How to Honor Loss & Why It Matters With Rachel Marie Kang
Episode Notes
We experience big and little losses all the time.
A friend moves away.
An opportunity passes you by.
A relationship ends.
Learning how to recognize and honor the losses we all experience can become a beautiful part of life, leading to more kindness, self-compassion, and connection with others. But we don't often talk about our losses, let alone how to honor them.
That's why I loved this conversation with Rachel Marie Kang about creating space to honor loss. She is the author of the brand new book, "The Matter of Little Losses," a beautiful journey through how to honor the big and little losses in your life.
Here's what we cover:
1. The difference between loss and grief (2:09)
2. Different types of loss (7:22)
3. How we process loss as children (14:23)
4. Examples of "little" losses (22:46)
5. The most important way to parent kids through losses (31:04)
6. Rachel's 3 steps for tending losses each day (35:25)
7. The thing we want most through loss (39:59)
8. Why honoring loss brings hope (47:25)
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Resources
- The Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things by Rachel Marie Kang
- Let There Be Art: The Pleasure and Purpose of Unleashing the Creativity within You by Rachel Marie Kang
- Follow Rachel Marie Kang on Instagram!
- RachelMarieKang.com
- The Fallow HouseDopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Dr. Anna Lembke
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books by Karen Swallow Prior
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- The Myth Pilgrim podcast
Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author.
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here today for this conversation about creating space for the losses in our life. Whether you're someone who's had a major loss, maybe recently, or even long ago—or whether you're just like every single one of us and honoring the little losses almost every single week, even every single day sometimes.
We're going to get into grief in upcoming episodes. Today, we're really focusing on loss. So I want to touch on right here at the start about what is the difference.
Loss is the event of losing something or someone. It's an external event or situation that leads to a change in your experience, or it might lead to an emotional response.
It can be really vivid and noticeable, such as the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, the loss of a job. It can also be a little bit more abstract or intangible, such as the loss of a dream, the loss of a sense of security, or maybe the loss of energy, or a certain way of feeling vital in your body.
So these are losses. They can range all the way from big losses down to little losses. Just yesterday I was going through the day and I got an email that was a disappointment. I would categorize it as a loss. It was a little one, but it had a big emotional punch and I had to name that loss so that it didn't take me out for the rest of my day.
And this is where we link from loss to grief. When we name our losses, when we're aware of our losses, when we notice our losses, we can then engage in a healthy process of grief.
Grief is the emotional response to loss, and it encompasses a wide range of feelings that arise after experiencing a loss. It can include sadness. It can include anger. It can include confusion. It might include a longing or a poignancy, a bittersweet feeling. It's really personal and it's really case specific.
So for example, for me yesterday, I didn't really feel a big grief. I felt a pinch of sadness and regret and even a little anger, but I did need to notice the loss in order to be able to tend to the emotional response to the loss. And it includes a process again, no matter how big or how little.
It involves coming to terms with the loss, adjusting your view of reality based on that loss, tending to the emotions that come up no matter how big or how little, and finding ways to cope and care for yourself.
And you're often doing all of this as you're trying to stay present to the tasks of your day, to the work that you have, to the parenting that you have, to all the things that you're involved with. So as our guest today talks about—this idea of tending to our losses is a really important practice that we all need to learn.
We have to have these skills to notice these losses and tend to ourselves through them because if we don't tend to our losses, we're not honoring the emotions that they stir up. And those emotions get sidelined. And as we know from everything we talk about this, and as we know from everything we talk about on this podcast, those emotions don't go away. They get exiled to a corner of your soul where they fester and get bigger, and then they come out in even bigger ways over time.
And so remember the loss is the event. It's the thing that happens no matter how big or how small and grief is your emotional response to that loss. Grieving is a skill. It's a skill we're not taught. But in order to grieve well, in order to honor the emotion of sadness, that is an important part of all of our human lives, we have to begin to notice our losses.
And if you struggle to notice or validate or honor, even the little losses in your life, you will bypass the grief process. On the other hand, if you begin to recognize losses, you can then frame them and brave your way through a healthy relationship with loss.
Now I want to introduce you to a tool that is from my upcoming book called I Shouldn't Feel This Way. It's The Looking Tool. And in the book, I walk you through this three step process I just laid out. It's naming, framing, and braving, where you begin to name different things that are occurring so that you can brave a healthy way through them. Now this tool can apply to anything you're experiencing, but I want to apply it today to this idea of noticing and tending to your losses. It’s pretty simple. It helps you understand how loss fits into the larger story of your life.
The tool consists of three parts:
Looking back.
Looking at today.
Looking ahead.
And it helps you understand your current relationship to loss because you're positioning that in the larger context of how you've experienced loss throughout your life. So for example, if you have big reactions to little losses in your current life, it may well be that you've got some big losses from your past that you haven't really looked at. And so you have a big reaction in your present because there's a backlog of untended grief due to losses you haven't really honored from the past.
And so as you begin to think about loss in your own life through this episode, you might notice: Where are there some losses that it might be good for me to honor and name and validate and show some compassion for myself as I look ahead? So looking back, here are some examples of losses from childhood that so many of us face and don't even realize that they still affect us:
Number one is just a loss of innocence. If you experienced some trauma or abuse or witnessed some trauma, there's a loss of innocence. Number two, there can be a loss of physical places.
Rachel talks about this in our episode today. I write about this in Boundaries for Your Soul. The loss of a home can be a big deal for a child through a move or through a relocation.
You can experience the loss of trust if there was a betrayal, a disappointment, or realization that the adults in your life were not actually trustworthy. And that can be a loss that it takes a while to understand how to name and recover. You might experience the loss of potential if certain choices were cut off for you. And then there's the loss of friendships or the loss of a feeling of acceptance or the loss of a feeling of acceptance in a peer group or the loss of security if there's a loss in your family structure.
And so these losses, if, again, not named, they still live inside our souls and we don't want to let the grief over these losses take us over. But the way to do that is to begin to do the work of gently honoring the losses in little ways.
When we look at today, some of the big and little losses that many of us deal with in our current lives. We deal with the loss of time. Time feels like it's moving really fast. We deal with the loss of different stages of our children's lives. I talked about this with Rowena in the series on transitions, how sometimes every milestone that you go through with your kids also presents a loss.
We deal with the loss of friendships. We deal with the loss of communities. Sometimes we deal with financial losses. We deal with the loss of a job or the loss of a potential career path. We might deal with the loss of a feeling of our youthfulness or a loss of energy or a loss of the health that we thought we once had. These are all losses that flicker through our lives on an almost daily basis.
And these losses again, do not have to take us out. They're part of being human. Jesus experienced loss all the time. The question is how do we tend to these losses in a healthy way?
And then lastly, when we look ahead, many of us are anticipating certain losses. We might be anticipating the loss of a loved one. We might be anticipating the loss of our own physical abilities, the loss of a career identity. The loss of a certain way we've been doing our family. Even good things can bring up these losses. When our kids leave the nest, we're happy for them, but it can bring up loss for us.
Tending to these losses in a healthy way is crucial for maintaining emotional and psychological wellbeing. These losses, even the little ones, can accumulate over time and impact our mental health if we don't learn how to address them properly. It's a little bit like a garden—you have to tend the garden. We have to tend these losses.
Stanford psychiatrist, Anna Lembke, wrote in her insightful book, Dopamine Nation, “with intermittent exposure to pain, we become less vulnerable to pain and more able to feel pleasure over time.” In other words, to keep pain from becoming too big, you need to tend to the right amount of pain in healthy ways.
We have to learn to tend our pain. And we do that by naming it, by honoring it, by noticing it when it shows up.
It starts by naming what's hard. Recognizing, “Ouch, that feels like a loss.” That hurts—that rejection, that disappointment, that lost opportunity—that hurts! Recognizing that it's okay to feel upset, disappointed or frustrated by a loss. When you validate those feelings—the truth of your experience in that moment—you can then take steps toward that healthy experience, again, of grief, whether it's a small process, a little process, or a big process of adjusting your view of reality based on what happened, caring for yourself, and then taking brave steps forward in light of that new reality.
And one of the most important things you can do as you learn to tend to your losses is to practice self compassion, is to be kind to yourself when you have that emotional response, no matter how big or how small. Self compassion means treating yourself with kindness, with concern and with support in the same way you would offer a good friend that support if they were going through something.
“Yes. That was hard. That's a loss.” Let's honor that. Let's validate that. Let's adjust to this new reality, and then we'll figure out how to find our way forward.
Today's conversation about tending to our losses is with Rachel Marie Kang. She's the author of a beautiful new book. It's called The Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things.
Rachel's book walks us through so many of these types of losses—losses from childhood that still impact us all the way to bigger losses in the present day.
Here's what she says: “Life is full of love, but it is also full of loss. Every big and seemingly insignificant loss—the loss of friendships, faith, dreams, health, community, and everything in between grieves us more than we think it will and often more than we let on. Why? Because losses matter.”
And as we learn to be kind to ourselves through loss, we are able to bring so much more kindness to everyone around us. And I think we could all agree that our world could use a little bit more of that kindness and that compassion as we all navigate losses every single day.
And so I'm so thrilled to bring you this conversation with Rachel. Rachel Marie Kang is the founder of the Fallow House and her writing has been featured in Christianity Today, Proverbs 31, She Reads Truth in and (in)courage, Rachel is the author of Let There Be Art and her brand new book, The Matter of Little Losses.
Please enjoy my conversation with Rachel Marie Kang.
***
Alison: I am thrilled to have you here today, Rachel. This is just such a beautiful book, and I'm so grateful that you're taking the time to come on and talk with us about it. So welcome.
Rachel: Thanks for having me, Alison.
Alison: I would love it if you would tell us a little bit about how you would have thought about loss or grief early on as a young person or even a young adult. How would you have coped with it back then?
Rachel: absolutely. I love this question. And I have to say, when I think back to my younger self or past days, I think, oh my gosh, I carried so much. I carried so much. And I now know that a lot of what I was carrying, I carried it because I cared. There was a great deal in my life that was taking place as I share in my book that mattered to me, that I cared about, even when I thought I didn't.
And I just want to read really quick from my first book, actually, because I literally say this almost word for word. I love how I say it. But I say there I am in that 1997 Kodak memory. So I'm talking about a photo, the girl who carries a lot, the girl who questions a lot, the girl who can't help but see that her lot in life is always asking, but never answering.
And then later on, I talk about beholding broken things and I say I was no longer just beholding brokenness, but it was beholding me. And I think I had this perspective of, I'm just a broken person because of carrying these sad and terrible and hard things, and so maybe this is just a personality defect, maybe I'm just a pessimistic person.
I now know that there was grief. It was real grief. And I'm so thankful for the gift of words and the gift of writing that was, I would say, how I made sense of my world and made sense of my grief as a young girl, just writing poems, writing in my journal, even before I knew really what I was doing.
Alison: Yeah. It's so interesting. You were processing through it, but simultaneously at that young age, you were also seeing yourself as broken. What's wrong with me? Even though what you were doing was beautiful coping, beautiful work of making sense of pain, but you didn't have the language of, oh, this is how one processes grief.
Rachel: Right.
Alison: You mentioned in the first part of The Matter of Little Losses, it takes bravery to be here. When did you begin to notice or realize that you needed to face grief, that you needed to be brave to really face some of that grief?
Rachel: Yeah, I think there were different nudges I'd felt throughout childhood, teenage years, adult, young adult years. I think when I think back though, the first nudge was as a teenager. It was at some event, I couldn't tell you the person who was speaking, I couldn't tell you where we were. I don't even remember any of that.
But what I do know was this woman on the stage was talking about anger and bitterness and sorrow. She didn't know my story, but she was naming how I felt and I will never forget, I had chills on my arms, goosebumps, just to be seen, and again, she didn't know my story. She was speaking to a whole crowd of us, but she called out how I felt.
And it was at that moment when I realized, oh my gosh, this shouldn't be here. This pain, this sorrow, this sadness, what do I do to get it out, to face it, to fix it? And so I'd say that began probably my first step towards a healing journey. And there were other places in my life too, where I'd felt those nudges, probably my college years in different positions of leadership when you're challenging others to make good decisions and to make healthy decisions.
And then you, yourself, you are automatically challenging yourself and saying, wait a minute, how am I doing in this area? My undergraduate years were really another season in my life of just lots of healing.
And then of course, motherhood, which I have just entered into. It's six beautiful, wonderful, fantastic, crazy years of tending to these sweet two boys that I have, but you are daily invited to check yourself and to see when and where you are operating out of pain or unhealth, however we want to call it, whatever it is for that day.
So yeah, I'd say it started many years ago, but that journey of learning to see, to bravely face those places. I'm still on that journey.
Alison: When you began to notice those nudges, so you were in high school when that woman was on stage, then you're in college in leadership and you began to realize, oh I'm dealing with some of this, did you reach out to anybody for support with that? And if so, was it helpful or sometimes it's not helpful.
People encourage you to shove it back under the carpet or stuff it back inside or even be shaming. And so I like to ask the question without the pressure of you feeling like you have to answer in the positive. It's helpful either way, because I think when we get those nudges, we tend, especially when we're younger, to take little fledgling steps to maybe move towards someone who we think can help us. And depending on the help that we get, to use your flower metaphor we can wilt back in.
Rachel: Yeah. Yeah, that is so good. I have to say that I had some really great leaders in my life while growing up. Even as a teen, I remember that moment I was at a church event. I was at some church gathering girls event. That swirl, I almost envision it as a swirl because you don't know what is all of this mess, this tornado of emotions and feelings.
I do remember taking that to certain youth leaders and, and being mentored through that and being tended to and heard through that and validated and prayed for and and I think I remember too probably the greatest thing that they gave was time. There wasn't a pressure of “we need to fix this now”, but you're in a relationship with people and so they know when to ask a question or maybe not.
And for some of us, it's not always a good experience, but thankfully, I did have good leaders in my life that knew when to ask a question and maybe to let me sit in it.
Alison: I love that reminder of what you're trying to show us through the book, which is time, spaciousness, gentle questioning, exploration versus you need to fix that. You need to pray that away. You need to not feel that, which can make us feel more ashamed for those emotions that are just really part of actually a normal response to hard things.
So I love that. I'm grateful that you had that experience. We talk so much, Rachel, about grief and we sometimes think of it in terms of these big losses and it's important, these sudden losses or big moments of losing someone or, a big loss of a relationship or even the loss of a dream of a certain type of family, we see that and these are really important things to name and honor.
I think it's so interesting that you talk about these little losses that maybe are even harder for us to give ourselves permission to grieve in a healthy way. Talk to us about what you mean by that idea of little losses and some of the ones that you encountered that led you to have to process all of these emotions.
Rachel: Sure. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I had so much fun writing this book, by the way. I know I tackle some heavy and hard topics, but there's so much nostalgia leaning into some of these stories and memories. And honestly when writing about moving home and friendships, those chapters, I thought about those losses when you move from a home and you start a new school and you make all these new friends, but you lose these friends.
That was something that I'd done a few times and I look back now and I'm like, where were the rituals? I think that I would have floundered less if I had someone that when we moved from our first house, what if we had gathered rocks and kept those rocks and made some sort of collection or, I don't know I'm just, I'm grasping.
Or even with friendships, I actually wrote in the book, I tried to make a ritual for myself. I share the story of, I'm with my friends, we're celebrating my party, they all surprise me and come to my house, we take a walk, we go to the gas station and we order these Coca Cola's that are in vintage bottles and my friends all go home the next day and I save those bottles and I wash them out and I keep them in my closet for years.
And when I look back on that moment, I don't think I was crazy, I think I was trying to create a ritual. I was trying to keep those friends as close to me as I could because I knew they were going back home and now I'm here in this new town and I'm going to miss them. How do I keep them close?
And so yeah, I had a lot of fun naming little losses and imagining that others would feel validated through that. But those were two that kind of surprised me and I had fun writing about it. But as I looked back, I thought, I wonder how things could have been different if there were words for this or rituals for this.
Alison: That chapter got me so much. I think it's so resonant. It reminded me of when we were writing Boundaries for Your Soul years ago, we needed a personal story for the chapter on sadness, on grief. And I just wrote this story about revisiting my childhood home. Years later, when my parents sold the house, like you said, there was not really a ritual and I was maybe disconnected from that.
And then years later, it was almost a flood of delayed grief. And I remember even as an adult, writing that and thinking, oh, this is such a little. thing. And that little story became so resonant for so many people, same with yours.
When I read yours, I was just like, oh, this formative age where the safety and security of these places and these people mean so much to these young parts of us and how you ritualized it. You found a meaningful way to ritualize that for yourself. Yeah, that was beautiful.
Rachel: So cool that happened since writing that book. It was in-between the time after you send it to your editor and you're working through it, so it hasn't come out yet, and one of my best friends’ parents left her childhood home and she was devastated.
I had gone to this home, and I was like, oh my gosh, like what do you do? And so I had to think, what would I have wanted? If I could go back to any of my childhood homes, what would I want? And I thought, I would love a leaf from a tree or a sprig from a plant or a flower, something to keep and to hold.
And within a few days I'd ordered like this clear glass frame that you can basically pluck a leaf off or find some flowers and you just dry press them and then you can preserve it forever. And so I sent those to her and I was like, can't save your home, but go get a snipping of the peppermint in your mom's garden or something and keep a piece of it forever.
Alison: You're really getting at with this whole idea of big and little losses, but parts of us long for that permanence, that sense of ultimacy with home, whether it's the home of a place or the home of a relationship. And that's what I love about what you're doing in this book, even the way you bring in really familiar art and literature that are so familiar to so many of us.
I think you talk about the Harry Potter series. You talk about Madeleine L'Engle, you're quoting a lot of these very resonant things that put us back in places of our memory. It's so human. And there are parts of us that know we can't hang on to things forever, but we long for that sense of consistency, of permanency, of goodness.
And so the fact that you were able to turn some of that pain into this gift for us to help us reconnect is just such a powerful gift that you've given us.
Rachel: Thank you for seeing that.
Alison: Tell me a little bit, Rachel, how has your faith helped you navigate grief, but also how have your losses changed your experience of faith?
Rachel: Okay, I love this question. And I actually want to allude to something that you had mentioned earlier. You were piggybacking off of a thought that I said, this idea of having these leaders that kind of gave space and gave time for the grief that I would unpack with them. As I think about this question, I think that's what my faith has given me.
It's given me space. It's given me space to think and to feel and to question and even to rage, which I really loved getting into later in The Matter of Little Losses, like the space to question and to be angry. And then even just literally space in journaling, to be able to journal to God and say, this has broken my heart, or why is this the way that it is?
Being out in creation, nature, God's creation, and finding an expansiveness in that–being held by nature and allowing that to be a huge part of my faith and what holds me. And as I thought about this, I thought, wow, I feel like I have found such an expansiveness even beyond the walls of a building, which is when you think about faith. Most often, we get this image of a church, which is true, that is part of it, but there are other parts, and I found that it's so expansive.
And then the other way around, how has grief shaped my faith? I think it's given me permission to see this as just as sacred as these qualities and virtues such as love and faith and hope, which are always lifted up so high and cast in such a generous light. What I am finding is that grief is sacred too. It's not to be feared or avoided–it is beautiful, actually, and it opens our eyes to love not only ourselves and God, but others more, to care more, to hold and carry more compassion.
I love this question because it does feel like faith shapes grief and then grief shapes faith and I don't think I'd want to have it any other way.
Alison: Listening to you, I sense that word–expansiveness. You almost light up, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but what I'm hearing you say, and I think it's really beautiful, so I want to just circle around it for a minute, is that in naming the different emotions, even the rage, the grief, the heartache, inviting God into those things, you've experienced more expansiveness of faith, more fruit of the Spirit, these qualities of love.
You don’t shove those away so that you can feel more loving. It's oh, as I honor the complexity of those feelings, I actually receive more from God, which gives me paradoxically more to pour out.
Rachel: Yeah. Absolutely, for sure.
Alison: I'm curious how connecting so genuinely and authentically with your own losses shapes how you're parenting your own kids through their losses,
Rachel: Oh my gosh, all the time, every day. I cannot write this book and then be doing the work of tending to my little losses and then simultaneously my kid will tell me about something that happened in school and, to dismiss that for whatever reason. If I'm busy, I can't handle it, my mind is overloaded and maybe I'm not perfect in the moment, but my mind will just circle on whatever it is.
And I will have to be like, hey, sweetie, hey, Milo, you know what? You were telling me earlier. I am so sorry. Tell me more about that. Let me listen. Or even in the moment, like turning off the impulses, turning off the over-productive mind and listening because all those little things, when little Rachel moved and little Rachel lost her friends and all the little feelings that came along with that, she needed someone in those moments to say hey, how is this for you?
I have found, and maybe this is why it comes back to bite me in the butt because my child loves to ask questions, but I love to ask questions. And actually my parents kind of joke around and they're like, yeah, that's kind of what you deserve because you asked us tons of questions as a kid and you were always talking.
But I ask him a lot of questions and I think it's for him, but it's also for me, if that makes sense. Like I understand that it feels good when someone is asking you a question, asking you, what do you think? How does this make you feel? Tell me your thoughts because they matter to me.
That's what matters to me. And so if I can give that to my son, any chance that I can get asking him a question, that's how I try to show up.
Alison: I love that. There's a question that they use in couples therapy: Is there more? Is there more? Is there more? Is there more? And you're just showing through that question a willingness, I'll be here with you as long as it takes. Is there more? Is there more?
And I imagine that's how God is with us. Is there more? He's never getting tired of listening to us. Because we're human, sometimes we're like, okay, I don't want to hear more, but I love the way your eyes light up knowing I'm giving them this out of the overflow of having recognized this is what the younger me needed.
Rachel: Yeah. I love how you put that.
Alison: So pinging off of that, tell me a little bit about spiritual practices. You're a mom, you're a writer, you've got a lot going on, and yet I can tell just by being with you, you're someone who is trying to actively engage the work, spiritually, of tending to your little losses. How do you do that? What are some of the practices and rhythms that help you continue to tend the little losses inside your own soul?
Rachel: Yeah. This is so good. And okay, when I think about this question, I'm like, okay, I want to give answers that are really helpful, but also practical, but also true to where I'm at. And as I thought about this, I'm like, okay. I've got this in my book, at the end of every single chapter, I have these little sections: remember, reflect, respire. Those are things that I come back to.
I write things down so that I can remember what's true. If you saw my wall right now, the wall that's in front of my computer, my camera, you would see pages ripped out from magazines, notes from friends like my old chorus teacher. I have to have words in front of me so that I can remember what is true.
And then another thing is to reflect. Light a candle. That's one of my favorite spiritual practices. Lighting candles in and of itself. It just feels like there's evidence of a presence with you and that holds me. That makes me feel held. And so I like to light candles and ponder your pain, entering into good questions and whether that's a conversation with someone that's asking you or they're saying tell me more. Is there more? I love that.
Or if you're journaling and you're exploring a question, one of my favorite things right now with my therapist is, she asks a question and I have to wait a whole week to answer that with her. But I love it because she gives me a question and I have to ponder it and I have to self-examine and I journal about it or think about it or pray about it or ask God, hey, can you speak into this? Can you show me?
And then I get to share it with someone, which is really great because that helps, but I just love that I get to ponder this question that someone else is posing to me. I really loved including this in my book. And this is probably something that catches me in my moments when I'm probably feeling unhinged, I would say, if I'm just overwhelmed.
Usually under my overwhelm, there's always more–it's like, why are you stressed? Why are you anxious? Because you're afraid, because you're worried, like what's really there? Respire breath prayers and these prayers are so short; there's just something to that brevity.
I remember, you know, a few years back during the height of COVID when I would pray with my older son and put him to bed, I just remember we would pray, God help me help everybody.
And that was it because there were just no other words for what was going on in the world and it's just so hard and so heavy. And there were only just so many words that we could muster up, that I could muster up as a mother, and when I look back on that season, I'm like, that was such faith, even just to pray those few words.
And sometimes we need that reminder in our own faith journeys. We don't have to come out of the gate with these long winded prayers that have these big words and there's no one to impress. God isn't looking to be impressed by us. He just wants our honest hearts and if all you can muster out is a brief confession or a brief whatever it is, I need you, that's enough.
And so those are a few things that have held me recently, are holding me now. But they're also in my book. And so I think that can be really practical and helpful for anyone out there that is wanting some spiritual practices to hold onto as you’re grieving,
Alison: I love the simplicity of “I'm hurting” as a prayer. That's a full, like you're saying, help me. I need you. I'm hurting. And the word that comes to mind as I'm listening to you, Rachel, is with-ness. And it's throughout the pages of your book, this idea, even as you're telling your own stories of just longing for that with-ness, someone to be with you, how you're learning to be with yourself in these little losses with your kids, with a friend and how we're learning to let God be with us.
When you talk about the candle, I've never thought about it that way before, the lighted candle as a symbol of with-ness, I'm not actually alone. There are lots of ways we can try to cultivate that sense of with-ness.
Rachel: I love that word as summing up all that this is centering around–with-ness. I absolutely love that. Yeah, that's so true. It resonates.
Alison: Which is what we want. We want to not be alone in the grief, in the feelings, in the loss. We see it more easily in some ways for our kiddos than we do for the parts of us that need presence. One of the things I think you do so well in The Matter of Little Losses is naming and sharing with us some of your own experiences.
Naming so we can find ourselves in them. But you also use some beautiful imagery. You explore loss through the language of flowers. You, as I've already said, bring in a lot of literature and art, which are these tangible manifestations and symbols. How did that language of flowers come to be and how has it been helpful for you in processing losses?
Rachel: I love this question so much because there's definitely a passion behind that. I studied stories in college; I was a creative writing major. It has been a journey of unpacking why I chose that and why this matters.
And I really do think stories are medicine. I really think that they are; they provide a simulation for life. And so even as I started writing this book, I thought to myself, I want to approach it similar to how I did Let There Be Art, but I think I want to really go into some literary criticism and analysis and delve deep into stories.
But I don't want to do that if it's just me wanting to do something–like what is the reason behind this? I'll just read really quickly from my intro “Why I discovered it matters”. As you read this book, you will encounter quotes from fiction and plays and references to art and film, all of which intend to give face and form to the ubiquitous and ambiguous nature of grief.
We need levity. We need beauty. We need hope. Books can be that, and art can offer that. It is just as Karen Swallow Prior, author of On Reading Well writes: Literature embodies virtue, first, by offering images of virtue in action, and second, by offering the reader vicarious practice in exercising virtue.
Irrevocably, story is embedded with the virtues we pine to embody. In reading, telling, hearing, and witnessing stories, we are afforded the safety and space to practice these virtues. So when you watch a movie or you read a fiction book and you fall in love with a character because they are courageous through conflict, you are not only just falling in love for that character and cheering them on, but you yourself, you want to embody that same perseverance, compassion, kind, and strength that they are living out and there's something to that.
I don't know, maybe I might be onto something. I might study this further, but there really is something to us gaining confidence, strength, and hope through these characters that we are watching through these stories.
And yeah, I had a really fun time unpacking different references to art. And I think what you said earlier too, there's a bit of nostalgia that we carry when it comes to certain characters and stories, right? And it's almost a universal language in itself.
When I start talking about Little Women and I start talking about Jo and the March sisters, we're all speaking the same language now. And so I have an easy way to talk about grief. I have images and symbols already there for my taking to to give examples and to reflect on what is hard about grief, but then also what is good and what could be good and beautiful and helpful.
Alison: I love that. As I'm listening, the image that comes to mind immediately is Frodo in Lord of the Rings when I'm going through something where it's just impossible. And if I have that image, there's something in there that helps me feel braver. It's transporting me into this idea that this is one chapter in the larger story, because we know that he comes out the other side. And so I can tap into a little bit of that hope vicariously.
It's so powerful. Art is so powerful to give us that sort of big picture perspective. I'm in it, but there's a larger story at work here. This is not the end of the story.
Rachel: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I was listening to a podcast earlier today, Myth Pilgrim, if anyone's interested, but he unpacks different works of literature and movies too. But he says this is why stories are important. They are symbols, and our whole faith is hinged on a symbol.
We have not seen God. He has these invisible qualities that we need symbols to show us who He is until we get Jesus. We have Jesus, this incarnate God who is with us. But other than that, we need something to show us, to grope for, to give us a picture, give us a sign, give us something to tell us what this looks like.
And stories are one way of doing that.
Alison: And that's what I want the listener to hear. Your book is a really unique combination where you're not shying away from the hard emotions, the hard stories, the losses, and it's also very uplifting. It's the both-and, and that's a hard balance to strike.
We don't want to minimize the pain. We don't want to minimize the loss. And when we can connect ourselves to a larger story, there can be hope paradoxically within that. And you've really struck that balance.
I'm curious, what would you want your younger self to know about grief, about loss, based on all that you've learned now?
Rachel: My gosh. I have never been asked this specific question, and I love it so much. I would tell her that I see her and I would say, I believe you. And then I would tell her that to keep tending and that even though her garden seems like it's only filled with grief, that someday you'll see those flowers flourishing.
That's what I would tell her. And then I would be her friend. I get these flashes of little me, and I'm like, she's so cute and fun and spunky, and I want to be her friend and I would be her friend.
Alison: She wouldn't be alone in that garden. I love that. That's so beautiful. She's lucky to have you and we're lucky to have the fruit of the tending that you've done as you've gone back to some of those little losses to honor them and bring us all just so much closer to those parts of ourselves that carry those things.
I had a loss this week. It was a friend of mine who passed away, somebody who was so dear to me years ago who I haven't been in touch with for a very long time. And so there's a part of me that can minimize that, right?
I saw that we had this conversation and I thought, no, it's a loss. That person mattered to me deeply from that very formative period of time. It was college and giving yourself permission to say, no, that matters. And then as you give yourself permission, suddenly I'm connecting with all these people from that period of time.
Suddenly something beautiful is forming by allowing ourselves to let that loss matter. That when we honor those losses, we actually come together. So I saw that we had this on the schedule and I thought, this could not be more perfectly timed. I am so grateful that you are giving us permission to honor the losses.
They matter, and finding our way through them is what brings us closer together, closer to each other, closer to ourselves, closer to God.
Rachel: Yeah. I believe that. Oh, thank you for sharing that.
Alison: Thank you for giving me a space to remind myself, every loss matters. We don't do ourselves any favors to minimize. So just before we go, I ask all my guests, what is bringing out the best of you right now?
Rachel: Ah, yes. To echo our earlier conversation, I think my children are bringing out the best in me. They're also bringing out the worst in me. But ultimately they really are bringing out the best in me. And I do think motherhood is such a crucible, but on the other side, you are just completely made new and you've got all these different elements that are interacting and it can be a bit much and sometimes it seems like the worst is coming out, but I feel like they make me a better person, my two boys.
Alison: You're the first person who's ever answered that question with the thing that's bringing out the best of you is also what's bringing out the worst of you. And I think there's a lot of truth in that. That's a very powerful paradox. So I love that. Where can our listeners go to connect with you?
Rachel: I love hanging out on Instagram. You can find my writings and sharings from my life there @RachelMarieKang. And then to learn more, to order my book or for anything else, visit me at RachelMarieKang.com.
Alison: Thank you so much for sharing your heart, sharing the fruit of your labor, and just sharing your time with us today.
Rachel: Thanks for making space.