Grief and Collective Mourning – Jenny Seaton from Curtin FM interviews Michelle Moriarty

Jenny: Joining us now is Michelle Moriarty, grief expert and founder of Grief Connect. We spoke to her recently, did we not, about what not to say to people who are suffering a loss.

Michelle: We did. Hi, Jenny, thank you for joining me.

Jenny: You must be very busy – there’s so much grief around the world at any given day, isn’t there?

Michelle: There is. There are so many of us impacted, and the reach of grief just expands across our nation.

Jenny: I think we all feel like we can’t do anything about so much of it, and we see it so much more now on social media, and the news tends to highlight a lot of grief – I find I just can’t look at it all the time anymore, it’s so upsetting.

Michelle: It can be really difficult when we’re exposed to grief repetitively, especially on social media, where quite often we’re scrolling and don’t necessarily have control over what content is put in front of us. When that comes up, we can feel triggered, and also experience that transfer of grief.

Jenny: We do, and it just weighs heavily on everybody – whether you have friends or relatives dealing with it, or someone who’s been in a crash, or, like the shark attack down south recently, you just feel for everybody. Now, we touched on grieving individually, which was things not to say, very interesting – do you hold workshops or something?

Michelle: I do have a seminar coming up in Belmont at the Ingot Hotel this Sunday, for people who are surviving grief and moving forward.

Jenny: Just give us some details again – spell the name of the hotel.

Michelle: The Ingot, I-N-G-O-T, on the Great Eastern Highway. The seminar and morning tea run between 10 and 12 on Sunday, so we’ll have a morning tea and a chat and connect afterwards too.

Jenny: I think that’d be very helpful for a lot of people. How do people find out about what’s happening – a website or anything?

Michelle: Yes, my website is griefconnect.com.au, and if you go to the events tab, the seminar will be listed there.

Jenny: Okay, well thank you for that. Now, the large-scale situations happening around the world, it’s rammed down our throats at the moment – everyone’s feeling a little uneasy about life, not like it used to be, to be honest. Have you had people saying to you that they can’t come to terms with what’s happening?

Michelle: Sure. For example, we’ve had a four-month-old and a nine-year-old killed in Tel Aviv, and the outpouring from the community was quite notable – thousands of people came to the funeral procession to mourn the loss of the children and their mother. People were holding orange balloons, symbolic to that situation, and flags and signs, which generates almost a social movement.

Jenny: Collective grieving, national mourning, it’s not new – it’s been going on since time began, and in every war millions of people lose their lives. It’s just something about human nature I can’t come to terms with, to be honest. But there are a lot of silly reasons why these things happen. Does collective mourning or collective grieving actually help people?

Michelle: It really does, because when we experience grief we often feel extremely powerless, and what happens when we come together is that sense of empowerment and community that helps us have our grief validated, as individuals and as a community, which allows us to start processing what’s happening in our new reality and our new normal when we miss people.

Jenny: I think sometimes we feel a little guilty, because we feel very lucky to be in a safe place, and we see what’s happening elsewhere, and there’s just nothing we can do.

Michelle: Yes, it can certainly be something where we have that transference of grief happening even when it’s not in our immediate lives – we can experience that feeling of grief for people we don’t necessarily know.

Jenny: That’s right. I think you can relate to the fact that if it ever happened to our country, our family, our homes – how would we feel? I can’t even imagine how we’d be coping with that.

Michelle: No, and it’s certainly one of those things where, as a community and as an Australian society, talking about grief is really important, so we’re better equipped with the skills to know what to do if such a tragedy were to happen here.

Jenny: We’ve got to face reality with what’s happening around the world, but I think we get to hear and see about it a lot more now, with social media and television programming and documentaries. You look at the people at the top making these decisions, sending young men to war against other young men they don’t hate, but the older blokes do, and they’re the ones who got them to go. I really do question it, I lie awake thinking about it, it’s just ridiculous. There’s not a lot you can do, you’ve just got to hope things change for the better.

Michelle: And if we’re wanting to include ourselves in that change for the better, social media is a really great avenue to be part of specific groups – there’s a sort of activism that happens there too.

Jenny: And how do people get into that?

Michelle: It would depend on the circumstance. For widowed people out there feeling very isolated – maybe living in a rural community, or feeling isolated at home on their own – the social media aspect of Facebook, for example, I’ve got the Grief Connect Over 55s Widow Support Group and the Young Widow Support Group. People can come into those groups and be part of a peer community without necessarily having to turn up face to face – that’s an option to create more intensive social interaction, but there’s also real value in that online community for our grieving processes.

Jenny: I can understand that, because it’s not that you’re talking about the sadness all the time, but how you can get through it – you get to share that, don’t you?

Michelle: Sure. It’s the shared experiences, and the “oh, me too” in a positive way – that empathy and compassion, and learning from each other’s shared stories, is really where a lot of healing and grief processing happens.

Jenny: Yeah, it makes a heck of a difference. Look, as always, we talk about sad things, don’t we – have you got a happy club?

Michelle: We also love to talk about the happy times – we do have happy memories of our people, and the thing about grief is that we can still grieve and miss our person, but also delight in life and feel joy again, Jenny. Grief is very layered, in terms of the complexity of the emotions, so it’s really healthy to talk about grief, and it’s also really healthy to have that balance, to be able to enjoy life and find your new normal as you go through a deep grief process.

Jenny: It’s the life process, isn’t it, the life cycle – inevitable eventually. Michelle, thank you so much, as always.

Michelle: Thank you for having me, Jenny.