February 28, 2008 - The Healing Power of Grief - Dr. Marilyn Stolzman and Gloria Lintermans

HEALING THE GRIEVING HEART
The Healing Power of Grief
Hosts:  Dr. Gloria Horsley and Dr. Heidi Horsley
With guest:  Dr. Marilyn Stolzman and Gloria Lintermans
February 28, 2008
G:   Hello.  I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley with my co-host
H:   Dr. Heidi Horsley.
G:   Each week, Heidi and I welcome you to Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope and conversation with those who’ve suffered the loss of a loved one and for health care professionals who work in this most difficult field.  As always the message is others have been there before you and made it, you can, too.  You need not walk alone.  Our show today is prerecorded so we will have no call-ins, but you can contact Heidi and me through our blog, www.thegriefblog.com with questions or comments regarding the losses in your life.  Don’t forget that these shows are archived on our blog www.thegriefblog.com as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org websites.  All these shows can be downloaded on Itunes and the transcripts are available to be accessed from our website www.thegriefblog.com.  So if you’ve got friends and you particularly like a show and you’ve got friends or family members who don’t use a computer, download those shows and give them a printed copy of the show.  Well, Heidi, how are you this morning?
H: I’m doing well.  How are you?
G: Great.  There are a lot of wonderful new things on the blog.  Our poetry contest has just been going strong, hasn’t it?
H: It has and we’ve gotten so many people that have written such powerful things, and you can say and express yourselves in so many ways through poetry.
G: Yeah, we really appreciate it.  It’s just so touching and brings tears to your eyes.  Well, Heidi, I wanted to say before we introduce our guests today.  We’re going to talk about “The Healing Power of Grief” with Marilyn Stolzman and Gloria Linterman, and I wanted to tell you before we introduce them that we’ve got their wonderful mourner’s bill of rights on our website and they’ve also put an article on the website so it’s great for you.  There is an address there, and they’ll send you that mourner’s bill of rights.
H: And I’ve got the mourner’s bill of rights in front of me and I know that Marilyn can talk about it more, but I want to say that the first thing on it says we have the right to express our grieving in our own way, and it ends with we have the right to believe that we will have a whole life again.  I love that.
G: I do, too.  That’s really great.  It’s a wonderful time to introduce them onto the show, isn’t it?
M: Thank you.
H: Absolutely.  I’d love to.  Our guests today are Dr. Marilyn Stolzman and Gloria Lintermans and our topic is “The Healing Power of Grief.”  Los Angeles-based Dr. Marilyn Stolzman brings her wisdom and hands-on experience to her books, The Healing Power of Grief and The Healing Power of Love.  She works as a bereavement counselor in private practice and is director of the non-profit Los Angeles-based organization H.O.P.E Unit Foundation for Bereavement, Loss and Transition.  Gloria Lintermans is a former syndicated newspaper columnist, currently a freelance writer, author, and widow. She has hosted her own cable television show and radio program and is the author of The Newly Divorced Book of Protocol.  Welcome to the show, Marilyn and Gloria.
M: Thank you.  Delighted to be here.
G: It’s great to have you on the show.  Well, I’ve got your three books sitting here, and your two books together, and then Gloria’s book on The Newly Divorced Book of Protocol, which we won’t be talking about that much today, but it’s a wonderful book.  How to be civil when you hate their guts.  Well, if you go to our website, you’ll find that book there as well as the other two books.  Now the other two books are The Healing Power of Grief: The Journey Through Loss to Life and Laughter and the other one is The Healing Power of Love: Transcending the Loss of a Spouse to a New Love, and I was looking at when these books were published.  They were published the same year.  You guys really went on a roll.  How did you get together to write these books?
GL: When I lost my husband, when he passed away, I thought my life was over, and in a sense it was—the life that I had known with him.  And I turned to a bereavement support group that was recommended by someone I knew and the group as it turned out was H.O.P.E. that Marilyn is the director of, and I attended the support group.
G: So, Gloria, your husband died and you went to H.O.P.E. which was Marilyn’s group there.
GL: Exactly.  And went through their program and after I had finished the program, Marilyn and I talked about – it was such a unique program that we really wanted to share this information with people outside of Los Angeles because this program is only in Los Angeles so we decided to write this book and then as we were writing this book, we realized that there are many people after the loss, after the grieving, that do want to fall in love again, form new relationships, and we’re not talking about someone to come along and save them as a white knight.  We’re talking after the grieving and after the healing.  And so we thought well, there are many people out there that have done this and why not profile them as well.  So we talked to twelve couples that were widows and widowers and that had built a new life, so one book was really an extension of the other.  We felt both books were needed to tell the whole story.
G: So The Healing Power of Grief – we have people who have other losses besides a spouse and I really found this book really has a lot of amazing information and a lot of resources for every kind of loss and we’ll get into that.  But The Healing Power of Love is really about people who find love after their spouse dies, right? and they remarry, and it’s stories.
H: Mom, not to interrupt you, but you know why I like the fact that it’s two books because in a sense as we’re healing and as we’re moving through our grief process, there is almost two chapters, two books to it.
G: Absolutely – oh, I love it.  Yes.
H: The first one is when you’re dealing with your grief and your emotions and you’re right there and you don’t know if it’s going to end and then the second chapter of your life is reinvesting in new relationships. 
GL: Absolutely.  Marilyn?
M: I wanted to make a comment about The Healing Power of Love.  There’s very little in the literature that talks about how people overlap their grieving and their loving, and so we came upon a format of interviewing twelve couples and asking them specifically, how did you do that?  Did you begin with a friendship?  How did you introduce sexuality?  Modern differences today in dating as opposed to dating years ago, and I think the important thing was that people still honored their grieving but they went on to another chapter and that was not really written about in the literature.  We found that was an important contribution.
G: Yeah, this is a very unusual book, The Healing Power of Love, and you also make comments after each one of their stories.
M: Right.  I did want the public to know that, should they need the services in L.A. and in the valley of the H.O.P.E. Unit Foundation, we’re available at 818-788-HOPE, that what makes our program unique is that it’s time framed into periods of mourning.
G: And that gets us over, I think, to The Healing Power of Grief, and how you’ve divided that.  Now I wanted to ask you, Marilyn, since you’re talking right now, how did you get the name for the book and how do you think grief heals?
M: Well, I think there’s something important that happens when people come into a group process and they talk with each other and they get validation from the therapist and from the other participants.  We have found that grief shared is grief diminished, and in having somebody witness your story, it begins to take the power out of it.
GL: I also would like to throw in that I learned during my grieving process that the only way to get over your grief is to go through it, and that’s where we came to The Healing Power of Grief because you have to embrace your grief.  You can’t try to run away from it because if you do, you don’t heal.  So we see grief as a healing process.
G: In your book, you have some common questions that I picked out because I feel that a lot of our audience is fairly newly bereaved, maybe even a year or two, don’t you think, Heidi?
H: Uh, yes.
G: Yeah.  Really early.  So I like some of these common questions you ask because people ask us these questions.  The first one was will the pain ever go away?
M: It’s interesting that you say that because I’m running group one now and that’s one to four months and people are asking that question all the time.  One of the nice things that we’ve added is having some of the alumni come in and reassure people that yes, it does get better and we did survive it and stay put and keep coming and that it will help.  I’d like to add proudly that the H.O.P.E. Unit Foundation received recognition this year from the L.A. Board of Supervisors and the L.A. City Council for over twenty-five years of service.
G: So, Gloria, tell us about your pain.  Did you feel like it would never go away after your husband died?
GL: As I mentioned, when my husband died.  And I don’t like the word passed away because it wasn’t pleasant.  Passed away implies just a very soft process and for my husband, it wasn’t.  When he died, as I said, I thought my life was over, and it was.  But there had to be an element of trust and going into a support group to me was like saying I trust that if I go through the process, somehow I will feel better, and it was very interesting because what happened to me, H.O.P.E. is divided into time periods of mourning, as is our book, even though mourning is fluid, and you might come in and out of these different periods, but when I was in the first three months of mourning
G: Which you call the shock time in your book.
GL: we would hear a group that was in, let’s say, the second year of mourning down the hall from where we were and we’d hear them laughing, and we’d think, how can these people be laughing?  We can hardly get a sentence out without crying.  But it showed us that, yes, we had to trust the process and that there was joy at the other end.
H: I liked how you brought in people that were further down the road.
GL: People that were newly bereaved. 
M: Right, as a matter of fact, the alumni group has recently done a beautiful brochure about what they gained from the program to give to the newcomers and a mentoring program has been added to help encourage the new folks, but I wanted to add along with what Gloria said that the focus on our program is to help people come back to life.  That the worst has happened and that we see our program as helping them survive, helping them talk about their feelings and in that process they become
G: Now what about people who don’t like group work?
M: and may not come, but we do encourage
G: But not to your group.  Here, you know, we’re international.  The show is international and you’re based in L.A.
M: I’ll tell you something — I think that from my own experience and from the other members that I met at the grief group, I would say a good percentage of them never wanted to join a grief group.  They went because a relative who just didn’t know how to help them had heard about this group or other groups and said you’ve got to go.
H: And I know that at Compassionate Friends they say you need to go to the group three times before you can make those kind of decisions.
M: Exactly, and once you’ve gone three times, you do.  To me, it gave me, every Thursday night, no matter what was happening in my life, I could be real.  I could cry.  I could grieve.  I could talk about it because your support community can only be emotionally available to you for so long.  And they think well, it’s time for her to get over it.  But a support group lets you grieve in what is your own grief time.
G: So the second sequence.  You have a workbook in the back of your book, which is very good where you suggest to people that.  And I’m thinking if people don’t get to group, I think they can probably pick up your book and they can read about these ideas.  They can read people’s stories and they can go to the back of your workbook and they can look at
M: And if you follow the workbook, it gives you tools because we know we can’t reach everyone that doesn’t live in L.A. to come to a group and they may absolutely not want to go to a group for whatever reason but the workbook is the best.  I don’t even like to call it a workbook.  I call it a healing book because it gives you definite exercises to honor your feelings and yet go through them.  Not run away from them.
G: Well, it’s time for us to go to break now and when we get back from break, we’re going to talk a little bit more about “The Healing Power of Grief” and about some of the common questions you might be asking about your own losses and we’re going to talk about some of the dos and don’ts and mourners bill of rights and there are just many things we’ll be talking about with Marilyn Stolzman and Gloria Lintermans.  I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, with my co-host, Dr. Heidi Horsley.  You can reach us through www.thegriefblog.com.  Don’t forget to enter a poem into our poetry contest and remember we’re archived on our site, www.thegriefblog.com, as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org website.  You can download all our shows.  Stay tuned for more.
Well, we’re hoping that you will go to our website, www.thegriefblog.com, so you can take a look at your mourner’s bill of rights there and read a little bit of something that Marilyn and Gloria have written on our site and I think you’re going to find the mourner’s bill of rights very useful so that you can be proactive with your grief.  I really think that grief is something you almost have to teach your friends about.  Don’t you think that, Marilyn and Gloria?
M: I do.  And I think part of what we’ve tried to do with people and part of what we definitely included in the book is go through the five stages of loss and explain in detail what people go through in each stage so that could normalize their grief.  The shock, denial, anger, depression, and the last stage which Elisabeth Kubler-Ross called acceptance I have reframed to be transition adjustment and integration because I think those three words more aptly describe what people go through. 
G: One of the things Heidi and I always talk about is the fact that these are pretty neat and pat but it’s been our experience that people kind of weave back and forth.  It’s not like I’m over this.  I’m over that.  Now I’m onto that.  Plus aren’t there a lot of extenuating circumstances like automobile accidents? murder? suicide? where people don’t progress through these quite as neatly, particularly if there are court cases?  That’s been kind of our experience.
M: Right, sometimes the complicated grieving, but we take a lot of time describing the symptoms, for example, in shock, and I totally agree with you that the stages overlap and are you liking it to a game of Monopoly where you might go three squares forward and two squares back.  It’s a very back and forth process.
G: Yeah, how about you Gloria?  One thing I like about you two on the show very much is that Gloria has kind of had her husband die and then Marilyn is
GL: Yes, I want to refer back to what you had said about educating your support group, your family and friends about what you’re going through.  I have found that if the support group can be encouraged to read the book, it can give people a good idea of what to say to help you and what not to say.  You almost need to educate the people that are going to be helping you in your community.  But I also think it’s important that while you’re moving through stages of grief, it’s really important to know and accept that healing takes time.  It takes patience.  It takes hope.
H: Another thing in the book that I like is that you say time alone does not heal.  You need healing strategies. 
GL: Absolutely.  We really promote what I’m going to call educated healing.  It would be like if someone were to say to me your life would be so much better if you only spoke Russian, I’d go, well, golly, how do I know?  Grieving, we think it’s something that everybody really goes through at some time in their life so why do they need to learn how to do it?  I think what people really need to learn how to do is to be emotionally available to themselves.
H: I like that.
G: I think that’s very good.  Practically speaking, how did you, Gloria, become emotionally available to yourself after your husband died?
GL: Well, I think for me it was, as I said, important for me to join a support group because I knew that no matter what face I had to put on to the world, because the world will only let you be sad for so long and then they don’t want to hear it any more.  I knew that every Thursday night when I was at my support group, I could be absolutely real and I could be available to myself, but for me, it really meant if I woke up in the morning.  You know those few minutes when you first wake up when you’re grieving and you just absolutely feel destroyed.
H: Well, it feels like someone threw water on your face.  You open your eyes and went oh, my God, he is dead. 
GL: Yeah, there’s just that moment when you become conscious that it’s like living it all over again and say okay, that’s how I feel, but I’m still going to get up and get dressed.  It’s not denying that’s how you feel, but accepting that’s how you feel and still get up and take that shower.
G: So being available and saying okay, that’s okay.  You’re not going crazy.  You can do it. 
GL: Exactly, and accept that some days are going to be harder and easier than others.  You may have a good day and the next day may be horrible.  That doesn’t mean that every day thereafter is going to be horrible.  Even in the course of one day, your emotions can be on a roller coaster.
G: Right, so Marilyn.  What if I say to myself, I haven’t been able to cry.  Why do I find it impossible to do this?  Especially for men.  I hear men telling me, they can’t cry.  They don’t cry as much.  Or people saying they can’t cry as much as they think they should.  What do you think about that? 
M: Sometimes people are describing a really tight feeling in their chest and they want to cry but they can’t access that and other people in the group are crying a lot but I think that when we encourage them to write about their grief or see a sad movie, there is some catharsis
G: Oh, that’s a great idea.  See a sad movie.
M: be in touch with their feelings.
G: Haven’t you got some movies listed in your book?
M: I don’t think we do, but I think like Terms of Endearment is a movie that people see and relate to, for example, and I knew of a woman who had a mastectomy and couldn’t cry for herself and after seeing that movie she was able to express some of her grief.  But we make the point of sharing with the public to give yourself permission to heal.  Allow yourself to express your feelings.  It’s not right or not wrong and we certainly validate with the men that it may be harder for them to express their feelings and we teach them and educate them in the group how to use the group.
G: Well, there are some biological reasons for not being able to cry for men.  I know there’s that oxytocin hormone that is very involved with crying so sometimes there are some biological factors connected with it, too.  So, Gloria, tell me, did you find yourself breaking down in embarrassing places and did you feel like you should have had more control over your emotions?
GL: Absolutely. 
G: Yeah, one of the things you have here is that’s a common question:  why do I break down?
GL: I was at my local camera store one day and I was really having a good day and I walked in and the owner of the store who I’ve known for years and years and years knew that my husband had died.  He looked at me very kindly and he said how are you doing?  And I immediately burst into tears, but it’s okay.  Why should we be embarrassed to have feelings?  Just because it makes other people uncomfortable?  Well, that’s just me.  That’s too bad.
G: It reminds me of the Hillary Clinton thing we’re involved with recently in the elections and she cried and all the comments.  That was kind of fascinating because I found there was kind of a split.  The men said this is really going to be bad.  And the women said, so what?
GL: It’s interesting, too, because this book has sold so well, not only in this country, but in the U.K., and I think that maybe there’s more of an acceptance there about death and that it’s something you don’t run away from.  The book has been so embraced there, it absolutely surprised me.
H: That’s interesting.
G: Yeah, that is very interesting.  The different cultural aspects.  Heidi and I often talked about Eastern Europe where there’s more emotion or Africa where there’s more emotion connected with loss.  A different kind of thing.  What about the fact that people say that they don’t have an appetite or they can’t stop eating?  What about losing or gaining weight?  Have you got any thoughts on that?
GL: Oh, that happened to me.  I could not stop eating and I knew what I was doing.  I was feeding myself emotionally with food.  I knew what I was doing and I gave myself permission to do it.
G: So you gained weight?
GL: Twenty pounds in the first year.
G: Marilyn, what do you suggest to people that you see who are binging or not eating?  Do you have any thoughts on that?
M: I encourage a lot of self-nurturing beyond the issues of food that people often eat when they feel empty inside and they can eat too much or they can’t eat at all and the same is true with sleep.  They can’t get to sleep or they wake up and they have interrupted sleep.  And again these are things we talk about with the people and it’s described in the book.
G: Can you talk about some of the self-nurturing that people might do?
M: I often give patients a list called nurturing yourself and divide it into three columns and talk about nurturing people in your life, nurturing activities, and nurturing places.  Where do you go in the world?  Who do you relate to?  Who do you talk to?  Friends or family?  And what are you doing?  And if they’re coming up shy on their list, we would talk in more detail about what can you do to make differences in your life?  What changes would you like to see have happening?
G: I love that idea, nurturing places.
H: Um hm.  Me, too.
G: And you could have a set place or a set thing that you did, couldn’t you, when something that you know keeps coming up or an anniversary date or whatever plan.
GL: Right, the sensitivity around holidays, of course.
M: And I think sometimes that takes people by surprise that they feel they’re pretty much on an even keel again and then Christmas comes up or a birthday comes up or an anniversary, and they’re just plunged into despair, and again it’s just self-acceptance.  This is how I feel right now and that’s okay.
H: And realizing that it’s normal to have waves of emotion during anniversary dates and during special events, etc.
M: Absolutely.  How could you not?
H: Right, because it brings back the loss.  It brings back what we’ve lost and the fact that your spouse isn’t with you and all the wonderful memories, too, of past holidays.
G: Isn’t that kind of touchy?  You’ve interviewed in your second book, The Healing Power of Love.  Is that kind of touchy when you’re in another relationship and then it’s your anniversary of your other one?  What do you recommend to people?
GL: Absolutely.  I am in a wonderful relationship now.  I felt I couldn’t ask people that I interviewed to be candid unless I was as well.  I’m in a very strong relationship and we just took a fabulous cruise and in the middle of the cruise, it was my boyfriend’s anniversary from his late wife and I knew it was a sad day for him and so I said to him, whatever you need today, let me know.  If you need alone time to honor your feelings, whatever you need.  And so he spent that day a lot of the time alone, being sad, but thinking about his late wife, and it was okay.  We don’t have to panic when our partner gets sad because of old memories.
G: I love that, Gloria, because you’re saying recognize it and bring it out and say it and let’s not keep this as what they say, the elephant in the room.  Well, let’s take a break on that note.  I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, with my co-host, Dr. Heidi Horsley.  We’re talking about “The Healing Power of Grief” with Marilyn Stolzman and Gloria Lintermans.  If you want to reach us, you can reach us through our blog, www.thegriefblog.com.  All of our shows are archived on our website and please take a look at the mourner’s bill of rights and you’ll be able to get that from our guests today.  Stay tuned for more.
When we went to break we were talking about some common questions from this wonderful book, The Healing Power of Grief: The Journey Through Loss to Life and Laughter and also the companion to this, which is a great book, The Healing Power of Love: Transcending the Loss of a Spouse to a New Love, which is a fascinating book.  We are spending a little more time on the Healing Power of Grief today, but this Healing Power of Loss.  If you’re thinking about getting into a new relationship.  If you’ve lost a partner.  This is a wonderful book with great stories in it and great comments at the end and a lot of issues that you really have never thought too much about.  Things like what happens if – Gloria was just talking about what happens if you’re with a new partner and there’s an anniversary and bringing it out in the open and that kind of thing.  One of the things I thought was kind of fascinating in your common questions from the book was when should I discard my loved one’s clothing?  And the other part was when should I stop wearing my wedding ring?  I thought that was a very interesting question that everyone must ask themselves.  Or do I ever stop?  Do I want to invite another relationship?
H: Or, mom, or do I put it on the other hand?
G: Yeah, exactly.  Which one of you wants to take that – Marilyn or Gloria?
GL: I wore my wedding band and my engagement ring on my left hand for about two years and it felt right.  Again, and I didn’t start cleaning out closets for six months because I wasn’t ready, but about two years after, I was having a facial and took the rings off because the facialist was putting cream on my hands and when I went to put the rings back on, I just knew – and this is two years later – that it was time to move them to the other hand.  But I still wear them but I wear them on my right hand because to me, going on in life is embracing and honoring the past.
G: So you kept them on your left hand.  Well, I want to move on to the idea of domestic partners and what about all these things with them, but before we do that, I did mention something that everybody’s always asking so I feel like I have to touch base on that before we move, and that is when do you change rooms?  When do you discard your loved one’s clothing?  And how do you do it?  Do you want to talk about that a little, Marilyn?  What kind of advice do you give people?
M: I’d say not to give advice but to normalize that almost anything goes and there isn’t a script on it.  They may give away clothes when they feel ready to and not to feel the pressure from the family during the first week of mourning to eliminate things.  That they need to say goodbye to objects and then the same kinds of conversations come up with photographs.  For some people, looking at photographs is healing and soothing and for others it’s the source of a great deal of pain.  But we validate a lot that you do this when you’re ready to do this.  I think we get disturbed if five years later people have not changed a thing in the room or not given away any clothes that that may be indications of complicated grieving or pathological grief response, but certainly in the first two years, almost anything goes, and we try to validate a lot of feelings that people have when they think they’re going crazy or that they are alone in this response.  So it’s very healing and hopeful to them to learn that others have the same reaction.
H: And I’ve worked with a lot of people who have had beautiful life quilts made with their spouse’s clothing, and they’ve been able to take their spouse’s CDs and get them sewn into these incredible quilts which they could either hang on the wall or use on their bed or just put in a cupboard.
M: The healthy important thing is that you don’t let anyone talk you into when is the right time.  Listen to yourself.  It took me about six months before I started cleaning out closets.  But what I did do immediately that I’d like to share with you that felt good for me and felt good for my late husband’s friends is I took a half dozen of his neckties and I had them dry-cleaned and I put them in boxes and wrapped them very nicely and sent them to a half dozen of his friends with a note letting them know how much their friendship meant to him.
H: Oh, I love that.
M: And they absolutely treasure having this memento.  And it made me feel good.  It made me feel like I was taking care of someone else’s feelings, too, and any time you’re taking care of someone else’s feelings, it makes you feel stronger.
G: Right.  Oh, that’s wonderful.  That reaching out and moving out, we’ve talked often about how those first movements of thinking about other people really starts moving you into another direction.  And I also wanted to say, we have people who take their loved one’s clothes and put them in a bag and tie them up because they want to keep the smell there.  Smells are really amazing, and I know people go to bed with their loved one’s clothes for a while.  You’re not crazy if you’re doing that.
M: No, and I think it’s important that after you give away the clothes, you hold onto a few favored things.  Maybe a bathrobe or a sweater.  Something that reminds you.
G: Yeah, we have our son’s letterman jacket in the closet still after how many years, Heidi?  24?
GL: I have an old flannel shirt of my late husband’s that I love wearing around the house with a pair of jeans.  It just makes me feel wonderful.
M: Smells elicit a lot of memories about the person and a lot of familiarity.
G: Yeah, one of our guest’s daughter died in the army and she wears her combat boots around.  Remember that, Heidi?  On her birthday every year.  So there are wonderful ideas and creative ideas that people come up with.  Well, let’s talk a little bit.  In your book you talk about domestic partners, which is a whole different area.  Having them die from AIDS or whatever some of these partners are dying from.  What are your special issues do you think for these folks?
M: I think it’s still the recognition of the pain and the sorrow and getting support and sometimes in our program, we have people who have been in that situation.  But there are differences of course when you’ve been married 50, 60, 70 years and someone has had a long-term partner, but I think it’s still important to honor the feelings and to talk about the pain and to get support for that.
G: Absolutely.  These folks get so left out at times.  They get left out of reading wills.  Oh, they get left out of so many things.
H: And because they weren’t legally married, their loss is so unacknowledged and often minimized when it was just as important a loss as if you were legally married.
M: Absolutely.  What does a piece of paper mean to your heart?
H: Right.  Exactly.
G: And you have a section in your book about that for folks who would like to read about that.  Well, you have a section in your book that I liked very much for our folks out there.  The dos and don’ts.  I really like that.  Particularly one of them where you said do attend social events if you wish.  Do listen to your intuition, but don’t attend events because of pressure from friends.
GL: Or do take your own car so you can leave when you want to.  A lot of that discussion came out of people’s comments about the insensitive things that people say to them and then I would ask them, well, what was sensitively said to you?  What did you like to hear?  What would you like to hear?  And we realized that people don’t often talk about the appropriate things to say.  They spend a lot of time being upset about the inappropriate things they hear.
M: But I think sometimes when people say things that turn out to be inappropriate because they just don’t know what to say, they just are so – I can’t tell you how many people came up to me at my husband’s funeral and said, well, he’s no longer in pain.  And I wanted to slap them and say, but he’s not here.  But they were just trying to help and I just wasn’t in a place where I could appreciate it.
GL: Well, there’s a certain awkwardness about talking with loss and until someone has experienced the loss, they are not as sensitive.
M: And people shy away from people that are grieving and go into a loss.  They’re somehow afraid that it’s icky and they’re going to catch it.
G: I was going to say, they feel vulnerable.  How about going out on those dates?  Going out with friends singly when you’re the only person.  You’re not dating.  You’re just going out with friends.  You say that that can be difficult, right?
M: They often describe they feel like they’re a third wheel.  We emphasize how important it is to begin to build a single network, to begin to have single friends to do things with because then they feel like the odd man out or when it comes to paying the bill at the restaurant, how should this be done?  How will they reciprocate?  That awkwardness about it’s a coupled world.
GL: I needed to do that when I went out with other friends, couple friends.  I needed to pay my share.  I needed to feel strong.
G: Yeah.  That’s important for people not to make you feel like you’re less than or whatever.  Well, we’re coming up for break now, and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, with my co-host, Dr. Heidi Horsley, and our topic is “The Healing Power of Grief,” with Marilyn Stolzman and Gloria Lintermans.  You can access this show in the next couple of days on our blog, www.thegriefblog.com where we have all the archives so that you’ll be able to tell your friends about it.  And also you can access our written archives and if you have friends that don’t use computers, you’ll be able to download them.  And please make sure you go to our blog, www.thegriefblog.com to get our mourner’s bill of rights and to read what our guests today have put on the blog for us.  And also enter a poem in our poetry contest.  Please stay tuned for more.
Well, this is our very last break, and before we want to close the show, I want to make sure that Marilyn gets a chance to talk a little bit about the H.O.P.E. Unit Foundation.  Do you have a website, Marilyn?
M: Yes, we have a website and its www.hopeunit.org and the phone number is 818-788-HOPE. 
G: Okay, great, and people can access groups through that?  What would they get from going to the site? 
M: They would get resources.  They would get mention of our book.  They would get staff details.  The locations of groups.  Comments about grieving and articles.  And H.O.P.E. stands for Hope, Opportunity, Participation, Education.
H: Wonderful.
G: That’s great.  So go to that site, and Gloria, is there anything that you would like people to access?  Do you have part of that website or do you have another site?
GL: Well, I have my own website at www.GloriaLintermans.com and the books are available on line.  They’re available at your local bookstore.  They’re all over the place.
G: Great.  Well, before we close the show, since this is our last break, I just wanted to give you a little run down on some ideas for healing that they have in the book.  They have wonderful things and we couldn’t even begin to touch them all but some of the suggestions that you have I really thought were good.  Believe you can survive.  I thought that was wonderful to believe in yourself.  Seek yourself.  And where we’re talking about groups, if you’re a group person.  If you’re not a group person, if you would pick up this book, The Healing Power of Grief: The Journey Through Loss to Life and Laughter.  You’re going to find a lot of information that’s going to help you in that book and they have sort of a little – I don’t know – you didn’t call it a workbook, did you? at the end, Marilyn.  What did you call it?
M: I’d really call it a workbook.  The second half of the book that allows the person to write their own thoughts.  To stimulate their own thinking.  To do some creative journaling.
G: Yeah, so you’ll be able to do that.
GL: It gives people absolute things that they can do to feel better and to take care of themselves and it’s also a way through this mourning period of being able to look back and see that you are making progress on those days when you feel you’ve been thrown right back.
G: And another suggestion ideal for healing there is to give yourself the time you need to grieve.  That’s really important, isn’t it?  Sometimes I think particularly for men, people just go to work and they never stop.  And you try to stay competent.  I remember trying to stay really competent, overly competent, and you just head back to work or school.
GL: And I think the recognition that healing is a slow process and it happens one day at a time.
G: Yeah, Heidi and I always say, if you like instant gratification, being a grief counselor is probably not where you want to go.
H: Absolutely, I’m always telling my students that.
M: Some days are going to be easier than others.
H: Two of the things that are kind of woven throughout the book, I think, also are surrounding yourself with supportive people and finding balance.  And I think those are great suggestions for people. 
GL: Like the importance of exercise, of self-nurturing, of reaching out to others.  A lot of concrete positive suggestions are made.  And encouraging people to talk about where they’d like to see themselves going.
M: Right, and part of the grieving process is being kind and less judgmental of yourself.
G: And another suggestion you have that I was looking at is the linking an object.  Have something that belonged to your loved one that brings you comfort.  That was an interesting thought.
M: Absolutely.
H: I like that.  I was thinking you could even put something small in your pocket.  Like when you’re having a bad time or a bad moment or if you just want to link up with them, put your hand in your pocket and feel that object.
M: Absolutely.  That’s very honoring of yourself and kind to yourself.
G: And then the idea.  You had one here.  Things that you should do.  I love this because I like to do it.  Get out in the sunshine.  And walk in the rain.
GL: Walk in the garden. 
G: Weed if that’s what you do or whatever you do.  Oh, another thing you had that I thought was good.  As time goes on, you may feel worse.  I had to laugh when I read that because I expected it to be better and all of a sudden it was worse which is great to know because every day is not good.
M: No, and some people also have a harder time with the second year than the first year after a loss because they think they should feel better.
G: Yeah, and also it’s kind of like well, this is the way it’s going to be.
H: Right.  It’s reality.
G: And then another thing you had was don’t accept the well-meaning advice of friends.  I like that.  You don’t have to accept it.
M: Everyone thinks they know how you feel and they don’t.
G: And we didn’t even get into the fact about it’s okay to date.  Yeah.  Giving yourself permission to date is interesting.  Even if it’s a loss of a child.  If you happen to be divorced.  When do you go on and do this.
M: There’s all kinds of complications that dating brings up again but that’s another whole book.
G: Absolutely.  You kind of get that in The Healing Power of Love.  People talk about that so that’s a great segue into that book.  There’s just wonderful advice and wonderful information here so I want to thank you both for being on the show.  It’s been fantastic having you on and it’s just great.  Did either of you have a closing comment you’d like to make to those folks out there?
M: My closing comment is love yourself.
G: Ah, very nice.
GL: I guess my closing comment would be thank you so much, Gloria and Heidi, for having us on your radio show today and that there’s a lot of good things in The Healing Power of Grief to help the public out there.  They’re in layman’s terms and very practical and hands-on and good resources so we see it as a good support for you.
G: Great.  Well, thanks for being on our show and it’s time to close it and I want to thank our guests, Marilyn Stolzman and Gloria Lintermans.  Please stay tuned next week when our topic will be “Death of a Daughter and Lies About Grief.”  Our guest will be Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle.  This show is archived on our blog, www.thegriefblog.com as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org website.  Please stay tuned again next Thursday at 9:00 Pacific Standard Time, 12:00 Eastern, for more of Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope, renewal and support.  Thanks for listening.  I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley.
H: And I’m Dr. Heidi Horsley.  Marilyn and Gloria, thanks for all the work you’ve done to help people heal after grief and as you so eloquently both said, grief shared and embraced is grief diminished.  Thank you.