Finding Your Light Through Grief: Honoring The Memories

Hey, everybody, it's Friday. We're here. My name is Jean Mitchells. I'm excited to be here today. So today is a day that we talk about grief and honoring memories. So as we pop on in here and as I dive on into the chat, I'll just have some invitations for you today. So I'm going to give everybody a few minutes. Hi, Anna. How you doing today? Happy Friday. We're here. Take a breath. Relax. Excited to see whoever pops in today. And if you're logging in on replay, my invitation to you as well is just take a breath.

You made it. You have arrived. It's funny, I teach spin classes and the number of times after a class is done where someone will apologize to me for being late. And I always say to them, why are you apologizing? You arrived. You showed up. It's not about me. It's about them. So they said yes to them. So whether you're here live or you're dialing in later, you've arrived, you're here. So I'm gonna dive right in today, and I'm gonna try to keep this as light as possible on a heavy topic, but mostly diving in on Fridays, every other Friday to kind of honor grief.

We've all experienced it in some way, shape or form. Whether you have a loss of a family member, a parent, maybe the loss of a relationship that was really important to you, friendship that was really important to you. Loss of a loss can take shape in a whole bunch of different ways. You could have experienced a divorce or a move in a relationship. You could experience a breakup. You could experience anything where you feel a hole, where you feel like maybe a part of you has gotten left behind or a part of you has disappeared or isn't functioning the same way that it had before.

So when we think about that today, it's honoring that memory. So if you are online live or you're dialing in later, I will always listen in later. I would invite you that if there's someone that you have lost, an actual person, whether it's a friend, maybe they've passed away, parent, type their name in the chat and say who they are. Or type a nickname or their first name or a title of a role that they played. If you don't want to get too much into the share in the chat. But I would love to hear who it is that you want to honor now.

When I think about honoring someone's memory, there's different ways that we can do that, right? There is the possibility of doing something that Reminds you of them. So I've shared before. I've lost my mom and dad and my aunt and, you know, the list of people that maybe we've lost in our lives could be significant. But I was in a store in California recently, and my favorite place, my brother lives out there. So every time I've traveled to California Since I was 12 years old, there's one place that I really like to go to, and it's Hermosa beach and it's the pier and there's like shops on this pier.

And it just feels like home to me. And I live in Minneapolis, but that place just hits different. It feels like home. So I was in this shop that I've been into before, and a lot of times it's really fancy and expensive and it's not my style. But I found these earrings that were made by a local artist. And it's these little tiny hoops here that have a little star underneath them. And when I saw them, I just got goosebumps. And I don't always wear earrings, it's not always something I remember to do.

But I got goosebumps when I saw these because it reminded me of my mom. And when my mom, she just always loved to wear little hoops, little earrings. And I had gotten her a pair for Christmas a couple years prior, and she wore them every single day and she never took them off. And when she passed away, they literally fell out of her ear because she had worn them so much and forgotten to clean them. And it made me think like I did so many different things for my mom, but I forgot to clean her ears.

You know, it's like these little things, but I wear these every day and I haven't taken them off since I bought them because it just reminds me of my mom. So it's a way that I can honor her. I can honor her memory. I can honor who she is and the fondness that I still have for her. So is there something that you do that you honor the memory of that individual that has left your life or has gone to a different space in our world. We don't know what that is. So whatever you believe, that's maybe where they are.

You know, I read something recently they talk about a lot of times when someone passes away, Especially like in my mom's long term care facility, they did a lot of things with butterflies and they would put a butterfly on her name and they had a blanket that we put over her as they rolled her out, and it had butterflies on it as well. And I saw something the other day that said that there are in certain religious beliefs, the butterfly is symbolic of the return of that person. So there are a number of instances that are unexplainable where a butterfly has maybe appeared in somebody's life and or maybe landed on a person's body or shoulder.

And in this belief system, they believe that that is the spirit of somebody who has passed. And it's fascinating because I have had different butterflies land on me. I've had a dragonfly land on a ladybug. I actually think my mom and dad come back in the form of ladybugs because they used to call me a love bug. And that was our little bug, our bug connection, I guess. But it's really interesting when you pay attention to the little symbols around you where whatever your beliefs are, there is the possibility, because we don't know what we don't know, but there is the possibility that those people that we love that have moved on and transitioned out of our lives are still present with us and remind us that they're always there.

Another way I honor a memory is I have a little cup that's a blue cup. I'm at work right now, so I don't have it with me, but it's this little blue cup. And every day I do a little gratitude ceremony with Kakao. And I hold the cup in a special way in my hands, at least for a little while, because the cup is the same color as a cup I had gotten my dad when I was in Japan. And the way that I hold it is the way that he taught me about how they drink Japan, when he was in Japan, in the army a long, long time.

And so it's my way to connect in to my dad by offering gratitude, because he always had this lightness about him. He always had a way to look at things that saw possibility in people, in situations. And so it's just a nice, gentle reminder for me that he is always with me because he's always here. Right? The choices that I make and the way in which I choose to live, I want to live in a way that would still honor my mom and dad. So I have the earrings, and I use the cup. And yeah, it's something physical and tactile.

But sometimes we need something physical to just remind us that we can see, something that can remind us that they're always with us in any way that we want them to. We might not hear their laughter as much or hear their voice as much, or maybe their face gets fuzzy in a memory until we see a photo of them. But the essence, the essence of who they are is what we can remember. So in our different stages of grief, whether it's a brand new grief, it just recently happened, or it's a grief that's been around for many years, there's always going to be a point in time where maybe we hit that spot where we feel sad, or we are reminded of an essence about them.

And we. We feel it. We feel it in our heart, we feel it in the pit of our stomach or our throat gets stuck. We're always going to feel them with us. It just might not be as prominent on some days, but we always have the opportunity, we always have that choice to honor who they were, the impact that they made on us, and how we move forward from there. So today, on this beautiful day, my invitation to you is to simply remember. Remember who they were, remember the impact they made on you, remember how they made you feel.

And there could be a whole spectrum of those feelings. Not every feeling is going to be good. And that's okay, because at the end of the day, we're all humans, right? We're not perfect. We're all human. And so find that one thing that you can do, maybe it's on a regular basis, maybe it's once a month, maybe it's every day for a while, because that feels good. Or you can just honor the life, honor the impact on your life and honor the pieces that you choose to take forward with you. So I'm keeping it short and sweet today, making it real.

And to everybody in Minneapolis, there's a lot happening in our world and our community right now. There's a lot of emotion, and I'm just sending you all kinds of love, big hugs, knowing that you're not alone. We're not alone. We have an opportunity to hold space with each other here. And we're always going to remember. We're always going to remember the people that made a difference in our lives, the people that touched our souls. And so today, my invitation is to simply just honor that. Feel what you need to feel and know that we got you.

Everybody here at Cadre, we have you. So tune in when you need and know that you are loved. And I hope you all have a really good day.