Storytelling with Impact | Dealing with grief by holding lightly

I’m constantly reminded of the simple fact that each of us lives a unique life — as no two life journeys are identical — and yet our experiences share common threads and themes. So it is with loss, as it’s a constant throughout life. We lose loved ones, or move on from one job to the next. During a natural disaster we may lose physical objects, possibly our entire home.

When loss happens, grief soon follows, and quite often we’re not sure how to react. Dealing with grief is not something we learn in school. At best, we learn from watching how others handle it. In her talk at TEDxLisboa, Charlene Lam shares her experience dealing with grief after her mother died unexpectedly from a stroke.

Charlene also brings the wisdom she’s gained over the years as the founder of The Grief Gallery , and author of Curating Grief. You might say Charlene is no stranger to grief.

Loss is a fundamental part of being human. Grief is universal. We will all experience it.

Charlene begins her talk with a simple, relatable image: a bottle of soy sauce in her mother’s kitchen. Growing up, this soy sauce evoked pleasant memories of home cooking and family dim sum. But after her mother passed, that everyday object took on a new, heavier meaning.

It symbolized the arduous task of clearing out her mother’s home, of letting go of personal possessions imbued with heartfelt memory and connection. This opening anecdote perfectly illustrates how tangible items become vessels of immense emotional weight after loss.

Grief taught me how to hold lightly. I invite you to hold lightly and to live fully in full color.

Her initial reaction was to “hold on tight” to every single item her mother owned, fearing that letting go of these objects meant letting go of her mother’s memory. This is contrasted with her husband’s suggestion to “just throw it away,” which represents detachment.

These extremes bring in a sense of tension into Charlene’s narrative, and at the same time, serves as a reminder that society often presents us with such binary messages. That it’s all or nothing. At this point, I’m sure many in the audience are reflecting on their own experiences with loss and grief. Reviewing how they may have reacted.

At this point Charlene proposes a different approach: “holding lightly.” Holding lightly, she explains, is about appreciating the beauty and joy of life while also acknowledging the reality of impermanence.

What I find brilliant in how Charlene tells this story is how the narrative weaves in her personal experience with grief, explores the topic more deeply in order to shift the focus away from her and engage the audience. In this way, she’s able to illustrate the fact that grief is a natural part of life that everyone must deal with at some point. What’s unique is also universal.

In the end, we’re invited to examine our own perspective on the matter, and to consider a new way to approach the issue, by holding lightly, and living life fully.

Transcript

When I say soy sauce, what do you think of?

Maybe you think of eating dumplings, soy sauce with sushi. When I think of soy sauce, I think of my mother.

In particular, I think of the bottle of soy sauce in my mother’s kitchen. And how that bottle of soy sauce took on a whole new meaning after she died.

Before my mother died suddenly in 2013, soy sauce reminded me of good food, home cooking, eating dim sum with my family in New York City.

After she died, soy sauce represented my connection to my mother, and it represented the terrible task that I had of trying to clear out her house and trying to let go of the thousands of objects in her home.

Have you experienced something similar? Can you think of a simple object that takes on a whole new meaning for you? Maybe it seems insignificant to other people. And maybe you’ve experienced the exact phenomenon that I did, where an object suddenly becomes precious after a loved one dies.

For you, it might be your grandmother’s ring, your father’s watch, or a family photo. These are the things that are precious to us. These are the things that we hold close to our hearts. These are the things that we would save in a fire. And it hurts when we lose them.

Loss is a fundamental part of being human. Grief is universal. We will all experience it. For some of us, loss will come in the form of a natural disaster: fire, flood, earthquake. Or an unnatural disaster: war breaks out in our country.

[Or a personal disaster. My mother dies of a stroke. Your marriage ends. You lose the job you love. You get a medical diagnosis that changes your life.

In Portuguese, we have this beautiful word, Saudade. I am still learning the depth of the meaning of this untranslatable word. But my understanding is that Saudade means longing for, missing something that we’ve lost, or that we may lose. We know that loss will come.

I talk about and I exhibit soy sauce a lot in my creative work. It represents my connection to my mother, but it also represents this key challenge that we have as humans. Intellectually, we know that we will die. We know that everything we love will someday die. How do we still live full, joyful, beautiful lives, knowing this will happen?

How do we love and feel attached to people, places, pets, and things, knowing that someday we may need to say goodbye?

There are several ways to approach this. When my mother died, I wanted to keep everything. I wanted to hold on to all her clothes, all the furniture, even the ugly furniture.

I wanted to hold on tight because it felt like I needed them to survive. Not everyone understands this. My husband, he said, “It’s just stuff. Just throw it away.”

Yes, I considered divorce. He did not understand that throwing away my mother’s belongings felt like throwing her memory away. It felt like throwing her away.

That’s the thing about grief. We can all have a wide variety of reactions to loss. I’m thinking of a father who threw away all of his wife’s clothing after she died immediately because it was too painful for him to see her dresses, her shoes, her jewelry. His daughters did not understand.

[These are all natural reactions. I wanted to keep everything, and someone else might say, “If it hurts so much to lose, if loss is going to come, I don’t want to hold on to anything.” That’s an option too, for all of us. We could give away our belongings, we could move to a distant land, we can say goodbye to our family and friends, and we can all live like monks.

It’s an option. It feels a little black or white. Hold on to everything or hold on to nothing.

When we’re grieving, it can feel like we only have those two options because of a major misunderstanding about grief. When we’re grieving, we get messages like, “You need to move on. You need to let go. You need to live your own life.” The implication is that if you hold on, you are staying stuck in the past. Black or white.

Move on, let go, or stay stuck.

What if it doesn’t have to be black or white? What if I want to hold on to a connection with my mother without having to hold on to a half-empty bottle of soy sauce forever? And I want to live my own beautiful life. What if we want to have full, joyous lives, knowing that loss will come? My suggestion is to hold lightly.

What do I mean by hold lightly? Earlier I mentioned how I wanted to hold on to everything that my mother owned. Hold on tight as if my life depended on it. Using your hand, can you show me what it might look like to hold tight? What does it look like to hold on tight to something?

Yes, as if you need it to survive. Yes. Some of you are making a fist, right? Some of you have a claw kind of shape. There is tension in your hand, there’s effort and energy in your arm. There might even be tension in your face. Now, what might it look like to hold lightly?

Yes. Some of you used both hands, forming like a cup or a bowl. Your hand is open. Some of you used one hand, palm up, fingers relaxed. This is how we hold lightly. We hold lightly and we can have things. We can hold them close to our hearts, knowing. Knowing that that bird might fly away.

Knowing that beauty will fade, knowing that life will change. Now, why is it important to hold lightly? I believe that when we hold lightly, we give ourselves the opportunity to live life in full color.

Not just black or white, but to live experiencing the full range of colors, all the shades, all the hues. To live with all the textures, all the flavors, tasting the bitter and the sweet. Maybe Saudade, like soy sauce, makes life more delicious.

Maybe grief can make life more beautiful. I find that when I hold lightly, I experience the world and I move through life in a different way. I look into my husband’s eyes and I fall in love with all the little details, trying to memorize them, knowing that someday I may lose him.

When you step out into the world today, no matter where you are, see if the idea of holding lightly helps you to experience the world differently. Maybe we admire a sunset, knowing that those colors will fade. Maybe we enjoy the smell of freshly baked Pastel de Nata, knowing that that fragrance will disappear.

Maybe we hear a song or experience music differently, delighting in that moment. Maybe we even experience soy sauce differently. Maybe now soy sauce tastes like the love of a mother, or soy sauce tastes like a love of life and living.

Grief taught me how to hold lightly. I invite you to hold lightly and to live fully in full color.

Thank you.

Back to you…

As Charlene notes, loss is inevitable, as is the grief we experience afterwards. How have you dealt with grief in your life? Did you embrace the all-or-nothing approach? The idea of holding lightly is one way that we can savor what we’ve lost, to remember the past while fully living in the present.

Even if your story involves a completely different topic, examine how Charlene structured her narrative in a way that engaged the audience, made the subject relatable, and presented her lessons learned as an option for dealing with the issue. It’s a universal structure that’s worth considering.

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