This conversation is one of those that is personal and universal. What do you do when your partner dies unexpectedly? What Kim did was delve into that experience and, over time, lean in to help others as they are hit by loss and grief. As she says, “I can be an upbeat, energetic person, and I’ve had this big loss. The content that I’m talking about is grief, and yet I’m enthusiastic about it, so that might feel weird to people. But I want to be of service and I want this horrible pain to be of use to someone.” Kim talks about her experience and her work, touching on many aspects of grief and loss.
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Transcript:
Diane Hullet: Hi, I’m Diane Hullett, and you’re listening to the Best Life, Best Death podcast. And I’m talking more with Kim Schuett, who I spoke with a while ago on pocket grief and Gosh, Kim and I just were bubbling over at the end of our recording time. There was so much more to say because I think grief is such a powerful topic, such an important topic.
And Kim has a lot of experience and a lot to bring to the table. So welcome back, Kim. Thank you so much. It’s good to see you again. We started to stop and then I was like, we just have to keep going. So. I often feel like that. Yeah, I do too. And, and what a treat to be able to just go ahead and do so. So Kim is the author of some little books that are about grief called grief surfing and hints for grieflings, which I love.
I love this idea of grieflings. So on the last podcast with Kim, she read a piece of that book and we talked about where you can get these books at pocket grief. com. Am I right? Mm hmm. That’s it. I wanted to go a little deeper into, you know, Kim really named it as that we are a grief, illiterate society and a grief avoidance society.
And I think this is so powerful and I want to read something from another book that I’ve been delving into, which is called Conscious Grieving, a transformative approach to healing from loss. This is by Claire Bidwell Smith. Oh, I said that funny. This is by Claire Bidwell Smith. And I’m curious if you’ll agree with this.
I’m curious what you’ll think. She says at the beginning, grief is something all of us innately know how to do. It’s not something you can prepare for or need to feel ready for. It is simply grief. And I was struck when I read that by this idea that grief is something we innately know how to do. And it strikes me as this kind of fascinating, like nature nurture thing, right?
We know how to give birth. Our bodies know how to do that. And yet we learn a lot about it. And we try to create a birth plan. We try to hope it goes the way it goes. And I think the same is true for death. Our bodies know how to die. We’ve lost touch with that, but I think there is this inherent nature that knows how to die.
Do we inherently know how to grieve or are we taught that by our family and what we see in our particular community around us? And, you know, Kim said something really powerful. You said something really powerful at the end of the last conversation we had, which was, This thing that a lot of this sort of I’m going to call it the quote unquote positive death movement or this kind of sense of how do we help those who are grieving a lot of that is aimed at a very privileged slice of the community, right?
We’re often talking about white people’s grief. We’re often talking about the disenfranchised grief of someone who has the privilege of living far away from their grandparent, which is very different than many, many people’s experience. So. I don’t even know where to go with that as an opener. Kim, I throw it out like three different things, but what are your thoughts on the innate ness of grief?
And partly I bring this to Kim as a question, these questions, because she teaches classes in grief. And I think you’ve got the kind of creative mind that is constantly thinking, how do we do this better? How do we do this different? What more could I be offering to my community?
Kim Shute: Right. Yeah. So we’ll take it apart one at a time, I think.
And if I forget one of the things, one of the three, let me know. And if a fourth comes up, let me know as well. So I think that there is some truth to the idea that we know how to do it naturally. And. I feel like the powers of society and the powers within our own families, whether that’s chosen family or families of origin that we were raised with, adoptive families, whatever, you know, however you define family, we learn from.
From those places, how it is that it is acceptable or not acceptable to grieve. So I think that the reason that I teach the classes that I teach is I have a lot of people who come to my classes. And they’re getting notes from friends or family that are telling them that they’re doing it wrong. And so, you know, if, if I have to summarize what it is that I teach in my classes, I mean, I have different focuses for each time.
But I would say grief needs to be witnessed. Like, don’t try to change it. Don’t try to fix it. Just be with somebody. I would say like, don’t try to be prescriptive, like telling people that they need to move on or get over it or anything like that is not useful. And those are messages that sometimes come from families and well meaning friends society in general.
And so it’s kind of like, it takes as long as it takes. There are people out there that. You know, want to know how to hasten it. You know what I mean? Like how to make it go more quickly or more smoothly, you know, I, I, and, and, and the way that I approached grief myself was that I treated it as if it was a sprint, you know, like as if it was something to move through.
And in fact, I remember saying to somebody pretty early on, like, I want to win grief. Like, I want to be the best griever that ever was that ever grieved a death. Cause I need to get on with life and I mean, partly it came from a place of like deep sadness, right? Like so we talked about in the other episode about what my husband died at 48 years old.
I was 45 years old and it was like, I wanted to. Live with a vengeance, you know, live with abandon because I was so, you know, sad that the fact that he didn’t get to live and he wanted to live like he was really trying to sort of, and I don’t really love the language when somebody has cancer, when we say he’s fighting, he’s going to fight hard, because like, what does that mean then for those of us that They end up dying, like, did that mean they didn’t fight hard enough?
You know, it’s just a weird dynamic. But so I lived with a vengeance for a period of time where it was like, okay, I’m going to just, I gotta live for two of us here. So I, I do think that the death conversation when we can have it openly really points out to your best life really. Right. And, and it happens to all of us.
And it’s really weird that we I don’t know, treat it as if it’s not going to happen to all of us. Do you know what I mean? Like we remove ourselves in this like, Oh, that’s a, that’s a thing way in the future that we don’t need to talk about. Or like, if I talk about it, it’ll make it true. Like we have weird things that we think around it.
Okay. So I don’t know if I answered that thoroughly enough in terms of the, like, do we have the innate, you know, abilities? I think that we do, but I think that we have to sort of take it back from societies where you know, dictated rules around it. Does that answer that? Yeah.
Diane Hullet: There’s something about leaning into your truth about it, leaning into what you know to be real for you.
It strikes me as so much of it is like both and, you know, and so much of it is paradox. It’s like, you can lean into what is true for you and look for the support of others and you can trust yourself and you can question yourself, you know, and you can, Take a really long time and you’re going to have joy in the midst of that really.
You know what’s coming up for me as
Kim Shute: you’re saying that is. Oh, you mean we’re still human in the midst of grief, like we didn’t, we didn’t somehow change into something completely different and this is ours and we can be perfect.
Diane Hullet: Oh, this is just like life. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Lessons for grief or lessons for life.
And I also was thinking about the great you know, Pema Chodron is a fantastic Buddhist teacher. And she has that metaphor of. You know, you are the sky and your feelings are the weather. So how do we, when the thunderstorms are rolling through, just try for a little bit of meta awareness of like, I’m rolling with a storm and I’m the sky and the clouds will roll through and the sunshine will come through and the rainbows will show up and the clouds will be back and the hail will come.
And the lightning. But I’m the sky. And I think that’s the kind of fascinating metaphor, if we can go to that, that helps us in these biggest times where we’re just flattened.
Kim Shute: Yes. For sure. So now I’m trying to think of, I know that there was the, the, the people of color conversation and the, are we, is the grief sphere mainly been targeted towards a privileged class?
But there was something in between, I thought, a second question, but if you come up with it, we’ll, we’ll explore that. I, I just honestly, so I just signed up for this class that started, I think it started in mid March and I was, you know, I printed out the syllabus and cause I wanted to be able to refer back to this stuff once it’s over because I’m using it sort of as food for thought in terms of, you know, because part of what’s difficult about where I work right now is that I don’t have a mentor, you know, and I’m not, I’m not a therapist.
I’m not a counselor. I’m not a doctor. I’m not any of those things. I am. I’m a griever. And it’s important to me. That if I’m out there teaching in the world that I make sure that I’m teaching people things that aren’t just made up. You know what I mean? Like that people have studied grief and they’ve been studying it for a long time now.
And I want to make sure that I am saying things that they have found to be true and helpful. Right. And I found that like some things for myself, because the grief of my husband was relatively traumatic. I mean, not, And that I mean, it was sudden, right? Like we didn’t expect a 48 year old to die. And we thought, in fact, You know, I’ve been told since he died that basically a relatively healthy 48 year old man with leukemia definitely should not have died.
So it was about the cleanliness of the hospital. But so, so you bring
Diane Hullet: a lot of factual and researched information to your classes. So you’re not, it’s not like here’s Kim’s opinion about grief, right? Right. And here’s some real stuff.
Kim Shute: Yeah. So in 2017, I went to ADEC, which is the association for death education or educators and counselors.
And I took intro to thanatology, which is a 16 hour long class. And that was one of the things that came up was the idea that just because you experience a death doesn’t mean you can put up a shingle that says, you know, grief therapist, just because you’ve been through it. And so it was really important to me after hearing that, that I make sure that I’m, Reading and listening to and learning from grief experts, you know, so that I’m not spreading more stuff that is not helpful to people because that’s all I want to do is I want to serve people.
And it’s weird, right? Like around this conversation about grief. You know, we say rebuilding a life or your new normal and for a, for a fresh griever, like if people said words like that to me when I had just experienced my death, I not a violent person. I’m actually a pacifist, but it just would tap into not quite rage, but very close where it’s like, I don’t want a new life.
You think I wanted this to happen to me kind of thing. Okay. So back to the, what I was saying is the reason I’m taking this class is because it’s important to me that I have a mentor, right? And so I want to make sure that I’m learning the most up to date things. And so I printed out the syllabus and right there on the syllabus, you know, is cultural competency, cultural humility, cultural awareness.
And, you know, in Newport, where I work, we have a really high population of folks that are coming from Central America and South America, and it’s growing that population. And are we able to serve them? And what does that mean? And then we also have a couple of different churches with lots of people of color in Newport.
But I was noticing, like, I’ve been teaching and I’m trying to think if I’ve ever seen someone who’s not white at one of my classes. And is that because. We’re not reaching them. Is that because we’re not teaching the right things? Is that because, you know, innately, both of those groups of people already have a much more community centered, you know, way of being in the world, whereas I think white people with our nuclear families have a tendency to be a little bit more Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Standoffish isolated, you know, and we, we like to learn things, you know, you know, we want to be experts in things. I think that that’s definitely plays a role. So, you know, I’m in the beginning phases with I actually, one of my books got translated into Spanish by a friend of mine who is originally from Puerto Rico.
And so she and I are trying to work to reach those different communities to say like, look and not to say like we’re coming in or that I’m coming in as a white savior to be like, let me teach you all about what I know about grief. That’s not what I mean, but making sure that they are getting what they need from, from their communities, or should we be partnering together to make sure that, you know, and is it different?
Like, is it different what you need from what it is that I’m teaching? Because I want to make sure that we offer what you need. Like this is to help people.
Diane Hullet: Right. Amazing. I think that’s all so relevant. I, I was struck too, by the conversation I had at one point with a man in Denver who works with the unhoused and you know, his experience talking about that population and their experience of illness, end of life, death, which just really went straight to my heart.
And I, I don’t know with the demographic changes that are coming, if we won’t see more people who are unhoused, who are homeless, who are. Transient people passing through communities with mental illness or addictions or not and their experience of end of life and death is, is just, it’s not what we would wish for our fellow humans.
So how do we impact these really underserved populations? I don’t have the answer.
Kim Shute: Yeah. I mean, I have a friend who actually, he lives in Lafayette and he often will work with folks who are unhoused, you know, trying to help them get some more needs met. And you know, I have a friend, actually my next door neighbor in the community they live in, I live in a cohousing community and she actually started a, you know, an outdoor church where it was like, she’s working with folks and she’s written a couple of books about, you know, ministries that actually involve the people that they’re serving.
Like instead of. A bunch of white people creating a soup kitchen that like you’re actually talking to the people that you’re serving and they are working in the, you know, in the soup kitchen themselves or the community meal or whatever it is that that institution is calling it, but yeah, it’s, I mean, to me, it’s like, I feel like we have to keep thinking about.
What the problem is that we’re trying to solve how to solve it, but also involving all the players, right? Like not coming in and saying like, well, we know, you know, like, I don’t want to come in. And that’s the thing that I try to talk about in my grief support classes is look. You know, you, you know, you and what you need better than I do.
I’m an extrovert, so I need very different things than a griever who would be an introvert, you know? And so I want people to be able to listen to themselves on how to take care of themselves because I really feel like, and this is the part where it’s a luxury as we’re talking about people who are unhoused and possibly marginalized communities where it’s like.
Is it, is this a white lens, you know, a white middle class lens where it’s like your number one job as a griever is to take care of yourself. It’s like, well, okay, what if you have to go to work? What if you have five kids to take care of? What if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from? Like, that’s a luxury and I have to think and sit more with that about like, what, Is it that I can do to help with those situations and I need to be invited into that conversation.
I can’t just come in and instruct people about what they need to do and point and tell people what to do.
Diane Hullet: You know, this is, this is sort of a tangent, but it kind of goes like another, I don’t know, another concentric circle out or something. Do you know the book, the wild edge of sorrow
Kim Shute: by Francis Weller?
Yes, he was just, they just featured him on did you do Anderson Cooper’s podcasts? I haven’t heard it yet. Yes. I love Anderson Cooper. It, it, so I, I think Francis Weller is featured on, in the first season and yeah, it’s really, he’s amazing. Well, he’s got this profound, you know,
Diane Hullet: his book talks about, he calls them the five gates of grief.
Right. And I won’t be able to rattle off what they are. But the one that always really struck me when, when, when I read about it was this idea that we have a. And I think that there’s a sorrow in us as modern humans that we weren’t born into a village, that like our birthright as humans is community is, is village is large extended families.
I mean, that’s sort of biologically what we’re lined up for. And that is not what we have going on. Most of us, many of us, some of us, all of us, I don’t know what the right phrase is, but so this idea that there’s a grief in our heart, there’s a hole in our heart because. Of the village that we lack. I’m just going to call it village is a simple way to put it.
And I was really struck by that as I don’t know this, this yearning that I, that I know I have, and I’m well supported with lots of friends. And at the same time I go, where’s my village? We’re all sort of siloed, you know, we’re all sort of in our individual spaces and how that plays out when you raise children, when you age, and when you die.
Is, is really very particular and our kids experience of village and community and being cared for in a larger context, I think is a fascinating kind of human question right now.
Kim Shute: Yeah. I mean, to your point, so, and this is maybe going too far down a rabbit hole or off on a side, but it feels related. So my husband and I were part of a community from 2001 until 2007 that was trying to build a co housing village.
And we ended up having to leave because we couldn’t afford it, but we made some of our very best friends there and they were a huge part of who took care of me after this happened and who took care of Gabe. So we would drive up. So they ended up actually eventually building and moving in in 2009. We stayed there.
But after my husband died, I came here and I live here now, I actually am repartnered. I’m engaged to be married again. And live in that community that my husband and I actually helped to fund and build like I found the land and, and the kids. It is absolutely a village and we’ve actually experienced a few deaths here and I mean, there’s, there’s this thing, right?
Like that I feel like goes unspoken. I’m a little bit more susceptible to it than many people, but it’s like, when you are this close to your neighbors and when you know so much more, when their hurts are big. It can get on you, you know what I mean? Or when their happiness is big, it can get on you. Like right now, we just had someone move in in their early 20s.
It’s a young couple who have a 16 month old. And I get a rental grandbaby! It’s so great! You know, and I get to walk their dog, but I don’t have to have a dog. And like, But it’s, it, but I think it speaks to what you’re talking about is that, that hole that we all have to feel connected. And I feel it, especially cause I’m an only child raised an only child and I had an only child.
And so I really feel that like, I don’t have that, you know, Thanksgiving for 20 or 30 people. Like I don’t have that. And so living here has given me that. And it’s been really a blessing. It was definitely a blessing during the pandemic. I moved up during the pandemic and it was. I don’t know how I would have survived.
By myself in my house where I lived with my husband and he’s no longer there. It was,
Diane Hullet: well, I just, I have so much respect for how kind of fully you’ve leaned into your grief and used it as a way to give back, you know, you just, as you said, In the other podcast, you know, you fell in love. I think it was in the other podcast.
Maybe it was this one. You fell in love with end of life, death, bereavement, because I think there’s something about it that’s so stinking real. And when you tap it, you, you do. Click into this gratitude for life and the beauty and the daffodils in the spring. Like it sounds so cheesy, but it’s really real.
Oh, and I know what I was going to ask you. I was curious. I was working with a client the other day and this was so beautiful. We were doing kind of a little visualization called practice for death developed by Taryn Estes, the founder of the Conscious Dying Institute. And as I read it to her, we just were sitting there quietly listening to these words and she’s in her 80s and she kind of opened her eyes afterwards.
And she said, Oh, that was so weird, but kind of so amazing. I realized that there’s going to come a time when I just step off the bus. I’m just going to be done and I’ll get off the bus and I loved that moment because I think until then she’s so, you know, had a very active life, very physical, and I think she was so identified with that.
I’m here that she hadn’t really touched that esoteric place of. Oh, at some point I won’t be here. And I was going to ask you, like, have you had those moments? I know I’ve had a few in my life and working in this work is like touching that kind of moment over and over again. And it does, it brings this incredible aliveness.
So have you had any moments of this experience of realizing you’ll be getting off the bus as well?
Kim Shute: Have I had moments? I mean, I, I feel like there’s this after I keep trying to bring it back to I statements instead of you. But sometimes I default to the you. I think that working in the sphere that I work in, right.
I, I, death calls come in every single day and I get those emails where it’s like, I know a new person has passed away. I know. And so there’s just this awareness, like this constant awareness, you know, that it’s like at any, at any moment we could step off the bus. And
for myself, I would say that I think about it a lot. In some ways it’s in the distance because my, my genetics put me at like early nineties. And so it’s like, I’m literally at like halfway if, if that’s true, right? Like if I’m on that trajectory, so I don’t think about it actively, but I do just always have it with me.
This, like, I want to put it in a way that says like, I always know that the other shoe is gonna drop, but it’s like, as I’m watching other people’s lives unfold, I sort of have this, you know, because I have this knowledge of what it’s like. But I have to be I have to be thoughtful in my grief and one of the people that I’ve been enjoying recently is Lucy Hone.
I think she’s out of either Australia or New Zealand. Do you know her? She does resilient grieving, so she’s a resilience researcher. She got her PhD at University of Pennsylvania when they were trying to bring resilience training to the U. S. military. And, you know, she’s just bopping along in her life and then her daughter, her daughter’s best friend and her best friend were all killed in a car crash when they were all going away for the weekend.
You know, like a Memorial Day weekend kind of thing, and instantly, her best friend, her daughter, and her daughter’s best friend are wiped off the planet. And so, here she is and the thing is, is that the, one of the things that is hard, right, when you’re a griever, right, is that people try to be well meaning, to sort of prepare you for what your next year or two will be like.
And, I, like, I like to be realistic, but at the same time not be like, here, I’m writing you your self fulfilling prophecy kind of thing. But what Lucy says that resilient grievers have in common, I think, are resilient people. Is that they ask, is this helping me or is this hurting me? And so, when it comes to that idea of thinking about my day when I’m gonna step off the bus I have to go like, is there, is there a reason for this?
Is this, is there a helpful reason for me to explore this right now? Or is now not the time? And so, you know, it sort of comes and it goes.
Diane Hullet: I don’t know. That’s incredible. That’s an incredible truth that she was, so she was being a resilience researcher essentially, and then have this experience. Well, and
Kim Shute: I mean, Oh, no,
Diane Hullet: I’m going
Kim Shute: to see if this really works.
Well, she had, so she has a Ted talk and she just released a book, I think called resilient grieving and her. I mean, to me, it’s just so amazing, but what was so frustrating in her experience, and I’ll, you know, I’m obviously, it’s much better to hear it from the person, but what she talks about is the idea of like, people are telling me like, oh, just write off the next five years, just write them off, you’re not going to be normal, everything’s going to suck, and she was like, wait a minute.
Like there has to be another way, like, I want to be a more active participant in my grief. I want to, you know and, and I, I think it’s just like those models that Claire, you know, is talking about in her book is like, you just got to find the one or the combination of them that work for you. For you, you know, like most of us do this thing, it’s the dual process model of grief where you go back and forth between focusing on the death and what that means in your life and rebuilding your life.
And you just sort of ping pong back and forth. That’s mostly what I see. I mean, there’s other. Ones that work, but that one really resonates with me. And I also feel like for me, post traumatic growth has been a huge part of my journey, but I don’t think that we should do assume that everything, like when people say it’s a pet peeve of mine, when people say like everything happens for a reason, it just pushes my buttons like nobody’s business.
Not everybody gets post traumatic growth and. It’s still just hard sometimes, you know, we have to show up for people. And it’s, I think it feels weird to me sometimes, like when I’m teaching my classes that I can be such an upbeat person and so energetic and have had this loss and, and the content that I’m talking about is grief, right?
But I’m enthusiastic about it. So that might feel weird to people. I just want to. I want to be like, I want, I want for this horrible pain that I have experienced and lived through to be of use to someone, you know what I mean? Like, and I have to make it of use to myself, but I would much rather be helpful to other people out there to let them know, like, look, you’re not alone.
For me, a turning point in my grief journey was the I didn’t even know it was happening, but I basically got a grief mentor. I got someone who had lost his spouse in his thirties, and he was about eight years ahead of me on the path. And it was a dark time for me, right? Like, and I can’t imagine that there would ever be a day that I would feel hopeful or laugh or smile or want to eat again.
And here’s this person and he’s eight years down the road and he’s dating and. You know, his son is growing up and he’s still going to work and he’s smiling and laughing. And that’s an option for me. What? That’s blowing my mind right now. So anyway, you really.
Diane Hullet: You know, the perfect digression. You, you just, you really had a huge experience with the power of community around it all.
It sounds like, like the, the, and not the power, the importance of community around it all. That, that really mattered. It mattered when you came back from Taiwan, off that airplane, from your husband’s death. And it mattered as you moved forward with your son. And it still matters to you now, as you live in co housing and move into different places in your life.
Yeah. Well, Kim, thank you so much. This has been so much fun. What a, what a great morning of a double conversation.
Kim Shute: It’s been really good for me too. I mean, I obviously love to talk about this stuff and you are lovely. What a, what a happenstance that we found each other across the, you know, country. Yeah.
Diane Hullet: Somehow social media does that. It keeps connecting me with people who just seem like, Oh yeah, this is the person I need to talk to. What’s the is it worth saying the name of the funeral? Home that you have done work for
Kim Shute: the
Diane Hullet: is so lovely
Kim Shute: for Memorial and Connors Funeral Homes. They’re both in Newport and Portsmouth, which is on a little island in Rhode Island.
Actually, the original Rhode Island, it’s Quidditch Island. And it’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s a, It’s a good place and they do good work. They take good care of people in their darkest days. And I just, I feel so honored to be a part of a group of people who are so loving and compassionate and show up for people when it’s really hard.
Diane Hullet: So beautiful. So you can find out more about them. You can also find out more about Kim’s books, which are called pocket grief at pocket grief. com. And as always, you can find out more about the work I do at best life, best death. com. Thanks again, Kim.
Kim Shute: Well, thank you for doing the work that you’re doing. I think it’s really important to engage us in these deep and authentic conversations around hard topics.
And you know, like when I think about older people and, and younger people, we’re afraid, we’re afraid to have this conversation and I think that we need to just keep showing up and keep making it okay. So the fact that you do that in the world is really a bright light and I hope that your bright light continues to shine.
Thanks, Kim. Have a wonderful day. Thanks for
Diane Hullet: listening.
End of Life Doula, Podcaster, and founder of Best Life Best Death.
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© 2021 BEST LIFE BEST DEATH. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
