Finding Your Light Through Grief: Savoring The Love

Hello, Friday, Jean Mitchells here. Coming in from a mall today and may or may not have been shopping at Lululemon. I hope you're all having a great day. Needed to push back a little bit today. I was running behind today, so I apologize. Hello Mel, how you doing today? Happy Friday. When you pop on in here, typically when I'm doing live streams, I ask people to come in and type a word or phrase about how you feel in this moment. I also am hopeful that there's not tons of background noise. Hi Jules.

Hi Amar. Welcome, welcome Amar. Did you get the job? When do we get to hear you got the job? So, so great to see you guys. Always a pure joy to be here. So today I am doing a talk. Every other Friday I do a talk around grief and our topic for today is savoring love. So here's my invitation to you. If you are feeling grief or a loss and if you feel amazing or if you feel compelled to type in the chat. What are you grieving right now? What is the loss that you're feeling right now? Oh, good on the interview.

Yay Yamar, you got this. I believe in you. So if you're feeling some kind of grief, whether it's for a job or a friend or someone passed away that you love, I'd love to have you type in the comments who or what is it that you are grieving. So for me, you know, we all have something, right? It could be the loss of a job. I will share a funny, maybe interesting story. So I've been a consultant for 16 years now and it was really fascinating, the very first project that I worked on because I wasn't prepared for what it meant.

I had been on this project team for about a year and a half and these people have become my best friends. Right when we do work, we work with people that we love and our work, because we spend so much time there, we really get invested, get invested into our team members lives. And so when my consulting project came to an end, I felt this overwhelming sensation of sadness. I knew that my project was going to end at some point. That's just part of being a consultant. I just didn't realize what it would feel like when it ended.

I wasn't prepared for that. So I literally cried. I'm not ashamed to say it, I literally cried for a few days because I knew that every day when I woke up I wasn't going to be going to the same client anymore. The same office, the same cube. Like this team brought me in as if I was everybody's little sister. And they were family to me. Now I still stay in touch with them, but we know that transition, it's just different, right? So I now, when I know I'm rolling off a project that I worked on, a client project for a while, I gradually start to work from home and start to disconnect a little more.

Now, more and more often we're remote now or we work part time remote or in the office. But I find for me, I need to at least have one meeting or lunch where it feels like we recognize the work that we did. And then I feel like I need to have time where I can just not be in the energy of everybody, like physically be in that space. So it's one type of grief that we can go through is that transition of a loss or a lost opportunity. But when I talk about savoring the love, the reason why I've started doing lunches with my team at the end of a project and I bring all of them tiny little gifts or I share something, a story about how I've seen them grow or how we've evolved as a group or a team to just recognize how far we've come to be where we are at today.

I do that because it allows me the opportunity to savor, Savor the moments that we had, savor the experiences that we had together. Life is going to be that ebb and flow always. We're going to start a new job, we're going to leave a job, we're going to have friends that might stay in our life for a season and then transition on. We're going to lose people, they're going to pass away and we're going to feel the loss of them in our life. So I found tiny ways that I can savor the love, savor the magic that I had in those experiences.

So I do that with my clients by having a luncheon. I do it also by setting a reminder on my calendar to reach out to some of these people once a quarter or once every six months. And I keep their birthdays in my calendar because at the very least I can re spark that connection that meant so much to me during that period of time. Tiny, tiny little ways that I get to keep alive. A time in my life that felt just natural. We were all working in sync together. Obviously there was going to be challenges.

Obviously, like any good family, you're going to not agree on everything but savoring those moments, savoring those relationships. Fast forward the last few years, I've been grieving the loss of my mom and dad and the transition of my nephews into being adults and what our adult relationships look like. So family is like everything to me as it is to maybe many of you as well. And so knowing that I live in Minnesota, my brother and his family, they live in California now. So it was always my mom and dad and I.

And then I would travel to California and spend time with my family. And every time I was out there, my nephews would be around and we'd spend time together and have date days or date nights as they got older. And then life happened, right? Transitions happen. So no longer here in Minneapolis, is it? My mom and dad and I, it's just me, right? And my partner and my dog and friends. But when I think about that nucleus that I relied on for so long in my life, that nucleus has changed. But here's what I've discovered when I savor the love of my mom and dad.

Here's what that looks like for me. I wear these gold earrings that I found on a trip when I was in California. The last time visiting my brother, I was at a favorite little shop on a cute little strip area that I go to. It's like a strip mall, but it's like more like a boardwalk because it's by the beach. And it's the place that I've been going to since I was 16. It's like my spot. And I found these cute little hoop earrings, and I got those because it reminded me of my mom. So my mom loved wear little earrings.

And the last pair of earrings that I got her were a pair of little hoops that she literally wore every single day to the point when she passed away and we went to take the earrings out, they literally fell off her ears because she had worn them so much that she had worn them out. So I'm savoring the love of my mom by wearing these little gold hoops. And honestly, I haven't worn earrings like that on a regular basis in a dozen years. Who knows? I don't even know how long. And every day, I've started this ritual for the last, gosh, almost month now, where I do a little cacao ceremony of gratitude in this little blue mug that reminds me of a connection point that I had with my dad.

So every single day, I get to savor them, a piece of them with me. So when we think about grief and we think about finding our light through that grief, I'm not going to say to you ever that grief doesn't come and go And I would be lying to you, looking at you directly and lying to you if I told you that every day was an easy day. Even though my dad has been passed almost three years and my mom almost two, I still find actually it's two in one, but I still find days like earlier this week, Wednesday, I literally couldn't do much because I just felt such an overwhelming amount of sadness because there's some things happening in life and I really just wanted to curl up on the couch of my dad or just call my mom and hear her laugh.

So that grief will always be a part of us. But what if we looked at that grief as an opportunity to savor the love that we had? I am so grateful that I had a lifetime, so many years with my mom and dad. Not everybody has that relationship. So whoever you grieve and whatever that loss is, hold on to that. Just because that job isn't there and that family that you worked with isn't there, it doesn't mean that they're gone. It just means that it's shifted. It's changed. So what might you do to hold on to that?

For me, I put their birthdays in my calendar. And at least once a year I reach out and say happy Birthday and maybe end up going to lunch with them. When it's my mom and dad, I allow myself to cry. But I also do tiny, tiny little things to remind me that they're there. They're always here with me in just a different way. And if I pay attention to the world around me, I might see a bird or a butterfly or dragonfly that reminds me of them. Or somebody says a phrase and I wonder why they said it, because it's a phrase that maybe we said.

And it reminds me to take a pause and just celebrate in that moment. So all things come from love, right? Fear comes from love. Loss comes from a love that we don't experience the same way anymore. So what if we just allowed ourselves to savor more of those moments? Make them special, hold onto them. It doesn't mean that the grief is any less sad. But it does mean that we get to hold on to the love that we carry. Because at the end of the day, we are loving beautiful, amazing human beings that are here on a journey.

All of us have a story, and we will all feel all things. But when we pack it down and we shove them down and we don't allow ourselves to feel it, that's when we do ourselves a disservice. There's many reasons to do that. And I'm not gonna tell you that I don't pack stuff down, too. But I do find that when I allow myself to celebrate the moments, when I allow myself to let that love peek into my heart and peek into my day, feel like I get to walk a little bit taller. So if you have anything that you'd love to share, type it in the chat.

I'm always excited to see what you have to say. But whatever it is that you might be grieving, honor it. Because that means whatever it was, it was important, and it made an impact on you, and that is to be celebrated. So today, my invitation for you is to find one thing that maybe you lost and then find something about that, whatever it was that you still hold onto into your heart and celebrate that love. Celebrate that you had that experience to begin with, even if it didn't last forever. I hope you all have the best Friday.

I look forward to seeing you all again soon. I'll see you on Sunday. We'll talk about some me time and some other cool things. Enjoy your day, and I'll see you all soon. And, Amara, good luck with that interview. You got this.