5 Things I've Learned About Grief in 100 Episodes | Episode 100 with Ashlee Proffitt

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Episode 100

I cannot even believe it. God has used stories and honesty, tears and even laughter to bring joy and hope and healing to women around the world who have experienced the loss of a baby.

This episode is an incredible milestone. One that I can hardly believe. There were many many weeks when the ontaking of producing yet another episode felt too much or too heavy. There were weeks when I wanted to shut the nearly broken laptop or put away the microphone and call it quits. But I couldn’t quit because I knew you would show up. I knew you would be waiting. I knew these simple but honest conversations would bring light to the darkness you were walking through. I knew because these conversations were what I needed 12 years ago.

I knew you needed to be reminded that you weren’t alone. I knew you needed the comfort of another mom telling you you’re not crazy, that the emotions you are experiencing are normal, and that while you may not believe it right now, you are going to be ok. I knew you needed to hear moms who had experienced loss who were just a little further down the grief journey laugh because in those early days of grief laughing feels like an impossibility. I knew you needed to hear women talk honestly about their faith journeys and what it looked like to wrestle with God amidst the pain He could have stopped. I knew what you needed because I needed it too. And some days, even all these years later, I still need it. Like you, I need the comfort of other women who understand this kind of loss; of being reminded I am not alone or the only one walking through such loss. I need their listening ear and their prayers and words of wisdom.

I’m so grateful you kept showing up week after week. I’m grateful for every subscribe and every download and every kind review. I’m grateful for every single dm or email -- would you believe that those messages mean so much that I actually screenshot them and have them saved on my phone. So when the work feels too hard I can be easily reminded that it is absolutely, 100% worth it. Because you are worth it.

You matter. And you are seen. And loved. And not alone.

In this special 100th episode I’m going to be sharing 5 things I’ve learned from the last 99 episodes. But more than anything I want you to hear me say:

Thank you for showing up and tuning in week after week. Thank you for sharing your stories with me. Thank you for giving me the honor of walking alongside you amidst your grief.

THE JOYFUL MOURNING COMMUNITY

If you are new to The Joyful Mourning Podcast I wanted to share two things with you. First, I wanted to invite you to join our free online community — The Joyful Mourning Community. Join hundreds of other women who are walking this grief journey, women like you who are searching for joy and hope after loss. A place to be reminded that you aren’t alone. A place to find comfort and healing. A safe place amidst the chaos of life after loss. For all the details about how to join this special community head to themorning.com/community.

Second I just wanted to share a few words about how this podcast has helped women like you.

Aimee said: “This podcast has helped me feel less alone and is the number one resources I share with friends who are going through loss or want to understand it better.”
Andrea said “It has helped me know that I’m not alone on this journey and there are other women who are feeling the same emotions as me. It has been my voice of reason on days when I feel like I’m spiraling out of control.”
Devyn said “I remember hearing Ashlee laugh and the comfort and hope that gave me that I would be okay, one day, was so healing on it’s own. It was a gateway back to God, as we know how hard that relationship can be post loss.”
Kayla said “it was probably the single most helpful thing for me! Being able to hear hope and strength and relate to other women let me know I would get through this.” And to those responses and the many other I received I say “thanks God. thank you for seeing these women. For loving them. For sustaining this endeavor to bring hope to the hurting.”

DAYBREAK ALL ACCESS REPLAY (LIMITED TIME ONLY)

One more thing — if you love the podcast I have something else I am sure you will love as well. A few weeks ago I hosted our first ever virtual event, Daybreak. And it was amazing. 9 different sessions — real women sharing honestly about different aspects of their journey of finding hope and joy after baby loss. If you missed Daybreak in its entirety or even just a session or two, head to daybreakconference.com for details about how to get access to the replays. The replay access will only be available for a short time and I want you to have it. Because just like this podcast, it will remind you you aren’t alone and that there is joy to be had.

DAYBREAK ALL ACCESS REPLAY BUNDLE

Thank you for being here week after week. Just like always, I pray this episode is a blessing to you.

Over the last two years I have interviewed dozens and dozens of women. I have researched things I knew about only from experience. I have done my best to ask good questions and to listen attentively. I have sat in a place of wanting to learn, to understand, a desire to grow in empathy and compassion, all so I could provide the most helpful and hope-filled resources for you.

To celebrate this 100th episode I wanted to share with you 5 things I’ve learned over the course of the last 99 episodes. This is not exhaustive and not in any particular order, because like grief, there is no order and it is rarely, if ever neat and tidy.

01. We all grieve differently. Even the same loss or same type of loss.

It is evident with every interview. With every story. Every person is uniquely created with different personalities and different histories that all play a part in the way one walks through grief. We see it differently and process it differently. Our feelings may even be the same but our response is different.

This is a particularly helpful reminder for marriages and close family members. You and your husband lost the same baby but the way you grieve will be different from one another and that’s ok. That’s to be expected. While it makes sense logically why that is true, in the thick of grief, especially those early days, when we see our spouse not responding the way we are we can think it’s because they didn’t love our baby, or that they don’t care, or they’re over it while we’re still falling apart or a plethora of other thoughts that just aren’t true. The truth is, he is just grieving differently than you.

This bit of knowledge would have been so helpful to me 12 years ago when I saw my husband responding differently than me and began to assume he no longer cared or didn’t love our son. I think had we really understood this early on we would have been able to come alongside each other and really cared for one another in a way that was helpful instead we just put up walls and kept our grief to ourselves. This is obviously incredibly harmful for a marriage -- we needed each other more than ever and instead isolated from one another.

I have heard this to be true from so many of the women I have interviewed and especially in the episodes where we were also able to talk with the husbands. So hear me say this, you absolutely will grieve differently than your spouse and differently than those closest to you because you are different, no two people see it exactly the same way or process it exactly the same way and therefore responses will be different. Knowing this will take such a heavy burden off of you. Giving you the freedom to grieve in a way that is right to you and the ability to really come alongside your spouse in a way that is actually helpful.

I want to mention here also that it is helpful to remember that grieving differently is not just a difference between a man and a woman. When I say we all grieve differently, I mean all. I could experience a very similar loss as another woman and yet our response could be completely different. For the grieving mother this can wreak havoc on her mental and emotional health if she doesn’t really grasp this truth. We likely have never experienced anything like this before and so we can find ourselves looking around us to validate our own response; we want affirmation that the way we are handling the different aspects of grief and loss is the right way. It’s interesting and incredibly sad that the comparison game we often play as women even plays a role in our grief if we aren’t careful.

But if you need a reminder that we grieve differently, that our responses to loss and grief will be different from even those who have experienced a similar loss just listen back to the dozens and dozens of interviews over the last 99 episodes. You will hear it in their stories and even the way they tell their stories, you will hear it in the words of caution they give and the encouragement they share, you will hear it in the tears or lack thereof. One enormous benefit of this podcast and the last 99 episodes is this, you have been able to hear from so many women who have experienced loss and I hope it gives you a picture of how we are all walking through this, clumsily, messily, trying our best to honor our babies -- there isn’t a single right way to navigate grief and life after loss. We are all just figuring it out as we go unified on the one thing that is absolutely the same -- we love our babies and we miss our babies.

02. Every loss matters because every life matters. And that means your story matters.

I hear the same level of intense grief in a woman who lost a baby at 8 weeks and a woman who lost a baby at 40 weeks. I hear the same struggles and fears and deep deep sadness in the woman who delivered her baby still and the woman whose 6 month old baby died in his sleep. It can be tempting to create a hierarchy of loss that distinguishes one as harder than another but inevitably what that communicates is that the length of our days is what makes our life valuable and not that it is life itself. We can hear the statistics that make our loss feel common and therefore not something deserving of grief and yet I want you to hear me say that something being common does not make it matter less. Your baby’s life mattered and matters still. Your loss, no matter when it occurred or how it occurred, matters and is deserving of your love and therefore your grief.

I made this statement in our very first episode, all the way back to the beginning, “a woman’s heart is instantly divided the moment she finds out there is a baby, forever changed by his or her life - no matter the length of their days.” And after 99 episodes I can still say that with absolute certainty. After dozens of interviews I have been reminded over and over again that our baby’s lives have value, they mattered and

A phrase I say often here is “your story matters” - I wonder if you believe that today? I know for sure that this podcast would not have made it to 100 episodes and the impact would not have been even a tiniest bit of what it has been if the only story shared here had been mine. Because my story is not the only one that matters. Your story matters. And whether you share what you're learning and how you're growing only in the privacy of your journal pages or you share it on a stage in front of thousands -- your story has the power to bring healing and comfort. It matters because you matter, and your baby matters, and the work that God is doing in you matters. With that I just want to publicly thank every single guest who entrusted their story with me here on the podcast. I am so grateful for you.

03. Loss & grief change us.

Like I said in that first episode, ‘a woman’s heart is forever changed” the moment we find out we’re pregnant. For many of us there’s a dividing line in our story, for example in my timeline there’s a before Aaden and an after Aaden. His life became a significant marker of befores and afters. A point in our family's history where everything changed.

I love what Sarah Garvey had to say about this in an interview that will be released in early January of next year. She said, after loss its like you landed on a strange alien planet where everything and everyone looks the same but they don’t speak the same language.

For a long time in my own grief journey I fought against the change. I hated the whispers and the awkward conversations and the pity head tilts and the obvious avoiders. I hated that my mere presence made others feel uncomfortable. I hated that I now saw death everywhere. I hated that I had lost the innocence of pregnancy and of the newborn days. I hated that I had to think about things like urns or gravestones or birthdays at a cemetery. I hated that I felt like a stranger in a room full of people I loved.

I hated that everything had changed. So I fought against it. I pretended that I was still the same. Until I couldn’t anymore.

It was an absolutely impossible endeavor. Because experiencing the loss of a baby changes us. And the subsequent grief changes us. And while I spent those early days and months and even years fighting against the uncomfortable nature of change and hating that I was different; I have since learned that there is beauty that comes with that change. I am a different person than I was on November 14, 2008. And with each milestone and anniversary God has grown me a bit more in different ways. And with every interview over the last 100 episodes I heard woman after woman say the same thing. I’m different now. I see the world differently. I approach parenting and friendships and work and my relationship with God differently. And they say profound things like while I wish God would have chosen a different way I am not sad about the change, I’m grateful for who I am today they say. Which leads me to number 4.

04. There is good to be had and hope to be found.

Like I said in number 3 and as you know, no encounter with suffering leaves you unchanged. And I can assure you that while uncomfortable and painful, the change is bringing about good in you. I have 99 episodes to affirm this truth.

Your breaking was not for nothing. There has been learning and growth. Your understanding of God’s powerful and miraculous healing has deepened. You have experienced His peace when it doesn't make sense and while your faith may seem weaker than before I promise it is being strengthened. I believe Philippians 1:6 that says the God who started this work in you will be faithful to complete it. Your understanding of suffering and navigating loss has grown. I imagine that your heart for women who are hurting has only grown bigger and bigger. You have grown more empathetic and compassionate and prayerful. You have a desire for heaven and eternity that likely wasn’t there before your loss. You see life for the gift that it is. You are less quick to pass sweeping judgements and quicker to listen.

Because even in the brokenness there is good, even in the tragic there are glimpses of joy. Even when we feel paralyzed by the hurt, unable to move on our own, God is moving in us. Making beauty from ashes.

05. A joyful mourning is possible.

I’ve learned from interviewing dozens of women that this idea of finding joy amidst heartache and brokenness was not just a pretty name for a podcast but an actual possibility. I have heard from listener after listener that the stories here and the encouragement here, the wisdom and affirmation shared helped women find hope and joy in the unthinkable -- it is possible to have a joyful mourning.

In our very first episode I shared the heart behind this podcast and since that hasn’t changed I wanted to share it with you again today:

Finding joy amidst mourning, amidst pain and grief, isn’t about a fickle sort of happiness that is exhaustingly fleeting - rather, a joyful mourning comes from a heart that is fixed on God. A heart that knows, no matter how fickle it may feel, her God is not -- He is steady, unchanging, trustworthy, and good. He will never leave her or forsake her. When she walks through the valley of darkness and death, He is right there with her. When she walks through the fire, He is there. When she walks through the flood, He is there. And His love for her never changes, it never grows weary.

A joyful mourning comes from a heart that is at peace, no matter the circumstances, because her eyes are on her God even amidst the pain -- Isaiah 26:3 says “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.”

A joyful mourning comes from a heart that is full of hope, knowing that this isn’t the end -- that God is still working and that one day He will fix all that has been broken.

But a joyful mourning is not natural -- fixing our eyes and attention and worship on a God who could have prevented the pain is not natural, trusting in a future we cannot see or fully understand is not natural, giving way to fickle hearts that sway with the wind and every emotion is natural; that’s our default amidst grief. And that is why I’m here, that’s why The Joyful Mourning Podcast is here -- to remind you of God’s goodness, of His love for you, of His nearness and His presence. Because our hearts need to be reoriented a little more often amidst grief. We need reminders of hope and truth just a little more when our world feels like it’s crumbling.

So maybe your heart doesn’t feel joyful or peaceful or at rest today. Maybe your heart doesn’t feel a strong desire to trust God or put your hope in Him. That’s ok. I’m here to remind you, as a mama who has spent the better part of the last 10 years learning what it’s like to love and trust a God who allowed such pain. This is me telling you that finding joy amidst sorrow is about leaning in to a God whose love for you never changes. And that sometimes that leaning in isn’t pretty or put together and that’s ok-- David’s prayers in the Psalms weren’t always pretty or put together and since they are in the Bible I’m going to go ahead and assume that’s ok. I’m here to remind you that He is good and He loves you and He desires for you to run to Him with your pain just like Mary ran to Jesus in John 11 -- run to Him with your anger, your fear, your doubt, your confusion and ask Him to fix your heart on him and in doing so to give you a heart that is at peace, a heart that is joyful amidst the mourning.

THE JOYFUL MOURNING COMMUNITY

And lastly, I wanted to remind you as I do every week, you are not alone. Maybe you feel alone today. Right now even. If that’s you, you can choose to navigate this grief journey alone but it is far better to find a friend who understands who will walk this journey with you. Come find women who understand and will tangibly remind you that you aren’t alone in the joyful mourning community — join us by heading to themorning.com/community.

I have found that to be true in my own life. I did not have a community like this when my son died -- that’s why I set out to create it. But the past few years have held a different kind of loneliness as I worked to create the podcast and resources for The Morning — often feeling very lonely in this endeavor. I share that with you because even in that loneliness God intervened to bring community.

Over the last year two women specifically have entered into the daily inner workings of creating the content for the podcast and the blog, diving into conversation after conversation in the online community — these two women stepped in and offered a listening ear and encouraging words, energy and passion and creativity and empathy and the biggest hearts for grieving women; they held my arms up when I didn’t think I could do this anymore.

To Meg Walker and Mary Margaret Powitz I just want to publicly thank you for being an answer to a prayer I didn’t even pray. I share that with you listeners not only to honor these two women and their hard work and constant sacrifice but to also give you a tangible reminder that God meets us in our loneliness with Himself but also with His people.

So if you are feeling lonely today, let this be the last day you feel this way -- there is community to be had to fight against that loneliness. Come join us in The Joyful Mourning Community — head to themorning.com/community for all the details about how to join.

While there are probably many many more things I have learned over the last 99 episodes I think those 5 are my favorite. I hope those things I have learned encourage you today. Thank you for being here. Thank you for celebrating 100 episodes with me. I pray this episode and all the others before it and all the others to come remind you that you are loved and not alone in this grief journey — until next time.