Aly Bird on Grief and Grief Support

  📍 This is the World Circle, a podcast about the ups, downs, and all arounds of the human experience. I'm Beth Huddleston, host of the World Circle. Today, I welcome Aly Bird. Aly is a qualifying registered psychotherapist, coach, speaker, and author of the book, "Grief Ally: Helping People You Love Cope with Death, Loss, and Grief."

All of her work is focused on providing a support and educational network for people experiencing grief and for the loved ones who support them. The genesis of her work and study in the area of grief began with her own first hand experience of living with grief after the sudden death of her husband, Will.

In today's interview, we talk about the loss of her husband and all things grief. Aly, it's so nice to have you here. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, it is my pleasure, Beth. I am happy to be your guest today. You're doing a lot of really good work in the area of grief and supporting people who are going through the grieving process and also those who are trying to support them in their unique experience with grief. In your case, you had a tragic loss of your husband, Will. What was your personal experience with grief in that loss? I was 30 and I was moving through life and I thought I was doing pretty well at it. And then in an instant, Will died in a hiking accident and I was thrown into the world of grief with really no understanding of what it was like to live with a life changing loss. I'd lost grandparents before that. And I knew sometimes people die young, but you know, not in my world. That wasn't part of the understanding that I had of how the world works. And my own experience of loss has very much been a trying to figure out how to exist in a world where all the rules were broken at once. But the way that I've done that and why I come to this work in the way that I do is that my community has been incredible. They have showed up for me since day one, and they may have been afraid, but they kept showing up anyway, rather than being silent and not choosing to lean in.

And I really attribute to them that I've come this far and I'm able to do this work because they have been so supportive and been willing to learn how to help me to survive and ultimately adapt to a life and a life path that I really didn't choose. No one would choose to be in the shoes that I am in, I think.

But yeah, they love me unconditionally and that's how I've made it to today. What was your life like with Will? What was he like? What were your plans at the time that this happened? We had a really, really beautiful life together. We met when I was 25 and you know, when you're young and you're confident and you're like, we could have anything that we want, he had the chance to move to the West Coast for work.

So I tagged along for the adventure and we had this gorgeous outdoorsy lifestyle together. We climbed mountains and we rock climbed and mountain biked and camped and it was everything that I had wanted before I met him. And I met him at just the moment when I was like, whether I have someone or not, I'm going to start doing these things by myself.

So he filled a gap that was just, just the greatest gift. He was full of energy and didn't sweat any of the small stuff, which I really appreciate it because I am definitely a person who sweats the small stuff. And we had big plans to make a life for ourselves on the West coast of Canada. And since his death, those plans have shifted and changed.

The loss that you experienced, the way that you went through the process...and you said you really did have a community that rallied around you. What have you learned about how common that is? Is that usual, unusual in the people you've worked with or that you've been around since this happened? I think grief is still something that's very foreign in our culture.

And I think that's a relatively new experience. You know, like a hundred years ago, people died all the time just because we didn't have the kind of medicine that we have or the hospitals that we have now. Yeah. Yeah. But we've kind of scienced our way out of acknowledging death. And with that, we've lost the ability and generational knowledge of what grief is to and how to support ourselves.

So in, in my experience, I had this really high caliber of support around people around me. But from my experience, even early on in my grief, I was told to go find community. And I really struggled to connect with others because I wasn't being left behind. I haven't been left behind. I haven't been abandoned or really felt misunderstood.

Whereas I think a lot of people who are grieving, particularly the death of someone who was a significant part of their lives or was supposed to be a significant part of their lives, like a child, for example, that's a very isolating experience for many, because the people around them just don't know how to show up.

And I don't blame anyone for not knowing how to show up, but I think fear stops a lot of people or just cultural norms of like, oh, I went to the funeral. I sent a card and therefore I, I did the steps 1, 2, 3, and now my grief support role is done where I don't think that is the reality for many. And a real isolation occurs when all we do is, is do the rituals and ceremonies and, and drop off some food and send some flowers. That's, that's not enough to help someone learn to live without someone who is supposed to be a big part of their life. In your book, you mentioned that there's the isolation often, but then there's also secondary losses that happen, which makes sense to me. I mean, you, you might have a financial relationship with this person you've lost and that puts you in upheaval. There's there's all sorts of, sorts of things. What would you say about that? When what happens to people with these secondary losses and their grief?

That's a, that's a great point. And I think that the death of 1 person is just 1 kind of loss that comes with it. Right? When you lose 1 person, there's a really a whole web of life that can't be sustained because they're no longer physically present with you and that can be  large things like you said, like financial losses because you're now 1 person and not 2, but then also just like little things in your life that they did from being the person who took out the garbage or shoveled snow in the driveway after a snowstorm that person then has to find a way the grieving person has to find a way to kind of fill the places or accommodate the spaces where that person used to be. And it, and they can be, it can be tangible things like the examples I said, but other intangibles, like I just finished watching, you know, a series that Will and I were watching together. He only got to watch the first three seasons. I watched the last three of six by myself.

And then when the series ended, I wanted to talk to him about it. And as much as I think that we both would be really happy about how it ended, there was a loss there because I couldn't talk about it with him in that moment. So not only is there that one loss that really starts this ripple effect of losses in a person's life, but the losses keep coming and they are ongoing.

And so they're something that you're constantly relating to. A new grief is getting stirred up and, it doesn't get the attention or the acknowledgement that the death of a person comes with, you know, if we had to have a funeral for every loss that someone experiences because of the death of a person, we wouldn't have time to do anything else.

And yet we continuously have to keep moving forward and existing the best we can to keep living just from like a basic needs perspective, we need to eat, sleep, work to make money to be able to do those things. It takes a, it takes a lot of energy to to be a bereaved person that simply exists in the world.

And I think that creates a lot of isolation because people don't understand that piece of it. That leads me to another point in your book that is the idea that grief does not get fixed or cured or go away. You don't move on from it. Like you're saying you may keep existing and you go on to new experiences, but it's not something that goes away.

What would you say about that? I think a lot of people have this misconception that grief is a feeling and like other feelings, it moves and shifts and sometimes you feel it and sometimes you don't, whereas my understanding of grief is that grief comes from attachment and when someone dies, there is a change in attachment and that creates energy and that's what the grief is.

And then that grief can be expressed as like any feeling that exists on a feeling wheel, but the only thing that would fix it would to bring that, replace that attachment back to its original state. And when someone dies, you know, that's, that's really not possible. So there isn't a way to, to cure it or fix it or recover from it.

It's just something that. It lives with you, you relate to it as you move through the rest of your life and it doesn't get fixed. You just learn how to integrate it and carry it somehow. You do a lot of work with people who are trying to support those who are going through the grieving process. And like you said, a lot of times people may be afraid.

They may feel uncomfortable. They don't know what to say. They almost want to avoid it because they just feel like they're going to misstep. So, in that sense, what do you think are some of the most important points that somebody who's trying to support a grieving loved one can keep in mind? I'm a, a really big believer of mindset shifts.

So what I teach in the book is that you cannot be perfect at grief support. Because grief is so unique to every person in terms of how it is expressed or just really felt viscerally. So you can't be an expert unless you are in the moment with that person. And even then grief has the capacity to shift and change as we experience new losses.

So you just can't be an expert. So throw away the concept of being perfect and not making mistakes as a grief ally. So I like to flip it. So instead of not making mistakes to be perfect instead, if you are making mistakes, then you are doing it, you don't have to be say perfectly, but you are doing it the right way because the way we learn is through making mistakes and there is nothing wrong with that.

And you have to really screw up. I personally, I have so many friends who have made mistakes and we've been able to recover from them. And it actually makes relationships stronger when you are mindful about the recovery after a mistake. Like you have to really screw up to hurt someone in grief support and to hurt them so badly that that is the end of your relationship.

And the worst thing that you can do is to not do anything or, or say anything because you might be afraid of making a mistake. Also to people who want to be supportive, like if they see someone having a good day, they'd rather not bring up the person who died out of fear that, you know, they're going to make this day worse for their bereaved loved one.

And I think that couldn't be further from the truth in terms of, like, I'm always thinking about Will. And I think if you ask any other bereaved person, you'd... You don't forget that they're dead. The more other people are willing to bring them up in conversation and to tell stories or even just ask how you are in relation to, you know, your grieving experience that just takes the pressure off of us.

To constantly be the person who brings them up in conversation, who gives permission to tell stories about them, because if you don't, there is an elephant in the room. And once you kind of like, bring that elephant out of the shadows, it's like a big exhale for everyone that says, Oh, you know, it's okay to talk about this person and their life, because they were there once and to just not talk about them, kind of like, erases the magnitude of the impact that they've had on the rest of the world. Have you seen when you're around other people, the people you work with, or having ever been in community of grief support, does that seem like a common thing?

It sounds like it from the way you're speaking, but that people would rather talk about the person they've lost as opposed to not, or do you sometimes see instances where people are sort of like, I would rather not a person bring it up. I don't think there's  a universal truth by any means, but I do feel that there is great comfort in having your loss acknowledged, and I'd say probably in the early days, maybe some people don't want to talk about it. I think the greatest thing that you can do if you if you are questioning whether it's okay or not to bring it up is to simply ask permission. You know, would it be okay if I asked you how you're doing?

Or I, I had this memory with X person. Can I share the story with you? But I think from my deeply personal experience, the, the weight that I carried for the first few years after Will's loss was so heavy and it felt like I was the only one responsible for keeping his memory alive. And the longer I put myself in positions of courage and leadership to be just literally saying his name and conversation to be like, Oh, Will and I did this to contribute to what was happening in the room.

There was just like a, the only way I can describe it as like an exhale from everyone else. And then once they're willing to talk about it, it's like, I, I feel less agony about having to, to keep his memory alive. And that also gives me more permission to live a life that is full and robust in the legacy of his death, which I think is a great gift that that many people are looking for, and I don't mean to you don't have to always acknowledge that they're dead.

I have a friend and I went to a Veterans Day parade. Will was a military member in Canada. We have Remembrance Day on Veterans Day, which you have in the US and we went to the parade and then on the way home, she was like, what do you think Will would have thought of that parade? And it was just a really easy way to insert him into the conversation and to keep him alive in those moments.

And it wasn't a sad thing. It was full of jokes and laughter about what he would have thought. And yeah, the only words I can say is that it is just a gift. Yeah. And I think, too, that we have this narrative that people get stuck in their grief, and I'm a firm believer that people get stuck because they are stuck under the weight of their grief of what I've described as like, trying to carry this person's memory around and feeling like you're the only one who is doing it.

But when other people are willing to share that burden, I think we will see far few people in this kind of, you know, air quotes stuck place, but to ask the griever to do it all on their own, I think is really unfair. That's really interesting to me when you say the weight of keeping his memory alive. I'm curious about what you mean by that, because it's like, you're going through the grief and the loss.

And is that a sense of, like, he's still so present to me, and so I'd want him to still be present in conversations? Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying, really, is that Will was a very active and meaningful part of my life, and I have no desire to un-Will myself. I, I want his presence and his impact on my life to remain a part of my identity as I, I move through maybe the next 50, 60 years and to do that on my own is a lot of work. Like, you know, it makes my stomach turn a bit thinking about how much effort that would take if I was doing it by myself, but the people around me are willing to continue to tell stories about him to ask questions about him.

And yeah, that, that helps carry, carry the weight and it doesn't have to be anything big and crazy. I remember the second anniversary of his death. Someone just saying that, Oh, I, I made chili from his chili recipe. And I was like, that makes my heart expand rather than contract because it hurts. And I think too, there's theory that underpins that called continuing bonds theory.

And they say that people who are bereaved have a much more...you have an easier time, grief is hard regardless for a number of reasons, but there is some comfort that comes when we remain connected to people who have died. So, I guess that's related to the weight as well. Like, it is a way for me to be comfortable in my future by having everyone acknowledging what has existed in the past.

Yes, that makes a lot of sense. There's also something that you talk about in your book that's important. I think it applies not just to grief, but to being in relationships with people in general, which is the idea of being nonjudgmental, supporting them in their individual experience and not trying to imprint something that you think they should be doing.

How would you speak on that? The idea of nonjudgment, letting somebody have their own experience and respecting that. The principles of grief allyship that I teach in the book, there are three. So the first is providing someone with empowerment to do grief in a way that feels best for them. Because grief is so unique to everyone, putting anyone in a box is just going to cause them more hardship.

So empower them to ask what for what they need to do what it is that feels good and makes them feel like they're going to be able to survive this. And the 2nd step would be to respect that, and that's hard sometimes because it means that you might not feel as connected to them, particularly if you were really close, respect and empower someone, the more it leads to step 3, which is just having unconditional love for that person. And that's really what it means to be unconditionally on someone's side on their team. And as a reminder, love is not always an easy thing. Sometimes it is a very active process of remembering that, like, I love this person and therefore I want the best thing for them.

So coming to grief support in a non judgmental way means that you're giving this person that you care about the best chances of surviving what hurts the most right now, but ultimately helping them adapt to a future where they can coexist with their grief. So, in the book, I teach a few things. The first tool to do is active listening.

So, just being willing to listen without trying to fix anything. Just giving this person that you care about an outlet to share what is going on for them. And, to do that, ask open ended questions, listen with all your senses, and just be curious, listen to understand, that is all. And then I also have a chapter about phrases that get thrown around in group support that I wish had never, had never been born.

Like, everything happens for a reason, or the phrase like, at least, or be grateful, or so and so wouldn't want you to feel that way. And I think all these come from a nice place, but I think people just throw them in because they're trying to fix something or they're trying to get the person to move their attention away from it.

But in that is a judgment and a disrespect to what is happening in their life in that moment. So there's plenty of guidance in the book in terms of what not to say and the tools to teach you how to actively listen. What are some, if you could come up with just a couple examples, what are some things you've seen in someone's grief experience where one person might have this reaction and another person may have a very different experience with it. That's a great question. I have an example of a friend of mine who unfortunately ended up in a similar situation to myself recently and I am the type of person who appreciates the time to feel my feelings.

So I will stay in bed and just feel what I need to feel. This friend, on the other hand, she's like, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be feeling in these moments. She's like, I'm not sure the utility of it. So I would rather do something. Some people are feelers, some people are doers. Some people want to learn as much as they can about what grief is.

I'll raise my hand to that. I am that person, obviously, because as I have ended up where I have, but some people just want to find tools to manage what is hard and continue doing what they were before their loved one died. And both of those things are okay. Some people might use running to cope. Some people might use art.

Some people might build things or start charities. I think the important thing to recognize is that they're doing what makes them feel the most okay. Because when we start putting people in boxes or expecting them to do grief in a certain way, that's when we do a real disservice. And I think people would be surprised about the variation that occurs in grief expression as well, like people within the same family will do grief differently, which can cause conflict sometimes, but I think the reason I wrote the book and the reason that I defined grief allyship as it is, is because when you do respect and empower and provide anyone with unconditional love, then it's going to help so many, everyone in the situation to get through the long haul. Yeah, when you're talking about that, and when you talk about it in your book, again, I think it does apply to so many things because it's like this idea that "well this helped me" or say someone had their own experience with grief, "Well, this made me feel better." You should do that. Or you shouldn't go back to work right away, or you need to move on and get into a new relationship or whatever it is, because that's how it worked for me. Or maybe that's just my idea of what would work for you. That person may never want to get in another relationship again.

They just may never want to and that's what works for them. They may want to go back to work right away because that's helping them get through the grief. So that's where I feel like it's so important to remember and what you point out in your book that it really is their experience. Well, I think that comes down to, and I'm the first person to say that I was guilty of this before Will died, like, I had an understanding of empathy that, there's that really great little clip that's like an animation of a Brene Brown talk about what empathy is versus sympathy.

I think it's like a bear and like a giraffe or something, but there's one animal that's like in a hole and they're saying, I'm in a really dark place right now. And sympathy is like, Ooh, yeah, yes, you are in a dark place. Empathy would be like joining them in the hole and my understanding of what joining them in the hole meant would be like, oh, yeah, I've felt that too.

And I think that's a really great example of what empathy is not. It is not saying me too. And I think that kind of applies for our larger experience of life is that we are all walking through perhaps the same landscape, but we are not having the same experience. So the act of saying me too, it's not helpful for everyone.

There might be people who are curious about how others have coped and will seek out those spaces and that's when peer support groups are great for whatever it is that you're going through. Maybe it's domestic violence or separation or you have children who are neurodivergent or you've lost a spouse.

For me, I had no desire to hear about the experiences of others. Not until quite recently, because I didn't want to hear people say me too. I am a person who feels things very deeply. So if you start sharing stories about others who are living with something that's also really sad, I will take that on.

And I just didn't want to hear it. I also didn't want to hear that it gets better because for a long time, the grief was what was connecting me to Will. It was something that continued to grow and shift and change just as our relationship did. So I wanted to be very, very connected to that pain. I've since kind of like expanded my understanding of how Will and I can remain connected, and it doesn't always have to be an agonizing experience.

But I'm a kind of person who likes to learn things for myself. Don't tell me what to do. I think that the principles of grief allyship, of showing up for people with unconditional support, respect, empowerment, that's a lens that you can apply to not only grief support, but just how to be a good friend or a good partner, or just be in relation with other people.

So in all the work now that you have done with others and in where you're heading with it, what would you say in terms of continuing on in your grief experience, how has working with others, has there been a change in your grief experience? Definitely, I think for a long time, I think part of my story too was a lot because Will died instantly.

There was no negotiation process with death. There was no consideration of it. So after he died, I became very familiar with grief. But still had a lot of fear about death and in the process of my grief and when I started to reach out, it really came through this lens of what it is like when someone is dying, not, you know, died, but having conversations about what someone's end of life looks like.

And what can be meaningful in those moments, and that's giving me much more liberty to examine how I want to live the rest of my life. It makes me consider what I actually want from my future to live a life that is full and meaningful to me, like, at my core, not what other people want for me, but really, like, what are the things that I am going to need for my future to live in a world without Will?

Because, you know, he was supposed to be there, but that I am also allowed to want things that make me happy. And that will make me want to get out of bed every day. Most days. And that has really come from conversations with other people who have experienced grief, but are now able to live in a present that they feel good about.

And that's been a huge growth point in my story. I think, too, when working with others, connecting with others, sharing my story, another one of the big things that has come out of that process is just the acknowledgement that there is grief in every room. Whether people are talking about it or not, there is somebody holding a story that if they share it, they will feel lighter or just a presence like being acknowledged, whether that is something that they didn't have the space or the people to share it with back when it happened, or just like a light moment, like, for example, my grandma died in 2014, and the last conversation I had with her was about how people don't wash their coffee cups.

You end up with rings in the bottom of your coffee cup, so I will be in a space and I pick up a coffee cup and if it has the rings in it, I'm just like, oh, that's a nice... like, my grandma is in this moment with me. And if I guarantee you any conversation you walk into, any room that you are in, there is a legacy of someone who has died in that space, if you have the courage to open the conversation and look for it. I want to step back real quick with a question. There's something that you said earlier on in your response where you talked about the suddenness of Will's passing and then in working with people kind of getting more into the process of dying and then losing the person.

I think that's what you were saying. So what would you say is the key there in sort of having a growth point with the suddenness versus working with people on a more gradual loss? The 1st thing is they are 2 very different things and, you know, I can mostly speak from my own experience that after...a death in your community questions how you want your own death to look like, and that's probably a universal across the board, but because I didn't have really any examples of what a good life and a good death looked like, it was something that kind of ruminated for me.

And I think for many people, we don't think about it until a death happens very close to us. And then it can become a point of anxiety, but if we are willing to acknowledge that you do die, which is much easier once you have had a death close to you, then it becomes more of a process of exploration of what are my options.

For me, I signed up to be a hospice volunteer, and that it was in part a way to get experience before I became an actual therapist, but in the course of being a part of that community, it has also opened my eyes to what it looks like to live with life limiting circumstances, but also how much quality of life can exist in those moments and leading up to them as well. You were speaking about it, you kind of went on to this makes me think about how I want to live my life going forward or feel maybe some, a little bit of a shift or something. So, is it like that sense of when you're thinking about death as a thing that's going to happen to us all and seeing people approaching it or dealing with terminal illness or whatever, that it has changed the way you look at how you want to live your life, in contemplating your own death. Is that? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think you sometimes you see this too, right? Like people experience something traumatic and then all of a sudden there is a bit of like a mindset shift of like, oh, I'm going to die one day. Therefore, I am going to live the life that I want to live. And early on in my grief, I recognized that as a pattern that some other people had. And in my head, I was like, I wish that was the impact of what Will's death has done to me, but it's not. Like I was riddled with anxiety about dying and doing to other people what Will's death did to me, but over time, I've learned that living a meaningful life and living it how you want doesn't mean necessarily you have to like go skydiving.

Or doing these really risky things to feel alive again. It's like, no, you can have a mission that is close to your heart, and that's what makes things meaningful. And there is a legacy that I want to leave this world with through the book, through my work, through validating people's grief experiences that makes my life worth living that makes me want to stick around and see that message kind of take hold versus just kind of disappearing and waiting for my time to die to come around and I'm happy with this place that I've come to through that process, but I also like want to be wary of like, no one else has to do that.

Like, I don't expect people to get to a place where my life is good again. That doesn't have to be the goal. I think particularly if you are in a grief support position, that's one of the worst things that you can do is set expectations for what someone's future is going to look like after someone has died who is supposed to be part of that future.

So kind of relinquish any expectations and know that it might be a possibility, but if they just simply survive, that is okay too. Any other messages you'd like to send out there for anyone who's grieving or trying to support someone who's grieving? I think the best advice, if you want to call it that, but it's not really advice, is like, this is all one big experiment.

Everybody's life is just one big experiment. And being someone who is actively grieving, particularly a more sudden death, it's going to take more experimentation than you probably have ever experienced before so conduct them accordingly. You know, if it feels good, let it feel good. If it doesn't feel good, do what you can to shift until it does.

And that's really the best advice I could give anyone for living with grief and loss. And then in the same vein, as someone in a support role, if your support doesn't land right away, be willing to accept it as an experiment. Get some feedback and try again. When you say that, it's something I thought of before we started the interview, is this...an idea of not taking things personally,  and it feels related to that to me. Because it's like, when you're doing life or trying to support them in their grief or whatever, the less you can take things personally, the better. And so when you say experimenting and just trying this and trying that, and if you make a mistake, okay, don't take it personally.

Like, everybody makes mistakes. What thoughts would you have on that concept? I'd say like, do your best to not take it personally, but you're also human. So if you take it personally, that's okay. But if you are taking it personally, just make sure you have your own recovery methods, you know, experiment there too.

Like if you become wounded by something not landed, it doesn't feel good to you, what can you do to remind yourself that you are human and they are human, and what you are both trying to do is something even more human, you know, supporting people as we live and we die. So it is okay to take breaks, to practice your own self care, and that's absolutely critical in supporting someone who is grieving, because this is an endurance sport beyond any endurance sport.

Grief lasts forever. Grief support can last forever. So do what you can to, both as the griever and as someone in a support role, like, one of my favorite quotes is you can't set yourself on fire to keep other people warm. So keep yourself warm and then go warm others. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, thank you so much for being here, really appreciate it. It has been lovely, Beth, thank you. Thank you so much for having me.