Loss, Grief, & Recovery: Good Grief, Part 2
This session continues the discussion into the paradoxical nature of grief as both deeply personal and requiring community witness. The conversation explores how grief fragments and splinters, with different pieces moving in various directions. The speakers introduce the concept of “ambiguous loss” and discuss the challenge of supporting others without imposing one’s own narrative.
Episode Transcript
Content Warning
As a content warning, this episode discuss trauma, healing, grief, involving a child and catastrophe. Due to the sensitive nature of this topic, please take care of yourself.
Tyler
My chances right now for outliving my youngest child are very high. It is most likely that I am going to outlive my daughter. And I have to be close to family.
Intro & Outro
I’m Jeremy. And I’m Tyler. Welcome to GoodPain, where we talk about life’s true intensities without pretending they’re easy to solve. What if the things we’re told to fix, optimize, or get over are actually where the real wisdom lives? Each week we gather for the kind of honest conversations you desire to be a part of more often about the relentless demands, the unexpected grief, the quiet victories, and everything in between. Because maybe, just maybe, the answer isn’t to limit the hard stuff, it’s to find the good in it. Welcome to the conversation.
Episode Introduction
This week we’re continuing part two of our grief discussion. And before we get into the show, last week we talked about the nature of what the editing process has been like and then also about that topic of violence. This week I’m excited for a couple of reasons. One is I’m excited because first I get to shut up for longer periods of time. And Jeremy gets to share. And I think his insight is really great. And as we continue this conversation around grief, one of the things that I also want to point out about the show in general is we started out doing this show with a conceit. It was my conceit. I love movies. I love cinema. And later on next year we’re going to be launching a show within this channel that we’re calling the Tell Show where my second and I, Heidi, will be discussing life’s intensities through a lighter subject matter of cinema. And we’ll be trying that out. We’ll see if it works. It might not work. We’re going to try it because we love movies. In this episode we tried introducing the show with the movies and I ended up cutting it. It was too forced. And that’s something we’re really trying to do here is to not force the conversations. We want them to happen organically to be on topic. But these are conversations that they’ll meander at times because they need to. We do end up talking about one of the movies in this episode. The themes that we really start to explore here for the next 40 minutes, it really is hope, grief and ambiguous loss. The power of giving voice to internal thoughts and how powerful it is putting into language the voice that’s already there. I mean, one of the things that’s difficult for me to in walking through grief is it’s still never linear. Time is linear. And that’s why we end up talking about time even within this conversation and what it means to watch things evolve, sometimes cyclically, not linearly and what that experience is like. One of those things that we also introduce in this conversation is the nature of two words that I historically have associated with shame, which is should and just. Should is not new. Lots of people have talked about stop shooting all over ourselves. And the word just, however, is also one that can be reductionist to what’s going on as if saying or offering a solution that is if I just do this, there’s some sort of escape that’s on offer for that. And I think that’s something we discuss here as a means for highlighting the ways that we in our grieving process, not only tell ourselves that we can escape it, but also telling ourselves is almost a statement of hope itself. Just is a word that is loaded with hope sometimes. If I say I just need to remind myself that this is a process, sometimes it feels like I’m trying to convince myself that I can somehow get better. I’m trying to convince myself that I can somehow crack the code and not have to deal with the heaviness on some days. That’s something that we advocate in this conversation for becoming more mindful about the ways that I’m trying to pull myself out of a hole some days. Last week, we ended up with a conversation I was having with a former coworker while we were still in Texas and we were getting ready to transition up to Colorado. We’re going to pick that conversation up again. We winded a little bit here in the pickup just so that there’s a little bit of context if you’re coming into this cold or have forgotten what we were discussing last week. So we’re going to start with about a minute of what we heard last week and then roll right into the rest of the conversation. We’ll wrap this up next week. We’ll pick up other themes around denial and defiance and other things that come up in the process of recovery.
Tyler
When I went to go and resign from this job, I went and talked with a friend who was also the person I was going to resign with. And one of the main reasons for why we were leaving, besides getting close to family, all those pragmatic reasons, came up out of me and is attached to that ambiguous loss. My voice broke as soon as I told him this was my chances right now for outliving my youngest child are very high. It is most likely that I am going to outlive my daughter and I have to be close to family. We have to do this regardless of my professional life and how happy I was.
Jeremy
Had you ever used those words to anybody?
Tyler
That was the first time I’d said it out loud. It was something that I knew.
Jeremy
I have a theory about this and the reason I ask is that every time you intuitively kind of understand what you need to do as far as a process. Workplace stuff is always an easy place. It’s time for me to move on, right? But the number of times that people just lose it and become emotional because they’re giving physical voice to a thought that they’ve had, it becomes real in a way that it wasn’t seconds prior. And I think that is powerful and I think necessary, but people just try to hold that in for so long and they don’t voice it oftentimes. And the fact that you took the heavy moment of what this means and why we’re having this conversation today about I have to leave. I’m sure that was the first time that it really hits in that way to somebody who’s not personally connected to this dynamic. It’s not a family member, right? I think other people will be very apt to understanding exactly what that feels like and in agreement with you that, yeah, I get why that happened. You’re giving me that look.
Tyler
No, no, there’s a couple of things. One is I can only imagine the sucker punch that I delivered to this friend in that moment.
Jeremy
I’m laughing now, but yes, of course.
Tyler
I know it was a sucker punch, not one that had any malicious aspect to it. But when that happened, I mean, it was the crack in my voice, the tears that welled up in my eyes were mirrored by the person that was sitting across from me. Rightfully so. He’s a father as well. And he’s just good people. And the fact that I was able to, that I chose that is reflective of who he is as a person and the quality of individual that he is.
Jeremy
There’s trust. You felt this is a safe place to take that punch to have a very honest conversation in a time when you needed it.
Tyler
There have been other times where what you just described that that giving voice to thoughts that we have. Yeah, I’ve found that there’s times where I’ve wanted to acknowledge those things, but I haven’t been able to find the words. Or the appropriate venue for them to be spoken into existence.
Jeremy
Is it because you kind of know that that’s going to be a bigger moment and possibly messy with emotion and messy is an ugly word in this context, but it’s going to bring out things on both parties.
Tyler
I have a tendency to be very cerebral about things.
Jeremy
That sounds right.
Tyler
And to explain them in a way that makes sense to myself, that makes sense to other people. And as good as I am at doing that and how that has been a part of my career for a long time.
Jeremy
Yeah.
Tyler
It is the lesser version of myself. And and that version of myself does not deserve to deliver some of these messages.
Jeremy
Wow.
Tyler
And the only one that has the right to deliver those messages is my most heart broken open, authentic, raw, vulnerable true self. And every time that I have found that voice and I’m putting quotes around that I have found this, it’s not it. It has found me and I can only say those things. I at those points in time, it’s not a matter of me trying to find ways of expressing in the correct way and the way that’s going to land the moment. It’s it is trusting that when I need the words to express, I will show up. I will show up and I have never been let down by that person. I have always found new novel ways of letting down that person by my cerebral self. And I this is in grief. Oftentimes what we what I’ve seen also with parents or others who are who are going through trauma or going moving through grief. Is there such an emphasis on finding the right words to say on on on doing it the right way? If anything in grieving that I try to hold on to an closer and closer to it as an absolute is that the more we ask the question, what’s the right thing to say? That’s that is scratching at the cerebral aspects that disguise us from ourselves.
Jeremy
Getting further and further away from the real heart of this, which is literally the heart of. I’m hearing the word authentic authenticity here or being authentic with you expressing how you’re feeling, not how you’re thinking, but how you’re feeling. And I think people need to be able to share and kind when they say, man, this really sucks. Yeah, or what I don’t know what the appropriate words would be.
Tyler
Authenticity, vulnerability. These are big topics, whether it’s been perpetuated by Bernay Brown and the conversations around vulnerability are fantastic and they are deeply troubling because there is a cerebral discussion around vulnerability that we almost it’s similar to what we talk about when we say, you know, what does it mean to be resilient? And we go out and we say we’re going to train resiliency and not to say that you cannot train aspects of resiliency, but this might be an overall theme that we continue to touch on is that our continued belief that we can prepare ourselves for being resilient for handling trauma is comical. The trauma itself is what prepares you. The grieving itself, it’s self referential.
Jeremy
Yeah.
Tyler
And part of us talking about vulnerability, resiliency, I think sometimes has smacks of if I prepare myself a forehand for that, then I can avoid it, that I can deflect it, that I can get away from it. And so that’s where I think that’s the cerebral activity. And that’s I and I’m saying this purely from myself is, is, you know, studying some of these things and equipping myself as I the more and more I reflect on that. I’m just amused. I’m amused because the answer has always been staring me squarely in the face. My grief for me is allowing my heart to be broken open and risking the fact it’s going to hurt that I can be hurt and sit with that hurt and that pain and that suffering time and time again. And early on, both Tiffany and I, we recognize this even within something that we would say, and it’s it’s evolved its meaning has evolved for us as parents, the pain that we carry from the loss of hope, what we grieve, we carry proudly. Because it is ours to carry. It is ours to routinely allow it to keep our heart open. Yeah. And not to seek to resolve it, not to seek to to get tools to stitch it back up so that we are more impervious to pain. It’s our reminder that there is something always worth feeling and reliving the pain and reliving the grief. It’s just not going to go away.
Jeremy
The thing that you’re talking about now, I’m only hearing one word that is absence from that to afford for you the opportunity to recognize the value of this, embrace it, hold it, keep it. I think all of these are powerful for some level of moving forward. I’m talking about I’m just, but you have to have those things. And I’m not hearing the word shame, because I think a lot of people would be ashamed of, oh my gosh, this is a thing. But there’s no reason that somebody that’s in this position would be ashamed of any of the things, the choices you’ve made, how you handled yourself, any of those things. I think it’s so easy for people to zero back into that negative thought process about, oh my gosh, I’m just going to be a mess. Nobody wants to hang out with me because it’s going to be covered or shrouded in sadness. Whatever the internal conversation is, and that’s a huge motivator, being able to release that shame because a lot of people don’t have the ability to do that or keep it longer than it needs to be.
Tyler
Shame for me is the word that I, there’s two words oftentimes that I listen to as a signal that shame is at play here. It is the word should, and it’s the word just. On the one hand, should informing ourselves that what we’re feeling, how we are acting is different than what we ought to be doing. As if there is something that we ought to be doing, and we all know that’s the case, that there are a lot of people that will tell us, including ourselves, that there’s something else we should be doing. That word is denotative of that. I think that’s a common language that is coming more and more to the forefront around the word should. But the word just also for me is this reductionist view that crops up in reference to ourselves. We feel we’ve made a mistake or we’re experiencing pain or discomfort, or we’ve done something that we’ve made somebody else uncomfortable. And as a response to the shame that comes up from that, we start anchoring to, “Well, in the future, I just need to do this. I just need to do this.” And it is reductionist to the experience that we live with fluid, dynamic relationships with other people, with ourselves, that can never be reduced to a playbook that helps us to avoid discomfort, pain, tension. And yet, that’s where those are the markers of what is shame. It is a social mechanism, whether that is in social with our communities or social within ourselves. What does that mean for me? It is that within ourselves, within myself, I have different versions of myself. I have the work version of myself. I have the social version of myself. I have all the selves that I think that I’m puppeting to hide me from myself, all these different aspects.
Jeremy
Or hide you from somebody else.
Tyler
That’s right. And that’s for me, again, borrowing from Parker Palmer. That’s the divided life. And part of what I strive for is an undivided life where those things are collapsing in on each other. That fragmented view of myself is less and less fragmented over time. Shame is the tool that’s wielded by either those outside of me that have taken hold in my mind, that have convinced that they have some sort of a claim, or the ones that I have crafted myself to drive a behavior that I think is tolerable, that will be accepted. Should and just are the standard barriers for shame for me.
Midroll
Sit tight and we’ll be right back after this short break. Championship Sunday, final hole. Our leader stands over his back. This is the moment that separates champions from everyone else. He reaches it, pulls out the familiar companions, anxiety, fear, defensiveness, the old tools. But watch this, the head shake, the gentle return to the bag. Now what’s he searching for? Ah, yes, he’s found it. GoodPainCo.com emerges like a trusted captain. This champion knows that real growth happens when we lean into difficulty, not away from it. He’s walking the green hell, listening to internal podcasts about resilience, referencing newsletter wisdom about trusting the process, the setup, vulnerability in his stance, no armor, no pretense, just authentic presence, and no fear of the past. Just authentic presence with the challenge, stroke, smooth, confident, and it’s tracking. It’s tracking. Yes, pure magic. And what’s he launching into the crowd? Digital shares, podcast reviews, newsletter subscriptions, the gift that keeps giving. Join the journey at GoodpainCo.com. Subscribe, share, review. Because champions aren’t made by avoiding pain. They’re forged by choosing to grow through it. Well done, sir.
Tyler
Welcome back to the rest of the episode. I am asking myself more and more not to shame the shame. You shouldn’t feel shame, you know it.
Jeremy
Sure. It’s cyclical in that way, isn’t it? Yeah.
Tyler
It’s to invite it along for the ride. And it’s to say that this shame that I feel is here. It just is here. And I don’t need to qualitatively decide at this moment whether it is worthy of being here, whether it deserves to be here, whether it shouldn’t be here. It just is here. Yeah. In its presence, it is pulling on things to exact a certain behavior, a certain response that I have a drive, a momentum, a history that’s going to push me down that path. And yet I don’t have to go down that path.
Jeremy
Yeah.
Tyler
I have a choice. I have an autonomy here. And this has been one of the biggest aspects that has been freeing is giving myself the permission to just allow, I just said the word just, to allow it to be here for the ride. It has no claim on me. It’s going to try to make a claim on me. Every time I can. I have a claim on me and in the Royal Tenenbaums, there is a scene where, where I’m trying to remember his name, not Chaz, but it’s Luke Wilson’s character. I’ll just say Luke Wilson’s character.
Jeremy
Sure.
Tyler
Where Luke Wilson’s character has, since he was a child, kept this peregrine falcon on the roof. And earlier in the movie, he goes up and recognizes that the bird is caged. And he’s kept the bird caged. And he lets the bird free. And near the end of the movie, he goes out there and a bird comes and he recognizes this. This is the bird that he freed. And they look at the bird and the bird has, they say, are you sure this is him? And they say, no, it is, he’s just grayer. He’s just started to gray. And when I think of that, I, we look at the signs of pain and discomfort, almost want to convince ourselves that we could have avoided the gray. And we forget that he was freed so that he could fly. He was freed so he could experience, he could live. When I think of grief and trauma and the shame and the shoulds, I have, I’ve wielded it as a means for telling me what I should be doing, walking through it so that I can stay caged. And the one who’s kept me caged is my mind and the freedom of releasing what I’m experiencing of the pain, of the suffering, of the hopes that I had that Claire would live a life that by my definition, by Tiffany’s definition, is more full. Is a matter of trying to pick and choose what gray feathers we’re going to have, instead of understanding that this is what’s going to age us. This is what’s going to age her. And grieving that is never going to go away. My response to that is to try and relent to shame less and less and as a means for trying to control and instead get back to the business of living.
Jeremy
Big ask, isn’t it? You know, the thing that I recognize all the time and I talk to students about is that you’d mentioned your mind is the biggest limiter, I’m paraphrasing, but it is your worst enemy. You’re always going to be super critical in ways that nobody else on the planet will be. You always have that self-doubt talk and it’s ever present. And it takes a real special set of skills to be able to quiet that. And I love how you painted that picture about you’re along for the ride, but you were an observer and you don’t have a say in this. How did you get to that place? What were the things? You’ve kind of illustrated some of the markers for you to recognize it, but what got you there?
Tyler
Time. The reason why I am almost just anchoring to time is every effort that I made by myself had its place. Similar to what we talked about of mine and Tiffany’s experience with one person saying something and each of us taking what we needed in that moment or not. It served its purpose, but that activity never got us to this point of allowance. That what we had to learn, what I had to learn was to allow more than to define what it is that I wanted, what I was going to grasp after, and to go through the exercises of acquiring knowledge, of cracking this case and chasing it down, wrestling it down and bending it to my will. The big trauma was clearly the first shot across the bow of that is that, oh, here’s your plans and here they are in a pile of rubble after the fact. Look at all of that hand-wringing and all of that planning and there are certainly aspects of despair that pop up where you start asking questions like, well, what am I going to plan for again? Like if this is sure, why would I go through the effort of putting any hopes or expectations in place? Then there’s this gentle patient voice that pops up when the hand-wringing has made your hands raw. You can’t wring your hands any longer.
Jeremy
You recognize nothing’s going to come from that.
Tyler
Where it’s just that voice is, be still.
Jeremy
Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
I have gotten to the point, there needs to be enough time to pass for the frenzy of activity to exhaust me, where it’s exhausted me so much where I can actually hear.
Jeremy
Be open to.
Tyler
Yeah. When it comes to grieving, sometimes that pain feels like it’s asking something of me. I need to do something with it. Particularly as a parent, this is going back to some of the ways we traumatize ourselves of, I don’t have, I should never have the, give myself the permission or license to be free and just be when my daughter is where she is. And it creates this cycle of punishing myself, of shaming.
Jeremy
Sure, yeah.
Tyler
And time gets me to the point again, where it’s, what did that do? What did that shame and punishment and guilt, what did any of that accomplish? It accomplished nothing. Claire is still here. I am still here. My family is still here. And that is enough until it’s not, until I’m back on that, that wheel chasing after something else and trying to prove. And it’s the part of it is also, is just recognizing how quick I am to be my own judge, jury litigator who is constantly building a case that I deserve to be here regardless of everything else that’s happened. Regardless of the fact that Tiffany and I carry responsibility and accountability and pain associated with parents that allowed something like this to happen and grieving, not only how we feel her life was shortchanged, but grieving how our family’s life was shortchanged by not being able to travel together as a family and see the sense of awe and wonder on all of our faces as we experience things anew. And we talk about baggage being a bad thing, arriving at a point, reminding over and over that that baggage is our life. It’s where our values are and it’s worth it. I don’t know how many people get a chance to prove to themselves and the ones that they love what it is that’s worth fighting for in such stark picture. If anything, the balance to some of the grief that we carry comes with the hope that Autumn and Heidi that that our friends and family see that we get on a daily basis to do something worthwhile. And does that justify the fact that Claire is injured? Absolutely not.
Jeremy
For sure not.
Tyler
I get to look in on what has happened to us and realize that what happened came with a choice. I could equally be grieving, choosing my own pain, choosing my own desires and anger and above the fact that I on a daily basis gets to choose some days better than others how I’m going to show up. And if there’s anything when I think about my ideal self, I want to grieve what has happened, not future happenings of continuing to choose to deal with the guilt, shame and grief of not making the right choices.
Jeremy
Yeah, that’s a no where road really.
Tyler
Yeah. That’s I think one of the big things that I love about the Royal Tenenbombs is that all of these things happen later in life when a whole bunch of water has passed under the bridge and it’s a picture of Royal Tenenbaum and his character arc, starting with a very pragmatic reason for why he needed to reunite with his family. And then his awakening came when he realized that the past six weeks that he had spent lying to them was the greatest time of his life and that he then makes the active choice to stop grieving what could have been the lost years and to fight for something that was never guaranteed for him was restoration to those relationships. And we we love the picture of restoration yet there’s never a guarantee for that.
Jeremy
Sure.
Tyler
We were never guaranteed that Claire was going to be restored. We were never guaranteed that all those dreams that we lost were going to be restored. And that’s the nature of grief. That’s the nature of hope is that there’s no evidence that you’re going to get it. Once we moved away from the acute event and, you know, three months on and things started materializing as this is what life is going to look like. The grief that we started to experience itself became a collaborator with our journey. That grief was something we welcome.
Jeremy
Wow. And that’s where we are. Wow. I think most people have not gotten to that level of acceptance. I don’t know the right word here. But I see that it has created a healthy environment in your relationship with your family, obviously, but just how you navigate through life. But that is a lot of experience speaking. That’s a lot of wisdom coming from trying the wrong things. And you found some good ones that helped you get through this in a way that you’re able to talk about it today.
Tyler
Let me take the impressive aspect and now moderate that with.
Jeremy
OK.
Tyler
Now the struggles that come with that. This is something that we’ve shared with a lot of other families who have had similar things they’ve gone through or people who are later in life who have seen a lot. Where we are now, where I am now is being friends with grief, being friends with trauma, having all the aspects of really good, solid friendships, friction with those things, collaborations with those things, you know, tips with all with with with those things. Well, with with with those with those characteristics and them now playing a role that is even more humbling, which is now we see it now. And I think for all of us as parents, we experience this as well. If you have kids and toddlers and teenagers and where we see things before they do and the degree of frustration that comes with that of they are making decisions. We know what the outcome is going to be. We know the danger they’re placing themselves and we know what they’re stealing from themselves. And trauma does that for you. You know, having a relationship with with grief, you see you do see the world differently. You develop a language that not everybody understands. And in so doing, you want to make them understand and you want to understand what’s going on. You want to to take people by the shoulders. Tiffany and I both have examples with with friends who they’re dealing with family members that they’re struggling with something. And we see a reflection of them rather than a reflection of the relationship before they do.
Jeremy
Sure.
Tyler
My kid is choosing wants to go to college for this and I know they shouldn’t choose to major in that. And I’m saying, like, are you really going to die on this hill? Like there’s bigger things and and the damage that you potentially are incurring in the relationship is is much bigger than and you’re not seeing that and wanting to shake them and say, Why are you wrapped around the axle on this so much and and it in and of itself becomes instructive because going back to your question that you said, Like, how did how did we get here? My answer was time.
Jeremy
Yeah.
Tyler
Time and a very patient version of myself that is aware of what I need at the right time at the right moment, including potentially creating friction with my relationships. That’s going to be a better instructor to me about who I need to become.
Jeremy
Yeah.
Tyler
Potentially some of that collateral damage we talked about is the better instructor rather than advice from people who have gone before.
Jeremy
Right.
Tyler
And what that in turn reflecting and remembering that it didn’t matter what people told me when we were in the middle of when we were in the grip of it or when things were frenzied. It really didn’t matter what people said. My inner teacher, my inner instructor was sufficient to carry me forward. And now what this has turned towards is continued humility, continuing to be humbled every single time. I see what somebody is going through and I have, I have the words to tell him I have that piece of wisdom that’s going to influence them.
Jeremy
Sure.
Tyler
I’m choosing to keep my mouth shut and instead I say it and I can feel it now as it’s coming out of my mouth saying why the why are you doing this?
Jeremy
Yeah.
Tyler
They are enough. They are enough. They have the answers inside of them. They don’t need your advice right now.
Jeremy
Yeah.
Tyler
Tiffany and I watched Yellowstone, the TV series. I’m familiar. I’ve heard of it. Yes. And there’s an episode, pretty significant tragedy that occurred. There’s a phrase that they said specifically that just about reduced me. Just the phrase is grief isn’t meant to be shared, but comfort is. We talk about a faux pas in when people are going through traumas is to say things like I know what you’re going through. And I’ve found that when that happens, again, intention is 100% good.
Jeremy
Sure.
Tyler
Lots of compassion for, for people that maybe have, have committed that faux pas. But there is a belief that I’ve, that is within me when I have done that to others where I am trying to convince them that they are not alone. They don’t need to be convinced.
Jeremy
Wow.
Tyler
They just need to not be alone. And sometimes that means just sitting with them.
Jeremy
And. It’s a lot harder to do that, isn’t it?
Tyler
What I can say these things out of a sense of I am really, really bad at it. I’m just not good at it.
Jeremy
I don’t think anybody is.
Tyler
Yeah.
Jeremy
This hit me like a ton of bricks, this example about people’s propensity to say things in the hopes that it’s going to create some level of comfort or acknowledgement of a shared experience. This is going to date me, but Nancy Drew used to have a TV show where the brothers would go out and.
Tyler
The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
Jeremy
And so they would solve all the world’s problems. Well, also going to high school or whatever they were doing was amazing. And so on this particular episode, the girlfriend of one of the brothers, she died in this car accident and it was really horrible and everything. And this line came up and said, I know what you’re going through. And it maybe it was teenage angst or whatever, but he landed this. He’s like, do you? And it was so brilliant. And it’s stay with me to this day. But it’s like, yeah, that’s kind of cool because you don’t know what they’re going through. And to assume that you do is arrogant. But I think again, you want to you want to ease that pain and some capacity. You want to make them feel that they’re not going through this thing alone. But everything you said is not the case at all.
Tyler
I think that’s the key is that even if we are not alone, that doesn’t change the fact of in that moment. Whether we’re even able to see that. And it’s not the job for me to convince somebody you are not alone. Like, don’t don’t think those things. Like I want you it’s in the last episode, we talked people asking, you know, what do you want? How can I help? There’s only one thing that I want. You can’t give it to me.
Jeremy
Right.
Tyler
Everything else that might actually be helpful to me. I’m not going to recognize right now. Yeah, I’m just not going to see it. I’m going to I’m only looking for one thing. And that’s where I that’s where I am and and where you think I should be doesn’t matter. Tiffany and I can tell you there are individuals in our story that we’ve talked to them about this. We’ve told them there how they have a specific spot in our in our lives and our hearts because of who they were. And to a fault, all of them are like, well, we we didn’t do anything.
Jeremy
Yeah.
Tyler
The inverse for that is like, you are not going to convince yourself that you are helping. And if that’s what you’re looking for, yeah, then we’re back to the conversation around violence is that you are seeking to convince yourself at the expense potentially of the person in front of you and the expense of your stated intentions.
Jeremy
Right. It’s a tricky balance.
Tyler
It is. That’s what I continue to grieve. Not only our experience, that’s the grief I’m going to continue carrying with me, but I look back at the times, the missed opportunities that I had to give that to somebody else, the times that I had to to be quiet to sit in silence. And I grieve the pain and the violence that I have inflicted on others. I don’t get to dictate the magnitude and the amount of violence that I have inflicted on others. I don’t get to dictate the magnitude and size of trauma and what pain comes out of that. For some people, the degree of pain that I experienced was felt by them when I when I interjected more of myself into their story than was necessary. And that is in the same way that the grief with Claire belongs to me. I grieve that pain that I inflicted on others. When I need to be humbled, that’s what I think. That’s what I think about.
Jeremy
That would do it. That would do it. I appreciate the conversation surrounding this. I’m sure more to come with a lot of variation of these things and open conversation.
Intro & Outro
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