Our Love is Worth the Pain

A Conversation with Joanne Cacciatore

Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is the founder of the MISS Foundation which helps people grieve traumatic death. In this conversation with In Good Faith host Steven Kapp Perry, Cacciatore discusses her experience with loss and what she has learned about comforting those in pain.

I was so struck by something you said: “Our love is worth all the pain I feel. You are not taking that from me. It's all I have.”

That is a really profound insight. Can you tell us how you came to that? 

Oh, gosh, I wrote that the first time in my journal, very early after my, my newborn daughter's death in 1994. I had seen several counselors because the people around me were concerned. I was grieving intensely, and it was enduring.

In an attempt to help, people sent me to different therapists who were supposed to specialize in grief, and none of them actually did. They actually made me feel more lonely, like there was something wrong with me. And then I had an insight after one meeting where I actually got up and left about thirty minutes into the session.

I didn't even stay for the full session because it was apparent to me that he was not grasping the extent of the catastrophic nature of my baby daughter's death. So, I went home and journaled, and I wrote that. I had this insight as I was driving home: I'm not going to let anyone colonize my emotions. These are mine, and they're valid, and every tear I shed for her is because I love her, and she's worth it.

That almost sounds like making other people comfortable. Like it becomes your job as the grieving person to make other people comfortable, which seems backwards.

Well, it is. And it still happens.

I've had patients whose HR representative came by their desk and asked them to remove a picture of their child who died because it was making their coworkers uncomfortable. I've had people be invited to parties and be explicitly told ‘we're not going to talk about your son's car accident and death’. I can tell you that this does not do grievers any good.

In fact, it exacerbates their sense of loneliness. And as you probably know, because most people have heard this in the news, loneliness is a number one contributor to premature mortality and illness. Grieving people feel so incredibly lonely because of the way that society treats us.

It’s very hard for people to talk about children dying, especially if they have children. I understand that, but we have to deal with this. Oftentimes in society, others who haven't lost a child act out of fear, not love or compassion—that's a real problem for grieving people that remains true today. We will pass down through generations our suppressed grief. We will pass down through generations our incapacity to deal with traumatic grief. I believe in the intergenerational transmission of trauma. I also believe in the intergenerational transmission of compassion.

What happens when we try not to feel what we are actually feeling? 

Grief is not this monolithic emotional experience. Grief is despair and anguish, sorrow and sadness. It's also rage, and guilt, and shame, and envy. It's many emotions under this sort of ‘grief umbrella’.

If we don't learn slowly, or we aren’t supported in carrying the weight of grief, we will just become masters of disguise and masters of distraction; that's probably not a good idea. We have a real substance abuse problem in our culture because we are emotionally stunted. We don't know how to deal with hard emotions.

So, when we have a hard emotion, what do we do? We check out. How do we check out? Well, we try to numb ourselves with booze, with drugs—prescription, over the counter, or street. We check out with porn, with gambling, and all kinds of very deleterious behaviors.

If we want grieving people to trust themselves with these feelings, they have to practice carrying them. They have to practice being with them. 

Your bio includes your bachelor's and your master's in psychology from Arizona State and a doctorate from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. But along with that, you say your greatest accomplishment is being mother to five children, now grown, and you note four who walk and one who soars. Now, no one would wish upon you what you experienced with that pregnancy and the birth of that fourth child.

What has it added to your study and learning that you have personal experience with this? 

Oh, well, I wouldn't have gone down this path. I mean, I hadn't even gone to college when my daughter died.

So it really led you here.

Oh, yeah. She's the North Star of everything.

I don't think I would have done this voluntarily. It's not the kind of thing you want to be called to, and I would give it all back if I could have her, but I don't get that choice. The only choice I have is what I do with it now.

Not in spite of grief, but because of grief. 

You talk in various places about pets being this huge factor in comforting people. In second place, I think, 60-something percent, so two-thirds of people, felt supported by a support group. What makes a good support group? 

As humans, we're wired for social connection and emotional connection. Ideally, in a well-run support group, that's what you have: all of the essential ingredients to socially connect and to emotionally resonate with others.

I sit across from a woman whose sixteen-year-old son died by suicide. We may be different in every other aspect—politically, socially, educationally, economically, maybe even religiously—but the fact that she's lost her child and I've lost my child, that's an emotional resonance that's more powerful than just about any other difference between us.

I had a friend who had actually lost a teenage son in a swimming accident tell me that “we connect at our broken edges,” which sounds like what you're saying there.

When you work with people who are part of a faith community, and they're wanting to get support within their congregation, what would you tell people to look for that will actually be helpful to them?

If I'm doing crisis intervention, for example, I encourage faith leaders to leave their Bible outside the hospital room. Instead, just go in and sit with the family, hold their hand and say, how can I be of service right now? What can I do?

If the person who's grieving the loss says, I would love some scripture, go get your holy book, and be careful what you choose. Saying things like ‘God has a plan for you’ isn't something that grieving people love to hear, even if God does have a plan for you. For a mother or father, there's no better place for their twelve-year-old than in their home at night in their bed.

I did a crisis intervention with a family whose little boy died of a seizure very suddenly.  They invited their pastor there to officiate, and this is how he started it: He raised his hands in the air and he said, ‘today is a day we celebrate’.  I looked over at mom and dad immediately and they were looking at each other. Mom had her mouth hanging open.  They really turned away from spirituality hard after that.

I get where he was going with this, from a spiritual perspective, but it’s a sad occasion. It's a tragic occasion. People don't celebrate the death of a four-year-old. 

That's very important. Something as simple as the choice of the words.

Absolutely.

No matter what your belief is, it is important to recognize where the person themself is, the parents in this case. They may have still been numb if it was such a new event. Can you talk about your experience with religion, or a faith group or congregation, in the grieving process?

I was an atheist for a long time, and technically, I'm a Buddhist priest. I teach meditation and I practice Zazen.

When you use meditation, do you notice that it helps people have a little bit of detachment to observe their feelings? Does that make it safer to experience and observe that way?

Well, when I teach people meditation, I teach them to really engage with whatever comes up. And just noticing it, that doesn't mean attachment or detachment. It's neither. It's neither aversion nor clinging. It's not pushing something away or pulling something toward. It's just allowing it to be.

It's sort of the overused but perfect metaphor of the storm. The storm rolls in, and it rolls out, and then it rolls back in, and then it rolls back out. No amount of resistance is going to stop it. No amount of clinging is going to make it stay; it just moves. Emotions are like that.

The beautiful thing about meditation is it makes space in the mind and the heart, so it's easier to approach these very, very hard feelings. It's easier to feel safe when confronted with them, not just when you're in meditation. When you're outside of meditation, it helps you maintain a spaciousness about your emotions so that you can approach them with tenderness and curiosity instead of fear and aversion.

That's beautifully stated. And I love what you've just taught about engagement rather than detachment.

I am a questioner, probably by nature. I think I was born to be a researcher. And so, I tend to question everything, but I will also say that I have had some profoundly inexplicable spiritual experiences around my daughter's death that I can't describe. I mean, I can't explain scientifically, despite being a scientist.

Those kinds of incidences that have happened to me over the past 28 years since she died are really what shifted me from being a hardcore atheist to thinking there has to be something—this can't be coincidence.

I hope I get to see her again. To me, my heart's greatest desire is that I will see her again. I have so much to say to her that I didn't get to say in her very brief life. I could cry now just talking about it, you know, because . . .

She's that important.

Oh, yeah. And the thought that that I will never see her again is almost too much to bear. It's worse than losing her once; it's like losing her twice.

Steven Kapp Perry is the host of the "In Good Faith" podcast, produced by BYUradio.org

Artwork by Eduardo Kingman.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to the full Grief episode here or below.