Grief Beyond the Five Stages: Relearning the World with Dr. Thomas Attig

Most of what we think we know about grief is wrong. The five stages. Closure. The push to let go and move on. Dr. Thomas Attig has spent nearly 50 years making the case for something better.

Dr. Attig is an applied philosopher, emeritus professor at Bowling Green State University, and past president of the Association for Death Education and Counseling. His 1996 book How We Grieve: Relearning the World became a landmark in modern grief studies. His new collection from Oxford University Press, Seeking Wisdom in Death’s Shadows, gathers 50 years of his work in 23 essays.
In this conversation, Eddie and Dr. Attig explore why the Kübler-Ross stages were built for dying, not grieving, and what actually happens when someone we love dies. They discuss grief as relearning how to live in a changed world, the ongoing love that continues after death, the self as a web of connections, and the crucial difference between reacting to loss and responding to it. Dr. Attig also draws a line between problems, which we can solve, and mysteries, which ask us to be transformed.

This episode is for anyone grieving, anyone walking alongside someone who is, and every clinician who wants a deeper framework than the one taught in graduate school.

Get the book: order Seeking Wisdom in Death’s Shadows directly from Oxford University Press and use promo code AUFLY30 for 30% off - also on Amazon.

For additional resources and helpful information, go to voyagescounseling.com and eddieeccker.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

So most of what most of us think we know about grief might be wrong. Stages, closure, getting back to normal, the advice to let go. My guest today has spent nearly 50 years arguing this. And this is the Voyage Guest. I'm Eddie, your host, as always, and I am here with an excellent, an excellent guest who I have come to enjoy so far, Dr. Thomas Addick. Thomas Addick is an applied philosopher, which we'll explain in a little bit. And he is one of the most influential voices, probably in modern grief studies. He has been writing and teaching about death, dying, and grief for more than 50 years. He's an emeritus professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, past president of the Association for Deaf Education and Counseling. And his first book in 1996, How We Grieve, Relearning the World, which is probably one of the most common ones or recognizable ones to the readers out there or listeners out there. His new book, Seeking Wisdom in Death Shadow, is just out from Oxford University Press. And it is his collective work. It's his magnum opus of 50 years of death and dying and study. There are 23 essays, five parts, and it's endorsed by every senior figure in the field, which is fantastic. And so far, it has been my pleasure to talk to you, Dr. Adams. Thank you so much for being here and sharing with us your wisdom.

SPEAKER_03 1:38

It's really nice to be here, and thanks for the invite. You're welcome.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

So before we get into this, like I mentioned, what is applied, what is an applied philosopher? What is that?

SPEAKER_03 1:48

Philosophy by definition is the love of wisdom. Applied philosophy is the idea that's very simple to take seriously the need for wisdom in everyday life, in environments outside of the schoolroom. If there's something serious to think about other than scientific agendas, philosophers are the folks you might want to have around. Starting in about the 70s or early eighties, uh, philosophers in many places started think uh teaching things like medical ethics, environmental thought, philosophy of law, the philosophy of art, lots of things. Government uh studies of all sorts can be done from a philosophical point of view. We had the first PhD program in applied philosophy at Bowling Green established in the 1980s, uh 1987 to be exact, and it happened to coincide with the fall of the Soviet Union about three or four years later, when there were lots of hungry students from the East Bloc who wanted to study Western thinking. And we put together a program with some economists and political scientists offering them to teach them about how folks in the West, the Western bloc, thought about justice and and and so on. And we had many students from the eastern part of the continent, and uh by the time the uh nineties were done, uh they turned out not to be so interested in Western thinking after all, and we've seen some of the consequences ever since. Yeah. But uh applied philosophy, where do you need some careful thinking about moral, ethical, political, aesthetic values and activities and so on? Bring a philosopher into the room, they're sure to offer some interesting perspectives.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

I love that. Um I I know that my profession, psychology, is birthed from philosophy ultimately. Uh, but what I've noticed, and I don't think is good, and kind of what you're reminding me of, actually right now, is the idea that philosophy is not super well integrated anymore into uh our graduate programs. Uh at least it wasn't in my experience, and when I'm supervising other clinicians, I don't see that integrated very well. It feels like we need a comeback of applied philosophy into our graduate program.

SPEAKER_03 4:28

I always believe that.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Yeah, I'm I'm with you on that. I think that would be fantastic. I I have not we're not anywhere near where you've studied, but I have some semblance of philosophical basis just because of my my undergrad education. There was some push towards that. Not because I chose it, but it was sort of interwoven into our program. But when I got to graduate school, there was almost nothing, which I find very interesting because it's it's so important to teach us how to think about things.

SPEAKER_03 4:57

I think so.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_03 5:00

And and and there's so much failure all around us.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Yeah. Yeah. And to to that point though, and and this is actually something I like I mentioned to you before we started recording, is uh this is a timely episode talking to you about grief, about death, about dying. And interestingly, I've been talking to a lot of my uh clinicians uh and clients about grief, death, and dying. And I find that as I'm talking to people, I don't have your level of expertise on this, but as I'm talking to people, I'm finding there is uh a real lack of literacy about something that's so basic to our human nature, something we all inevitably go to at some point. We're not nobody talks about it. Everybody pushes it aside, they wanna they want to get over it and all of this kind of stuff. And it brings me to my question of like with such ignorance and such desire to ignore so much, what prompted you to make this your career?

SPEAKER_03 5:56

I'm afraid that's a long story.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

A can of worms we open.

SPEAKER_03 6:04

I'll do it as quickly as I can. I was born into two large families. My father was one of ten, and my mother was one of nine. Yeah. And all but one on both sides married. So uh when I was growing up I had approximately thirty aunts and uncles and that many or more cousins. And my dad was eighteen years older than my mother, so his family started dying considerably earlier than hers. I remember when I was small, first first memories of death and dying were of going to hospital rooms and going to funerals. When I was five or six, a cousin on dad's side died, and we didn't go to funerals that were very far away because people just didn't do that at that time. They couldn't afford to do it, they couldn't take off work, they couldn't do things like that. So a letter came, and this is the first one of them I remembered, but there were dozens along the way. A letter came, my mother easily just picked up the letter and thought, oh, this is about so-and-so. And she opened it and it was a death notice and discussion of the life of the fellow who had died. And instead of just going to my dad and saying, Look, we've got this letter, the whole family had the letter. I had a brother that were the two of us. He was nine years older than I am. That becomes important later. She decided to read the entire letter front to back. And we had lots of those letters while I was growing up, and I thought that's what people did in families when somebody dies.

SPEAKER_02 7:48

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 7:48

They talk about them and they read whatever descriptions they could get about what happened. Sometimes they inquire for more. Turns out it's very rare for people to do that in families, but that's what our family did. I remember my editor with the first book I wrote some time ago. She said, How did you get the way that you are so comfortable with this? And I said, Well, we, you know, mom used to read the letters. What letters? She said, Oh, we never heard a letter like that in my house. In fact, I don't think I attended my first funeral until I was about 19 years old. And I thought, okay, that's unusual from my point of view, but maybe what I haven't experienced is unusual from yours. Anyway, I became used to it, and when people began to get sick and went weather side of the family, they lived in the Chicago area where we did it. So she would take me to the hospital, and we would sit all day with someone who was dying, sometimes talking, sometimes just sitting. And I got used to that.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 8:50

I can't say that I loved being there, but I loved the people I was visiting. Sure. You know, it was a little quiet and inactive, and little kids aren't comfortable with that. But I got comfortable with things that a lot of people were uncomfortable with. And if it really upset me, Mom was good at drawing tears and holding me and so on. So I was inculturated just into being familiar with this. And some of the stories were horrible. I I had a cousin who suicided. I had a cousin who lost an arm in a combine accident, but continued to farm until he was combined to death. He fell into the machine and farm processed. All right. Wow. Now these things are shocking, but it's just part of what I grew up with. I always wanted to be a teacher. I admired my teachers most, and my brother was on his way to becoming a teacher, nine years older than I was, so I got to watch him go through college and all that stuff. And I was really good at math. Perfect scores on the SAT and the advanced SAT and so on. And I thought, I'm going to be a math teacher. And one of the guys I admired most was this wonderful math teacher in high school, Mr. Midendorf. And I went off to Northwestern, confident that I was going to major in math. And about the first part of the first semester I was there, I had a stream of math professors coming through. People were breaking legs, people were getting sick, people were sort of forced off on leave for some kind of reasons and so on. So I watched seven professors come through, and I didn't want to study with any of them. And it was pretty clear that several of them did not want to touch the likes of me or teach the likes of me. So I thought, wait a minute, you've got to be a teacher. You make up your mind on that. Do you want to teach trigonometry to students who do not want to learn it? And the same problems through 30 or 40 years of teaching in a high school. Why do you want to teach people who don't want to learn what you have to learn? No, that isn't the life I want to live.

SPEAKER_02 11:07

Yeah, fair.

SPEAKER_03 11:08

I think the humanities. So I in my sophomore year, I tried literature, history, and philosophy. And I liked philosophy the best and I did the best. So, all right, I'm going to study philosophy. I studied phenomenology and existentialism. Phenomenology teaches you how to describe and interpret experiences, the full range of human experiences, not just knowing or not knowing, but living your life in all kinds of different in different ways. And existentialism, where you're challenged to think seriously about how to live a finite life that ends in death with meaning and integrity. And that's what I knew when I left undergraduate school, so I looked to study more of that as a graduate student. I studied with one of the all-time best historians of phenomenology, and I I wrote a dissertation while I was there. Before I got to the end in doing that, about the second year after I passed my prelims and they said, Yeah, you can go ahead and get your PhD. My dad died. And dad was 70 was 73 when he died, and he'd had about five years of a succession of strokes that sort of made him disappear on the bed where he was. He was uh it was time for him to die. We had good conversations where it was pretty clear that I told him how much I cared for him, and he told me the same. So there were no lingering issues, and I didn't feel bad about facing death or anything like that. I was driving back from the uh funeral and I just noticed, you know, just just for the goodness in it, it would be wonderful to be able to sit down in a chair with a a philosophy professor I admire and have a serious talk about what's just happened and what do events like this mean. I didn't need counseling, I just wanted I wanted some wisdom wisdom in a conversation, and I couldn't identify a single member of the faculty who would be comfortable with me approaching them that way. Some because they were small and I was big and I was a little bit scary. No one was intimidated by the vastness of my mind or anything like that. Most of them I thought of as kind of stiff or caught up in the in the textbooks that they were reading and teaching. Uh and I I said to myself, look, you're gonna be a professional professional philosopher and you want to be a teacher. All right. You don't know exactly what you're gonna be teaching, but be accessible, be approachable, be the kind of person that I would like to find at the end of this road where there's a good conversation to be had and maybe a little bit of wisdom to share. And I started teaching at Bowling Green State University, and within a couple of years of my teaching phenomenology and existentialism and some ethics courses there, they invented a new college of health and human services with programs in nursing, social work, gerontology, child and family development, among others. And I thought the students in this course could use a course on death and dying. I've been dealing with a few death and dying issues in my ethics classes, and it comes up in the existentialism as well. I think I can put together a class. I proposed it, they said, come on ahead, do it. And I thought they don't really need a mini ethics course. We'll scatter an ethics issue or two throughout the the the weeks, but what these people need is the courage to go into rooms that I've had the courage to go into all of my life, where people are dying, where people are grieving. And uh they're gonna be scared to do that. Uh we have to talk about death and dying in a way where they can reflect on their own personal experiences with others who are dying, facing their own mortality, and so on. So I did this important thing. I thought we should do self-reflective exercises as a main part of the course so they can think through the experiences they've had, how they've maybe affected them negatively, or weighed down on them, or put them off, or confused them, or whatever. So I had him write on their three most important loss experiences, preferably through death. And they wrote hundreds and eventually thousands. And in the first few years that they were writing them, I just had discussions with the class afterwards. And then I started feeding back some ideas, and I said, Look, none of you have mentioned a single of Kubler Ross's five stages of dying and grieving. They never did. And there were hundreds and thousands of these stories. The stories were about their engaging with the world as it changes when somebody dies. And they're there's they're saying there's there's all that stuff left upstairs. I don't know what to do with it, or my family didn't know what to do with it. Or grandma is in a bad way now, and I need her, and I want to have a conversation with her, but her son, my father, just died, and we both need to talk to one another, but neither of us knows how. Or there was a young fellow who startlingly, I can I'll never forget him, he was a strong guy. He said, I I went into the living room one day, and I found my father with a gun in his hand, and he was thinking of killing himself. And literally, I had to wrestle the gun out of his hands. Or my dad would have died. People talk about they they can't go through neighborhoods because they used to walk there with the person who died. They're not sure about going back to that church where they were told things that are incompatible with what's happened.

SPEAKER_02 17:34

Right.

SPEAKER_03 17:35

They they don't know how to handle the fact that the families now lost their major source of income and they may have to leave their house and and go to a completely different way of living.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

Right.

SPEAKER_03 17:46

And so on. Eventually I started feeding back to them what they were telling me, and I said, It seems to me that what you're talking about and the challenges you're facing when someone has died, is your world has changed much more than you ever thought it was going to. And you don't know how to go on living given the changes that you're gonna need to make.

unknown 18:12

Right.

SPEAKER_03 18:12

And it's overwhelming. It's it's huge. That's how I got there. I started writing about it, and it got a little out of hand, but I've now written things than I ever thought I would.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

Yeah, I I don't think it got a hand. I think I think you did the right thing in writing about these things. And it's interesting, you you brought up Kubler and Ross, and uh I was curious if you would talk about that a little bit too, because it's I mean, that's the framework that that we learn in graduate school. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:42

It's it's the framework that the culture learned. And she she wrote about that as five stages of dying. And there's a plausibility to it I can explain, but there's no plausibility to thinking of grieving as unfolding in the same way. When you're facing dying, you're facing something that normal people like you and me, with egos that like to control things, are really confronted with something that's challenging your abilities to do what you kind of expect to do in most circumstances. So egos like to control. Right. And one of the ways in which we do that with our egos is we fight or we fly. We we want to contest with something we think we can prevail over. Uh and if we realize we really can't do that, we'd like to get the hell out of the way or get out of dodge so this stuff doesn't catch up with us.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

Right.

SPEAKER_03 19:45

So dying. First defense, denial. Denial is this isn't real. And you can try to make it not real by controlling it and making it go away. Or if you realize you can't do that, you can kind of try to run away from it.

SPEAKER_02 20:03

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 20:04

That doesn't work if you're dying. Eventually, the little guy's going to catch up with you. So next the next phase is something like anger. And with anger, egos, you ever meet an ego, especially a male one, but women can do it pretty well too. They want to control things by raising their voice loud enough to scare the thing away, or being strong enough to fight with it and and and make it submit. That doesn't work when people are dying either, but it's a plausible thing to do, or give it a shot anyway. Bargaining. Well, maybe I can negotiate with this then. But when someone's dying, ultimately you can't negotiate what isn't negotiable. Sure. But what happens? You've tried three different ego defenses, they're not working. Depression, what's that? Crap. What I usually try doesn't work. I mean, that's it in a nutshell. What I usually try here doesn't work. And then eventually you're supposed to come around to acceptance. Well, I actually am dying, and let's work with that together. That's not where coping with death ends, it's where it begins, because eventually you've realized this is the guy who's in the room with you, uh, and you're gonna have to learn to live him and live with him until you die. There's a lot of uncertainty and room to try things when you're dealing with something uncertain and ambiguous as the doctor got right got my prognosis right.

unknown 21:39

Right.

SPEAKER_03 21:39

Or isn't there a way that there's another cure available and so on? And families fill themselves with that kind of talk. When someone has died, there's no ambiguity about whether he died or not. He's dead. You see his body. He's in a box, you have a ceremony around him, and so on. Deny. You don't try it. Anger to try to control it. That's not really part of most of what people do when they're grieving. And trying to bargain in a way and make him come back to life and so on. Very few people try to push in that kind of direction. Those five stages didn't come up for hundreds, if not thousands, of my students. They didn't think of it at all. There's something else going on. And that's what grieving tries for attention for. And my view, which I think is a good one, is it's big enough to involve our whole way of being and potentially a change in almost any part of our lives. So you're in the wor you're in the world this way. A major figure is not going to be in that daily life of yours anymore, nor in the next chapters of your life among the living.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

Right.

SPEAKER_03 22:59

And what you have to do is figure out how to change constructively how you're living in your daily life and shaping your daily life and where you're going into the future. We can talk about love and other things as part as part of the package, but we'll do that on your schedule, not mine.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

Yeah, I I love that. Thank you so much for explaining all that. And I think you're right. When I have what would it be, people who are familiar with those five stages coming in and they're going through grief, they they get very frustrated because they it's nonlinear and it's probably not being applied properly. And I'm like, you know, grief is more like a bowl of spaghetti. You know, you're you're trying to right. It's just kind of everything all at once all the time. And you know, I often get questions like, well, when is this going to be done? Like, when are we going to be over this? When will I stop feeling this way? And I I noticed in your writing that you have some takes on that. I I'd love to hear more about that.

SPEAKER_03 23:59

Oh, uh, I was just tempted to jump in, so thanks for the invite. Yeah. You're itching. All right. Maybe I'll start it start at it this way. If I had a whole room of your clients gathered together, or my students gathered together, and we get to this topic, I would say, all right, everybody in the room with that this is show and tell, we've got some questions here. I've got my suspicions, but I have to have some confirmation. How many in here have had experiences learning how to live? Everybody. Not necessarily well, but you've learned some lessons about how to live.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:44

Is there any one of you in here, raise your hand high, if you believe you honestly, you have finished learning how to live well? Anybody? I I know your your clients are gonna cheat and say no, but no one ever raises their hands. They really don't, okay. Yeah. Uh do you how do you expect to at some point finish learning how to live as long as you're alive? No, okay. If grief is relearning how to live, do you think that's likely to finish at some point? It's the same stuff, only it's just in response to this particular thing that's happened to you. Nobody raises their hand figuring that they're gonna be over it. Well, if I'm telling you that grieving is relearning how to live in the world, one of the things I'm telling you is let go of expectations that you're really gonna be decisively finished with these challenges. Okay, let's do some other things. Let's talk about you just can't love anybody after they've died because they're just not around to love. You guys gathered together here in the room with with me today to hear me, and so on. Did anybody bring all of their living friends and relatives with them into the session this afternoon? They're here physically. When I'm done talking, you could introduce me, I could shake your your father's hand, your brother's hand, your mother's hand, your your little brother's hand, and so on. Anyone bring everybody in here? No. Okay. Now about all those people that you left behind. When you left them, did you stop loving them? Anybody? No, all right. When you left them, do you strongly suspect that any of them stopped loving you when you parted? No. Well, here we all are in this room loving people we care about who aren't in the room with us, who we can't see, we can't touch, we can't hear. All right? It's not that we stop loving and then when we get back together with them, we start loving again. We have a sense that we're loving them when we're apart, don't we? Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. Everything you can do while apart from the people you love while they're alive, you can do after they've died, except what requires that they be physically with you. Is that freeing your thinking just a little bit? Well, it sounds like an abstraction. Okay, Dr. Edig, feed me a little bit more. How are you loving your best friend or the person you love most who's alive right here today in the afternoon when you're with me, but you're not with him? And they'll start volunteering. Well, I think about him. Well, I was just telling the guy who sat next to me a story about my mom. When he started telling me a story, we tell stories about one another. Is there any way you feel different for being your father's son or your your your mother's sister and so on here while we're apart, but you feel like uh she makes me good, and when I think about her, I I feel good. Uh that's a result of it. I'm also thinking that we're having company later today, and I'm remembering some of grandma's recipes. And she's at home and I can ask her questions, but I know her recipes. You will know those recipes after she's died, unless you choose to forget them. Why would you choose to forget them? They're some of the best things you've ever eaten. And so and you can you can think about it for a while, and we get from those we love who aren't with us memories, conversations, inspirations, nagging questions, good advice, bad advice to sort through and and discard. We get training and all kinds of everyday things that we do when we're living. And I wouldn't know what to do with a garage door if it weren't for my dad, and so on. And as they think about it, they realize how much they have, and that can't they can always have, unless somebody says, oh, don't talk about him. Every time you talk about him, you just feel so sad. So, well, maybe I wouldn't feel so sad if I could think about these other things that people are shushing me away from talking about, and so on. It's like that, I think, in the scale of it, and the baseline, easy to access if you think about it carefully, credibility in the idea that we don't stop loving, we don't stop missing, and we and we don't stop treasuring persons who have died in our lives. And in some cases, and then we go and see Eddie, there are troubles in our issues with someone who's died, and we're not doing particularly well in sorting out how to get beyond those troubles. So the two of us talk together about how to let go of some of the things that maybe I have to let go of, or how to learn something more from some of the things that eventually I'm gonna spend less time on with his help.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

Yeah, grief can be really a complicated, nonlinear, n unclear mess of things sometimes.

SPEAKER_03 30:30

Yeah. Let me see something about the little society we live in. Up until I would say the first ten years of my working in this field in writing and thinking and so on, there was a kind of halving, a one-halfing of what grief is about. The culture was spending most of its time, and the serious writers were spending most of their time on the reactions that come over us when someone dies, what happens to us, the sorrow that comes into our lives, the inertia, the helplessness, the powerlessness, the the I don't know what to do. I'm it's like waves of unhappiness are rolling over me. And uh there's nothing I can think of that gains any traction on what I'm fighting. It's just I'm losing, I'm losing, I'm losing.

SPEAKER_02 31:29

Right.

SPEAKER_03 31:30

Well, in almost every one of our experiences, there are initially reactions to things happening to us, and they are matched by responses, which are active engagements with what has happened to us. Our wills become involved in deciding to go this way rather than that as the big waves hit, and bringing in some people to help you cope with it together, and reaching out to traditional prayers and services that maybe helped you get through times like this, and reaching out to more active engagements with what's happened that are known as responses as opposed to reactions. And responses don't feel helpless. They don't feel powerless, they're not. They are engagement of the strengths and abilities that you have with what's happened to you. Sometimes physical, sometimes emotional, sometimes psychological, sometimes social, sometimes spiritual, sometimes intellectual. You try to make it make more sense for you or find a way to make it more sense for you, uh, and so on. And what these things do for you, the responses, is among other things, they tend to lift some of the weight of the reactions that your society around you focuses on. And what people typically do in response to people who are who are grieving will say, get it out, scream it, make it go away by getting it out. If you do it loud enough and long enough, you won't do it anymore. But that expelling of energy is not getting you anywhere.

SPEAKER_02 33:13

No.

SPEAKER_03 33:14

And I think people misread emotions, and this is very simple. All of this stuff, what I found is the nickels and dimes ideas are the best ones. Or here's a nickel and dime idea. Simple idea how the culture would be different if everybody learned this. Okay. Emotions aren't just intending to scream until you can't stand them anymore, like a physical pain. They're calling your attention to something that needs to be attended to or responded to. And your fear tells you to get out of the way of danger, your this tells you to get out of that, your your hope tells you to move in this positive direction, etc., etc. And I think the whole culture for a long time, read Sigmund Freud in the 1920s, 1919 perhaps. The thing you have to do with grief is completely disconnect with the person who has died. Take them out of your life completely, think no more about them, be motivated no more by them. Get them out of the way. Now, what that is doing is saying you've got this terrible reaction that's come in your life, dissipate it, make it go away like a gas. And then you can go on and live. And that's only focusing on reaction, as opposed to the put possibility of focusing on responding. And are there constructive ways of responding to loss? Are there loving ways? Are there hopeful ways, and so on? And a good part of what I say very simply is yes, all of those are there. And it pays off a great deal, especially if one of the outcomes is moving from sorrow at having lost the physical presence of this person you love to realizing that on the other side of the worst of your reaction, you can you can move in a responsive direction where you slowly reconnect with what you still hold that you still love. So you go from the privilege of loving in presence to the pain of the pain of loving in permanent separation that really hurts you, and it's painful because it's a precious thing to lose, to all that stuff when they were alive you can still do that involves loving, that doesn't require them to have their bodies on hand, and you can actually get to a fullness in love again, wrapped in gratitude for the privilege of having known them when they lived, and the privilege of having come through the darkness of your grief into a lasting love and appreciation for the person who died on the other side. And that that's what I'm holding out for, and that's what that's what the books are involved.

SPEAKER_00 36:17

That's beautiful. I love that. I I often tell people when they come in fraught with pain and suffering and just desperate for relief, that it's for the very reason that you feel this pain, that I know that you loved them so much. And what a gift this pain is in some sense that you might then remember you know who they are to you and how lovely that is. And you you talk a little bit about that in your in your writing too, about like kind of it's almost like a fabric, like a weaving of kind of parts of who they are in in your sort of psychological experience. Can you describe more about that too? Because I think that illustrates really well what you're getting at.

SPEAKER_03 36:57

I I think the first public well the second public presentation I ever gave about grief and loss, after a very early one in Israel of all places, was on uh grief uh and personal integrity. And I was trying to imagine sort of how a soul and spirit and a self are put together. And in the Western culture where I grew up, there's an awful lot of thinking of selves as sort of self-contained cells, like atoms, self-contained, all the energy is held within, none's going out or coming in, uh, and these things don't really affect one another. There's mom and dad and others, brother and sister all in a cluster, that's the family. All right. Well, what happens when the two of you are like this, self-contained and not really affecting one another directly or even indirectly? What happens when one dies? Here's an image of it. What happened to this grieving self? Nothing. Nothing at all. Still self-contained, still just fine in that little capsule, and we all float around as capsules or self-contained atoms. Now, we're more like this.

SPEAKER_02 38:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 38:16

We're connected to one another in all kinds of ways. And when you think about it, at birth, we are received into a world where lifelines are reaching out to us from every angle you can imagine. The sun is beating down, the water's flowing by us, the bed is waiting for us, our mothers and fathers' hands are welcoming us and feeding us and clothing us and helping us get to sleep, helping us to learn our first words, take our first steps, and other people come along: aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, grandparents, eventually Sunday school teachers or yeshiva teachers and uh school teachers, and then the whole apparatus is feeding us, and we're taking more as we grow into taking more, and so on. So, what you have to picture just to get a sense of what happens when somebody dies, when you're all put together in a in a spider's web, I don't know quite how to illustrate it. Yeah, just picture all those radiating lines making connections in the world, and then all the the lines that go around to connect the lines that are radiating out, they're connected. So how you're related to mom is connected to how you're related to dad, remotely connected to your fifth-grade teacher, more remotely you've created to whoever happens to be the head of the government at the time. But we're all woven, we're all woven together.

SPEAKER_02 39:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:47

So picture yourself as a creature where mom's over here and dad's over here, and your two little siblings are over here. And as you grow, there are more and more radiating lines, making connections with more and more people and things and projects and things that you care about. And when somebody dies, it's as if there's a blow struck to the web, and those go, but all this other stuff is still up there. You have a less integrated surviving self. But there's still a lot there that hasn't been directly affected by what's happened. And the closer mom and dad are to your other brothers along with you, the more your relationship with them is going to be affected because their relationship with your brother is also hurting them. So they've lost threads of a connection and so on. But most of your web is still intact, but injured. And a way of thinking of grieving is weaving new threads in, picking up the the lapsed ones that have kind of broken off from your brother or sister that can still be woven back in because they weren't utterly smashed.

SPEAKER_00 41:05

Right.

SPEAKER_03 41:06

And I I think that's a much better way to think of what happens when in the great web of webs where we all have our place, uh most of what was there before this event took place is still there. What was in close and still there, some major threads are lost. And that's what we grieve about, but we haven't lost the whole thing, and we don't have to listen to Sigmund Freud saying, break all ties.

SPEAKER_00 41:36

Yeah, it's a little too sociopathic for me. Right.

SPEAKER_03 41:45

Of the web. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 41:47

Makes tons of sense. And I think the Freudian idea it feels very sociopathic, frankly. I don't know how you can just disassociate or disconnect without any kind of fallout psychologically if you're not a sociopath. Um there's gonna be some kind of whether it's delayed or latent or something, fallout from that undealt with uh break in in connection. Because we, you know, and I think attachment theory fuel connects very well with this too, because to be in a secure bond, I often use a similar framing. It's like we're we're bonded together in such a deep way. And then when there's like an affair or a you know, a divorce or whatever it is, some kind of thing happens, it it fractures and breaks that interweaving. And we're we're designed, I think, specifically, to be very closely knit and for the duration of our life. And I think that's also partly why it hurts so terribly when we lose the thing, because we're it's like outside of design in some sense, you know, like to have those bonds.

SPEAKER_03 42:45

There's an aspect of it where I think when you're in the middle of it, and it's hurting more than anything has ever hurt, you can overestimate how much has actually been broken.

SPEAKER_02 42:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 42:56

And you can use the ver the verbiage of everything's broken.

SPEAKER_02 43:01

Right.

SPEAKER_03 43:02

My situation is hopeless, right, and so on. And you probably say this this marriage is breaking up, and so on. You probably still have family members who care about you, children who love you, and so on and so on, but it doesn't seem like they're there when what's happening is this thing's because this is central, but it's it's not the whole. Right. But I think I think it makes for good television and a whole lot of other things when we exaggerate just how bad it is. You get your what you want to do with your cries for help is send them out as wide as you can and and make the make the tale you're telling as serious and severe as you can. So you get the attention that you desperately need. And one of the things you should be reaching out to is other people who can help you.

SPEAKER_00 43:52

Yeah, and that's a tough one today. To your first illustration, um in in the maybe the West, the broader and western kind of mentality. Is that we are so individualistic that in a lot of ways we've forgotten or don't know at all how then to bond or weave or connect or even just recognize that we are that we belong. You know, like when people are suicidal, they often think, well, though you know, the world will be better, better without me in it, everybody else would be better off without me in it, and I just need relief, I'm overwhelmed, I can't tolerate this. But the thing that they miss so severely is that they actually belong, that they're that they are interwoven with a community or another, and they matter, and that their absence tears they'll they'll never have to deal with that. Those of us that remain, I think we have a major lack of awareness uh and of grief, of death, of dying, and I think it's sad because it's inevitable and it comes for all of us, and it's worth our time to consider. And it's worth our time to consider deeply because I think to your point in so many ways is that it causes us then to reflect on maybe what matters most in our life. And you mentioned that kind of about your career too, and and focusing on what matters most.

SPEAKER_03 45:14

I think part of what's happened in our culture, this isn't my primary point, but I think this is this is captured by some of it. We're so individualistic and we're so egoistic, and we're so control and management intent that we tend to think of everything, and and this is why let it all go, put it in the trash can get a lot of mind, is a plausible solution. In our culture, what we want to do is be finished with difficult things and engaged in the pleasant, and we don't finish with it, and we won't finish with what we're trying to throw away with ordinary behaviors having to do with grief and loss. And I think there are major kinds of challenges in our life breaking down into two, and we tend to think of the first, which are problems. Egos are really good at controlling and manipulating and overcoming problems. Problems are challenges that are finite, easily circumscribed, you can get a handle on them, we're able to do something to change them, make them go away, or dampen them down, or transform them in some ways that make it easier to live with them, and when we can that problem solve moves on to something else. And we are huge problem solvers. If the American psyche could be plumbed, I think people would find pride of being able to handle any problem that comes our way, and that's what our engineers are trained to do, and that's what our cleaning people are trained to do, and what our cooks are trained to do. Finish the order, get a lot of the way to be done, be proud of what you've done. There are other kinds of efforts in this life, and in contrast to problems where we get to change them. There are mysteries and these are bigger order challenges in living that we don't get to change. Transforming of it, transforming of it. The difference between problems and mysteries is among other things we mess with problems and take care of them and change them. We have no control over mysteries. What we can control is how we live to them, how we live with them, how we choose to respond to them. In problem-solving mode, we're doing an awful lot of reacting without even thinking, and we can get away with it because there are the kinds of things that we can finish with in responding to mysteries that are constants in life that cannot be eliminated, much less modified in any significant way. The only thing we can do is transform ourselves, re-reshape how we are choosing to live our lives and what we're trying to do with them, and adopting some set of values as opposed to another and so on. We don't do that with our egos. We do it with what's deepest in us, our souls, which care and love deeply, and want to ground us and enable us to inhabit where where life is good and spirits that want to engage with the stuff that's really difficult in life, and help us get past the worst of what we can't eliminate and help us reach for better than where we are. Reach for adventure, reach for love, reach for significant change, reach for growth, reach for adventure beyond imagining, or you just stretch yourself into the wonderful the wonders of the new that's available to you. Soul and spirit together, they mess with your life and make you who you are. These are the ones that enable you to change and grow in response to the stuff you cannot eliminate, but you can embrace in constructive ways. And that's how I think of my fellow humans. And the work I've done has sort of brought me in contact with all of this, and it's been kind of nice.

SPEAKER_00 50:00

You know, something I love about this conversation just in general, that we don't get a ton of, just to make a broad observation. I'm sitting with you, I'm 45, you're you're how old again? You're in your 80s, you said?

SPEAKER_03 50:14

80.

SPEAKER_00 50:15

80, okay. In old days, we used to go to our elders in our communities, and we used to go to people and glean wisdom from them about those big mysteries, because they haunt us all. There's no escape from those big mysteries. And I I hope that if any uh viewer of this episode or listener of this podcast can glean anything that is hear Dr. Addict's wisdom that he's giving. The book he wrote, Seeking Wisdom, is literally his whole life's work about these mysteries. And we professionally certainly don't do a good job at dealing with a lot of these issues. You can take like that extra class or maybe do an extra study on, you know, grief, death, and dying, but you've spent your entire life doing this. And if I can just acknowledge that this is a privilege to sit here and hear your wisdom on this issue. And I thank you for that. Thank you for taking the time. That's very meaningful, and I hope more people can see that and find, you know, you you mentioned early in the story, I don't know, I don't remember if I was pre-recording or during our recording time, but you mentioned that when when you were trying to figure out sort of your career and where you wanted to go, you uh you tried to find professors to talk to about these issues, and it just wasn't available. So you became you became that guy. And I and I love that. You dedicated your life to it. And that's that's beautiful. You dedicated your life really to helping people deal with these mysteries. And it it feels so timely to me because it feels like we're we're in such a an era where these things are just avoided and first as normalized as as you experienced growing up where you just had the letters read, it was kind of normalized, death and dying was just a part of life. It's hard, it's brutal, but it's a part of life, and it is. And it's not to speak cavalier about it, it's just it's just what it is. It's one of those great mysteries that we will all face at the end of our days. And I thank you so much for talking to me about it because you know, we we just don't get this very often anymore. We don't get people willing to share their wisdom. Thank you. So I I appreciate it. Can can you tell our our listeners and our and our viewers where they can find this book? And I will of course put all those details in the show notes, but can you let everybody else uh let everybody know?

SPEAKER_03 52:44

The best thing you can do is save yourself 30% by doing seriously, a $35 book becomes a $25 book. That's not a bad deal.

SPEAKER_00 52:57

Not at all.

SPEAKER_03 52:58

What you need to do is go to the website of Oxford University Press and look for my title in the address line, Seeking Wisdom in Death's Shadows, and it will take you there. And you can get a full description of the book, you can get a picture of the cover, uh, you can read about a little bit more about the author and so on. And if you decide you want to order it, you can press the little button where they invite you to put in the title that you want to order. And then you can push and take yourself to the checkout counter. And when you're there, there's a little window that invites you to put in a promotion code. And the code to enter is five letters and two numbers. The five letters are A-U-F-L-Y 30. Then you push the button to order, and if you ordered one copy, you'll get one for 10% off. Or if you order a thousand, as I'm trying to encourage you, for all your friends and the in the local Boy Scout troop, get them young. They'll give you that same discount on as many copies as you want. If you want one of them for say family members or something like that, or if you want to just pass a copy around, you can do it. But if I can give a plug-up, I've never written and I've done some pretty good things.

SPEAKER_00 54:23

You you have done some amazing things, and you've been writing about this for a long time and teaching on it for a long time. It's worth people's time. I think if you're a professional, especially doing what I do in the therapy psychological world, I feel like this is a necessary book, uh, especially given um, I don't know, lack of understanding broadly. Uh, even again from some of the folks I've I've supervised over the years, and it's not a knock against anybody, it's just that it's just a general sense of ignorance. People don't know, they haven't faced these issues, they haven't learned about them. And this is the kind of material that you really want to bring into the room when you're working with clients, I think, professionally. So uh I thank you for that. So I I think professionals need to read this and and need to participate in the conversation.

SPEAKER_03 55:11

I agree with you.

SPEAKER_00 55:12

Yeah, we need we need to think about these mysteries. So, Dr. Adde, thank you so much again for joining me on the Voyage Cast and sharing your wisdom. I deeply appreciate that time with you. I hope maybe we can have you on again and talk more in depth on other areas and kind of side trails of this stuff. That would be really interesting, and I think it's worth our time, frankly. All the notes are open to that. I'd love it. All the details on the book also will be in the show notes as well. And yeah, thank you so much, man. I appreciate you.

SPEAKER_03 55:43

You're more than welcome. Good luck to the rest of you.

SPEAKER_00 55:46

Thanks.