Why Spirituality May Be a Missing Link In Your Grieving Process

Healing from grief isn’t just emotional—it’s spiritual. Learn how to nurture your soul while navigating the psychological journey of recovery. https://bit.ly/4md1ENF

Why  Spirituality is Important

Grief affects every part of our lives — our emotions, our relationships, our bodies, and our sense of meaning. Yet one area is often overlooked in grief care: the spiritual self.

Whether or not you identify as religious, spirituality (where we connect with the earth, ourselves, and others) is the place where we ask life’s biggest questions. Why did this happen? What does this loss mean? Who am I now?

In this episode, we explore how grief often forces us to confront our beliefs about meaning, purpose, faith, doubt, and connection. 

We Discuss:

• Why spirituality is often the "missing link" ignored in grief treatment.
• The concept of spiritual bypassing—using faith to avoid the pain of mourning.
• How grief can shake—or reshape—your worldview and faith.
• Finding a holistic balance: How to hold both psychological healing and spiritual exploration at the same time.
• Why grief requires embracing “both/and” instead of either/or 

For many people, healing from loss involves more than emotional processing. It involves rebuilding a worldview that has been shaken by death. Grief is messy. Faith questions can be messy too. But exploring them may be one of the most important parts of healing.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Intro-Learn About the Link Between Sprituality and Healing from Grief
• 01:22 - Happy 6th Anniversary! We're Venturing into Season 7
• 02:04 - To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes
• 04:12 - Whanitta Sheetz’s Fried Ripe Tomato
• 05:35 - Spirituality: The Missing Link That Can Prevent Grievers from Moving Forward*
• 11:05 - Connecting to Spirituality through Nature: Sunlight and Tomatoes
• 20:24 - Gathas for the Practice of Mindful Living - Thich Nhat Hanh
• 28:48 - Outro-Every Day is a Gift

 *Content in this episode is shared with permission from WhatsYourGrief.com 

#GriefSupport #SpiritualGrief #GriefHealing #FaithAndGrief #LossAndMeaning #GriefEducation #BereavementSupport #GriefJourney #EveryoneDiesPodcast #TalkingAboutDeath
 

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to our six-year anniversary podcast of Everyone Dies. Relax and settle in for our podcast about serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement. Because even though everyone dies, no one must face it unprepared.

In this episode, we explore the role of spirituality in the grieving process. I'm Marianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner, and I used my experience from working as a nurse for 48 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life. And I'm Charlie Navarrette, an actor in New York City, and here to offer an every-person viewpoint to our podcast.

We're both here because we believe that the more you know, the better prepared you are to make difficult decisions. And remember, this podcast does not provide medical nor legal advice. Please listen to the complete disclosure at the end of the recording.

In the first half, Charlie's going to talk about a new cookbook called To Die For, a cookbook of gravestone recipes, and has our recipe of the week. In the second half, I'll be talking about the link between spirituality and grief. And in our third half, Charlie has short verses to recite during daily activities to help us return to mindfulness.

So Charles, happy anniversary, happy anniversary, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy anniversary. There's a rattlesnake, I just heard it. Yeah, okay.

Is it festive enough? Oh, a rattlesnake is always festive, of course. Alright, so I have a question here. Not that I have not been paying attention.

So, okay, is this the end of year number six? Or is this the beginning of year number seven? Yes. Oh, God, I hate when you do that. Season seven, who would have thunk for our first half? If I'm going to be honest, I am never going to make anything from To Die For, a cookbook of gravestone recipes.

But I am extremely glad that it exists. And not to worry, gentle listeners, I will toast this with a corpse reviver. Yes, it is a real thing.

During an internship at the Congressional Cemetery, the author, Rosie Grant, stumbled upon a curious phenomena, people who had requested that recipes be engraved into their tombstones. She began to collect the recipes and to research the people buried with them, in some cases, meeting and interviewing their families. Most of the recipes are for baked goods and sweets, including Guava Cobbler, Clubhouse Cracker Bars, and Jono's Jack Daniel's marinade.

A headstone has two purposes. Either you're documenting the life that was lived there, or you're leaving a message for future generations. A recipe is a perfect combination of documenting their story and leaving it for the future generations.

Through her cookbook, Grant advises families to have early conversations about burial arrangements and how relatives would like to be remembered. She also gives tips for recording family history and food traditions. Grant even includes the recipe she'd like on her own gravestone someday, Clam Linguine.

Oh, she had me at hello. My joy comes from the ritual of making it with others, she writes. It's in the steam that rises when the clams pop open, the clink of glasses as you sit down to eat.

The food is just the excuse to gather. And that, I think, is how I'd like to be remembered. Our funeral lunch recipe is Juanita Sheets' Fried Ripe Tomato, which is engraved on her tombstone.

Juanita Sheets' greatest joy was her family. She cherished spending time with her loved ones, cooking up delicious meals and engaging in spirited games. Her passion for the Red Sox was unwavering, and she found solace in the beauty of nature.

A true cribbage savant, her competitive spirit and sharp mind made her a formidable opponent. Juanita is remembered as a loving and supportive mom who was always there for her children. She instilled in them the importance of family, tradition and hard work.

Her memory lives on through her children and grandchildren who continue to cherish her recipes and traditions. Bon Appetit! Please go to our webpage for Juanita Sheets' recipe for Fried Ripe Tomato and additional resources for this program. This is the part where we ask for your financial support.

Your tax-deductible gift will go directly to supporting our nonprofit journalism so that we can remain accessible to everyone. You can donate at www.everyonedies.org. That's every, the number one, dies. And at our site on Patreon under Everyone Dies.

Marianne? Thanks, Charlie. Everyone Dies has received permission from whatsyourgrief.com. You can go check out their resources at wyg at whatsyourgrief.com to share some of their blogs with our audience. We appreciate their generosity of sharing their expertise with us.

Grief is a complicated thing, and the complexity is increased by limited bereavement leave from work, disenfranchised grief, and grief that results from a traumatic event. To heal, we're encouraged to seek grief from a holistic perspective, with one persistent notable exception, the spiritual self. Despite its growing recognition as a valid and needed avenue of treatment, holistic approaches have yet to make significant progress as it relates to addressing spirituality, and especially in grief.

The truth of the matter is that if we are to expect healing, we need to do work within all areas of life, including the spiritual self. Whether or not you are religious, there is a spiritual component of your being from which you connect with the earth, with yourself, with others, and depending on beliefs, with a divine being. The spiritual self is also the place in which we find our meaning and purpose, which is a primary piece of life that requires rebuilding in grief.

If a person's spirituality is also tied to religion, then an added layer of work often needs to be addressed. The relationship a griever has with spirituality and grief tends to go in one of two ways. Psychotherapist John Wellward brought attention to the first when he named the concept of a spiritual bypass, in which people use their spirituality to hide from or avoid their psychological needs.

In other words, one's spiritual or religious beliefs make it permissible to focus primarily, if not entirely, on spiritual needs or belief to the detriment of psychological needs. If spirituality is the missing link in grief treatment, this approach swings the pendulum too far in the spiritual direction. The other track then swings the pendulum completely to the other side.

Here, one focuses solely on psychological occurrences and needs and avoids the spiritual component entirely. However, the work of grief necessarily includes an awareness of one's own spiritual and religious beliefs, because it is often in grief that such beliefs undergo examination for some significant change. It's helpful when engaging in grief work to determine on which track you fall.

Try to determine why you fall where you are and consider if, perhaps, differently approaching spirituality and grief is the missing link to healing. As with other areas of grief work, exploring the spiritual side of grief is a time when the concept of either or must be avoided and both and embraced. Grief could be approached from both the angles of psychology and faith and the work done with others and alone.

Pain must be both felt and released. More deeply, grievers wanting to fill the gap left by this missing link are encouraged to give themselves permission to explore both certainty and doubt, comfort and abandonment, a commitment to faith, and a break from faith. Allowing both and, instead of forcing oneself to choose, is one way Grievers can extend themselves grace and remove additional guilt the religious world might project onto them.

It's okay, and probably necessary, to engage questions as they arise. After all, your world has been rocked, and when that happens, the foundation on which your world is built needs to be investigated and the cracks filled. Give yourself the gift of space and time to do so.

Find safe people with shared beliefs who will allow you to ask the big questions, express doubt, and wonder about existence. Seek out leaders within your faith tradition who will engage you not in teaching but in discussion based on compassion. You do not need to settle for less.

Spirituality is oftentimes the missing link that prevents grievers from moving forward as fully as possible. It can be messy when religion is thrown into the mix due to beliefs that dictate if how a person incorporates psychology, how a person engages emotions, and or if a person is even allowed to engage their grief rather than simply rejoicing in what comes next, according to that faith tradition for the person who died. The truth that grievers know, though, is that hard doesn't mean impossible.

And messy? What about grief isn't messy? It's always a terrible time in life to try to navigate grief. Unfortunately, grief doesn't care about timing. Do what you can to fight against your impulse to avoid this important work.

Take breaks and seek out a community who will help you face it openly, honestly, and with grace. Charlie, I'm guessing you have some opinions about this. Maybe one or two.

What am I asking here? Are people cognizant of spirituality? I'm thinking, well, yeah, just that. Okay, yeah, are people cognizant of spirituality? I get what you say. When Michael, and again, long-time listeners know my son Michael was murdered several years ago.

With him, it was... I didn't realize it, but I was house-sitting in this great big old beautiful house where the back wall was all glass. And that sunlight that came in, for me, just was warmth and comfort. And this was during COVID.

Nobody was around. I don't know if Marianne, for me, that's, you know, as you hear you describe this, that's what it was. There was a spirituality, for me, it was that.

Just sitting there, letting the sun come in, and just being bathed by that sunlight. I was not aware I was doing that. Is that a type of spirituality? I would say so.

I think people confuse spirituality with religion. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And don't take advantage of that, you know, finding the peace where you find it and finding connection to nature or whatever's out there.

I had this experience. Our house in Norman, we live next to people with five children under the age of nine. Oh, geez.

And the first four are boys. And the baby is still a baby, so I don't know much about her yet. But the boys will stand at the fence, and they'll talk to me.

And they're hysterical. And I just love chatting with them. And one evening, I was out there just coming from the pool and taking a shower, and I had on a T-shirt that had, like, what could be interpreted as a religious symbol on it.

But it was a nice, soft, long T-shirt, and I got it for that reason. And one of the little boys, who was, I guess, around five, said, oh, that's a cross on your shirt. What church do you go to? And I said, well, I go to the Church of God.

And he said, oh, so that means you don't go to church. Oh, geez. How old is this kid? Five years old.

And he comes up with these things all the time. And his mom's standing there, and she kind of puts her head in her hands, and I started laughing, too. And I said, you know, but, you know, I don't miss a moment.

Right. I said, you know, though, I said, I don't need to go to a church, a building, in order to be in touch with my spirituality. I said, I can, I said, one of my favorite things to do is, you know, like on a Sunday morning is to go out to my garden and, you know, sit and watch my plants grow.

Oh, yeah, yeah. See what new things are happening there. And I said, that's how I connect with my spirituality.

And he said, yeah, I can see that. Oh, that's cute. And I thought, oh, good, I passed the test of the five-year-old.

But I think he's, I think that he's right. You don't, you know, or I'm right, or we're both right, is that you don't have to be in a building with a structured belief of God to be spiritual. And I think that my experience in working with people who've experienced death in their life is that sometimes people will get very mad at God and have this anger where they won't even say the word or want anything to do with it.

And it's like, well, you know, yeah, you're angry, but, you know, does that mean that we have to cut off other sources of comfort? And I think in this piece, what we're talking about is finding that balance, that and, that you can be engaged with your spirituality, and it might be the thing that helps you to heal. And don't discount it just because you're really mad at God. Yeah, it's just you find that spirituality in different ways.

I mean, I don't find it in, you know, a lot of the things of what you were just saying, but just, yeah, I mean, just, what am I saying here? I find a certain amount of peace just by doing something. I was staying at a friend's house, and they were away, so I stayed at their place for a couple of months, and my friend Robin had this spectacular garden. And she left me these detailed instructions on what to water, when to water it, how much water, and if there was a little sprinkle of rain the day before, to be careful with these particular, you know, plants and vegetable things.

And I'm like, are you out of your mind? Yeah, she was not smiling when I said that. How brown was that garden when she got back? Nothing brown in it. Really, good job.

Thank you very much, you're very kind. No, no, she was very, very detailed. She had been an interior designer, so she made this, I'm going to frame it one day, this wonderful map of her garden, and just exactly what to do.

And it's a little frightening, as frightening as it was in the start of it, after about a week I just got into the rhythm of it. And it was just something, I don't know, just very peaceful, tending to these little plants and shrubs and vegetables. And just being aware of the weather, if there had been a light drizzle, I knew I didn't have to put water on some of these leaves.

And I had to be careful that some of the bigger ones, the shade was covering something smaller underneath, smaller leaves. I don't know, Marianne, it was just really, it was really very nice. It's just that about... I can relate.

Yeah, I know you can. I was just surprised how much I did. I related to it.

Me too. It's like, you know, I'm thinking, there's got to be a grocery store nearby. I really don't need to tend all this, you know.

Oh, and the tomatoes? Yeah, those tomatoes, I just, when we were kids, tomatoes tasted different. And I had not tasted tomatoes like that in, well, years, decades. Yeah.

So I enjoyed that very, very much. And that's why I grow tomatoes and I grow basil. And my kids would always make fun of me because I'd say, oh, this is all fresh from the garden.

Or if I put it down and I didn't say that, they'd say, is this fresh from the garden? I'd be like, you don't appreciate me. Do they ever? No. No.

No. So, in our third half, Thich Nhat Hanh's book, Stepping into Freedom, An Introduction to Buddhist Monastic Training, provides us with the guidance we need to walk through the world in a mindful, reverential way. The beginning of the book is about gathas for the practice of mindful living.

Gatha is a Sanskrit term meaning verse or hymn. Thich Nhat Hanh describes them as short verses to recite during daily activities to help us return to mindfulness. We practice gathas all day long, when we wake up, when we enter the meditation hall, during meals, when we wash the dishes, and with each activity.

Here are three for you to start with. Upon Waking Up Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand-new hours are before me.

I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at beings with eyes of compassion. Upon Beginning to Eat With the first taste, I offer joy. With the second, I help relieve the suffering of others.

With the third, I see others' joy as my own. With the fourth, I learn the way of letting go. On Impermanence The day is ending and our life is one day shorter.

Let us look carefully at what we have done. Let us practice diligently, putting our whole heart into the path of meditation. Let us live deeply each moment and in freedom so the time doesn't slip away meaninglessly.

It is helpful to memorize each gatha Han advises. As you silently recite the first line, breathe in, and as you silently recite the second line, breathe out. When the gatha is finished, continue your activity and you will find that your mindfulness has increased.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes an analogy for gathas. When we drive, road signs help us find our way. We see the last sign until the next one appears.

When we practice well, the gathas are with us continuously and we live our whole day in awareness. Living in awareness is one of the best ways to stay in the moment and to free ourselves, at least for a time, from the weight of active mourning. And so we end this week's episode.

Please stay tuned for the continuing saga of Everyone Dies and thank you for listening. You can find more episodes from our series about grief on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. Follow and subscribe to the show.

Share it with someone who needs a little hope today. This is Charlie Naborette, and from comedian Robin Williams, death is nature's way of saying, your table's ready. And I'm Marianne Matzo, and we'll see you next week.

Remember, every day is a gift. This podcast does not provide medical advice. All discussion on this podcast, such as treatments, dosages, outcomes, charts, patient profiles, advice, messages, and any other discussion are for informational purposes only and are not a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment.

Always seek the advice of your primary care practitioner or other qualified health providers with any questions that you may have regarding your health. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard from this podcast. If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately.

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