3 Tips For Coping With Grief, From Patty Lennon

All of this year, I’ve been dealing with something very serious. This is the first time I’m sharing this news with the PJW community, and I’ll be opening up about it on Instagram soon.

In late December 2021, my partner of 17 years, Panos, was diagnosed with cancer. He was suave and debonair and smart and funny and twice an olympian swimmer. Early on, he received a terminal prognosis, but after consulting with his doctors, we decided to proceed with chemo treatments and I became his caregiver. From January onward, he grew very, very sick. He was admitted to the hospital multiple times. Then in April, he contracted Covid, at the same time they found blood clots in both of his lungs and his bile ducts became blocked. Because of Covid I wasn’t allowed to see him at all while he was in isolation. He recovered from Covid and eventually came home, but come late May, his doctors said there was nothing else that they could do and his days were numbered. He was in the process of transitioning. By that point, he hardly recognized me. Five days later, he died at home. All at once, my new reality sank in. I was faced with an unthinkable truth: The life and love I’d known for nearly two decades was ripped right out from under me, and there was nothing I could do.

To say the experience was traumatic is an understatement—it was pain beyond what I thought I could feel. Seeing him suffer was awful; losing him was heartbreaking. Since then, I’ve been doing what I can each day to cope, but I would be lying if I said it was easy. Every morning I wake up without him, I’m reminded of what I’ve lost. There are moments when I feel marginally “better”—that doesn’t even feel like the right word—and others when I feel like I’m right back in it. For the most part, I’ve been trying to stick to my routines, be there for my clients, and continue showing up for the Pure Joy Wellness community. For 8 months I literally have not been able to speak about this. Part of why I’m sharing this now is—because I know this community is a safe space where I can be real and honest, and be met with love and support. I also know that as women over 50, grief is something many of us have experienced in our lifetimes or will experience at some point. And as we get older it becomes a greater part of our reality. Loss is unfortunately part of life, and grieving, I’ve learned, is a process. 

One morning after losing Panos, when I was having a particularly tough time getting out of bed, I came across an episode of Patty Lennon’s “The Space For Magic” podcast about grief, and so much of what she said resonated with me. That’s why I decided to interview her for this blog post, and to have her on my Instagram Live to talk about grief and how to cope with it. Below, you’ll see the questions I asked her and her responses. I hope they can help you as much as they’ve helped me—and I hope you’ll tune into our Instagram Live @purejoywellness, on Thursday, August 18 at 3 PM EST/12 PM PST.

For now, here’s a bit of Patty’s perspective on grief. 

How do you define grief? How do we typically experience it emotionally? Physically?

If you look in the dictionary, I think the definition of grief is a deep sorrow. I define grief as a process that humans go through when they need to integrate a loss. Oftentimes we think of grief as something we feel when we lose someone, but we can experience grief in lots of different ways. When we lose a job, when we lose an identity, when we lose something tangible like a phone or something gets destroyed that has meaning to you—all of those produce grief because at its heart, grief is the process of integrating the reality of a loss. 

So, is it emotional? Is it physical? It’s actually all of them right? It’s a psychological process; it’s an emotional process; it’s physical in the sense that our bodies process all of the emotions and the psychological experiences as they integrate with our nervous system. 

Why is dealing with grief so difficult?

Well, there are a few reasons. One is that as humans, we naturally do not like change. And a layer on top of that is we don’t like loss. We just don’t want it. So actually, accepting the loss is difficult because of the way we’re built—the way our brains are structured. That said, it becomes significantly harder when you grow up in a culture like we have in the United States and in most Western cultures, where death and loss are not honored with proper ceremony, proper reverence, and propter time. Many children are taken away from the experience of death. Death and loss are things we culturally look away from and avoid. And as a result, the process of incorporating loss into our lives becomes stunted and invisible. 

So, typically when someone experiences a great loss—certainly if it happens much later in life, in your 30s or 40s or older—it can be quite traumatizing because the actual natural process has not been shown to that person. They don’t have the actual understanding of what grieving looks like for them as an individual. I will say, for me personally, when I lost my mother at 40, it was very difficult, but I had gone through other grieving with grandparents and aunts and uncles, so I knew somewhere what to look for. But much later on, when I lost my father, it was different because I knew what to expect from myself, so it wasn’t quite as startling. 

What are your top tips for dealing with grief? 

Tip #1: Allow yourself to feel what you feel. Even though we have not been trained and exposed to what grieving looks like as a society, and we don’t honor it, we still, within us, have the natural instincts on how to grieve. Honoring what we’re feeling when we’re feeling it is the best way to allow our own natural instincts to emerge. 

Tip #2: Release the desire for a finish line. We are very achievement oriented in our society, and that spills over into our emotional, spiritual, and psychological processes like grief. We want to know: When is it going to be over? But grief isn’t something that “ends.” It’s a process that we evolve through. So if you can let go of the finish line, you will then be able to go and allow yourself to feel what you feel and not judge yourself for it. 

In fact, you may find yourself thinking you’re going backwards at times. Let’s say you experienced a death and it’s been a year since then, and you’re just starting to get your footing. All of a sudden you hear or see something, and you’ll be right back at that original, raw grief and think “did I go backwards? Am I going to have to redo this year like it’s been?” And it doesn’t work like that, it’s a moment. Moments come and go. The judgment of where we are in relationship to an ending of the finish line of that grieving…that can really mess with our minds and our hearts. 

Tip #3: If you believe in a higher power, ask for signs from your loved ones. Obviously if you don’t believe in a higher power, you can skip this one. But if you do, this tip is for you. Our loved ones are very close—the idea that death is a separation is an illusion. It’s not one that you have to convince yourself of when you’re raw in grief. If you believe that your loved ones are on the other side of the veil, that they’re in some other place in some other form, then asking them for a sign to let you know that they’re close is really helpful.

I have many more top tips that I plan to talk to Renata about, so make sure to tune into our IG Live on Thursday, August 18 @ 3 PM EST/12 PM PST on her Instagram @purejoywellness. 

A huge shoutout to Patty, whose words have helped me through this tough time. I hope to see you all over on Instagram this Thursday for the Live. 

Until then, 

Renata