In a society that does not know how to properly deal with people who are getting through the loss of a loved one, one must learn how to give themselves permission to grieve in their own way. Suzanne Jabour, a certified grief educator and transformational coach, is changing the paradigm around grief through her very own three-pronged approach. She explains how individuals can navigate through grief according to their own terms, as well as what it takes to create grief-resilient workplaces. Suzanne also celebrates his son Ben who died at 22 and shares how she cherishes his memory by sharing stories about him.

I am sharing my experience of loving the same man for 32 years, a mother to two adult children, a retired military officer, a breast cancer survivor, and my connections with others. 

Anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should reach out to a suicide hotline or local emergency number in their country: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/suicide/suicide-prevention-hotlines-resources-worldwide.

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Permission To Grieve: Getting Through Loss With Suzanne Jabour

Our guest, Susan, is a grieving mom who found meaning in her loss through providing grief education, sharing how grief works, and how we can support people experiencing it. Her three-pronged approach is designed to change a paradigm around grief. She works with grievers to chart their path through conscious and curious grief coaching. She trains grief-informed leaders and transforms businesses through her Grief Resilient Workplace Program.

She is available as a speaker to share her story and help normalize grief as a healthy response to loss, big and small. She has a BA and BED and decades of experience as a trainer. She is a Certified Grief Educator, Transformational Coach, and Workshop Leader. This conversation with Susan is going to empower you about things people shouldn’t say in grief, how to manage grief in the workplace, and being able to transform memories and experiences as we create our new normal. Let’s get into this conversation now.

Susan, welcome to the widowhood. 

Thank you so much for having me.

When you hear welcome to the widowhood, what came to mind just hearing that put together?

It’s such an interesting phrase. I think for me, because I’m not a widow, I feel like this honored guest because I have all these other kinds of loss, but I don’t have that particular one. I just feel like this honored guest in this space of women who get that aspect of grief and that experience. It’s so interesting to me because I often feel like there’s a parallel between the loss of a child, which is the most recent grief that I experienced, and the loss of a spouse because it’s those people who are so intrinsically tied in your life. I’m sure we’ll end up talking about that, but I’m so fascinated by that parallel. I just feel like an honored guest in this space. Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you for being here. I want to expound a little bit on the particular choice of widowhood because I am originally from Chicago and the word hood means family to me. When my late husband Mark passed away, oftentimes, people just looked at me being a widow, but Mark’s loss encompassed more than me. It was his children that lost a father. It was his siblings who lost a brother. His nieces and nephews lost an uncle.

My siblings grew up with my husband being in their life and they were at a young age that even though he was their brother-in-law, he was more like Uncle Mark. My nieces and nephews looked at him as a dad. The intentionality was not just to frame this only to include the loss of widows but to include the loss of everyone. If my husband’s parents were still alive, they would have lost a child. His parents left this world, but it was intentional to make sure that everyone who has lost a loved one knows that they have a place in this conversation.

As you mentioned, grief, I don’t try to compare it. Everyone’s most difficult grief is the one they are experiencing now. I know, and you probably heard this, that people try to compare, well, the loss of this is worse than the loss of that. No one’s going to win that argument, but what I can do is win by holding space for you and being a safe area and letting you know that I see your pain and what you are feeling is real. You are welcome here as we all learn to walk in this process and this journey together. Thank you for that.

I love two things about that. I love the idea that it’s like your family, like this is your widowhood. It’s your people, your squad. I think that’s so important because one of the things that happens in grief in our culture is to end up feeling so isolated. That concept of having this space where. We get you. You are welcome here. We get you. We will not turn our backs. We will not run away. We will not say something. We might say something awkward, but it won’t be a cliche or platitude because we’ve all heard those and thought about how stupid they are. 

We can almost land there, but I will mention this. If you’re reading this show, Widowhood Road Talk 15, and we do have our own Discord, and it is a safe space for people to connect because sometimes you meet people, you don’t want to particularly give them your phone number, but you want to be able to engage with other people and find encouragement in community. 

That is something that I am very encouraging for people to have a community. We found that by doing it on our Discord. If you’re interested in being part of the Discord, you can message me, email me, wherever you’re reading this, and invite you to the community. There are obviously some safe guidelines, but it is a place to know about when current events are going on and to be able to find encouragement. 

Three-Pronged Approach

People are sharing things that are helping them. People are sharing information, what they want to be on the show and different topics. It really is a community that is being built. Thank you for mentioning that part. I want to inquire about a few things that I know are important to you. You provide a three-pronged approach. What does that mean when someone is looking to work with someone who is a grief coat? For you, what is that three-pronged approach?

My end game really is shifting the paradigm around grief because what I discovered when my son died was that I didn’t know enough about grief to be able to do it myself in a way that felt healthy. I had to become a student of it for my own survival. The people around me, including friends and family, coworkers, and my employer, they didn’t know enough about it to just be able to show up. The level of fear is so high, that’s what I find when I ask people if I’m in a workshop or an opportunity where I can say think about a time when you didn’t show up the way you wished you had for someone, what was it that held you back?

About 98% of the time, it was fear that we didn’t know what to say, we didn’t know what to do, and we didn’t want to do harm. Really, with the best of intentions, we all end up isolated. What I really want to do is help break down that fear and lack of understanding. When I think of how we break down fear and lack of understanding, it’s with education. For me, the three prongs are working with grievers. That’s one-on-one coaching, or I like you, I’m building a community. I’m doing mine on Meetup, where we have a free drop-in grief cafe to just come together for a conversation. 

Conscious and curious grieving is the path that I found for myself, which was about being conscious and accepting of all of the emotions. In the early days, first of all, how to survive. The curiosity becomes about what on earth is supposed to be next. How do I make a life in this place that feels like a post-apocalyptic nightmare? That’s a prong one, helping grievers. Promp two is creating grief-informed leaders because leaders in our communities, families, and workplaces don’t know what to do with us when we’re grieving. 

That’s just a reflection of our overall society that doesn’t know what to do with us when we’re grieving. It’s a no shame, no blame conversation, but we have to up-level our skills and our understanding and our mindsets and our emotional intelligence and all the things so that we can really show up for people in a robust way in communities where the grievers already are. Grievers, a huge percentage of them end up pulling away from those communities because they don’t feel accepted there and they don’t feel connected there anymore because the fear that they face is so big. 

Working with leaders to be more grief-informed. Then I love getting into organizations, into businesses to create a grief resilient business because if you can have a return to work policy for grievers after the woefully inadequate three to five days they get off, they’re able to come back and feel connected to the workplace, which most of us need to be there financially. Most of us want to be there because that’s a huge part of our identity, which has been blown apart. It’s a big part of our social circle. It gives us a bit of a respite from grief. We’re in a place for 7 or 8 hours. We have to hold it together for the most part.

It’s really valuable to be there. What’s happening in workplaces is harmful. It costs an astronomical amount of money. The latest survey was done in 2022 and released in 2023. The cost of workplaces in the US is a hundred billion dollars annually. This is big money that’s being lost in organizations because we’re too scared to talk about this topic and we’re too scared to help people and we’re harming people inadvertently and that’s just not okay with me anymore. I’m here to have these three ways that I really see as powerful ways to shift and upend the paradigm we’re in right now, which frankly doesn’t work for the grievers and the support people either. 

Remembering Ben

Thank you for explaining that. You briefly mentioned something I’d like to take a little bit more time to go into. You mentioned your son and what is your son’s name? 

His name is Ben. 

Thank you for sharing that. What are some of your favorite memories of Ben? 

I have so many favorite memories of Ben. Ben continues to be, for me, a really magical unicorn of a human. He was profoundly gifted. I have tons of memories of him, especially in elementary school, realizing that the world didn’t work the way that his brain worked. I remember him coming to me in, I don’t know, grade three or grade four, whatever the second year is that you start doing division. They had done division one year, and now they’re in math, and they’re doing division again. I remember him coming home from school and saying, “Mom, we’re doing division again. We did division last year. I know how to do that.”

I’m like, “Yeah. Okay. Here’s how school works. Yes, I know you did division last year and how to do division. The other kids, like some of them, were staring out the window cause it was sunny, and some of them were just confused by what the teacher was saying and some of them forgot. You’re going to learn division again. The bad news is you’re going to do it again next year and the year after. This isn’t good.” This is how it works. I have so many memories of helping him try and navigate how to be himself in the world. 

We really loved going to musical theater traveling to New York, and just like a well-oiled machine seeing, eight shows in five days or however many slots there were. Go do rush tickets and buy cheap seats, sit behind things, and stand up; all kinds of silliness. I just love those memories of traveling with him especially. My favorite, favorite travel memory is a picture that I found and I actually still have it on my mantle and I probably will forever of him and his sister. My daughter Kathleen is three and a half years older than Ben and at the time, I think she was 19, so he would have been 15 or 16. 

We were going on a Disney cruise and we’re also magical Disney people. We love everything Disney and we cruised on Disney many times. We were going on one and we’re sitting in the terminal and it’s a very long wait to do the check-in. You sit around and it takes forever and it’s boring. I looked over at the two of them. This is a 19-year-old and a 16-year-old. He has climbed onto her lap and they’re just giggling between the two of them. I looked at them and I was like, “How old are you?” 

He says, “Five.” He holds up five fingers, like a little kid would do. I was like, “You totally are.” Just those moments of the world was a complicated place for Ben. When you’re profoundly gifted, you don’t fit in anywhere. He has struggled with depression and anxiety for much of his life. That was another complicated thing. To get those moments where he was just in his joy goofing around with his sister being a five-year-old when he was, in many ways, also very cool. It was just really fun. 

Thank you for mentioning that. You’ve already mentioned that Ben has transitioned from this world. You also just stated something about remembering those good times. When Ben left this world, was it hard to remember those good times? Was it just the current part of his passing that was bigger? How long did it take you to start retracting those good memories? 

I have to think back. I don’t think I ever lost track of them, but I think it’s very wise the way that you describe it as being the current tragedy and despair and horror become bigger than them for a while. I don’t really feel like I lost them. I could always reach out and touch them. Though I also was very clear that there was a curtain between the before and the after. In a lot of ways, that curtain is still there. 

My memory is still atrociously terrible. Thank goodness for all the great brain research. I understand why it’s terrible. They tell me it’s up to five years. I’m holding on to that promise of like another year and a bit until it might start to resolve itself. Those memories were always there to touch. As my daughter and I intentionally navigated this path, we did a lot of things to keep those alive. We have what we call revisit, reclaim trips. 

We go intentionally to places that were important to us with Ben as a family to say, “Yes, we’re going to go and we’re going to purposefully and intentionally remember all of those great amazing memories and make an assessment. What does this place mean to us now? Does it have a place in our future? Does it just belong with the amazing memories? How much do we want to write over those?” One of the really interesting things that happened was we did a revisit reclaimed trip to New York on his second anniversary. It was obviously a very tender time. 

Those then adversaries are so tricky to navigate for, I don’t know, as long as I think it’s going to be forever. We ended up doing some things we had always done. Not doing some things we had always done and really loved to do with him because we weren’t ready quite yet to write over those memories. We wanted to hold them as memories with him in them and then did some new things that we had never done with him but in this place that we all loved and had enjoyed traveling to together. 

The kids had gone there without me a couple of times, and we had gone as a threesome a couple of times. We’d gone with the extended family, as if we had done that trip a number of different ways. It’s partly for me about figuring out how to weave those memories into the present and into what’s possible next and into how you go forward. To me, I’m carrying him with me. There’s none of this getting over it, getting through it, leaving him behind. All of that is not a thing I’m interested in and I don’t think anyone is really. It’s about how we do this and have him here with us.

Grieving Process

I love how you mentioned going to a place where you were there with Ben and doing new things in a very familiar place. I would dare say the idea of creating a new normal is something that people are accustomed to having navigating that process is very challenging. How do we have holidays? How do we go on vacation to the place the family always went to because not wanting to overwrite those memories but yet create new ones and still hold that loved one close to us in the process? I love how you and your daughter were able to do that. You also bring a question to mind that people are struggling in a family unit, both grieving the same person, giving space that may not look different. Did you experience any of that with your daughter? How did you navigate that? 

One hundred percent we grieved very differently. I opted to grieve out loud because I knew for me that it was literally the only path that was available. I had a very clear vision of myself as that crystal glass that the opera singer sings that note, particularly somehow my vision was a Looney Tunes cartoon if that resonates for folks of our generation. Somehow, it was a Looney Tunes cartoon and the opera singer sings that note and the glass goes, “Shh,” and I just knew that if I wasn’t out loud about it, then I was going to explode. That was not going to be survivable.

That was my path. She opted to be much more private, which was totally fine. I feel grateful. One of my dear friends who I call my four stalwart companions. These are the four folks who showed up for me in those very earliest, awful, messy, horrifying days and still are right by my side with anything I need. They’re for me regularly. We’ll talk about Ben. We’ll talk about my grief. One of them sent me the most brilliant book, which is the book I send to everybody I know and I highly, highly recommend. 

It’s a children’s book called Tear Soup. It has one little section that talks about how the two people who are grieving are doing it very differently, and they’re just giving each other space to do it their way. I remember having that conversation with my daughter and saying, “I’m doing it this way, you’re doing it that way. Both of those are okay. We can support each other in doing it our own way.” I think the other realization that was so important to me was that I saw so clearly that in a weird way, we weren’t even grieving the same person. 

We’re both grieving Ben, but my relationship with my son and her relationship with her brother are totally different. Even though the three of us were very close and had really healthy relationships, for the most part, we all had our moments, but for the most part, really healthy, really close, really respectful of each other. We still weren’t even grieving the same person. 

Our losses were different. The expectations she had for the role he might play in her life going forward were different than the expectations I had for the role he might have played in my life going forward. It really was a lot about giving ourselves permission and each other permission to just do it however made sense in the moment. A lot of the time, it was the same. A lot of the time, we would just clutch each other and sob our brains out. 

Other times, I would be okay and she would be sobbing. Other times, it would be vice versa. Sometimes we would both be laughing in hysterics or chuckling over something stupid or whatever it was but it really was so important for us to just think, “We both loved him intensely and differently. He was a magical part of our lives for both of us. How we’re going to try out our own path isn’t going to be the same.”

Sharing Stories

Thank you for sharing that. Many people struggle with that. I love that you mentioned it was the same person. I’m glad you brought it up, but the relationship with the person is different. That relationship is going to be a catalyst for what you are grieving. Even though we’re in the same house, it’s the same person. We have to think about the meaning of that and then different personality types and different characteristics. How we’re going to handle that? It’s the same person. It’s more complicated and has more pieces to it than that. Thank you for expanding on that. You also mentioned hearing stories about Ben. How do you feel when other people share stories with you about Ben? 

I love it. For me, I’m all about it. I’m happy to hear it. What’s been really interesting, what I’ve come to learn about people who have anxiety, especially if they have social anxiety, is they often compartmentalize their friends and their support systems. When Ben was alive, he had these two amazing groups of friends, and I knew about them, but I didn’t know any of them. They didn’t know me. I had met his best friend in each of the circles, but I hadn’t met any of the rest of them. Ben lived with me still. He was 22 when he died. Where we live, it’s very expensive to live in. 

He still lived with me, which was totally fine, but I didn’t know any of them. He didn’t bring them around when I was here. I didn’t know them at all. What’s been really beautiful since his passing is that I’ve gotten to know very many of them. What’s the most magical for me, especially, is when people share stories about him that I wasn’t privy to. They’ll share stories about stuff they did together that he maybe told me a version, his version of it, but this is theirs, or I was out with one of his friends for lunch and she was telling me about one because Ben loved to cook and one of his love languages was finding stuff to cook for people. 

Finding my recipes because I’m vegan. He would find vegan recipes of stuff he knew I loved. That was one of the ways he showed that he loved us. This friend was telling me a story about how she came over to our apartment one day and they cooked together. I never knew that. It was really, I find those really magical. If it’s a shared memory, I love that too. Similarly, with how we’re grieving someone differently, everyone’s perspective on the event or the thing you did or what he said, we all remember it slightly differently.

Also, if you’re someone supporting a griever, one of the most thoughtful things anyone ever said to me in those early days was someone at work who didn’t know Ben. She came up to me very courageously, which takes to talk to a grieving mom grieving out loud in the early days. She said, “I’m so sorry this happened,” and whatever lovely things she said. She said, “I didn’t know Ben. What’s one thing you wish that I had known about him? Can you share him with me?” That was such a powerful question. 

Of all the awkward things you could say to someone that built an instant connection. It was her way of saying, “I didn’t even know him, but I care about you. Could you share him with me?” I’ll never forget that moment. It was during the times of the pandemic when we had all kinds of restrictions at work. We’re literally standing in the parking lot, six feet apart, yelling at each other through our masks, like that whole thing.

It was really one of the most touching experiences I had in those early days. That sharing of stories for me is so powerful. I know for some people it’s intensely painful. For me, it’s both. It’s worth the pain to hear the stories. Over time, I’m able to think of Ben and hear the stories with more love than pain, which is beautiful. Even from those very early days, we would share stories with tears streaming down our faces because of the pain. It’s a way to touch the love. For me, it’s always been all about the love. 

Thank you. I would like for you to speak to the person who is a friend of someone who has lost a loved one, and they have stories about that relationship that they know the griever does not. How would you recommend approaching this person grieving about wanting to share stories about their love?

I think the first rule of grief support is it’s all about permission. It’s about giving the griever permission to do it their way and not trying to tell them how or fix them. It’s also about asking permission for what you might want to do for them or what you might want to share. It would be so beautiful. I love it when people say things to me like, “I was thinking about them the other day. I’d love to share it with you. Is this a good time? I have this memory that I don’t think you have. Would you like to add to your memory bank?” There are 1,000 gentle ways that will sound more like you than me because that’s what something I might say but it’s about asking that permission. 

We forget that with permission, we can do almost anything with grace and without doing harm. It’s when we barge in with our agenda that we get in trouble. If you can go in thinking, “I would really love to share this story with this person, but I need to remember, I have to have their permission first.” Just say, “I remembered this time that I was with your loved one. I’d love to tell you about it. Is this a good time for that? Could we go for coffee one day and just share memories? I’d love to hear more about what you remember.”

Thank you. 

That permission piece really opens up everything. 

Grief Coaching

I would agree with that. How did you transition Susan from losing being to coming up with a three-pronged approach or taking the curious, grieving coaching into, I’m going to help other people in this? What was the shifting, the pivot for you in that?

It actually happened relatively quickly after he died. I realized that I didn’t know enough about grief to do it myself, as I said before, and so I really became a student of grief for my own survival and realized that I didn’t know enough, and that meant I had not supported people as well as I could have. I could see that very easily. The other thing I was fascinated by was that in all sorts of places like Discord or Facebook groups or wherever I was interacting with other grievers. There was this universal understanding that grief changed your address book. 

I was so curious about that because it had happened to me 100%. People who I thought were my closest supporters disappeared like cockroaches when you turn the light on. They just had vaporized and people who I hadn’t expected to step up had. I was so curious about why that was. The other thing that happened was to get the spin out of my head. For any of you in those early days, your brain is just spinning, spinning, spinning all the time, and you cannot focus on anything. I had to still that a little bit for my sanity. 

I started writing, and I would share what I was writing, what I was learning, what I was thinking today, what I remembered about then, whatever it was on Facebook to my friends and family, and my normal profile. The response that I got from people was so universal that no one in their life was talking about grief this way, that they understood it in a way they never had before because I was just sharing openly what was happening and what was true for me. I had the opportunity. I was looking back at it the other day and trying to figure out when exactly that had happened. 

Ben died at the end of September of 2020. In January of 2021, way before I had any right to be speaking publicly, really, in so many ways, I had an opportunity that dropped in my lap to be a keynote speaker at a Mental Health Awareness day. There’s a media company in Canada called Bell and they do Bell Let’s Talk Day every January. I had this opportunity drop into my lap to come and do a keynote about grief and how that’s linked to mental health and Ben’s mental health journey and all of the things. 

I started talking about it really early as a grieving mom grieving out loud, as a speaker saying, “Here are some things we can do to do better for grievers and in mental health. Here’s my three-pronged approach.” I’m not sure why I have a magical relationship with three in my life. Even in that talk, I pulled up the slide deck the other day and it’s a triangle. It’s the three things we could do. Break down the stigma on demand support and better meds. This would solve everything. I really started talking about it very early. Right before Ben had died, I had just finished my coaching training. 

I had my program, what I was going to be, my focus, and all the things, it was all set. That weekend, I had reached out to someone I wanted to bring on as a consultant. It was all ready to go. Of course, that exploded when Ben died. I already had that skill set and that desire to help people. I come from a long line of helping people, people. Part of our childhood was what are we doing to make the world a better place? How are we helping people? I also knew that I was really determined that this tragic thing that had happened was not going to be for anything. 

If I could use what I was learning to expand my reach and help more people and open more conversations and to help people understand better. That, for me, was a really powerful way to help make meaning out of what had happened. Not that I don’t actually believe things happen for a reason. I just think that’s a weird construct. It doesn’t really work for me, but I do believe that when things happen, we have choices. I was clear that my choices were going to be about how I can help change this paradigm that’s so harmful to everyone. 

How can I live the biggest, most exciting, most vibrant life, which is the path that Ben was on and I fervently wish was still on? It was those two things together that were like, how do we do this? How do we start? I just started small and started writing on my friends and family page. Then, I started a newsletter and podcasting, developed programs, and pivoted the programs. Now I’m at it, and it’s like, “These are the three things that the grievers need help with: the leaders need help, and the workplaces need to step up.” If we could do that, it would really shift everything.

I can definitely relate to that. My husband’s passing is the catalyst for what I do now and being able to take my journey and use that to help other people. As you said earlier, the isolation and the silence can be loud. If you don’t have someone to help you navigate through that, I had a conversation with a deaf doula and she said that she feels like she is the rope that’s hanging out to people. 

You still have to do the work to get up the hill, but that anchor is that there is a place of reality that does not always have to look like this. I can still have a life. Me living off of their love is still more powerful than staying in that place. Our lives have meaning even in their absence, and we need to be able to find what is important. It is important also to find that as you mentioned when you return to work. What is the type of services or help or guidance that you give to grief-informed leaders? 

The place for grief-informed leaders is really to be able to be someone within an organization within a community who can step in when those losses happen and has the grief knowledge. We start with, we actually start with emotional intelligence because you need a level of emotional intelligence and emotional awareness, the ability to name and feel, and all of those things before you can step into these big, messy conversations because the conversations are going to be big and messy. That’s how grief works. We start with that emotional intelligence piece and make sure that people are really working on being in touch with themselves.

We look at grief education. How does grief really work? We don’t talk about it. We don’t share our stories, and we’re not learning from each other. There’s this big gap of knowledge and understanding of the real timeline, of the kinds of symptoms that people might experience, particularly brain fog when we’re talking about workplaces, brain fog is a huge issue. It’s huge. We cannot continue to ask people to come back to work like nothing happened when their brains is literally not firing correctly. Neurologically, it’s not firing the way that it normally would, as it did before. 

Brain Fog

Talk about grief fog, the brain fog, because people hear that term and I always want to make sure because I, too, did a lot of educating and trying to understand why is my body, why am I not? I was like, why am I no longer a high-functioning individual? Why am I waking up and cannot remember the task that I’m doing? Please talk about the fog.

First of all, if you’re feeling it, the fog is real and it’s very normal. It’s normal enough that researchers are studying it. It’s like super normal. This is not one of you who is not losing your mind. For me, because I didn’t know that I thought that I somehow had some catastrophic brain disease that was instant onset. That’s really how I felt. I was so scared to name that to anybody because you already feel like an outsider and you already feel like there’s so much different about your world that to name this too and to admit to people who hadn’t stepped up in a big way like, “By the way, there’s also something wrong with my brain.” 

To say that to your boss, that’s a whole weird conversation. We’re not going to go into our employer and say, “There’s this thing and my brain doesn’t really work right, but I want to come to work.” The reality is our brain doesn’t work right. That’s not correct. It works exactly right, but it doesn’t work like we’re used to. The fog shows up exactly the ways you’ve identified. Remembering tasks, especially like sequence tasks, I have to do A to get to B to get to C to get to D. I would get to B and be like standing on an island looking around going, I don’t even know what I’m doing here.

I have no idea what’s next. This is something I used to do with complete automaticity and I now have no clue how to do it. To the point that I vividly remember one day standing in the shower. How showering is automatic? We all have a system. I do one thing, and then we do the next thing the same way every day. That’s why we have such brilliant ideas in the shower. I remember standing there one day and thinking, “How do I even do this? Like the water is on my head.” I’m in the shower. I can see the shower curtain. I know where I am. That’s great. 

Have I washed my hair? I don’t even really know. Have I washed my body? I’m not sure. I had to talk to myself for months. Step by step through my routine of having a shower. It’s to that level of disconnection from the things that used to be automatic. It impacts our connection with time, our ability to know what day and time it is gets disrupted. It impacts our reading comprehension. For tons of people, reading comprehension is really complicated. I’m a voracious reader. I’m really just now able to do non-fiction books. Non-fiction was impossible.

I couldn’t read a non-fiction book to save my life. I could read fluffy fiction and that was about it. It impacts that. It impacts our ability to remember things and directions. I’ve lived where I live for almost 50 years and I use my map app all the time now because to describe to someone else how to get somewhere is impossible. For me to get there, if it’s a well-trod path, sure. To think of anywhere new, I couldn’t remember the layout of my own city that I had lived in since I was a child. It’s really intense. What’s fascinating about it is, especially when it comes to a workplace or when you’re in a leadership position, there are some really simple things you can do to support that person. 

That technology allows us. We can have shared calendars. You can put events on there for them with reminders so that they know they don’t have to worry about it because someone is managing their calendar for them. They’re going to get a reminder when it’s 10 minutes till the meeting. They can gather themselves, remember what the meeting is about, and get to the right place or the right Zoom call. 

We can document deliverables. We can break down tasks. We have shared documents. There are so many things we can do in a workplace to allow people to be supported because we know their brain is foggy. There are all kinds of reasons, and they are literally neurological things happening in the brain as it rewires itself and makes sense of this new reality. There are really simple ways that we can help people.

Grief-Resilient Workplaces

Thank you. Does that go in line with the idea of transforming businesses into grief? Are resilient workplace programs some of the things you spoke about?

Yeah. When it comes to the business, we also would look at where your employees are bringing grief from their personal lives. Here are three again. Three is clearly my magic number. Where are employees bringing grief from their personal lives? Where are you creating grief in the workplace? Every business has grief embedded in it somewhere. Where do your customers or clients show up with grief? We need to be supporting our employees who are grieving their own stuff. We need to be supporting our collective grief experiences. 

We need to be supporting our clients who are bringing grief to us. We’re looking at those three areas. The employees we’re going to support through a really robust policy that gives the supervisor somewhere to start and has a follow-up plan, all the things you would have in a return to work policy from an injury, same idea, what adaptations can we offer, all of that. We look at our collective grief experiences and how we can talk about them differently. How can we name them so that it’s not taboo to talk about how upset we might be about something that happened?

If we launched a product that didn’t work or our quarterly earnings are down or we’ve had to restructure. All of those things happen regularly in businesses. We move offices. All of those things bring grief with them. How can we provide exceptional care for our clients who are bringing grief with them to our workplace? Especially if you’re a business that might be one of those first few phone calls, having some specialized staff that can help those clients makes a big difference. When we’re talking about loyalty and we’re wanting to really support our clients, it means everything. 

From my experience, I know what companies were amazing to deal with and which were horrible. I know that for many other grievers in my life and they know mine. If you think it doesn’t matter, we all have bigger spheres of influence than we understand. When I tell someone, “That company was terrible. How were they for you? They were terrible for you, too.” We’re all telling our friends if it was good, bad, or ugly. Even in a business sphere where ultimately the bottom line is important, most of us care deeply about people. Besides the bottom line costs, the human costs are unacceptable at this point. We can do so much better. 

Unacceptable Things To Say

Thank you for explaining that. You dived into this a bit and I want to circle back to it. People say things to people who are grieving at work, at home, places of worship. When you heard me just mention that, what came to mind to you?

It just makes me want to scream. If I had my dream, everyone would write down all of those cliches and platitudes that they’ve heard that they’ve maybe said and say, “That wasn’t what I meant.” Rip them up, and have a ceremonial burning. We need to return them to wherever they came from. I blame it on about 1950, when we were all pretending everything was okay. We need to send those back to Father Knows Best. It’s not okay. What it makes me think of too, is what I’ve come to see as us having the sense of open-endedness and closed backwards. 

We tend to say something really close that closes off the conversation. All of those cliches. Even the ones that have that place of worship foundation. They’re in a better place. No, I want them still to be here with me. No matter my belief system, I would rather they were beside me than some other glorious place. They’re no longer suffering. They would want you to be happy. Aren’t you over it yet? There’s a million of them and I just try my best not to remember. Most of those shut down the conversation. 

We’re trying to be supportive and open up the conversation, but what we say shuts it down. What we offer to help is that we’ve all heard it. Anything you need, give me a call. I care about you. We have that backwards. We need to say something open-hearted and open-ended, and we need to offer something that is a yes, no question that is very specific because the open-hearted I don’t even know what to say, but what I know is I care about you deeply and I’m here to figure this out with you. 

Something open-hearted, honest, and vulnerable, that’s what creates connection and builds the conversation. The offer needs to be, “Go to your fridge, open it up, tell me what’s missing, I’ll bring it to you this afternoon, or send me three recipes that freeze well and I will cook them for you and we’ll load your freezer with the food you’re actually going to eat.” For a neighbor, on Thursdays, “When I take out my garbage, can I sneak into your yard and take out yours too? I know about grief, but you probably don’t even know what day it is.” 

Very specific. Yes, no. Open up the conversation and make the specific offer over and over and over because at any given moment, we may or may not be able to take you up on it. That doesn’t mean we don’t want support. It doesn’t mean we don’t need support. It means in this instance, we are overwhelmed with other stuff and we cannot accept it. We’re not intentionally closing the door.

Profession And Expertise 

Thank you so much for that. You are a Certified Grief Educator, Transformational Coach, and Workshop Leader. How is that helpful to someone who is grieving? 

I think it’s helpful to someone grieving because I have a foundation of knowledge and skills that can help people. It’s based absolutely on my lived experience and what I’m independently researching and learning for myself and from my clients and conversation groups. It also has a foundation of training, understanding, and knowledge that I’m building upon. The foundation is really solid.

On top of that foundation, I can add all of my own knowledge and wisdom, and understanding. On that foundation, we can welcome in your knowledge, wisdom, and understanding because we all have that beyond our understanding that we can access. If we can find it and be able to share it with someone who can say, “Yeah, for where we’re at right now, for what you’re telling me about what’s going on, it does make a lot of sense to try that. 

Let’s give that a try and see what happens.” I was working with a client and saying like, “What do you envision? What’s your dream?” She’s at the point where she’s realized that what’s missing is she’s missing meaning and purpose. It’s like, “Then let’s put our dreaming cap on.” There are so many ways that I’m trained to just help you understand yourself better. My approach is absolutely not prescriptive. It’s expensive. It’s bringing out of you what you already know, what makes sense to you with my support and my scaffolding around you of all the things that I know. 

Thank you. How does a person get in contact with you? Is there a particular region where you work with people in person or virtually? How does that work for you, and what are the services you provide?

I do almost everything virtually. I think the biggest win out of the pandemic was we all discovered Zoom and how easy it was to connect with people around the world. I was just thinking about that the other day. I don’t think I have any local clients right now. Everybody is on Zoom. It’s all virtual, which is amazing. I have no aversion to local clients. They’re lovely. 

It’s nice to be able to meet face to face. I also think we’ve all learned that we can have really genuine conversations and connections in these little funny boxes that we’ve gotten to know and love. I do almost everything virtually. It has a bunch of positives to it besides that I can work globally. It also means that when we choose to, we can record things, and people can have them later. They can re-listen to things. It makes all of that so much easier. 

The best place to find me to learn about any of those things is on my website, which is SuzanneJabour.com. You can click on my Linktree and then you get where am I on Facebook? Where am I on LinkedIn? Where am I on Instagram or where’s my grief cafe meetup group? You can find all of the things on that link tree, but yeah, start there. 

Thank you. Do you do any on-site work? 

I do with businesses that are within my community or organizations. I’m in Vancouver, Canada. If you’re in the lower mainland, I absolutely will come to you. There really is something magical about speaking to people in person. I did an event recently for the chamber of commerce out in the suburbs and it was a women’s event and to be in that room of 60 women, there is something really magical about that in-person piece. I love working in person and I love the impact that I can have on a bigger geographic scale. 

I have asked you a lot of questions. Have we covered all the things that you thought about you wanted to discuss and have in this conversation?

I think so. I think we’ve given people a really great I love these exchanges as a really great modeling for what a conversation about grief can look like. I hope for people, it doesn’t feel heavy. It doesn’t feel overly sad. It’s very normal. Grief is so normal. I just am so appreciative of this space as a place where we can have a normal conversation. What did you learn? Here’s what I learned. I love that you shared some of your story to and what you’re creating with the widowhood.

I just think it’s so powerful for us to build community because it’s the isolation piece that I hear over and over and over again. As you said, that silence that is so loud is the thing that needs to get disrupted the most. I’m going to do it with the things that I’m working on, you’re doing it with the things that you’re working on, and all of us together can really make a big difference for people. I’m just so grateful to have had this time with you.

Question for Tina

Thank you. I’ll allow it to flip a little bit. Any questions of me that come to mind for you?

I would love to know more about all of the various services that you’re offering because I know you have your Discord and I know you just did your fundraiser that you do regularly, which is amazing. I know you do some journaling supplies. Tell me more about what you’re up to. Give us a chance to read again what you’re up to. 

Thank you for that question. I’m going back to the idea of threes. We have three ways in which we support people who are grieving. One is through social content. That social content is finding us on the big social media platforms. I hope I remember them all. There’s Facebook, there’s TikTok, there’s Instagram, there’s YouTube, there’s LinkedIn, and then there’s X. We put content on all of those different platforms because you and I both know that when people are grieving, they are up at the most absurd amount of time, and there’s randomly searching on the internet in some form of fashion for something about grief.

If you put in Widowhood, Real Talk with Tina, or WRTWT on any platform, you’re going to get some content that we have placed there. Those can be anywhere from some dark humor to something that is very meaningful and supported and encouraging for our weekly podcast. All of that content is seen at this point from our analytics in 99 different countries and over 3.4 million views. That tells me hurting people are finding our information. The second way in which we support people is through resources. 

We have two grief support groups a month. One is exclusively for men because we just know men love talking about their feelings. They want to do that all the time. We have a widower who hosts that group. He hosts that on the second Thursday of the month at 6:00 PM Eastern time. I host a grief support group open to everyone on the last Thursday of the month. On our website, we have an array of different books that you can find on different topics. Maybe if you’re trying to support a child. 

Maybe it’s something looking to the death of a pet, or maybe it is dating after being widowed or widower or managing your own grief. We have those books listed there. You can back-click and just have a book that you’re looking for. Then there are also mental health professionals, grief coaches that we have listed there as a reference. That is two. The third way is through events because we are always trying to create community. In the month of May, we have an honoring the founders’ birthday celebration where there my birthday is in the month of May. It is a fundraiser. 

Widowhood Real Talk with Tina is a registered 501(c)3 here in the US. Those funds go to the organization. In the month of August, when we’re recording this episode, we have an annual walkathon called Walk for Love. We ask people to walk one mile a day between those seven days and at the end of every day of their walk, they do a hashtag walk for love and hashtag their loved one’s name. That is very powerful for many reasons. One, other people seeing like-minded, experienced people being bold enough to say their loved one’s name in a video or to hashtag in place that empowers the griever to honor their loved one and to know they’re not alone.

When you’re grieving, you isolate to be able to get out of the house and also create a new habit, somebody regaining their health because your health is often impacted as you’re grieving. Some people may have mobile devices. Some people may walk in place at home. Some people have maybe never exercised. This is encouraging them to do something for their own wellbeing. We recommend that you contact your health professional and give it approval to do that. We have an event in the first weekend of November called Surviving the Winter Holidays, where we have mental health professionals come together. 

It is a virtual platform for people that is a paid event. Then it’s about a 90-minute workshop where you’re broken out into rooms to be able to get coping skills on managing the holidays. Right around October for a lot of people, it’s a blitz between there and January because sometimes there are just a lot of holidays between October and January, depending on what your preference is, that elicits a lot of memories, a lot of nervousness, a lot of not wanting to be with the crowd like normal. How do I navigate life in the absence of this person I love? 

The final event that we have in the year is Surviving the Winter Holidays, which is an in-person event here in Norfolk, Virginia, where we have different sponsors who provide food and beverages, and they sponsor the entire event for people to be able to come together. This is a Blue Jeans Low-Key Party because it can be super stressful thinking about my spouse not going to be there and getting dressed up and they’re not there. This is to come and have fun. If you want to dress up, fine. If you don’t want to, that’s not required. What it is is we’re stamping. 

It’s the first week of December and we’ve almost survived these winter holidays and we’re going to celebrate each other. We’ve had people come from New Jersey, Tampa, Florida, and Richmond. When you’ve been interacting with people virtually, there’s power in being able to meet someone in person. On the major holidays, such as here in the state, the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, I host a Zoom event that is found on Eventbrite. I think it’s five or $10. 

The reason for that, I used to do it for free, but I’ve learned, unfortunately, that people don’t always value what you give them. To give people some stake in the game, there is a $5 or $10 registration fee. I hold that space for people because people have found it very helpful before going into Thanksgiving to have someplace to lament, to know that I’m not the only person doing this and the ability. On those major holidays, I host a Zoom event to support people who are grieving and going through those individual holidays. 

Amazing. Thank you so much for all that you’re doing that has come out of your own tragic loss and really is making a difference for people. 

Episode Wrap-up

Thank you for what you are doing. The ability to take your experience and still be able to hear people’s individual process of their grief. Sometimes, you find people trying to mimic what they’re doing and imprint on other people versus hearing where you’re at, giving you space to grieve how you are. I’m here to be on this journey with you. Thank you for being here in this conversation. I will allow you to close this out to our readers.

What I will say to the Grievers and the supporters alike is it’s all about permission. If you’re grieving and you are struggling because there is no one there and no one listening, no one paying attention, no one helping, you have to give yourself the permission to just grieve the way that you need to. Unfortunately, Tina and my work is not done. Society is not quite ready for us yet. We often don’t get that permission from outside. You have to give it to yourself first.

What I would say to the supporters is that one of the most generous things that you could do is to intentionally and verbally give permission to the griever in your life because if you’re a safe space for them, they might not know that. If you can be a safe space, they need that. If you can be that person who brings grief’s groceries, they need that too. Everyone has a role to play in supporting someone who is grieving. When we step up into those roles, the connections we built, the friendships, and the bonds are valuable to us for the rest of forever. 

Thank you so much.

Important Links

• Susan Jabour
• Tear Soup
• Linktree – Suzanne Jabour
• Facebook – Suzanne Jabour
• Instagram – Suzanne Jabour
• Facebook – Widowhood Real Talk with Tina
• TikTok – Widowhood Real Talk with Tina
• Instagram – Widowhood Real Talk with Tina
• YouTube – Widowhood Real Talk with Tina
• X – Widowhood Real Talk with Tina

About Suzanne Jabour

Suzanne is a grieving mom who has found meaning in her loss through providing grief education – sharing how grief really works and how we can support people experiencing it.

Her three-pronged approach is designed to change the paradigm around grief. She works with grievers to chart their own path through Conscious and Curious Grief Coaching. She trains Grief Informed Leaders and transforms businesses through her Grief Resilient Workplace programs.

She is available as a speaker to share her story and help normalize grief as a healthy response to losses big and small. She has a BA and B Ed and decades of experience as a trainer. She is a certified Grief Educator, Transformational Coach and Workshop Leader.