Loving Your Way Through Grief with Emily Thiroux Threatt

Jennifer Norman:
Hello, beautiful humans. Welcome to today's podcast. I'm Jennifer Norman, founder of The Human Beauty Movement and your host. I created The Human Beauty Movement to help inspire radical self love, radical self acceptance, and radical self expression. On this podcast and in our community, we have in conversations about diverse aspects of the human experience. Diving deeper into the richness of our souls is where we find our truest, most authentic selves. It's the source of everything creative, imaginative, and beautiful that we have to offer. Take a moment now to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. I'm so glad that you're here, joining me for today's show.

Jennifer Norman:
With all that's going on in the world these days, many of us are looking for support to navigate life's challenges and how to handle grief. is an author, podcast host, speaker, and facilitator of The Grief and Happiness Alliance. After the deaths of two husbands, as well as many family members and friends, she has considerable experience with grief and the grieving process. Yet she's learned to face life with love, optimism, and joy. Her books include bestselling The Grief and Happiness Handbook and Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief. She created The Grief and Happiness Cards and is also the host of The Grief and Happiness Podcast. I'm so honored to welcome Emily to the show.

Jennifer Norman:
Hello, Emily. Aloha.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
Aloha. Thank you for the invitation.

Jennifer Norman:
I'm pleased that you're joining me for such a poignant topic and something that I think everybody can use in terms of some support and some help every now and again, because we all go through grief.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
That's right. At any given time, everybody is probably dealing with some form of grief for something.

Jennifer Norman:
A lot of people think that grieving and happiness are at the opposite ends of the spectrum, but is it possible to grieve and be happy at the same time?

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
Absolutely. That's one of the main reasons I'm doing what I'm doing, because lots of people think that once they are in a grieving process, they feel guilty if they do anything that makes them feel happy, or they just think that they'll never be happy again, or they can't be happy. And the main way to be able to move forward is to be able to not be solely concentrating on your grief and doing things to be happy can really help with that. I know some people will laugh for the first time they remember since someone died, and then they say, oh no, I can't believe I did that. It's okay. It's okay to smile it's okay to laugh and it's okay to feel good.

Jennifer Norman:
Why do you think that it is that people feel so guilty? If they feel happy or if they give themselves this space where, oh, my gosh, they all of a sudden left, or they're doing things for themselves rather than thinking about perhaps if it's a loss of a loved one or something devastating has just happened. Why do you think people feel so guilty?

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
Guilt is a funny emotion, and I think that people are trying to do things in a way that's respectful of whoever it is that passed or whatever it is. I live on Maui, and we just had those horrible big fires. And there's all different layers of loss that people are grieving. So you can grieve any of that, and you feel like, if that has happened, how could I possibly be happy? My husband's never going to kiss me again. How could I possibly be happy? And we kind of run these things in our brain over and over again, and that causes you to, if you happen to slip and smile or something, that you go, oh, no, I need to honor my grief by not being happy, and that's just not so.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. It's also common to compare your grief to someone else's grief or the way that they're grieving. Perhaps somebody says, you know what? I need to just muster it up. I need to carry on. I need to go to work. I need to focus on the kids. And so they cut themselves off from perhaps feeling a lot of the grief, and then, whereas others seem to sit with it for years and years, is there a right or wrong way to grieve?

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
No. Everybody grieves in their own way. And when we realize that, that's kind of a relief. A lot of times we think that we need to grieve in the way that we've seen before. For instance, if your father died and your mother survived him, how did your mother act in her grief? And in my case, my mom didn't smile anymore. She just didn't at all. And she eventually got back to doing things, but I just didn't feel that she was happy again until, interestingly enough, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and she cried when she first heard that. And then after that, she started being happy again and smiling and laughing.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
And I think it was because she was relieved that she didn't have to stay here without daddy anymore, and she couldn't articulate that. But observing her, I think that's what it was. So we look at role models for much of what we learn in life. And if we see somebody else buck it up, go back to work the next day and never talk about it, then we think, oh, maybe I should do that too, or however someone else behaves. So it's important to do your own grief your own way, and whatever you find helps you is what you should be doing.

Jennifer Norman:
Some people think that the people who can just focus on other things and get back to life as normal, it's like, that's considered strength, or, oh, that person is so strong to be able to do all of these things, whereas other people who sit with their grief for a little bit while longer are considered weak. Or perhaps that seems like a vulnerability or a weakness.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
That's kind of a societal view of it. If people who aren't actively grieving something big right now, if you think about it, you'd go, oh, well, I go right back to work, or, oh, well, I wouldn't be able to do anything else again. And you get this all set up in your mind of how you'll do it, and then you do it, but not for the right reasons. And the people that, for instance, don't do anything about their grief after a loss are the ones that have the most trouble with it, because it'll come up on you when you don't realize what's happening all of a sudden. And it can be very stressful.

Jennifer Norman:
Now, some of us have been taught back, perhaps in psychology class, back in high school or whatever, that there are the stages of grief and that it is normal to go through the process. Perhaps you can share with people what the stages of grief are, and then talk about, is there a specific time period? Is there supposed to be a specific amount of time where grief is supposed to last? How long is grief supposed to last? But first, let's talk about the stages of grief.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
Okay. Those stages of grief came about from something that Elizabeth Kubler Ross wrote back in the...she wrote them as the stages of dying, not of grief. And people just started kind of going, oh, there's stages. We can apply this to grief, too. And so she wrote another book that said things about the stages of grief, and she had identified five at that time. And I know when I was writing my first grief book, I was doing some research, and I looked it up, and some people said, no, there's only three stages, and you have to do these three, and you have to do them in this order. And then somebody else said there were like twelve stages, and it didn't matter when you had them, you might have all of them. And you might not have any of them.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
So it's a real controversial thing. And if you find yourself acting in a certain way, that could be one of the things that are on that list of stages, but it's not necessarily so. I was going to say a crutch, but that doesn't sound very good. It's something that people can look to, to have some support of. Am I doing this right? Everybody always asks something like that. There's no right way. Your way is the right way for you, whatever it is that you're experiencing. And there's some things that, for instance, one of the five stages is bargaining.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
And I never did that with anybody that I've known who's died. That's like saying, oh, if you save this person, then I'll go to church every day for the rest of my life. Or that sort of bargaining. And bargaining I have discovered when people tell me that they did it is kind of like New Year's resolutions, that when you make that agreement, you really think you're going to do it, and then you forget it pretty soon. So it's not particularly helpful. But if you happen to notice that you're doing that, you can go, oh, that's one of those stages that people say I might go through. So it's just a stage, and I can deal with that.

Jennifer Norman:
In terms of the main stages of grief, I believe that it starts with an idea of denial or disbelief.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
That's always the first, unlike on any of the lists, because it's a very hard concept for your brain to wrap around that you were speaking to someone and the next moment you couldn't. Because death happens actually kind of quickly, and you can wake up the next day and go, oh, my gosh, he couldn't possibly be gone. In bed, reach over to where they were, to touch them, and they're not there. It's a very common thing because we're so used to the presence, the physical presence of people and things and whatever it is that you've lost and you loved, you're so used to that. It's just hard to believe that it's not there anymore. And so you kind of unintentionally deny it. You'll go, oh, I need to call whoever it was right now, or I need to remind them, or, our anniversary is coming up, what are we going to do? That sort of thing. Your brain takes a while to adjust to the fact that things aren't going to be the same as they were before.

Jennifer Norman:
It's a bit of a shock to the system.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
And that's where denial comes from. It's that shock, right?

Jennifer Norman:
And then is the second stage sadness.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
Everybody feels some form of sadness with a loss of any kind. And if you hold that back or you don't deal with it, then that's not going to work. That won't help you, because it's not going anywhere until you deal with it. I know. I've seen people that just amaze me that they can, like somebody I knew whose husband died, and there's lots of other options besides husbands, that's just the examples that I happen to be thinking of right now, but she was always considered a real strong person in the community, and she gave this incredible eulogy for her husband to this gigantic crowd. They were really well known people in the community, and tons of people were there. And she gave the eulogy, and she smiled, and when it was over, she was getting hugs and shaking hands and smiling. And I thought, how could you do that? I thought putting myself in that position, I couldn't have done that. And I can only imagine when she got home what kind of shape she was in, because it seemed like she was kind of circumventing her sadness to hopefully she wouldn't experience it as much or it wouldn't be so bad. But talking to her later on, I realized that she was just as sad as anybody else was. She just was putting on a good show because that's how she dealt with it.

Jennifer Norman:
I see. Yeah. Commonly, I believe that from a therapeutic standpoint, and I know that you said that it's a source of controversy, but it helps for people to know where they're at, because sometimes people think about the grieving process, and if you go through these stages of grief, and then you ultimately come to a place of acceptance, and acceptance is usually the place where people feel, oh, you're out of the grieving process, but are you ever really out of a grieving process, especially if it's something very personal? But the idea of denial and sadness, anger, bargaining to your point, and then ultimately acceptance as a resolution of coming through it, perhaps people think of those as moments of healing and knowing where somebody is. If they're angry, you can say, okay, that's part of the grieving process, and I need to let that person be angry, or they need to just let it out, or if that person still is in a place of sadness, let them sit with it and be there and empathize. However, from the perspective of knowing, we can feel all of these things at once, from one moment to the next. It's almost like trauma, because it really throws your system into, once you've felt a shock to the system and once you've felt some sort of traumatic experience, it's almost like anything normal goes out the window, because your nerves and your system is just so completely different from what it was before the incident actually happened. That, again, to your point, there is no right or wrong. It's just like the way that you feel is valid.

Jennifer Norman:
The way that you are behaving because of your feelings is understandable. And for others such as yourself, to know that and to have that empathy and to be able to hold space for people who are grieving, and then to have support, or people who understand what you're going through, such as an alliance like what you provide, is very, very helpful. Because I think that the thing that a lot of people do is they try to take it all upon themselves and they do it alone. And that's not an easy place to be. It's nice to have support. It's nice to have people who understand. Perhaps that's why people do it alone, because they don't have enough people around them that really understand or would take the time or have the time to be able to understand what they're going through. But let's talk about some of the ways that you've found are helpful for people to take care of themselves or to think about how they can be supported through their grief.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
There's lots of different ways, and I think the key is to be open and explore things. You mentioned at one point about how long grief takes. And my belief is if you love someone, you will carry that grief with you for the rest of your life. You hold it in your heart, you can smile about it, you can remember how much joy you had when you were with that person, or good feelings that you had. And so grief kind of morphs into a different entity, so to speak. But it's still there. My dad died in the still grieve him, because I still love him, and I'm going to love him for the rest of my life. It doesn't matter that it was all those years ago.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
My grandmother died a long time ago, and I was really close to her and I still grieve her. So the thing is to not judge. That's one of the things that you can do that's different, that's not on that five things list is to release judgment of yourself or of other people. Like, oh, is that person still grieving? It's been two years. That's none of your business. Their grief is their issue, that they're dealing with the best way they can. So when you don't judge other people, it's easier for you to let go of judging yourself, because if you're going, oh, am I doing this right? What am I missing? That's one of the dangers I see with the five stages is people think they have to go through all five of them, and they have to be in order so they can graduate because they've heard the terms so long, and that's just not the way it is. Some person can experience one thing, and that's the only thing that they're experiencing.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
So that's one thing, letting go of judgment. Another thing is to allow yourself to be happy, to do things that can make you smile and can make you feel better so that you're not being so hard on yourself. And another thing, the thing that I promote, probably more than anything else, is writing. There are so many different ways that you can write about your grief, and that's so healthy to do. And your writing is kind of like your companion, where you can find solace, where you can tell your story. I know when I was right after my, I've had two husbands dying. After the second one died, I was looking for books to read to see if I could get some comfort from there. And I would look at the description of books and the get them because they sounded like I could find some help in there somehow.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
And I discovered that most of the ones that I ended up getting were memoirs. Now, writing memoirs is a wonderful thing to do. It can help someone who's grieving tremendously because you're telling your story, and it's very important for you to tell your story. And you'll find that the more you tell your story, the less it weighs on you, the easier it is to deal with. For instance, when Jacques, my first husband, who died, when he died, before he died, we discovered that he had a heart issue, and we had no idea that that was going on. And it was an emergency when it came on, and it was an incredible experience. For about a week, all these different things happened that I wasn't anticipating at all and having to figure out how to deal with as I was going along. And when I'd see somebody who knew us and say, they'd say, well, what happened? I'd start out by telling them that whole story.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
And I could see their eyes kind of glaze over after a while because I was giving them too much information. But I found every time I told that story, it got a little shorter. I didn't have to share every detail of the story. And now I can say, if somebody asked me about it, I can say, well, he had severely blocked arteries in his heart, and he had heart surgery, and he felt a lot better afterwards instead of going through the whole thing of getting him to the hospital and what it was like and all the lots of details happened in the story. So that's the sort of help you can get from writing, is telling your story and telling something else that you remember about the process or what happened, or an incident. I had a horrible incident with Jacques when he took a fall out in public when it was very hot, and I couldn't hang on to him enough, and he landed on the pavement, and because it was so hot, the asphalt burned his back really bad, and the had to be in the hospital. And I had such guilt about that, and that was a story I didn't want to tell because I felt like I had failed him because I couldn't hold him up when he was falling. And so the more I wrote about that, the more I could work my way through it so that I could release the guilt that I was feeling.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
And I did, because I did everything that I possibly could under the circumstances and I could forgive myself. And forgiveness is another one of the big things that if you can forgive anything or anybody who needs to be forgiven, that's so freeing. You can feel so much better. A lot of times people say, oh, if the doctor would have only done this, or if they would have found out sooner, or why didn't they diagnose this, that sort of thing. And you hold that against whoever it was who did whatever they did, or in an accident with a drunk driver. If only that person hadn't been drinking that day. Or, you can't change it. You can't go back and change it, but you can forgive whatever the situation was.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
And that's a good thing to write about, because your brain gets tired of rerunning the same thing. It's like watching a bunch of reruns of a movie. You don't need to watch it. After a few times, you can remember it all. So if you can get out whatever it is that you need to forgive and go through the process of forgiveness and release that judgment and write about everything that you did, just doing that can be remarkable in how much it can help you through your grief.

Jennifer Norman:
And there is the process of learning to forgive others, as well as learning to forgive yourself, such as you were just describing how you felt so guilty about not being able to catch him when he was falling. Being able to forgive yourself for things like that that you may or may not have done and hold yourself accountable for is powerful, to be able to release that.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
Yes, it really is. I know I ended up feeling like I needed to apologize to a doctor in particular, who I felt that he hadn't handled the situation correctly and that my husband wouldn't have had to suffer as much as he did if that doctor would have done what I thought the doctor should have done. And after my husband died, I thought, what good is that doing me to carry that, to be angry at him for not reading my mind, for not knowing something that was beyond his knowing whatever it was that I was holding against him. And I found apologizing really helped me release that feeling.

Jennifer Norman:
That's powerful because, yes, a lot of times, the doctors, the hospitals, anybody who is supposed to be helping in a situation, we end up blaming them and being able to say, you know what? They did the best that they could with the tools that they had. They did the best they could. That's very important. And knowing that it's okay. We cannot change the past. We can only look forward.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
That's right.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. And you also talk about saying yes and how that can make you happier. Can you talk a little bit about why you say opening up and saying yes can lead to new opportunities?

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
Yeah, I love to talk about that. I was one who had a knee jerk reaction of saying no automatically when somebody asked me something, just because I felt like I needed to think about it before I gave an answer, whatever it was. And it was a habit for me. And Jacques died in February, and I had been pretty much dealing with things by myself. I just didn't know what to do. And I wasn't really talking to anybody about it. And I wasn't going anyplace. I'd go to work and come home and just.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
I just couldn't get motivated. And so when New Year's came, I said, okay, I've made New Year's resolutions in the past, and they didn't do me any good because I forgot them after a couple of weeks. And I thought, I'm going to have one intention for this year, and I've got to figure out what that intention is going to be that's going to help me the very most. And so I meditated on it. I let it simmer a bit instead of just doing something quickly, saying, oh, I think this will work. And what finally came to me was to accept invitations. And I thought, well, that's dumb. Nobody's inviting me to do anything.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
As I said that, I was thinking, well, I haven't exactly been putting myself out there as available to do anything. And I was responsible for that, too. It wasn't everybody else. And I figured, because the feeling was so strong that that was what my intention was supposed to be, that I said, okay, I'm going to go with that and see what happens. And my life changed totally as soon as I started saying yes to things. And I had wonderful experiences that I doubt I would have had before because I probably would have said no if somebody asked me. But by saying yes, I got to do things I never dreamed that I would have done, that I enjoyed a lot. And it kind of opened me up, and I found myself smiling, and it felt so good to be able to do that.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
It really changed my life. And it wasn't long before I realized that I could also say no if it wasn't appropriate, whatever it was for me at that point in time. But I could say yes whenever I wanted to. And it brought great things to me that I wouldn't have sought out for myself. They literally came to me. Like, for instance, one of the first things was I was invited to be on the editorial board for the newspaper. And I wasn't a journalist, I was a writer. I taught writing for a long time at the university, and I had written an editorial for the newspaper.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
And I think they remembered me from there when they invited me to be on the board. And that was an amazing experience. I had no idea what doing that sort of a thing would entail. And it was fascinating. I met so many people that would come to us to help the newspaper decide whether, what side they were going to be on, a controversial topic, or what they were going to publish and what they weren't going to publish. That was really interesting, and it got me totally out of my comfort zone or anything that I really knew anything about before. And that was kind of the start for it. And then lots of other things came after that.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
I would get invitations for the most interesting things, everything from helping with an endurance bicycle race. It was amazing. I wouldn't have thought about that. But I got invited to, and so I did it, and I got invited to go to South Africa with some friends. And I hadn't really thought about going to South Africa before, but, boy, I'm glad I did. Just the process of saying yes, and those are all kind of big things, but they allowed me to start saying yes to the little things, too, and saying yes to me. Like, I can invite somebody to go to lunch with me, I can go to a movie by myself, all those sorts of things. By starting with the kind of big picture things, with saying yes, everything else kind of followed along with that.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
And that was really what got me moving forward, because I always say, you don't get over grief, but you do move forward in it, and you can keep going forward and the path keeps opening wider for you.

Jennifer Norman:
That is beautiful. I also think that it really has very much relevance to the notion of taking radical responsibility for your life and your own self care, because nobody's going to be able to care for you as much as you can care for you. And you recognized, just as people say, with New Year's intentions and whatnot, but you had the intention. You went into that moment, you knew that at that time you were in your psyche and in your emotional state, that you were ready and you were putting yourself out there. And you said, you know what? This is the time of yes. But there is a time of no. There is a time that self care means no, not accepting everything and stringing yourself out and putting on a face that is happy for others for the sake of their own happiness, thinking and being authentic to yourself and knowing in your own soul when it's right to say no, and then when it's right for you to say yes and open yourself up to these opportunities that can then bridge you out and help you to feel that you are then fulfilling what you truly want to be and do and experience in your life. And knowing that that grief will, it perhaps will always be there.

Jennifer Norman:
But the emotional wrought that it has on your heart and on your life can be lessened. The grip can be a bit lessened. I know that it does tend to resurface on trigger moments. It can be an anniversary or a birthday or holidays is a big one. Holidays always very. Or a song or a smell or a phrase, a catchphrase, anything like that can bring back a whole wave of emotional feelings tied to grief. But it's beautiful to know. Yes, you can equally be grieving, and you can also feel joy and happiness.

Jennifer Norman:
And there is no right or wrong way to do this.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
That's right.

Jennifer Norman:
Now, you are also the head of these wonderful online gatherings called The Grief and Happiness Alliance, where people deal with loss. You write together, you learn happiness practices. Can you tell us a little bit about the alliance?

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
Well, I would love to. I started out, we had moved to Maui two years before my most recent husband died. And I was trying to figure out, because I didn't know that many people those two years. I was mostly spending with him and taking care of everything that needed to be and really living in the moment with him. And the he wasn't there. And so I needed to figure out what to do. And as I mentioned, I taught writing, and I'd written college textbooks, and I thought, I'm just going to write about this. And I wasn't writing it for anybody else to read.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
I was telling my story, or in Hawaii, they call it talk story. And so I was doing that, and I kept thinking about different things that I could write about that would help me. And the more I wrote, the more it helped. And I thought I could help other people by showing them these different ways of writing about their grief that could help open them up, too. And so I didn't know that many people. I actually only knew people on the island who knew my husband that I knew were grieving. And I couldn't say anybody else who was actively grieving. So I just put a notice in meetup and said, if you're grieving and you'd like to learn how writing can help you through your grief, come on over to my house.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
And they did. I made a lot of new friends, and it went really well. And I did that for quite a while. And I got to the point where I thought, something's missing. I'm not sure what's missing in this equation, but I need to give them more than that. And how do I do that? And I remembered a book that I had read after my last husband died, called Happy For No Reason by Marci Shimoff. And as I was thinking about it, something about it came know one of those things, coincidences that happen like that. And I thought, I think that's what I need to do.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
So I checked into it and discovered she had a program called the Happy For No Reason certified trainer program. And I thought, well, I'm going to do that because I want to be happy. And I did it. I became certified. And the cool thing about this program is she wasn't teaching you how to do something specific like teach Happy For No Reason classes she was giving. All of her research she's done on happiness to you to use however you wanted to, to support what you were doing. And so I thought, okay, I want to combine grief and happiness, and how do I do that.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
So I started talking to people about it, and they said, grief and happiness. Those two words don't go together. And I thought, yeah, they do. So I decided grief or happiness and happiness. So I decided to invite a bunch of people I knew from all over the country, actually, to do a pilot program. And I met with them on Zoom and told them what I had in mind. And then we actually did a gathering like I'm doing now. And then afterwards we got together and talked about it, and they all said they'd never thought about something like that before, but they thought it was a great idea and they wanted to support me in it.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
And I said, well, my one issue is I don't think people should have to pay for something like that, but it does cost to do things like that for everything that's entailed. And they said, well, we'll create a nonprofit organization that will pay the expenses, and then you can tell the people that come that they're being supported by this nonprofit that really believes in what we're doing, and that knows that it can really help the and that's helped because a lot of times if you give something away for free, it doesn't have a perceived value. But if they see that somebody's supporting them in this endeavor that they're doing, they tend to stay with what we're doing, especially after they've come to a meeting or gathering. And so they created that, and we funded that. And I created my Grief and Happiness Podcast, and I'm amazed at the following that I have with that, because I wasn't sure when it's a totally different concept than you're used to, you're not sure how things are going to turn out. And I've been amazed at the support I've had for that podcast and the number of downloads I've had. It's really wonderful. And the gatherings have become so popular, and people from different places in the world attend the gatherings because they can, since it's on Zoom, and they've gotten to be more and more people.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
So we are just in the process of, we created a facilitator training program so that other people can facilitate the groups like I do, and they can do it in different time zones. Since I'm in Hawaii, we had somebody in Saudi Arabia, and she was coming at like 10:00 at night, and when the time change happened, it made it 11:00 at night. And she said, I'll be back when the time changes again. I just can't go to work the next morning if I go to a meeting at eleven, the program, we've interviewed the people that are going to be in the first group of facilitators, and we're starting their training in January. And I'm really excited about it because we can create these groups in different places throughout the planet to help.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, yeah. And so tell us a little bit about what people learn or what they do in any of these sessions with the alliance.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
First of all, we make sure everybody has met everybody else so that people are comfortable there. So we start with that and then I give them a different topic every time. And the topics just come to me during the week every time. I've never been stuck for a topic. And they'll write about it. The meetings last for an hour, gatherings last for an hour, so they might write like ten minutes. And we go into breakout groups that usually have about three people, sometimes four people in the group, so that everybody can share with other people what they wrote, what they got out of the experience of writing on that particular topic. And then we come back together and the group leaders and the groups will report on what was interesting or what they learned and keeping it kind of confidential so that the people that were in the group feel safe when they're in that breakout group to say anything they want to, knowing that when the report is given by the leader in that group, that they're not going to be pointed out and say, oh, she did this.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
And sometimes they'll go, well, I did that. And I want to tell you this about it when we're in the discussion afterwards. And so those discussions are great with people getting to express what their feelings were about what they were writing. And then we do a happiness practice from the things inspired by what Marci Shimoff taught me. But I found lots of other happiness things to do, too. And I'll give you an example of a really popular writing topic we did a couple of weeks ago. I said, I want you to write or plan to write a children's book on grief, some element of grief that you could share with a child or children that are important to you. And I wasn't sure how that was going to go over because it's really different.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
Well, they were so excited about it. They each came up with such different concept of how that book could be, what it could look like, what they wanted to express, what was important they felt was important for the child to be exposed to or to learn. And it was all really positive and I've heard from some of them since that they're going ahead with actually writing a children's book about what they got inspired to do in the gathering that day.

Jennifer Norman:
That's amazing. Yeah, it sounds like it's truly beneficial and it's rewarding.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
At the same time, the people just love to come when they do their little introduction at the beginning so that new people know who's there. They often say something like, I look forward to this all week, every week, because they really want to do it. And a lot of the people we get is because somebody that has been in a gathering has invited them because they told them how much they got out of it. So it's a real positive thing to do, and it makes me feel really good. At the end of every meeting, the people are smiling, and I can't help but smile the rest of the day after that because it just feels so good to even when somebody's. I've got somebody in the group now that's in really early grief. They lost their loved one just a couple of months ago, and that person is really participating and saying that they didn't know what they would do without the group at this point, that they love the support and they love what they're learning about themselves by writing. And they're so grateful to be able to talk to other people who get them because they've also experienced.

Jennifer Norman:
Lovely. That's lovely. So in addition to the alliance, you have these two wonderful books, the Grief and Happiness Handbook, which, for those of you who are watching on video, is on Emily's screen, and also Loving And Living Your Way Through Grief. Can you tell us a little bit about what to expect in these books?

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
Well, they were a real passion project for me. What happened was, a few months after my husband died, a dear friend of his died on the mainland suddenly. And he was much younger, and he wasn't sick. Nobody expected the death. He just dropped dead. And I was so concerned for his wife. And we lived close to them on the mainland. And I would have been over there and helping her and doing things with her, but I was so far away.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
I thought, what can I do to support her and to help her through this? So I decided I would write her a note and put it in the mail every week for a year that would be supporting her through that. First up, I printed them off on my computer. So I put a picture that I had taken on Maui here, a different picture on each one of the notes that I sent her. And each note was on a different topic and before I actually started writing the notes, I thought, I better see if I've got 52 different things I can talk about. So I made a list, and I did, and I looked at that list, and I thought, this is an outline for the book, for a book, being a writer. So I ended up getting an agent, getting a contract, and writing the book. And it initially was going to have 52 chapters in it, one for the subjects that was on each one of those cards. And that turned out that that was going to be way too long for the book.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
So we published Loving And Living Your Way Through Grief as 26 chapters. And then the same thing with the next book. The Grief and Happiness Handbook has the other 26. So there's 52 different things having to do with grief. And you can go through either book anytime and look at the table of contents and say, oh, that's what I need to think about today. Or we were talking about forgiveness, and there's a chapter on forgiveness. You could find that and see what I said about that. And the handbook actually has places in it where you can write, where I give you prompts about things to write about what you experienced in that chapter.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
And people seem to really love that.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, seems so helpful. 52 ideas. Wow. And then you also created The Grief and Happiness Cards. What are those about?

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
This is what they look like. You can see it looks like the book, and it's like a card set of 52 cards. And each one of them has on one side the topic that I talked about in each one of the chapters, and then has a picture that I've taken here on Maui on the other side. And the cards are really beautiful. They're heavy weight, have a little gold foil on them. The design is gorgeous. And people who have gotten them like them very much, and they use them for different things. Some of them pull out a card a week and have that be what they're thinking about that week, or what they're writing on in their journal that week, or just something that can bring them comfort, or they can meditate on that week, or they pull one out whenever they're feeling a little down and want some support, they'll pull it out and read it, and they can think about that.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
Other people give them for a bereavement gift as something that will support the friend for a long time, instead of just a regular greeting card that is just once, and then it's over. This way, it continues to support them throughout the time. And I've had people discover that they're good for people who are dealing with things like chronic illness because they're very supportive that way, too. So they've been purchased for gifts for things like that, or some people buy them for themselves to just use them however they want to.

Jennifer Norman:
That sounds lovely. I was actually thinking about bereavement gifts, that it would be lovely to show your support and think about just these little tokens that are perhaps helpful between the books that you've written as well as the cards directing people over to your podcast or over to your website so they can learn a little bit more about the alliance or your nonprofit organization. So many things that you're doing to help people as they go through a grieving process are understanding grief or looking to support any of their loved ones through their stages of grief and their moments of grief. And how to be an ally. How to know that it is important to consider your own self care, to consider the forgiveness, to consider the fact that it is okay to feel joy. It is okay to smile. It is okay to move forward through the process in your life and knowing that the fact that you can be a beacon of love and light and joy for others, having gone through it, being a life lived, experienced person in your grief, is what this is all about. We experience and then we care for others, and we show our support for others who are in the same situation or a similar situation as you've been in.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
Yeah. I wanted to say one other thing about the books and the cards is that all of the profits from them go directly to the nonprofit organization so that we have money to keep it going and do more things for people who are grieving. So all of that goes to.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh, it's all circular. Love that. Emily Thireaux Threatt. Please take a look at Emily's work. I will put all of her information in the show notes. Thank you so much, Emily, for your work and for being on The Human Beauty Movement Podcast.

Emily Thiroux Threatt:
Oh, thank you very much.

Jennifer Norman:
Thank you for listening to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. Be sure to follow, rate, and review us wherever you stream podcasts. The Human Beauty Movement is a community-based platform that cultivates the beauty of humankind. Check out our workshops, find us on social media, and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at thehumanbeautymovement.com. Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.