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Jen: Hi, it’s Jen Richler. Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet. 

When Rebecca Soffer was in her 20s, she never would have guessed that one day, she’d be writing books about grief and loss. She was living in New York City, working full time in TV, when her life was upended.

Rebecca: My mom was killed when I was 30, and my dad died four years later. So between the ages of 30 and 34, I lost both my parents.

And I felt like I was snipped loose from everything that had tethered me to a foundation in my life, and I did not understand how to be honest and open about what I was going through in a world that kept making it very clear that it was not particularly interested in that.

Jen: Rebecca was frustrated by the stigma that seemed to surround death and loss. So she decided to do something about it. In 2013, Rebecca launched the website Modern Loss, along with her friend Gabrielle Birkner. The site’s tagline: Candid conversations about grief. Beginners welcome.

In the beginning, Modern Loss mostly published essays about grief. These were raw, deeply personal reflections on the death of a loved one—often sad, but also with an unexpected twist—like the one where a woman uses her late husband’s life insurance money to buy a fancy diamond ring. Their how-to guides were also offbeat, with headlines like “Disrupting the Funeral: 7 Innovations You Should Know About” and “Yes, You Should Binge Watch Netflix on Mother’s Day.” In all of these pieces, people faced loss head on, without platitudes or saccharine sentimentality.

I stumbled on the site in its early years. It was over a decade after my mother had died, and I was still struggling. It was especially hard to find people who understood what I was going through; reading the Modern Loss essays, I felt like I finally had. In fact, I started occasionally writing and even editing essays for the website. Putting words to my grief and reading other people’s words was really therapeutic.

Over the years, Modern Loss grew. People started sharing their reflections and experiences on the site’s Facebook and Instagram pages. There were mindfulness and yoga retreats, live storytelling events, even holiday gift swaps. Modern Loss had become more than a website—it was a community.

Rebecca: And then COVID hit. And all of a sudden, the entire Modern Loss community, which had learned to, yes, very much lean on the community online and in person, but also lean on coping mechanisms that it had developed along the way, such as going to therapy, you know, like, having brunch with friends, seeing your circles, taking that walk, finding solace in your office as a break, volunteering at your kid's school as a respite—people didn't have that anymore.

And that was very overwhelming, because I felt this enormous responsibility to be there for so many people who suddenly had not only feelings of, you know, grief that were newer, but resurfaced feelings of older grief that were being triggered in this pandemic.

Jen: Rebecca had been hoping for a while to create a resource that would guide people through grief and loss. Now the need seemed especially urgent. So she wrote The Modern Loss Handbook: An Interactive Guide to Moving Through Grief and Building Resilience. The book came out earlier this year.

In this episode of Can We Talk? Rebecca and I talk Modern Loss: trigger days, bespoke holidays, Jewish grief rituals, and what to say—and not to say—to someone in mourning.

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Jen: I’ve read my share of books on grief, and one of the things that sets the Modern Loss handbook apart is the interactive element. In one section, the book includes space for readers to write down their reflections about what Rebecca calls “their person”: the things they loved most about that person, but also the things they found most annoying or infuriating; their favorite memories, and the ones they wish they could forget. In another section, readers are invited to describe and draw the early stages of their grief as an island and their current grief as a city. There’s even a Sad Lib for readers to complete—you know, instead of a Mad Lib. I asked Rebecca why she decided to make the book so interactive.

Rebecca: Because I feel like what people suddenly didn't have was interaction. They were just alone with their thoughts and very, very lonely and scared and not understanding how to move through, you know, grief in a world that was suddenly incredibly socially isolated, where even just the calming salve of a physical touch was something that we were scared of.

And so, I wrote this in such a way that it would be like a friend guiding you through a really, really hard time, but one who was like, “Listen, there is no one-size-fits-all for this. And so why don't you just try some of this stuff and see if any of them can be tools in your toolbox? And if something works, that's amazing—put it in the box. Something else doesn't work, fine; doesn't work. That's cool.”

Jen: Something else I really appreciated about the book is that it includes some elements that are a little bit more lighthearted than you might expect in a grief and loss book. So one that I really liked was this bingo card where readers are invited to color in all the “experiences you've graced with your tears either intentionally or unexpectedly.” Things like “at a Disney property, at karaoke, to a kind or shockingly unkind customer service agent.” Maybe you could say a bit about why you chose to include some of those more lighthearted elements. 

Rebecca: Yeah, because I mean…look, you need to laugh. You need to feel levity and lightness. And also, because grief is an extension of life, which is connected to death, and all of those things are very messy experiences. And so by virtue of them being messy, they're gonna be ludicrous. By virtue of them being ludicrous, we're gonna have to freaking laugh about it sometimes, because it’s so dumb sometimes that you just have to laugh. What other choice do you have? Like, yes. Have I found myself crying during a movie starring The Rock? 1,000,000%. Like, yep. So I put that in grief bingo.

Jen: And it's not—as some grief and loss books can be—it's not at all a religious book. Um, it, you know, mentions the grief rituals of different religions, partly as, like, possible sources of inspiration or jumping off points. But since you are Jewish, I'm curious if you think there are any especially helpful Jewish rituals around mourning.

Rebecca: Yeah. I mean, look, I think this is a very Jewish book. 

But to answer, like, the specific question, I think shiva is like, the coolest thing ever. I just loved that it was like, kind of a mandate for people to come hang out, and make me not be alone physically, because I really didn't want to be alone. And to just be surrounded by people, in that period of time, was probably life-saving—I mean, maybe not literally life-saving, but sanity-saving.

For me, what didn't resonate was an unveiling.

Jen: An unveiling is a Jewish ceremony where the tombstone is put in place. It’s often done at the end of the first year of mourning.

Rebecca: It was becoming incredibly obvious that my mom was just not gonna be around in year two either, and that it was really permanent. And so the unveiling did not help me. It actually was incredibly painful. Because everyone was like, “Listen, it's, like, the next phase, and things get easier,” and like, no, no, guess what? They didn't; they got a lot harder.  

Jen: You said, um, that this is such a Jewish book. And I'm curious if you could say a little more about, like, what you think is particularly Jewish, not just about the book, but, like, the whole Modern Loss project in general.

Rebecca: Well, you know, look, Jews love storytelling. And so, for me, the Jewish sensibility of the Modern Loss project really lies in the beauty of storytelling and connection and, you know, making storytelling a change agent and a catalyst for more empathic treatment of others.  Uh, and that of course can all point toward that grand mission of tikkun olam. Because when you teach someone how to be more empathic through showing and not telling, then that's when you can really effect positive change. And you can move the needle on a real societal stigma that shouldn't be stigmatized. So for me, this is very Jewish.

Jen: I’m going to shift gears a bit and ask about another way to look at grief, which is through the lens of gender.

Um, my mom died many years ago, when I was 22, and I sometimes felt like, as a woman—even though I barely felt like an adult at that point, but, as a young woman— it sometimes fell on me to carry on her memory, like, you know, planning holiday get-togethers, cooking some of her special foods, um, because those were the things that she had done. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts or examples of the ways that grief can intersect with gender.

Rebecca: Generally, when they're going through tough things, depression can look different in men than it does in women. It can look much more like anger or, you know, just being really busy or being withdrawn, you know, whereas in women it can look more like a lot of crying, a lot of, you know, anxiety. I mean, I just want to be very clear, I’m very much generalizing here. We grieve in different ways, too. Um, I don't think that we do a good enough job of like, encouraging men to access their feelings, uh, because that is associated with weakness.  

Jen: And then, like, on the flip side, a woman might get more of a reaction of, like, why isn't she crying? Because there's, like, an expectation that women will be more demonstrative in their emotions. So then when things don't line up with gender  norms, I think, people can be judged for the way they grieve, right?

Rebecca: Yeah. And that's so silly. Like, we’re all just human people. Loss is loss is loss.

Jen: Um, we’re airing this episode close to Thanksgiving, and for people who are grieving the loss of a loved one, it can be really heavy. Um, you know, maybe they really associate the holiday with the person who's died or even certain foods or recipes. And so their absence can feel so striking, um, on days like that. And you talk in the book a lot about trigger days, um, like Thanksgiving, but they can also be very particular to the person. Can you say a little bit about the idea of trigger days and, you know, ways of coping that you and others have found especially helpful?

Rebecca: I mean, trigger days could be any day. Maybe it's Thanksgiving, maybe it's a Tuesday—you know, maybe it's when you watched, like, Real Housewives together.

A holiday like Thanksgiving is a time machine because you know where you were on any given year with or without that person, whatever was going on. And you think about that, and that can be really hard.

And the destructive part of it is not that it's just, like, oh, Thanksgiving is, like, November 24. It's literally, like, the three months leading up to Thanksgiving and we rake ourselves over the coals, right? It's like, Oh, all these people are making plans. Oh my God. Why is everyone's family seemingly intact? Why does it look like everyone is like, alive, everywhere, except for in my family?

You know, we just, we let the looming part of it, um, really affect us. And of course it does, because we're also surrounded by promotional materials that come at us, you know, for all these holidays. And so it's like, it's a very hard thing because it turns one day into, like, basically a season.

And so I encourage people to do whatever they need to do for themselves, with regard to however they're feeling on any given year. Some years you'll be totally fine, right? And other years, it's gonna feel excruciating. And you never know which year is gonna feel like what. If you wake up on that morning and your entire body is like, rejecting whatever you had planned, don't do it. It's not worth it. You know, you don't deserve to do that to yourself. People will have to understand, but you need to be clear with them that you're just…you're having a hard time.

But I also talk about a lot of ways to reframe holidays, to connect with the memory of your person in ways that feel like you're bringing their spirit, their essence, into the holiday. Um, I also, for what it's worth, I’m a really big proponent of creating a bespoke holiday that doesn't have anything to do with any of these days.

Jen: You gave an example in the book. I think it was Katie Fisher Day. Could you talk about that example? Because I loved that one so much.

Rebecca: Totally. Katie Fisher Day is a holiday that was founded by my friend Matt Fisher. His sister was killed by a drunk driver, and she was in her early twenties, Katie. And, obviously, he was devastated. They were extremely close, and her thing was baking cookies and sending them to Matt in college every week.

And so he created Katie Fisher Day, and the whole premise is to just encourage people to, kind of, do a solid for someone else. Specifically, if you can make or send cookies to somebody, that's amazing, and post about it. Or, you could just do anything. It's basically like a random act of kindness for somebody.

And he created a hashtag #Katie Fisher Day, because he really wanted to see what the impact could be. And every year, it's this awesome thing, because you have hashtags from all over the world. Like, he says he's seen pictures of cookies, like, on the banks of the Nile. And anybody can do something like this.

Jen: Um, you talked very early on in our conversation about the pandemic. I wondered what lessons you think, um, we've learned or we can take from the last couple of years about grief and loss.

Rebecca: I think that, um, it's incredibly clear that we can't exist in a vacuum. We need each other so much. That community is the thing we have. Like, we may not even have health. We don't have political stability. We have the ability to create community during very, very hard things and pull each other in that way. Um, and that grief is the great leveler, and that that is the thing that can build bridges among people and create that community, because we're all experiencing it.

For me, some of the hardest moments of this pandemic have forced me to go back to the early days of how I managed my early grief from death loss. I used what I learned after my mom died. Which was, I don't know how I'm gonna get through this…Like, remember March 2020, and every day felt like a billion years. And, um, I just found myself going back to my early coping mechanisms. For me, it's two words: go micro. Like, don't worry about how you're gonna get through this whole thing. Just get through, like, 12 PM. Okay, you got to 12 PM; get through 3 PM. And that is the stuff that pulled me through in the early days. And still, I go back to it whenever I need to.

Jen: What about people who are trying to support someone who’s going through a loss, like a friend or a coworker? What advice would you give them?

Rebecca: I think that…keep it simple, stupid. You know, like, remembering that you don't have to be a therapist to help somebody in a hard time. You just need to be a human being that recognizes that things can be really hard and just think about a time that felt really, really, really hard and scary to you. Even if it wasn't connected to a death loss, I'm sure that you can think about a time where the world felt really scary and you didn't understand what life was gonna look like and yada, yada yada, right? Well, that is what grief feels like.

And if you don't have the perfect thing to say, which…there is none [laughs], you can always say, “I wish I had the perfect thing to say. I am so upset that you're going through this. It looks really hard, and you're right, I don't understand it directly, but I want to,” and just make it clear that there's nothing that they can do to scare you off.

Um, on a practical level, think about like, what do you know they need without asking them. Like, are you their neighbor? Do you know that, like, they definitely need their lawn mowed [laughs], you know? Can you do that for them? Can you offer…are you a friend and you know that they have kids, you know, can you offer to take their kids so that they can bathe or just stare at the wall for a bit? I mean, what can you do?  

You're not gonna fix their grief. Once you realize that, like, you don't have to fix everything, you don't even have to fix anything, you just need to take the load off a tiny bit, it kind of feels a little bit more manageable to be a meaningful support to someone,

Jen: Right. And I guess on the flip side, this is something you spent a little time on in your book, which is some of the more insensitive or unhelpful things that people sometimes say to people who are grieving. Can you give us a few greatest hits?

Rebecca: [laughs] So yeah, my greatest hits, um…”Was she wearing a seatbelt?” That’s a winner. When people find out that my mom died in a car accident and that is literally their first question.

Be wary of, like, the information seekers. Uh, because it doesn’t make them bad people; it just makes them, like, people who don't understand that, you know, you're not gonna protect yourself from something happening to you just because you know the details. Or anything that, like, starts with “at least.” You know, “At least you had a great relationship” or “At least you can always get pregnant again” or “At least you already have two healthy kids.” You're negating the current pain that they're in.

Um, and to me, I just really don't love the, “I can't imagine,” like the “I don't know how you do it.” And I think it's just in the way in which you say it. If you're like, “I can't imagine” and that is literally, like, your way of offering support, then you're really just drawing a line between you and them. You're like, “This is your grief. I can't imagine…” like, “This is you. This is all you.” And, like, how lonely do you think that feels?

Jen: Yep.

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Jen: “Resilience” is in the title of your book, and, as you point out in the book, it's kind of easy to sort of roll your eyes, because it's become such a buzzword. But, as you also note, it really is so important. And so, can you just talk a little bit about the relationship between grief and loss and the Modern Loss project more generally, and the idea of resilience, like, what that connection is for you?

Rebecca: Sure. Um, my argument about, like, why you need to learn about the word resilience is that, you know, I'm trying to impress upon the reader that, like, we're not born with a finite amount of it and that it can be strengthened. It’s like a muscle. Um, we can learn how to level up for ourselves in different ways, when times are hard. And sometimes we need a reminder of really hard things that we've already been through and be reminded of that, to prove to ourselves that we do have resilience. And resilience to me is in, like, really just like showing up for yourself and being able to somehow, even in the wonkiest way possible, move through a really, really difficult thing.

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We, the people who are the survivors, are the ones left to figure out how we move through our lives, and move through them in a way that's meaningful, and build meaning out of this, like, shit pile sometimes. And the way that we can do that is by being aware that we're not alone in it.

Even though grief is a very, very individual experience, it should not be a lonely one.

Jen: You can find the Modern Loss Handbook by Rebecca Soffer anywhere books are sold. And you can find the Modern Loss community online at modernloss.com and on Facebook and Instagram at Modern Loss.

Thank you for joining us for Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Our team includes Judith Rosenbaum and Nahanni Rous. Special thanks to Jenny Sartori for help with this episode. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble. You also heard “Kallaloe” by Blue Dot Sessions.

You can find Can We Talk? at jwa.org/canwetalk or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m Jen Richler…Until next time!