Abby: How to Move On after Grief
August 29, 2024
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Today, we are hearing more from our beloved Abby Wambach about when her brother died. Go back to the last episode and please listen. We’re discussing what has been one of the hardest and most brutal-ful experiences of Abby’s life, losing her beloved brother, Peter, last year, at the end of last year.
At the end of the last episode, she talked about how the grief, one way to look at it, opened up a portal that allowed her to really grieve a lot of other things in her life, allowed her to learn some things about the way she wants to move forward in life. She has told us she’ll talk to us about those things that she learned and is learning during this past year, because the grief doesn’t, as far as I’ve seen, it hasn’t gone anywhere.
Abby Wambach:
No.
Glennon Doyle:
It might be changing or, but it’s just there, right? The grief is still there. This happened in the end of December 2023.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, five months ago.
Glennon Doyle:
We’re five months out. What do you want to tell us about what you’ve been learning?
Abby Wambach:
Well, interestingly, I’ve done as much research as I can, trying to figure out grief, logically.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like all of my books about embodiment.
Abby Wambach:
[inaudible 00:01:33].Glennon Doyle:
“I will learn embodiment through these eight books.”
Abby Wambach:
Intellectually-
Glennon Doyle:
“Please see this PowerPoint presentation regarding embodiment,” or my 12 books I have on minimalism on this shelf over here.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. The only way I can explain grief is that it’s just like a friend who’s with me all the time. Sometimes it’s sad, and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s happy, in some ways. Sometimes I can be in grief around thinking about my brother. My parents used to vacation down in Florida for the winters. They were like snowbirds. When I was mid-teens, they got this condo, and it was right on the water.
It was such a joy to go down there, because we were coming from Rochester, New York, which was freezing and always cold and always snowy. Every time we would go down there, we all would be so happy. I would spend almost all the time that I had in the water, boogie boarding, swimming, body surfing in the water. Back then, we didn’t, sunscreen wasn’t a thing, so just like burn, and then peel, the whole thing.
Glennon Doyle:
Thanks, Mom and Dad. Thanks.
Abby Wambach:
I know, but even, do you guys remember doing baby oil?
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, God.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, God, yes. We would sit on our roof with aluminum foil under our faces, and baby oil all over our faces and bodies.
Glennon Doyle:
Then when we were done with that, we would go to our job at the local tanning salon, which didn’t even pay us.
Amanda Doyle:
We can discuss any number of shameful things, but that is a bridge too far.
Glennon Doyle:
No, we’re leaving it. We worked in a tanning salon.
Amanda Doyle:
By the way, we didn’t work in a tanning salon. We didn’t get any money. What we got is free sessions at the tanning salon.
Glennon Doyle:
Why was anyone letting us live this way? Go ahead.
Amanda Doyle:
They weren’t, they weren’t. We did it, remember when my parents found out one time, and they came to the tanning salon and physically removed us?
Glennon Doyle:
No, I don’t remember that at all. Ugh.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s because it was just me.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh.
Amanda Doyle:
That they physically removed.
Glennon Doyle:
Are you serious?
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. Anyway, go ahead, Abby. You’re in the water.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, so I’m in the water, I’m in the water, body surfing, and my brother, Peter, unbeknownst to me, just happens to be looking out on the balcony to the water, and he sees me struggling. Well, I get caught in a riptide, and I literally cannot swim back to the shore, because I’m 14 or 15, and nobody’s taught me the rules on riptides, that you have to swim parallel to the shore, not perpendicular, not back to the shore. You have to swim away from where the riptide is, because then you can get back.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s a good metaphor. Carry on.
Abby Wambach:
Anyways, all of a sudden, I’m feeling like I can’t do this, so I start screaming. A second later, Peter is right there, and he swims me back to safety. I’m throwing up on the sand, and he just offhand, just like, “You okay?” I was like, “I don’t know.” He is like, “What the hell were you doing out there?” As a parent would do in the moment, blame you for this horrible circumstance we put ourselves in.
Glennon Doyle:
Defense mechanism. You had to have done something to cause this, because my grief is too strong.
Amanda Doyle:
Judgment.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m protecting myself from this terror that you could die by deciding you’ve done something wrong.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Go ahead.
Abby Wambach:
When somebody saves your life and then they die, it’s like, I have been riddled with so much guilt for some reason around not being able to afford him the same life grace. In my intensive therapy, I went through a lot of the trying to figure out why I needed to know what happened. It was so important to me, and I was shielding the need to understand it with, “Well, his heart health relates to my heart health. We are related.”
That had nothing to do with it. I have been under the firm belief, and we are all under the firm belief, that if you’re a good person, then good things will happen to you. This was against a basic tenet of belief that I have been operating under my whole life. This went straight against it, and I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.
I couldn’t understand how this thing, how this person who was such a good guy, he was such a good guy that his kids no longer played hockey in Rochester, because they all are gone doing their own things now. He still was going to the local hockey league, DJing between periods at the hockey rink.
Glennon Doyle:
He was such a community… It made me feel so… Hearing from all of the different communities in Rochester that he was entrenched in, and served in, and showed up in, it made me understand that that is the most beautiful thing in the world, just being an irreplaceable part of a real community that you can see and touch and feel. People put their… Tell them about the stickers.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. This specific hockey league, they ended up putting PW, my brother’s initials, on the back of their helmets in remembrance of him, which is so sweet, but none of this made sense to me. Peter was a good guy. He was a good person. He didn’t let people bully, he was like that guy. How can this guy be the one that dies early?
In my intensive therapy, I understood that the system that I was operating under was faulty, that I was placing such importance on being good, as if there is such a thing, and as if that would even matter anyway.
Amanda Doyle:
You mean on you?
Abby Wambach:
Yes, my life.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re trying to meet the standards of the rubric you’re living under.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
If me, Abby, is good, me, Abby, is safe.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right. If I am good, if I am kind, if I am generous, then good things will happen to me.
Amanda Doyle:
Or at least not really, really bad things.
Abby Wambach:
Right, at least I won’t, yeah, exactly. This was like, “Wait a second.” This has had to make me rethink the whole operating system. Think through what is good, and what is bad, and why, because it’s all a perspective. What I think is good, someone else might think is bad, I don’t know. It’s like this big illusion that we all live under, that capitalism, patriarchy, religion, politics, politics probably not so much anymore, but having to reorient or to reestablish an operating system for myself, that felt like such a tall order.
This desire, I love a good challenge, I like to figure shit out, PS, so did my brother, and I really understand deeply now that it has been causing me so much suffering, trying to understand. We will never know why or how he died. Even though we have his death certificate, we will never know what caused his real cause of death. We will never understand why it happened.
Amanda Doyle:
Can I ask a quick question?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
When you say it was causing you so much suffering to try to understand this thing, you would never understand, meaning literally what happened to my brother?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. Just going in circles.
Amanda Doyle:
How did he die?
Abby Wambach:
Just going in circles on it. How did he die? Why did he die? Then I would start putting judgment on him. “Well, was he healthy enough, and did he take his medicines? Did he go to the doctor enough?” All this bullshit, that it insinuates that had he done all that stuff, he would still be alive.
Amanda Doyle:
He would still [inaudible 00:10:19].
Glennon Doyle:
Right. Then the same level, the suffering that comes in trying to figure out literally what happened in the micro of those moments, and weeks, and months, is the same suffering that trying to make sense of why did it happen in a spiritual worldview perspective.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s as if you can figure out the first thing, you can figure out the second thing. The truth is you’ll never fucking figure out either of those things.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right. That’s exactly right. That’s what was so hard for me to even start putting my head around. Like, “Okay, I’ve been sold a bill of goods around this good bad thing. Okay, I understand that now, okay,” moving to the next phase of, “Can I accept not knowing? Is that possible?” The real truth, if you want to get to the real truth-iest truth of every truth, is that we will never know why or how somebody dies or where they go.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you think that not knowing and really embracing not knowing is the only loving way forward? When I think back on that time or myself, when we don’t embrace not knowing, then we insist on knowing. What knowing does is it makes us accuse and accuse and accuse and accuse, because it doesn’t stop with you didn’t maybe take care of your health. Then it goes to like, “Well, this goddamn town is unhealthy, and if you didn’t live here…”
“Oh, wait, but what if my parents weren’t like that? What if their parents weren’t like that?” The judgment, when you have to know, you can’t know. You take back your power by judging, judging, judging-
Abby Wambach:
Blaming.
Glennon Doyle:
… And blaming, blaming, blaming. It just, until you said that, never struck me that not knowing, surrendering to not knowing, is love.
Abby Wambach:
That is absolutely right. The extension of it, because we’ll get to where did he go in a second, but all of my grief throughout all of my life, I think has been perpetuated by the disease of needing to understand it. All of the heartbreaks, why would they not want me, and then ruminating and looping on that. Peter dying, how did this happen? The more therapy and the more honest, the more really, because the therapy I’ve been doing is about real honesty, and truth, and trying to get to the root of it all.
The root of it all, and I know that this is going to sound so fucking crazy, is that we won’t ever for sure know anything. The only thing to do is to be like, “Interesting. That’s really, really interesting,” because it is. I turned a corner when I started to look at it as this experience that he has had, this experience that he has walked through that I have not yet. I will, and I think I’ve mentioned it on the podcast before, but I have had this outsized fear of death.
It’s because I have been trying to understand it, and there is no way I will ever understand it until I have experienced it. What an interesting thing to suffer with your whole life, without letting go and surrendering to the not knowing. That has been my work. The weirdest thing, and I don’t know if you can tell, but it has transformed the way that I think about everything. I am more curious. I am less judgmental. I am like, I get shit done like I can handle tasks, but when talking about this kind of stuff, I have loosened my grip on needing to know, and I have surrendered to the fact that I will probably never know.
I don’t know what I know, good and bad, everything, the veil has been dropped, in a way, where I think that I hit this roadblock that I kind of kept hitting throughout my life. I was like, “Yeah, no, that doesn’t make sense. I really just want to know. I just really got to figure… I’ll figure it out one day.” I think that the art of grief of where I am, and the fear that I’ve had with death, the art of this is the letting go of the need to know, and the surrendering to what actually is.
What actually is is that this is the human being’s experience. The human being’s experience is to be born, and who knows what happens in the middle, and then to die.
Amanda Doyle:
Then who knows what happens after that?
Abby Wambach:
Then that’s the other thing that I’ve been riddled with. Where did he go?
Glennon Doyle:
What the Pod Squad needs to know is how hard-earned every single thing she just said is. This is not something she read. This is, for months, Abby would sit down at dinner and say, look me in the eye and say, “I need you to tell me again, where do you think he went?” With a full on seriousness, like, “Where is he?” God help me, I just thought I was supposed to try to answer you every night. I don’t know, what were those conversations even like?
Isn’t it interesting to try to go back to that time when you were so in it? We’ve had many experiences like this over our marriage, but it felt like getting this rubric out of you was an exorcism.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s kind how it felt, like, “Where is he?” I needed certainty. I needed date.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re a little mad. You’re a little mad.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. Why can’t you tell me?
Glennon Doyle:
Why can’t you tell me?
Abby Wambach:
You know a lot of shit.
Amanda Doyle:
You with all your bible thumping and your whatever.
Glennon Doyle:
A lot of good [inaudible 00:16:54]-
Amanda Doyle:
You are when it comes down to it.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly. When we really need you, you got nothing.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah,
Glennon Doyle:
I had stuff. It was just all shit.
Amanda Doyle:
Just wasn’t passing the sniff test.
Glennon Doyle:
No, not for Abby.
Abby Wambach:
It’s interesting. I’ve talked to my brothers, and sisters, and my parents, and everybody’s doing grief in their way, and there’s no judgment here. I think that everybody’s relationship with Peter was different than the one I had with him. Their experience with his loss is going to be different than my experience with his loss will be.
It’s impossible to go through this experience without centering yourself. When you are dealing with somebody who’s passed away, it’s just instinct. You’re like, “Oh, my gosh, that’s going to happen to me. Where will I go? What will my family do? How will they respond?” One thing I’ve learned in this experience is that before this experience, I thought, oh, I’m going to have a pretty nailed down will, and what I want for my services, and whatever.
I now would alter that to, I do think the services, for me, this is no judgment on other people, but for me, the services and stuff that happens after I die are for the living and whatever makes them feel like they can say goodbye to me in their way. That is what I want for that experience.
Glennon Doyle:
You mean the kids?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, you and the kids. I don’t mean to put you under more work. I’m happy to plan it if you want, but…
Amanda Doyle:
Just make, at least make a playlist, okay? That’s really hard for Glennon.
Abby Wambach:
I’ll be dead. I’ll be in a different place, wherever that might be. If it’s in nowhere land, then I’m in nowhere land. If it’s in heaven, then I’m there. If it’s spiritual energy, and I return back to the well in which we came, then that’s where I go. We will never know where that is. The living will never know. It’s like the little game we’re playing down here with ourselves, like, “Oh, I’m going to figure this out.”
Religion didn’t do it for me. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to do atheism.” Then I was like, “Oh, I’ll just be uber spiritual.” All of that is pointing to some idealism of knowing. I have found for me that that created more suffering, this belief that I would figure it out.
Amanda Doyle:
I have never heard anyone talk about it this way, Abby. It’s so fascinating to me, because as you’re talking, I’m thinking of all of these things. The way you’re describing needing to know, to me, it’s like, one of the reasons we need to know is completely about self-preservation.
It’s the same way, it’s like when your marriage falls apart, everyone wants to know exactly what happened, because really they want to know, “Okay, look, my relationship’s different than that, so my marriage isn’t going to fall apart.”
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
When you need to know what happened, you’re like, “Tell me something that I can use to assure myself that I am also not going to die when I don’t deserve to die.”
Abby Wambach:
That’s exactly right.
Amanda Doyle:
If you have on one side that self-protection, self-preservation, which, as you’re describing, if you have that your whole life, every day of your life, the suffering we go through, trying to protect ourselves, in the little bitty ways and the big huge ways, is so sad. The opposite of self-protection is surrender. You’re surrendering to exactly that, that you’re never going to fucking know. You’re surrendering to the idea that there is no way to protect yourself, that you are just as likely for anything to happen to you as anybody else.
None of it makes any sense. It’s like those ideas of God are on either side of that too. It’s like, one side of God is like, “Follow these rules. We can know. We can know. We can judge.” The other side of God, indigenous cultures, the word for God is mystery. What you’re surrendering to is mystery.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
Your only belief is in mystery.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Then I think you think you learn, or if beingness is any lesson to me, it’s like, what you learn is the thing you thought was the burden, the fact of death, the thing you thought was a burden is not the burden. The burden is trying to figure out the thing. Trying to figure out your grief, figure out God, figure out life and death, figure out why good things happen to bad people, and vice versa, is, I think of the Prometheus, like the boulder on your back that you will spend your entire life carrying and will never, ever…
It’s not the finally figuring it out, solving life, solving death, solving grief that lets you put the rock down. It’s the admitting that you will never figure it out, and you don’t have to. It’s putting down the biggest burden of your life that you don’t have to figure it out. Since you don’t have to figure that out, you don’t have to blame anybody for it, including yourself.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. I think one of the things, I just want to say this, because I think it’s important. Everything is the most important, and nothing is important at the exact same time. I know that sounds so fucking bonkers, but it’s true to me. Even though I believe in every cell of my being that I don’t know, I have no control over how and when I will die, I’m still going to treat my body healthy.
I’m going to try to eat as well as I can. What I’m saying here is that I have no control. What I have been doing over the course of my life is I have been suffering with the idea that I can control the longevity of my life. It’s the suffering from the idea. It’s not the actual doing of it.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s the intention behind. It’s like, two people could be doing the exact same thing.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
If one’s doing it with certain intention, they’re suffering while they do it. If the other one isn’t, then they’re not. Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
Yes, yeah. I have a complicated genetics history. We have heart disease in our family, and thyroid stuff, and diabetes stuff. I’ve been very proactive slash… What is the word?
Amanda Doyle:
Neurotic?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. What’s it called when you think you’re sick all the time?
Amanda Doyle:
Hypochondriac.
Glennon Doyle:
Hypochondriac.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, slash I doom. I’m very in tune and in touch with my body, probably to a fault, but what that does is causes me a lot of suffering, thinking about, oh, my gosh, have I gotten all the tests done? Am I alive? Am I going to be able to survive all this? Both of these things can be true. At the same time, I’m just trying to relieve some of the neuroses around the way that I think about how much control I actually have here.
The same goes with grief. I think so many of us struggle inside of grief because we want it to be over with. What I have learned, like I said earlier, or the previous episode, is that grief has become a friend to me, in that I am developing a real true relationship with it, because it’s the access point to all of the most intense feelings that I feel, the most intense sadness, the most intense anger.
Yes, I can experience those without being in active grief, but this is a little treasure trove of intensity that is super interesting. Yeah, it’s hard, yes. Don’t want to be there forever, but developing a relationship with those emotions and the experience of it is, I think, one of the greatest gifts of this time for me. One, because I’d never had a relationship with grief before, and two, it’s like trying to reorganize the way we think about grief.
It’s like grief, oh, rather than, “Oh, this is interesting. You’re like a little professor that you’ve come to teach me some shit.” Glennon, you’ve talked about this, when pain comes to your door and comes knocking, you let pain in, and ask it to sit down and teach you everything that you need to know. That’s how I feel right now about this. I actually, I’ve developed a relationship, a close relationship with this friend of mine, grief, so much so that I don’t want it to leave.
I wonder if this is a common thing for folks who go through grief, because it’s my direct line to Peter. I can get… In my therapy, I’ve laid some breadcrumbs back towards certain emotions, because as you get away from grief, you can forget. It’s easy to move on. It’s easy to forget. I have laid some breadcrumbs back to even the stuff that brought me to my knees, because it’s this full body, “Peter’s here,” experience, and that there is a little weird comfort in that, that, “Oh, he isn’t forgotten.”
Now, all of us, I don’t care what you believe, but all of us, in order to keep Peter’s spirit alive, that now lives in our memories. To me, memory isn’t just about, “Oh, I remembered the thing.” It’s like, “What kind of energy did that create throughout my whole body?” How can I reverberate, or send, emit Peter energy out into the world, so that he’s still with us in some way, shape, or form? Whether it’s like the blinking lights, where I’m like, I cry. I still cry sometimes. I’ve been crying this morning.
I’m looking at a picture of him, I keep a picture of him on my bedside table, and he’s on my phone. The other day, I thought, gosh, I wonder, it feels kind of masochistic, in a way, to always be confronting it, this grief thing. Maybe it is, on some level, but I also think it’s this little muscle that I’m learning to work, that it’s like, “Oh, there’s that intensity, there’s the anger, there’s the sadness.” Watching his kids play sports, and graduate from college, and all this stuff that’s happened, that would’ve happened in his life had he been alive.
Every single time, I’m just like a wreck. I’m like so sad, sad for his family, sad for him. I talked to my mom, and she’s still going through it pretty intensely. It’s been such an extraordinarily, I don’t even want to say difficult, but that’s the only English word I can think of. It’s been strenuous, it’s been taxing. It’s been, in moments, all-consuming. It’s been confusing. It’s been infuriating, and tragic, and shocking.
There are definitely days that I’m fucking tired of it. I just want to have a day that I don’t experience any of this stuff. I think it will get easier. I think that my relationship with this specific grief will get easier, especially as I keep dealing with all the cars to that train of grief that I’ve carried throughout my life.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you describe the train one more time? I think it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard, and it was in the last episode. Describe how you thought about it first.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. Well, it was actually said to me by my therapist, grief can also feel like a train, where the first car shows up. It could either be your first real experience with grief or the most recent one, you choose. Then it’s just carrying all of these other trains, all these other cars on the train of your grief, of the different moments in your life where you experience grief, some you might have dealt with.
For me, I really hadn’t journeyed down this train. This train did not have… All of the windows and doors were shut. Now, I feel like I’ve gone through, I’ve walked through all of the aisles of every grief that I’ve experienced in my life, and some of the windows on those cars are open, getting some air to them. Some of the cars on that grief train, those windows are still shut.
Glennon Doyle:
Yet. Yet, right?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, yet. They’re still shut. I will work my way there.
Amanda Doyle:
Slow and steady, slow and steady.
Abby Wambach:
I don’t know, I’m pissed at Peter for leaving. I understand that he probably didn’t have much to do with it, but I’m just still a little bit mad at him.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. Thank you for saying that. I think that people don’t admit that very often, of anger to the departed, and I think it’s very, very normal.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. I’m just like, “Gosh, man. We miss you.” I know his kids miss him, and what an interesting thing, to be mad at somebody who’s dead.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, it’s like, we all want to leave the party. We can’t just go. The rest of us are here suffering. It feels a little bit like that. Like, “Oh.” It’s such a beautiful thing, just to focus on the missing, though.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
The missing is what’s left. It’s like, remember that beautiful moment when Stephen Colbert used to ask everybody , “What happens after we die?” Everybody would spin these convoluted messages based on their own spirituality or their own…
Abby Wambach:
Are you going to talk about Keanu Reeves?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
Yes, thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Keanu Reeves just looked at him, and he took a moment, and then he said, “I think that when we die, the people who loved us will miss us very much.”
Amanda Doyle:
God.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. It’s beautiful.
Glennon Doyle:
I think about it all the time. It’s like, that’s the only thing we know, and that is enough.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
Who’s to say that isn’t the knowing? We’ll never know. We’ll never know. If we know that, is that not the answer? Is there not something deeply beautiful and spiritual about that, that we will go, and the people that love us will miss us very much?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, it’s beautiful, and it’s true. Honestly, it’s interesting, because some of my grief and heartbreak that I’ve had throughout my life, I would compartmentalize some of it. I would have certain times of my life, or just in a day, where if I was feeling longing for somebody, that I would spend some time that day, and I would long for them. I would consciously think about them, and think stories about them.
When I was laying in bed, where I would fantasize about whatever thing could happen to bring us back together. It kept me company, in a way. It was this alternate reality that I was experiencing, that the missing or the longing, it wasn’t a direct one-to-one replacement, but it was something, and I find myself doing that with Peter.
We always do, my family of origin, they always go to this special place every summer. It’s my favorite place in the world up in Canada and the Thousand Islands, and I’m going to go this year because Peter was the one that would weed, and mow the lawn, and set the place up, and make sure it was like, as everybody remembered it, nostalgic-wise. Then he would spend the entire fucking day driving kids on boats, whether it was just a boat ride, or wakeboarding, or water skiing, or getting on a jet ski.
He just was the guy who did it all. I think that his presence is going to be pretty palpable being missed this year. I think a lot of us are going to try to get up there and not take his place, but try to fill in the void. The missing thing, yeah, it sucks to miss somebody. It’s also kind of where he lives now, for me. He lives in this place, this alternate reality of my heart, and my soul, and my brain, a fantasy land. I dream about him.
I remember the first time I dreamt about him. I woke up and told Glennon, I’m like, “I saw my brother in my dream,” and that felt so good. My consciousness is like, “Okay, we can do this now.” I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to this missing thing. I think what also happens in grief is that people get tired of it, which I totally understand, and there’s absolutely no judgment coming from me here. I get it.
I really want to intentionally go towards allowing more space and room in my life for grief to show up whenever it needs to. Like I said, it feels like this access to my brother and to the heartbreaks of my life. I like to think that I will be able to sustain a life with grief, not just joy and happiness. It’s like, “Oh, no, the pie is the pie.” It’s almost like this one slice had a question mark on it, and I never was able to label it. I feel like now, I’m able to see the full pie chart of my life, of myself, of my consciousness, of my parts.
Glennon Doyle:
The humanity.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. I’m able to write in with big, bold letters, “Grief. Grief lives here, grief lives here, and I want it to live here. I’m not afraid of it. It will not kill me.” At least I don’t think.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s a mystery.
Abby Wambach:
It’s a mystery.
Glennon Doyle:
It will.
Abby Wambach:
It’s not linear, it’s like a circle that keeps kind of changing and morphing. The thing that I am most proud of myself at this point in this process is truly believing that there is so much that we don’t know, and there is so much out of all of our control, and that a beautiful life is so important, and also not important at all. Everything is everything, and also, everything is nothing. Does that make any sense?
Glennon Doyle:
I’m telling you, it’s like living with Yoda now. It’s amazing what this work has done in you. I’m just amazed. I’ve been listening to you talk about this for five months, but hearing you say it all in this one capsule, I just admire you so much. I think you’re absolutely brilliant.
Abby Wambach:
Thank you. Also, I don’t mean to speak on behalf of grief.
Glennon Doyle:
No. You’re speaking on behalf of your grief.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
I love how you describe it as a friend, and when you’re talking about it, it makes me feel like this little friend… You know how you have a friend who always wants to talk deep and always wants to stay close to the bone, and you love that friend, but sometimes you just want them to shut up and you want to talk to your friend who wants to talk about Zach Efron [inaudible 00:38:32]? The grief is that friend. The grief is like this podcast. Sometimes you just want something lighter, but it does help.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
I heard you talk recently about how I feel like language with you, you have come up against frustration with language not being sufficient to explain what’s going on in you, or you’re so carefully choosing your words because you’re trying to convey something that is beyond words. It feels to me like you’re bumping up against this word grief, and the hugely negative connotation of it.
When you’re saying, “Grief is my touchstone to Peter, grief is my touchstone to my past griefs,” what I really hear you saying is, “This thing, grief, is my touchstone to myself, to this self that I didn’t know that I was brave enough to explore, to this fullness of life experience.” It’s like this broken thing, but that really is not negative, really, all in itself, right?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, it’s hard.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s the ache. It’s the ache that is both love and pain, that is both beauty and ugliness. That is… You cannot have one without the other.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right. That’s exactly right. I think that that’s probably the greatest teaching of this experience is that I’ve learned that I’m not afraid of what happens after death, because I’ll be dead. I am so afraid of losing life because I love living.
I’ve learned that that’s interesting, especially because the only sure thing about living is dying, and so I have to accept both if I want one of them. I can’t not accept death, because death is life. Death is a part of life. Death might be the actual point, I don’t know.
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t know. I once had this vision of myself, and that all I’m trying to do is figure things out. I can just figure it out in my head.
Abby Wambach:
I know, I know. I’ve been watching it since my revelations, and I’m just thinking lots of things.
Glennon Doyle:
I had this vision of myself as a little girl, and I was walking through a forest that was like another realm, and I had a little notebook, as I always do, and I was trying to figure something out. Out of frustration, I just yelled to the guy, “I don’t know.” What happened, as you know, babe, was this explosion of joy from the universe. Fireworks went off, flowers exploded. The realm celebrated.
I was like, “What the fuck just happened?” Then I waited a few minutes and I said it again, “I don’t know.” Explosion of joy. It was like the universe was like, “Oh, she gets it. Finally.” The truth-iest truth you can say, and the most beautiful gift you can give yourself and your people in the universe is just to celebrate the I don’t know forever. It’s like magic words.
Abby Wambach:
They are, and I have avoided them my whole life, and I feel like I’ve been saying, “I don’t know-“
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, you have.
Abby Wambach:
… So much.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. It’s putting down a burden that you never had to carry.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. I thought that I needed to know things for my worthiness, for respect…
Glennon Doyle:
Safety.
Abby Wambach:
… For safety, all this stuff. It’s just not true.
Glennon Doyle:
Grief is the portal into the I don’t know, which allows you to breathe a little bit.
Abby Wambach:
Maybe
Glennon Doyle:
Maybe. We don’t know. Pod Squad, we do know that we love you, and we will see you back here next time.
Abby Wambach:
Thanks for listening, y’all. Really appreciate it.
Glennon Doyle:
If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you’d be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you, because you’ll never miss an episode, and it helps us, because you’ll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner, or click on follow.
This is the most important thing for the pod. While you’re there, if you’d be willing to give us a five star rating and review, and share an episode you love with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle, in partnership with Odyssey. Our executive producer is Jenna Weiss-Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren LoGrasso, Allison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz.