Ep 84 | Kimberley Pittman-Schulz

Childhood Grief, Grieving Voices Guest, Grieving Voices Podcast, Pespective, Podcast, Sibling Loss | 0 comments

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz | Finding Peace Amidst the Ashes

SHOW NOTES SUMMARY: 

When Kimberley was a child, a house fire would change her life as she knew it forever. Both her older and younger sisters both perished in the fire. However, Kimberley wouldn’t learn the truth of how that life-altering moment came to be until her 30’s.

Growing up, Kimberley’s father also worked a job that kept the family on the road. As a result, Kimberley found it challenging (and heartbreaking) to forge deep connections with others because they were constantly on the go.

Kimberley found her voice through writing after experiencing a two-year “loss limbo” after the death of her dear neighbor and her mother’s death years ago. She’s since written a field guide for living with loss without losing yourself.  Additionally, on top of Covid-19, she remains at her husband’s side as his health declines as well.

Remnants of the sadness continue to ebb and flow throughout her life. However, Kimberley has learned tools that have enabled her to find peace amidst the ashes of her grief.

RESOURCES:

• Ep. 40 Dr. Chris Kerr | Death Is But a Dream: End-of-Life Experiences
• Book | Grieving Us: A Field Guide for Living with Loss Without Losing Yourself

CONNECT:

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• LinkedIn

Victoria Volk 0:08
This is Victoria of the Unleashedheart.com, and you’re listening to grieving voices, a podcast for hurting hearts who desire to be heard. Or anyone who wants to learn how to better support loved ones experiencing loss. As a 30 plus year griever and advanced Grief Recovery methods specialist, I know how badly the conversation around grief needs to change. Through this podcast, I aim to educate grievers and non Grievers alike, spread hope and inspire compassion toward those hurting. Lastly, by providing my heart with ears and this platform, Grievers had the opportunity to share their wisdom and stories of loss and resiliency. How about we talk about grief, like we talked about the weather? Let’s get started. Thank you for tuning in. It’s another episode of grieving voices. And today, my guest is Kimberly Pittman Schultz, she is an award winning poet and author who writes teaches and speaks about death, living mindfully, and being a force for change in the world. With 25 years plus, as a philanthropy leader, and charitable and end of life planning advisor, Kimberly has worked with incredibly diverse people looking for meaning after the loss of a spouse, partner, child, sibling, parent, grandparent, or beloved animal. Her focus is helping people cultivate joy every day, so they can be so they can more deeply experience the meaning and beauty of their one. And only fives, thank you for being here.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 1:43
Thank you, great to be here. With you and your listeners.

Victoria Volk 1:47
Just looking at your website. I felt like I like to look at people’s website and to get a feel for you know, the vibe survive. And so I actually heard something not that long ago that you can really understand someone by the written word, like what they write. And it’s like, when you meet your favorite author, like you’ve been reading all their books, and then you meet them in person. But you’re always gonna have like the some sort of judgment, right? When you first meet them? Well, they’re not really what I thought they’d be, but you fell in love with the writing, right? So you but you feel like you know them because of the writing. And so just, that’s where I really look at people’s websites. And I feel either either I feel that connection, or I don’t, and I felt it with you. And that’s why I had asked, you know, I wanted to have you on. So please share what brings you to grieving voices?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 2:45
Well, besides your lovely invitation, I really listened to some episodes, I think you do something different with this with this podcast, with your guests with your audience, than anyone else is doing. Because you really do allow people to spend some time with their loss story. So often, we’re so focused on how do we heal and move forward, which is a big part of what I’m about, right? You know, I don’t, you know, there is a degree to which you need to spend time in that story and really experience that story. And one of the things I start out with in my book, and it’s one of the first practices is telling yourself your own loss story, because so often, we’re telling our stories to other people. And we’re always tweaking them because we have a different audience, right. So you might say one thing, they’ll coworker, something else to a friend, something else to your pastor or your rabbi. But so often we don’t pause and really just sit with our own loss and process it. And it’s hard. I’m not saying that’s an easy thing to do. And you don’t necessarily want to do it at certain points of your process. But that’s one of the things I feel like listening to how you interact with your guests, is that people have a chance to sit with their story a little bit and then to move forward with what has come out of that experience. And it’s still coming out. Because you know it I like to say last comes along. And then it comes along with us for the rest of our lives. So it’s a it’s an ongoing process. So I’m really excited and honored to be here talking with you.

Victoria Volk 4:15
Thank you. I love that last part when you said it comes along and along and along and along write it because wherever you, you take your past with you wherever you go, right? Yeah, I had one guest. She’s actually a mentor for me through the Grief Recovery Institute and she said your past becomes your present until it’s healed or your past is your present until it is healed. So that was definitely true for me. So thank you for listening to my podcast and for your kind words. I really appreciate it. What are the losses that have been most impactful for you?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 4:57
Oh, you know, one of the advantages and disadvantages, I suppose and being on the planet for a while as there are over time, you’re going to have loss and you’re going to have multiple losses. I think, obviously, for me, there were two sets of losses that really have impacted my life the most. When I was about three and a half years old, I lost two sisters in a house fire, we were all in the same room. And I won’t go into the details except to say that I was the one that was able to rescued and my other two sisters could not. And so obviously, that was a big, a big impact for me and my, my mother could not ever talk about it. And so as a kid, I really, ever no one was supposed to talk about it. And so there was that whole trying to process it as a little kid and then moving through your life. So that was at age three, at age 43. My mother was dealing with small cell lung cancer terminal, and two weeks before she died. So we knew at some point that this was going to come to an end, that was not a big surprise, although it’s still a surprise when you’re actually there. But you’re kind of grieving that anticipatory grief, then of a friend and my next door neighbor, two weeks before my mother died, killed herself, shot herself in the heart, and happened to do it under the tree that my kitchen window looks out on. And so So I have these series of losses, there been many other losses. You know, I have companion animals that I’ve grieved deeply over and still missed. Even I have other cats in my life. Those two sets, losing my sister and then losing Ruth was my was my friend and neighbor and my mother, within two weeks of each other, that were really kind of big events and pivotal for me, and in shaping who I am.

Victoria Volk 6:44
Wow, I can’t imagine. Can I ask were you the one that found your neighbor?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 6:50
No, she did it at night, Memorial Day weekend. And it’s interesting, because I had this practice. Every evening and I still have this practice. I stopped it for about two years after she died. But when we go out, I go out every night and say good night of the night. And I just kind of take in the night and I feel moments of gratitude. And I said good attention that to people and that night. For whatever reason. I was tired. I don’t remember why. But I did not do that. And I was woken up at one o’clock in the morning, my husband and I by knock by the sheriff on the door telling us just acid we’ve heard anything seen anything. And I just immediate it’s a weirdest thing. I just the weirdest thing. But I just knew immediately something was wrong with Ruth. And Eva said that to my husband. He goes, Oh, you know, I’m sure it’s nothing. And of course, it was very much something we learned the next day.

Victoria Volk 7:42
I asked that because you’d said your window faces. So I just Yeah,

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 7:47
Well, fortunately, I did not witness that. And by the next morning, she they had removed her. I mean, she was no longer there. But I could never, I mean, Victoria could just never look at that tree again, the same way. I mean, I just could never, you know, to me, I’m very nature oriented person. So the tree instead of being the symbol of growth in life became you know, the tree of life, right? That’s the ultimate archetype was just really a great tree of sadness for me to look at every day, and just think about her being there. And, you know, and anyone who’s and I know many of your listeners have dealt with all that goes through your head in a suicide all the should have could have if I’d only and then what was going through that you’re just trying to put yourself in that person’s place trying to imagine how you your life is so broken that you get to the point that you’ve made that choice for yourself, you know, so So Now fortunately, I didn’t witness that. But it did become every morning every night. Every time I looked out that window it was really tough because we just a reminder that roof wasn’t Ruth, Ruth wasn’t there anymore.

Victoria Volk 8:51
You still live there?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 8:53
No, no, I was became very difficult to live there. And then after my mother passed away, we were living in Pennsylvania then and my my husband’s originally from California, we lived much of my adult life in California. We knew at some point we wanted to get back west. And that moving to Washington State before returning back to California. But I will say that Korea became very hard to live there to live in Pennsylvania just because my father was still there and siblings were still there. And I I didn’t grow up there. But I had lived there for seven years and moved there to be closer to my family. Ironically, when I left California, I would say to people, people say you don’t move from California to Pennsylvania, you move from Pennsylvania to California, you’re doing it backwards. And I’m like, Well, I just want to get to know get to know my family before we all leave the planet. And I kind of said that off the cuff and how true it turned out to be in terms of really developing, you know, getting close, not living to my parents and 20 over 20 years. So I’m so glad I made that move, but it became really difficult to stay there particularly to stay in that house. After Ruth’s left.

Victoria Volk 9:58
That’s even more great too, right?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 10:01
Yeah, that was probably one of the big mistakes I made. Because not long after that I was offered a position. I had been leading a CEO of a community foundation in Pennsylvania, and I’ve been offered a comparable position in the West. We knew we wanted to get back west, I had this feeling of just you want to flee, which sometimes happens with loss, right? You have this feeling if you just want to run away. And so in the midst of all this, and then my father is in his ended lifetime, he he continued another two and a half years. But you know, so you then move across country and you start a new job, and we didn’t move back to California back move to Washington State, which was, I loved making I loved about living there. But that’s a lot of change at one time. And looking back, it’s like that, that would not be one of my recommendations. To anyone at that point. Anyway, I think it was too soon, but I’m human.

Victoria Volk 10:55
Right? We learn as we go. But yeah, that’s a great tip, though, to give Grievers it’s, you’re not thinking necessarily clearly right? You can’t really tune into your own intuition and your own guidance system, because you’re so filled with emotional stuff. So I think before you make any life changing decision like that, like a move across the country, or a job or anything, it’s really take that time to settle into yourself and maybe kind of get some guidance maybe and how to tap into your own knowing. Right?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 11:33
Absolutely. And I think even though, you know, we talked about, you have multiple griefs over lifetime. Each of those, even though we do have griever styles, and it’s not the you categorizing anyone in any one way we do know, there’s some general styles of grieving that people fall into. And then you’ve got things like gender and gender orientation, or introvert extrovert, all those things play into how we grieve. But I’ve also found that each loss and different points in our life results in different responses to grief and loss as well. So it’s not like because you dealt with one loss this way that that means the other, you know, the next loss is the same way. And so what surprised me about my mother’s loss, in particular, besides being tied to this other loss, is, you know, I knew she was going to be passing away, I had all that anticipatory grief. And I expected it to be difficult, but I didn’t know it would lead me into two years of what I call lost limbo, because I just really, really, really was lost. My father who in many ways I felt closer to it was difficult to lose him. But I kind of rebounded from that much, much better. And I do think it has to do at a more complicated relationship with my mother, than I did with my father. And sure, that’s all of that. But that’s the other thing you don’t know. So you need to, you need to kind of spend a little time again with with your give your grief a little chance to unfold. So you know, what is it going to be like? Because initially, you don’t necessarily have a whole lot of control, you’re kind of following it before you learn how to, you know, reintegrate it into a new lie?

Victoria Volk 13:03
Did it help you too, and I don’t know, maybe you weren’t able to do this, or maybe it wasn’t part of your process. But I imagine your mother losing two other children. I’m a mother, I can’t imagine losing a child, you know, and so instil the difficulty of still having to be present and be a mother to you, in any other children that do have other siblings

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 13:29
Later on. Yeah, later on, my sister came along, and then something even further later on, my brother came along, so there were other children later on. But to get where I think you’re going it, my mother’s life was changed forever. And my mother, what I did not know, until I was 33. Because again, nobody talked about it. And when I would try to ask questions, people would just try to change the subject matter. All my life until age 22, from age three to 33, I did not know that part of what caused the fire. What I knew was an accident. But what the story I had been told to protect me actually was not true. That in fact, my mother fell asleep smoking in bed, and had a can of hairspray next to the bed that blew up. And that just immediately, just the house just went up in flames so quickly. And so she lived with that, her whole life and at the end of her life, you know, a big part of trying to, for her to find some peace as she began, you know, her process of leaving this this life was trying to come to terms with that even all those years later, as her life was coming to an end. It was a very real thing, but I didn’t know that until I was 33. So then I kind of went through a whole nother loss process around that because, you know, my my father said, Well, we didn’t want you to like blame your mother. It’s like, gosh, dang, I don’t blame my mother. I had this immense grief for her like for her like I was owning it for her and just, I think about all the times you couldn’t hug my mother, my mother wasn’t good at hugging like she, if you went to hug her, she just kind of lean in almost like she didn’t deserve a hug. I mean, we used to laugh about that. It’s like, now I know why, you know, and I think about some of the she, you know, she’s separate from some mental health issues as well. I’m sure all this exacerbated, right. And if I’d known some of this, particularly as a teenager, oh, my gosh, it would have helped me, it was still been a challenging time in our household, but I would have been able to process it better. So sometimes people try to protect kids. And in the long term, you know, maybe it’s not as protective as people think. But yeah, she, she struggled her whole life.

Victoria Volk 15:44
And I say grief shared as grief diminished. And I think that’s, it’s a disservice to children, when we think that not talking about it as protecting them. And my dad passed away when I was eight. And that was something to my mom openly grieved. And it was almost to the point, and not unhealthy. But like I couldn’t, there was no space for me to grieve. Because it took up so much room in our home. You know,

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 16:12
Yeah, I do. I absolutely know what you’re saying, Victoria, I really do.

Victoria Volk 16:17
So, you know, parents listening, it does not help the children to shield them from the reality of grief, it really sets them up to, like you said, unlike me, personally, too many people that I’ve talked to on this podcast, who experienced traumatic or grief experiences in childhood, it’s not something that just goes away. Because it wasn’t talked about, in fact, it has probably more does more damage than anything. Did you feel this immense pressure then to to to do something impactful? And do something? You know, because?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 16:57
Yeah, that’s an interesting question, because I do feel. And it’s interesting to where you come at this question, because I think one strategy for actually dealing with loss and the fact that and survivor grief and survivor guilt, like, Why did I get to live, you know, just be I mean, I’m alive, because I happen to be on the bottom bunk, and old enough to walk to a window and pound on a window and get out, right? I mean, it’s just so arbitrary. In some cases, I mean, just the way it happened. So part of what has helped me is being what I call an avatar, which is, you know, there are times when I’ve not wanted to do something, or I felt really stuck, or, you know, I called the certain kind of Griever process I called being a bear, where you just want to go in hibernate in a cave, and just everybody go away. And part of coming out of that as saying, Well, you know, they didn’t get to live. So I need to live for myself, I need to live for them, I can see things I have clothing that I wear that my mother never got to wear, that now we were very different people. So she had long arms, she was taller. So I roll up the sleeves, you know, but I wear them for her. And I feel her when I do that. So on one hand is a really healthy and empowering thing to do. But I have also been in exactly the place that you’re talking about where at one point I became such a workaholic, such a, you know, just really felt like I can’t waste a single minute, because there’s all these people that don’t get to live like 911, I still think about the people who got up like any other morning and thought they were going to go to work or go to school and come home and it was just gonna be another day. And they didn’t get to have any more days after that. So you feel you can get to a point where you take being that avatar for your others a little too far. So it really is about balance, it can be a way to help you integrate them into your life, because they are part of you. That’s been removed. And so you’re trying to hold on to that part as you move forward. But you can take it to an extreme and I have been in that place and had to just back off and say, maybe my others want to rest right now maybe my others would like to sit outside in the sun and just chill, you know. So it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s an interesting part of all of this.

Victoria Volk 19:11
I don’t want to circle back to your mother’s decline and how you said that, you know, part of her process, in her End of Days was to come to terms with those losses that she had. And I had actually had a conversation with Dr. Chris curve. He’s researcher of end of life experiences. And the one thing that he says is that and I think this is something that people don’t necessarily look at terminal illness and think, Oh, gee, that’s a beautiful experience, or it can be right and I certainly was one of them because that’s how my dad passed away in a nursing home right but going through end of life training as a doula completely flipped that on its head for me, because I’m talking to Dr. Chris curve because just to your point It’s like our soul has this, this or soul process, what what it’s longing for right as we get through to the end of life and he had a beaut He has a beautiful example in the podcast episode. But essentially, and one of the stories was two that is shared real quickly, I’ll share it. But a mother had lost a baby miscarried. And at the end of her life, her family was in the room with her and she started rocking a baby. And they realize that, because there was actually I think someone in the room that did not know that she had had a miscarriage. But it’s, you know, the loved ones come to you, at the end of life, and it’s been witnessed and stories have been taught, it’s been documented in research that this starts happening as early as even six months before someone passes have a terminal illness. Did your mother ever speak to any experiences like that?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 20:57
Absolutely. And I witnessed it. I mean, I witnessed it myself and my father, who was agnostic and would never have expected it and who’s ended up lifetime in the hospital had some very amazing experiences. With my mother, though, to get to your question, it was still several months before she passed. So it is sometimes it comes and goes over that period of time. But she would have to, there were several, several things were meaningful. She was visited by her mother, she felt her mother there. And her mother, she and her mother had a complicated relationship. And the time that they spent, seem to bring some reconciliation at the end of life. And then and I write about this in my book, actually, there’s a point at which my sisters, and it’s not my sisters, it’s my older sister, I had one of the sisters that died one, when I was three and a half, my older sister was right before her seventh birthday. And my younger sister, the day of the fire was literally her second birthday. So she died on her second birthday. So my mother at the end of life for a while and it just lifeless for just out of the blue, in the evening would be visited by my older sister. And so the first time this happened, I was with my mother. And we were sitting together and you know, interest, kinda at the end of the day. And Sue was really kind of tucking her in, if you will, for the day, she’s, you know, no energies, you’re very tired, right? And, you know, my mother seeing my sister and became very distraught, I mean, physically distraught, like, almost like she was in physical pain. And what disturbed her was that the older sister was there. But the younger sister who had died on her second birthday was not there. And it was extremely disruptive to her. And so I’m going through my, my, my mind trying to think, you know, what can I offer here? What can I do here? Because she’s just like, physically bent over like, she’s in physical pain. And so I just said, Oh, mama, you know, little kids, she’s probably just off playing, you know. And the goal was not to anyway, minimize what was happening, because I could see what she was seeing. She was looking in a very specific place, she was seeing my older sister as a child, I wondered in my head at the time, Victoria wondered, what does this scene look like to my mother, because she’s seeing my older sister who’s just before her seventh birthday, and here’s her 40 something year old, you know, middle child, right at that point, you know, what do we look like to her. But as soon as I offer that, and she thought about that, she calmed down. And then she didn’t talk to my older sister, but there was just this quiet and she, and she just walked away feeling or had this feeling that my older sister was okay. And then she felt loved. And that was really comforting to her. And then my sister just kind of disappeared. And this happened for a while for, you know, really a couple of weeks. And then just as mysteriously, she stopped being visited by my sister, she never did see my younger sister. But somehow she came to terms that she was just off playing and that somehow the interaction with you know, whatever my older sister was, in that moment, whatever real is, you know, was very real for her. set her mind at ease, and it was a great gift. And it was not someone said, Oh, well, maybe it’s her mess. It was not her meds, you know, I don’t know what it is. Is it the mind? Is it the Spiritual World, I just one of the beauties of being at this stage of my life is it’s like, cares, whatever it was, it was real for her. And, and it was healing for her at a time that she really really needed that. Feeling things were okay after so many years of them not being okay.

Victoria Volk 24:36
And the how that is helpful for you to and your healing and for many families who get to experience that with their loved ones, right. That’s and I think like Dr. Chris Kerr said in that episode, too, he said, you know, we medicalize dying, we medicalize dying, and when we medicalize dying, we robbed people of the opportunity to you not keep them comfortable, but don’t rob them of the opportunity to have these very lucid experiences that really step like, set their soul at ease, really, it can help their release.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 25:15
Right, right. And I think it’s also a gift for you, if you let your mind be open. I mean, I’ve certainly had people. And I work in in charitable and philanthropic end of life planning. So I’ve worked with a lot of people at the end of their life who are trying to do some like charitable and estate type planning. But we’re also in a time now have of what I call kind of a good death movement, right? Where people are very consciously thinking about what they want that end of lifetime to be like, I think the COVID pandemic has brought new light to that, and people realizing what they don’t want. So they start thinking about what they do. But having worked with so many people over the years, who are in that end of life are nearing that end of lifetime. And the experiences they’ve had, and I’ve talked with people are like, Oh, Dad’s going crazy. Again, he’s thinking this, and he’s thinking this, and I’m like, don’t try to correct him. lean into it. This is real for him. And when you try to tell him, no dad sounds, so is dead, or, no, that’s not really here, you’re hallucinating, or we need to scale back your meds. People are well intended, but it doesn’t help that person at all. I’ve never seen any time where that helps. And if anything, it can drive people into I am I again, I’m not I’m not a psychiatrist, or psychologist, I just know what I’ve witnessed and experienced. And that is, when you try to tell people that these things are for you just make them feel a little crazy. And like they’re like they’re dying wrong. I mean, that’s just that that’s like that would be the crazy thing is to have people somehow think they’re doing their own and the lifetime, wrong, because you can’t and you know, the fact that we can’t explain what these things are, or we’re going to come up with an explanation doesn’t really matter. It’s for them, it really helps.

Victoria Volk 27:02
I also think, too, it’s why it’s so important that before you get to that point with a loved one who is sick or dying, or before you find yourself in that situation where you’re by bedside, it’s so important to have addressed what is incomplete for you with that relationship, because I think, you know, it can be a less than loving relationship, or it can be a super duper loving relationship almost to the point of codependency. And then you’re just holding on and holding tight with, you know, with the grip that let’s do anything and everything to stop this from happening. And it really is dishonouring the natural process. And yeah, so there’s so many different ways we could dig into that topic even more the end of life is something that Yeah, I haven’t really fully explored yet as an end of life doula, I’m not even sure what that’s going to look like for me. But education is a definite cornerstone of that. Just that’s why I started this podcast to is just education, grief, because so many don’t even recognize grief in themselves. But it shows up in all kinds of ways.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 28:12
Well, because grief when people think of grief, they tend to compartmentalize it to just mean sadness, or longing or whatever. But it’s this kaleidoscope, I mean, absolute kaleidoscope of emotions, physical sensations, thought patterns, it’s so many things. So you get, you know, so sometimes people will say, and I can think of several people I’ve worked with over the years who think in my book, I write about this one artist who’s really funny, she’s really quickly but she’s like, Oh, I’m so past grief, you know, over her mother dying. But then all the three years after her mother died, all these weird things started happening in her life that she couldn’t make sense of. And, you know, I think we came to the conclusion was she she was still grieving, and they’re still things she needed to deal with, you know, that she just hadn’t really dealt with. And they were showing up in multiple ways that you wouldn’t think that screen. It’s like, Yeah, I think that probably is part of your grief, you know, so. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Victoria Volk 29:07
Yeah. So tell us a little bit about your book.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 29:10
Ah, well, you know, it’s interesting. I, you know, a little over a year ago, I started writing, I decided to write a book. And it wasn’t something I had really planned to do. But I had been really just paying attention to the people I was working with in my work and how they were struggling with COVID and the seeming randomness of this invisible virus that was making some people very sick and others not so much. And that, you know, initially the deaths were very terrible. I mean, at one point, I think in April of 2020, the people that were going into the hospital in New York, if they were over 65 and put on a ventilator, they had a 95% chance of dying. 90 now, things have gotten a lot better since then, we’ve learned so much. There’s more therapies, there’s all kinds of things, but that point I literally had older people that I was working with who said, I want to add something into my Advanced Directive. Because if I get this thing, I don’t want to go to the I just want something that puts me to sleep. I don’t want to go that way without my loved ones around me. And, and so I think so I’m having all these kinds of conversations with people. And then right before people believed in COVID, I mean, initially, there was like, Oh, you have to go to China to get it. If you did, this probably not a thing, right. And I gotten sick on a business trip. In Seattle, right around the time, Seattle was determined to have community spread. Long story short, I, whether or not I had, it’s not clear, I didn’t have flu, because I was tested for that. And the early when I finally was able to get a test, because there was almost no test here, it was a really early version. And I was actually the first person in this one area to get tested. So you know, I’m not even sure how accurate at that point, they could be accurate, and inaccurate both ways. But I was very sick for about a month. And so you’re laying there watching all of this unfold, and you’re hearing interviews with people. And you’re, and I like to read a little bit, you know, beyond just the typical what comes on your media, you know, news channel or comes up in a feed on something. And so I’m picking up these stories in strange places of people having what seems like COVID, even though supposedly, they never been to China, or at that point that France, you know, started spread out. But the fear that was there and fear across all age ranges, and the sudden feeling that, oh, my gosh, this could happen to me, this could happen to somebody I know. So writing the book for me was about.

And of course, you feel a little egotistical, but I felt like I this had been such a part of my life, it’s like, I’m really good at that. I’ve dealt with it for so many different ways I’ve dealt with it in my career, I helped raise funds for the first pet loss support Hotline at a veterinary school early in my career. So I thought maybe I can offer something to help people navigate this some actual practices and some storytelling, so people don’t feel all alone. And then my husband is in his end of lifetime. So, you know, the title is grieving as a field guide for living with loss without losing yourself. And the title really works on multiple levels. Because in some ways, you know, I’m kind of grieving, the end of what I know is going to be my own relationship with my husband, and he’s still with me, which is wonderful. But we know day by day, it’s it can happen at any time, right? That’s always been true for all of us. Right. But when someone gets older, and when they have a very major illness, you know, it just brings it into such focus. So the book was about, you know, not only, you know, you write about something, you get better at it yourself, and you understand it better yourself. So my goal was to help others to kind of help myself through some difficult challenges. And to just to just offer some practices, because I know for myself that there are a lot of really good grief books out there. But I myself when I was looking for different therapies or strategies, I felt so often there was no how to, you know, there were stories to read about there was talk therapy, but there was never like, what are some specific things I could do to try to take a break from this, and I had figured those out, at least for me, may not work for everybody, but I wanted to share those. So that’s really what the book is about. And I gotta tell you, Victoria, it’s just, you feel a little egotistical, like what do I really have to offer. But you know, since that time, I’ve had some amazing outreach from some of my readers, telling me about how the book has helped them. I had somebody come up in my Facebook, and I’m not a big Facebook person. But you know, she’s in Vietnam, and she’s not only dealing with, you know, grieving a longer term loss with her parents. But Vietnam has been having some very difficult challenges. And from what she described pretty horrific challenges with COVID-19. I recently popped up that one of my books, reviews on Amazon was from someone who lost a about a 50 day old infant, many years ago and has been struggling all these years, even though she has other children, and his mood clearly move forward in her life, but she’s still been struggling and found, you know, not to me, it’s not about my ego, but to the way she described the impact of my book on her. It’s like, you know what, something happened to me tomorrow, at least I know, I helped somebody, I helped a few somebodies and that’s what it was about. That is what it’s about for me.

Victoria Volk 34:25
I love the title too, by the way, would you say that you feel you’ve healed much of your grief.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 34:34
I do. I mean, I think grief is an interesting thing. Because in some ways, it is like a really bad wound and that you have some kinds of wounds that will completely heal, right. They’ll completely heal. There’s no scar, there’s no damage to a tissue or bone. And then there’s more severe wounds where you’ll have a scar that’ll be there’ll be with you. Or I think about Anne Lamott, the writer who talks about you know when you lose Somebody sometimes it’s, you know, you’re going to move forward, but it’s going to be like having, it’s like having your leg broken. And when it rains, you know, you have an achy leg that day because of this break that you endured. I think she’s right about that. I think for me, I’ve healed it. But it is like a wound. It is like a broken leg that aches when you know, when the weather gets cold and damp, or a wound that sometimes just opens up again. And I do think it’s that way for most people. So I feel that from the standpoint of, is there joy in my life, you bet even on the worst days, I know how to find it. But there will always there’s always something there because the loss does really go along with you.

Victoria Volk 35:41
Living in in it as we speak, you know, with COVID, and your husband, what are some things, some tips and things maybe some that you include in your book, you don’t have to give away the whole book, but a few things that you would share with the listeners today?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 35:59
Well, for me, what really helped me get out of what I called that two years of lost Limbo after Ruth suicide and my mother’s death and moving across country and starting, you know, a new life someplace else. Um, you know, I struggled for two years and one night I went, I lived there, we bought a house that had some river frontage, I was very fortunate. And I, when you lose, when you’re in grief, a lot of your routines and habits get broken. And that’s one of the things that I reflected back on that I think gets overlooked even, even in sometimes very, really excellent grief. psychotherapy, for instance, is the dailiness of our love how love is a habit and how, when you lose somebody, your days really do get broken, because there were times that you did things or times if even if they weren’t present, that you are thinking about them at certain times, or doing things all those rituals, habits and routines tied to them are now broken. And part of it is trying to figure out what those are, sometimes people don’t realize how their days are broken. Part of it’s figuring out how to bridge those so that they don’t get become giant grief holes, because I think we’ve all had those moments, I was talking to someone recently who told me on a very certain day, very certain time, she can be doing great all week. But when that day and time comes, she’s integratable because that’s when her mother died. She’s at least figured that out. So then you can start to plan around it. Right. So what helped me is when I was really struggling, and I had these broken days, and I hadn’t yet figured out why I couldn’t get it together, you know, why was I still struggling so much after two years, which I later found out is actually not terribly unusual. You know, I mean, it’s not the ideal. I mean, I would certainly Life is short. So I would certainly encourage trying to get to joy sooner rather than later. But the one habit that wasn’t broken is I always locked the doors every night before I went to bed. And I do write about this in the book. And one night, I just decided to wander out to the river. I was definitely having a blue day and I just wandered out to the river. And I was just standing there in the darkness. And it was very quiet. But I could hear the water coming over the stones in the river. Sometimes you can actually hear voices in the water. And it’s not like there’s really actually it’s just the way the sound of the water moving through the rocks and the shifts and you could hear birds shifting up in the trees, you know, and their night roofs and it was there was Miss so the just feeling and I was just really taking it all in and then I decided to go back and lock the doors and go to bed. Well as I was walking back to the house Victoria, I realized in that few moments, it couldn’t have been more than three or five minutes I stood by the river. I felt okay. I didn’t feel sad. I didn’t feel brilliant. I mean, you know, I wasn’t my world was I wasn’t suddenly cured or healed. But I felt okay. And so I realized I had taken a break from grief. And so then I started thinking I need to do this, I need to do more of this. And I started implementing what I call tiny come back to your senses rituals, because for me, it was just coming back to my own body, my own senses, being so caught up in the sounds, the sights, the smells, well, how I how I felt in that moment, that it turned on the volume on my mind a little bit because I think our minds are great for healing, but they can also pull us into some dark places. And I just got absorbed. And so what I will always encourage people is just the simplest thing at all is just to stop and breathe. And you don’t have to be a meditator. You don’t have to be in mindfulness. Those things help. But you can literally just take three minutes get an egg timer, an old fashioned egg timer if you need to, and just sit and pay attention to your bread or I like to tell people pick one cents and cent cent your sense of scent is often a good one because it involves breathing. Although a scent is something that really triggers you because your beloved loves, you know lavender or something you might want to choose hearing or taste. But just really immerse yourself in that sense for just a few minutes. And you really can’t take a break from grief. And once you start taking more breaks and make those breaks larger. Joy can start to come back. The joy is there. I really believe It’s always there, but you can invite it back in. And I will say, just really quickly, I want to define what I mean when I say joy, because it’s not like you’re a bully, and you’re gonna kick your heels up, you know, the, you know, all is good forever. To me, Joy is about feeling connected to your own life, feeling connected to the moment, feeling like your life has meaning and purpose, even if you don’t know what it is. But if you just belong to the moment into your life, and to be a part of the world, to me, when you have that, that’s really where joy starts. And that’s what those little grief breaks allow you to do. So that’s what I would encourage is just get back to your senses for a few minutes today.

Victoria Volk 40:39
I actually did that before our call today. My back patio is just one of my favorite spots because the birds and so I went and I sat on the concrete and just close my eyes and I just felt the sun on me and the breeze and heard the birds and the barking dog then ate the neighbor’s barking dog. But it really is just finding that sense of peace within ourselves. It it doesn’t have to be this pressure to feel joy, but just a sense of peace. That’s with that comes from within. And like you said, it’s not you can’t you it’s not just gonna happen on its own. You have to curate that. And so yeah, I think that’s a perfect, perfect tip to give because I’ve I’ve worked a lot in working on that myself, like just, I do believe I do meditate daily, but break in middle the day, 10 minutes,

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 41:35
Way more powerful. I’ve had people say, Oh, it sounds so hokey. You know, and I tell a few stories in the book, one in particular that you know, up and coming executive who just was go go go, but every night would come home and just sob as she said sob into a glass of wine, because she was missing her brother so and didn’t feel like she had time to do anything. But we all can find just even three minutes. And it sounds hokey and Pollyanna ish as I’ve been accused of both those until you do it until you have that moment in that you had today of being in the sun. And you’re feeling that sun. And you’re also hearing things and even if what you know, you’re not even judging the dog barking, you’re just like, you might not have ever even noticed that. It’s just all these things that you that happen all the time. I mean, we have sensory input coming in at us right and left all the time. And of course, if we tried to remember everything and pay attention to everything, we go a little bonkers, but in the moment to really just feel that son and be paying attention to all of that. It just slows everything down. And you realize that the world is just okay. And it’s still going on. And you’re here. I mean, you’re here and you’re feeling it. So? Yeah, it’s not it’s way more powerful than it sounds. It often sounds too simple to be true, but it works very well.

Victoria Volk 42:48
Well, it takes a conscious choice. You can’t just say, yeah, you have to choose it. Because like I said, it’s not going to spontaneously happen on its own. You can chase sadness, and sorrow, which are valid feelings. But do you want to chase those feelings? Or do you want to chase, solace and peace? And feeling good? Just ask yourself what would feel good? Right now? Exactly. My face. And that’s why I chased it. I sat down and I just felt the warm sun on me. Because pretty soon it’s going to the leaves are turning Oh, the North Dakota winters are long. So yeah, savor it while you can write. I’m curious, too. You’ve given some great tips. But what are some things that you found helpful in ways that others supported you? And have supported you now with, with your husband and everything?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 43:42
Yeah, I think one of the things that has surprised me at different points in my life is when we think about being supportive for others, I think the two things I would say is, it’s very easy for all of us to feel like we want certain kinds of support for even if we can’t name it, like you don’t realize you have, you have an expectation until the expectation isn’t met. And then you realize that there was an expectation there. I think without realizing it, when we’re grieving, there is a sense of what we think we want from other people. And sometimes people immediately round us can give us that, and sometimes they can’t. And so there’s two things I would say about that, that I think are really helpful. One is it, it’s very easy when you’re grieving and anger and disappointment and loss. There’s so many emotions that go with grieving. But if you let yourself get caught up with, you know, you had someone on your podcast that talked about a friend who just wasn’t there for her, like radically not there for her. Um, you can get so tied up with and I’m not reflecting on the person you’re interviewing, but I’m just saying I’ve done so many people that’ll get so tied up and that becomes part of the grief, being angry, being disappointed being hurt all those things. You just pull yourself down deeper into the hole. Sometimes the reason people like at the end of my mother’s life, the person that you There are two people in her life two women friends she cared about deeply one of them was so there for her, one of them was so not there for her. But that’s because she had such an empathic personality, she could not personally bear it. So I would say, express radical empathy. And just say, You know what, I don’t understand why this person, not here, it upsets me, it hurts me honor it, acknowledge that that’s how you feel. But then I’d say the best thing you can do is let go of that and just assume for whatever reason, she or he cannot be there for me, and move on. Related to that is accepting that sometimes the people immediately around you are not the ones that can support you. Sometimes what you really need are other kinds of people that you would not think about. And so for me, like when I was really struggling with my mom, it was actually my mother in law who didn’t live near me. But we’ve talked frequently by phone, who I felt was one of the most supportive people to me at the time, in dealing with my loss of my mother and an understanding why this, why is it taking so long to read my mother in law, got it in a way that was helpful. The other thing is, you know, is sometimes being a part of a group of strangers that are on their own loss journeys. One of the things that I’ve started as a result of my book, and people wanting help, in implementing, because it’s one thing to have the information, it’s another thing to actually implement it and figure out how to integrate it into your life. So you know, one of the so I’m rolling out something that’s essentially a part workshop part course, if you will, smart, you know, sort of small group experience, so that people can support each other and the don’t, they’re coming together don’t know each other, but they’re on loss support paths, or are different loss paths where they can support each other in ways that maybe other people right in their immediate environment can’t. And sometimes people can talk much more openly about their loss with someone that’s a perfect or an imperfect stranger than they can with someone like a lot of mothers I find, and maybe you can relate to this, have a hard time talking about a loss, because they need to feel strong for their children or their spouse. And so sometimes it’s easier for them to talk with someone that’s not part of their family where they can really let their hair down and just, you know, express what’s going on and then have accountability. So if you say, I’m going to start doing the thing, where I go out every day in the sun on my back porch at 10 o’clock, so that I can start getting those breaks, and then you let your life get busy. Or you’re in that kind of grief hole. You have someone that can kind of say, Hey, are you out on the patio? Did you do it? Are you out there, let’s go out in the patio together, I’ll get on my patio, you go on your others. So that would be the other thing I would say is look for people that might not be in your environment that can support you or understand you and help you feel okay, and help you stay on your own path to getting better.

Victoria Volk 47:48
Absolutely. I agree with all of that. What has grief taught you?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 47:54
Oh my gosh, Victoria, so many things. At the very I let one of the things I like to do is go with the very first word that pops into my head, which can be dangerous. I suppose if I’m having a I haven’t had a word nerds, or sometimes quirky words popping in my head. But the first word that popped into my head, when you ask that question is resilience. Because there are a few experiences. And you know, sometimes we like to say certain losses are worse than other losses, I really like to stay away from that because somebody losing a grandparent, it can be actually way worse than losing their dad. It’s hard to imagine, but I’ve witnessed it. It has to do with that relationship and the dailiness of that relationship and how broken those days are. But what I would say is, so whatever that when you go through a really tough period of grief, whatever that grief is for, for whatever that loss by name and via death, that might be a divorce, it might be you know, your parents got divorced. And now you don’t see your dad, very often your mom very often, when you go through that, and you are able to come out on the other side, you’ve learned some things, you’ve learned some skills for the next one of those that comes along. Because you know, we know there’s always going to be another something coming along, you don’t look for it, you don’t invite it. But you can become more resilient and kind of take care of yourself better so that when the next thing comes, you’re able to not get stuck as long or hurt as long because I do believe in the sciences there that the longer you stay in pain, it can become a way of life, it can become a new way of life. And then it gets harder and harder to actually get back to a place of wellness and feeling joy and peace and those kinds of things. So resilience is definitely the thing that pops into my mind. And it’s a it’s a code word for some because I know in some situations, you know, resilience suggests like Oh, Buck up, you know, come on, be a man be a woman. Yeah, that’s not what I mean at all to me. And I even define it in my book so that we’re talking about the same thing because sometimes even in the work environment, resilience is used to say, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and let’s move on. It’s like an excuse for not granting people space to To be human basically is what it means. But resilience, what I mean is really, and it’s and was often described as bouncing back. And I, I gotta say I disagree with that definition because I don’t think coming back from grief is ever a violence. I’ve never just bounced back, and you’re not really bouncing back, because you’re like, you’re not the same person you were before that event, you know, when somebody dies part of who you are that relationship, I mean that physical presence is gone. And you have to figure out a new way of living without that person in their in their previous form, you know, we can take them with us in a different way. So really, resilience to me is really about, you know, knowing how you develop the skills and mindsets to help you take whatever’s coming in to know to know in your bones, that you will get through this, and that you have an ability to, to get to a new place is going to be different, but where you can feel good again.

Victoria Volk 50:54
Yeah, I’ve said this many times on my podcast, and I’ll say it again, because it came up and that was your word. But when people I think the word resilience in used in reference to children who’ve experienced grief and loss and traumas children, I think that’s almost a way for adults to let themselves off the hook. You know, when they say children, oh, they’re resilient, they’ll bounce back, like you said, they’re resilient. But children don’t choose resilience. Resilience is something that it’s they either, it’s a survival mechanism, really. And so you know, this being a child who’s experienced who was in a home with a lot of grief, and was raised with grief in the home and had personal losses yourself as a child, you lost your sisters to don’t forget that, you know, like people can forget that, like you had a loss as well. And so I am curious, how did the lack of communication around your loss, your mother’s lost the loss of your sisters out did that, especially in the teen years? Because that can be a really trying time for a lot of people. But how did that impact your school years?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 52:11
Yeah, I mean, gosh, probably in so many ways, including ways that I probably can’t even articulate or even understand myself. Because you really even now the stage of my life, I still process pieces of it. And I still have elements of memory that I kind of come back and look at again. And as time goes by, and you have new experiences and memories, you know, that also changes how you remember what you remember, it’s, it’s there’s like a layering on effect. So it’s, you know, you just keep evolving, I will say by the time I got to high school, my father was also a field engineer for several years in my life. So before my sister and brother came along later, sort of the, you know, afterwards, right much later, I think was nine when my sister was born, and then 15 When my brother was born. But there was a period where kinda reminds me of me leaving my home in the east to go back west, you know, where my father got a job as a field engineer. And so we put all of our stuff in storage, we were living in St. Louis, then that’s where I was originally born. And instead of just leaving my mom and I there, while he went off to all these job sites, he bought a travel trailer and we went with them from place to place, it was actually a really good experience for my mom, because it got her away from again, just getting away from a very dark, place and time. But what it meant for me is when you’re constantly moving, and sometimes you’d like I went to three different first grades and several different second grades, and there’s periods where my mom would train me or teach me, you know, while we were traveling, or because we were going to be someplace long enough to really be enrolled in school. So I would say one of the things that made that complicating as you learn early on, because I’d had lost that every time you start to make friends and then you’re going to move ouch, ouch, that doesn’t feel good. So you stop really trying to do that. And so it’s interesting that I’ve spent a career working one to one with people because most of my life up until, you know, really into my 30s I was not just an introvert but painfully shy. And when we would move to a new place I just stopped really even trying to connect and so I didn’t as a young person build a lot of those relationship skills. I don’t know I still to this day don’t have a lot of close friendships. I know a lot of people because of my work but so I think you know, it definitely shaped that and when you add in this sort of moving thing you know, it has made it has made me for up until my 30s resist getting really close to people because if you lose them, it doesn’t feel good. And it was until I got further along into my life that I realized that that’s not a fun way to live either. You know, granted if you don’t love no problem with grief, right? You don’t have it right so you know that you so when you start loving and caring about people You just have to accept that the grief goes with it. But once you’ve developed some some skill sets, that happens, and when you talk about even resilience, you know, I always say, I really couldn’t agree with you more, I think it’s, we do expect children to, like, somehow they don’t understand and everything’s gonna be okay. And the problem is because they don’t actually understand and their brains don’t have all the different inputs and knowledge bases, they can come to some pretty bizarre conclusions, which I did at times about, you know, my self worth, did I cause their death because So, uh, you know, I had a, I broken my sister’s crayon that day, and you know, and she was mad at me is, you know, so and then she went away Is it because I broke a crayon, there’s all these things that kind of happened with that. And then I would also say, if you’re in a really bad place, it’s kind of like resilience in parts of the developing world that are dealing with war, or extreme poverty, there’s only so far resilience will take you with, even within intentionality, if the environment that you’re in is constantly, you know, difficult abuse of, you know, not really supporting, you know, a full, rounded, healthy human being. So it has its limits. At some point, if you’re in a really bad space, you have to pull your your hands unless you can get out of that. And some people can, some people will live their whole lives in a situation where they can never be all that they could be just because of the nature of their situation. And so they can do the best they can do. But there is a limit to where any of this will take you as well.

Victoria Volk 56:23
You know, when I think of resilience to it, in terms of COVID, many, many people are having to kind of dig in that resilience well within them. I mean, this because we as we spoke briefly before we started recording, it seems like where is the end? You know, it’s like many people asking themselves, when is the end of this?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 56:46
And the gravy? Yep. Yeah. And you know, and there’s this tendency to, you know, because, throughout across the country, and across the world, people have responded to the situation, it’s bubbled up at different places at different times earlier, in the pandemic, it was really no big deal where I live. And now, you know, at this point, we are a year and three quarters into the pandemic. And my area is, you know, has one of the highest case positives in testing and we had the worst month last month, even though we’re you know, a while other areas, people are out, living fairly normally. So I think that’s the other thing is, is how important it is to approach all of this from a place of empathy, to realize that some people the whole time, as we talked about earlier, before, our conversation now had to get up every day, no matter what’s going on, and put on a mask and go do what they’d always done, you know what it’s like, I always think of the folks working in the grocery store every time even to this day, when I go in, I come out with my groceries, you know, I mean, who knew you’d go grocery shopping and have to have a remote space around you. And so I always say thank you to the people that have been there throughout all of this to make sure I could get ahead and let us you know, by the same token, there were others because of serious health issues, their own health issues continue. And my husband, I are still very, very isolated relative to everyone else we know because, you know, there’s some health issues that we have to be uber careful about. And we know that the virus could be probably fatal at this point. So, you know, that’s the thing I think is important is to realize whatever is going on in your world, you know, somebody else has a whole different, it’s like the invisible back of rocks, we all have an invisible bag of rocks we’re carrying around, we don’t know what’s in that. So to really approach it with empathy without knowing when people say or do things that seem opposite or irritating or don’t agree with our beliefs. It’s probably because they’re coming from actually a very similar place a fear of concern about well being. And you know, COVID put mortality front and center for everyone at all age ranges. It’s not just something off out there happening to other people, we know, oh, my gosh, this could be me. So what does that mean?

Victoria Volk 58:58
Just as there’s no hierarchy of grief, or a loss, a type of loss, there’s no hierarchy of fear either. You know, it’s like your fear is no worse than my fear. My fear is no worse than your fear. And I really, me personally, I, I honestly, I don’t watch a lot of the news and I don’t, I have made a conscious choice and effort to not worry about COVID Me, for me, personally, my body like I am not going to let myself succumb to that fear. Because the fear itself is making people sick too. And I just I don’t, I don’t show up. I can’t show up with you. I can’t show up in my work that I do with my clients and grief in their grief. If I’m sitting here, living just consumed consumed by fear, personal well being those little breaks we were talking about sitting in the sun, sitting outside in the darkness they The Night thanking the day thanking the son thanking, just giving thanks, right? To wake up, right and maybe building in some routine to help bring some normalcy as much normalcy as you can. Just to get through another day

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 1:00:18
Routines really help, I mean, we tend to think of routines as staid and boring, but they I mean, I think that’s one of the things again, that happens with any kind of loss or grief. And there’s just such a sense of loss, because our, just our loss of our way of life, loss of ordinary, the ordinary ability to look at a face and see their whole face, you know, is a loss for a lot of people, right? So I think, taking, you’re having some routine, and people will say, Well, I have a hard time sticking to a routine, there’s always a few things, it’s like, you know that for me, it was locking the doors at night. The other thing that’s No, no matter what is happening, I make a cup of tea in the morning. And so one of the ways I started getting better, was trying to add in that sort of grief break, you know, after I was having my cup of tea, or as I was had or turn that type of cup of tea into an experience, not just slugging down a quick cup of tea, you know, to really experience everything the sense what it looks like, in the glass, how the warmth feels in my hands, you know, sniffing it, you know, all of it, the sound of it going down my throat, and watching the steam go up and just, you know, disappear into the, you know, to the sky. So finding it, people can find a place where their routine still kind of works, where there’s something that they just almost always do. And then just start by building even a few minutes. And it sounds crazy, it doesn’t sound like it would do that much. But as you know, it just, it can make a huge difference in how the rest of your day goes.

Victoria Volk 1:01:43
I have a morning ritual, I get up about 5:45 and I meditate for about 20 minutes. And then I do my gratitude journal. And there’s some other things I do. I’ve set my pot coffee pot the night before. So it’s I grab my cup and I come down my my Zen Den, I call it and you know, it’s people might say, Well, nothing’s happening. I meditate for 10 minutes and nothing’s happening and the monkey doesn’t shut up. And I think with grief, the monkeys have like tambourine. So it’s like really loud. Yeah, there’s

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 1:02:14
More monkeys going nuts. Yeah,

Victoria Volk 1:02:16
Yeah, all the more reason to like, just sit in nature for a little bit. But I cannot tell you though, after I think I’m on day 39, you’re not going to notice anything profound, right? You might get like this intuitive hit or this intuition or the sense something like you need to do that day or reach out to somebody or whatever, you might get a thought that comes to you. But I think what happens, more net, like naturally unfolds is that you aren’t as reactive to people as you would have been before, or as you used to be. And I definitely feel that true for myself. Like I’m not as easily provoked. And I think, especially in times of COVID, which can happen very easily amongst family friends. Yeah, I think it’s so important to latch on to something that can help bring some I really, it sends a peace within yourself.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 1:03:16
And that that reactivity thing, I mean, that’s a really important place to think about because it is very easy to be reactive to just, and again, you’re often reacting out of fear, or some somebody pulled your trigger, whatever that trigger is. But it’s also that ability, that when you start to feel yourself going down that path, it gives you a greater ability to pull yourself back so that you don’t get stuck in that place. I know just for me and doing my tiny come back to your senses ritual, I do have a process where before I start that ritual, I take a moment to check in with my emotions, to do a quick little body scan, like what’s actually going on in my body, what’s feeling kind of cranky, or crinkly or not great. And then after I’m done with my ritual to just have a little check in and just say how am I feeling right now, that also does help bring that sense of momentum. I feel you get that feeling a little bit faster. Because if you can realize I actually do feel a little bit better, you know, and that little glimmer, I think kind of motivates you for the next time and the next time so it really, yeah, I think we’re, we’re on the same very much the same path.

Victoria Volk 1:04:20
Absolutely. So what gives you the most joy and hope for your future?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 1:04:25
And most joy and hope for my future? Well, quite a few things. I think for me, it’s wanting to feel like I can be helpful to other people. I feel like you know, we all have different things going on in our lives, but we also have something to give and that even though I’m many ways introverted, I love a lot of time and solitude. For me, finding some way to help others on their journey, whatever that is to help them be able to be more of what they have the potential to be to help them unlock their own potential anyway that I can really help people live more Fully, whatever that means to them. It’s not about my way that to them. That is what really gives me joy and hope for the future and feeling like, you know, you take what you learn, and you pass it forward in a meaningful way.

Victoria Volk 1:05:13
My art for my podcast is me on an island with a megaphone, right? Because you feel like you’re on an island have one by yourself, like, isolated, you know? Exactly. And no one’s listening to me. That’s why I need this megaphone. So you have a megaphone, and you have the world’s attention. What do you want to scream to the world about grief? What’s your message?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 1:05:33
Think about that for just a quick moment here. I think what I would say is that grief and joy coexist, you have to believe that and you have to know it, then that in the muck, no matter how deep your grief is, to look for and find that opening, where joy is still hiding in that moment, it’s entirely possible to be in the depths of grief. And yet to have to go back to you in the moment of sunshine on your patio, that moment of feeling, okay, feeling part of life and the world and knowing that you’re going to get through it. So I think I would just want people to really know that joy is always there, it doesn’t feel like it at times, but you can look for it, you can try to take that break, and create those little breaks in grief that let just a little bit of light in that. And again, whether we call it joy or peace, as you have been saying. That’s I just think so often people don’t believe that there are some Facebook groups that I you know, follow. And so often people will feel like, I will always be sad, I will always be in this place. And someone recently typed in everyone talks about their neck. No, I’ll never get better. Is that really true? I don’t know if I can go on living, if that’s the truth. Some people don’t. I would say the vast majority of people do, but there is an element. And it’s what you said earlier, Victoria, there is a degree of choice. And even though we might choose it in the moment, it seems really hard. And each day, it’s not easy. If you just can believe in your bones, that there, there is something better for you. And you just have to try to find a way to get a little break in that grief. So it can come in and find you and you can find it.

Victoria Volk 1:07:17
That was my story I over 30 years, right? I thought that was my story. I’m just going to feel like this for the rest of my life. This is This sucks. You know, this sucks. It sucks. You feel stuck, you’ve no you’re not living to your full potential. I felt like I was meant for more felt like this. This is just how it is I am destined to be in this space of stuckness and suckiness forever, like Graceville you know, I was stuck there. And but I knew in my bones that I was meant for more. But I knew I was not living up to my full fullest potential. And so it is really just not letting go of hope that there is something there for you to help you. For me. It was Grief Recovery. It changed my life. It’s led to this podcast, it’s led to Reiki, it’s opened so many doors for me. It’s why I’m talking to you today, literally, you know. So Chase, that feeling of feeling good. You want to feel good, find what makes you feel good. And it’s not a sturb. Like we say in grief recoveries short term energy relieving behaviors, it’s not alcohol, it’s not going to be the drugs, it’s not going to be the sex, it’s not going to be the man or the book or the fantasy world or whatever. It’s actually action action, moving yourself forward through it, working through it by taking action. That’s how you widen that gap. So I that was

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 1:08:47
Actually a key component in my book as well. But you know, there is while you can do while there are the hummingbird Grievers that Go Go, go go go. That’s a different that’s trying to outrun grief right at times. So I couldn’t agree more that it is, you know, finding that intentionality to take some action to create whatever that is, and it’s gonna be different for different people. I mean, that’s, you know, what, what may have worked for you is gonna be different for me different for someone else, but the action is really just sort of waiting. Like, I have to say one of my pet peeves is when people say, Well, time heals. Like the time is time. I know people who have who are still, you know, 30 years. That’s a long time. That’s it. You know, time passed, and you didn’t you know, you know, that’s why I say you know, we have this one and only heartbroken but still beautiful life. And so regardless of what we believe after this life, the only thing we really know for sure, and I just hate to see anybody not make the most of whatever it is that is meaningful for them. And the reason that they’re here and to feel that sense of purpose. So I’m so glad that you found something that created this moment of being here talking with each other and seeing your face smile

Victoria Volk 1:09:53
And you too lead to your work. I think our passions in life is all about often are often born out of our deepest sorrows.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 1:10:03
It’s very true in working in philanthropy, people don’t often realize how much philanthropy giving, whether that’s volunteering, giving financial gifts. Random Acts of Kindness often will come out of people’s love stories, things, you know, sadnesses things that were difficult, and they want to make something better. No, not only honor somebody like a lot of giving, it’s a way to try to make sense out of something that’s senseless, basically, you know, that you do I mean, you just you do find your way.

Victoria Volk 1:10:33
Yeah. There’s hope. Don’t lose hope. Absolutely. So where can people it first? Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 1:10:41
I think we covered a lot of ground here today. Victoria, I just want to say thank you so much for this conversation. I, I hope that your listeners find some things that we’ve talked about that will serve them in whatever they are trying to work their way through. And just know that there are people that care about them. It may not be obvious right now, but they’re, they’re out there.

Victoria Volk 1:11:02
Absolutely. And where can people reach you if they like to talk to you?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 1:11:06
Well, I am at poetowl.com. And I will be setting up a special landing page for your listeners. So I will get you that link for your notes so that people can I like to create a special place. So when you’re going to a website you’ve never been to before you know, you can see a familiar the podcast cover and just and just know so it will be poet owl.com/grieving voices. And so I will get that set up for your listeners. It’ll have a link to my book and how you can get that it’ll have a link to the workshop that I offer for people trying to work find a way back into their lives after a loss. I think I’ve agreed for assessment. There are a few things but certainly my book, an easy link there of it.

Victoria Volk 1:11:52
And I’ll put all the links to the in the show notes as well. Sounds good. Well, thank you so much for your time today and sharing your wisdom. I very much appreciate it.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz 1:12:02
I’ve enjoyed it. Yeah, I have enjoyed it. Take care.

Victoria Volk 1:12:06
You too. And remember when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love. From my heart to yours. Thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, please share it because sharing is caring. And until next time, give and share compassion by being hurt with yours. And if you’re hurting know that what you’re feeling is normal and natural. Much love my friend