Melody & Gracelyn | Luna Peak Foundation: Filling a Gap in Cancer and Grief Support
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
Melody and Gracelyn are an aunt and niece team behind Luna Peak Foundation and Luna Peak Publishing. Through their nonprofit, they publish photography books, engaging workbooks, and children’s books that show people they are not alone in grief.
Their work helps dispel stereotypes about cancer and grief and provides resources for the whole family to help heal. They have donated over 2,000 books to hospitals, therapist offices, schools, and universities.
Nonprofit work aside, Melody and Gracelyn discuss their grief experiences, resulting in the women joining forces to offer grief and cancer support. At age six, Melody was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and was given a 50% chance of surviving beyond one year; she underwent treatment for the next three years. She’s been a cancer warrior ever since. Gracelyn was inspired to support others after the unexpected loss of her father when she was twenty-six.
Throughout their adversity, Melody and Gracelyn wish people knew they are not alone and that cancer and grief support exists. And that it is possible to smile and laugh again after loss.
RESOURCES:
CONNECT:
- Luna Peak Foundation on IG
- Luna Peak Foundation on FB
- Luna Peak Foundation on LinkedIn
- SnapShotsofLifeAfterLoss on IG
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CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Victoria Volk: Thank you for tuning in to grieving voices. Today, I’m excited to talk to an aunt, a niece duo, they are Melody and Gracelyn, and they are the team behind Luna Peak Foundation and Luna Peak Publishing. Their work at Luna Peak uplifts, multicultural cancer, and grief survivor stories. Through their nonprofit, they published photography books, engaging workbooks and children’s books that show people that they are not alone. Their work helps just spell, stereotype, about cancer and grief and provides resources for the whole family to help heal. Today, they have donated over two thousand books to hospitals’ therapist office schools and universities. Melody was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at age six and has been a cancer warrior ever since. She was given a fifty percent chance of surviving one year and underwent treatment for three years until age nine. Being a survivor at a time when not many survived, set Melody on a course to help newly diagnosed cancer patients. Melody studied sociology in art history at the University of California, Irvine. Gracelyn studied sociology at Santa Clara University and received a master’s degree at Columbia University, inspired by the sudden loss of her dad, Gracelyn has built a fund grief community an online platform at snapshots of life after loss. Gracelyn is certified by the David Kessler Grief educator program and is a trained end-of-life doula by the Alua Arthur growing with Grace program. Thank you so much, ladies for being here today.
Melody & Gracelyn: Thank you so much for having us.
Victoria: So I could go into a lot of different directions here to start out, but I just we kinda know understand, like, the backstory of how you both are using your history, your experience, through Luna Peak. But how did you to come together to start it? What was the was there a conversation? Was there a question, like, what was it that sparked the two of you to come together, to share your experiences through your work?
Melody: I’ll take this first. So basically, Luna Peak has been a dream of mine for many, many years before we started it. I just didn’t know how to start a nonprofit and how to do all of these things. And I had a few books even written in some old journals. And I talked to Gracelyn about some of the ideas I had and, you know, how I could, you know, make them work. But then the sudden loss of her dad and her grief kind of sparked us coming together and creating a luna peak foundation because we both wanted to take our difficult experiences and turn it into something beautiful that can help other people. But when Gracelyn finished college and was in the workforce, she had a little bit more knowledge of how to start all these things. And so when we came together, when luna peak was formed,
Victoria Volk: sounds like a dynamic duo because you have that marketing background and Gracelyn. Mhmm. And So how long did it take? Because I’ve talked to a few nonprofits to this up to this point, and it is like this grueling process in the start from the sounds of it. And even when I think about starting a nonprofit, I’m just like overwhelmed.
Like, how did you did was there local resources that you tapped into? What did that those early years look like in starting Luna Peak.
Gracelyn: We kind of started doing this work before everything became official, so it was kind of a rolling basis. Basically Melody’s idea to do a massive photography project of cancer survivors we started all of this and then slowly we realized, okay, we need to set some structure to this and really, you know, make sure to put a foundation in place so that we can continue this work. And then expand it into the grief community as well. So it’s taken a few years. We were a private charity person, then we became a public charity so now we’re officially Luna Peak Foundation Inc. So it’s taken a bit of time, but we rely on our village and we rely on our board members and other people with expertise to come in and help kind of fill in some of those gaps. And we kind of learn as we go. Lot of research. Yeah.
Victoria Volk: What is one piece of advice that you would give to others who wish to start a nonprofit?
Melody: I would say be patient and really think about your mission before for me. Your nonprofit. You like, figure out your why before you would form it. That’s my advice.
Gracelyn: And definitely, make sure that the work that you’re doing is filling in a gap. Make sure that you’re providing something unique in the space. And know how your talents are going to contribute and use that mission to actually make an impact because there’s so many nonprofits out there, but it is really cool to think. Alright. People have figured it out before we can figure it out too.
Victoria: Can you speak to a little bit then how each of you what piece you thought was missing and what individually you bring? What gap are you filling? How do you articulate that?
Melody: Yeah, for me, I’ll speak for myself. I create books that I wish existed when I was sick, that I like, resources that didn’t exist at the time when I was younger. And one of the pieces is multicultural stories. So if I did find any information on childhood cancer, survivor, or anything like that. It just didn’t look like me. So I really wanted to make sure that, you know, there’s a lot of diversity in our books. We make sure that everybody can see themselves in our books. So that’s a piece that I think is unique. And also, Like, for us, we also include families. So we don’t just talk to cancer survivors or cancer fighters or breeders just to them.
We talk to the whole family. Because the whole family’s grieving, the whole family has cancer. So that’s our mission.
Gracelyn: We’re trying to humanize the topics cancer and greed because they’re very scary, but they’re very common experiences. So through showing multicultural stories and especially through the photography that we do. We knew that that was kind of key to impacting people. And people responded really well to seeing the eyes and faces within the photography of people they could relate to because sometimes that’s not out there. Sometimes people wanna just see a story, sometimes will wanna engage with it. Sometimes people wanna share their own story too. But that kind of all unfolded after we started to humanize the topic and really show what people look like. What does cancer look like? What does grief look like? What does grief look like? Ten years from now? Twenty years from now? Those are all questions that we had. And we kind of what about this process in a very curious way. We needed these books then and we need them now. So, you know, we hope that these large-scale photography projects and workbooks for kids, workbooks for adults, workbooks for the siblings of kids with cancer, And sometimes these groups that are oftentimes forgotten. In terms of providing support, we hope that they can feel to work that we do.
Victoria Volk: So if someone were to purchase a workbook, is this something that they do on their own time at home? Is their support as they work through it? How do you support people as they utilize the tools and the resources that you have shared?
Melody: Well, we have a large online community. So people reach out to us constantly via DMs or comments on our pages. We also will do workshops where we’re helping them work through the book. Most of those are in person, but we’ll break it up so that it’s not so overwhelming. It’s not homework. It’s not like you have to do twenty pages a day. You find the page that speaks to you and you work on that page. That’s how we work. But for the most part, I mean, people buy it and they kind of go along on their own, what speaks to them, what they think they need that day. So if they want something that’s snarky and funny to help them heal that day, they find that page. But then there’s some pages that are very much just in remembrance of their person that they lost. Or talking to their doctor or having their doctor sign a book for them. So it varies. Different people
Gracelyn: Different people Different pick the different times. And everybody’s different. Right? You never know what kind of mood you’re gonna be in, but if you pre-open a journal that’s kind of intimidating, so why not have some of these directed prompts? Why not have some humor? Sometimes in your grief, you do just wanna laugh.
Victoria Volk: I’m glad you brought that up in the pre-conversation form that we have, that I share. You had wrote about humor and dark humor, how helpful in healing. And I’m glad that you mentioned that because say, you might say something that other people are just like, oh my god, I can’t believe said that or I can’t you know, but if when you’re in it, it’s like anything to lighten the mood a little bit, to make yourself feel a little bit lighter. And I know for a lot of people who might have that personality of self-deprecating humor, which is kind of my personality a little bit. You know, I might have that sense of humor that many people may not get, but I think it’s important. It helps to I don’t know. I guess, feel lighter. Yeah. I go in the moment, I suppose. But now that we’ve talked a little bit about Luna Peak, I would like to dig a little bit deeper into your individual stories because really that’s how Luna Peak was born. So you had shared about melody about your diagnosis as a child? And how not many children survived? What do you think was the difference for you? I mean, given a fifty percent chance of survival, which I don’t know, you can speak to that too, but in my opinion on that, it’s, you know, we are all statistic of one, like everybody is everybody is different and everybody responds to treatment and all of that differently. And so I think that can be really damaging to the person’s psyche. An adult, not much less a child, to be told that. So can you share a little bit about that experience? And what was happening with your family at that time?
Meldoy: That was very, very time. I’m from a large family. I’m the youngest of five. So it definitely affected everybody. Everybody differently because we’re we have big age gaps.
So some of my siblings were adults when I was diagnosed. So the sibling that was still a child had the worst time with it. But I have to say, like, being a kid, I was six years old, So I kind of didn’t know anything different. I thought treatment was normal. You know, going to the hospital was normal. And I don’t think there’s any rhyme or reason why I survived and somebody else didn’t. It’s luck. I think I was lucky. I think that I was very lucky that I was diagnosed early. My mom felt lymph nodes on my neck and kept on persisting, and the leukemia hadn’t shown up in my bloodstream yet. So it would have been very easy to just say, okay, you know, she’s fine. We’re not gonna go back to the doctor, but my mom persisted. And the cancer was found in my bone marrow and spinal fluid. So luckily, she got those extra tests. So I was diagnosed a lot earlier than I think some kids you know, the diagnosis comes later and then it’s harder to care. But in the eighties, when I was diagnosed, it really was kind of a death sentence. You didn’t you didn’t think you were going to survive at all. And in our neighborhood, there were three kids that had cancer, and I was the one that survived. So, yeah, a lot of survivor guilt with that. So, like, a lot of people be like, what did you do different? It’s like, I didn’t do anything different. I was very lucky. But one thing that I think did help was staying positive and continuing to live life as a normal child as much as I could. So I tried to attend school as much as I could, and I tried to stay with my sport. I was a swimmer. So my parents, you know, would make sure that I was still attending swim meets and swim practice and kind of a little bit of normalcy.
Victoria: Had grief been something that had been a part of your life, up to that point? Or as you were going through your treatment? Like, is that something that was openly talked about in your home?
Melody: So not openly talked about, but experience. A month before I was diagnosed, my grandfather died very quickly from a colon cancer diagnosis. So, you know, my father had to deal with his dad dying and then me being diagnosed in a very short amount of time. So I knew what grief was and I knew that our family kind of suppressed it. You didn’t talk about it. You dealt with it on your own. But, yeah, I had just attended a funeral right before I was diagnosed.
Victoria Volk: Wow. How do you think that experience has evolved with you? Like, how do you feel like you’ve evolved maybe with your grief from that experience over time? Because, I mean, you had obviously, a loss of some childhood there, even though your parents made an effort to make sure that you had as much of the childhood as they as you possibly could. But how do you think that that has how you’ve evolved with that experience over time?
Melody: Yeah. I think that I learned a lot about grief because it was constant. A lot of friends were dying. So I think I learned how to live with it and not fight it. I guess, I’m okay with feeling those feelings. And I think a lot of people try to hide their grief. So I think it was it was good for me to sort of I mean, I don’t wanna say, grow up with grief, but I also had to grieve, you know, my childhood, and my parents had to grieve the child. They thought what they were going to have. Because you think you’re gonna be taking kids to baseball games and you think you’re gonna be taking your kids on vacations, but instead they were taking you to chemotherapy. So there was a lot of grief in our house for sure.
Victoria Volk: My dad was diagnosed with cancer. I was about six. He was given about six months to live. But he lived sixteen months and ultimately he passed away when I was eight. And so I under when you say, like, the whole family grieves, the whole family experiences, the cancer. That’s very true. It’s you know, I wasn’t and we were separated too because his treatment was, like, three hours away. But at that point, there really wasn’t nothing they could do him, but I understand where you’re coming from, how the whole family just experiences it, you know, full on. Right? You bring up a good point with losing other friends, right? Because as a child experiencing cancer and going through cancer, you meet other kids who are going through cancer treatments and things. Just as adults who might connect with other people who are going through cancer treatments and lose friends along the way and you don’t understand, well, why am I still here? And why did they pass away? Children experience that too, and that’s something that really is not talked about. Do you have a resource for helping the parents assist the child and losing other friends to the same thing that they’re maybe not the same thing, but a similar experience.
Melody: One thing that did help me, and this is gonna sound super crazy. I told this story before, so Graceland knows what I’m about to say, but I planned my own funeral at six. So when I was given it in a fifty percent chance of survival, I plan my own funeral, and there was something very empowering about that because I felt like if I died, I knew that things were gonna go the way I wanted them to go. So I chose my plot, which is still sitting there. I made sure that it was overlooking the pool because I wanted to look at my friend swimming.
So I chose my own plot. I chose my own coffin. Like, all of the crazy things that, you know, people go through. After somebody dies, I did it all before. And there’s something very good about being able to I mean, healing. It was healing for me to know that if I wasn’t here, that things were gonna be the way I wanted them to be. And I allocated which toys are going to which friends. So, I know, crazy. But so that was something I would actually, you know, advise people to do if you know that, you know, if somebody says you have six months to live, like, plan it because It does. It feels better. It really does feel better.
Victoria Volk: Now I’m sure people who are listening like me are curious. How did that come about? Like, is that something your parents, like, hey, how would you like to plan your own funeral? Like, how did that come about? Like, is it just, like, you know, were you beyond your years as a six year old you think?
Melody: For sure. Yeah. I don’t know if it was the cancer diagnosis or just who I am, but I felt like I was an instant adult at the moment of diagnosis. I don’t know exactly the moment that came about, but I know that I have a quirky mom that, you know, does things differently. And so it was probably her saying, hey, let’s go, you know. And we live in a really small community in California, and everybody kind of came together to help. So I’m sure that, you know, maybe somebody said, hey, you know, we’ll give you a discount on this or that or, you know, trying to help the family. So maybe that’s how, but I really honestly don’t know what started it, but I know I actually had a really good time doing it.
Victoria Volk: That’s interesting. I would say you’re probably an old soul. So, Gracelyn, I know you mentioned earlier that a father had passed away when you were twenty six. Is he your brother? Melody?
Melody: My brother-in-law.
Victoria Volk: Oh, brother-in-law. Okay. Was that a sudden loss for you or was that kind of expected?
Gracelyn: It was a sudden loss. So I thought I was actually training for a mudrun, and he was on a run. And he had a heart, like, a cardiac event it wasn’t exactly a heart attack. It was an electrical issue with his heart. So it was very sudden. I was in New York at the time. But Melody is here and actually, you know, it’s Melody’s brother-in-law, but really he was kind of a father figure to my aunt as well because we all kind of grew up together. Melody was kind of like the first child in my family because of the age gap between Melody and my mom. So she was kind of raised as their first baby. So we’ve been on family vacations together. We’re all very tight knit. So, yeah, it was a very big shop. It was actually seven years ago this week.
Victoria Volk: Can you speak to what you’ve learned through working with other grievers and survivors of cancer versus maybe survivors of the family left behind due to a sudden loss, like do you have anything specific that you did that helped you and that you have passed along to others that you’ve worked with and and and shared your resources and things with.
Gracelyn: You know, I don’t think anybody could really prepare you for the finality of someone being gone. Whether it’s a sudden loss or an anticipated loss. I mean, just the effect of having somebody there one day and not the next. It’s just wild and it’s so difficult to cope with that emotionally and physically to just you know, that person’s just there’s such a large space. There’s a large space in your heart. There’s a large space just in your vicinity, in your home, just somebody missing from the table. It’s just a very crazy experience, and it’s really difficult to get used to that. But I think having stories of other people learning how to cope with that has helped me I think when I started the process of interviewing and photographing creepers, I was just two years into loss. And I was very much broken. I wouldn’t definitely describe myself as lost as broken. You know, I had already gotten a career started, but when you experience that type of loss, it feels as if the life that you were living is gone. Right? You have to start your new life without them because everything is just reshuffled, all your priorities are different, everything that you thought mattered, maybe doesn’t matter as much anymore or different things matter more now. So, you know, I would describe myself as very very broken and lost and listening to people’s stories. And connecting with people either from my past or even connecting with our own family members was very healing for me. And the more that I started to interview people and get to know their stories and connect with them over this shared loss, the more I figured out, oh, okay, I don’t have to grieve exactly the way that they had grieved, but I can figure it out for myself. And that was kind of a big turning point at least for me. And, you know, even reconnecting with family members who are part of our project, it was crazy because, you know, in the case of even Melody’s dad, not having the opportunity to grieve his own dad while Melody was going through treatment, well, you know, that I was able to reconnect with him and get his grief story through this project. And so each of us with a father loss connecting And this is my grandpa who I’ve always grown up with. And I didn’t hear anything about his grief until, like, I sat hand out, and I learned what it meant for him as a father, you know, as a fatherless father going through other types of adversity in his life and how he started to rebuild.
And, yeah, maybe our stories aren’t completely the same. And I don’t think they have to be the same. To learn how other people have gone through it.
Victoria Volk: I totally one hundred percent agree. And that’s really the why I love this podcast so much because I’m storytelling. Right? People are storytelling. They’re telling they’re sharing their stories. And you’re sharing the stories of others through your photography in the book. I used to be a photographer. So it never occurred to me to, like, capture other people’s stories of grief through photography. Had you had an interest in photography before that project?
Gracelyn: I think I’m known as the person in the family who is like the annoying one who always demands a photo. Yeah. And I think everybody who is annoyed with it until my dad died, and now we’re like, oh, we have so many photos. That’s great, actually. So we’re a very decent eventful type of family. And, you know, it’s not like we were experts before we started this. We weren’t photographers by trade, but you know, we kind of started into it and we just made sure to focus on the eyes and the faces and kinda people bring their mementos to the table and share their story. And I think the point kind of came across as we went through it.
Victoria Volk: One thing I wish I would have done is purchase the book before we got on this call because I would have loved to have paged through it and been able to speak to it myself personally. So I do look forward to checking it out myself. So thank you for that work that you have done and put into that. And both of you for Luna Peak foundation because I’m sure that there are children who are feeling happier and lighter because of the resources that you’ve shared. Like, I’m not alone. Because even as children, they can feel alone and isolated in their grief. And I didn’t ask you yet, Graceland, but was grief something that was talked about in your home growing up?
Gracelyn: Yeah. It wasn’t. And you know, I had experienced a loss of an uncle who actually lived with us. And I think about my dad’s story, my dad had actually lost everyone except for her sister in his immediate family.
Victoria Volk: Okay.
Gracelyn: Very young, actually. So, you know, he had even gone through five different close losses before he passed away, very suddenly. And, you know, he never talked about it. And so that is kind of an interesting element to it and that I’m perpetually curious about that. You know, how did he get through the loss of his dad, his mom, his sibling, another sibling.
You know, how did he get through it? And that’s kind of still a mystery. And so I think part of work is kind of digging into it and, you know, laying bare all of these unspoken pieces of grief and other people’s stories. Because I kinda don’t have any answers myself, and it’s hard to so you actually go through it, which is an unfortunate reality of a lot of people’s grief experiences.
Victoria Volk: You know, I say, like, you know, if you’ve been with the same person for forty, fifty, sixty, seventy years, and, you know, spouses, let’s say they’re married, and one of them passes away. And it’s not uncommon that the other spouse passes away shortly thereafter, and they say, well, he died of a broken heart. Perhaps that is part of it with your dad, that he had so much loss that he didn’t complete those emotions for himself with all of those losses. It wasn’t, you know, something that he just buried and stepped down and, you know, perhaps it was a broken heart. Literally, like, a broken heart. It’s not about digging up the past and hashing everything out. Right? Because all relationships are different and there’s less than loving relationships and there’s loving relationships. But regardless of what kind of relationship you have with your loved ones, there’s gonna be stuff that upsets you and makes you angry and sad and maybe resentful and all of these things and, of course, lots of love and joy in memories too, but that’s, you know, the polarity of life. Right?
So what is your training through the David Kessler grief educator program taught you that you may not have realized before any aha moments through your training and things.
Gracelyn: I think what I found most valuable was the thoughts on children’s grief and how they go through it. Because I lost my dog when I was twenty six and Melody has a lot of experience with grief as a child, but that was something that I wasn’t as familiar with. And to hear some of the stories about what he has done therapy and to think about how play is incorporated into children’s grief and how that can be helpful. For them or how they can compartmentalize on, like, adults can in their grief. They can kind of go in and out of their grief. A lot more than an adult can for example. And so that has helped inform the work that we do in talking to adults. In, you know, hosting these workshops and just being a general resource for people and creating a kids version of our group workbook for example. And it kind of helped us organize some of these pages too because kids do wanna draw. Kids do wanna talk about their memories. They do wanna talk about their loved ones favorite things. And how can we do this and kind of interleave more playful activities in between it? Or how can they use their creativity to unpack their grief experience? And even if they might not fully understand what grief is, they’re still grieving. So how can we do this in a very honest way and invite them and welcome them to start to process their emotion? And so I found that to be really useful. From the grief educator program.
Victoria Volk: I think it’s important to mention too that the parents or the caretakers or caregivers of the children are open to their children talking about their loss and their grief because for a lot of parents in that situation, let’s say they lost their parent. The child lost their grandparent. There I’ve personally heard of situations where the parent does not want the child to bring up the grandparent because it sets them or it makes them sad or whatever. And but really, it’s not about you, the parent. Right? Like, and maybe that’s part of the lesson here is that if you’re not willing and open to talk about your own feelings and your own grief, your child is not going to feel safe talking about their own. I’m certified through the grief recovery institute and there’s these six myths of grief and one of them is you know, a few of them don’t feel bad. Replace the loss. Grieve alone. And these are things that we learn that is emulated by our parents and caregivers of how to how to deal with grief when something happens. Like, they don’t talk about it, so I guess I can’t talk about it or I’m told not to talk about it. So now I gotta go grieve alone. Right? And so we I can speak to that personally as a child who lost a parent as a child. There has to be space for children to let that go and to express it. And so I love that your program incorporates that, but the parents really do have to be open to that to their child having that experience and sharing it with them. Otherwise, they grew up a griever as an adult that’s like many of many people walking around stuffing their feelings and not talking about it. Right? So I’m glad that as a society, I think we’re getting better at this. I think we’re getting better as adults sharing and talking and communicating and demystifying death and dying even too. Right? Like, it doesn’t have to be this even as an end of life, Dula, which you are a trained in a life dual as well. So am I? It’s so much in common. It’s important that we are able to have those discussions of what is important to us at end of life to there are so many things we could talk about here, but what piece of advice that you would give a young adult who has experienced a loss of a parent or someone significant. I know you had mentioned the things that helped you, but if people aren’t sure what to do or where to turn, what would you suggest?
Gracelyn: I love saying that, you know, you can carve your own path I think everything is shopping after loss and the change just keeps coming. And the sooner that you can roll with the punches and welcome those changes, the sooner you’ll be able to cope with it in a healthy way. I think not a lot of people understand at least from the outside, when you go through grief, it’s not just the grief of your person. There is an entire ripple effect. And it affects your whole family, it affects your whole network, your job, where you physically are, just so many things can also change and so many different secondary losses that come with it. And I think there’s so many stereotypes and I think as a griever, there’s so much dancing around uncomfortable topics and not making other people uncomfortable with what you’re going through. And it’s okay to carve your own path, and it’s okay if you end up doing something, you had no idea that you would be doing. I mean, I’m really shocked by everything that we’ve created. And this is just kind of where my life has led me, but I think my dad would have I was crazy for quitting my day job and for quitting a very stable day job in corporate America to, you know, just try this out. So, you know, it’s okay that your life might look different. It should look different after loss. And I think part of embracing that change is honoring the fact that the loss has occurred. And to acknowledge it, why would your life look the same when some of you that you love so much is gone? So Yeah. I guess it’s twofold. Be okay with carving carving your own path and be okay with the changes that just keep coming.
Victoria Volk: My last guest on the podcast, she said something that was very poignant. It’s very simple. How do I want this to change me? Because we do have a choice. You know, it can really derail our entire lives. Loss and grief can derail our entire lives. We can base our choices and our decisions of that emotional weight that we carry or we can do something about it. So thank you so much for what you guys have created. And I want to ask to, what do you feel like are the gaps right now that you see still in the grief and end-of-life space?
Melody: I think that talking about it is always going to be a gap. So that’s why I’m very proud of Gracelyn’s snapshots of life after loss on Instagram because she’s created a community of people that can talk. So seeing other people talk triggers you to talk and tell your story and hearing other people’s story. So it’s this like she said, it’s this ripple effect. So I do think that, you know, storytelling is important. And what you’re doing is important. And, you know, I do think that the gap is finding someone or finding other people that are like you that are grieving similar losses as you that connection. So I think the connection is needed. And there has been so much progress with celebrities talking about grief, grief in
Gracelyn: the news, especially with COVID. There’s so much more talk about grief, which is, you know, incredible and you see so many creative people using their unique talents to draw, to create films about grief in a very real way documentaries, and that’s been a really awesome thing to see. I mean, we’ve been doing this for about five years, but you know, still more keeps coming out and I love seeing that. It’s really empowering even for me as a brief creator, if you will. But, you know, we always need more stories of men talking about their grief. We need more stories of people talking about their grief when they grew up not having grief. Great resources. One of the people in our project is actually a family friend. He’s holding it down as sixty six years after loss. So we have, like, a whole range of people who talk about their loss, and it ranges from one to sixty six years. But, you know, to even have somebody come to the table who had no resources to then share about six decades worth of grief and what he went through. The more that we get these stories and we get men, we get people who are of different generations talking about you know, the landscape and what resources they had and what wisdom that they have to share. The better we’re all better off hearing the experiences of someone who can relate to and, you know, and then learn from people who have a different background. So we just hope that there is a lot more age diversity cultural diversity, gender diversity, all the diversity, I think we’re all better off. You know, seeing and hearing those types stories.
Victoria Volk: Was it just you or are you the only child in your family, or did you have a sibling that you experienced the loss of your father with?
Gracelyn: I have a brother. Yeah. He’s older.
Victoria Volk: Did it bring you closer together?
Gracelyn: Yeah. We were very tight knit. I would say we’re a very, very close family, which is why it’s been hard to go from a family of four to that kind of rebalancing act of going to you know, become a family of three. But, yeah, we’ve gone through so much together and, you know, it’s really shed some light on all the different types of loss and grief that you can go through. And I really see him as a companion in my grief, and I’m thankful that we’re actually five years apart, so he’s five years older. And he has more memories than I do with my dad, and sometimes he helps fill in those gaps for me. And even though we’re both adults when it happens, you know. Mhmm. Still those five years are five years of, you know, more he knew about my dad, and I’m really thankful that he is a friend in this process. He is my best friend. Yeah.
Victoria Volk: Do you highlight also stories of people who may not have had someone die, but still have experienced maybe estrangement or maybe they were adopted and they don’t know who their parents are situations like that. Do you address or do you highlight all types of loss? Or is it mostly people that have experienced the death of a loved one?
Melody: So far, it’s only been the death of a loved one, but we acknowledge all types of grief, obviously. And where we have a few things in the works that will expand on types of greed and types of loss, but it’s still more loss than you know, grieving something, you know, grieving a change in your life or something like that.
Victoria Volk: How would you to define grief?
Melody: I guess, for me, I mean, this it’s a common saying that brief comes and waves. So it’s a feeling that’s ever-changing. It’s a constant changing feeling for me and we talk about moments of grief that come and go and those moments even change. You know, we feel like memories. So you hear a song about your person on the radio. And sometimes that song will make you cry, but sometimes that song will make you happy. So there’s, you know, creep I guess there’s no definition for me. It really is just an ocean. Grief is an ocean.
Victoria Volk: How about you, Gracelyn?
Gracelyn: I think it’s just a part of you. I think it’s something that is just forever than there. Like almost physically, it’s just a part of your body that’s just always on you. One of our participants actually said that he was under the influence of grief, and we really loved. We really loved that quote because It’s just and that kind of just comes over you, you know, in good ways and in bad ways and everything in between, but we thought that was, like, a really good way to explain how grief just kind of overtakes you sometimes.
Victoria Volk: That really could be a really snarky and funny bumper sticker. Is there anything else that you would like to share about Luna Peak Foundation or Luna Peak Publishing? Or about your stories?
Melody: You know, I like to tell people that when you know a griever, it’s I we get this question the most, actually. Like, my friends, you know, dad just died. What should I do for them? You know, because we wanna help our friends or, you know, our companions that are dealing with grief, but often people don’t know how to help. And since everyone briefed you have to know the person, but I feel like Gracelyn’s book, our book beyond wreath, is probably one of the best things to give to a new griever. Because they have so many resources in one place. They can find someone that is similar to them or how many years out of grief because one thing we want to know is what is grief like five years from now, ten years from now. And you can find that in the book. And I certainly don’t like getting flowers for deaths or for grief because, I don’t know, the smell of the flowers, like, reminds me of funerals. It reminds me of death because the flowers die. So I like to give our book. Obviously, I do, but I tell people, like, something that’s tangible that they can hold and they can keep with of them is better than a bouquet..
Victoria Volk: That’s great tip. I just wanna share a resource with you both through the grief recovery institute, the founder of the grief recovery institute co-authored a book called the grief recovery handbook but in that book, they define grief as the loss of hopes, dreams, and expectations, and anything that you wish would have been different, better, or more. And for me, that, like, totally rings true for I mean, that covers all kinds of grief. Right? I mean, loss of hopes, dreams, and expectations. I mean, I can be for relationships. I can be for your life. It can be your career, money, like all sorts of things. So I just wanted to share that resource with you both that that book exists and there’s also when children Grieve is another book that they have. But yes, I think the more people that do this work, the better off society is no matter how you bring it about, no matter how you share it, whether it’s through photography or through workbooks or there’s so many resources now that, like you mentioned, before, did not exist. Twenty, thirty years ago. I know for me as a child griever nobody knew what to do. Nobody knew what to say, so nobody did anything. Nobody said anything. You know? And like you said, when children, you know, children can come in and out of their grief and they can compartmentalize, like, don’t assume that just because a child is not exhibiting sad or, you know, anger behavior or something. You know, like, I was a wall like, I was a wallflower. Like, I was very shy and kept to myself and some children just experience it differently or express it differently, like, you know, they say, you know, too, like, children that are exhibiting, like, anger or aggressive behavior. They’re just hurting that’s a child hurting, you know. And so we just we label them kids as bad kids or good kids, you know. And so I think we need to get away from those labels instead of asking what’s wrong with you, maybe what happened to you, you know? So thank you for the resources that you’ve created and have put out into the world and what you have to come. So what Can you share a little bit what you’re excited about right now?
Gracelyn: I actually just brought her our sample of the grief workbook for kids. So we’re working on that. But a lot of what we do is we bring care packages and books to kids and hospitals. So for pediatric, cancer boards, we bring them some of Melody’s resources and her children’s books and the workbook and the photography books. And so we’re getting those all into Spanish as well.
Victoria: Oh that’s nice
Gracelyn: So that’s kind of one of our, you know, big parts of our mission is to make these books accessible for people and to make this learn being in education and processing accessible for everyone, so especially in the LA area where we are. We like to donate all of these books to hospitals, so we’re working on those new books. Yeah.
Victoria Volk: I love that. And I’m also told or we had talked about it before that you’ll have discount code for the week after the episode airs? Yes.
Gracelyn: So the code will be grieving voices in all caps. And everyone will get 15% off when you use that code.
Victoria Volk: Off of a book. Right?
Gracelyn: Yes.
Victoria Volk: Yes. Okay.
Gracelyn: Then that’ll be through our website, which is lunapeakpublishing.com.
Victoria Volk: And I will put that information in the show notes as well as along with the dates. So we have that perfect. And anything else you would like to share?
Melody: Just that you’re never alone. You know, you walk past a grieve every single day and you don’t even know it.
Victoria Volk: That’s true. And you don’t know what people are physically dealing with, right? Because sickness and illness can doesn’t show up all the time with a bald head. Right?
Gracelyn: Right.
Victoria Volk: You know, compassion. Let’s give some compassion. And light in the world. We need it for sure. One more question. What has your grief taught you?
Melody: I mean, I think what I just said that you’re not alone, you know, finding other creepers. You know, it taught me that there is no right way to grieve.
Gracelyn: The same for me as well. And I think I figured out that sharing can be healing, whether you’re sharing with yourself. And acknowledging those feelings or sharing with a community or sharing it a book. It was through that ripple full effective healing that we figured out our path as a nonprofit, actually. It was through having cancer survivors share their story with another cancer survivor and to have that really quick bond with someone and to see kind of the healing happened there. In addition to putting their story in a book and elevating their voice and having that heal the readers. We like to call that the ripple effect of healing, and that’s kind of continued with the grief book as well. And it was through other people sharing their stories even with me as the editor that really helped me heal. So I’m really thankful to have discovered that. It’s okay to acknowledge this, and it’s okay to, you know, give some power back the grief experience even though people might not wanna talk about it. It’s okay to share and it’s okay to find those people and the community that understands you.
Victoria Volk: Very important. Thank you so much. I love this conversation. I like what you guys are doing and sharing with the world. And I appreciate your time, both of you for being here today. And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.