Interview with Dana Russo - A Companion in Grief, episode 67

0:00 Welcome back to When You Love a Prodigal. If you love a prodigal, you can discover, help, and hope for your wilderness journey right here at When You Love a Prodigal, and also help and hope for your own life journey. Today, we have a very special guest. Dana Russo is a longtime friend of mine. We go way back. Way back. Way back. She has made beautiful music for large and small audiences over decades, and I've been so blessed by her beautiful voice that you have given her.

0:44 She has turned some loss and grief in her own life into a powerful, compassionate ministry to others, to people like you and me who love a prodigal. Dana, in her growing, in her efforts to serve people who are really experiencing grief and loss, founded with her husband, with him or you all just are now working together? We're now working together. Okay. A ministry called Hope Rises, and we all know how much hope matters to us. She calls herself a companion in grief, and I love that.

1:30 She's got credentials, she's a social worker, a degree and certifications in death and grief care, and four decades of walking along hurting hearts gives her a wealth of experience. You can read even more detail about her license as in her background, and her family, and the show notes. But I want us to hear from her rather than my talking so much. She loves that she has two grown children, and they're married, wonderful spouses, that's always nice and not always true.

2:13 A two-year-old grandbaby and another one on the way, and you know that's my big heart right now is grandchildren. Welcome, Dana. Thank you so much. I'm glad you could come. I'm grateful to be here. Thank you. Let's just get right into this and tell us about Hope Rises. That's a great sounding name. Where did that come from and what is it? Well, it came from an image in my mind that I've actually seen personally, but a blackened forest that wildfires had gone through.

2:53 Despite all probability, there were these little seedlings of green coming up. I've always sensed that that's a picture of people who are walking in grief. That image is a big part of why the name Hope Rises, that despite everything, hope can come out of just the most horrid circumstances. We provide services for those who are experiencing grief or those who feel alone, stuck, wounded, or just immobilized in life. We can experience grief with death losses or loss of a job, a relationship, or when a loved one makes choices that breaks our hearts.

3:44 Many non-death losses are tied to losing our hoped for future. That sounds very familiar. That sounds great. Well, you said you can help people when they feel sad, but it's more than that. If grief is not sadness, what is it? I think our culture has equated grief and sadness. It definitely includes sadness, but it's so much more. Grief is all the conflicting feelings that we experience when there's been an end of or change in a familiar pattern or behavior.

4:28 Basically, anytime we experience a significant loss or disruption, or change, we might experience grief. It's not just about death loss, it's more tied to love. How does grief present itself for the most part? Well, presents itself in a wide variety of ways. In thinking about those with prodigal children, Dr. Pauline Boss coined a term a few years ago called ambiguous loss. Some people find it helpful to know that there's a name for what they're experiencing.

5:11 One type of this ambiguous loss is where the person is physically absent, but psychologically present, such as say a kidnapping or disappearance, a divorce, perhaps even incarceration. Physically absent, but they have a psychological presence for you. A second type of ambiguous loss is when the person is physically present, but there's a psychological absence. This is basically when someone we love becomes someone we barely recognize. This might be due to mental illness, Alzheimer's, traumatic brain injuries, or the effects of substance abuse.

6:00 This person looks like your son or daughter, but they seem to be a different person altogether. Physically present, but psychologically, who they were is gone. In this situation, you are actually grieving someone who's still alive. Ultimately, ambiguous loss is relational loss. It's an ongoing type of loss. It doesn't seem to have an end. Ultimately, it's a loss of control. There's no easy fix or solution. Oh, yeah, that. Control. Well, I know many people with prodigals suffer that exact thing that you're talking about often because their kids grow up, or a spouse, or a family member, or sibling.

6:52 Then they either on their own make very different choices. They really reject what they've known, or they get married to someone who has a different view, who pulls them away. Really, I can't tell you how many stories I hear of people who, I don't know where they are, they won't talk to us anymore. It's their own choice or it's the influence of someone else. It's devastating. Some it's years and they've got no word. They have grandchildren that they have never seen. Those are very painful losses.

7:32 Yeah. Because in our American culture, we've identified loss as just death loss, we don't recognize that we're actually in grief. What are some symptoms that you are in grief? You might not even know it. Right. In this situation, you feel like, well, it's a hopeless situation. Of course, I'm sad, or of course, I'm frustrated, or of course, I'm tired. But grief is a normal response to an abnormal loss. When this happens, it can affect us in the five domains of life. It can sometimes impact us physically.

8:14 It may impact our sleep, positive or negative, impact our appetite. Many people talk about feeling so lethargic. They just have no energy, extreme fatigue, or their body just feels super heavy. It can impact you physically. Of course, emotionally, you're experiencing an underlying sadness, or sometimes it comes out in some people as a restlessness or an irritation. C.S. Lewis said after the loss of his beloved wife, he said, I did not know that grief felt so much like fear. A lot of people experience fear in grief.

8:56 Many might feel anger, especially in these situations. I would think anger would come out sometimes. Yes. Anger in grief is a protest emotion. It's saying, this isn't right, this can't be happening. I refuse to accept this. Yes. You're protesting. But in grief, down underneath all of that anger, anger is crying out, I want back what I lost. There's a lot emotionally that's happening inside a person. Grief can impact us cognitively. You may find yourself misplacing things more often, or forgetting appointments, or struggling to stay focused in a meeting.

9:40 Are there other reasons for those things? Well, yes. I was about to say, some of us, it's our age that brings that on. But yeah, just a lack of being able to focus or feel like you're walking through a deep fog where you just can't make sense of things. Everything's fuzzy. They've done a lot of studies on the brain of those who are in bereavement. It shows that the brain is literally not firing on all cylinders. It's literally breaking down. That can impact you cognitively, socially. Grief causes us to perhaps want to pull away, or disengage, or withdraw, even from spouses or those most close to you.

10:26 It can feel very lonely. Then the fifth domain is, it might impact you spiritually. It may find it hard to pray or read the Bible, or it may impact the relationship you thought you had with God. Now you've got some big questions for him that he's just not quite who you thought he was. That he can allow this to happen. Yes. Yeah. It can impact that you lose vision for people who are in ministry. Some people, I just don't have the vision that I once had. Part of that is grief.

11:07 Yeah. I can think of it being just a, it just stops you. It's like I can't go on because this loss is so great. I'm in such pain that we lose the hope, which is why Hope Rises is such a good name for what you're doing. But we lose hope that there's a future. We can't picture it without this person, or this person as they were, or as we hoped they would be. We find that more of our families are dealing with prodigals who are actually past their teens. They may have started then, but the real pain comes when they're young adults, and you have really no control.

11:55 But you think that's not the way we raise them. So that's also a grief that we feel that's like a failure, that we must have failed for that to have happened. That's also just very grief inducing. Absolutely. To feel like we failed in our most important job raising a human being. Yeah. It's a loss. Again, that lost of your hoped for future. It's just a constant reminder that, wow, you can do everything the best you know how, and your son or daughter still has a very independent life and mind.

12:44 What do we do with this grief? How do we keep going? How do we handle it or find a way forward? Well, one, we need to recognize that grief is not our enemy. You just mentioned that everything slows down, it's suspended, you're in a different time, almost in a time warp sometimes. All those symptoms that I described, if you think about each one of those domains of life, all those symptoms are trying desperately to get us to slow down.

13:26 One of the things we can do is recognize that grief is trying to share something with us, it's trying to get our attention, it's not trying to harm us. Denying or distracting yourself from grief only delays and complicates any integration of this new reality. As the saying goes, if nothing changes, nothing changes. We need to come into this right relationship with our sadness and our sorrow and our grief. How do you do that? Well, most people don't want a relationship with grief. I'll just start there. True.

14:07 We'd rather go get a root canal than saddle up to grief. It's like, no, that's more pain. We think it's more pain. But the reality is it's just exposing our pain. In America, we're so consumed with this excessive positivity. The mind said that you should never be sad, or you should always look on the bright side. For those who are spiritually inclined, well, God always has a reason. We just feel like we're not allowed to have sorrow. It's toxic. This mentality is toxic. We need to remember that pain is trying to get our attention.

14:51 Now, for those who maybe cut themselves, it's the pain that draws our attention to the fact that, oh, I need something. I probably need stitches. I could bleed to death. Pain is important. Also recognize that grief and mourning are different. In our culture, we use them interchangeably, I think. But grief is all those internal feelings that we have on the inside. Mourning is what I call grief gone public. It's getting those emotions from the inside outside.

15:31 Grief is needing movement. And so there's a few things that we can do. I'll list a couple right now, and then we can share a couple later. But first, we need to name it. We need to call it out. Give it a name. This is my grief. And admit that you've lost something really precious to you, whether it was someone who died or a broken relationship, loss of dreams. We need to name all those. List them out. And once you begin to do that, you realize, oh, maybe that's part of what I've been carrying around all this time.

16:12 A word of caution here, we each have an internal grief meter that subconsciously scales our pain to someone else's. Well, at least my son's still living. At least my daughter's still in my house. People do that all the time. Yeah. And so we do that, I guess, trying to just recognize it could be worse. However, the danger in shared grief is in those comparing of losses, it's not giving your own heart permission to grieve. Your loss is your loss. It's turned your world upside down.

16:55 And so it's important to think through what has ended or changed or what was I hoping for that hasn't happened. Some people have a hard time just kind of writing down a list, but answering some of those questions, I assure you the arrow of grief always points to what's most important to us. So we need to name them. Can you explain that? Well, because grief is tied to love. If we have loved and attached, when that thing is taken away, we will probably experience grief. And so if you can't get in your mind, what is grief? I'm not going to name my grief.

17:35 Well, that's a silly little thing. They're not going to be home this Christmas and it's going to change things. No, that's a grief. That is a loss. And it's loss because you love them and you want them in your home or you want a family that feels whole or whatever the case may be for you. And so grief is surfacing so many symptoms to tell us things are not normal. And many people try to keep those emotions under check. And so secondly, what we need to do is feel those emotions. Again, people in our positive culture don't want to feel sad. We don't want to feel stuck.

18:17 We don't want to feel these depressive feelings. But it's only right that you feel sorrowful when your loved one is making these decisions. It is a human response of love that is not being given back in the same way that you are longing for it. And so many people in our culture, we numb it. We either get busy, we veg out on Netflix or binging, gaming, some turn to alcohol, food, some turn to alcohol, substance abuse, anything to numb the pain.

18:59 But Brene Brown wisely cautions us, when we numb the dark, we also numb the light. And so our emotions are not the problem. We fear sometimes that if we give into our feelings, that we'll get stuck. But the opposite is actually true. The more you push grief away, the more it wants to cling. It's like lint on black slacks. It just kind of wants to cling. And it wants to be acknowledged. And it wants to be felt, a couple of things. And naming our losses engages our mind, which is good.

19:41 Feeling our grief engages our emotions. But it's not enough to actually just feel the emotions. Third, we need to express them. Yes, there's a friend whose husband died of COVID, who's expressing her grief well with beautiful poetry that she's sharing with the world. They're learning, everyone else is. But for her, it's how she's handling this. It's still been very, very hard for her. But she's doing that to express it. So it's hard, though. And you're right, as far as our culture.

20:24 I've been in almost every part of the world. And when they have grief, it's not quiet. They talk about it, but they mourn. When you look in biblical times, and they would wail, and everything, because it's a great loss. And we, as you've said, don't tend to do that in our more Western world. We push it down and not acknowledge it. So that's hard. It is. And like your friend, being able to write and express, again, grief needs movement.

21:05 And so if she can write and express herself that way, many people find it helpful to be physically active. The arts, writing, or painting, or dancing, or anything, to kind of just get the, I heard of a place that I'm so anxious to visit. I read about it right as COVID hit a couple of years ago. But a local place here that is a boxing club. And I'm not normally the type that would be drawn to a boxing club. But I think once a month, they did it a special evening with a licensed counselor who came in to talk about grief.

21:50 And so sometimes we just want to pound it out. So there's all kinds of ways of, hopefully, expressing our grief. Cry. I encourage some of, I've actually encouraged some of my clients to take a drive, go to a park where you're going to be, feel safe, but feel alone, and just scream at the top of your lungs. Keening. You're talking about that wailing. That's called keening. It's like this. It's a sound and an expression that's too deep for words. And we need to let that out. We need to get that out often.

22:32 And with this ongoing loss, it's not just a one and done. Oh, yeah. Oh, now I'm fine. Yeah. Oh, no. It'll make you feel better for a short time. But there needs to be something that you can actively move your grief. Find a grief therapist, somebody who can actually help you process. You don't need to be. Are there very many people trained to do that? Well, that is a good question. In my understanding and experience, not many that are specialized in grief. My husband is a licensed mental health counselor.

23:12 And even in his schooling, they were not required at all to take any courses on grief. Not one. And I find in surprising it is, isn't it? Yes. Because for mental health, they have to be generalist. So they just touch on so many things. And yet, when people with this type of grief go to a counselor, they may be treated like they have depression or treated with just, well, think more positively about it. Now, granted, that has its place. But often, grief needs to be expressed before it can move to a healthier realm.

23:57 And if you don't have that outlet to just be honest and not feel like someone's needing to fix you right away, it can be harmful. Well, because often, the person who would be willing to be there with you and come alongside and listen grows weary of it. And so then they're like, OK, time to move on. And maybe you're not ready. Yeah, exactly. And even with death losses and other types of losses, I have some people that have come to me, and that's been their thing. They say, I feel like I'm wearing out my friends, which is just heartbreaking.

24:41 And granted, whether that's real or perceived, the effect is the same. They don't feel free to speak and speak ongoing about it. And so I think with ongoing loss, like these ambiguous losses, people, again, our culture is just not well-trained. Our churches are not well-trained. Our ministries are not well-trained to know how to walk long term with those carrying these weights throughout their life. And so yeah, to process grief, we need to name it, feel it, express it. Of course, this is a flyby, right? This is not all conclusive.

25:22 Yes, I know that. Listeners, you know that too now. Yeah. These are just ways to get you started. So name it, feel it, express it. And then lastly, we need to ponder it. OK. I'm a fan of pondering. But I'm not sure I see that. So can you explain what you mean? Yeah. Well, as we were talking about before, that pain is trying to get our attention. This deep kind of pain we're talking about and the deep kind of suffering that we're talking about parents living with, it has a way of bringing to the surface some of the deepest existential questions in life, questions on the meaning of life.

26:09 Why am I even here? If I can't raise a kid who whatever, what good am I? It shuffles our priorities. Yes, that's true. It would shuffle them. Grief always shuffles the priorities. And it exposes what we value for good or for ill. And so there's a lot of adjusting going on. And many times we have questions for God in times of crisis. The God we thought we knew didn't come through the way we thought he would. Or should. Or should. Exactly.

26:50 And so even though questions, you feel like, well, what good does it do to ask these questions of God? He does what he wants to do. I've heard a lot of people kind of dismiss this whole concept of pondering. But I guess I would invite you and suggest that asking those questions takes you on a different path than not asking. Open that up just a little more. By not asking, it's if you think of any relationship. If you don't ask, some clarification in an argument or a disagreement or whatever, you can only go so far.

27:33 And so in the same way, in a spiritual sense, when we're not willing to ask God those questions, even if we don't think there's going to be an answer, all we do is shut it down. And when we shut down those questions because, well, I've got to keep my faith intact. It's not OK to ask God. It's whatever that reason may be. We basically are closing off a part of our hearts in this intimate relationship with God. So we need to ask those questions. We need to ponder. So many people don't feel they have permission, that it's wrong to doubt God like that.

28:17 And we don't feel that we can be honest about our pain, our loss, our anger, or the why God, why. And I would love to make, you know, that's one of my messages is God's OK. He can handle it. We're not ever going to be too much for him. He already knows. It's not like we're covering up or hiding something. So basically, when you ponder these things and when you're honest about your pain with God, oh, my goodness, that is what Jesus can relate to.

28:59 He knows the suffering. He knows the betrayal. He knows murder. He knows those things. And if we do not bring that part of us, we talk about sharing in the sufferings of Christ, this is what we're talking about. We are sharing suffering. It may not be exactly as Jesus experienced it, but he's experienced it as we experience it. Well, and he's sharing in our suffering, too. It's a coming together. And knowing that sometimes, you know, God's so big and so righteous and everything.

29:41 But Jesus, at least we know, suffered greatly. And so we know that he isn't just compassionate in the ethereal sense, but he can be there because he has been there. He's one that will not try to shut down your tears. He's not quick to offer you a Kleenex box. He's not quick to say, well, let's go for a drive. Jesus allows you to sit. He sits with us. He sits with us. He accompanies us in our sorrow, in our grief. And I wonder, you know, we ultimately, grief is a very spiritual journey.

30:27 It's kind of an other type. It takes us out of this world into something else. And we tend to think of, in this culture anyway, we tend to think of terms of getting over it or needing to let go. What if instead of letting go, we saw more like letting in? What if we pondered what grief might want to show us about ourselves, about our loved one, about life, about God? What if we saw grief more as a doorway, not something to be gotten over or fixed?

31:11 This type of processing is critical if you have hopes of integrating your new reality into your current life. You can continue to stay in the past of dreaming, or you can be so distraught and just feel like it's all over. But we want to integrate our sorrow with living, because they're all in the same heart. That's a really helpful thought. I want to make it a little more practical. So you have somebody whose child has overdosed and not lived through it.

31:52 And the loss is pretty much unbearable. The death of dreams, the death of love, because they're gone. So you're saying wonderful things to walk through this and not just stuff it down or be cheerful, but to enter in with the grief. So if you were talking to one of my prodigal lovers, what would you say? I know you've given us an outline in a sense, but how would you approach that with them, to get them on that path, to be able to grow and learn and become and not be stifled by it, not be stopped in life, but be able to have new life come, even from grief?

32:42 Well, obviously, timing is everything, right? Yes. Initially, if I were meeting with this individual, I would listen, and I would ask questions about their loved one. And I would ask questions about the journey that they've been on. I would ask questions about their hoped for dreams that have been dashed. We would go through just unpacking years, perhaps, of pain and sorrow and disappointments. And you can't think of healing until you've kind of been.

33:22 And I don't mean it quite like this. You need to clean out the wound. But part of that healing of cleaning, there is clean pain and dirty pain. There is clean grief and dirty grief. And in these type of situations, there's a lot of dirty grief that gets in there, feeling responsible, feeling like, if I'd done this, then that. And clean grief is, I've just lost my son. I've just lost my daughter. I don't even care about eating or sleeping. It would be fine if I didn't wake up tomorrow. Those aren't necessarily suicidal thoughts of suicidal ideation.

34:03 It is just the reality. I am so crushed. I don't know how I will go on. So for quite some time, that is the journey we will take. And as they begin to ask questions, then we just explore those questions one by one together, giving them plenty of room to meander all through all the mazes. And there may not be this bright, clear solution at the end. But it's, again, that presence with someone. And years after, I would maybe ask them about their loved one by name, say their name.

34:45 Oh, absolutely. It's a hard thing. It is a hard thing. And so it's this ongoing. Their loss is ongoing. And we need to come around those who are suffering at such deep levels and show compassion. And how would you pray for that person? One of the main things we talk about is prayer is your way to make a difference, to bring about change, to engage all that God has offered us in this journey. So this would be a place where people would pray. But I wonder how we pray.

35:27 At such times. Of course, that would be very individual to the person, their loss, whatever. But I would think just praying for great grace, praying for safe people to surround them. That's very good. Because how we handle someone in that acute time of grief may determine whether they come back to church or not. I'm not kidding. I meet with many people who have left the church or left faith because of people like you and me, believers.

36:08 So I pray for safe people. I pray for surprises from God that are very personal. I pray for answers, if there are answers, that they would be revealed either now or in time. You just pray as the Spirit leads you, as you know those people or know their situations. And I would pray that they would not go the American route and stuff their grief. I would pray that they would allow this grief over time, over a long time, to expand their world.

36:50 And it always does. That's great. That's really helpful. Because the last thing they need to hear, which they hear, is it's time for you to get over this. And they're not on anyone's timetable, but their own with God. And so any last thoughts or comments? I don't know. There's an interesting concept by a gentleman. His name escapes me right now. That's OK. It happens to me all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, he describes they're not really stages. They're kind of loosely like phases of grief. But I think it applies in this sense of ambiguous loss that we have the initial loss, whatever that is.

37:41 And child leaves home. Child makes really bad decisions. There's this initial shock. There's this additional loss. And so we have a grief that responds to that initial loss. And then there is a very long, and again, it's very individual, a very long season of losing every time we think about them, every time we get a note, every time we see somebody. It could be you see one of their classmates and who's doing super well. It's just this continual losing, a reminder of what is no longer your reality and no longer your opportunity.

38:24 And then if we engage with grief and not fight it, we actually can get to a place of what is called loosening. So there's the loss, the losing, and eventually this loosening. That's great. I like that. Very helpful. Frances Weller. There it is. Oh, OK. The name came. Dr. Frances. It does that to me all the time. Sometimes in a minute, sometimes in an hour. Well, let me talk to the listeners as we wrap up then. You've heard Dana share a lot of things.

39:05 And almost all of us who love a prodigal are at some place in a grief journey. We come a long way on it. And yet there are still steps to take and losses that are painful to us. So I encourage you, as she has shared a lot of ideas with us, to think, all right, what could I apply now? What can I do? Who can I talk to that would be a compassionate companion in this conversation? And begin to make that part of your grief journey.

39:50 Don't feel the pressure to solve it all, but to give it time to work through and to give permission to yourself to grieve and to work through it. We'll have some of Dana's resources listed in the show notes. And so be sure and check there and click on something that looks interesting to you that you could read or watch or understand better. So thank you, Dana. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, I'm so glad you could be with us, because I know that you were speaking to the heart of every one of our listeners.

40:33 Because if you love a prodigal, no matter where in the journey it is and how old they are or if they're children or if they're other people that you care about, you've given hope and some tangible help of ways to walk through that and not condemn yourself because you didn't get over it fast enough and didn't handle it better. So thank you. I'm really grateful for that. And let me say, as I always do to my listeners, if this conversation or this episode has been helpful to you, let's make sure others know about it.

41:19 And so tell your friends so they can listen to it. Or be nice to me and go and rate the podcast and write a review for what a wonderful guest Judy had on our podcast with Dana Russo. Thank you. Bless you.