Episode 81:

Hello, and welcome to The Upstream Leader Podcast. I’m Heath Alloway, your host for today’s discussion. If you’re a first-time listener or a long-time listener, I am so glad to have you here and looking forward to having you as part of the discussion today. And our guests today, I do have Karen Scott. She’s actually a return guest and is the co-founder of Lost & Found Grief Center. Karen, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you for having me back.

Absolutely, Karen. I learned a lot during our last discussion. And then also I have Melanie Blair, the Assistant Executive Director for Lost & Found, and Melanie is actually a first-time guest. So Melanie, happy to have you on the show.

Thank you. Happy to be here.

And Melanie, I feel like I need to give everyone a disclaimer that we do know each other. Our daughters actually play soccer together, so we’ve known each other for, I don’t know, Melanie, at least probably the last three or four, maybe even five years.

Yeah, lots of good times on the soccer sidelines.

Well, that’s probably a whole other episode, Melanie, as we get into this. So, one question we ask all guests, Melanie, I’ll start with you, this is your first time on: What has really made you the leader that you are today?

What brings me to Lost & Found and puts me in this leadership role is just my own past experience here as a, I say participant, but my family, my husband and I came to Lost & Found for services when our son died at nine months old, and that was about six years ago. And from that moment, I just fell in love with the mission here at Lost & Found, what the work has done, and obviously, personally, it’s shaped me into the person that I am today.

I often get asked, how did you get into grief therapy, you know, how are you at a grief center? And I think that this chose me. I didn’t necessarily choose it. Unfortunately, you know, I hate to have my child die to be in this role, but I think that it shaped me as a person. And Karen Scott has been my therapist, my mentor, and she really has helped me grow personally and professionally. And so I owe a lot of where I am today to her and her guidance and her continued encouragement that I’m capable to be in this position here.

Well, Melanie, I appreciate you being on and just sharing your story and not only that, just the powerful and meaningful work that you do with grief, because it is something that will impact everybody at some point throughout our lives. So appreciate that, Melanie. Karen, what about you? What’s made you the leader that you are today?

Good mentors, experience, being passionate about the work that I do. I’ve just been very fortunate to have many people in my path. I’ve had two different careers, one in education and one in the nonprofit world. I had good mentors in both. Sometimes you learn from bad examples too, you learn the things that you don’t ever want to do, and so I’ve learned from that. And I am a voracious reader. I read books on leadership, I listen to podcasts on leadership. I think everyone has to find their own style and it helps to get information from a variety of sources and things just, certain things will just click with you.

And Karen or Melanie, it’s something that I’ve just said, as I’ve learned more about Lost & Found Grief Center, I’m still shocked to this day that there’s not a lot of Lost & Found Grief Centers or anything like it in a lot of other states. So, just if one of you could, just give us a 60-second, what is Lost & Found Grief Center?

It’s a nonprofit that provides grief support services to grieving people. We limit that to people grieving the death of an immediate family member, whether that be a parent, guardian, sibling, and we do it at no cost to the individual. We do it through support groups, therapeutic support groups, because we know the power of a group in normalizing your experience. We do have individual counseling on a more limited basis, we charge for that. But we recognize that when most families don’t have the income to do individual counseling, and so we try to offer our services at no cost to them. And one of the reasons you don’t find these across the country is because there’s not a leader with the passion and because they may not have a community that’s generous enough to support this endeavor.

So Karen, with that too, one thing, I think it will be important for our audience to understand as well, how has the demand for the work that you’re doing, how has that been impacted the last, let’s say two to four years?

It’s been impacted tremendously. The pandemic brought grief out of the closet. People were able to hold it at arms’ length and think that will never happen to me or only old people die. And with the increased deaths that we saw of young people across the country, I think almost everyone knew someone who died and it was in the news all the time, and so it forced people to confront the reality that death does come to everyone.

It’s navigating the conversation around death. I think so many people hesitate to approach a grieving person to talk about grief. And like she said, putting it in the news, the way that it was really kind of just forcing society to navigate a different conversation that hadn’t been happening for a really long time.

And so how it’s impacted our services is the need has exploded. Because a part of that too, is, I think people begin to realize, I can’t do this on my own, especially as they knew more and more about it, talked more and more about it, it’s called grief overload in the professional realm. And sometimes that just brings people to their knees emotionally, and they reach out for help.

Well, that’s all good background, and Melanie, I don’t know if I’ve ever even shared this with you, or if you’ll even remember the conversation. But it was probably two years ago or so, you were over at the house and you and Emily were out on the back porch talking, and I didn’t even know, you know, some of the things that happened and she shared that you were very open and like how it’s actually healthy to have that conversation. And just knowing that, Melanie, has helped change my perspective, although yes, maybe I’m still uncomfortable talking about it, it’s helped me get more comfortable having those conversations, so thank you for that.

So let me share something with the two of you, and I want to see how you respond to this: I was on a call several weeks ago with several HR professionals, and we were talking about different policies, and they were talking about paid time off, and different things they were doing as an organization. And I knew we had this conversation coming up, so I asked the question of what are you all doing with, you know, bereavement and leave or bereavement policies? And there were several firms that they didn’t speak up, so I don’t know if they just didn’t have anything in place or they didn’t really know what it was, or, the common response was “We give three days.” I have to ask, is that normal? I can’t imagine that three days is enough time in that situation.

It’s not enough, but it’s sort of the standard—three to five if you’re lucky. And if you’ve ever had the responsibility of planning and executing a funeral and managing all the things around it, you can barely get that done in five days, much less all the business stuff that comes after that, and none of that is counting the tremendous emotional impact. And I’m curious, Melanie, how many days did you have?

It was five days. However, my situation was just a little bit different—I didn’t return to work after my son died, mostly because I didn’t have the emotional capacity to work in the field that I was in. And at the time I was working in human resources, and I knew that five days was not going to—five days was when we were going to actually get his body back from St. Louis. So it was seven days before we could even hold a funeral for him. So I couldn’t even begin to wrap my mind around returning to an environment where other people needed me, because I didn’t have the capacity for my own two small children at the time, the twins were five, and my husband. So, it wasn’t nearly enough time to even begin to process what had just happened to me over the last three and a half weeks.

Let me ask this: Why do you think organizations are just completely missing the boat on this? What’s the driver behind that?

They’re business-driven, you know, they’re motivated to make money, I think. And, you know, they need people to come back to a space and be productive. And they often think that the individual is going to return back to the space and be exactly the same person that they were, and producing at the same level that they were. And that’s an unrealistic expectation for a grieving person.

I think we have to change the conversation to one of preserving talent within your organization. Employers invest a lot in training someone. And so if you can provide a policy that provides the support and flexibility they need to allow them to return, while having extra days off might feel expensive, if you really looked at that realistically as a business owner, we all know how expensive it is to go interview, hire, recruit, train—all of that—a new employee. And I think the cost-benefit, if we just take out again, the whole human aspect of it, I think we’ve missed the boat on understanding that fully.

So just to go back, Melanie, you mentioned kind of the whole bigger picture and you talked about the time you had, how much on your husband’s side, how much time was allowed there?

He worked in a little bit of a different atmosphere. So he was in sales and so he had some additional flexibility in his hours. He wasn’t kind of punching a clock like I was, you know, I was expected to be there at eight, and if I needed time off, I was expected to make that up or take time off to accommodate that. So he had a little bit more flexibility in terms of when he was producing his work, and they catered to that for a while. I think people want to be incredibly supportive upfront, but again, I think they have an unrealistic expectation of the timeframe, and again, these are kind of those cliché statements that people say in terms of, you know, when are you going to be over this, or get over this, or let’s move on.

And just with time, I think they saw that he was a top producer, but with time, they were saying that he wasn’t producing at that level. He didn’t have the capacity for that. He, I don’t want to say you don’t care anymore. That’s not it. Your priorities shift, and so your mentality, the way that you’re thinking about things shifts, like, you know, my family and these two small children and my wife, who are incredibly sad, need me, and I have very little to give. So I’m going to choose to give to those people versus expending what little energy I have in a different environment.

Which, Melanie, in a lot of cases, I mean, that’s what you’re hoping someone will do is invest the time and their energy in where they need to, and where they need to focus on. So, I’m going to take a different approach here, some different scenarios that I’ve come across the past couple of years: Say an organization experiences a loss within the organization. How does that differ whenever it’s someone that you work with day to day and maybe it’s a team member or someone that you work with on a frequent basis? Is there a difference to a policy or any guidance that you would have for organizations that may be experiencing a loss in the workplace?

It’s a completely different environment than if one of the workers has a loss in their personal life, because it impacts the organization and impacts everything about your work. We often spend more time with the people we work with than we do our family, and so there need to be policies about how the entire workplace is going to respond and be supportive of everyone there. And that really is a more complex picture to develop. People in this area are fortunate enough to have Lost & Found who will come in and kind of work with their people on a short-term basis to just work through grief, understand, talk about things that are helpful, and we can do that as a kind of a crisis response. The ideal scenario would be that people have prepared for that ahead of time.

So Karen, something you shared, I want to go back to our very first conversation that we had, and you shared that we are a death-denying society, and there were some key takeaways that I think are worth revisiting, and I have made many of those mistakes of wanting to try to help or solve the problem, or I’ve made the cliché statements about let me know what I can do or sorry for your loss. What guidance do you have for someone to be there, or once you know the grief is there, how can someone be there and what should they be thinking about or what should they be doing in that situation?

The most important thing is to be present. Don’t go be the cheerleader and tell them how they’re going to get over this and all of those things. I think grief is not something to be fixed. It is a life-changing event, and you need people to walk with you as you struggle through that journey, and to provide flexibility and understanding. And so I think the way in which a manager approaches that tells an employee everything about what he really values. Is it all about the money we make here, or do I really want to help my employees be the best that I can? And so the first thing is, don’t try to fix it because it can’t be fixed. On the other hand, there are very tangible things you can do: Think about your own household. If your spouse had died, what would be the things you struggle with? And they’re not complicated. It’s things like meals, grocery shopping, getting the children to the events, cleaning the house.

Laundry.

Yeah, laundry. The more you can get help, just that tangible help, and people are very touched by the simplest acts of kindness.

I always say, be a doer, not an asker. And what that means is, when you approach a grieving person and say, “Let me know what I can do,” they have no idea how to help themselves, let alone let someone in. It’s not that they don’t want to, it’s just, you’re in such a state of despair and fog, you can’t think logically like that. And so it’s in the moment when you realize that a task needs to be accomplished that you can’t accomplish because you don’t have the capacity and those often lead to just additional breakdowns. And it is hard to pick up the phone and ask, hey, in five minutes, my kid has to be at soccer practice, can you come pick them up?

So I always just encourage someone to just be a doer. And by being a doer, it’s doing the tangible things. It’s getting a laundry service, it’s sending a meal, it’s honestly, one of the biggest things was taking my kids—taking them out of an environment that was so sad for them, and they were five, and letting them do normal kid things.

There’s a book that’s actually about helping someone who has a family member who’s dying. And one chapter is called “The Captain of Kindness.” And it talks about designating someone to be the Captain of Kindness. And that person kind of assesses the needs and divvies them out to the friends or coworkers who are saying, I’d like to help, and they create a schedule of who’s delivering meals, who can help, they need somebody to take their children, and they have practice three days a week, and get all of that done, which is such a blessing because again, the bereaved person can’t think 20 minutes from now for what my family’s going to need.

Do you have any guidance, because one thing I’ve observed is a lot of times there’s that initial rush, maybe the first couple weeks of, hey, let me know if you need this or that, or you know, people wanting to step up to do things or stopping by. What advice or guidance do you have for, you know, past that first two or three weeks? After that initial rush, maybe when things start to, I don’t know if settle down is even the right way to put it, but do you have any advice for, you know, friends, family members, co workers on how to have that ongoing focus and not just be there for the first week or two?

I mean, I’d stagger it, for one, you know, one, having, again, that point person that can communicate with the family, especially if we’re talking in the work setting, having that one person in the work setting that can continue the dialogue with the employee about how things are going and where they’re at and what they can communicate with others, but staggering that. And I use my own story a lot because it’s my biggest reference point, but you’re not eating really in the early days. You’re not sleeping. You’re really just, you’re in a very big survival mode. So although the meals are a welcomed gift immediately, like if you have a house full of family while you’re trying to tend to services and things like, that’s great, but to stagger that out across time versus it just day after day, these large meals, I mean, there were times when I was just handing food to my neighbors, because it wasn’t getting eaten in my own home. And so continue the conversation. Don’t stop asking.

We have this social norm in our country that, you know, two to four weeks, everything should be back to normal, well, normal never returns. And in two weeks a family is still very much in shock and very much overwhelmed. And so I do think people zoom in at first because it’s on their mind, but then they forget about it and go on leaving this family isolated and drowning. And so I think, as Melanie said, stagger it and be in it for the long haul and most importantly, know that it’s not over for this family in a couple of weeks. The shock and the long term impact on them lasts for years, and they still need some help in the months that come.

You kind of started to get into this a little bit. We’ve talked about the professional environment, so we focus some on the organization. Let’s get into from an individual that is experiencing grief, and they’re in the workplace, and I don’t know if there’s a normal path you probably learn as you go, but is there anything that people should expect or any guidance if they are going through grief and how that impacts their professional lives?

They should be prepared for what Melanie called the fog. You have limited brain power and your brain gets overwhelmed by the powerful emotions. And so, people who are grieving tend to be really critical of themselves when they return to work, and they feel like, I’m just not cutting it. And so I think a manager who can be supportive of that, sensitive to that, and believe in them, we know your talent hasn’t disappeared. Some of us just take and leave for a little bit. And so help people have the confidence that you’re going to get there, it just takes some time.

And I think, again, just having the conversations, I think it’s very helpful, I know a number of people who’ve come here have done this, when it’s time to go back to work, they stop by their workplace for 15, 20 minutes before the day they actually return, so that lets people say, “Oh, we care so much about you,” you know, and those are teary conversations and it kind of gets a little bit that out of the way. It’s kind of dipping your toe in the water in a way that’s manageable for you rather than coming back to work on a Monday morning and bam, it all comes.

I think it’s important to ask the person what their needs and wants are upon a return. You know, Karen and I, in our discussion in preparation, we’re talking about, there are two kinds of people: One person that likes to have the comfort and wants to be approached. And then the other kind of person that doesn’t want to be approached at all, right? They want this time to be a break from everything else. They want to dive into that. And so simply just asking, do you want people to approach you and ask you questions upon your return? What kind of information can I go ahead and share with them about what has taken place? Letting the grieving person kind of guide and direct that need and want upon returning to work.

Let me give you this scenario. So something you said kind of sparked a thought. We’ve talked about how organizations, three to five days, which we know that’s not the right time. I’ve also heard people say, I want to come back to work immediately or almost immediately, it helps keep my mind off things. How would you respond to that?

Well, for some people, that’s exactly what they need. Not to stereotype, but men often need that. So much of our identity is our workplace and our skill set and the things we do. And so, if someone feels like they want to do that, I think you can allow them, but you also need to be paying attention and checking in, because they may think that’s what they need, and then they may get there and actually be struggling with it. It may be more than they thought they could do, and they may feel like it’s a mistake, but they can’t say that now, so I think you allow them that, and say, let’s see how it goes, and I’m going to check back in with you, and we’ll kind of assess that, and see if it’s working for you, because we want to do what’s helpful for you.

I think it’s important to be flexible.

Yeah. And you know, Melanie and I were talking about this with the families we’ve worked with here. It is a different scenario with someone in an office situation versus a blue collar worker who punches the time clock and works on an assembly line, where they’re very much an active part of a team. That requires a little more flexibility. And often people being, other co-workers, being willing to step up and help, or a manager to be a little more creative about how we’re going to manage that. One thing that we know happens is people have what we call grief bursts, you just have a meltdown. You don’t always know what triggers it, but all of a sudden you’re overwhelmed and sobbing. People desperately need a place to go, acknowledge that upfront, when that happens for you, here’s this place you can go and have that meltdown in private and kind of have a minute to pull yourself back together. No one will bother you. No one’s going to think less of you. That’s far more productive and helpful for the employee than having to sit at their job site and have the flood of tears and that creates embarrassment and all of those things.

Karen, you said, you know, people sometimes find their identity at work, and Melanie, something you said in the opening about how Lost & Found shows you in finding purpose. What role does that purpose or finding that in your work, I guess, I don’t even know if this is the right way to say it, but it signals you that maybe I am ready to get back into the workplace and move forward with my career. What role does purpose play with that?

Well, I think it’s individualized. I was fortunate enough in my own situation that I was able to take about three years of healing, independently, to focus on my family, focus on my husband, make sure my marriage stayed intact, to make sure I received therapy. I mean, that’s something that we talked about yesterday, the thought of an employee trying to aid themselves and their healing and coming to therapy, but maybe having to return to work after such a heavy session. I was so deeply depleted after an hour therapy session, you know, again, grace for that. 

But how I knew it was time for me? I knew that I always needed a career. I knew I wasn’t always meant to be a stay at home mom. I think I was fortunate enough to have the time that I did through COVID and sickness, my fears, and navigate that, but genuinely, it was Karen always having this impeccable timing of checking on me and checked on me when I was having a really bad day and said, I can’t change any more diapers, I can’t clean my house anymore, I think I’m more than this. And she said, you are, and we knew you would get here, so let’s talk about that. And so, it’s such an individualized journey and I think that’s why it’s so hard and why businesses put this three to five day span on it is because for each person, it requires maybe a little bit different scenario to get them back to that place of productivity. And I came back part time. Then I added a little bit more. And now, I’m really in it.

Yeah, well, gosh, Melanie, I hate to say it this way, but hearing you all talk and me even referring to it as a policy, because it doesn’t seem like a policy, it’s more of a journey and connecting community and people and being there and helping people through that. So, let me kind of flip the script here. We’ve talked a lot about the issues or the problems that organizations have, and I don’t even know if you can answer this or not, or if you know the stats, but just to kind of set the foundation, do you have any gauge on what retention stats look like just on average? I know it’s probably not specific to public accounting, but just on average, what’s the retention rate look like when someone does go through a significant loss in their life?

I think it depends on the culture of the environment that they’re working in. If you invest in your employee and you are flexible and creative with them in these moments, the likelihood of them staying with you is pretty great, because what we do know in this time is that again, we’re self critical going through this and we know we’re feeling different, but I think we really hold on to those really negative situations. So the wrong words, the wrong treatment, you know, I think really just, we’re not capable of navigating those situations the way we once were. We just can’t. And so I don’t know what the actual statistic is, but I think if you have a great working culture and you can be flexible and you can navigate that, I think the likelihood of you keeping that employee is pretty great.

There aren’t many statistics, I’m not sure there are any, because like so many things with grief, we don’t measure it in our society. We don’t talk about it, we don’t measure it, and many would tell you that’s why there is not more governmental support, supposedly what we measure we support. We’re not there. And so, back in, I think it was 2017, there was a huge study done on the loss of productivity of workers from grief, trying to highlight why this matters to employers, and it’s the only study of its kind that I’m aware of. There are smaller ones here and there, and I think it was the Wall Street Journal that, the Wall Street Journal published it, and I can’t even remember how many billions of dollars were lost in worker productivity. Someone should be doing that again right now because of COVID and because of how much more prevalent grief is, but we shy away from that. It’s kind of like it overwhelms people. So I don’t know. I don’t want to study it.

I can tell you that what we see here is people are generally given some grace for a few weeks, and then everyone forgets and they go back, and then employers start to, way too early, put a little pressure on you’re not producing, you’re not producing, and they lose workers from that. People, they want to do better, they simply can’t yet, and so they leave and they not only leave, but they leave angry and hurt and feeling horribly misunderstood and undervalued.

Yeah, Karen, gosh, I got to think in that situation, too, for the people around them, that’s got to kill the morale within the team, too. If they lose someone that they were close to or a team member because of that, that we weren’t there to support them, I have to think that there’s a little bit of thinking, gosh, if that happened to me, is that how I’m going to be treated? Which can hurt that productivity as well.

It sends a loud and clear message to how your business thinks of you as an employee.

Seems very nearsighted, just hearing you talk about it. It seems short term numbers instead of long term success.

Yeah.

So, say we have a firm or an organization that’s, this really clicks with them and think, gosh, you know, we just went through this as a firm or, you know, as we grow, we need to have something like this in place. What starting point or what guidance would you have to help set them up to be successful? Because we know this will happen at some point. We know it will happen. What guidance do you have to help them be successful in navigating an emotional situation like this?

What we’ve started to do, some more requests that we’re getting is for us to come and just start the dialogue with HR professionals. Start having the conversation around how to plan what that looks like within your own organization, but not to be reactive, but proactive in these situations. And so I, We are seeing more and more businesses requesting that we come and just say, tell us what things should we be talking to them about? What are some checklists? Give us an idea of things to say or not to say. So starting that conversation, I think is really critical.

I think you learn so much by asking people about their own experience. So I think, what a powerful message if you involved your employees in a team, kind of working on this, and for any of them who’ve had an experience, what would have helped you that you didn’t get, and what did you receive that was very helpful? And so it lets them know you care about their own experiences, because again, every work environment is different. They will have a sense of what would have helped.

Is there anything that we have not covered today that could be helpful? Because this is definitely not my wheelhouse, and I learn something new every time that I talk with you. So is there anything that we haven’t covered today that either an individual or an organization should be thinking about?

I think there’s another whole podcast on if someone within the organization dies, and when they die at work, it is a really big event, and there are so many more things that need to happen than, we’ve again, we’ve gone on site and helped workers with that, but that’s a completely different impact on the organization. So it’s a two pronged thing they need to think about: How do you support a grieving employee dealing with their loss, and one thing we didn’t talk about in that vein, is if a person is ill for many months before they die, because that certainly impacts the worker. But then the other whole topic is what if someone on your team dies?

Well, I may have to schedule that in, Karen. I look forward to the next conversation. Because again, I learn something every time from this. Something that we like to do with every conversation is leave our listeners with a resource or, you know, something that’s been very impactful to the two of you. Is there anything that comes to mind that’s helped you in your journey? Again, that could be a class, that could be a book, whatever it may be that could be helpful to our listeners.

Well, I think I’ve told you before, my reading list is long. The most recent book that I read, well, there are two, one led to the other. One is by Colin Campbell, who’s a father that both of his children died in a car wreck, he was driving, his two teenage children died, and his book is called Finding the Words, and he’s very real in things that people said and did that were not helpful. And setting things up with people, he talks about he developed a schpiel that he would share with people to start a conversation and how that conversation and how that changed over time. I think it’s helpful for everyday laypeople, it’s also helpful for professionals. He talks about how important community was in getting him through it.   And I learned about his book in the book, The Amen Effect, written by a rabbi who happens to be his rabbi. The Jewish community has very real, helpful traditions that they do around death, and it involves the whole community coming together and supporting a person for, are you ready for it? One year. And so, we’ve lost so much of that in our society, and I think it’s very helpful to read some of those things, but just to know, it’s about a community that needs to hold the person and the family up as they go through this terrible journey.

And I’m going to come back with a question on that. I’m going to actually end this episode different than I end any other episode. But Melanie, we’ll give you a chance to go first.

The biggest thing for me is community. It had been years into my grief when Karen suggested to attend this course. I think it was a 12 week course through David Kessler. And I know that’s not a realistic expectation for many people. But in this course, there were several types of people within it. There were professionals wanting to gather additional information, but then there was also just individuals that had experienced their own loss in there. But the dialogue, the open, honest conversations, the real community—I think community is the best thing. And I think that’s what Lost & Found has to offer for people is a safe space to navigate something that they don’t feel like they can get anywhere else in their life. But David Kessler has a lot of great resources out there. He’s a well known grief expert.

Very good. Well, again, we’re going to end this episode a little differently. This is going to be our bonus question. You both mentioned community and your resources. Maybe, Melanie, we’ll start with you: A situation, because we’ve talked a lot about the individual, the workplace. Do you have any aha moments or anything where you’ve seen or you’ve heard an organization going above and beyond and being there for the whole family? Because I think like just hearing your scenario of an organization being there not for just one, but for others that are involved and the impact that could have. I think we get so focused on the employee, we forget about their family members and other people that are tied to them that they’re supporting emotionally. So, any thoughts around that or any examples that you have to share? I’m just trying to stretch our listeners’ thinking on going above the policy and what we can do to make a big impact.

For me, it’s genuine kindness. It’s a level of just sincere motive. I don’t, you know, just genuinely saying things like, I don’t have the words right now, but I genuinely care about you as an individual and your family and your needs. And so that was the biggest thing in my own journey was, I wish that people would have had an inkling or an understanding of what was happening in my world to offer me just the simplest acts of kindness, because I think we just get so self consumed in our world and we go about our daily lives that we just tend to forget that everyone we encounter has a story. It may not be grief, but they’re dealing with something. So genuine, sincere kindness.

I would argue we know it when we see it and we know it when it’s not genuine.

Yes.

It’s hard to describe that, but you can tell a difference.

Well, yeah, when it’s genuine, they come back. They don’t make you say it. You guys know each other through soccer. If your children play on a soccer team or any kind of team, and a parent has died, why would you not say, hey, I’ll swing by and pick your kids up and take them to practice? I’ll cover this or that, you know, when you have the tournaments and all that, they can come with our family. Because that’s hard if you’re grieving and you don’t want to deprive your children of all that, but if somebody else can just take your kids and let them have that childhood thing. I know somebody whose neighbor said, I don’t need you to worry about your lawn. I’m going to mow your yard all summer long, so you can kind of get back on your feet, and do those things. We had a mom here. She thought I did it. I did not. I wish I had thought to do it, but she just opened her doorstep one day. It was the holidays, last thing she could think about, and someone had put a decorated Christmas tree on her porch. And so she didn’t have to think about going and getting a tree and getting the ornaments down and all that.

So it’s those simple acts that again—think about your own life. What would I be missing? And what would my kids miss? I have another friend whose, her husband’s friend took their son to the Boy Scout camp that was coming up that dad was going to go. And he said, you know what? I’ll step in. I won’t be as good as your dad, but I’m going to do it for you because they fit, the children feel different, and so any of those things, just very practical ways, filling some gaps for this family and supporting them.

Well, Karen and Melanie, I greatly appreciate the conversation and not only that, just the meaningful work that you do. And as I wrap up again, I’m going to do this one a little different. I’ve already asked a bonus question. So I’m going to share my hope with our listeners that there was an organization or an individual or two that needed to hear this conversation today. to help them going through one of the most critical times in their lives. And not only that, I’ll go back to one of my opening comments: It just, I’m still shocked that there are not more states or more organizations like this available. So maybe a listener, maybe someone hears this and starts thinking about, how can I create something like this in my community to make that kind of an impact? So I’ll just leave everyone with that hope. I appreciate your time and we look forward to the next conversation. Thank you.

Thank you so much for bringing this important conversation to the front.

Yes, thank you.