I’m your host, Dr. Jennifer Levin, I am a grief therapist and the founder of From Grief to Growth, the host of the podcast, Untethered: Healing the Pain from a Sudden Death, and I am the creator and author of the Growing After Traumatic Loss course. I provide support, guidance and teachings to help you with the aftermath of chaos, trauma and grief.
Good morning everyone and welcome to the first podcast episode of Untethered: Healing the pain from a sudden death. I am Dr. Jennifer Levin and I specialize in traumatic death and help individuals forge through the struggles and pain, trauma and chaos of an unexpected death. Strange as it may sound, I am really excited to be here today. Excited is not a word I usually use in my profession, especially when talking about things related to a sudden death, but it really seems to fit right now. I am excited to finally have a space to bring people together who are living with this unique type of loss to share information and experiences with you so that you can learn ways to manage and reduce your pain and move towards healing.
Our main focus today is going to be talking about the differences between a sudden and anticipated loss. But before we get there – I want to take a few minutes and talk about why this podcast was created.
Grief and loss have never been an easy topic for us to discuss as a society and we could have, and probably will, have an entire episode about why that is. We are just uncomfortable talking about death in general and most people are ill equipped to respond the way we need them to respond when we experience the death of someone we love.
However, after a loved one dies in a sudden or unexpected manner there are a whole host of issues that neither you or anyone else could ever envision that arise associated with a sudden or unexpected loss. Unfortunately, there are very few places available to get information, support, resources and, in my opinion, most importantly, find a community of others who speak your language, who understand your pain and the unique set of circumstances that you live with on a day to day, hour to hour basis. Untethered: Healing the pain from a sudden death was created to be informational, experiential and communal. We encourage you to contact us at [email protected] with suggestions and questions for this podcast and we also encourage you to engage with us during our Facebook lives which take place on alternating Wednesdays from the podcast also at 9:00am PDT.
Now since today is our very first podcast there are a few things that I also want to mention about grief and traumatic loss in general. You are going to hear me refer to these grief fundamentals throughout our time together.
First and foremost, there is no timeline in grief. A sudden loss that occurred a month ago can be just as devastating as a sudden loss that occurred 3 years ago. Yes, it is true, when your loss occurred more recently you are in an acute phase of grief and you are more likely to be numb and in shock, especially if it just occurred. However, this does not mean that a loss that occurred 3 years ago, 5 years ago can be any less difficult. It’s possible to have a grief attack, experience trauma symptoms, or triggers at any time. Grief has no timeline.
Second, and you have probably figured this out by now, but you never truly get over the death of a loved one, whether it is sudden, expected or not. You are going to hear me talk about moving towards healing but the truth of the fact is we never truly heal. I mean, how could we? However, the pain does change and evolves and in time, with patience, love and the added benefit of tools and guidance that you are going to get from me and this podcast you are going to learn the things that you need to start to grow around the pain. You are going to move towards healing.
Third, there comes a point in your grief where accepting the death of a loved one becomes part of the process. But I want to tell you that accepting your loved one’s death does not mean you have to like it or be okay with it. But there’s going to be a time when you just have to accept it. Accepting it means you just have to acknowledge the reality that the death has occurred.
Finally, I want you to know that grief is love. The death of someone you love hurts so much because you loved so much. I find this one of most useful pieces of advice for both myself and others because it puts things in perspective – grief is love transformed. And they say love hurts. The good news is there are many ways to express your love even in grief. And we are going to be focusing a lot on those ways throughout the different podcast episodes that I am going to be presenting.
Now, before I turn to the major differences between a sudden and expected loss, let’s talk about a working definition of a sudden or expected loss that I am going to be using when I talk about a sudden loss or a sudden death in my podcast.
Ok, it’s going to seem obvious, but a sudden loss happens without warning. One moment, life is going as planned and then you either witness an unplanned event, you come home to something, you get a phone call, the doorbell rings and FLASH everything changes in an instant. Because it is unexpected there is no goodbye, nothing is planned and your world as you know it basically disappears. Depending on the relationship you have with the person who died, everything can change in an instant.
Now, these types of deaths are usually due to a homicide, a suicide, accidents, overdose, an unexpected medical crisis/cardiac events and they can even include COVID. They are often traumatic in nature and they can also include loved ones who have died in foreign countries due to war, terrorist acts, natural disasters and there are many other unique situations that I am not listing here. An expected or an anticipated death, on the other hand, includes cancer, advanced age, for example, somebody who goes to sleep and doesn’t wake up, and other medical conditions such as chronic heart failure or COPD, that are associated with failing health. Now it’s true, we never know when an individual is at the end of their life, and that’s true in an anticipated death, but most often we have a general idea that the end of life is near, and this is especially the case when hospice is involved.
So let’s now turn to 5 of the major differences between sudden and expected losses. Now I want to state these are not the only differences – these just five that I have chosen to highlight for us today.
So the first, Survivors Are Left with feelings of intense vulnerability – So after you experience a sudden or unexpected death you begin to realize that if this can happen out of the blue; something bad can happen at any time and it can happen to anyone you love. This is quite a big realization. And it leaves you with a lot of vulnerability. Many of my clients find this paralyzing. And as a result they have acute anxiety, they have fears of leaving the house, some people have given up driving for a while. Many people start to panic when someone is late coming over or they cannot get a hold of someone they love on the phone especially if it’s a child or a spouse because they worry that something has happened to them. As a matter of fact, our very next podcast is going to focus on what we call the Theory of Shattered assumptions which provides an explanation for why we feel so vulnerable and why our world no longer feels like a safe place after we have experienced a sudden or unexpected death.
The next reason I want to talk about is the inability to say goodbye, which accompanies an unexpected death. Now, like I said, it’s true when someone has a degenerative disease such as cancer we never know when the actual moment of death is going to occur, we do know that an ending is coming and that there is time for conversations and to “get your affairs in order”. But when death comes out of nowhere, especially for someone who is considered to be on the younger side, there is no time to say goodbye. Sometimes the last conversations are transactional texts like, “can you pick up something at the store”, or a quick voicemail. These final exchanges can feel very empty and for some people they may not have even occurred during positive circumstances and this can complicate the grieving process even more.
The third difference I want to talk about is that a significant percentage of sudden deaths may have been preventable in nature, and this can torment survivors as they grieve. Grieving an event that could have been avoided makes accepting a loss extremely challenging. Often individuals in this situation struggle with grief intermixed with guilt and self-blame regarding a perceived action they wish or believed could have been taken to save their loved one’s life. Unfortunately, in many circumstances there is no way of knowing whether or not these actions would have made any difference at all in the final outcome.
Fourth, another difference between a sudden or an unexpected loss and an expected death are the number of unanswered questions and the amount of uncertainty that exists. After a loved one dies in an unexpected manner our mind goes into overdrive trying to figure out what happened. We have questions, we have lots of them. What happened? Our mind thinks this doesn’t make any sense. We are constantly thinking could I have done anything different? Would my loved one still be alive if I had done something different? And many people develop what I call a bad case of the would haves, could haves and the should haves. Unfortunately, many of these questions never get answered and we have to find out how to live with this uncertainty, otherwise we can drive ourselves crazy.
So, the final difference I want to acknowledge today and this is one we are going to spend a lot of time focusing on in this podcast series, is the manner in which our loved one died. And that is because, unfortunately, it’s often traumatic and it can even result in trauma for those of us who are grieving the loss. A sudden loss is unfortunately often traumatic either in the way our loved one died or in the efforts that were used to try to and save or resuscitate our loved one from dying. And by traumatic, I mean something violent happened to our loved one’s body. And if you witnessed any of these events, it can further complicate your grieving process and result in symptoms that range anywhere from anxiety, rumination (which means replaying what you saw in your mind over and over again), you could also be having sleep difficulties and you could have a full blown case of post traumatic stress disorder better known as PTSD. Many individuals who have experienced a traumatic loss describe a sensation of feeling like they are just walking around waiting for the next shoe to drop which is also known as what we call hypervigilance. Trauma responses can be very destabilizing and make it very difficult to actually feel the grief because your emotions are what we call so dysregulated. And the story of the event itself, the trauma story, can even interfere with the life story of your loved one who died. And it is really important that those trauma symptoms are contained and we figure out a way on to how to get those controlled.
So those are the first steps in working with trauma and a traumatic loss before the real grief work can be done.
My goal today was just to give you a little bite, a little picture of some of the topics like these and many others that we are going to be exploring in future podcasts. After we are up and running for a while, I am going to be inviting some of my colleagues in the field to join us and then some of my clients and members of this community to share some of their experiences to help others. Make sure you tune in to our next podcast in two weeks. The title of that podcast is – My entire world turned into chaos – the theory of shattered assumptions. In this episode we are going to explore your feelings of vulnerability and I am going to teach you how to reduce those feelings of vulnerability and increase the feelings of safety in your world for yourself and the loved ones around you.
I want to thank you so much for joining us today in the inaugural episode. If you know someone who is living with the sudden or unexpected loss please invite them to subscribe to our podcast. You can also find me on Instagram @fromgrieftogrowth and on my Facebook page From Grief to Growth. Don’t miss my Facebook lives every other Wednesday morning at 9:00am PDT. Be sure to like my Facebook page and sign up to be notified when I go live so you don’t miss any announcements and opportunities to interact with me. Bye for now, and thanks for tuning in today! Take care.
Thank you for listening today. Be sure to subscribe to my podcast so you never miss an episode. For help with a sudden and unexpected loss sign up for my free mini-course where I will teach you the three truths about living with a sudden and unexpected loss. Please visit www.fromgrieftogrowth.com to sign up.
