Let's Complete Your Grief | How do you deal with past wounds? | Cole James and Lois Hall

And I wanted to be a doctor from about the time I was in the sixth grade on. Our local doctor got killed and I wanted to just go to medical school, come back and be the doctor right there in the hometown. That didn't happen, right? And so other things did and that's where my career with the Ohio Department of Health came into play.

But if I were describing my childhood, I tell people it was an idyllic childhood, right? I mean, I don't remember having any violence or any abuse or, you know, no big tragedies, no big tragedies. But my mom and I were never close. I never in my entire life heard my mother say the three words I wanted most to hear, which were I love you.

Nothing was ever good enough for my mom. I got straight A's. But if it wasn't an A plus, it wasn't good enough. If I did the dishes and put the cups in the cupboard, she'd come and take them out because it wasn't good enough.

If I did the ironing, she'd come back and do it again because it wasn't good enough. And so while I had what I thought for a long time was this idyllic childhood, that not good enough message kept playing in my head all the time in all kinds of scenarios. And this desire, this need, who more than your mother do you want to say to you, I love you. I don't remember ever being touched or hugged or held by my mom.

Now she was a wonderful woman. She was a wonderful woman. She worked hard on the farm. She was a good mom.

She fed us. She made her clothes. I would have told people it was an idyllic life. But yet, and still that hole in my heart was when my friend said, my mom is my best friend, I went, what would that be like?

And so then getting older and realizing how that not good enough message kept playing over and over and over in other contexts, that was life limiting. That was life limiting. And I had horrible self esteem. If somebody thanked me or appreciated something I did, I'd always come back and say, oh, it wasn't that good.

Or, oh, I messed it up. Or, oh, it wasn't good enough. And so I started to believe that I wasn't good enough. And I'm sure that that played out in my relationships with other people until things changed, until I got free again.

So that's kind of the childhood. It was idyllic. There was no big major tragedy, but it was just this hole in my heart for where my mom should have been. So that's the childhood story.

Just for the audience, you know, Lois and I work together every day. And that's why I just thought it would be so cool to have her on a podcast. My wife and I are fledgling beginner homesteaders, right, with lots of mistakes and laughs in between us trying to figure this out, right, both grown up in the city. And Lois grew up on a farm.

So it's been fun to kind of like run stuff past her. You guys ran a lot of chickens, right? They had this massive amounts of chickens and we're like 40, maybe 40 right now or something like that. So I'm always kind of getting guidance from you from you on that.

One thing that I think is interesting, right, is right now my kids childhood is vastly different than than what mine was just just in terms of living in a more rural setting. And I think it's kind of an interesting kind of just thought process of kids at group in a city versus kids at group on a farm. I mean, my kids, they see dead animals all the time. Now that could be on our farm.

That could also just be driving along the road with the high dense deer population and elk and all these things where death is just a part of it. And you're forced to have the conversation where I have friends in cities where every time they lose a goldfish, right, they hide it from the kids immediately and then create this whole like finding Nemo tail of how the fish jumped out and is now somewhere else, like hiding death, hiding, hiding that. So if you can't, Lois, I'm kind of putting you on the spot here. But if you can, can you tell me a little bit about just again, life growing up on the farm for you and sadness and how that was handled by your parents and just a little bit about that?

Absolutely. And in fact, even hearing you talk, our stories are reverse. I grew up on a farm. Now I live in the city.

My kids grew up in suburban Columbus, Ohio and they live in cities. They'll never know what it's like to live on a farm. They'll never know. And so growing up on the farm, we had about 8,000 chickens, which back in the day was a lot.

Now there are farms with millions. You never get to know them or name them or anything like that. But we had about 8,000 chickens and they just, they die. Chickens die, you know?

And they just always disappeared. And in fact, gross, gross thing, sometimes dad would feed them to the pigs. How gross is that, right? So there were the chickens.

But the other things, cats and dogs, we never had pets in the house. But we always had two or three dogs and you know, dozen cats, rowing around. And they would die too. You mentioned getting hit on the road.

And they would just disappear. They would just magically disappear. And dad never said anything really about that. They just disappeared.

I don't have a clue what he did with those dogs and cats. So the message I got, and mom never said anything about anything emotional. But the message I got was that death was no big deal. He never said that.

He never said those words out loud. But that was kind of the subliminal message I got that was death was no big deal. And then when my grandmother died, you know, my mom took the phone call. It was a Sunday morning and she said, well, your grandma has died.

We're going to take you and your brother to church. We're going to go over to grandpa's house. We'll come and get you. Somebody will come and get you from church later.

And again, that message played again. Well, you're the only grandmother I knew. My other grandma died before I was born. And so your only grandmother that you knew just died, you go to church and pretend like everything is just fine.

So again, that that message of death is no big deal. Even kind of played there with the only grandmother I had ever. You just go to church and pretend like everything is fine. My dad worked at a grain elevator and he fell off of one of those big buildings at one point.

And we were practicing for a Christmas concert. He worked at the elevator as well as having the farm, practicing for a Christmas concert. And his boss came and motioned me over to the window or the door of the band room. And he said, your dad just fell off the elevator.

We've taken him to the hospital in Lima. We're not sure how he is. But you just stay here and practice for the concert. Go to the concert.

Somebody will come and get you tonight when it's over. And my dad, now my mom, not so much. My dad was my guy. Right?

And so that was the first recollection that I really have. Oh my God, something could happen to my dad. Right? And again, it was, you just stay here and keep doing what you're doing.

It's like no big deal. My dad just fell off it like a three-story building. So that was interesting. And then other farm stories.

We had a farmer next door who got his arm caught in an auger. We had somebody who literally had barbed wire poke his eye out. The guy who owned the elevator, his son, died in a grain accident. He fell into one of the grain bins and suffocated.

So working on a farm, there was death. There was loss. We never really talked about it. It was just kind of a part of growing up.

It was no big deal. That's just what happens. So I find it beautifully, blessedly ironic that now, grief is so much a part of what I do because it is a big deal. Loss is a big deal.

And you carry it with you and this pounding it down and pretending like it's not there, didn't really help anything. We just kept going. You just kept going. Yeah, it's a really interesting topic.

And I don't have the answer. Obviously, Lois and I work with grief and loss and pain and sadness. That's our career is helping people with that. And now that I'm living this life, it has been.

So we've been doing this for now three years, four years my wife and I and our four kids here and I to hoe. But even when we were in Oregon before that, we did like homesteading on a smaller scale. And now we have like 20 acres and we have we've had sheep, we've had pigs, we've had rabbits, we've had like, we're trying to figure out what we'd like and kind of what works with our world, you know, having a full time job too. I don't know what the answer is.

And that's really kind of where where I'm feeling compelled just to talk to you about this today, Lois is it. We just dropped off six sheep the other day, right, to the butcher. And I'm unloading them in the horse trailer and all I knew to all I kind of know to do is say a prayer and thank them and then they're all kind of sitting there, kind of looking confused at their new home. And I know, you know, that they're going to be harvested in the next kind of 10 minutes.

And it's a father and son and they're amazing people that do the butchering. If it's smaller scale, we've done a lot of butchering too on the farm being Ashley specifically. So I'm not outsourcing this job all the time unless it's like a lot of animals or but again, just watching my kids and me, there's a difference there. Like my like why it was with me at my eldest son, he's 11 and there was kind of now he was he was kind of over the sheep because they laid down on his ducklings and killed his ducklings.

So they were he was already angry at the sheep, but that's that's kind of story, isn't it? Yeah, it is. It's definitely a death story. Yeah, yeah, literally.

But he didn't need that that completion that I needed. He didn't need to say goodbye to those sheep like I did, right? Me, me kind of living this life in my 30s and 40s is very different than him starting to lead this life at five or six. I mean, he's helped, helped us harvest chickens since he was probably five or six, right?

And all of my kids seem to be that way. I'm really enjoying this conversation, Lois, because it's like there are certain roles in life, areas of this country and world where you live, where there is more death right there in front of you. And it needs to be that way for all of us to live. I mean, the fact of the matter is for us to live, other things need to die.

It doesn't matter if you're a vegan, a vegetarian, a car on the carnivore diet, things are are dying for us to live. And so how do we have, how do we number one, identify the pain and what hurts and then the other things that don't hurt and is that okay? Is that not okay? Again, I'm kind of feeling this all out as I go.

And I'm having my kids as a reference, I'm having my wife as a reference, I'm having me as a reference. And so it's just kind of interesting thing. It's like what you were saying about death wasn't a big deal. And I was curious for you to get into, well, when did human death come into it?

Is it a big deal then? Oh no, it was even treated not like a big deal there, right? So just kind of an interesting topic. If you have anything on what I just said.

Well, so going back to pets, talking about pets or animals that die. So we always had these pets. And the first memory I have of pets is dressing them up in doll clothes and pushing them around the barnyard in my little doll building. They were barn cats, but they were very, very friendly.

But when we got married and had our kids living in a suburb, they wanted pets. And I said, no, nothing doing. We live in town. There's no place for them to run.

They need to be outside. You wouldn't take care of them. You wouldn't clean the cage. You wouldn't do this.

You wouldn't do that. And so our kids never had pets growing up. Never had pets growing up. We might have got the goldfish at the state fair, right?

But you swing that bag a couple times and the next thing you know, they're gone too. But I was sharing my lost story several years ago, about 2015 when the pet lost book came out. And our youngest adult child had brought home a hamster. They were living in an apartment and they were going to get a new apartment and their new roommate was going to have a cat.

We didn't think the cat and the hamster would maybe get along real well. And so they left the hamster with us. Now mind you, my kids are all grown and gone. But here sits this hamster in the cage.

And I would come home at the end of the day. Beckett Grandma's home, right? And he liked the corn kernels the best. And so I would feed him the corn kernels through the wires.

And you know, Beckett was my baby, Beckett. And I noticed at a point that he quit going up into the little penthouse in his cage. And then I noticed that he started kind of staying right near the water in the food. And I thought, hmm, this isn't good.

And I thought, you know, I didn't know this. But smaller animals live shorter lives than big animals. And so sure enough, one Saturday morning I woke up and Beckett was cold and hard and dead in the corner of his cage. And I grieved.

I cried, right? And so as what happened was, I mean, so I put Beckett in a little box. I put some excelsior in the bottom so he'd be comfortable. I sprinkled him with some oil so that he wouldn't smell and the neighbor's dogs wouldn't dig him up.

I put some corn kernels in in case he woke up and he wasn't quite dead. He'd have some corn to nibble on on his way to wherever hamsters go to. Put him in the box, rode on the top here, lies Beckett Hall. And I put in the date that he died.

And we buried him in the backyard. And as I told that story, I said, does that sound like something a six year old little girl would do? He never got to do with all those pets. And I started to cry, not just because of the pets that I had lost or the fact that Beckett had died, but it made me realize part of the reason that I never wanted my kids to have pets was because I didn't want to get close to them.

Because I knew in my heart that it was a big deal, right? And so now I'm seeing that the impact of my loss and my grief and this no big deal myth prevented my kids from the joy and the beauty of having pets. None of them grew up with pets in the house. It wasn't because they couldn't run or they wouldn't clean the cage or they wouldn't take care of them.

It was because I didn't want to get too close to those pets. And so it was like what an awful regret to have not only had my life impacted by that, but then to pass that on to my kids. And so my oldest son now has a wonderful dog, Bengal, that they love and adore. And Cade has three cats, then they love and adore him.

And Jason is thinking about getting a dog, but they didn't have that experience as kids because of me. So yeah, how it affected my life, but also the life of my kids is still just an amarvel to me. And the fact that we had that little funeral, just like a little girl would do. That made no sense.

Well, right, right. Well, yeah, there's so much there. So thank you for telling the truth about that story. And I just, I want to, for the audience, just to really come back to why, why we kind of came up with what the term feel free again.

We believe, and I know a lot of us would agree with me, that unresolved emotional pain robs you of choice because you are, are busy with your coat of armor trying to shield from the next loss, right? So if I have pain from my past and I don't know what to have done with it, I don't know how to complete what is unfinished emotionally for me, that really limits my future choices. And so feel free again, really represents, hey, let's go ahead and find ways for us to complete what is unfinished emotionally and therefore have more choice in real time. Now, again, this isn't to beat up my parenting or Lois' parenting, but really, you know, what I'm hearing is like low from Lois' story in attempt because she had that coat of armor because of, you know, having a lot of incomplete loss in her past, right?

There was no choice for her to consider getting animals for her kids. Now this could be subconsciously, it could be conscious, you know, but either way, the choice wasn't there for Lois. It was, we're not going to have pets in this household because I don't know, I don't know if I can really hang with being getting attached and then having more loss, right? So that's really interesting.

And then the other thing that I love Lois is, again, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks with judgment or with comparison or minimizing what I love for you guys to hear in the audience is, Lois was going to go ahead and have that memorial for Beckett, whether anyone liked it or not because Lois knew what she needed to do for her based on a bunch of stuff she's picked up in her life and skills and tools. So she knew intuitively she's going to have a memorial and no one else gets a vote in that. And I love that part. I don't want anyone to miss that.

I do that too. I really have the freedom to live my life how I want to without it having to fit in perfectly with what society would think, right? In different areas, especially when it comes to emotional completion and doing things that will be beneficial for me to complete what I need to complete with any relationship I have. So, you know, thank you for that story.

Yeah. One other beautiful point about that story too. The kids weren't here. My husband and I buried that box in the backyard, right?

And so the point about nobody judging or comparing, I have the most amazing husband. He's never, he's never done some of the grief work that I have, but he did not deny me the opportunity. He dug the hole. He was right there, right?

He did not deny me the opportunity to have that ritual to say goodbye to Beckett. And so that's what you said about nobody denying or judging. He was so good because of just us Moses of what he's learned. But he knew too it was important for me to have that ceremony for Beckett.

So yeah. Yeah. And I second that Don is the man. I love your husband.

He's a great man. And it, yeah, there are these things that are really important, these rituals that we've had throughout the dawn of man, right? Which are these rituals saying goodbye to our loved ones, friends, family, and also animals that were friends of ours too. And it's such an important part.

And I think what's sad, right, is we've sterilized so much of death now, right? Where we don't really really have a much of a role in the death of a loved one in a hospice environment, in a hospital for that matter, right? There's a bunch of bells and alarms. The minute someone dies and we're not giving a lot of people, right?

We used to bathe the body. We used to have the body right there in the living room. I mean, I believe that we had picture windows and part of that was so that we could get full caskets through. I mean, there was a lot more completion work being done by our ancestors.

And there was a lot more time spent allocated to the saying goodbye, definitely to the physical, right? In our work, we talk about when someone dies, we'll take death, for an example. If someone dies, you have the end of the physical, right? But it is not the end of the emotional.

And for many people, depending on their beliefs, it's not the end to the spiritual, but it is certainly the end of the physical. Well, nowadays we get robbed of so much of that saying goodbye to the physical. One of the things I'm really grateful for is when my dad died, he died at home and the hospice nurse would come and do checkups. But this was a, you know, several month long process, right?

I got to really say goodbye to my dad physically for a while. And I remember I came in to check on him. It was like three at night and I came and I saw that he had died. I just could tell looking through the threshold of the room, I saw my mom sleeping and I just knew that he was dead right from across the room.

And we got to, I woke my mom and she already knew and she was just sleeping next to him, you know, and she already knew and then she got up and then we got to spend the night, you know, outside of the room but going in and kissing him and hugging him. And, you know, I got to do a bunch of emotional completion and I'm so glad I had that, you know, and I feel for people that don't have that. And I hope and I wish that we could have more of a movement in hospital and clinical settings to do this more, a lot more than we're doing right now because I think it's a really important part of it, right? And so anyway, it's kind of another thing I wanted to talk on when you're talking about the ceremony with Beckett, right?

That reminds me of another childhood memory too. My dad was first generation American. He was Welsh and all of his family lived in Wales, right? And I remember as a kid, they would send us photographs of the cemetery plot or photographs of the person in the casket.

And as a kid, I thought, Jesus, that amazing, that's gross. Why are they sending us this picture of this dead person in a casket, right? Well, he didn't get to be there and I'm getting chills cold because I hadn't remembered or thought about that in a long time. But you know, for him, he never met them when they were alive, but he had letters, he had stories from his parents.

And so those pictures, and even though it took weeks in the mail to get here, it might have been two, three weeks after they had died, but those pictures were really important to him because that was the only thing he got to do in the way of a ritual. And so finally, I think it was 1972. We finally went to Wales and dad could see those cemetery plots in reality and it was important to him to go there, right? And to go to the homes where his grandparents had lived.

And again, thinking how we're such a mobile society now too, immigrants here and there and people who grew up in Columbus now live in New York. And we can't always physically be there. And so what you were talking about reminded me to even of that story and how sad it must have been for my dad to have not been able to grieve with his family for those losses. I have a copy of a letter that somebody sent to him telling him about his mother dying, or his grandmother dying, and he wasn't there, right?

I mean, I can't imagine. And again, it took days, weeks, how long did it take to go across the ocean back in the 50, 60, 70s? And so you're right. I mean, again, being there for that ritual is so important, so important.

And again, it just going back to earlier in our conversation, it's why I'm so interested in comparing my kid's childhood to mine. Again, just carcasses, bodies, things are not unfamiliar to them. And again, I think there's good and there's bad to that. But I do think how urban we are now as a country, right?

Think about how much more that was a part of a child's life was. Death was just a part of it, right? We were witnessing that, right? Well, now you can grow up in a large urban area and really almost think that death doesn't exist for much of your life.

And I think there are different fears and there's different things that, again, I know we don't want to get too deep in the weeds on that. I think culturally we are really getting in our own way in terms of working towards saying goodbye to a lot of these people with just any kind of lack of awareness around that. Now, again, there, but on the other side of the coin, right, it's kind of like I think of, okay, well, how do we help kids like you, Lois, when you were a kid and you had a bunch of death around because it was the business to raise chickens to harvest or to get eggs, but there was going to be lots and lots of death. My kids, same thing.

And how do we, how do we make sure that they still have the choice as adults to have, you know, pets in the household versus I just can't open that door because it was so overwhelming as a kid, right? Like these things obviously because I care about my kids, I love them very much. I want to figure out, okay, well, what is the balance there? They're going to be around death because I very much, Ashley and I are very passionate about really kind of being connected to our food, not just hiring some middleman to do all of that.

Like if I'm going to do those things, then I really need to know what that's like. And we have a lot of appreciation towards us putting in that work and I think it really benefits the kids in a lot of ways. But at the same time, I want them to be able to know how to work through that stuff, right? And it's not like it, like sometimes you have your domestic pets and they are, they're part of the family.

And then you got just on the pure other side of it, you got the meat rabbit, right? But then in between, you got these ducks that you kind of really crack up about, right? And you do form a relationship or like, why? He loves the pigs.

And so he's got relationships. And it's like, how do you say goodbye to kind of a friend, but somebody that you know is really being raised for to feed the family? But it does kind of like blur the lines between domestic pet and this is what we do, right? And so again, I don't have the answer.

It's like I'm very new to this, right? So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or guidance knowing what you know. Yeah, the one thing, again, childhood memory comes to come to mind. You know, when you grow up in the country, there's 4-H, right?

And for the girls, you do sewing projects and cooking projects and so forth. But for the guys, they raise steers, they raise pigs, they raise sheep and they take them to the county fair, right? And they clean them and they wash them and they train them and they teach them how to stand just perfectly, right? So that they look really good for the judges.

But I've never done that part, but I wonder how much the 4-H talks about what happens when that grocery store buys your steer. You know, I wonder how much they talk about this, this, this, kind of that, that gray line that you were talking about. This, this steer was my friend, right? And now I'm selling him for, you know, $30, $40,000 and where's he go next?

So that's, that wasn't interesting. Remember, and so mine too is, is that blurred line. But I think cold the thing and I know you do this with your kids and I, I've always tried to do it with mine too. And it comes down to telling the truth, telling the truth.

The chickens died. The deer was killed on the road, right? Rather than we lost the dog or, you know, somebody passed or, you know, all those euphemisms we use. And to kids, it's very confusing.

It's very confused. What do you mean you lost them? Where are they? Are they under the bed or are they in the closet?

Where are they? What do you mean they lost them? And with people, well, you know, grandma just went to be with Jesus. I remember when our second son was about six years old.

My mom and dad died when he was like five and then mom died when he was six. And he was being kind of mischievous in the back seat of the car one day. And I said to him, hey, stop it, stop it right now. I'm going to stop this car.

And he goes, mom, don't you yell at me or I'm going to kill myself and go to heaven and be with grandma and grandpa. Because we talked so much about grandma's going to be in heaven with grandpa now, right? Grandma's going to be in heaven with grandpa. She's in a better place.

All those things we say, which may again be spiritually true. It was spiritually true for us, right? But to a child, it sounded like, again, it sounded like a choice he had to. Grandma and grandpa always were nice to me.

They never scolded me. If you're not nice to me, I'm going to kill myself and go to heaven and be with grandma and grandpa. Oh my gosh, did that stop my heart? We got to have a more serious conversation about what this whole thing means, right?

So losing somebody or somebody past or they went to sleep or they're in a better place. We got to tell the truth. And I am sure, again, you're talking mostly animals on the homestead there. But I'll bet when your dad died, you told the truth to your kids about that too, didn't you?

I'll bet you didn't say grandpa went to be with Jesus or grandpa fell asleep and asleep and would, you know, whatever those platitudes are, I'll bet you told your kids the truth. In fact, I'd be curious. How did you tell your, because there are various ages. You said, why it's 11, you know, and they go younger from there.

But how do we tell our kids the truth about death, right? It is a big deal. It is a big deal. Pat or a person, it's a big deal.

How did you tell him? Yeah, yeah, it is. I'm trying to remember exactly. It was such a whirl when I was going back and forth from Oregon to Idaho as much as I could to be there.

And I'm pretty sure I had to do it over the phone. There was no way that I would, that's the other thing I think too is sometimes we hide the truth for weeks and weeks. And, you know, for so many different scenarios, that's not a great plan either, because if we're taking, if we're taking kids for an example, kids are like black belt at intuition. They're so intuitive and it's not until we get in the way as adults that they really, we kind of beat that intuition out of them over the years, right?

So if you're like dancing around something or waiting for the right time or we didn't want you to know during your SATs about this, right? They're feeling, they're feeling the energy, right? And then you're telling them nothing's wrong. And then you're, we're teaching them to distrust their intuition, right?

So we think we're, well, yeah, definitely, you know, so now, so we have, thank you. Yeah, we have, we have a, we have a loss of trust in a parent. We're, we're learning how to distrust our intuition as well. And we are, and we're just avoiding what needs to happen, which is they need to know the truth, right?

So anyway, back to my story, I'm sure I, I talked to my wife, right? And then I, I'm, let's just, let's just say I did this because I assume I did. I don't remember specifically how it went, but they were very well aware of the whole thing. That's another thing.

A lot of families would have opted to be, oh, I'm just going to go visit grandpa, right or whatever. But we were, again, age appropriate. I have four kids. So age appropriate, we're having conversations about what cancer is and kind of what grandpa's feeling, you know, and kind of, you know, so we were trying to be there when they, when they, when they were asking questions, again, I'm not going to constantly remind my 11 year out throughout the day.

Now, remember grandpa's dying over here in Oregon. If he asks, I'm going to answer honestly, right? Kids are going to go in the moment. They can be giggling and sledding one second and then be super sad about the reality of what grandpa's going through the next minute.

And we can, we can address that and then they can go back to being back in the moment. And I think that's all good. I'm not trying to get in the way of any of that. I'm not a fan, just kind of a sidebar.

I'm not a fan. I've seen a lot of adults that are un, that have unresolved grief around, let's say a sibling or a parent. And then they're like constantly trying to remind the child. Okay, do you remember what this anniversary is and do you write in there and they're bringing, they're bringing all this kind of incompleteness they have.

And they're almost like wanting the child to, to, to, to really like we're going to go to the memorial. Again, this year and we're going to go to the honorary, you know, event this year. And I'm not doing a great job articulating what I, what I'm, what I'm trying to get at. The takeaway is if we're adults and we know that we're hurting and we're incomplete with this grief, we really owe it to our kids to do our work.

It's one thing to want your child to know about their uncle that they'll never meet. It's, it's, it's, it's one thing to be able to tell stories and really you want that, that person's memory to, to live on and, and your kids to know. Who there? That's like one thing and I got no problem with that, but it's, it's another to really be, to be, I don't know, low.

So if you want to help me out, it's, it's another thing we're unfinished with that relationship and we, and we have to almost force the messaging and force all of the. Yeah, the stories and the events to the, to kid. It's, it's just, I don't know if manipulation is right where we're. It's heavy for the kid.

It is, we talk sometimes about enshrining or bedeviling, right? And so it's kind of what's the balance in the stories that we tell. Oh, Uncle So-and-So was just wonderful. He was just amazing.

He was just awesome, right? And so they get this, this one-sided understanding of who that uncle was. Or he was just ratnastier, he was this or he was awful or he was this. So we, we kind of, I think from some experiences that I've seen people go through, is we kind of tend to do that, right?

Rather than the realistic, nobody's to say to reset, nobody's to the devil. Ever, you know, they're all kind of all over the place. But sometimes in our storytelling or our memorializing, and maybe that's just our human nature. To do that.

But I don't know if that's what we were going to do. No, no, thank you. It's not where I was going, but it's a really important topic to bring up in Shrine and Bedeviling. I think another thing that happens a lot that could not happen as much, if we had more tools about how to complete emotional pain, a lot of the time in our, when people go through divorce, we get so busy telling the narrative to the child, stuff that's not really appropriate for the child about who their dad is or who their mom is or really who their dad or mom is in the perception of the person kind of hurting over the breakup, right?

I just see this a lot of the time playing out in that specifically, that, that loss. And if we had other tools, right, and, and Lois, try and help people with these tools, obviously, if we had other tools, we really could, we could really, again, find more of an accurate memory picture of who that person was, find some empathy there, work on forgiving all that really kind of stuff that is below the line or what, what Lois called bedevilment, that'll free us up to go find some above the line stuff that, that when we did fall in love with them, all the good memories we did have. And then sometimes that will rehumanize that person. And then we can, you know, we can kind of be a little bit more accurate with talking about the RX in front of our kids.

I think that would be such a huge gift if the world could just learn how to heal from that stuff, you know, more. Yeah, either with my mom, right, when I talk about my mom, I do this a lot. And my youngest adult child never knew my mom or dad, right? And so the stories we tell, right?

If I had not used these tools, I would be telling these stories to that child, right? Our two older kids, they had the chance to know Grandma and Grandpa. But if all I tell is these kinds of stories, my mom was a wonderful person. She fed me.

She taught me how to cook. She gave me my love for numbers and data and statistics. She was very organized. She loved to send cards, you know?

I mean, there were many good things about her too, right? That if I was only stuck with this, that's all my, that's all my third child would know. And what I tell people now is, and unfortunately, I love my mother more now than I ever did when she was alive. Because going through and using these tools helped me really go back and see, no, she wasn't always this.

She just loved me in a different way than what I expected or hoped that she would. And knowing what little I know about her childhood, she didn't get a lot of love and hugs and touches either. You know, and so, you know, I can have compassion for her in that. And I can realize that yes, it wasn't what I wanted or needed.

But, you know, she loved me in many ways. She loved me in many ways. And so I can have a more accurate picture of her, which is helpful for me. It's helpful for me as a mom.

It's helpful for me as telling, you know, stories about my mom to my, to my adult children. Yeah, that accurate. Having more that accurate memory picture of who the person really was. It's, it's, it's anyway.

No, thank you. That's, that's wonderful. Um, okay. So the next place I want to go, if you're good with it, is we're going to flash forward through Lois's life.

And she is magically at the Department of Health, right? Correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah. But I really would love to get into.

I just think this is such a cool part of your life. You, I don't want to, I don't want to step on this story at all. Um, but basically you find yourself in kind of a big national event, right? Or in it.

Um, yeah, arena, um, that went down in history. So would you mind kind of telling us a little bit about that story? I would be glad to tell you about that. So I wanted to be a doctor.

You heard me say that earlier. That was all I wanted to be and people would say, well, maybe you should be a nurse. I didn't want to be a nurse. I wanted to be a doctor.

Well, when I didn't get into medical school, I was crushed. What am I going to do? I had no other plan B, right? And, and I was crushed.

And when I called home and told my dad and mom that I got that last rejection letter, I don't remember what my mom said. But dad said, well, honey, don't feel bad. Maybe you can be a nurse, which just crushed me even more because he was my guy and he didn't understand what a big dream that was. So camera moves forward.

I, I get a call from the placement office at my university and I didn't even know they had a placement officer that I had signed up with it. And they had this job opportunity available at the Ohio Department of Health to be a communicable disease investigator. I didn't have a clue what that was, but it sounded exciting. All right.

So we put on our best clothes and the state fair was going on at the same time. So mom and dad drove me down to Columbus. We stayed in a hotel. I went to the interview for the job and then we stayed overnight and went to the state fair the next day.

It was a wonderful blend between country and city. So I got this job and turns out it was a Centers for Disease Control Funded Study of Rye Syndrome, which back in the 70s, 60s and 70s was a very mysterious childhood illnesses illness. Some kids would get the flu and chickenpox and they'd get better. But some kids would get the flu or the chickenpox and they would just start to be getting better and all of a sudden they would grow it go into this amazing projectile vomiting.

Their brains would swell. They would have neurological complications. Their liver's got funky. Sometimes they died.

Sometimes they survived but with with lasting complications and it was a mysterious disease. Nobody knew what caused it. So the Centers for Disease Control funded a study at the Ohio Department of Health, Michigan in Arizona and so we did a case control and I was right out of college. I was just a kid.

I don't know what 21, 22 and what a big and the CDC. Oh my god. I'd heard about the CDC but I'd never been there. Right.

And so I got to go to CDC and all these kind of it was really amazing. Anyway, so that the work that we did actually we did a case control study and we interviewed parents of kids who got rice syndrome and parents of kids who didn't. And what we found was that kids who who were given baby aspirin during their chickenpox or the flu were more likely to go on and get rice syndrome than kids who weren't given baby aspirin. And you are probably too young to know this but back in the day people used to just pop those baby aspirin for their kids.

I mean they were little pink pills, little orange pills. Now we use them as old people to help us with our with our cardiac risk. The little 81 milligram pills, right. And so it was really our study, the Ohio Department of Health study which I worked on that that that sealed the link between giving a child aspirin and they're getting rice syndrome.

And so the aspirin companies didn't like that. So they sued us. I did a seven hour deposition with the silk suit lawyers from the aspirin companies which again for a kid who's 22 grew up on the farm. That was an amazing experience.

We got to testify at the Institute of Medicine in Washington DC. I had never been there before. I mean again just what a story for this little farm girl right. Well so so there were actually journal articles published.

They could not refute our study. That's the so what. The aspirin companies no matter what the lawyers tried to do they they got our data they looked at the that the questionnaires they looked at the data and they could not put a hole in our study. I did good work right.

And you'll love this too. I remember sitting at the kitchen table coding data forms and praying God let us find something in this data. And so to this very day if you go to buy a bottle of aspirin and you look at the warnings it's going to say on the back of that bottle do not give this product to children it may cause rice syndrome. In that amazing.

And so I'm a real data geek. I've got a slide on my phone. I should have sent it to you ahead of time. But when when that article was published and doctors started finding out that hey this link between aspirin and rice syndrome is real and parents started finding out the data went from up here with with cases and mortality.

Zoom. Clear down just like almost over a year's period of time. And so again for me you know it was like oh my gosh I have probably saved more lives by doing a good job in that study than if I had been a little doctor back home in a little small town. It was amazing.

That was my first job. That was my first job. And so to have a couple journal articles published. I was the fourth author.

I was never important enough to be first second or third. No offense to them. But what an amazing thing. But the other thing that that I remember about that was one of the treatments as I remember it as I understand it was when kids would have this and their brain was swelling.

Again it was the 60s and 70s. They might do something different today. But as I understand that they would cut their skull so that their brain could swell without being damaged. You're a dad.

I can't imagine standing at the foot of that bed seeing your child in that condition and then thinking I gave him the aspirin. I gave him the aspirin because the news was starting to get out even before it was official. And so that's really too when my interest in grief was first kind of peak. Again it was no big deal on the farm.

But seeing these parents with the grief of what was happening to their child and this responsibility, this regret. Oh my gosh. I gave him the aspirin. Was really touched my heart.

I'm a left brain logical epidemiologist kind of a person. But I'm also a right brain heart kind of a person. And that just broke my heart. That just broke my heart.

And so I was also responsible for doing the case counting and surveillance for Legionnaires disease which was new back then, toxic shock which was new back then, Kawasaki disease which was new. So it was what an amazing early career in public health to be at the state health department working on CDC funded projects and and and these mysterious diseases. It was amazing. It was amazing.

People say I should write a book. I don't know. Anyway. And then in 1981, in 1981 along came a new mysterious disease where you were probably born in 1981.

Aren't you cool? April? April? Yeah.

So in June of 1981 there was this article that came out about this mysterious disease among young gay men in San Francisco in New York. Well it's a mysterious disease. Give it to Lois. Right?

So rice syndrome Kawasaki, toxic shock Legionnaires, etc. And they added AIDS to my list of diseases to work on. And as we saw AIDS growing, they took the other diseases away. And so the middle kind of middle third of my career was just working in the AIDS program.

And again, my heart broke for and back in the early days it was young broke for those young men for their partners for the for the physicians. Right? Infectious disease docs usually gave people a pill. They got better and they went home.

These young men, there was nothing given them to make them get better and go home in the early days. And so even the medical professionals were breathing that they weren't being able to be successful. And the families, the families. You couldn't you couldn't you know somebody says, Oh, hey, how's your son?

Oh, he's great. He's fine. He's wonderful. How's yours?

Oh, well, he's gay and he's got AIDS. So again, this not being able to talk about it, not being able to tell the truth. The grief that they had with this secrecy and the fear. Right?

I mean, in the early days, we didn't know how it was spread. The whole COVID thing in the early days reminded me a lot of the early AIDS days. And so again, I was struck by the grief primarily that the that the professionals had and that the parents had. And that's when I met your dad, a friend at church had a son who had died by suicide.

And so I was asking her, you know, how do you deal with the grief? And she said, Oh, you got to you got to read this book, this grief recovery handbook. And oh, John James is coming to Columbus to do a talk. And you got to you got to go and hear him.

And so again, my career in public health really spurred my my interest in grief. And for me to this very day, I consider I still work in the field of public health that grief is my program. So, you know, so yeah, I have loved my work in public health and and how it how it works together with with the grief work. Yeah, I would thank you for that.

That's such an incredible story to be to kind of be at the epicenter of all of those things as like starting your career and being the epicenter like in public health in those times and in dealing with all of those struggles that we struggled with. That's incredible. I yeah, again, you're you're you're remarkable woman. You know that you don't need me to say that.

But again, I love to just hear this. I could. So, so if you would now, let's go from okay, now we're established, now we've had, you know, we've had a career now in public health. You talk to this lady and she she puts on your radar grief recovery.

You know, and grief unresolved grief being, you know, something that is part of it. I would I really am interested to hear your story on how you went from public health and treating all of these different things. In addition to the public health stuff, I think we're really dealing with right this minute, which is obesity and drug addiction and alcoholism and violence, both domestic violence, gang violence, anger, suicide, right? All of these things that are public health issues, big, big serious issues.

And when I just want to know when it really, you had the aha moment that oh my underneath all of this is unresolved loss, emotional pain, grief, whatever you want to call it, obviously people are calling it trauma right now. And there's of course there's factors and there's nuances to each of these words I just said, but ultimately it's about sad things happening from my past and I don't know what to do with them and they pile up and I have to find something to distract me from that. Will you walk us through kind of just in your history when you kind of connected dots and stuff like that? Oh my god, absolutely, absolutely.

So I met your dad. I went to the conference where he was speaking. I heard him. I was hooked.

So I got back in touch with with your dad at the institute and I had CDC grant dollars for AIDS and professional education dollars. And so I used some of those CDC grant dollars to bring your dad to Columbus. I don't know, three, four, five times to talk to doctors, to talk to nurses, to talk to clergy people, to talk to I mean I brought him several times and he would take going back to the airport when hell, I'm not coming back to do another talk till you get trained. So through the United Methodist Church, I'm a United Methodist and through the United Methodist Church I got some money at grant to take the training.

And so it was it was a training in Memphis with your dad and as with the aha moment, the light bulbs going off, I remember exactly. There's a point in the training where we talk about all the ways that that we try to numb our feelings. Right? We eat, we drink, we drug, we shake babies, we drive risky, we do all kinds of things.

And more now, we play on our cell phones, we use video games, we do all kinds of things, we shop. Some people clean, that's not me. Some people exercise, that's not me. Mine is more like sleeping and eating, but those are the ways we numb it too.

And I remember sitting there and thinking, oh my god, we've got a program at public health for every one of these things and they're not working. Right? We've got pamphlets and brochures about drugs and tobacco and alcohol and obesity. And then the next thing that we talked about after these behaviors that we engage in, we call them health risk behaviors in public health.

But the next thing your dad talked about was all the ways these these unresolved griefs impact our physical health. Right? We gain weight or we or anorexia and bulimia or we or we have our diabetes gets out of whack because we're eating all the wrong things or we get cancer because we smoke or we, whatever, all these physical things, our immune system gets messed up. Even even pregnancies, right?

I mean toxic stress in a community we know now impacts the health and the vitality of the baby in a pregnancy. And so again, we had just talked about all of these health risk behaviors that we use to numb or escape or distract from grief. And then we talked all about the physical things and it went, oh my god, we've got a program for all of those two. And they're not working.

We're spending millions of dollars on all of these public health issues and it's not working because we're not getting to the heart of the matter. Right? In fact, I tell people now when I do talks for public health people, the word is right there. The clue is in the word.

Our dis-ease causes our disease. It's right there in the word, isn't it? Our dis-ease with all this stuff in our life. And it's never just one loss.

It's never just somebody died. Well, somebody died and then your income changes and maybe you have to move to a different house or you get a divorce and all these things change and happen. And then your health starts, so we're sick and tired of being sick and tired. That's the way we live our life.

Right? And that's not how we're intended to be. I love this idea of coming back to freedom. We are not, we were not intended in my belief by our creator to live like this, but we do.

We're just numbed out from all this stuff. And so if we could get to the heart of the matter, that's what really frees us from all of these things, from the risky health behaviors, perhaps from some of the illnesses and the social things like the violence and the cutting and all the, you know, harming your body and all of those things, you know, it's a public health issue. That was, to me, it was sitting in that training with your dad. I had heard him do talks for an hour or two several times, but it was sitting in that training and really spending some intense time on these health risk behaviors and the health healthy outcomes and impacts of that.

And literally I sat there in the training and cried, because that's my career and we're not making a difference. And then I got back to work like the very next week. And I think I think you mentioned domestic violence a little bit ago too, one of my work colleagues came back from a conference where she had heard about this thing called the ACE study, adverse childhood experience. As it was new back in the 80s and 90s.

And she came back and did a presentation at a staff meeting on the adverse childhood experiences study. And I tiered up again, because what the ACE study says is these things start in childhood. And so now we're coming full circle. What do we tell the kids?

Is it a big deal or is it a not a big deal? Do we say that dad died or we just do we say we lost dad? Right. And those things that happened to children in their lives that we never talk about, that's where that dis-ease starts.

And so for me, that was again the absolute link and affirmation that this whole journey of wanting to be a doctor and not getting into medical school and finding public health and doing the right study and working in AIDS and meeting your dad and getting the training. It just all came together. It just all came together. We cannot work hard enough fast enough and wide enough to help people be free again.

Right. We've got the tools. We can't work hard enough fast enough to help get that message out there because it's possible. So that was my aha moment was in that training seeing those flip charts up on the wall with the with the risk behaviors and with the health impacts.

That was the aha moment that said grief is a public health issue. Okay. I love it. And I was just just seeing the audience knows.

I was just out in Ohio with Lois. And I got to see a little bit about what she's been up to in Ohio. And it's nothing it's nothing short of amazing. This is again she's putting this together right in the 90s, right?

I think she's putting this together. Oh wow public health unresolved grief and emotional pain and trauma. Whatever you want to call it, but it's emotional pain that we don't know what to do with is causing all of these public health issues. And we have all these programs to manage your anger or help with your eat nutritionally.

But we can't do that if we have this mountain of unresolved energy that is is continually on fire in us. And we have to you know in these these things that we're doing are just essentially us distracting right. So we're trying to we keep trying to treat treat the symptom. And it's like but we're not going in dealing with it.

So can you tell like again I was so floored so you have Joe Missola and you have all these other people in the Ohio Department of Health. You know big state they finally get it. He said such great stuff at at this conference. I was out with you.

So would you just kind of just tell the audience all the cool stuff that you guys in Ohio are doing around this topic now. You know now what 20, 30 years later into it now. Right right. Well and that for me is you know the value of persistence.

I tell people I have been like water drops on a rock. I have been talking since the 90s about grief as a public health issue. And I really couldn't get a lot of people to listen. COVID came along and all of a sudden people are starting to talk about grief.

It's really kind of the first time you started to hear the word grief in any of the news stories right because people were dying and it was mysterious. It was scary and there was no treatment in the early days and it was you know frightening and and healthcare workers were burning out right. Well that's the same thing that happened in AIDS when they couldn't help those guys get better. And so in October and just a shout out to Joe he's actually the health commissioner for Franklin County public health.

Okay. Got you. Joe is with Franklin County Health Department. Wonderful magnificent guy.

I love him dearly. So I've been like this water drops on rock and so in August of 2021 COVID was still a pretty pretty much at a peak. Governor DeWine again shout out to the governor into our health director at the time Dr. Amy Acton.

They were doing great work with with with COVID in Ohio. And the governor had weekly calls with all of our local health commissioners and one day he asked what do you guys need? What do you need? What can I do for you?

And the health commissioners just started talking about our staff are exhausted. They're worn out. We're seeing death in our community. You know people can't go to funerals.

We're not having kids in school. They can't go to graduations. What do you got for that governor? What do you got for that?

And so one of my colleagues at the state health department ODH Wally Burton called and said, lowest we had this call today. And I've been hearing you talk about this grief stuff for decades now. Could you do something for us? It's like you bet I can.

When do you need the proposal? He said, well, I need it by Friday. This was Wednesday night. So I put together a proposal.

I sent him the proposal. I didn't hear anything. I had, well, you know, it didn't go anywhere. A couple of months later I get a call from another administrator who says I want to talk to you about that proposal.

What? Right? And so she said, oh yeah, that thing I sent in. And she said, yeah, they want to fund it.

And I said, well, what parts? I always put the kitchen sink in a proposal. And then we take things out that they don't want to do. So I put the kitchen sink in there.

And she said, well, I don't know. Look at it. I guess they want to fund it all. So I have to my knowledge.

And I would know this because of my connections with public health and with the grief recovery institute to my knowledge, Ohio is the only state in the country where the state health department. I'm so proud of them. You took them some time. But they gave me a contract to work on providing grief education and support for our local health department staff.

And so the program has four components. First is education. I've done I'll bet you now close to 100 webinars for public health professionals, community health workers, patient navigators, anybody who will listen. Just a basic one and a half hour talk on what is grief and why is it so mysterious?

And they get it. They love it. That's part one is education. The second part is support for those people who listen to that webinar and go, oh, great.

You know, I've got some stuff I need to work on. You know, that's that what you're describing. That's me. I'm that kind of person.

I need help. And so again, kudos to the to the Ohio Department of Health. They will allow me for anybody who who participates in one of those webinars or who finds out about the program. If they want to actually go through the grief recovery method, they will let them do that.

And many of their local health commissioners let them do that on work time because keeping a healthy employee saves your money down the road too. And so I've also been able to help local health department staff go through the program. And it's been wonderful. The comments have been wonderful coming back.

And then the third component is training, right? I could keep showing them and giving them fish or I can teach them how to fish. And so the biggest part of this contract is to have local public health department staff go through the training. Same one I went through with your dad, right?

To go through the training so that they can provide these programs at the local level so that they can provide these programs. So we have 22 right now, 22 trained and more coming next year to be a grief recovery method specialist in their local communities. We had a call this morning end of year summary. Tell me what tell me what you've been doing.

And one of the questions is what has what have been your challenges. But one of the questions is what's the best part? What's keeping you do this? And their face is just light up.

Oh my gosh. When I see them get it. When I see that one of the one of the public health nurses from from my rural health department in Putnam County, Ohio, she said one of her past participants said to her, you know, Sherry, I'm singing in my heart again. Cole, is that not free to be alive again?

She said, I was so burdened by this stuff I was carrying. I feel like I'm singing in my heart. Who wouldn't want to do that, right? And so and so that's the kind of success that they're getting at the local level.

And then the second program which I want to focus on more next year is this helping children with loss. We've got to teach adults how to do a better job. And again, we're coming right circling back to your kids on the farm, me on the farm. We've got to do a better job helping our kids deal with the loss, the change, the stuff that happens in their lives because it's a pretty shitty world.

If you watch the news and read the paper and our kids are affected by that. And so we have the second program that I really want them to focus on next year for school staff, school personnel, school nurses, pediatricians, family and children services people, juvenile justice people, foster care adoption. I mean, look how many places people touch our kids' lives. And so that's the third piece and then the fourth one.

How many fingers did I use? The fourth one is evaluation. How are we doing, right? Are we making a difference?

Are we moving the marble? And so that's the program we have here. And they have funded me since October of 2021. And I just learned this week that they're continuing that funding through December of 2024.

So it must be working. It must be working or they wouldn't give those dollars, right? I am so proud of the Ohio Department of Health, the Association of Ohio Health Commissioners and our local health department staff who are the boots on the ground of delivering these programs. So that's what we're doing in Ohio.

And I would love to see other states pick that up too. So yeah, you guys are the model. What you're doing there and what you helped establish there in Ohio. Again, our country would be really in a better place if we could find out how to do that in more states.

And it's just again, what you're doing is nothing short of amazing. I also want to just give you credit publicly because again, with your background with all this all this research and studies, I remember we're in Arizona having lunch one, you know, years back and you're like, Cole, we really need to we need to really study this work, this method, the grief recovery method. And I was resistant just because it's not really my world. I don't come from a very academic background.

It's just not kind of my lane. And I had some doubts about it, right? But again, you you you helped initiate basically this this work becoming evidence based, right? So like you were saying, it must be working there.

They're you know, renewing the contract. We know it's working in large part due to the the research that you helped head up. So I just want to thank you for that too, because that's really opened a lot of doors for this work to be found, you know, just understood is credible and legitimate and and and helpful,