Episode 70 — Friend-Loss is a Disenfranchised Grief: with Rebecca Feinglos

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INTRO: “Hi, friends. Today, I chat with Rebecca Feinglos, Grief Expert and Founder of Grieve Leave. Rebecca Feinglos is a Certified Grief Support Specialist, Startup Founder, and Former State and Local Policy Advisor.

She founded Grieve Leave in 2021 as a way to document her experience on a year-long grief sabbatical and process her own grief and loss. She lost her mother in her teens, her father suddenly in 2020, and her marriage in a drawn-out divorce. Grieve Leave has grown into a global community of 30,000 with online reach well into the millions that provides tangible takeaways, resources, and a healthy dose of humor, creating an entire movement around taking intentional time to grieve.

I was so excited and honored to talk to Rebecca. And while we talk about grief as a whole, we also focus on Friend-Loss Grief and how it is a Disenfranchised Grief, which is something that took me years to actually come to terms with. Disenfranchised Grief means that you do not get the same support as other types of grief, your grief does not feel as validated, and Rebecca was saying how even though intellectually she knew, she knows that she has every right to deeply grieve her friend Courtney, there are still moments where she questions, and she says, am I allowed to feel this sad?

Did I know her for long enough? Were we close enough? Those questionings are signs that your grief is disenfranchised.

I really enjoyed this conversation. Rebecca has a great sense of humor, if you don’t know already. And if you catch it, there is a moment where I accidentally say that the opposite word of “subliminal” is “bliminal”, which by the way, would make so much sense and I stand by it. Thank you so much for listening.

REBECCA: First of all, Hannah, I'm so, so glad to connect with you finally. We, before you started recording, I was thanking you for just being very gracious as I've had my own grief experiences related to losing a friend in the past few weeks. And we were supposed to speak on your podcast and do that recording literally like the same day that I found out that a friend of mine was dying.

And that timing is uncanny to me. And it is also really making me feel very grateful for the opportunity to connect with you and is making me reflect on how lucky I feel to be leading this work with Grieve Leave. And so, yes, I would love to tell you about it. It just feels so intentional and so full circle in this exact moment in time. It's amazing to me.

HANNAH: Wow, yeah.

REBECCA: So I'm Rebecca Feinglos. I founded Grieve Leave a few years ago after at the age of 31, I had two dead parents and a divorce all under my belt. And I decided to take a year off of work to focus on my grief, which is an immense privilege to be able to do that. My thinking was, I need to figure out how to process these immense losses that I have had in my life. And I feel like I have no space or vocabulary to talk about these things, particularly as a young person. And Grieve Leave became what started as my own blog of just writing down my own thoughts on what does it mean for me to grieve my parents and grieve my divorce and grieve the pandemic and grieve leaving my job, even though the divorce and leaving my job were intentional. There's still grief there. That blog took off. My social media took off because it turns out that so many of us are struggling with what it means to grieve and are looking for grief support that feels really relevant to each of us.

And my work these days is leading Grieve Leave as a company. And I train workplaces on how to create more grief-informed, more grief-supportive environments for their employees who will face loss.

HANNAH: We need that. That's so needed.

REBECCA: Right? I'm like, girl, it's happening in our workplaces. Whether bosses are ready for those conversations or not, they're coming. And two days of bereavement leave us nothing.

HANNAH: Ridiculous.

REBECCA: But this is like a whole other conversation. So I do that, and then Grieve Leave is a community of over 30,000 people worldwide. So that is connecting people through social media, through our online platforms, through grief support groups in person and virtually. And I just feel really lucky to do it. And I feel grateful to have conversations, like I said, with you and with other people who are speaking up about grief. That's how we can change this culture around stuffing our grief down.

HANNAH: Yeah, and I appreciate the work you do so much. I really feel like I've seen a change just in the past 10 to 15 years. I don't know if you've also seen that change or maybe I'm just getting more involved in the world. But when I first started grieving my friend in 2015, it was almost like an echo chamber. There was nothing around. It's just so different now. And yeah, you're filling a void that needs to be filled.

REBECCA: My god, we are in this work together. And I mean, my two cents on that is, so my mom died when I was a kid. I was five when she was diagnosed with glioblastoma. It's a really deadly form of brain cancer, the deadliest. And she lived for eight years with that disease and the impacts of the disease and then died when I was 13. And I wasn't in grief support. I wasn't in therapy. Even though my father was a physician, right? It's not like we didn't have access to care. Mental health was not the conversation. And ostensibly, I looked like I was doing great. I had a lot of friends. I was great in school. And for me, the message that I got loud and clear was, well, we're not supposed to tell people that we're feeling down. And if we just succeed and hustle our way through life, then we're doing a good job grieving. Like, I'm doing so well, even though my mom is dead. Like, look at her go. And it wasn't until my dad died 22 years later, and then I got divorced. And I was like, oh, I can't hustle my way out of this one. It's just insurmountable. I have to pause. I have to think about these feelings that are suffocating me. Grief will suffocate you if you don't make room for it.

HANNAH: Absolutely. Absolutely.

REBECCA: But those conversations were not happening 20 plus years ago. Like, yeah, now they are, thanks to people like you. And I also think the pandemic did that. It's like one good thing from the pandemic.

HANNAH: Yes. Yes. It's become more mainstream almost to like talk about grief because we're all going through it, albeit in different ways, but and to different degrees, but yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so thank you so much for telling more about your background. Also, I want to say anyone who hasn't listened to her podcast, Grief’d Up, please check it out. It's amazing.

REBECCA: Oh my God, thank you for plugging. I probably should have mentioned it. Whoops. Yes, Grief Leave has also launched a podcast because I'm trying to be cool like you. Because the more that we can do to lift up conversations around grief and loss, the better. like, you know, as well as I do that sometimes it feels safer to listen to other people talk about their grief as opposed to making yourself vulnerable and putting your own face out there or going to a grief support group or commenting on something online. That can feel really scary. And sometimes just listening to someone else talk about their loss, whether that is this specific episode right now, like listening to our conversation is helpful, or listening to the many episodes that you have or the episodes of Grief’d Up that we have, that can help you feel more seen in your grief. So yeah, Grief’d Up is, we talk to all kinds of people grieving all kinds of losses, not just death. We recently talked to Shane Battier, who's a retired NBA player whom I loved watching when he was at Duke, which is where I went to school and it was my happy place as a kid with my dad. But talking about his grief from retiring from the NBA, for example. There's grief all around us.

HANNAH: Right. It is, it's, it's, it's everywhere. And I really love that you do that because I feel like there's not many places that focus on all the types of grief and like validate that leaving a job is grief, divorce is grief, you know, things that aren't a death, maybe in a literal sense, but they are a death in a different sense.

REBECCA: Totally. They're a loss. Any big life transition of any kind comes with grief. And that doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It doesn't mean you're weak. It doesn't mean you're a failure, nothing like that. You are just human. Therefore, you grieve. That's a life well lived.

HANNAH: That's beautiful. I, you know, as I grow older, I'm realizing that grief is the other side of love. It's kind of like two sides of the same coin. So, you know, and we love, he loved his career. You know, we love our hobbies. We love all kinds of things. So that love also counts. And that also has the other side of the coin. So I love that you talk about that.

REBECCA: Totally. Oh my god, this is also maybe a silly example, but maybe not. I like to say love isn't logical. When we're in a new relationship or an old relationship, love follows no logic. It is just this very deep sense that we feel. I loved my husband through and through, and our marriage didn't work. There was no logic there, right? But grief is the same. There is no logic in grief. Logically, I know, whatever it is, especially in the earliest days, my dad was never coming back. But the feelings almost have a mind of their own sometimes in grief, just like love. And I think it's really interesting that we say, “We fall in love”, but we don't say “we fall in grief.” And that's silly, because it's like both of them are the same to me. Like we fall into like this sense of grief. Like we fall in love. It is beyond our control, and that is OK. It can be all consuming. So anyway, agreed. Long story short, agree. Grief and love to me are like totally intertwined and parallel.

HANNAH: That’s also why I feel like this is just sort of thoughts that I've been chewing on for months and years is that like, I was trying to figure out why is friend lost grief not as validated. And I realized it's because the love is also not as validated. There are books that have come out that are talking about this. And I'm like, “yay, I'm not the only one!” I have lots of book recommendations, but like, I mean, if you really look at how society is set up, platonic love is the lowest tier of love, according to society. They are below romantic partners and family. And, and it's like, it's not to diminish those loves, but for many people, they're all equal or they're not like, you know, friends are last. And so if the love's not respected, then the grief would also not be respected.

REBECCA: Oh my God I think you are just speaking like gigantic truth bombs right now. Like when we think about grief, so many different types of loss and grief are disenfranchised. Like that we feel grief, but we don't feel like we should feel that grief. So I think divorce falls under that category. Pet loss falls under that category. Divorce falls under that category particularly because of shame around getting divorced. Like, “you asked for this. So why are you feeling grief?” Because it's a loss, regardless, right? Pet loss, same thing. Like, is it silly that I feel this down about the loss of my dog? That is grief that's disenfranchised.

When we lose a friend...I feel like we ask ourselves, “should I be feeling this kind of loss? Should I be grieving this much?” Because to your point, we diminish the importance of that connection in the first place. Just like we diminish the importance of a connection with a pet, or we diminish the importance of the end of a marriage.

I mean, for me, my friends are my family, right? Like both of my parents are gone. My brother is my sister-in-law now. And my soon-to-be-nephew are like my only close family members. They're all I have left. So to me, my friends play this very special role in my life. I care deeply, deeply, and love deeply all of my friends. And that's why like, talking to you today is particularly important to me because it's like I hadn't lost somebody I cared about from a friend perspective before three weeks ago. It's different.

HANNAH: And I'm so, so sorry. I mean, yeah. When you told me that it happened, it just, my heart just broke and I've been thinking about you so much. So what is your friend's name?

REBECCA: Courtney. I could tell you about Courtney.

HANNAH: I would love to hear about Courtney.

REBECCA: I would love to tell you about Courtney. So there are some layers here. Here's what's really interesting. Well, actually, let me tell you about Courtney first and then context. Courtney was an incredible human being who just lit up every single room she walked into. Kindest human being. Hilarious. I've never met anyone like her. She just like, stole a piece of my heart when we first met. Blonde. I wonder if she would call herself strawberry blonde even or redhead. But in my mind with my dark ass hair, she was basically blonde. Petite. Worked as a genetic counselor at Duke because Courtney had, I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right, Loeys-Dietz syndrome. It's related to Marfan syndrome. And she suffered from it her whole life, but you wouldn't know, except that she was a huge advocate. So she would host fundraisers for research on her disease and for Marfan syndrome more widely. And I was just captivated by her and just who she was.

And Courtney had a stroke. a year and what month is it October? I think in August of 2023, she had a stroke at the age of 28. And then this year, three weeks ago, she had another stroke. And that is ultimately what led to her death. And it's just mind blowing to me. She is someone that I've grown especially close with over the past year as she worked on recovery from her stroke. And I grew very close with her husband as he navigated what it was like to be a caregiver to a spouse at such a young age. And that was just not the life that they were planning on.

The other context that I'll give is like interesting layers here. I am friends with them through my ex-boyfriend. So it was the first relationship I was in post my divorce. And this is like a whole other lens to the conversation that I think we would have had, you and I, but for Courtney's death, like I lost friends when that breakup happened, right? Because.

HANNAH: Right. Right.

REBECCA: I no longer was spending time with this entire friend group I had spent a year and half with. And breakups chain true you are friends with. But after that breakup, I stayed close and got closer with Courtney and her husband. And there's a lot of interplay there that we can totally talk about of what it was like to go to her funeral and see all these people that are related, you know, friend group of my ex-boyfriend seeing my ex-boyfriend. It's just like different layers of grief that was really interesting.

HANNAH: So many layers.

REBECCA: From as like a grief person, I was like, whoa, this is a hell of a lot. Even I, Hannah, I was just like, “do I have a right to feel as down as I do about Courtney's death?” Like, “was I close enough with her? Like, do I count enough as a friend to feel grief?” And I have never questioned that in my life as, or let's say in my experience doing grief work. I've never had that complete moment of doubt. Like, “do I have a right to feel this grief about this friend?”

HANNAH: That questioning, feel like, like you were saying earlier with disenfranchised grief, I feel like that's a sign that it's disenfranchised grief is when we're like, “wait, am I allowed? Do I own this?” And I, I, that's something I've also been grappling with for years is like the ownership because, I was talking to someone, I think in episode one, where she was like, “I feel like I have ownership over my dad's death and my grief over that. I do not feel the same way about my friend.” And she even like questions how much she can talk about it because there's also that whole thing of like—which is valid, you know, we don't want to cross any boundaries or step on any toes, but like a lot of times that can silence us completely, because of the whole thing. So yes.

REBECCA: Like it's not my story to tell. Yeah. Yeah.

HANNAH: Exactly. Yeah. And it's like, who gets to tell the story? You know, it's so complicated.

REBECCA: That's so interesting. Even in talking to you about it right now, this is really interesting. Obviously, I've never questioned talking about the grief that I have for my parents. Or maybe I've questioned it around my divorce. This is interesting because it's like that grief also involves another person who is still alive. And my grief for Courtney now is like, well, A, do I have a right to feel it? Was I enough of a friend to her? Did we talk enough? Did we connect enough? Did I know her well enough compared to like, she was not my childhood best friend. You know what I mean? So then you talk yourself through whether this was enough of a friend to really grieve. But then talking about my grief for her has an impact on her husband, who is alive.

Her friends who are my friends too, but as we've talked about, they are my now ex-boyfriends friends. So that comes with an additional layer of funkiness. And my two cents on all of this is I will continue to speak up about my experiences in grief in the hopes that it helps somebody else. And I will do my best to do no harm to other people along the way as I tell stories and talk about my own experience. I try my damnedest not to speak to other people's experience, and I'm trying to talk about my own grief. But grief for a friend is it involves other people. It's sticky.

HANNAH: Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I love the way that you said that and looked at it because it's like, you know, I feel strongly to talk about it because it might help other people. Also, I'll do my hardest not to harm anyone. And it's, I was talking to someone else about a similar idea and he was like, if you're carrying a cup of coffee and someone bumps into you and you spill coffee on them, like you feel bad, but like you really, you weren't carrying 30 cups of coffee, like you were being responsible. So it's a similar kind of deal. Like we do your best. It won't guarantee that it won't maybe hurt someone. And if it does, hopefully that can be resolved and it can be okay. But we shouldn't have to be silent. We should be able to carry our cup of coffee.

REBECCA: Oh my God, let's carry the cup of coffee. love this. I love a good analogy for grief and how we carry it and how we talk about it. like, I thank you for saying that.

HANNAH: And so how long have you known Courtney? When did you meet her?

REBECCA: My ex-boyfriend and I started dating in 2022. But we met in 2021. So Courtney and I would have met at the beginning of 2022. And so, right? So it's a couple years, two and a half years. And it makes me wonder, do I have a right to feel this way? Do I have a right to grieve that relationship?

And I think we, I've heard this when people have talked about sibling loss. The question that folks get asked is, “were you close with them?” That it's almost like we're judging how much they should be grieving. And maybe it's the same with friend loss, right? I am like, well, did I know her long enough to grieve her, even in answering your question I’m like, people who are listening are going to be like, “Rebecca, chill. You weren't friends with her for that long.” But intellectually, I know that is ridiculous. We can grieve all kinds of relationships, short, long, whatever they were.

HANNAH: But it's that emotional feeling of still like, gosh, like you still question it because of all the subliminal and bliminal messages. [laughs]

REBECCA: Bliminal.

HANNAH: If only that were a word.

REBECCA: I like it.

HANNAH: All the subliminal and explicit or bliminal, I'm going to coin that, messages that we get from society. like, I really don't think love has, love doesn't need a certain timeline to be love, you know, and, but if only we could really feel that, and really know it deep down.

REBECCA: I love that. Or it's like, I don't know, like if I had been dating someone for that amount of time and they died. Of course, that's understandable because romantic love, according to your definitions from earlier, right, that's over platonic love. And so we feel more justified as a society to grieve the loss of that kind of relationship from a death. Right? Or even from a breakup, I think we understand heartbreak as grief. Like we understand that as a society.

But the death of a friend, it doesn't have rituals around it. doesn't have like, it's not a normalized experience. So it leaves people like me being like, should I, “am I allowed to go to this funeral? Like, should I be there? Are people going to be surprised to see me at the funeral?” I think that was something I was really navigating.

What does it mean that I show up to this? And I tend to advocate for like, always go to the funeral. If you're questioning whether or not you should go to the funeral, go to the funeral. Go. Because it means you care. It means you were impacted by that loss. Whether you are a friend of a friend, or you knew them for five minutes, or you didn't know them at all, and you're just very touched by their story, go to the funeral. You will meet somebody and learn something more about that person, you will show your respect. That has an impact just showing up. And so I was telling myself that I need to go to this funeral. And I qualify as a griever to go.

HANNAH: Yeah. So what was the, if you want to share however much you want to share, what was the experience of the funeral like? I know you said there were a lot of layers happening.

REBECCA: So what was interesting was it was a celebration of Courtney's life hosted at NC State. So she was a Wolfpack girly. I am a Duke girly, as already discussed, because I can just bring that up at any time. Anyway, it was at Carter-Finley Stadium, which is NC State's football stadium. So it was in like a suite at the top. And they had a sign put up on the scoreboard that said “we love you, Courtney.” I mean she was a big, big state fan. Loved going to State Tailgate. Tailgating with Courtney was fun. I certainly experienced that. And tailgating with their whole friend group. It's a very close friend group. They all went to college together. There's a lot of love there.

I think that there were multiple things that were beautiful and challenging about that whole experience of going. I was very nervous, obviously. Maybe not obviously. I was extremely nervous and anxious to see my ex-boyfriend and to see that whole friend group again. And I was excited at the same time because I missed them.

Like I miss all these people and I was like, I get to catch up with people. Like that was something I was looking forward to also, this just wonderful mix of anxiety and a love of being a yapper as I am. And so I was looking forward to it. And getting there, was like just kind of ripping a band-aid off immediately. Of course, I see my ex-boyfriend immediately, and we interact, and it's fine. And I spend the rest of the evening catching up with all of these people I haven't seen in a year plus. And we got to shoot the shit. We all talked about Courtney. I met Courtney's sisters.

It was beautiful. We saw, there were so many beautiful pictures of Courtney and displays of objects that meant a lot to her from her wedding rings to NC State and Patriots gear. She was from Massachusetts originally. And it was just like this big hangout sesh.

Everyone was drinking, chilling. And the feeling that I kept having was, I just want to give Courtney a hug. Like, she should be here. She should be here hanging out with all of her friends. And she would be, she would be buzzing around, socializing with everyone. It felt so weird to me that I couldn't just give Courtney a hug. Because any time I had ever hung out with that friend group, pretty much, she would have been there.

HANNAH: Right.

REBECCA: So that was, I've never experienced that before from a friend perspective. That was different. But it was a beautiful funeral, Hannah. Beautiful. I mean, just like, she would have loved it. Like, what a weird, like, it was all her favorite things. It was at NC State. You know, alcohol was flowing, she loved to have a good time, and people were just chilling, like for hours. It was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

HANNAH: Wow. Thank you for sharing. I, I'm glad that it was beautiful because that, I don't know, having that ritual can be so healing during such a terrible time. And, yeah, I'm glad you were able to like reconnect with some other friends, while you were there, but yeah, that feeling of like, she should just be here.

REBECCA: Totally. Yeah, that was weird because I didn't feel like at my dad's funeral that my dad should have been there. Maybe I felt like that at the house, like being at the house, it was weird that he wasn't there. There was something about how young Courtney was, and that, of course, her celebration of life would be fun and vibrant like she was. And so that also just leads to this incredible sense of absence of this person that we're all there to be talking about and celebrating. And also, this is, I don't know, I feel like I'm saying things that I have never gotten to talk about before, and I talk about grief all the time.

Like standing there getting a drink at the bar at this celebration of life and I'm chatting with the person next to me. It's almost like a wedding. I'm like, so how did you know Courtney? You know. It felt like a wedding of just like how we connect with each other over our love of a person. We are all there for a reason. It was beautiful and so hard.

HANNAH: And so hard. Yeah.

REBECCA: So hard, but it really, it felt a lot like a wedding to me.

HANNAH: Wow. Yeah. And it also shows that like, again, something I'm learning as I get older two seemingly opposite things are true at the same time, which is this was beautiful, and it was like a wedding, celebrating her love. And it was so hard and so sad. And both are true.

REBECCA: You know what else too in thinking about like, because of my relationship with my ex-boyfriend and because of the breakup, like both things were true, that led to such a close friendship. I don't know, maybe I would have still developed such a close friendship if we hadn't broken up. But for the end of that relationship, maybe I wouldn't have gotten so close with them. And then the other interesting part is I've gotten so much closer with her husband and supporting him. And our friendship has evolved and changed. Our friends and the dynamics of friendships shift after breakups. And we grieve some of them. And then some of them come together in ways we didn't see coming.

Same after a divorce. You never know who's going to take the side of the other spouse. And it surprises you sometimes, right? And you never know who's going to become one of your closest people or in time those relationships shift even. This is the first time that everything is coincided all at the same time of a death plus the Tetris of breakup friendship grief. And it all came to a head and has been coming to a head these last few weeks. And it's been a lot. And it has also been this beautiful learning experience. Like, this will happen again. I will lose other friends. It's crazy that I haven't, you know?

HANNAH: Yeah.

REBECCA: Like it was always like adjacent people, like someone in college who died or someone I hadn't spoken to in a long time who I heard died. I'm thinking of a guy also I went to high school with who I loved who was in just like a slightly different friend group didn't go to my high school. He got into a very bad car accident and suffered significant brain damage. He didn't die, but he was just kind of gone from the friend group. that, but that is as close to losing a friend as I had ever been from a death.

HANNAH: Right.

REBECCA: It's been very humbling to think through. This person's just gone.

HANNAH: And it's really hard to... it's like a...I don't know, it took me months, if not years to even wrap my head around that concept because there's something about them being young and like our age and like the expectation that we would grow old together and that that doesn't happen. It's just kind of, I don't know, really hard to just for your brain to understand. I don't know how else to explain it.

REBECCA: It makes you conscious of your own mortality too. There's something about being in that same exact age demographic or having, though Courtney was a little bit younger than me, we are both very…oh, tenses with her. That's interesting. I'm having to navigate like “Courtney is”, “Courtney was”. That's so, I haven't done that. That's so weird. I was about to say Courtney and I are both super high energy people.

And I don't even know where I was going with that. think I was just going to say she was a little younger. Oh yeah. But just feeling like a peer is gone. And that's just final. There's nothing that can be done about it. It was a wild moment. That sense of finality, too, getting that in a text message from her husband was also really hard. That was tough. But also, however you need to tell that news, you should tell it.

HANNAH: Yeah.

REBECCA: Right? But it was, it just kind of came completely out of nowhere. And it just really wrecked me in ways I did not expect. And then I felt selfish for wrecking me. Like, come on. You need to just keep focusing on your work. And yeah, I felt really guilty for feeling as down as I did. I felt super, I felt really guilty for rescheduling our podcast episode. I felt guilty for, I canceled a couple meetings that day too that I was just like, “I can't. Like this is really so deeply unsettling for me.” It totally caught me off guard. Yeah. Yeah.

HANNAH: Yeah. that, mean, grief's already so hard and to feel guilt on top of it is like, it breaks my heart.

REBECCA: I'm trying to give myself the grief advice that maybe you and I would give other people. And I'm like, know, grief is really isolating. And we need to give ourselves permission to grieve. I was talking myself through these things. I was trying to. But man, who did I hear this from? Joe Marisa Renee Lee, the author. She's a boss. She wrote Grief is Love.

HANNAH: Okay, no, I haven't read that one yet.

REBECCA: She's great. I think this was her that posted this on social media. She said something like, “even as someone who is a grief expert, I feel like an amateur. I feel like a novice every time I go through another loss.” Like it is one thing to talk to other people and support other people through their losses. It is entirely a different experience to be sitting in it yourself, right? And to remind yourself of what you know intellectually is true, but grief isn't logical, right? And so your grief and your brain will play tricks on you and be like, “you're actually really selfish for feeling this way. And you're so ridiculous for grieving your friend Courtney.” And intellectually, Hannah, I know that's not true. But as a grief expert, as someone who talks about grief all day, intellectually, I know that is true. But the feelings are nonetheless there.

Because grief is not logical. And sometimes you just got to sit in it. You got to hear that guilt. You got to hear that disenfranchisement, like chirping in your ear that you shouldn't be feeling this way. And then you have to just sit with it and let your grief be there. And I don't know that old me would have canceled meetings or would have even given myself space to feel it.

HANNAH: So what's the state of getting bereavement leave if you lose a friend? Is that even an option?

REBECCA: What a great question. OK, let's just take a bird's eye view of what bereavement and grief related policies look like in America. First of all, the difference between the words “bereavement” versus “grief” generally. Bereavement is specifically the grief we feel from a death. It is how we process a death related loss. So like, bereavement leave for divorce, for example, doesn't make sense because there is no, like that word doesn't apply. So if we think about just grief related workplace policies that can include bereavement leave. OK. So if we're thinking writ large about grief related workplace policies, you probably in your workplace, depending on what state you live in, depending on how big your employer is, you probably have two days of bereavement leave.

HANNAH: Oh my god.

REBECCA: If a close family member dies, and close is usually defined as parents, child, sometimes grandparents, usually not aunts and uncles, and certainly not someone who is a friend. Good policies that are written well would include things like in-laws in that definition or someone who is adopted in those definitions. Poor policies leave that language totally vague.

HANNA: Oh my god.

REBECCA: And those policies for bereavement leave of those two days are usually anchored to the date of death or to the funeral. So you take that leave to go handle the death or go attend a funeral. That is the point of the leave. And so when we have decided societally in our workplaces that you get two days off when someone quote unquote close to you dies, and then you go back to work as if nothing happened, we get the message loud and clear that we are not supposed to, our workplaces are not the place to talk about grief. But de facto, our grief is going to show up wherever we are, right?

A good workplace policy around grief. should not just be two days of bereavement leave for a close family member. That's ridiculous. It's ridiculous.

HANNAH: It's ridiculous.

REBECCA: It could look more like flexible paid leave that is just available to you as an employee to use throughout a year. That could be you on the death anniversary, years after a loss, taking a day. Because you know you're not going to be your best at work that day anyway, because it's an overwhelming day of the year. Maybe. I'm speaking for myself. March 14, 2020 is when my dad died. March 14 every year, not a great day for me. Not super productive.

A good workplace grief policy would make space for the grief of the loss of a friend. It could look like you requesting days off or time off or flexible work hours as you navigate going to your friend's funeral or helping your friend's parents or loved ones or spouse navigate the death of that person.

When you have flexible leave, it allows for your whole self to show up at work because de facto, like if you are going through a heavy loss, you are probably not performing well anyway. And if anything, when you go back to work and you feel more isolated and you feel like no one knows that this big loss has happened in your life, maybe it'll make you want to leave that workplace. So it's even like counter not having good bereavement and grief related policies make you want to quit.

HANNAH: Yeah.

REBECCA: So let's offer more flexible leave for people. And we don't have to justify, like, what was your relationship with that person? Send me the death certificate of the person. I mean, there are a lot of workplace-related policies that are wild. If we just give people flexible leave and trust them and let them take time to honor the grief that we should have no judgment over, whether it's worth a day or not, you will have employees that want to stay in that workplace and will do better work because they feel cared for and respected by their managers. But yeah, the more flexible the better when it comes to what should be true in our workplace policies around grief.

HANNAH: Yeah, that's wild. didn't know that. Like I knew it was bad, but I didn't know specifically why or how.

REBECCA: Oh my God, I didn't have bereavement leave when my dad died. And I didn't know that. I was a state employee for my entire career was in government and policy before I left to found Grieve Leave. And I spent my career as a teacher and then as a policymaker. And I was leading all of our school closing and then reopening work during COVID when my dad died.

And I was talking to my boss, and I was like, “hey.” It didn't sound that positive. I was like, “how many days is our bereavement leave policy?” And she contacted HR. And I remember when she called me, and she was like, “we don't have bereavement leave.” She didn't even know.

HANNAH: Oh my god.

REBECCA: So I've been working on legislation. I'm going to knock on wood. You knock on wood for me too, that now we've introduced a bill this last session. We're going to introduce another bill this coming session that both times will have bipartisan support to get state employees in North Carolina bereavement leave, because this is ridiculous. The least we can do is give people a couple days off. We're shooting for three. Come on. Come on.

HANNAH: Yeah. And that's the, that's the least that you should do. Oh my God. I cannot. And then you're forced to like use sick days, but that—

REBECCA: If you have them.

HANNAH: If you even have them, yeah. And that becomes a whole…

REBECCA: Vacation Leave. Your grief’s not a vacation.

HANNAH: I'm pretty sure I used my sick days.

REBECCA: Did you?

HANNAH: Yeah. I don't, I don't think there was, I'm 99.9 % sure I didn't use bereavement leave.

REBECCA: Was your workplace receptive? Like, did you have to prove what you were using the days for, if you don't mind me asking?

HANNAH: No, no, I don't mind at all. Luckily I had a very, very kind manager and kind employees who completely understood. And they were like, yeah, my gosh, like take however much time. And I only took two days, but the reason for that is because I was in my bedroom, just like a caged tiger. Like I was like, I don't know what to do. So I guess I should go back to work. Kind of like you were saying like, if there was a place for me to land, if there was support, I would have turned to that, but there was nothing. So I was like, I guess I just get busy? Like, I don't know.

REBECCA: But that's so normal, too. Sometimes work can be the anchor we need in our grief. It can be the routine. It can be the thing that holds us steady. And that's so true. And knowing that, we can build workplaces that are more supportive of each other when we come back to work. We don't pretend like that person was never gone on bereavement leave. We don't pretend like the loss never happened if we know about it. Because it's weird coming back to work and you're just like going about your day, typey typey, whatever your job, know, insert your job here, know, type type. And people are chatting with you as if nothing happened. That is so unsettling. When like, actually, if your colleagues just say like, “hey, I know Courtney died.” “Hey, I know your dad died.” Hey, I know whatever. “And I care about you and I'm so sorry,” that creates a more vulnerable and I think more trusting workplace where you actually want to be there for each other and you get better work done. I'm glad that your workplace felt like an anchor to you, or at least it felt like a place for you to land. Yeah, I like that.

HANNAH: Everyone was so sweet and kind and they all knew. So they were, you know, I came back, they were like, you know, gave me hugs and everything. And then I remember, and this was just like, it just popped in my head because we were talking about disenfranchised grief and how friend grief is often treated. A couple months later, one of my coworker’s dogs died, which was horrible. And they were like, “we need to get her something. We should get her flowers. We should do this.”

And I remember saying, “y'all didn't get me anything. And my friend died.” And they were like, “Oh, yeah.”

REBECCA: You said it out loud? You said it to them?

HANNAH: I did!

REBECCA: Obsessed with you. Obsessed with you.

HANNAH: Because I was so, I was so angry and it was like, it wasn't to in any way dismiss this dog dying. Like, yes, we should get her flowers and everything. But I was also like, what about me?

REBECCA: Yeah, ooh, and it comes back to who owns the grief. In trainings that I lead for businesses, I'll pose hypotheticals to them. A really extreme version of this is a colleague, their mom dies, something like that. And a GoFundMe is created for that colleague, circulated around to the office. Six months later, another person in your office loses a parent, but no GoFundMe gets started for them because they're not as popular, they're not as well known, they don't have as many friends in the office. And so then it creates this just deep sense of inequity and their grief becomes disenfranchised.

And so if you as a workplace can do things like have a standing committee or maybe your workplace is less formal than that, but a group of people who think about how they react to and prepare for grief in the workplace, then everyone can get flowers, right? Everyone can get a card, at least. We can be more consistent about how we talk to each other about grief in the office. But that culture doesn't just happen by itself. We have to build that intentionally.

So I'm so sorry for your experience. And again, I am obsessed with you speaking up about it that you're like, “yo, what about my grief? Thank you.”

HANNAH: [laughs] One of those things where like never in a million years would I say like something like that out loud, but I was, it was like, gave no fucks anymore. I was so broken. And I just remember feeling, it was like, I was just compelled and I was like, “I have to say something. And I'm so sorry, but I have to say this thing!” And luckily they took it well, but yeah.

REBECCA: I love that you said it. I love that you said it. Ownership of friend grief is so real. And I just, I haven't thought about that for myself until these last few weeks. So it's like hearing you say it, I'm like, that's so interesting. Like how should a workplace treat an employee who they know is going through a loss of a loved one?

Like, who are they to decide? Who is an employer to decide whether that relationship merits their support or not? Can we just, like, as a general rule, say let's support people in their grief?

HANNAH: And yeah, it's just like, we shouldn't be ranking other people's love. I just, yeah.

REBECCA: Mm-hmm. So let's not rank their losses. Right. Like it doesn't it doesn't make sense or like it goes back to this feeling of “should I be grieving this hard?” “Should I be feeling this down?” Because I've been through quote unquote harder things. I've been through like very clearly the close relationship losses to me. Right. And so like, why is this upsetting me so much? Of course it's upsetting me. It makes me confront my own sense of mortality. We're near the same age. It makes me think about my ex-boyfriend and all of those friends and the relationships that ended. It makes me angry at the world that just randomly Courtney had this disease. Courtney had this autoimmune disorder. And it's just not fucking fair.

HANNAH: It’s not fair.

REBECCA: But of course I'm grieving. Of course I'm grieving. I know that intellectually. And I am glad I'm giving myself permission to talk about that grief and make space for it. Because I think so many of us would just be like, “let me be quiet about that. It's none of my business. Her husband should be the one who's feeling sad. Her friends who have known her for longer should be the ones who are feeling sad. It's not my place to grieve.” But that's not how grief works.

HANNAH: It's not how it works and it's not pieces of a pie. You know, it's not like the husband fills up the pie, you know, it's like…yeah, like our grief doesn't take away from their grief. We should all have a whole pie. I don't know why I'm doing pie.

REBECCA: Pie for all. Pie for all. Strong agree. But it's so true. It's like even with Liam Payne's death last week, so many folks, when we experience the death of a celebrity that we feel close with, that we feel like is our friend, that we feel like is our peer, that grief can hit us hard. And even in the comments section of our grieve-leave posts about Liam Payne's death. There are people who are commenting things like, those of us who have been through real losses are like, it's ridiculous for me to see how upset people are over this celebrity's death. And I hear that. Like, I hear their pain. I hear their anger. And it is coming from this view of grief as a zero-sum game, as one pie that we're all scrounging up our share of this finite grief that will disappear if other people have too much grief. It makes our grief less. That's bullshit. That is not how grief works. We all get to have infinite grief, infinite pies for all. What's the, what is it? It's like clouds maybe, like something that it just gets to all exist in the sky. All of our grief can be. And because I'm grieving for Courtney doesn't mean her husband grieves less. It doesn't mean that I grieve my father less because I'm grieving for Courtney now too. I'm glad you said it that way, Hannah. That's awesome.

HANNAH: I realized that our capacity for love is pretty infinite. And I remember realizing that like a couple of years ago when it kind of blew my mind, I was like, whoa, what? Whoa! For some reason, was like such a big concept I couldn't even like hold it all at once. Cause we will keep meeting people hopefully like for the rest of our life and we will keep loving people and just like adding them to our love and it doesn't take away from the previous people we love and have loved. So I was like, oh my God, there's no limit!

REBECCA: The limit to love does not exist. It does not. And the limit to grief does not exist. And not in like a shitty way, not in like a we're all doomed way, but in like these feelings, like the depth of relationships and the depth of connection that we get to have with people is not finite at all. A life well lived is full of grief. It's full of grief. And that is fine.

It sucks, and it's hard, but you are living a good life. You have built close relationships with people if you are grieving. You have done jobs you loved. You've really valued your body, let's say, and then you were diagnosed with something. The grief that we feel is totally parallel to the amount of joy that we've experienced in our lives.

Let's come back to Courtney. She was just so wonderful. I'm so... I can't... I've just never met another person like her. And that's why it hits me so hard. It's because of that. Because she was such a light. Because she was so young when she died. That means that the grief is heavier. You know, or just heavy. I don't want to compare it. The grief is there.

HANNAH: I don't know, what's something Courtney loved to do or what would you do with Courtney when you'd hang out?

REBECCA: Girl, girl, sports. That girl loved sports. But it's so interesting because over the last years, we talked more as she was in her stroke recovery. We talked a lot about grief. And we talked a lot about, like, she was writing a book. But then we'd also talk about bullshit. She'd be like, hey, Becky, just. People call me Becky. You can call me Becky if you want. “Hey, Becky, just bought this gorgeous red dress for NC State tailgate and they have a Duke blue one sending you this link.” And I'm like, “girl, love you. Love you.”

She just loved sports. She loved people. Yeah. Those are the things that I think of. She just had this way to connect with every single person that she met. I'm thinking about her running this amazing fundraiser. She was wearing this like a badass pink jumpsuit and she was just like floating around like a boss bitch, like a beautiful boss bitch and just like running this whole thing, this whole event on the mic. Just wonderful. I really just loved her a lot and I still do. And I love that I get to reconnect with that friend group because of this experience. Like I got to catch up with everybody. Like Courtney got me back with people I hadn't spoken to in a while. Like, that's a gift, you know? And I'm grateful that she did that.

HANNAH: Yeah, like you were saying, like, just the…the anger, like why do the good ones have to go? You know, so young. It’s the whole feeling of, it’s not fair.

REBECCA: It’s not. It’s not fair at all. It’s not fair at all. That pain is not evenly distributed. It makes no sense. It makes absolutely no sense. My parents shouldn't have died young. Courtney shouldn't have died young. None of this. I think it is so reasonable to be pissed in our grief. So reasonable.

And in just talking to her husband too, the amount of conversations that I have with him to just normalize, it's OK to be angry about what's happened. And as her friends, it's OK to be pissed. Everyone has a right to whatever feelings that they're feeling in their grief, whether that is anger, whether that is deep sadness or whether that is like thinking of Courtney as you're chugging a beer at NC State tailgate. You know, like let the joyful moments like sink in there too. It can all be a part of grief.

HANNAH: And anger is not like just a stage that like you go through and then you're done like I feel like I mean, maybe it'll come and go like it could exist in a million different ways But yeah, sometimes I wonder if I'm just like the anger is just always simmering, you know, or if it's just become like a new, it's almost like a callous of like cynicism, but then I also got the opposite at the same time. Like I also got more like appreciation of joy and like when things are really magical and synchronicity and all these things. And it's like, and I'm like, and everything sucks. It's like, I'm both. It's really confusing. I don't know.

REBECCA: That resonates so much for me of just like, huh, the worst things in my entire life, hopefully that will ever happen, like it can't get much worse, have already happened, right? So I can be really pissed about those things. And I can also see so much more like joy. Like I really appreciate the moments that I get now. The other thing is like when you go through the depths of fucking hell and you go through these losses, it means that I can sit with Courtney's husband. can sit with people going through loss today because it doesn't fucking scare me. Like I know what that feels like. So I am going to be present for you because I can. And yes, I'm going to have my stupid fucking anxiety overseeing my stupid, he's not stupid he's wonderful. My stupid ex-boyfriend at this funeral. Like I'm going to have anxiety about that just because I'm a human being.

Damn, what a privilege that I feel strong enough to go, that I feel like I can. I can confront grief head on now because I've seen it. I can talk to her husband and be a listening ear for him as someone who is removed from the friend group a little bit but knows everyone. That is a privilege that I can step in and provide that safe space for him. And I will as long as he wants it. You know, that is a gift. And I think when we go through grief, when we experience those losses, the beautiful part of it is we get to show up for other people.

HANNAH: Yeah, that's true. Like it's given me a level of understanding and empathy that I just didn't understand it before. I couldn't have even comprehended it. And yeah, I think that's absolutely true.

REBECCA: I just want to thank you again for creating space for talking about grief, period. I want to thank you for elevating conversations about the loss of friends, whether that is from death or the other things that I thought I was going to talk to you about before Courtney died, of thinking about just the ends of friendships for whatever reason.

There's grief in all of it. But I thank you for lifting up that kind of grief, specifically the grief we feel for friends, because it matters.