Any fellow griever will tell you that reentering life in a post-loss world can feel disorienting. Walking through the skyway weeks after losing my little brother, I felt dazed and hollowed out, forgetting how to put one foot in front of another in this pedestrian tunnel I had paced through so many times over. The thought of meeting up with a friend over the lunch hour or simply making eye contact and smiling at bypassers felt lifetimes removed. The once familiar now felt foreign in every sense.
“I think the thing I didn’t expect in life after death was kind of how all over the place I was,” says Minnesota native Dr. Sherry Walling, a clinical psychologist, author, and “accidental” grief expert. “After losing my dad and brother, I felt super alive and grateful for my life and connected to my children and ambitious about what I wanted to accomplish with my time … and then I also felt incredibly touched by the finite nature of our lives.”
Walling explores these dualities in depth in Touching Two Worlds: A Guide for Finding Hope in the Landscape of Loss, a book that chronicles the inner workings of her own grief and leaves behind a foothold for those feeling directionless in their own bereavement. In her therapy practice, Walling says she knew all the “right” things to say to help people through grief. But when she lost her father and brother within six months of each other, she learned that society’s default response to loss needed some work. Her book is not only a labor of love, it’s a call for grief reform.
The Business of Bereavement
“I really think our culture has mistakenly honored thrivers as people that don’t feel, and I think there is real courage in going in and through grief,” she says. “I’d love to change the conversation to honor the people who are giving themselves over to the experience; who are welcoming the feelings and hard conversations and not rushing back to the semblance of life.” She says that society has a tendency to celebrate those who fast-track the grief process in an attempt to return to “normal.” We’re emphasizing the wrong things.
“We’ve identified that sometimes it’s helpful to have something to do [like returning to work] that’s not all about loss,” she says. “But I think there’s some starts and stops with that.” After the shock wears off and reality has settled in, people experience a real decline in their emotional state—usually 3 months into their grief. This is around the time clinical depression can set in. “Have an open conversation with yourself and your employer: Can you work part-time for six weeks?” she continues. “Part-time is a really lovely option for people. It gives a little bit of structure, there’s something meaningful to do, and you don’t have to endure the fatigue of a full day.”
Much of our culture’s perception of grief—a linear and orderly process with a start and cut-off date—can be traced back to Elizabeth Kübler Ross’s On Death and Dying, where the five stages of grief were first introduced (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). But anyone who’s suffered a deep loss will tell you that these stages shouldn’t be taken literally. Perpetuating this misconception is dishonorable to the changing nature of grief and hurts grievers in the process.
“The gift of Elizabeth Kübler Ross’s work was that we had someone articulating the multiple domains of grief: You can be peaceful and calm, and you can also be angry and in denial,” says Walling. “In her early work she did present them as a stage-wise model but later, she debunked that. I’m grateful that she articulated that it’s not just one thing, because I think earlier conceptualizations were predominantly rooted in sadness.” It’s a very American thing, she says, to view a framework like the stages of grief and ask ourselves how we can win or overcome it. “It’s never over; it becomes a new identity or new relationship.”
Shaping Grief Through Action
Walling’s book—released yesterday in major bookstores and in digital/audio formats everywhere—may be her first foray into novel writing, but it isn’t her inaugural attempt at writing or publishing. (She self-published a guidebook in 2017 called The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Keeping Your Shi* Together.) When her dad received his cancer diagnosis, she journaled her stream-of-consciousness thoughts and feelings into bits and scraps, which eventually manifested into full-bloom paragraphs and short stories.
“I was doing it so often where I had a gut-check moment like, Maybe I should share this more universally,” she recalls. Capturing her loved ones’ lives through written expression felt like a form of beautiful preservation. “Because these are love stories, I’m keeping the memory of my brother and father alive, and there’s such tenderness in this book,” she says. Among this personal collection, readers will find chapters rooted in marking grief anniversaries, how to cry in publish, talking to kids about death, and “take-a-moment” reflection exercises.
Catharsis is a word we drop several times throughout our conversation. I tell Walling that working out in the months after my brother passed would invariably lead into a full-scale sobbing session on my drive home. She sympathizes, sharing that grief incited physical movement for her, too—except hers drove her to the circus, and not to the gym.
“Doing circus arts got me so in my body, and that was really important,” she says. “There’s so much emotion in it, but it’s also very athletic. It helped me feel alive again, for lack of a better term.” Last May, she produced a show that was centered around the loss of her brother, set to footage of her suspended in spinning silks with other aerialists. She says she was asked to be a guest speaker for TEDx this fall, sharing how the circus arts helped her blaze a path forward through grief.
Her hope for her book, she says, is that it serves as a heads-up to the things we will lose one day; a bit of planting the seed for the way forward. “On one hand, I’m so grateful to be alive and on the other hand, I really had a picture of death in a way that was very close and very scary and hard to hold,” she says. “I can be totally accelerated and excited in one moment and in the other, laid out flat. One breath from death myself—fluctuating between two ends of the spectrum.”