Introduction & Author Background

• Hope Edelman author of 8 non-fiction books including bestsellers "Motherless Daughters" and "Motherless Mothers"
• Recipient of 2020 Community Educator Award for Association for Deaf Education and Counseling
• Certified Martha Beck life coach, facilitates motherless daughters retreats globally
• Lives in Los Angeles and Iowa City
• Mother died at age 42 from breast cancer when Hope was 17 (1981)
• Father died when Hope was 40
• New book: "The After Grief: Finding Your Way Along the Long Arc of Loss"

Defining After Grief vs Traditional Grief Models

• Quote from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: "Loss happens in time, in fact in a moment, but its aftermath lasts a lifetime"
• Traditional grief (new grief): acute symptoms 6 months to 2 years - shock, numbness, horror, sleeplessness
• After grief: long-term phase after acute grief ends, characterized by ebb/flow, expansion/contraction
• Can last rest of our lives with periodic upswells/spikes/surges
• No vocabulary existed for this long-term experience

Historical Context of "Getting Over It" Mentality

• Early 20th century factors created linear grief model:
  • World War I mass carnage
  • Freud's influential 1917 paper
  • Spanish flu pandemic 1918-19
  • Women's suffrage movement
  • Victorian mourning rituals abandoned/contracted
• Five stages of grief misapplied from Kubler-Ross's work
• 1980s-1990s: therapists noticed "letting go" approach caused distress
• Mid-late 90s: shift toward continuing bonds theory
• Culture slow to adopt new understanding

Research Methodology & Approach

• Northwestern journalism school background, minor in cultural anthropology
• Master's in non-fiction writing, University of Iowa
• Qualitative interviews vs quantitative data
• 81 in-depth interviews for "The After Grief"
• Multiple file cabinets of research articles
• Ethnographic interview approach - people as experts of their own stories
• Listened for patterns across interviews

Cultural & Individual Variations in Grief

• Grief extremely culturally relative
• Ranges from weeks-long funeral processes to cultures that stop saying deceased's name
• Male vs female grieving patterns:
  • Female: emoting, reaching out, talking, connecting
  • Male: action-oriented, doing, building, problem-solving
• Example: Hindu culture - men handle cremation/funeral tasks, women in designated mourning room with community support
• Grief-prone personalities exist - more attuned to certain emotions, predisposed to anxiety/depression
• Siblings respond differently even to same loss due to temperament

Personal Connection & Continuing Bonds

• Hope keeps mother present through:
  • Day lilies in parents' wedding vase on dining room table
  • Wedding picture on kitchen wall
  • Living by values parents instilled
  • Sister has mother's picture in kitchen corner (based on medium's suggestion)
• DNA connection with birth parents creates powerful bond
• Adoptive parents provide years of values and experience
• Impossible and harmful to "let go" completely

COVID-19 & Collective Grief

• Book finished June 2020 during quarantine
• Part of 90-person bereavement task force meeting weekly on Zoom
• Mirror image of 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic
• Mourning rituals eliminated again - no funerals, memorials, bedside presence
• Victorian elaborate rituals lost in 1918-19 never returned
• Hope for hybrid model: in-person gatherings plus livestreaming for broader community access

Youth Bereavement Statistics & Characteristics

• 1 in 7 American adults (14%, 30 million people) lost parent/sibling before age 20
• Children mourn in bits and pieces over lifetime
• Process different pieces as intellectual/emotional development occurs
• 5-year-old doesn't understand future implications (wedding, graduation)
• May have grief responses at ages 10-12, teenage years, when reaching age deceased was
• Adults must connect dots for children - may not recognize delayed grief responses
• Protracted grief normal for childhood losses

Types of Grief Classification

• New grief: acute phase right after death, 6 months to 2 years
• Old grief: response in present to loss in past (anniversaries, holidays, birthdays)
• New old grief: experiencing old loss in completely new way after reaching milestone
  • Example: grieving mother's absence as grandmother only after having own children
  • Cannot pre-grieve these experiences

Three Rings of Grief Model

• Developed when couldn't find long-term grief models
• Target/bullseye visual:
  • Inner ring: tight circle of emotional pain during grief spikes
  • Middle ring: everyday optimal functioning
  • Outer ring: growth - knowledge, insight, wisdom, gratitude, appreciation
• Can move between rings based on trigger events
• Growth ring where people become better parents, start foundations, run races for causes
• Post-traumatic growth concept: trauma becomes springboard for personal development

Difficult Relationships & Complicated Grief

• 15% of population experiences complicated grief
• Ambivalent relationships create ambivalent grief
• Grieving loss of hope for relationship change/improvement
• Loss of possibility person would get help for mental health/addiction
• Important to accept yourself wherever you are in grief process
• Trained counselors available for complicated grief
• Some people don't cry - doesn't mean wrong grief style

Traumatic Grief (Suicide/Homicide)

• Different from other grief forms - among hardest adjustments
• Trauma around violence/sudden death
• Trauma must be stabilized before grief processing
• Story of death can overtake story of person's life
• Reaffirming relationship meaning helps access grief work

Anticipatory Grief & Dementia

• Process when knowing someone will die
• Releasing attachments to future assumptions
• Dementia: losing person before physical death
• May feel relief/resignation at actual death after long anticipation
• Finality still impactful despite preparation

Resilience & Personal Agency

• Resilience: faith/hope to face each day knowing random bad things happen, believing you'll survive if they do
• More choice in after grief phase than acute grief
• Choice over meaning-making and purpose development
• Agency over seeking support, therapy, community
• Can choose how to show up in world as someone with loss experience

Practical Applications & Resources

• Importance of revisiting/revising loss stories over time
• Meaning changes at different life stages
• Story development phase: piecing together what happened for emotional/intellectual completion
• After grief community page on Facebook
• Online programs and aftergrief.com resources
• Modern Loss community literacy about long-term grief

Stephen Colbert Quote & Philosophy

• Lost father and two older brothers at age 10 in plane crash
• "Learning to love the thing you most wish had not happened"
• Best example of post-traumatic growth and resilience
• Takes time to settle into this understanding

Children & Modeling Grief

• Important for children to see appropriate emotional expression
• Models that sadness after death is normal
• Balance needed - don't threaten children's security
• Have adult support system for intense grief moments
• Not one-and-done conversation - can revisit with children as they mature
• Mistakes in grief parenting can be addressed later