Mine is but a fabric in a giant tapestry. And when I can see it from that perspective, it allows me to create a little bit of, of distance from this main character energy that I carry around that we carry around. It allows me to see that my experience here, while massive for me, insignificant in the grand scheme of things, that gives me a little bit of grace to mess up a lot. It allows me to approach my life with a. Some lightness and gaiety, and to hold it all really lightly. Because 1 in 110,000,000,000. Yeah, yeah. One of one big deal. And I’m trying to be in that one of one as much as possible, while also holding that I’m also one of 110 billion thus far.

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:56] Yeah, that’s a tough duality for a lot of people, me included, when you decide to start doing this also, you know, probably my earliest reconnection with just like really exploring the notion of death and a good death was Atul Gawande’s book, which I think so many people really stumbled upon. Then it became really big, and I was really surprised. I remember how big that book became and how like it stayed a part of the public conversation for so long. And I was like, oh, so this is something that people actually want to know about, but they don’t seem to want to talk about, you know, like they’ll search out wisdom or information. But also that book kind of really made it clear it’s like we are potentially really getting wrong. What a quote good death is and is not. And I think that was a wake up call for a lot of people. So I guess the question I want to sort of ease into with you is in the work that you’re doing. And having been around this, it’s this notion of what is and is not a good death.

Alua Arthur: [00:15:57] That’s a big question, a big question. Yeah. Let me back up a little bit. I think that people actually do want to talk about it. I think culturally we don’t make space for it, because what I find with my work is that when I mention the work that I do, it’s one of three responses people lean in and want to ask me if I know what happens after we die. The answer is I do not. They tell me stories about when their mother or brother or father or sister somebody died, and how they wish that they would have had some support. Or they talk about grief and their fear or concerns about their own dying, or they shut down and walk away. The ones that shut down and walk away, though, I guarantee, are the ones that probably end up ruminating over it. You know, they don’t just shove it. I think they say, whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. And then probably spend some time on it. And I’ll bet that if I had a second chance with them, they would probably talk about it at that point. I think we want to talk about it. I think that’s part of the reason why that book was so big is because they were people were reading these words. They were learning about something that they probably had some inkling or curiosity about themselves and finally hear somebody saying the things. And so I hope that more people keep saying the things. One tricky thing is this notion of the good death, because for starters, just even embedded within is this value based judgment about what is good and what is bad. And many of us, you know, I think one of the things that I often have to support people through is when they are unpacking how somebody died and all the guilt or sadness or shame they feel over how the person died and the judgment of themselves in that experience or the judgment of the death and death just is the meaning that we make on it is the value that we assign to it.

Alua Arthur: [00:17:37] And I wish that we could pull away a bit from that judgment and think of it more as just it occurs, and we are all medical care systems included. I think doing the best that they can to support people, to not be in pain or to not die if you have violence and overdose and suicide and all the ways that we think of as bad deaths necessarily. Um, there are plenty of not good deaths that occur in the medical care system as well. And what I like to start seeing is us talking about the most ideal death under the circumstances. Just so many circumstances that people are dying in. And so a big portion of my job is to supporting people in experiencing the most ideal death under the circumstances. The notions of a good death are wrapped up in things like, you know, being free from pain, being people that you love, having an opportunity to make amends or heal relationships. To have all your affairs in order. For some, it’s being in their own home or in their own bed and wrapped up in a lot of these things is also conversations about agency and privilege. And and they’re they’re tricky to unpack. And so I think if we can identify what would be ideal for us and use that as a way to create a framework around preparing for the end of life, that could be really useful.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:58] You shared some of the things that we might think about. Agency is a word that you’ve actually said a number of times throughout our conversation, and I think a lot of people have heard that word thrown around a lot of different contexts. In this context, what are we really talking about when you use the word agency?

Alua Arthur: [00:19:15] I’m talking about informed decision making. I’m talking about me making choices for myself based on my value system. I’m talking about the opportunity to be able to communicate that and then have it be respected. Agency is a key component in helping people prepare for death. For me anyway, it’s like this is yours. You know, you get to have it how you want it. This is your death. You get to have it how you want it to the extent that you can. And I’m going to do the best I can to ensure that for you. And then when it’s my turn, I get to do the things the way that I want to.

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:48] So what are the questions that we would ask either of ourselves or like from the family, from those supporting that might bring as much agency, agency to the experience as we can muster?

Alua Arthur: [00:19:59] Many of them. I’d start with some conversation around end of life decision making. Who do you want to make your decisions for you in the event that you can’t? So somebody who’s going to serve as your healthcare power of attorney or your medical decision maker, somebody who would think like you would in making the decisions that you would and not do the things that they would do for themselves, or rather, do the things that you would like for yourself. I think it’s also important that we think about what kind of care we want at the end of our lives. Conversations about life support, treatments and our values. Thinking through things such as what values make a life worth living? What condition of living is worse than dying? Um. Thinking through I want to live as long as I can. Dot dot dot. To help people get clear on what they actually value. Because we can forward those into our dying if we’re clear about them while we’re living, which creates greater agency for us, because then I’m clear about what I value. And then hopefully you can just do that to the extent that you can. Having an advocate goes a long way. Having somebody who has heard you understands you and can go go hard for you when time comes is incredibly supportive. Um, I think as long as we are talking about what we desire, that goes a long way because we’re not doing that much at all.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:20] Yeah, you use the word values. Also, as soon as you said that, it reminded me of a conversation I had with a Rabbi Steve later in L.A., actually a couple of years back. And he was he shared with me the notion of, I think he called it an ethical will. Yeah, I think a lot of people have talked about or heard of last Will and Testament, like the standard definition of will, but the notion of an ethical will, as this is sort of like my key values that I want to share with you in story form. Like these are the these are the areas that I really have strong feelings and value associations with. And here are stories about them. And it’s not necessarily written in the context of somebody who feels like they’re close to death, but just somebody who wants to pass these on, maybe to children or family members or others and wants to really codify them. And I thought it was a beautiful notion and a beautiful potential gift to give others. But at the same time, just the process for you as an individual of visiting those questions, I think is probably so clarifying. And what I kept thinking was, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we did this earlier in the dying process, like assuming the dying process literally starts the moment we’re born, that what if we actually visited all these things much earlier in life so that we could get clear about them and live them, not just in when we know that we have a very small, finite amount of time left, although we might not know exactly what it is, but literally just from that point forward, once we have the clarity, say like, how can I step into this as much as I can? So I thought it was a really interesting exercise to do, almost like in different seasons of life as well.

Alua Arthur: [00:22:55] Absolutely. I’m smiling so big because my work here is done. We got it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:01] And that’s a wrap.

Alua Arthur: [00:23:04] Yeah, but 100%. Let’s talk about it. Even something seemingly small. When Aretha Franklin died, I was in a room with some elderly black people. And one of them brought up her funeral and that they had changed her outfit 3 or 4 times. And she said, well, I don’t want that for myself. She said, just put me one outfit and leave me alone. And I said, great. Does your grandson know this? Have you told anybody about this? This is something that you value. You know, this is something that you think is important. And we talked through why she wanted that for herself. And it was a casual gathering. Okay. I am bringing death everywhere I go into. But this was not a work event. This was just I was hanging out with somebody and some elders were there. And so if we can repeatedly, like, have these conversations casually when we need to, to start thinking about them, and then when it’s time to start to write them down, codify them in some way, communicate a little bit helps a lot more than nothing at all. And like I said, and I’ll say again and again and again, people do want to talk about it. They do. It’s just about finding the right time and occasion for it to come to pass.

Jonathan Fields: [00:24:09] Mhm. Yeah. No that makes sense. One of the things that you talk about also that you write about is this notion of I think the phrase you use is, is finding your feet. He’d take me into this concept a bit more, and how it relates to the conversation we’re having.

Alua Arthur: [00:24:22] Finding your feet, for me, is a practice and presence, because when I’m living in my head, I can be anywhere. I can be in Persia. I could be back on the plane. I can be rethinking that one silly thing. I said that one time that I still haven’t forgiven myself for, you know, not here in the present, but when I’m with my feet, when I can feel the slippers that my feet are currently in, or the floor where you sit or anything, grass underneath my feet. I’m here in the present because the body is always right here. The body can’t go to Persia unless I hop on a plane in this instant. The body is no longer. When I said that silly thing in the third grade. The body is here right now, and so it allows me to bring myself into the experience I’m having at this moment. It’s really useful when people are in anticipatory grief, which is an experience where somebody is already feeling the sadness of the death that hasn’t yet occurred. And there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not bad. It’s nothing to be fixed. Yet it can be debilitating for some, because then comes the guilt over not appreciating what they still have, meaning that the person is still present. And so this practice can be supportive. There just be like, we’re here right now and today your person is still alive. Today you are standing in Los Angeles. Today you are dot, dot, dot just bringing us right here, right now into the body for the body.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:44] I mean, would the practice be as simple as literally almost like feeling like intentionally scanning your body? Almost. And just like looking for physical sensations throughout the body? I mean, maybe starting in your feet, but then elsewhere, elsewhere to to sort of draw yourself out of your thoughts and into the somatic experience.

Alua Arthur: [00:26:02] That would be incredible if people can carry it up that far. Yeah. But so I just started with the toes. Just feel the toes, you know. What are they feeling? What’s the sensations? We’re right here. Ground here. Yeah. Great. If we make it to the calves. But I think at that point most people are often tomorrow night’s dinner. Right, right, right.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:18] When you think beyond the work that you’re doing, and also now in the context of a book that you’re putting out into the world, briefly, perfectly human. Do you have a sort of intention that you hold for this as it moves out into the world?

Alua Arthur: [00:26:30] My intention, I think, for all of it, even back into the legal aid days, is always to be of use. You know, to be of some use. I want to reach the end of my life, having made the experience of my fellow human just a little bit easier, if possible. If I can offer a shoulder, a hand, a word, if I can help somebody feel seen, if I can help them feel heard. If we can amplify or multiply that any one of us is doing, that creates good for other people in some way, that would be great. I teach death doulas also at going with Grace, and one of the big motivations in getting started there was to share the knowledge that I’d built with other people. You know, if I can do it one on one, that’s great. That’s one additional family that supported spectacular. But if I can teach five people to do it, that’s five more families, you know? And if I can teach 20, that’s 20 more. And then if that one teaches another one and before you know, it amplified going out there in the world. Ultimately, my hope is always to have been of service, to support somebody, to help somebody have a little bit of an easier ride while we’re here. It’s hard enough already, you know, it’s great to the fact that we all have such individual imprints and unique expressions means that I hold medicine for you, and you hold medicine for me. So let’s share as much of it as we can.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:57] It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Alua Arthur: [00:28:05] What comes up is the image of a hammock and sunshine and people who I love. The people that make me belly ache, laugh, make my cheeks sore. Um, people who make me feel like heart eyes emoji as soon as they round the bend. The smell of my partner’s shirt. Um, my niece and nephew grown up. My godkids. Ease of being champagne bubbles in my blood. In awe of life that feels like a good life.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:42] Thank you.

Alua Arthur: [00:28:43] Thank you.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:45] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Our next guest today is Claire Bidwell Smith, a licensed therapist and internationally recognized grief expert who has helped countless people navigate loss and transformation. Her work has touched readers in 22 countries, bringing clarity and compassion to one of life’s most challenging experiences. In her latest book, Conscious Grieving A Transformative formative approach to healing from loss, explores how we can approach grief with greater awareness and understanding. Drawing from both professional experience and expertise, and personal experience of losing her parents at a young age. Clare offers a fresh perspective on how grief can reshape our lives in meaningful ways. Here’s Clare. It’s interesting. We’re living in a time where I feel like the word grief has taken on different contexts and different meanings. And I think an interesting starting point would really just be to ask the question, what do we actually talking about when we’re talking about grief?

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:29:44] Hmm. That is such a good question. What we are talking about when we’re talking about grief, I really think is a series of emotions that come with change. I think we’re talking about change a lot when we’re talking about loss, and that is something we are often resistant to. And there are so many feelings that come when things change and when things fall away, and when our identities shift because of change externally and internally. And so I really think it’s the series of emotions that come up around that. Sometimes it’s fear, sometimes it’s relief, sometimes it’s exquisite anguish. Sometimes it’s just like a dull sorrow. You know, there’s so many different kinds of emotions that can come. But I really think that the entry point is change. For a long time, grief has been relegated to the loss of a person, which is what we mostly think about when we think about grief and when that happens, when we lose someone we love, someone we’re close to. It’s not wanted. It’s not something we invited or sought. And so in that way, I think that there is a huge shift that comes that’s quite painful and unexpected. Sometimes, even if the death itself was expected, what comes with it is really is really difficult. But we do grieve for all kinds of other things, even when there’s a positive change. You know, if we’re moving across the country or we take a new job and we’re leaving a beloved old job, even if we know that this is positive change. There is still some grief around letting go of things.

Jonathan Fields: [00:31:09] Yeah, I mean, no doubt it occurs to me also, we’re having this conversation on, God willing, the back end of a really brutal four years in the history of the world. And while a lot of people lost individuals, there was a bigger loss that I think so many of us had, which is this sense of this is the way that the world is, and that we can kind of count on the fact that we can wake up tomorrow and it’s going to look relatively the same. And in the blink of an eye that was gone. Does that in your mind? Is that a form of grief also?

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:31:40] Yes, 100%. I think we’ve finally really started to recognize that kind of grief. We’ve been talking about it more and more. I think we began to talk about grief in new ways during the pandemic. But as we hit this four year anniversary of it, I think that there’s vestiges of it that we’re not even recognizing still that remain. But what’s interesting to me is that the way you kind of phrase that about what kind of life as we knew it, you know, disappeared. But that happens too, when we lose someone we love. And what’s interesting to me is I see a lot of anxiety occur within within the grief process. And I’ve been writing about that for years. I was 18 when my mother died. I was just starting college, and it was a similar experience to the pandemic. Life as I knew it was suddenly gone. You know, the person who held our family together, the person who was my go to for everything was suddenly gone. And I didn’t really know what the landscape of my life looked like anymore, with her not in it. There’s a lot of reasons that we can develop anxiety after a big loss, or have our anxiety go up in levels after a big loss. Some of it is due to these changes that occur.

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:32:51] Some people, when they go through a big loss, they will have to change jobs or their finances will change, or they lose childcare partners or, you know, everything physically even changes, not just the emotional landscape, and that in and of itself can cause anxiety. But then there’s also the reckoning with our mortality. I mean, many of us who go through a big loss, maybe we’ve never been through one before. Maybe we thought we had acknowledged that death was down the road at some point, but we hadn’t really felt it or experienced it. And so suddenly you’re looking at life through a new lens. Safety and certainty can go out the window a lot of times with a big loss. And that causes anxiety, some kinds of trauma that come with loss, you know, seeing someone through a traumatic death or a long illness can be really difficult and give you a really different sense of the fragility of life and of yourself and other loved ones. Um, couple that with just kind of our, our culture at the moment, all the technology, all the social media, everything else that’s causing anxiety, politics, war and the environment, there’s so much going on. And so it’s all kind of ripe for so much extra anxiety that comes on.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:05] Yeah, that makes so much sense. You know, as you’re describing, that part of what’s going through my mind also is that when you use the phrase safety and security, and when that goes away, or when it’s like when, when it’s seriously dented, which I think it has been for almost everybody in some way, shape or form. I feel like different people respond really differently. Some people look at that and they’re like, wow, like, life is fragile. Life is we’re made no promises. I need to actually be the person I want to be, do the things I want to do, like show up the way that I need to show up, that I’ve always been afraid to. And others go the exact opposite direction. In your experience, is there a more common sort of default to that, or is it really just all over the place? Depending on who you are and what your history is?

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:34:47] I think it’s all over the place, and I think you can inhabit both realms. You know, I think it can be incredibly liberating to go through a loss that kind of pares everything down to its essence. You know what matters to you. What do you care about? What do you want to do with your life now that you kind of have this new understanding of it? It can be terrifying and also incredibly freeing to go through. And so I really see some people inhabit both. They’ll become more anxious, yet also more liberated in terms of who they want to be. And then you’re right. And then there’s the two sides of it as well. Some people really go into some very anxious spaces. And I think for those people, there’s also a part of themselves they begin to explore. That has to do with finding a new framework for which to understand themselves. Life meaning if they’re not willing to to ask some of those really big questions, they’re going to stay in that state of anxiety. I think it really does shatter your understanding of the world, and it changes your belief system whether you want it to or not, and whether you resist it or not.

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:35:53] It really begins to. I have seen people lose someone really close to them, and it seems almost impossible for them at some point not to wonder where are they? Can they see me? What happens when we die? These really big existential philosophical questions that they may have never asked themselves before. And I think that that is a part of the grief process as well. It’s a really interesting part, but I think it’s difficult for so many people who don’t have any kind of pre-existing framework or have stepped away from a framework that maybe they had growing up. I think that people are lacking ritual. They’re lacking community within their grief. They’re lacking kind of role models and historical evidence that they would have otherwise been able to kind of lean into. And I think we’re seeing it so much more in our younger generations, which might explain some of their anxiety as well. And so there’s been this really big proliferation of grief books and writing and work lately. And I think it’s because, you know, we’re becoming more non-secular.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:53] Now that makes so much sense to me. Your newest book, you make this distinction, you sort of create these categories. Well, you didn’t create them, but you sort of you map them. These five different types of grief anticipatory, complicated, ambiguous, disenfranchised, collective. Walk me through each of these a little bit, because I’ve never seen it sort of broken out this way. I thought it was really fascinating.

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:37:12] Yeah, I think it’s helpful to really be able to understand grief in different ways. Anticipatory grief is the grief that we feel when we know a loss is coming. So maybe thinking about empty nesting, or you have a family member with dementia or you know, you know, you’re going to leave a job, or maybe you yourself have an illness that you’re facing. There’s an anticipatory grief that comes with knowing how much losses is ahead. And that kind of anticipatory grief is is complicated. You know, it brings a lot of anxiety because there is that uncertainty and there’s not a definite date sometimes with some of these things. And so you’re often swimming in the sea of what ifs and maybes and thinking about things that haven’t quite happened yet. Ambiguous grief and disenfranchised grief. Those are really for grief and loss that are not as recognized. You know, pet loss, divorce, illness, racial disparity, you know, so many different places that aren’t necessarily being recognized by our culture. And so those are hard ones to carry, too. I think that grief is already pretty lonely and isolating. And then when you’re carrying some of those, when no one else can recognize them and see what you’re carrying, that can feel sometimes confusing, you may feel shame and doubt around some of those. I do really feel that it helps to find communities in which we can talk about our grief and loss, and feel seen by others who understand it or are going through something similar.

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:38:40] Again, it is really lonely. I think so many of the people that I work with, they have a lot of questions and confusion around their grief process, and they often think that they’re doing it wrong and they want to know, you know, what am I doing wrong? And how do I do this? What’s the answer? Is there a formula? And there isn’t a quick fix to grief? It’s frustrating that grief can look so different and feel so different in so many different losses. But it’s also true, you know, each loss and each kind of grief that you experience is going to be different from the last. You know, if you lose both parents, the grief that you feel for each one might feel really different depending on the relationship, depending on the age you are, depending on where you are in life, all of those kinds of things. And so finding ways to just be able to recognize and talk about that grief with other people who understand. But when you carry something all day, every day by yourself, you show up at work or you show up in your family and no one’s really seeing this grief that you’re holding, you begin to doubt it for yourself and you try to push it away.

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:39:43] And when we do that, it always kind of backfires. You know, there are so many versions of grief that become complicated or Edit or extended. I think when we have a loss that is complicated, maybe you were not close to the person for a period of time, or maybe there were things that were unresolved, and maybe you were in a relationship with someone who was somewhat abusive or very abusive, and yet you lose them. There’s a complicated grief that goes with that, and I think that that kind of grief takes more work because there’s so many layers to peel up. There’s so many things that you kind of have to work on before you can even get to the pure, raw grief. You have to sort through the relationship, sort through the manner in which things played out, sort through guilt or regret, and that extends the grief process in a big way. But I also think that we’ve been very naive about how complicated grief is in general, and how long grief lasts in general. So to put these stamps and labels on grief is sometimes helpful. And then sometimes it’s, you know, we’re just finally catching up in some ways to what grief really just is.

Jonathan Fields: [00:40:53] Is the ability to navigate grief in a way that is holistic and healthy and constructive as much as it can be. Is that the domain of certain people but not others, or does everybody have access to this?

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:41:07] I do believe everyone has access to it. I think that there is a privileged level, of course, where there are people who can afford to take time off and go to expensive therapists or, you know, do all kinds of self-care for themselves in grief and take time to just be with themselves during that kind of process. That is a very privileged place from which to deal with your grief. However, I think there’s a lot of ways we can engage with it. I think that even if you’re working a lot of jobs, even if you have a busy family, that you’re taking care of a lot of obligations, there’s still time to meditate for five minutes, write in a journal for five minutes, seek out an online community at no or low cost that can help you during a lunch hour. You know, get through some things. I think the main thing to engage with about grief is just to make space for it. Making space for it is talking about it, acknowledging it, trying not to just carry it without ever talking about it. You know, that’s that’s when things really go awry. I tell my clients, you can schedule your grief sometimes if you need to set aside some time on a Sunday morning or a Saturday afternoon when you don’t have as many obligations, and sit down and open up the grief.

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:42:19] You know, open it up by looking at photos, by playing music, by talking about your person and bring the grief on cry. You know, rage. Do whatever you need to do. It really does help you go back into your life and take care of the regular day to day things when you’ve made a little space for it. But I do a lot of group work in the grief work I do. I do retreats and groups and online groups and seeing people come together, even just for an hour on a zoom and talk about what is going on with them for their grief. Then they can go back to their job as a teacher, or go back to whatever it was that they were doing prior to jumping on a zoom in their car for 45 minutes. It really helps. It really helps them kind of be able to hold it in a different way as they do get through their days.

Jonathan Fields: [00:43:06] As you’re describing this, I had this flashback a number of years ago in conversation with Liz Gilbert, who lost, had recently lost her partner, and she described to me, you know, like being months down from it. And she thought she was kind of okay walking down the street in the East Village in New York. And she described what she called a carve out moment. She was like, literally, she’s walking down the street, her knees would buckle and she would be sobbing. And so I’m curious about the notion of, okay, so scheduling grief, take a half an hour or whatever it is every day and just be in it, completely immerse you in it. But that still doesn’t negate these random moments where it’s just going to completely hit you, does it?

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:43:46] No, it definitely doesn’t. There’s always going to be triggers that arise. You might see somebody who looks like your person, or you might hear a song when you’re at the store, you know that something might happen that just kind of brings you to your knees and really brings all of that grief. But if you’re already in a place where you are making space for it regularly, you’re getting more comfortable with it. Right? I think that’s the thing. I have so many people tell me they’re afraid to start crying because they fear they’ll never stop. They’re afraid to open the door to their grief. But I think if you’re keeping the door open on a regular basis, you’re not as afraid of it. And so when those big waves of grief come on, you kind of know how to ride them a little better. Does that make sense?

Jonathan Fields: [00:44:27] Yeah, I mean, I think it does. It’s sort of like it’s it’s like grief exposure therapy to a certain extent. Right. How do you approach advising somebody to sort of prepare those around them to understand what’s happening and be with them in a way where you feel like you can feel what you need to feel and express what you need to express. And they feel like they understand how to just be there with you and they understand what’s going on.

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:44:59] It’s a good question. You can only prepare people so much. There are some people who really can’t stand to see others in pain, or they really want to tidy up your grief, or they want to try to fix it, and there’s not really going to come a place where they can hold that space for you. I see this all the time and hear about it all the time from the people I work with, you know, even family members can’t. They just can’t allow them to sit in that pain. They’re constantly trying to fix it or trying to offer them some positive ideas. And you know, well, at least this or think about that and you be grateful for this. So you’re always going to have those kinds of people in your life. And I think again, this this goes back to the idea of community finding people who can allow for that space for you, who can see you, who can just let you be where you are in your grief is really important. Sometimes those are family members and close friends. Sometimes they’re new people. Sometimes they’re strangers. You meet in a grief group or, you know, at work, even when you share about going through a loss. There’s a saying about grief. Strangers become friends, and friends become strangers because there are people that really have a hard time with other people grieving.

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:46:10] And it’s one of the secondary losses that I think comes with other big losses. You start to really kind of shift everyone that you’re connected to who can show up for you and who can’t. That said, to answer your question properly, I do think that you can tell people you could send a text message or an email or tell someone to their face like, hey, I’m really going through this with my grief. I feel like I’m doing okay with it, but there are definitely moments where I’m struggling and this is what it might look like. And this is how you can show up for me. You know, either just hold space for me when I’m crying, or come over and hang out with me, or distract me, or help me talk about my person, share memories with me that you have. There are ways we can definitely do that, and I think there are people who will show up, and especially if you can tell them a couple of things that they can do for you, please come empty my trash every Tuesday. You know, whatever it is, people like to try to help.

Jonathan Fields: [00:47:05] You said a couple of things along the way. Also that without using the word identity, really spoke to the way that grief can change us on an identity level. And in fact, you use the word transform a lot. Um, you know, like when you speak, when you write and often offer grief up as this process that yes, can be brutally hard, but also that holds this potential for transformation a number of different ways. So take me into that a bit more.

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:47:30] I do use the word transform and transformation a lot, and I believe in it. You know, I think for a long time we’ve looked at grief as this horrible thing and this affliction that we need to kind of get through and get over. But I think that there is a lot of really beautiful things to find within grief. I think it teaches us a lot about ourselves. I think it asks a lot of us. It asks us to think about things we’ve never thought about before philosophical things, existential things, just what matters to us, who we want in our lives. Again, there’s some liberating aspects of it, you know, it can really help us kind of discard ways of being in the world or things we no longer care about in in light of this kind of loss. It’s a really hard thing to hear about when you’re in the beginning of a big loss. It’s really hard. You don’t want to hear about transforming at all. You just want your person back. You want to be out of this pain and agony. You want yourself back. You want your life to go back to the way it was. You don’t care about transforming. You really don’t. It’s something that comes in time and it comes in so many little bits and pieces that it’s almost upon you before you’ve realized, you know, after a while, all these little bits and pieces have occurred to really shift your identity and to change your view of the world.

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:48:43] I think there’s a real kind of letting go of ourselves and the and the person we once were when we lose someone else, and when we get to the other side of that through a lot of pain and fire and anguish, through knees buckling on sidewalks, you know, through, you know, losing finances and having to make all kinds of changes, all these secondary losses. There is a place we can get to down the road that really does. We look back and we reflect and we think, wow, I have grown so much and I have changed so much. And there’s a grief in that too. I mean, you know, you think, oh my God, my person never saw me become who I am now. And there are pieces of me now that are better than before. But again, that’s really hard to hear in the beginning. And I’m always aware of that and conscious of that and want to always kind of call that out. It’s like another part of that club that you don’t want to be part of. The people who’ve been in it for a long time know that there’s there’s some light at the end of the tunnel, but the people who are just arriving to the club, you know, we don’t talk about it right away. That makes sense.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:47] Yeah, the end of the day, it’s so much of this work is also about how do we tell the story of meaning in our lives and in the lives of those who we care deeply about. And then when they’re no longer there, how do we recreate meaning when so much of it was defined in relationship to people who no longer are with us? And that kind of brings us back to something you referenced a few times also, which is this notion of they’re physically not here with us anymore, but does that mean that they’re actually they we have to sort of like just cut ties and assume like they are actually in no way really accessible to us anymore. And whether you have metaphysical beliefs or spiritual beliefs that believe in the afterlife or not, even more broadly, you know, like, are there ways to carry carry them with us. Where? Yes, we have to tell a different story, but they can still be a part of it.

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:50:37] I think it’s actually so important in the grief process to find new ways to continue that relationship and carry them with us, and I think that we make a mistake a lot in thinking that the relationship is completely over. I think there’s a period of time in the beginning when we have to kind of adjust to the physical severance of that relationship. They are no longer physically here. They’re not going to walk through the door again. We’re not going to be able to pick up the phone and call them. However, when we have had somebody in our lives that we were close to, there’s an internal version of them that we keep. It doesn’t have to be spiritual. You don’t have to believe in anything in particular to access that internal version of them. You know, I had my mom for 18 years and I was so close with her, even to this day. It’s been 27 years since she died. I can still think of like, what would my mom think of my outfit today? And I know what she would say. Like, you’re wearing too much black, Claire. Like, you know, And I can hear her voice, and I can see the way she would say it, and that we have access to it all the time, you know, and we can go to them and we can still lean on them, ask them things, listen for the answer.

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:51:43] There’s that version of being able to connect with them. And then there’s the making, meaning ways that we can as well. I met with a rabbi. I’m not Jewish, but I met with a rabbi for a year at one point when I was working on a book about kind of exploring different versions of the afterlife and how that impacts the grief process. And he explained to me that in Judaism, there’s not a big emphasis on the afterlife being this place that we go. It’s more about what have you left behind, what’s the legacy you’ve left behind? You know, what were the good deeds you did here? What were the things that you can pass on to your children and your grandchildren? You know, what can you embody of the people that you loved and lost? How can you pass on those traits and those those qualities? And I think that that is the most beautiful version of the afterlife I can think of. You know, I think of my my father’s generosity and his his storytelling abilities and just bringing those things into the lives of my children who never met him is his afterlife. You know, how beautiful is that?

Jonathan Fields: [00:52:40] Yeah, very much so. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:52:51] To live a good life means to appreciate that at one point it comes to an end. My father said on his deathbed. He said to me that life wouldn’t be so sweet if it had no ending. It was one of the last things he said to me, and it has always stayed with me, not because it was the last thing he said, partly, but also just the realization that if it just, if it never had an ending, we really, I don’t think would value everything that we get to to find meaning in.

Jonathan Fields: [00:53:21] Hmm. Thank you.

Claire Bidwell Smith: [00:53:22] Thank you, Jonathan.

Jonathan Fields: [00:53:24] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors and bringing us home is my dear friend Cyndie Spiegel, a celebrated speaker, best selling author and expert in authentic leadership who has helped countless people discover hope in difficult times. Her book, Michael Joy’s Finding Hope Especially When Life Is Not Okay, it emerged from her own journey through profound loss, including the murder of her nephew, the death of her mother and a cancer diagnosis all within months. As a former professor at Parsons School of Design and Certified Positive psychology practitioner, Cyndie brings both wisdom and practical tools to help people embrace life’s complexity, and her work offers this refreshing alternative to toxic positivity, showing how we can really hold space for both pain and possibility. Here’s Cyndie. So when you’re in that spot and you’ve fallen to your knees and you’re realizing, like whatever tools or strategies or things I could think or advice that may have sort of helped me just coast along, given me access to what I’ve heard you describe as like big happy, you know, in the past, like it’s just not there right now. And it may be a long time before I can go to that place again, but that doesn’t mean that joy has to completely cease to exist in my life. But you have to step into it differently. And I guess that’s where sort of like this exploration of the concept of micro joy really comes from. So take me into sort of like the genesis of this, of both. Just the understanding. Yeah. How joy in some way, shape or form might still play a role in your daily existence. Um, that leads to this sort of like really fun term micro joys.

Cyndie Spiegel: [00:55:06] It’s interesting because after my nephew was killed, I remember very consciously thinking, I can’t be upbeat, positive, Cyndie, right now. I don’t have it in me. And that’s what people had come to expect. Sassy, but also positive, you know? And I was not her, I was not her, I was sad, I was grieving, I was broken. But I also knew that there were glimmers of hope and that I deserved some sliver of joy despite everything. And so it’s very easy to assume that Mike, rejoice simply means small joys, things you see day in and day out. And to be clear, that’s not that’s not my intent behind the word or the title of the book. Instead, Mike rejoice really came to be about honing the ability to find joy in spite of everything else. The sort of foundation of Micro Joys is about holding, learning to hold joy in one hand and grief in the other. At any particular moment. And so, as I started to slowly tell memories very publicly, or share memories about my nephew online, I realized that they brought me joy. You know, I would smile, I would think about this kid with these huge eyes, you know, in kindergarten, graduation in this big white robe that was way too big. And these things brought me moments of happiness and glimpses of joy. And so I started to call these moments, whether they were memories or something really cool that I’d experienced or, you know, a special gift that came, they became like, rejoice.

Cyndie Spiegel: [00:56:40] And really, what they were were these moments that I’d experienced where it wasn’t very far reaching to find them, to access these joys. They were there. They were with me every moment. So that’s the term. It’s not about small joys, but instead it’s about honing this ability to hold both things at once. As we move forward, I think we all need to reconsider what our narrative is for joy, because that outdated belief and toxic positivity like this good vibes only bullshit. Like that’s just not it. And as a world, we are grieving the loss of millions of people, and we have to learn a new way. And sometimes that means simply leaving space for the difficult things and not punishing ourselves, or feeling shameful for feeling a moment of joy when you’re in the midst of grieving. Because I think that’s that is so toxic when we can’t allow ourselves even a sliver of joy simply because we are grieving. And this book is really about feeling multiple ways and sometimes simultaneously, and leaving the space to feel all of it at once. Fall to your knees. Heartbreak, but also joy that is bigger than you’ve ever known possible. And sometimes you will experience that in the same breath.

Jonathan Fields: [00:58:03] Mhm.

Cyndie Spiegel: [00:58:03] And what grace it is to allow ourselves to feel that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:58:07] Yeah. And I also I don’t want to skip over. You used a word which is shame. I don’t want to skip over that because there’s the notion that when you’re going through great struggle, great loss, great upheaval or anxiety, or just straight up sustained fear and groundlessness, which almost everybody has been over the last few years, that you shouldn’t have access. There is something that is, quote, shameful about you, just like having access to something which makes you laugh out loud or like because it’s almost like, you know, you don’t have the right or the privilege to buy yourself out of this experience that like, you know, you just have to be in and especially when when that experience and that feeling becomes the fabric of society becomes the norm, then you saying, but there are still moments where, like, I loved and I laughed and I giggled and, you know, like I reflected and it was awesome. It makes you an outlier. And it’s sort of like, who are you to feel that when we’re all feeling this?

Cyndie Spiegel: [00:59:11] Yes, yes. I remember after my nephew was killed, having this very visceral response to finding any humor or joy, because I didn’t want my family or my nephew’s family to feel as if I didn’t care. And so I didn’t want to feel these moments of joy. And of course, no one would ever say that to me. But that was how it felt like, I can’t be too much of this. And what I’ve come to know is that very few things in life are absolute, right? Like grieving doesn’t need to be one way. In fact, some of the biggest micro joys that were experienced at that point were together as a family telling stories about my sarcastic ass Jewish mother or my nephew whose humor was so dark, like those were the things that brought us all so much joy. And it wasn’t until it became collective with my family that I felt like it was okay to feel those things. And as a culture, I think we have a long way to go in allowing people to feel multiple things.

Jonathan Fields: [01:00:22] Yeah, 2020 hits and the world is sort of like flattened by the pandemic. That alone would have been and was devastating for literally hundreds of millions, billions of people. Your experience of the years between 2020, and I would imagine even to a certain extent now. Um, the last 2 to 3 years wasn’t just that. It was almost like this impossible. Piling on of that and that and that and that. Talk me about these years. Talk to me like, share the unfolding that has been your life over these last couple of years.

Cyndie Spiegel: [01:01:02] Up until 2020. I was on an upward trajectory. I left the fashion industry, and I sort of stepped right in and had been figuring out this new way and speaking and writing, and things seem to be going well. They were in fact going really well. 2020 happened and there was a global pandemic, which we talked about. But in May, May 29th of 2020, my 32 year old nephew was walking to a friend’s house and he was murdered. Uh, now, this was the same week George Floyd was killed. So there was this echo everywhere of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter. It was finally landing on the global stage, as it should have been. And then there was the very real lived experience of my nephew, who was a young black man being murdered, and it became deafening. Everything I believed to be true about the world shook in that moment. And, you know, I could obviously spend the next hour talking about that. But what happened shortly after that was four months later. My mom, my beloved mother, who you know, anyone who knows my work, knows. I’ve always talked about my mom and her influence. My mom died, and I will often say this about those two incidents that my mom helped to raise. My nephew and my brother was only 18 when my nephew was born.

Cyndie Spiegel: [01:02:25] When my nephew was killed, he was actually living with my mom. So she’s the one who answered the door at 2 a.m. to the police, letting her know that her grandson was killed. I often say about their relationship that I believe she at least partially died of a broken heart. Four months later, she died. She was certainly not healthy, but we didn’t expect her to die. And it happened. Her her decline happened very quickly, but nonetheless. Um, in September, on September 22nd of 2020, she passed away. There’s so many layered pieces of that time in my life. So we, you know, my nephew passed away. My mom passed away a month after my mom passed away, my 49 year old brother went into cardiac arrest. He had a stroke. He went into cardiac arrest again, completely out of nowhere. He spent the next ten weeks in the ICU. That was sort of it for us. My oldest brother, who had just lost his firstborn son, and my mom. We were now together having to become caretakers for my other brother because again, at this point in the pandemic, there were no visitors and there certainly weren’t visitors to the ICU. But we called three times a day for ten weeks straight because we wanted to ensure that my brother was cared for and we couldn’t be there.

Cyndie Spiegel: [01:03:43] So we needed the staff to know that no matter how hard they were working, we wanted them to know that he was loved. And so that’s what we did. So by the grace of who knows who, my brother did make it home ten weeks later. And just as we thought everything was starting to settle, the dust was starting to settle and we would find some new normal. I had started to catch up on my doctor’s appointments that all of us sort of postponed for that first year of the pandemic and was quickly diagnosed with breast cancer. It came out of nowhere. I could not have expected it. There were no lumps. It was so far afield from anything. I thought that was possible. But I was nonetheless. And quickly thereafter, they found another spot with breast cancer. You know, I feel very lucky in the sense that it was early stage breast cancer. So I went through, I don’t know, 26. I almost can’t remember 26, 28 sessions of radiation. I didn’t need chemotherapy. We live by, you know, one of the best cancer hospitals in the world. And I moved through that time. But truthfully, I didn’t tell my brothers about my breast cancer diagnosis until about six months ago.

Cyndie Spiegel: [01:04:51] And the only reason I told them then was because the book was coming out, and it’s mentioned in the book. But I remember when I did finally sit down and tell my brothers about it, my oldest brother started bawling. I’m sure he’ll love that. I’m telling everybody this and my my younger brother just froze up and I was sitting between my two older brothers. They’re both older than I am, and I made sure to be really light and to laugh about it because I didn’t know. I didn’t want to break their hearts again. And I felt like as a family, we had lost so much that I didn’t want to do that to them. And so until I absolutely had to tell them I wouldn’t. And when I did, I made sure that it was very light. I laughed, I made jokes because that’s what we do in the Spiegel family. We make light of things. And so that was a very long answer. But that was the the long and short of it. And then there were the two years that followed that and or the year and a half that followed was me really trying to find my way back to myself. And that’s how Mike Richards came about. Yeah, it was a bit of a me coming home.

Jonathan Fields: [01:05:54] Yeah. You know, we’re all going to go through hard things. We’re all going to suffer. We’re all going to struggle. But can we actually are the things that we can do where as we’re moving through them, we still have those moments available to us, which I think so many of us would like to have and believe is possible right now. You lay out in the book, I think it was about 50 essays, which described vignettes, stories from your life going all the way back to like recent moments and then invitations or prompts at the end of each of these. I would love to go through some of those because I think each one of them is both telling, but it’s also they’re great invitations for everyone listening to be like, oh well, maybe I can explore this a little bit. One of the early ones is sort of like your experience around spices and spice shops.

Cyndie Spiegel: [01:06:40] Oh yeah. So the first thing I would say before I get into any of that is in order for me to have really understood the fullness of micro joys, I had to sit in my grief because micro joys are really foundationally. It’s accepting all of it. And so we don’t reach this place by escaping the hard stuff we reach this place of recognizing micro joys, when we can experience the contrast of the hardest times. And with the spice shop in particular. It was in Brooklyn. It’s sahadi’s. It’s been around for a hundred years at least. And every week I would go into the shop, and it is one of those magical places to me where the smells, the lines, the food, the languages. I just remember after all of this happened, going back to Brooklyn and visiting Sahadi’s and feeling so present for all of it. Now, this is a store that I went to day in and day out when we lived in Brooklyn Heights. I had never experienced it as much as I did that day because I was so present. I listened. I felt, I smelled, I tasted the food, and I remember walking out into the winter day feeling so alive. I couldn’t tell you about most visits that I had to sahadi’s, but that one. Three years later, I could still tell you about it in detail. And that is the power of being present.

Cyndie Spiegel: [01:08:15] Allowing everything else temporarily to fall away. Now that temporarily peace is really important, right? Because we can’t walk through life ignoring most things. But when we allow ourselves the grace of being present in any moment, the way that I did that day at Sahadi’s, it becomes so tangible and it becomes a place that I can always go back to. So now, if I need to sit down and think of something that brought me joy, I can think in detail about that winter day that I went to Sahadi’s. So presence, being present and really practicing, being present while also acknowledging right, that we can’t always be that way. But can we take a half an hour once a week. And I don’t want to make this prescriptive. And I remember actually, Jonathan, you and I talking about this before I wrote the book and I said, I don’t want to tell people how to feel anymore. I don’t want to tell people what to do. And we had talked about that for a while because you said, yeah, no, I haven’t wanted to tell people what to do for a long time, you know. And this book is not about telling people what to do. It’s not about telling you how you can access all of the micro joys. It’s about sharing my own lived experience and giving you something to consider.

Cyndie Spiegel: [01:09:30] Like, consider being present in moments, particularly when you are struggling or in a difficult time. Take a moment and consciously choose presence. Something else that I walked and moving out of that period of time with is the power of memory, the power of tradition, of writing things down. I tell an essay in the book now I am bluish, right? I am a black Jew. My mom was such a Jewish mama. I mean, she loved through food. I tell you know, I’ve written essays in the book about my mom’s food, and about a year or so before she passed, I remember she was wanting to get me a birthday gift or a holiday gift. I don’t remember what. And I said, you know, I don’t want you to buy me anything. What I would love if you would start to write down the family recipes. And I knew that we had the recipes, but I wanted them in my my mom’s old hand, like her own handwriting. And so, as best she could, she spent the next year handwriting the recipes for me. That to this day when I open that book, I can feel my mom, not only because I see her handwriting, but because Mama Shelly was giving me notes on how to be in the world. Like she would give me a recipe, and then she would say, and don’t forget, don’t walk away from the stove.

Cyndie Spiegel: [01:10:47] Because if you walk away from the stove, you’re going to burn the pot. And if you burn the pot, like she’s literally giving me this sort of motherly advice and I don’t know where I had the forethought to ask for that, but it has really reminded me to write down memories, because when we lose our people, we lose a bit of our grounding and having those memories to go back to and keeping them somewhere where we can go back to them is a really beautiful way to activate a micro joy. Another one is to be in conversation with friends and ask them to remind you of funnier times, a silly situations that you’ve been in. Because again, in the hardest of times, I couldn’t come up with anything. I just couldn’t. But our friends and our family become our memory keepers. You know, we remember things about other people that we don’t remember about ourselves. And, I mean, it was amazing the stories that were told that made me laugh so hard that my stomach hurt even in the midst of everything, because I could choose to talk to friends and say, can you remind me of a better time? So presence is really the foundation of micro joys. Allowing yourself to be present, not just physically, to experience the space around you, but to experience the conversation that’s being had.

Cyndie Spiegel: [01:12:09] To experience the details that are surrounding you. To listen to what is happening and to just be in it. And what was equally important to me was sitting around doing nothing, which is not something I have ever been comfortable with. And when I say doing nothing, I don’t mean I literally spent 365 days sitting in a chair, but the idea of sitting in a chair for two hours watching my cats or plants or looking out the window, it has created a calm in me that I have never experienced. So these are all micro joys, and I don’t think that I could ever go back to who I was before, because the world has changed and I have changed, and micro joys have truly been a tool for me to move forward. And I try not to say move on because I think it’s just, again, one foot in front of the other. But when we allow these moments to sink in for us, these memories, these thoughts, these feelings, these words to truly matter, then we always have the ability to access them when we need them most. But if we move through the world not paying attention and expecting that everything will be there forever and not truly understanding or seeing what is. We can’t go back and access these beautiful experiences because they’ve gone.

Jonathan Fields: [01:13:33] I want to also, um, there’s a word that you introduced that I’d never heard before, and that was Freud and Freud. I think a lot of people have heard the term schadenfreude, you know, which is sort of like wishing ill of others.

Cyndie Spiegel: [01:13:45] Wishing it, but kind of not.

Jonathan Fields: [01:13:47] Yeah. Or reveling in the demise of others. Um, you introduce sort of like the opposite term, which I never heard before. And I thought it was really cool because in those moments where we’re struggling, really finding a hard time figuring out how do we access joy through the own circumstances of our own lives. It’s like a gateway to be able to experience that through the joy of others.

Cyndie Spiegel: [01:14:12] Yeah, it’s borrowing someone’s joy. So bread, who is a woman in dear Grown-ass woman? She actually introduced this term to me. And it’s Freud and Freud, I think. And it is the opposite of schadenfreude. So it is feeling joy for the joy of others. And it’s really allowing ourselves to be in those moments when people are experiencing beauty. One of the things that comes to mind for me first is seeing someone in a public place get engaged. You’re at a game, you’re in the middle of Times Square. You’re in the mall. You know someone falls to a knee, perhaps, or just turns over and the camera pans to them and you see them getting, you know, getting engaged. And hopefully the other person says, yes. And the entire audience breaks out into applause. That is the ultimate frightened parade, right? Like we are in it with you at that time. Our heart is swelling for you. There’s not a differentiation between my joy in that moment and yours. We are all in this together. We are all allowing ourselves to feel joy at the joy of someone else. Uh, you know, your best friend calls you and announces that at 45, she’s pregnant and she didn’t want to have kids before. But she did for the last few years and you were over the moon for them. But there are so many moments that we have where someone shares their excitement with us, and we simply accept it and move on. And the idea to me, with Freud and Freida is again, in these moments when times are difficult, borrow someone else’s joy, borrow someone else’s. If you can’t find it in your own well, that’s okay. That’s temporary. But borrow someone else’s and allow yourself to feel joy for the joy of others. I also loved that word.

Jonathan Fields: [01:16:00] Yeah, I love it too, and I think that is a good place for us to come full circle as well. So I have asked you this question, but it was a while ago, so I’m going to ask it again, as I do at the end of every conversation in this container of Good Life Project.. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Cyndie Spiegel: [01:16:17] To live a good life means allowing yourself to be quiet when you need to, and joyful and loud and over the top when you want to.

Jonathan Fields: [01:16:27] Thank you.

Cyndie Spiegel: [01:16:28] Thank you.

Jonathan Fields: [01:16:30] And that wraps up today’s spotlight conversation on grief, loss, and meaning making. Thanks so much to Alua Arthur, Claire Bidwell Smith, and Cyndie Spiegel for sharing such profound wisdom about navigating life’s hardest moments and finding meaning in the midst of loss. And if you’d like to hear more from each of those transformative conversations, you can find links to the full episodes in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by, Alejandro Ramirez, and Troy Young. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music, and of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you’re still listening here. Do me a personal favor, a seven-second favor, and share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that’s awesome too. But just one person even then, invite them to talk with you about what you’ve both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.