Parables of Grief
The Parables of Grief podcast is for anyone who has lost a spouse. We discuss the common everyday lessons learned in this journey of suffering when your best friend and confidant is dead. We address the loneliness, the secondary losses, and the hope that lies ahead on this path. We look to the Savior as the master healer in every episode, and we focus on the light he brings to our darkest hours. We cling to His promises, especially his promise that, “I will not leave you comfortless. I will come to you,” which is found in John 14:18.
Parables of Grief
Parables of Grief--The Gift of Being Acquainted with Grief
Have you ever thought of grief as a companion rather than an enemy? Join me, Mama Bear Wendy, on a heartfelt journey through the Parables of Grief podcast, where we transform sorrow into strength. This episode brings you personal stories of loss and healing, beginning with a young girl's touching portrayal of grief as a character she learns to engage with rather than fear. Drawing from scriptures like Isaiah 53:3-5, and the example of the Savior, Jesus Christ, we explore how being "acquainted with grief" can be a surprising gift. By recognizing grief as a part of our journey, we discover avenues for healing and resilience.
We'll also share reflections on a concept known as the loss histogram, which highlights how past grief interacts with current experiences. Through the poignant narration of losing family members, we'll examine enduring emotional connections and the resilience built from those experiences. In this episode, symbolic ceremonies, like breaking glass objects, illustrate how acknowledging grief can release its hold on us. We end with the 5 Pillars of Resilience, offering support for those navigating their unique paths through grief, reminding you that hope and healing are always within reach.
The information provided on this website is for educational purposes only and should not be considered as a substitute for professional psychological advice. If you are experiencing mental health issues, please consult a licensed therapist or other qualified healthcare provider.
If you would like more grief support please see my website at Mamabearwendy.com for upcoming grief groups and 1:1 opportunities.
Although your experience and path will be unique, there is hope ahead in this path and you are not alone. I can see your pain and we will walk this road together. Here is a big bear hug from Mama Bear Wendy, your fierce support in the journey of grief, until next time.
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"Wendy has a beautiful way of sitting in the deep end of the ocean with you. Her presence alone is healing. She meets you where you’re at and doesn’t push you any further than where you want to go. She gently nudges you into new places with new perspectives. She is highly intuitive, sensitive and compassionate. She brings a depth to the table you rarely see. Her experiences have given her an extraordinary level of understanding and a safe place to walk to as she is a safe harbor fill of strength and integrity. She is raw and real and beautifully vulnerable and she is exceptional at conveying the words that are hard to find. She is a rare one." Christi D.
Hello friends, this is the Parables of Grief podcast and this is your host, Mama Bear Wendy, I'm here to share some love and light with you on your journey through grief and loss. I hope, as our healing paths connect for the next few minutes, we can walk together and find strength for the road ahead. One scientist suggests that what the grieving need most is to have others witness our pain and help us not feel so alone. I hope in our time together you will find the companionship and understanding that you need. The intention of this podcast is to use parables of grief to find the Savior and His promised healing in the daily and commonplace, to see how we are truly never alone and to find, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the Savior by our side, even if we didn't recognize him at first, because he showed up in unexpected and common ways. Also, there is much coming soon to help with your journey. The Parables of Grief book will be coming out by Christmas of 2025, and there are opportunities to join me in online grief groups and one-on-one companion sessions. Please check out my website at momadbearwendycom for more information.
Mama Bear Wendy:Hello friends, today we're going to talk about being acquainted with grief. This is a hard one. I think most of us do not really want to be acquainted with grief, but my suggestion today is that being acquainted with grief is actually a gift and makes us more like the man who was acquainted with grief. I'm going to share with you a scripture about that man, our Savior Jesus Christ. I'm going to tell you some stories about my experiences being acquainted with grief and I'm going to share with you what I've learned, and I hope that as we discuss today, you will find that maybe grief is not what you thought. So let's start with our scripture, and our scripture today is found in Isaiah 53, verses 3 through 5. There is a second scripture, in Mosiah 4.14, that goes along with this, so we'll actually have two scriptures. Isaiah 53, 3 through 5, says he talking about the Savior. He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid, as it were, our faces from him. He was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed Again. I was going to share a second scripture. This one is found in Mosiah 14.4. Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.
Mama Bear Wendy:So our first story today is from a friend of mine. I met her at my very first grief group right after my husband died. This would have been about February or March of 2023, we both went to a grief group in our neighborhood and I learned that she lost her husband a week after me, also in a car accident in a car accident, and she had three daughters that were also in that accident, and her 14-year-old shared some wisdom. This a couple weeks ago. And something that she's learned from grief is that she has actually drawn her as a character drawn grief, not herself and in this image of grief she has imagined letting her out daily to teach her what she has to teach, and then she is glad grief is to go back into the background and let this young lady do her work or school or whatever it is that she's required to do. She learned early in her grief that if she ignored grief and didn't let her out, then she grief got bigger and bigger and would come out in embarrassing ways, like perhaps at school, or perhaps at a church activity or in some place that she did not want to be grieving. And so this young lady gave me an example that maybe grief isn't this monster that we thought she was. Maybe grief actually is a partner in this time of loss and is our way to process and navigate the loss of our spouse.
Mama Bear Wendy:So some experience with grief throughout my life. I was challenged soon after my husband died to do something called a loss histogram. Some scientists say that loss is like a tuning fork and as you have new experiences with grief, other experiences in your life get triggered, they resonate with this experience and so all kinds of things may go off in your brain as you experience trauma and loss and grief. So, as she had me do this loss histogram, I wrote down things like when my younger cousin was killed, also hit by a teenage driver, and there was a lot of loss for our family at that time. I was very close to her older sister and my aunt, the mother of this little girl, and watched some very raw, bleeding, open wound grief. Very young I would have been maybe 12 or 13 at the time and I didn't really understand what I was seeing. I didn't understand the heavy, hard emotions. I've been an empath most of my life so I could feel how hard it was, but I didn't really understand or have any skills or knowledge of what to do about it, so it was kind of devastating. Other experiences were when my grandfather died.
Mama Bear Wendy:My grandfather is one of those people that I don't know if you have ever thought a person was an antique. My grandfather Smith is one of those people. They don't make them people like him anymore. He was three years old when his father was killed in backcountry Kentucky by a man who wanted his dog. So he had a very good hunting dog. His wife had let this man take the dog for a hunt and he didn't bring the dog back as he had agreed, and so my grandfather's father went to get the dog and the dog came running to him when he called and my grandfather's father turned around and started to walk away and the man shot him in the back and killed him.
Mama Bear Wendy:When my grandfather was 13, his mother died of tuberculosis. So for the 10 years she was a widow. She was an amazing woman who rose up out of the poverty and poverty, education, boundaries and all the things of her time and ran a good food store what is that called Dry goods store and saved money for her children. And anyway, when she got tuberculosis she of course got sicker and sicker and eventually died. So when my grandfather was 13, when my grandfather was 13, he moved in with his aunt, his mother's sister, and his uncle, his father's brother.
Mama Bear Wendy:Okay, so I'm showing some history here. Anyway, this is family history. And so these two, his aunt and uncle, raised not only his family of three children when his mother died of tuberculosis, but also his other aunt's children, and I think she had five. So all in all they had 18 children in their home. The boys slept out in the barn, the girls slept in the house, and my grandfather has many, many stories of being hungry.
Mama Bear Wendy:He has stories of going into and so this is going to sound like Lord of the Rings for a minute, so enjoy with me. He has stories of going into the neighbor's garden and stealing potatoes and then going out into the woods and cooking them, but not knowing that you had to punch holes in the skin or they would explode. So they would take these potatoes out into the field and make a big mess. Anyway, they were starving. So my grandfather took his mother's example of education and rising up and went to school and became a school teacher. He bought an apple orchard.
Mama Bear Wendy:My grandfather is an example to me of rising up, of resilience, of being not defined by your circumstances, and when he died I was devastated. My grandfather was one of those people in my life that when I would come into the room he would make me feel like the most important person in the world. He would say things like bless your heart and all the Southern things that you hear, and my grandfather would sing and he would whistle and he was the hardest worker I have ever met. He was amazing. I remember going on tractor rides with him. I remember going on out into his barn and just having grand adventures with my cousins in their big old barn in the hay, and when he passed it was very hard. I was very sad about my grandfather's passing.
Mama Bear Wendy:So these are some of the things that were on my loss histogram and I decided to do something with these things to acknowledge their place in my life. This actually came from Grief Group. She suggested that one of her patients clients, one of her clients go to the local thrift store and get different pieces of glass that represented her loss and her emotions. Actually it was about her emotions. So she went and got one that had a smiley face on it and she went and got one that had different things that represented her emotions, and she took them out into a place and broke them and, symbolically and kind of as a ceremony, had this overcoming or incorporating or processing emotion. So I decided to do that with my loss histogram and the same friend that lost her husband a week after mine. And I went into the mountains in this beautiful place surrounded by quaking aspen that would sing to us I love this idea of them singing when their leaves rustle. And we broke glass for each one of these losses in my life and became acquainted with my grief in a way that I had not before. I had a piece of glass that was an apple for my grandfather's apple orchard. When I was very young we had a dog named Goofy, and that was probably my first remember of loss was when we had to give Goofy up because we moved, and so I had a mug that had Goofy, the Disney character, on it. Anyway, all of these things we took into the mountains and we broke them, and as I broke each one, I felt like I released chains of identity and heaviness to these moments of loss in my life.
Mama Bear Wendy:I also wanted to talk about this idea of despising. Throughout the scripture that I read you. It talked about we despise the Savior because he was acquainted with grief, and I have definitely experienced that idea of despising grief. I don't want her in my life. I don't like her. She is hard and heavy and exhausting. So my experience with grief and not listening to her in my life goes back to a story I've told in a previous podcast.
Mama Bear Wendy:This is where my experiences as a nurse did not serve me well. When my husband died and what I mean by that is most of my career I have ignored the needs of my body and if someone is dying and you are the nurse, then nobody cares about your bodily functions. If you're hungry, then you go get a Coke and you caffeinate until you can keep going, and if you need to use the bathroom, well, you don't because nobody is allowed to do that right now, and so there has been a lot of ignoring the signals that I am given. And, again, in my loss of my husband, this did not serve me well. It did not serve me as it had in my career. One of the things that was sort of my rule when I was working is get to the end of the shift. You can't cry, you can't fall apart, you can't be devastated, whatever, until you get home. And so that really didn't serve me, because this shift again, we're in two and a half plus years now and it's not over. The shift doesn't end and the man that carried me during the shift when I would get home, isn't here. He died. So I've had to learn new skills. I've had to learn new ways to deal with grief, because I've learned that my body will just tip over and say we can't carry this anymore. It's too heavy. So one of my questions for you is what if you personified grief and sorrow and this actually goes to a book that I really like. It's called A Hind's Feet in High Places, and a hind is a mountain goat and they can climb, like you have seen mountain goats standing on the edge of cliffs on little tiny pieces of outcropping that don't look very safe, of outcropping that don't look very safe. In this book, grief and sorrow are personified and it is a story similar to something like Pilgrim's Progress. It's this beautiful book about Much Afraid.
Mama Bear Wendy:Much Afraid belongs to the Fearing family and Much Afraid's life is spent in fear and doubt and shame. She is crippled and she has some kind of face problem, something about her face. Anyway, her family is very negative about her capabilities because of her lameness and her feet not working. But she has a friend that is the shepherd in the field next to her home and she goes to him and sings songs and finds comfort and the shepherd is always kind and he always encourages her and he always tells her that she is capable and she is strong. And one day he tells her I know the desire of your heart to go to the kingdom of love with me and to the upper places where the hinds can go, and I will give you feet like the hinds that you can jump to the kingdom of love with me, that you can jump to the kingdom of love with me. And Much Afraid, of course, is terrified by this idea. But he has given her hope and so she, through much tribulation and trial, gets to the place where they are going to meet and he assigns her two friends.
Mama Bear Wendy:Friend number one is grief, friend number two is sorrow, and she hates them. They are scary and tall and big and they speak a language she doesn't understand and she wonders about the shepherd and what has he done and how can this be right? But as she suffers and as she tries to take this journey and it's hard and the rocks hurt her broken foot and she falls she learns that if she hangs on to grief and sorrow, if she clings to them, they are strong, they do not fall and they do not abandon her under any circumstances and they do not abandon her under any circumstances and she starts to learn their language and learn from them. And they are powerful. They are harsh and scary and big, but they are also strong and loyal and valiant in helping her in her journey, helping her in her journey.
Mama Bear Wendy:So my proposition to you is what if grief and sorrow are actually compensatory blessings for losing your spouse? I have a quote for you from Elder Scott. He says Find the compensatory blessings in your life when, in the wisdom of the Lord in your life, when, in the wisdom of the Lord, he deprives you of something you very much want. To the sightless or hearing impaired, he sharpens the other senses. To the ill, he gives patience, understanding and increased appreciation for others' kindness With the loss of a dear one. He deepens the bonds of love, enriches memories and kindles hope in a future reunion. You will discover compensatory blessings when you willingly accept the will of the Lord and exercise your faith in Him.
Mama Bear Wendy:If you would like more grief support, please see my website at mamabearwendycom for my upcoming 5 Pillars of Resilience group and one-on-one opportunities. Although your experience and path will be unique, there is hope ahead in this path and you are not alone. I can see your pain and we will walk this road together. Let's take a deep breath together and here is a big bear hug from Mama Bear Wendy, until next time you.
