Pivotal People
Join us in conversations with inspiring people doing amazing things. Their insights and experiences help motivate all of us to find our purpose that fits with our abilities, gifts and life situation. Get a "behind the scenes" look at successful people making a difference in the world and benefit from their advice for the rest of us. Our guests include authors, artists, leaders, coaches, pastors, business people and speakers.
Pivotal People
Beyond the Darkness: Finding Hope After Losing a Loved One
Clarissa Moll shares how her husband's tragic death in a hiking accident transformed her into a widow with four children and ultimately led to her calling helping others navigate grief and loss.
• Author of books on grief including her newest children's book "Hope Comes to Stay"
• One in five million children will experience the loss of a parent or sibling before age 18
• Importance of using real words like "died" and "dead" with children rather than euphemisms
• Grief is not something we "get over" but becomes a lifelong companion
• Learning to hold joy and sorrow in the same hand
• Grief has its own language that includes more than just sadness
• Most helpful support comes from people who simply sit with us without trying to fix our pain
• Remove the word "still" from conversations about grief as it implies a timeline
• Grief is both universal (everyone experiences it) and unique (no two experiences are identical)
• Clarissa produces Christianity Today's news podcast "The Bulletin"
Visit clarissamoll.com to learn more about Clarissa's work, and find her on Instagram and Substack.
Order Stephanie's new book Imagine More: Do What You Love, Discover Your Potential
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I'd like to welcome Clarissa Maul to the Pivotal People podcast. You're going to love Clarissa. She is a very prolific and successful author, podcaster and a producer. She has a very compelling story. She has turned her personal experience of loss into a real calling to help other people who are going through similar situations. She has written books about grief and loss. She has hosted national podcasts about grief and loss and today we're talking to her about her newest book, which is a beautiful and poignant children's picture book that helps kids and families navigate grief, and in reading this book I thought the pictures were beautiful, but in reading the back of the book, where she talks to parents about how to navigate grief with kids, it really opened my eyes on how we could be doing a better job of speaking with children and helping them through these times. So, clarissa welcome, it's great to have you. Thank you times. So, clarissa welcome, it's great to have you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me, Stephanie.
Speaker 1:And I thought we'd start with Clarissa. Could you give us a little bit of your background, your story? What got you started on this path of helping people navigate loss and grief?
Speaker 2:Well, six years ago, I was a homeschooling mom. I was a homeschooling mom of four kids, married to an awesome guy who I had been married to for almost 20 years. But our lives changed in the summer of 2019 when my husband, rob, fell to his death in a hiking accident in the middle of our family vacation thousand miles away from home certainly not something that is ever scheduled on an itinerary, but his death changed our landscape of life forever. It left me a widow now, with four kids to raise on my own. And so, over the last almost six years, I have done just that. I've tried to figure out how to rebuild a life after loss, how to become parent and sole breadwinner and housekeeper extraordinaire, or maybe not so much to try to fulfill all of those roles that are required for raising a family and building a new life.
Speaker 2:And I'm a remarried widow now, in a blended family of nine. And the grief doesn't go away, even after good things enter your life. This is what we discover as we walk with grief and loss that you begin to live life in a different way, holding the joys and sorrows of life in the same hand. And so really all of my work, my professional work that flows out of that loss is an attempt to do just that to be able to hold the joy of life with its sorrow in the same hand, to be able to receive both of those things as they come and try to live an open-handed life.
Speaker 1:First of all, your four children. What were their ages in 2019 when?
Speaker 2:this happened, so my youngest had just turned seven and my oldest was just about to turn 14.
Speaker 1:was just about to turn 14. And you talked in your book in the back, speaking to parents, about the importance of talking to kids honestly about grief. Your press release talks about that one in is it? Five million children will experience the loss of a parent or a sibling before the age of 18, I believe that's right.
Speaker 2:One in 12 kids in the US.
Speaker 1:And how would you say grief is typically dealt with, Not 30 years ago, but today? How is grief typically dealt with for children?
Speaker 2:Well, I think there's certainly a sensitivity that has increased over the last, even the last decade I would say more than 20 years now even for children who have experienced loss. I think the frequency of school shootings, of mental health issues in children and those under 18 has really given us a new face, a new understanding of the things that kids deal with that are hard, and certainly children have always dealt with hard things. Groom's fairy tales are written for children who had to face death, and we know that this is not something we can run away with or run away from. But I think in contemporary living, in our culture, we tend to not want to think about our mortality, and the same goes for how we talk with children about it.
Speaker 2:There are a lot of euphemisms we use. Oftentimes you know, grandma went to a better place or our pet dog crossed the rainbow bridge we don't want to actually say death and died and dying. And yet when we do those things, when we limit our language, when we use euphemistic language to describe this very real thing that none of us can avoid, we're not preparing our children very well for the things that they will face, that are hard, the suffering that is inevitable in simply being human, and so part of my work is to help families begin to have those conversations, to not wait until the school shooting happens or until there's a suicide in your teen's community. To not wait until there's a deep and grave mental health issue that has you despairing to have those conversations, but to begin, in very small and gentle ways, to talk about mortality so that, as that conversation grows and develops over time, you're ready or at least have some basis of knowledge, a foundation from which to move when those big and hard incidents show up, because we know they will.
Speaker 1:And you talked about. You know I do this. I say you know someone passed away. You talked about with children, to use all the real words. That's right they died, they're dead, they're dying.
Speaker 2:We use all those real words, and we use them when we're talking about the leaves in the autumn. Words and we use them when we're talking about the leaves in the autumn. The leaves fell and the leaves are dead now and we see roadkill on the road and we talk about an animal dying when it was hit by our car as it crossed the street, but somehow, when it comes to ourselves, we're not able to muster up the courage to say those hard words. But as we do that, as we bring those scary things into the light, we actually release them of their power and their hold over us, and I think that can be really helpful for children who have a lot of fears about the unknown.
Speaker 1:And adults. Your first book addressed grief for adults. Can you talk a little bit about that book and what you know, having gone through this horrible experience yourself? What enlightened you? What did you bring to the reader in that book?
Speaker 2:if we start with adults, Well, I really have to start 10 years before that, because 10 years before that my husband had written a book called the Art of Dying Living Fully into the Life to Come. He was an investigative journalist, he worked in a funeral home on the night shift, was a hospice volunteer, and he really wanted to understand how modern people died and why there was such a spiritual deficit when it came to how we faced this inevitability. And so, for the first 10 years of our marriage, he was researching and writing and thinking about death and dying, how to help families as their loved ones approach death, how to approach death yourself if you were chronically ill or aging. And so, really, after Rob died, my work became a continuation of his own. He had brought us up to the grave plot, so to speak, and it was my endeavor to take us on from there. And so my first book, beyond the Darkness. It's all about living fully into the life that does exist after death, because I remember, after Rob died, thinking a part of me has died too, and to some extent that is true. There is a part of us that is no longer when our loved one dies. And yet I was fully convinced that Rob's death wasn't my own, that there was something more for me to do, to experience, to live for, and I wanted to find out what that was.
Speaker 2:And so for me, that was an integration of bereavement theory, understanding what it meant to grieve in a healthy way, a productive way. It was grief support. What are the things I need to do to survive these hardest and rawest, most tender times of grief? And then faith. You know, death opens up a lot of conversations about the afterlife, about God, about spirituality, things that if you are a person of faith, you may be used to talking about. But even if you're not, you may start to ask those kind of questions in ways you never did before. And we are whole people, body, soul and spirit. And so I wanted to think about what did it mean to live fully into life after a loved one dies? And so my work in Beyond the Darkness for Adults, in Hurt Help Hope, which is our book for teens, and in Hope Comes to Stay, this children's book, is all in that same trajectory helping take a person from those first moments of disorienting grief into a life that I really believe can be flourishing and deeply satisfying after loss.
Speaker 1:I'm just sitting here saying, wow, you are doing such wonderful work. I read your children's book which, by the way, I have to say to everyone, it is such a beautiful book.
Speaker 1:The story is so dear and so clear. And you know I'm 61. So I have lost some. You know I've lost my parents. I can relate to grief and you had some simple lines in your book which are for children but really spoke to me.
Speaker 1:The little girl asked at the beginning of the book what is grief? She overheard people using the word grief at her father's funeral. This is a story of a little girl kind of going through this. Her mother had a baby and she's the older sister and she was trying to understand what grief is throughout the book. And so she kind of takes you through and you kind of walk with her and you see what you're talking about, clarissa, about grief doesn't go away but it can coexist with a full life.
Speaker 1:The first one, grief, is sadness jumbled up with happy memories, and I thought that's true, it's not just sadness, it's jumbled up with happy memories. And then another one sometimes grief was quiet and she could just be happy, right, mm-hmm. So we've all experienced that, where you're just in that. I call it the tunnel of grief. And then you'll have moments where it's lifted and you're like wait, am I allowed to be happy? Why am I happy? I can't be happy. I should be and talk about that. I mean, that's a and it's not a straight line. Someone told me when my mother died grief is not a straight line. Don't expect it to be a straight line, and nothing. There is no right or wrong way to grieve.
Speaker 2:That is so true? Yes, yeah, I think. If grief is a companion, if it comes with us to the office and after we've lost a loved one, we know grief shows up at the office we're disoriented, we can't concentrate, we struggle to focus in meetings. Grief shows up at the kitchen too, in our diminished appetite, our craving for particular foods that are attached to memory, and grief goes with us everywhere we go. But grief has a language of its own.
Speaker 2:Grief sometimes speaks to us of sadness, but if you've been a caregiver for a loved one for a really long time, you may be surprised or disoriented to discover that grief speaks peace. Grief speaks release or relaxation, a sense of contentment or completion and, like you're saying, that can be really scary. Did I not love the person? Do I not care?
Speaker 2:We have a real caricature of the language of grief, and part of this book is to expand that language, to help people understand, to help children understand that you don't have to cry to be grieving. You can sometimes be happy when you think about your person, you can play for a little while outside and when you fall and skin your knee, feel like the world is crumbling around you and you just want that person to be with you and hug you and love you again, that all of these feelings, all of these emotions are part of that language of grief, that, as we take it in every place that we go, whether it's the classroom or the soccer field or the boardroom, we are learning its language in those different settings, learning how it adapts, how it gives us wisdom, how it brings clarity to our priorities and to our values. And really all of my work is helping folks become more conversant with this unexpected and, granted, unwanted visitor.
Speaker 1:You were obviously very young at the time too. I mean so to talk about unexpected. You're not the only person, you're not the only woman I've heard of whose husband died in a surprising hiking accident, and so it's not just sometimes like when we have a dying parent. You do have some time to prepare for that and, as you said, like, especially when, like mine, was elderly, especially when they're elderly there is a piece about that, but I would imagine the grief is different when it happens so unexpectedly and at such a young point in your life. Do you have various clients you're helping who are in different stages? Do you see different help them based on their situation?
Speaker 2:I think that's a great question, and it highlights two things that are really important for us to understand about grief. First, that it's universal. I mean everyone will die. Everyone will have a loved one die. There is a commonality to our experience, stephanie, yours and mine, even though we didn't lose the same person. And yet grief is also unique. So it's universal, but it's also unique.
Speaker 2:I can never step fully into your story, neither can you step into mine, and so there is a sanctity there in that individuality that we need to honor in one another. There are folks I have met who have been married to a spouse for 50 years and there is no sense of peace as they let sense of longing. And there are those who have been married only a short time perhaps, have only known a friend for a short time, and they're able to move forward in ways that are truly amazing for the capacity that they show and the deep sense of loss that they have endured in a moment's notice. There's nothing that is replicable about our experiences of grief, and so part of our work is we love one another as we support one another is simply to honor the uniqueness of one another's loss, to become a student of each other, to say tell me about your story, what do you feel like you need today, instead of sort of superimposing our own experience onto someone else.
Speaker 2:I found that the folks who were most helpful to me in the early days of my loss were just those sorts of people, the folks who would come alongside and say I don't have any answers, I don't have any advice, but I'll sit with you, I'll walk with you through this and that companionship means all the difference.
Speaker 2:It makes all the difference, it means everything to a grieving person and at a time in your grief journey, as you become familiar with this companion of grief, you may discover a sense of camaraderie with all kinds of different people who have experienced loss. I remember when I was first widowed, I just wanted to find another young widow who got it, who understood what this was like. But over time I began to feel a deep connection to the woman who had experienced abandonment in her marriage, to the dad who had lost a child, to the friend who was burying a grandparent and had so many happy memories that were just overwhelming as this goodbye happened, that there was a sense of being joined with one another in this common experience, even as our pathways to it and through it were very different.
Speaker 1:I love that. So I'm sitting here thinking, Clarissa, if someone is listening, and they are like, wow, you know I'm still grieving whatever loss I had and they really haven't processed it. I mean, that's why I've always said we all have our own tunnel of grief. You have to go through it. You cannot go around it. You cannot avoid it. It's always going to be there until to go through it. You cannot go around it, you cannot avoid it. It's always going to be there until we go through it. What advice would you give people who feel like they might be stuck? They don't feel like their life is flourishing, they don't feel like they're moving on Well.
Speaker 2:I think the first thing that I would encourage them to do would be to go ahead and take their dictionary and scratch that word still right out of it, because we know and I'm so glad you said that word because it's one we use all the time when we're talking about grief you know, it's been a year, are you still having trouble? It's been five years. You're still not sleeping through the night. And what it does is it reminds us it's a cue word that we have certain standards that we have cobbled together, whether cultural standards, religious standards, whatever these are family of origin standards about how to do this thing. And when we realize that grief isn't, as you said, a process that we sort of are dumped out at the end and have a certificate of completion, but that it is a companion we're walking with through time, it gives us a lot of permission for grace that we can say hey, you know what I am feeling stuck.
Speaker 2:Okay, what's going on in my life? Have I hit a milestone where I wasn't expecting grief to show up in such a powerful way? And here it is. Maybe it's the birth of a first grandchild, the graduation of a child, retirement, and all of a sudden these feelings of grief show up in a very turbulent and raw kind of way in my life and I can say well, I'm still going through this.
Speaker 2:When we scratch that word still out, we simply say I'm going through this and we can acknowledge it. We can say all right, it's time to go back to the basics. Am I eating enough? Am I sleeping well? Am I getting movement? Do I have connection with people who support and love me? These are the kinds of things that allow us to keep going, even when the road gets kind of sloggy over time, because the thing that we do know about grief is, as we walk with it, we begin to grow with it and our lives grow around it. They become fuller, and so if you feel like you're stuck in a moment, perhaps that's all, it is just a moment and it bears a slowing down, looking around to see what other elements of our lives may be affecting or infecting our sense of bereavement, and then dealing with those little pieces as we adjust to grief's presence with us in what may be a new season of our lives.
Speaker 1:So this is why I love doing this podcast. I am sitting here thinking, wow, thank you for giving permission to have grief forever. Mm-hmm, I mean, I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes. My mother died 15 years ago. You're the first person I'm telling this to. I still. She wrote this beautiful inscription in my Bible and.
Speaker 1:I have read that 4 million times and I said to my husband last week when my mother wrote that inscription she might have taken 30 seconds to do it. She had no idea that I would be reading it 4 million times over 15 years and I still get weepy when I read it. She had no idea that I would be reading it 4 million times over 15 years and I still get weepy when I read it. But it's such a symbol of she gave me this door to faith, which is the most important thing in my life and it's the greatest gift she ever gave me and I can hold that right next to my sadness that she isn't here for the birth of her first great grandchild.
Speaker 2:You know, but it's okay, thank you.
Speaker 2:And we want our children to understand that too, because as they learn and grow, as they develop into adults, they are going to experience that sadness. You know, my kids will never see have their dad cheering them on as they walk across the stage to get their diplomas. He will never be there to see their first babies born and there will be, in those wonderful moments, the remembrances of him that are so sweet, like you're describing of your mom, the sweetness of her presence, the sweetness of what she invested in you that is always so precious. But in that moment there's also an awareness of absence and we can hold that. Like we said at the beginning of our conversation, we can hold those two seemingly conflicting feelings all in the same hand, realizing that to dismiss the sadness is not to be fully human, it's to be sort of robotic.
Speaker 2:And to dismiss and to hold only onto the happiness is to kind of not be honest about what is true about the world and the brokenness of the world. And so to be fully human is to say I love my mom and she was so precious and invested so much in me. And 15 years later I think of her and it makes me want to cry Grief is that carrying forward of the love that we have for our person into the lives that we now live without them, and it's bittersweet, it's painful, but it is an endeavor that, if you're a person of faith, if you're a Christian, we know that there's a consummation, there's a coming day where those wrongs will be made right, and that is a point of hope, a point of light to walk toward, even though we have to hold these two hard things in the same hand.
Speaker 1:Well, that's beautiful. The name of your book, the children's book, is Hope Comes to Stay right. Is it currently out?
Speaker 2:I didn't check it is.
Speaker 1:It is available, so people can buy it on Amazon, I'm sure, and other booksellers. But, clarissa, you have a number of avenues for helping people. I will have all of this in the show notes, but I always like you to tell people exactly how they can connect with you and what you offer, in case they don't go to the show notes, which they're not going to. So how can we reach you and what can people expect?
Speaker 2:Sure, well, you can reach me at my website, clarissamallcom. It's mall like doll, and I hang out on Instagram and on Substack as well Great places to connect with listeners and readers. I'm also the producer and moderator of Christianity Today's flagship news podcast, the Bulletin, and folks might say whoa, whoa, whoa, stop the bus News and grief. But you know, I have found that grief has given me new eyes. It's given me new eyes to see the world, to read the headlines, to read the news, and I know that for a lot of folks who have lost a loved one, they can't take any more input, they can't take the news, they can't even really scroll through social media, and so one of the things that I find to be a particular blessing in my work at the Bulletin is this opportunity to bring the eyes that are trained by grief and loss to the headlines, to be able to say where is there pain here and where's there a possibility for hope and redemption? So that's a fun part of the work that I do there as well.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much. I will have all of that in the show notes, but you know, I just want to thank you for not only being on the podcast, which I so appreciate I mean, I cannot wait to share this episode but for doing what you're doing. You could have been much more self-focused, and I have no who knows how many thousands of lives you're helping with your work, with your message, with your podcast, with your books On this side of heaven, you're never going to know, but ultimately someday you will know. So hope comes to stay Clarissa Mall. She has other books. I am definitely going to get your first book.
Speaker 1:I would really like to read that because, also, we didn't touch on this, but the whole idea of how we can be more supportive of friends and loved ones who are going through grief. I loved how you said just people just coming to be with you, not trying to come up with any words. In fact, it's better not to say any words at all. It's better just say I don't know what to say. But I want to thank you so much and I look forward to airing the episode and getting feedback from people. I know they're really going to be blessed by it. Thanks so much. Thanks so much. Thank you, stephanie.
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