Compassionate Leadership: On a mission to build compassionate organizations | Janet Gwilliam-Wright's Story

Janet Gwilliam-Wright , a grief awareness advocate and educator, shares her personal experience of losing her mother and how it shaped her life.

She launched the Mother Love Project as a platform for motherless daughters to share their stories, and co-founded Bloomwell Partners, a global training and consulting firm working to build more compassionate and grief-informed workspaces.

In this conversation, Janet discusses the importance of honoring and remembering our loved ones, the complexities of grief, and the need for support and understanding in the workplace.

Janet also shares the two main aspects of her work: consulting and training.

She helps organizations build grief-informed cultures through policies and practices, and provides grief education and training for managers and leaders. The training includes workshops and webinars, and focuses on a six-part framework with monthly coaching calls.

Janet emphasizes the importance of addressing various types of grief, including those not related to death. She also highlights the impact of grief-informed practices on employee retention, recruitment, and overall well-being.

Takeaways

• Grief is complex and nuanced, and it is important to allow ourselves to feel all of the emotions that come with it.
• Support and community are crucial in the grieving process, and connecting with others who have had similar experiences can be incredibly healing.
• The workplace often lacks understanding and support for grieving employees, and there is a need for more compassionate and grief-informed workspaces.
• Managers and leaders play a key role in supporting grieving employees, and training and resources should be provided to help them navigate these situations.
• Grief-informed cultures can be built through policies and practices in organizations.
• Grief education and training for managers and leaders is crucial.
• Different types of grief, beyond the loss of a person, should be addressed.
• Grief-informed practices can improve employee retention, recruitment, and overall well-being.
• Supporting employees through grief and loss not only benefits individuals, but also creates more compassionate and engaged workplaces and communities.

Janet GWilliam Wright's Social & Website:

• Mother Love Project
• Bloomwell Partners
• @janetgwilliamwright
• May 9th Community Call

Nina Rodriguez Social & Website:

• @griefandlight
• griefandlight.com
• 1:1 Grief Support
• Grief & Light Podcast
• Subscribe to my newsletter

Disclaimer: griefandlight.com/safetyanddisclaimers

Transcript

You're out in your community and you're talking about the company that you used to work for and the way that your team rallied and you smile and you're filled with love and compassion for them and gratitude because of the way that you were treated. What signals to people. This is a company that I should do business with. There's a reputational benefit to compassionate leadership and compassionate business practices. You just lost your loved one. Now what? Welcome to the Grief and Life podcast, where we explore this new reality through grief colored lenses openly and authentically. I'm your host, Nina Rodriguez. Let's get started. Today's guest, Janet William writes is a grief awareness advocate and educator. She launched the Mother Love Project in 2020 as a platform for Motherless Daughters, marking the 25th anniversary of her mother's death. Since launching the project, over 150 women from around the world have shared their stories. Janet is also co-founder of Lumo Partners, a global training and consulting firm working to build more compassionate and grief informed workspaces one organization at a time. She has 20 years experience leading large organizational change initiatives. She is a wealth of information, and I am honored to welcome Janet to the Grief and Light podcast. How are you? It's so nice to see you. Thanks for having me on your podcast. I was so excited to be here. Thank you so much for being here and happy early Mother's Day to you. We are recording a little bit before Mother's Day. This episode will release Ripe for Mother's Day, so I wanted to wish you a happy Mother's Day. Q It's a it's a big day in our culture, isn't it? Ever honoring the those key figures in our lives, including your mother. So if you could just tell the listeners what's her name and start with who she was and how she influenced your life. Yes. Oh, my gosh. Such a huge way. I appreciate so much the opportunity to talk about her because as you know, you know, when our our person dies, the longer we got from that passing, we were asked about them less. So we get to see their name less. And it's just so important to me to be able to to talk about her. Her name was cast. Sandra Hi, everybody. Colored cars. Some people called her Mama Cass, actor, the mothers of the performance because she just took care of everybody. She was very warm and kind and a beautiful friend and a mentor to a lot of women and men, too. But a lot of women she was advertising executives in the 1980s, which is, you know, if anyone's ever seen Mad Men, you get a little bit of that flavor. She was the vice president and creative director of a very large advertising. And I thought she walked on water. She was larger than life and she was the center of our family, as many women are. So, yeah, that was a bit about my mom. Well, thank you. Will dedicate this episode to Kath and to all the moms that we're celebrating. If you have a mother in your life that is with us in person or in spirit. Either way, we celebrate them and their presence in our lives. So Kath sounds like a pioneer for her time as she was a business woman and mother Kath. She was the motherly figure, but she's also the pioneer in her time, in her day. She is somebody that sounds very admirable. So thank you for sharing that with us. And unfortunately, we're also here because she no longer with us. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990 and I was 13. And so really at that time there wasn't a ton of awareness about breast cancer. And so, you know, she went through her treatments and and got all the treatment that she could. And we thought, okay, we got it. She's good. You know, we always talk about that five year remission period, and she was just shy of it. So and I was 17. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and it had re diagnosed and it had spread to her liver. It was very aggressive when it came back, as is often the case. And she left for another year. So she died on the day I graduated from high school. I was 18 and it was June 17th, 1995, which is why I outlined the Mother Love Project on June 17, 2020, the 25th anniversary of her. Understand that when you found out you were graduating, you were in the middle of your graduation ceremony. So it was a bit of a shock and it was a very pivotal moment in your life, not just because of the loss, but because of the changes in your life. You were going to college. Essentially, it's when we come, young adults. And unfortunately, that had to be with this major disruption to your life. I have often said that was the day that my life imploded. My life was never the same after that day. I have my before me. And my after me. And I. Had to keep going. I have was I was accepted at university and I was bound and determined to go. I wasn't going to. For better or worse, let anything derail my plans. My mom had wanted me to go away to university. That was something that was important to her. She'd had that experience as a young person. So I did go away in that I went a little bit down the road. But I did live in residence and I had that on campus experience. And really, I think that that's what saved me in those early years after my mom's death, I had a group of friends from high school and new friends that I'd need at the University of British Columbia, where I went. And they rallied. They surrounded me with love and kindness and support and let me cry and let me talk about her and process my emotions. And I think that I really, in those early months and and years really kept me going. Community so key and processing grief and for context we were talking this is in the 1990 so the conversation weren't necessarily as open as they are nowadays. We have gotten so lucky to be in a space now where through social media we're able to have these more open conversations and still we have a very long way to go. At the same time, you also didn't have the full support as you perhaps would have today. So from my understanding, you know, it impacted your life quite a bit. And, you know, tell us a little bit about how about to fundamentally help define who you are today. Absolutely. I like to remind people that when my mom died in 1995, the Internet didn't exist. It didn't have e-mail. There were very few resources available in my community. I reckon up big idea what I had was hoping to book and that book made a huge difference in my life. Soon as I read it, it was released in 94 and I remember somebody gave it to me and said, I think the Eagle really punished this book. And I read it cover to cover probably in a day. I just devoured it and it showed me I'm not alone. Are other women out there who are like me and what I'm going through, what I'm feeling is very common and to be expected. And that brought me enormous comfort in those days and weeks and months after my mom died. I had the help of a therapist. She didn't label herself as a grief therapist, but that's exactly what she did. She worked with a lot of people who were in palliative care, whose family members were dying. That was her area of expertize. And my mom had started to see her before she died because of her diagnosis. And then my brother and I had seen her as well. So I continued to see her. I didn't have any money to pay for therapy. So one of my mom's friends actually paid for therapy tours, but just such a lifeline at that time. And now I unfortunately but fortunately for me, I had two very close friends whose parents had also died a couple of years before mine. And so we had this bond. We just we knew what the other person was feeling and what they were going through. And so I really I really leaned into my community, but at the same time. I became such a workaholic, such a perfectionist. Everything I did, I threw myself into my schoolwork because that was the only coping mechanism I had time. My anxiety was through the roof. It was like pouring gasoline on the fire. And so I just worked and worked and worked and worked. And I drank. I drank a lot. You know, I was a first year university student. And so nobody really batted. And I. But looking back on it now, it was just it was just to numb those feelings of sadness and hopelessness and desperation. I didn't know how to cope with the loss of not only my mom, but the loss of my family, the loss of my home, the loss of the life that I had that I had had for 18 years. It just, poof, punished overnight. And the pain in those early days is so brutal that we just want to get it under control. We just want to have a moment to breathe. So I have so much compassion for that. That version of you that had to go through something, even though it sounds like you had wonderful community and resources. There's a level of loneliness that at the end of the day, you go to sleep and you're there with yourself and your thoughts and the reality of it all. And and, you know, so it's very happy. I also hear you when you say you had this therapist that knew your mother and also your brother. So there is a bit of continuity there. And I would like to ask you, what makes somebody a grief therapist? Like, what is the difference between, for lack of a better word, a regular therapist versus an informal therapist? Yes, such a great question. And I had no language for this when I was 18 that I have now. So looking back on it, it's really powerful because this amazing woman's name is J.D. Brown. She served in Cuba. She's a trained nurse. She's written a beautiful book about Greece and her work with the dying. So I encourage anyone to Google J.D.. She's such a magical person. I think what makes her Greece informed is her connection to death and dying is that her whole practice has been informed by work with the dying work with the family members of people who are dying. And I think that that grief informed practice around being in palliative care units, being with sitting with people who are dying, sitting with people who are watching their loved ones die. That is so profound. And I really I mean, I wouldn't want to speak for her, but certainly when it came to me, I think that she really encouraged me to. Explore the feelings, all of the feelings that I had about my mother's death, because they were so complicated, they were so complex. They were confusing. I was so confused all the time. Why am I angry? Why do I resentful? Why do I feel guilty? I think when she died and this is so common, especially with mothers, we sanctify them, right? They become saints. We can't. And even people will say, well, don't speak ill of the dead. Well, sometimes we want to, because if there are parents and they mean mistakes, there are complicated feelings and memories that we need to explore. So I think that that's what. Really Janie helped me to do in my sort of 18 year old. Brain was try to process the trauma that I was experiencing, but also to understand that. I was allowed to have these other emotions that I didn't think I should be feeling. And I think that that's what made her grief informed, in my view. Thank you so much for bringing that up. We guilt ourselves so much into how we, quote unquote should be feeling after loss. And and thank you for emphasizing this point. Lost is nuance. It's complicated. It's layered. Humans are complicated, nuanced and layered. So loss is going to be a reflection of that. And it's not to say that we're only going to say bad things, but we are dealing with imperfect humans, ourselves included the person that we lost and the reality of it. I had this conversation with another guest on the podcast and she said, There's so much freedom in being able to speak the full truth of our experience with this person, whether they're with us or not. And that full truth can be so liberating. Some people use the word healing. It could help us move forward in very powerful ways. Oh, thank you for highlighting that. Yeah, absolutely. So you started the Mother Love Project in 2020. Tell us what that was like. That year was the year that everybody in the world remembers quite vividly. Yeah, it was the third month of lockdown. Many people I was working around the clock and I could see in the distance this anniversary coming and I realized, wow, it's been 25 years. What a milestone, a quarter of a century that felt so profound to me. And I really felt like I needed to do something public. I had never spoken about my grief publicly before. Well, not once. And I really wanted to share my story because I thought. If I've got a story to tell, I want to memorialize my mom, you know, in all of her fullness, but also represent my experience as a motherless daughter. Maybe there are other mother listeners out there who might want to do this. Some of them were my friends. I sort of poked them and said, I have this idea. What do you think? They said, Yes, do it. And I was in the shower one day where I get some all my best ideas and thoughts. Before I didn't want to get home. I, I just was like, it should be the mother of the project. I don't know where that came from. I have still to this day, I don't know. But I was I saw it. I went on Squarespace. It was like, okay, I'll just figure it out. Got the handle on Instagram. And I posted a story and I said, If you have a story that you would like to share, send me a message and I will post it. And I waited I sort of held my breath a little bit like, oh, gosh, this would be a bit of a mistake. I don't know. And then I met all over the world. It was such nominal. Women reached out to me on Instagram and said, I want to share my story here. The pictures of my mom and me and my grandmother. I mean, just the most beautiful, loving, complicated, amazing tributes. It's a living memorial. It's a living testament to our mothers. It's something that we can point to and say, here she is world and here's her name and this is my story. And I think for a long time, Nina, honestly, I felt like I had this giant hole in my heart that just would never close. It would never heal. And I think with every story, I post it, every interaction I have with women, I think that whole gets a little bit smaller because I'm so filled with love and gratitude. I'm so filled with joy and social, with connection and community. These are women I've never met. I'll probably never meet them in person. And yet I feel so connected to them. I know about their families. I know about their grief. It truly is an honor to to do this work. It's it's it's been beautiful and it's beautiful work. And there's so much power in sharing our stories. I am a huge believer in that for ourselves and for each other and to get through life. Because whatever you're feeling, another person's feeling their version of that and sharing these stories is incredibly powerful and has a beautiful ripple effect, an impossibly beautiful way that we will probably never know that end result of. I love that you created this secret space for other women to honor their mother. We as Graeber's love any opportunity to say their name and to talk about them and honor them the way that we remember them. So how beautiful. So it started with this page. And are you doing something an hour of Mother's Day? I'm guessing it would be if we had a windy arbor and we are. So on Thursday we're doing a community call. And this is something that I started last year where we did community events and just keep together in a circle and shared and journal, then reflected and did some breathing exercises. And we're doing a community call garden this Thursday night. People would like to join us. It's a really safe space. It's a peer group and it's a wonderful way to connect with other women who have had a similar experience. Yeah, if somebody wanted more information, they wanted to participate. How can they how can they do that? So you can go to the website Mother Love Project dot com. Some of the Love Project is all one dot com and then click on the events page and you'll see the registration is there and there's some information about the date time and the setup of the event. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. We'll link that in the show notes. And if you are feeling that this information resonates with you, I highly encourage you to join the space. A lot of people get intimidated by the idea of joining a group of people who you technically don't know. But I always find a magic about connecting in grief. It's like we're already in this really bizarre space, but the magic of it is that there's no mask, there's no representative, it's just purely each other's essence, connecting in very profound ways with people. They also understand that your the women who participate are from literally all over the world, correct? Yeah. Yeah. So mostly mostly the women who have joined us have been from Canada in the US just because of the time zone. However, no Eastern time zone, but definitely have had women from the UK reach out and say, Oh, this is great, I can I can make this time because, you know, 10:00 in England, 5:00 here we welcome. All experiences. It's really important. As you say, the magic is in that connection is that, oh, I see you. You know, I get it. I feel what you're saying and so much similarity. And I just think real, real community, real camaraderie is felt. It's pretty it's pretty amazing. I have to say. It's pretty special. One interesting dynamic that could feel very painful for in grief and a lot of grief viewers will understand this is sometimes the people we thought would be there during the most difficult time in our lives. Not only disappear them more often than not, through no fault of their own, they will say the wrong thing. They will do very hurtful things because part of the reason we're having these conversations is that we live in a very grief averse society that because of, you know, our aversion to big feelings, big emotions, tough conversations, we get it wrong. More often than not, we end up. Unintentionally most of the time hurting other people or hurting each other. So the power of these groups and these conversations and these spaces like the Mother Love Project is that you're with people who get it and you're aiming the support in a complete stranger that sometimes feels more like a long lost family, if you will. Yeah, when a computer's regular. True? Yeah, it's true. You just find this instant connection. It's. It's so true, I think. You know, as you say, we live in a grief phobic society and we're so isolated in our grief. And, like, grief requires unity is connection, is ritual is the externalized expression of our grief. And we so often are denied that now in our culture. And so, yeah, this is exactly the this is exactly the space to get that kind of validation for sure. I love it. But that's not all. You also are co-founder of Wombwell Partners. For my listeners who have been here a while and might have heard a previous episode with Dr. Michael Harris. Janet and Dr. McKell founded Bloomfield Partners, which is a global training and consulting firm, building more compassionate and grief informed workspaces. And I love this mission so much. I love, love, love this because one of the most difficult things for a griever to do is go back to work. I had a dear friend, for example, she unfortunately at a pregnancy loss, a stillbirth to be more specific. So sorry. I know. I feel it's been very, you know, life changing for her. And she says one of the most difficult moments in her life was these nine months where your coworkers are excited for you. You might have even gone to the baby shower. They are asking you for the name. They're in this journey with you and suddenly you return after way too short of a time. Because grief leaves the borderline non-existent. Not. And she said it was the most shocking, painful and surreal thing, and coworkers didn't know how to talk to her, so they avoided the topic altogether. So this is just one example of so many different ways that the grief is, quite frankly, mishandled at the workspace. So tell us about your work with Blue Angel Partners and what is the mission and how you're helping Dreamers? Yeah, no, thank you. So, my dear friend, business partner, as you say, or your previous guest, Dr. Michael Harris, who is a licensed psychologist based in Memphis, Tennessee. She and I co-founded Global Partners last year. And our mission is to build more compassionate organizations one workplace at a time. And we mean it. We are so mission driven. I think, as you say, one of the most difficult. Transitions for anyone who's experienced significant loss is going back to work. If you're working each person in North America, even around the world, you will typically get 48 hours, maybe 72, if you're lucky enough, unpaid leave. That is atrocious. Anyone experiencing that loss and having to go back into a professional work environment is going to experience probably some pretty significant anxiety about doing that. I have managed managers for a long time. I'm a leader in my organization. I've been an executive for many years, and this is just something that managers are simply not trained to do. They are not well equipped. We put them in these situations with enormous complexity and then say, Go ahead with it, but we won't train you. We're not going to give you any supports or any resources to do that. And what we find from the data is that people really have one of two experiences when they return to work, either abusing or absolutely terrible. There's very little room in between. And so the people who have this amazing experience, they have managers meeting passion. They're leading with their humanity, they're leading with connection, support. How can I help you? What can we do? Let's rally. All of this happens. It's a very much a bonding experience for a team building trust. That's that manager that we have. Most managers who do not do this because they don't know how. They're not well equipped. They don't have the emotional intelligence or the communication skills to be able to extend that hand. That's really essential. So there's there's really two parts to what we do. One is a consulting function. We help organizations build create informed cultures through policies and practices. And the other part is training. We do grief education in the workplace. We also do training for managers and leaders. So this is anybody from the C-suite right down to, you know, a floor steward, somebody who's a team lead, anybody is responsible for the management of other people in the workplace. That's who we work at. But we also do group education with employees. And it's a phenomenal experience because every organization we go into, they say, Oh my gosh, we're so happy you're here. We've been wanting to do this for so long. You know, we get phenomenal feedback because people are so happy that they get to actually talk about grief at work. So it's been a great sort of great experience. It sounds like it's very holistic, too. So you assess the needs of the particular company and how they work with your employees and you provide the training accordingly, which is very powerful. And this training, what does that look like? Is it a module? Is it how does it work? Yeah. So we have a variety of trainings that we offer. We can do workshops, webinars. It really depends on the needs of the organizations holistically. We talk about the learning needs of the organization. Our framework is a framework and it's like training mcaleny we go through a six part framework and we have monthly coaching calls. This is really where the magic happens. So managers will often say to us, Oh, your theory is amazing. We love what you're saying, but gosh, I just don't know what to say. What do I say? Hey, what do I do? What are these like small things that I can do? And so we take managers on a monthly basis through live coaching calls where we talk about issues, we talk through practical strategies, we will playing and we give feedback and it's so rich and it's a really impactful experience because as we know, adult learners, they need to put into practice what they've learned to make it active. So that's really how we designed our program and we've gotten some really fantastic feedback. That's very powerful and that's very helpful because we truly like that. We don't have the words and there are words. There are things that can be there are in others. And there are ways to support grievances and also grieve. Grief doesn't necessarily have to be due to the loss of a person. It could also be different types of grief. So what kind of grief can you address, for example, through these trainings other than the loss of a person? Yeah, that's such a good question. Thank you. We always start all of our presentations by saying, in our culture, we talk about grief as the death of the family member or friend, and we talk about grief. We're talking about divorce, the loss of a home, the grief that people feel about climate change, climate disasters, natural disasters, the death of a pet infertility, pregnancy loss. When we talk about grief, we talk about the hierarchy of grief, sort of what is acceptable to grieve and what isn't. And we are taking that whole paradigm and just shifting it right on its head and saying, Nope, that's not us. That's not what we're doing. We're here to talk about grief and loss and we say and loss to really encapsulate all of these major, significant losses that people go through that feel so invisible and so difficult to talk about, but have enormous impact on our lives. That's huge, huge, huge. Because when we look at this bigger picture, grief and grief, which is related to loss of life, whether that be a human loss or a pet loss, because pet loss is a lot more impacts people a lot more than we care to admit sometimes, and especially with the companions that have been with us for almost like two decades. Right. And a little grief. And it's not to to make it less important is a way to frame these two different sides of it. And grief is a non death related loss. So it sounds like you cover the whole spectrum. And when we look at it from this bird's eye view, people could see how sometimes we don't even recognize we're grieving certain things in our lives. We're not aware of it. But certainly how many people go through divorce, IVF, caretaking. You know, the I love that you include the environment there. There's a lot of people that are mourning changes to their environments and places that they've known their whole life. And just the reality of the world we live in, quite frankly, could be very stressful. So helping people navigate that is fantastic. And I'll give I'll use myself as an example. I like that you pointed out there's one or two outcomes. You either felt supported during your time of grief or you didn't. And I can vouch that most people did not. When my brother died, my team rallied. I was in the middle of closing a real estate transaction back then. And I remember, you know, the fog kicks in, the dissociation from everything that's happened, it just feels very surreal and it's difficult to focus on deadlines and all these things when you're still trying to grasp what the heck just happened. So in my case, I got very lucky that my team rallied for me. That made all the difference. As somebody who worked for this company, it made me feel so grateful. And this there's so much value in what they did for me and my family during our time of need, that I will be forever grateful to them. And think about that multiplied by an entire workforce of employees of billions of bags. Right. And yes. Would you say that it reduces turnover? Have you seen the data in terms of what it does to the workspace? Right. Yes. So we have some key data points. One is around turnover. So that's a retention a retention point. The other one is recruitment cost to recruit a person. So we know that turnover is higher when people are not supported. It costs on average $50,000 to replace a person. So I can tell you that your return on investment is much higher with respect to corporate continuity, corporate knowledge, talent, succession planning. When you work to retain your employees through compassionate leadership, the cost of replacing that person is very high and it's very costly, not just in terms of recruitment, but also the time to recruit. You are you're losing key business continuity by doing that and you're putting your business at risk. The other key data point that we have is around presenteeism and absenteeism. So we know that people who are not well supported in their workplace are at higher risk of burnout, higher risk of physical illness, higher risk of mental illness. All of this puts us at risk for extended sick leave, long term disability, which is costly. We know in the Canadian economy alone, absenteeism costs $16 billion a year. That's it. Enormous number, I often say to C-suite leaders and executives. Not only is this the right thing to do, but it's also the business savvy thing to do. It's the strategic thing to do. So when you're thinking about your business, you're thinking about your strategic goals. We need to apply the same principles of planning and strategy to the inevitability that our employees are going to experience loss. Absolutely. There's a cost to do this, and there's a cost to not doing this, to not preparing. It's you have to choose which cost you're willing to pay. It's going to be way more beneficial for the company and for the employees and for every human involved all around. You to go through. I want to say one more thing about costs, and I want to bring it back to your example. So when you're out in your community and you're talking about the company that you used to work for and the way that your team rallied and you smile and you're filled with love and compassion for them and gratitude because of the way that you were treated. It signals to people. This is a company that I should do business. There is a reputational benefit to compassionate leadership and compassionate business practices. On the other side, there is reputational risk. Had your company not treated you that way? Boy, you'd be saying something very different to your friends and family and community members about a company, and that is a risk to organizations. And I think that we forget that reputational risk is something leaders have control over. They can do something about this. They just need to plan effectively. I agree. I talk about my company in a way that is authentic because I mean it. I mean, when I say that they rallied around, they were wonderful. When I look back on my life and that really difficult moment, how everybody showed up for me, that's priceless. That has a value that goes a long way. And you're absolutely right. I have nothing bad to say about this company. In the day and age that we're living. Think about the people that go straight to social media, the visibility that has. And you have one person doing this and another then another. And it becomes, like you said, a reputation for the company that they're not supportive, etc., etc.. And that is costly in more ways than one, for sure. That's right. It is amazing. So you have the mother led project. You have OneWorld partners. You're working with grief in a very personal capacity and in a professional capacity. What would you say grief has taught you through all these years from being 18 years old, brand new to it, the shock to now working to help other people navigate it. How would you say? Grief has shifted for you and what have you. What has it taught you? Oh, such a good question. I think over the last almost 30 years, it's almost it's 29 years this year. What I've really realized is. This is complicated. It's not black and white. It's not one thing or the other. It's not just sadness. It's anger and resentment and joy and gratitude and longing and. I spent so many years really running from my grief. Like running as fast as I possibly could until it caught up with me. I realize now that I am okay to sit with my grief, to sit with the difficult feelings that I have and just let them come and it's okay and I can survive. And they're not as intense as they were when I was 18 and alone and terrified and overwhelmed by the waves of grief that kept hitting me. Now I really sit with my feelings and I allow those feelings to show for me. And then I feel okay. And I think my grief has allowed me to connect with people that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to connect with and, you know, created this. Beautiful company with Macao. I wouldn't have been able to, you know, create if I hadn't started the project and. I think it's given me a voice in on and I I'll. I felt like I had didn't have a voice for such a long time that I couldn't. Couldn't tell my own story, but I can tell my story and I really feel a responsibility to help other people tell their story, too. It's brought me a lot of joy and a lot of, I think, peace that I didn't have. And maybe it's middle age. Who knows? You know, it's totally possible. I turn 47 this year and I feel very mature. I think perspective and time has been helpful and just so much, albeit I have been for so long and it just has really helped me because grief morphs and changes with you as you age and you go through these life transitions and having children and buying a home and getting married and getting my first job. I did all of these things without my mom. And that breaks my heart. And that's okay that my heart is broken. I sit with that, I honor that. And I think my grief has taught me to give myself grace because I give people a lot of grace, but I'm very hard on myself. And I think over the last. I would say probably six or seven years. I've really just. I tried to work on giving myself a lot more grace. So, yeah, that's what. That's what my group has taught me. So beautiful. And I love that you incorporated I grief. It's not just sad emotions. There's also plenty of joy and acceptance and and grace along the way. I always like to make the distinction that there's that early grief and where it's confusing and everything feels like shards of glass and it can be so stressful. And then with time, it's not necessarily the time heals everything because you still feel the both missing your mother and the wishing she would have been there and all the longing, all of that is still present. That doesn't really go away. It's more that with time we gain perspective and with time the shards of glass become. I just have this visually the pieces of glass on a stamp on a beach that they're just. Yeah. And they're almost beautiful. They're like the viola and like, these little gemstones and those edges get. Worn down. Yeah. Yes. And so something so initially painful has the potential to become something beautiful that helps us gain our boys and after our stories, help other people, etc., etc.. So it sounds like that's what we're doing. Yeah. I do want to say something about the sharp edges. Yeah, because I can tell you that I still have quite a few and they're probably not as sharp as they used to be, but they're still there. And there are moments. Places. Sounds. People. Pictures. Memories. Music. Were those sharp edges. They they come out because it's painful. And I think the past probably six or seven years, maybe eight years, has really given me an opportunity to recognize what those are and not judge myself for it and not sort of turn away from it, but to really lean in and get curious. Oh. What does that mean? Oh. What's that about? Oh, I'm feeling anxious. Okay. Why am I feeling anxious? Okay. Let's process. It's a real process for me, because as a kid, I didn't grow up learning how to recognize new feelings. And so now, as an adult, I'm having to learn for the first time what that actually means. And I think that my grief is a prism. It's like a it's a frame that I am able to look through and go, oh, look, I feel sad. I feel sad today. Okay. I'm going to sit with why I'm sad. And that's been enormously helpful for my mental health. I love that. Yes. That the shards of glass turning into smooth glass. That's not the point of grief. The point of grief is not to turn them in to move glass. It happens or can happen with time. But I love that you said, you know, not all of them are smooth. There's still shards of glass that peek through every once in a while. The difference is you learn to accept and acknowledge them and navigate around them more with them or through them. Thank you for that. I really like that because again, nuanced grief is very nuanced. So I'd like to give you a few minutes to say last words, maybe cover something that we didn't talk about or just anything that's in your heart today as we approach Mother's Day and and the floors are all yours. Thank you. Well, I will say about Mother's Day, but also today, right, for a lot of us and not just for people who have. Lost their mothers or strange from their mothers who are struggling to have children who have children die. You know, I hold your mother in my heart. On Mother's Day. I'm sure that's a difficult day for her, too. And. You know, I think it's okay. However you want to spend that day. Give yourself permission to spend it. Don't. Don't feel that you should do this or you should feel bad or you should be this way. Like, let's just take that word shut out of our vocabulary because it's really damaging and it doesn't serve us and honestly it doesn't serve the people around us. I spent years, eight years pretending like I was really enjoying Mother's Day when I was dying inside. And I can tell you that I wasn't fooling anybody and not a great actress. And everyone around me knew that I was not doing well. And I pretended I was like, Oh, this is great. This is so much fun. No. So now we don't play that treat anymore. We don't play that game and we spend Mother's Day. My partner and I, the way that we want to spend it, and that is purposeful and it's intentional. And sometimes during that day, I just have to say to her, I just need a few minutes. I'm just going to go upstairs when they go to bed, you know, I just need to lay piece out for a bit and just be with my thoughts and to hope that the feelings come as they come. And then I'm okay and I can go back to whatever we're doing. I think that that really models. Emotional integrity and emotional authenticity for my children as well. I'm not putting my mask on, not pretending like everything's okay. Like they know when Mama is not doing well. And that's okay. Yeah, I say that. I just want to leave. You know, our beautiful listeners with is this idea that grief is a structure like any other structure. And it is informed by and shaped by and a product of. You know, sexism and racism and patriarchy and socioeconomic status, culture, religion, language. The language we use around grief is so profoundly impacted by how and where we grew up. And our family structures. And I think we we so often talk about grief as very individual. We ve live in a very individualistic society. So that makes sense. But grief is profoundly social and is shaped by social forces. So I encourage you to think about your own relationship with grief and not you need, you know what I mean? Like the royal white. You. I do think you. I know. I know you do. I do think the royal we we should really we think about how grief is is shaped and a form. You know, our family structure, our culture, our religious beliefs, all of those pieces really culminate in how we deal with grief and loss in our own lives and the access to resources that we have. The access to support. How do we pay for therapy? How do we pay for medical care? If you live in the United States or elsewhere, we don't pay for medical care. But you don't need. You know, and and race and socio economic size and culture. All of these forces shape the way that we experience grief. And it's so profound. And I don't think that we enough. So that's my that's my soapbox that I'm on today. So thank you for letting me get that off my chest. Thank you for forcing that into Noah. That's a very, very important point. Like a while ago, I did an episode called What's Your Grief Bias? Precisely because of that, there's a lot of expectations for Grievous to get back to normal and come back when you're not sad anymore. And oh, I'd rather the old you and all these fame or even with them, the grief community. And I love that you say grief is impacted by all these other elements and external forces, if you will, outside of our own control, because that impacts our ability to move through grief. So thank you. Thank you for bringing that up. Context of everything. And this access to to being resourced during a time of need is everything. And that is something that. It's not talked about enough. So thank you for bringing that and thank you for doing your part because you are helping people navigate grief through blue male partners and through the Motherlode Project. So very timely episode. If you are listening and you're having a hard time this week as we approach Mother's Day, we see you, we hear you, and it has some incredible resources that can definitely benefit. So check out the show notes, click on her information, connect with her. She's an incredible, beautiful soul and a light and a wonderful person all around. And I believe you work with any type business through at least a part of this. Okay? Absolutely. Private sector, public sector, not for profit. We we work with everyone. Perfect. So if any of these messages resonated with you and it's something that you can find value, which, you know, you should because we're dealing with humans, anything that has to do with human employees navigating life, I guarantee you, you sit down with somebody long enough, you will find their grief. So having these tools and empowering each other in workspaces and in personal spaces is priceless. So check out Bloom. Well, Partners, check out the Mother Love Project. And Janet, I thank you so, so much for being here. You are wonderful. And as a final question, what would Janet today tell Janet on her graduation day? Oh, boy. Finishing with a doozy. Janet today would tell Janet on her graduation day. You're safe. We're going to be okay. It's going to be okay. I'll give you a hug. I know you feel like everything is shattered into a million pieces, but you're not shattered into a million pieces. You just feel that way and you're not always going to feel like that. It's going to get better. You know. Thank you so much, Janet. It's been an honor. Thank you for having me. It's been such a pleasure. That's it for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe to the Grief and Light podcast. I'd also love to connect with you and hear your thoughts and your stories. Feel free to share them with me at my Instagram page at Grief and Light. Or you can also visit Grief and Light dot com for more information and updates. Thank you so much for being here, for being you. And always remember, you are not alone.