Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Grief Works

Episode Date: November 3, 2018

You can probably name the five stages of grief - from denial to acceptance - they've become pretty well known since being proposed in 1969. But later researchers are finding that grief is rarely that cut and dried, and it may not be as widely experienced as we once thought. Join Josh and Chuck as they look at the sad science of grief. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's S-Y-S-K Selects, I've chosen How Grief Works. It's an episode from April of 2013, and it covers everything you ever wanted to know about grief,

like do animals grieve? Of course they do, don't be ridiculous. And if you happen to be grieving right now, I hope this episode helps. So sit back and enjoy, or whatever you might do with it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.

There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. That makes the Stuff You Should Know the podcast. Good grief. Yes, good grief. I looked that up. What did you come up with? Well, it just struck me, you know, because Charlie Brown says it, you know,

where I know it from. Then I thought, where did that come from? Because I wonder those things. And it's just, apparently, they think it's just what's called a minced oath, like when you substitute God for good gravy, or good googly-ease, or... I gotcha.

Great googly-moogly? Great googly-moogly. But then I thought grief was weird, because that's such a specific thing. But then good gracious, gracious is very specific, too, and ill-fitting, so I guess it's just a minced oath. Good grief. Well, maybe good gracious came from good grace,

and somebody was just feeling a little buzzed on schnapps, and they added gracious instead. Maybe so. Minced oaths. Good gravy. That's good. That's probably the funniest thing that will happen in this show.

Hopefully. That wasn't even that funny. Yeah, but this one's not supposed to be funny. It's about grief, you know? Yeah. And I think we should point out from the get-go that this is about grief, human grief, Western human grief.

Yeah. But that's not to say that there aren't different types of grief, and that humans are the only ones who do grief. In fact, I have a story for you. Yeah, I got a little animal action, too, so. Oh, you do. That's a good story. That was the funniest thing in this episode.

This story took place back in the spring of 1999 in Uttar Pradesh State, India, specifically in the town of Lucknow, and even more specifically at the Prince of Wales Zoo. Okay. There was a 72-year-old elephant, female elephant named Dominie, and Dominie was hanging out in her little house

at the Prince of Wales Zoo when all of a sudden she got a younger, pregnant friend delivered to her, named Champakali. And Champakali was, as I said, pregnant. She was actually on maternity leave from her regular gig, where she would just let tourists ride on her back. Okay. All right?

And so she was taking the Prince of Wales Zoo to basically just have a nice, comfortable term and then give birth. And Dominie just fell in love with Champakali. This is so sad already. So she basically became a maternal figure to Champakali. They were best friends. Champakali would lay around,

and Dominie would stroke her pregnant belly with her trunk. They just got really, really tight, which is very normal in the elephant world. Yeah. So you could almost imagine that Dominie was growing excited as Champakali got closer and closer to her due date. And when finally she did go into labor, Champakali died during childbirth

and gave birth to a stillborn calf. And Dominie, I guess they let her come in and hang around the body because elephants are known to grieve. Well, even as far as elephants go, Dominie's story is a little, it's pretty bad. She cried over the body for a while and then went over to her enclosure

and just stood still for a week, right? You're killing me. After the week, during this week, she stopped eating. She got to the point where her legs swelled from basically starvation and dehydration until she fell over. And then she just laid there for what turned out to be the rest of her life,

where she wept and refused to eat and refused to drink and grieved over the death of her friend. And finally died herself a few days later. And the vets tried to keep her alive. They did what they could, but they said in the end, in the face of Dominie's intense grief, all her treatment failed. Cheese.

No, they're buried next to one another. I had a dog situation like that similar when I was a kid. One of my dogs died and they were best buds and the other one just like was never the same and died about three months later and seemed healthy at the time. And I went out and laid down in the doghouse and cried. Nice.

It was like seven devastating. That's a wonderful thing to do. That's working out your grief. Yeah, but as far as the animals go, it really is pretty evenly divided among scientists to say, yes, they show all the signs of grieving and that's what they're doing. And then others that say, no, they are not grieving.

We are putting that on them as humans. Yeah, that's, I totally disagree with that. Yeah, it's just, you know, it's really two camps. So we've talked about this before. Yeah. We've run up against this before and I don't think either one of us have changed our positions at all.

I think they grieve, but then you hear like this one great ape, you know, was famous recently for carrying her little dead baby around for like three days. And other scientists came out and said like, you know, this is a long gestation period. They have singletons, having a kid is a big deal. And so she's carrying this baby around

in hopes that it will come back to life. And it's like in a comatose state. And, you know, it's a practical, adaptive, evolutionary thing that's happening. It's not grief. And then I think you're heartless. Right, yeah. They're grieving because adult chimpanzees don't grieve.

They took the baby chimp and made a purse out of it. That's what the scientists did after that. Well, but then for animals, I don't want to get too sidetracked, but you have to think like when some clearly show signs of what looks like grief and some don't at all, like the chimpanzee in the same arena. Like they eat other chimpanzees

while they're still alive and screaming. Well, those are the ones that back talk. Or they go off the die by themselves and there's no grieving. Or they will make, like if one of them is dying, they will like kill them. Right, but imagine you're an outside observer of the human species.

We lose chemical weapons on one another and yet we still have funeral practices. I mean. I know, it's interesting. I wonder why certain animals do and certain don't though. Yeah. It's very interesting. Well, getting back to humans, the human realm of grief,

there was a man who recently was married to his wife for 62 years and she died. And on the way to her funeral, he died in the back of the limousine. Oh, really? And yeah, which I thought was incredibly sweet. And then his daughters, I- They died at the funeral?

No, no, no. They put a sign up. They decided to just have a double funeral and they put a sign up at the wake that said, surprise, it's a double header. And then buried him next to her like that day. Well, I guess their family has a good sense of humor at least. But the point is, is yeah, that is.

That's, they used a sense of humor to grieve or else they weren't going through grief. And the point of that whole thing is, is that there's no set way that grief works, which is great because we can say just about anything here and still be in the right. Because psychology is still grappling to define the process of grief.

And some very recent studies that you found show that grief is not present in everyone and that everyone deals with it very differently. And there's not really any specific way to handle it. There's just some great general guidelines. And then we should say grief is a very personal thing. Yeah, and I myself have experienced the spectrum of grief in my life, like including, you know,

like family members passing away, not to be too cold, but some are, you know, you super grief for and some it's like, well, you know, they were very old and they had a great life. And then we saw this coming and that's one of the things that, you know, it's one of the types of grief, anticipatory grief, they say is probably easier because you're working that stuff out over time.

And it's nothing like an accident or a child dying unanticipated grief. Well, completely different. Yeah, it is. So you mentioned anticipatory grief. That's like if somebody's got a prolonged illness or something like that, you have the chance to say goodbye ahead of time, maybe.

Deal with these emotions. Exactly, and then once death actually comes, you've been prepared for this for days, weeks, months, right? Yeah, and a lot of times, maybe there isn't any quote, unquote, traditional grief going on at all because you're just so prepared. Right. And it's just a matter of executing all the things

that you need to do if you're the person that's in charge of that kind of stuff. Like you're so prepared, you blow off the funeral, you go to the grocery store. I don't know about that, but... Might be a serial killer if that's the case. Psychologists call that kind of grief, anticipatory grief, basically the money grief

because it's about as light as you can get. Sure. Post-grief, post-death, I should say, right? Yes. And then again, I want to say there's probably a listener out there who helped their husband or their mother through a long bout of cancer that the person finally succumbed to.

That's absolutely untrue. I agree with you wholeheartedly. Like there, again, there's no specific, like no one can tell you what your grief was. Again, it's personal, this is just, these are very broad strokes, so okay. Then like you mentioned, unanticipated grief, right? Yeah, that's, from my experience,

I had a friend that fell off a building and died. And that's like, definitely the hardest. Someone young, an accident, and... But still, if you want to talk about five stages, I'm not a big believer that that's the case because I didn't experience all those stages at all. But again, someone might experience 10 stages. It does, but the point is with unanticipated grief,

like you couldn't have, you or your friend didn't wake up that morning like he was gonna die. Right. But he still died. And you have to deal with it all of a sudden. Yeah. And then there's ambiguous grief, which for my money is probably the worst kind of grief.

This is the kind of grief that comes where, say, if you have a loved one who is kidnapped and you never hear from them again. Yeah, I never felt that one. Your parents abandoned you as a child. Yeah. Or just something happens to somebody and there's no real resolution or closure.

Yeah, or it doesn't have to be even death. It can be like your girlfriend, you come home to a note on your bed and you never hear from her again, or a wife, I guess. Yeah, because I guess we should also say, like grief doesn't just have to come from death. No, of course not. Grief is basically the deep and poignant distress

caused by bereavement. And bereavement is the state of being deprived of something or someone. So that could be through death, whatever, yeah, exactly. But yeah, so those are the three types of normal grief just off the top of our heads. We made those up, right? Yeah.

And you mentioned the different kinds of, the different stages of grief. And I mean, that's just such like a pop trope these days. Yeah, the five stages. But it was actually new just as recently as 1969 when Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross came up with the five stages of grief that you always hear about today that any 10-year-old could probably recite to you.

But have since been kind of deconstructed and changed and questioned and challenged. But these are kind of the road map to go through grief, right? Yeah. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Right. And denial is just basically saying,

this is, you're not true, they're still alive. Like what you say is a lie. And I don't wanna be anywhere near you because you're lying to me right now about something very horrible. Yeah, I've never experienced that. Even with my friend who fell off the building, like that's as sudden a news as you can get over the phone.

And I'm just not the kind of person who's like, no, that didn't happen. I was like, man, it immediately hit me that that had happened. You know? Yeah. And I started from there, I guess. But I didn't experience anger either. But if it might have been my brother,

I might have experienced anger. You raise a very good point. There's different, I guess, risk factors. There's different elements to grief. And some of it is personal. Some of it has to do with how close you are to the person. Sure. Some of it has to do with the type of person you are.

You're a pretty resilient person. If you were a very sensitive bookish type, you might have taken it a little harder. You know what I mean? Yeah. You have a very, very, very strong, tight support group. You do. Yeah.

So I would say that that probably helped quite a bit. I'm sure you had a group of friends that helped you through that. They were probably friends with the kid too. Yeah, absolutely. So you went through it as a group. Yeah, going through something alone is always hard. Even if you think you're a loner and don't want

to be around anyone, you're probably not doing yourself any favor. Right. And then lastly, you had prior experience with grief. You'd thrown yourself down in the doghouse when you were seven. So you had that experience to draw upon and to know you can make it through it. It does get better.

It does go away. Yeah. So you're gonna have the hardest normal kind of grief if you are, like you said, a loner with no support group. If this is the first time you've ever experienced grief, if you're the sensitive bookish type and if you were extraordinarily close to somebody. Right.

Right? Yeah, totally. In fact, I used to do acting exercises in college. I took this acting class and believe it or not, I took one acting class and I was not very good at it. And he used to tell us to try and do like crying exercises and stuff. So what did you think of it?

My brother was always the go-to. Like imagine my brother had gotten killed or something. I would just like boom, water work. That's so sweet. Yeah. Yeah, your brother. I think I could make myself cry if I thought of your brother dying.

I know, he's a beloved guy. He's such a good guy. I'm just kidding about the other family members by the way. All right, so anger, the second one? Yes, it is. Pretty self-explanatory. Yeah. Bargaining fascinates me.

Like the idea that you feel like you're suddenly in a position to make a deal with God. Yeah. To reverse the circumstances or bring the person back or take away the pain. Yeah. That's just so crazy. And it's like you think of somebody bargaining

with God or some higher power and they're like looking up, talking to the ceiling or the sky and that that is one of the normal stages of grief. Yeah. That's, I just find that fascinating. I did that when I was young with girls. Oh yeah.

Well, I was heavy into church, very emotional kid and girls like, you know, it was one of those deals like, God, just please, if you would just come back to me, I promise I'll like do this and I'll do that. Yeah. But I'll clean behind my ears. Yeah, I grew out of that pretty quick. Yeah.

Because I realized it didn't make any difference. That girl's either coming back or she was hitting the road. Exactly. And God probably had little, if anything, to do with that. That's right. He was dealing with bigger problems. That's right.

After that's depression and this one's kind of tricky. Yeah. If you go through the stage of depression, if you do, it's not necessarily requisite. Right. They're starting to wonder if possibly you're already depressed. Yeah. And if you were already depressed,

that probably means you're going to maybe get stuck in the stage for a while. Yeah. Or you might go through a depressed stage and then come out of it. Right. It's not necessarily, but the problem with this stage is that depression is a recognized mental disorder

and grief is not considered a mental disorder. Right. And yet, in one of these five widely accepted stages, you go through a period where you have a mental disorder. Yeah. But it's part of a normal process. And that's basically like taking psychologists and throwing them into the Thunderdome,

greasing them up with chicken fat and handing them battle axes and saying, explain that. No, that's the funniest thing said in the podcast. The last one is acceptance, of course. When you are finally able to move on. And I found that one fairly interesting article where they charted this and they said it would look like a W. Yeah.

Is that right? Like the high points and the low points? Yeah, which I guess denials a high point. And then it goes down to anger. Yeah. Up to bargaining. I guess, if you feel like that's getting you somewhere, maybe it's an up.

Maybe. Maybe. At the very least, it's manic, I would think. Yeah. Back down to depression. And then finishing the W with a nice bit of acceptance. Yeah. And they've, as you said, that we've

sort of been studying this for like 30 or 40 years. And there was always that five stages thing. But recently, they're looking more into it. And they've done some studies with widowers and widows. And they found that they really oscillate wildly from day to day. And it's not necessarily going to be a W. It's I felt great today.

And really, my spirits were up. And I was even laughing. And then the next day, they were really sad. And it just really is all over the map. Right. But I think, overall, what they're finding is that on a long enough arc, people emerge from it. And it seems to be somewhere on the order of six months

to three years. Yeah. Seems to be, and I think that's the outliers are maybe six months to three years. That's such a ridiculous time frame, though. But I mean, if you study enough people, you can probably create like a. Make up like three months to five years.

Right. No, totally. And then say anyone else is an outlier. Right. But that's the thing, like you can't. That's why everybody is very wisely, they avoid saying things like that. Like this is, this is like.

It's almost a respect for the process. Like no one wants to come out and say, no, this is how it is. Yeah. Because you can't. And that's a mean thing to do. And actually, there's grief is in danger of being medicalized in the DSM-5, one of the proposals. There's always been an exemption to bereavement

with depression, like a depression diagnosis. If the person has recently gone through the process of grief or is in the process of grief, you can't diagnose them with depression. You can, but you're not going to get reimbursed for any meds you prescribed them. Well, under the DSM-5, they're taking away this bereavement exclusion so that doctors can get reimbursed.

That's good. Yeah, but it medicalizes grief. It says no, and now it's a mental disorder. Well. When it's not supposed to be. And it's a slippery slope. Yeah. You know?

A temporary disorder, though. You would hope so. Yeah. All right. Very keen insight. Nice work. Thank you, psychology today. Yeah.

Is that where you got it? Oh, yeah. OK. Ooh, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

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So should we talk a little bit about dealing with it, I guess? Yes. You know, these are, it's good advice. But it's also, anytime I read something where they're like, take care of yourself and eat right and exercise. Yeah. Avoid drugs and alcohol. Yeah.

But it is very much true. You know, it only is going to make things worse if you wallow in this and abuse yourself with drugs and alcohol and don't eat and, you know, step all night. There's not a therapy to pouring like half of a 40 out on the curb for someone who's gone and then drinking the other half. Yeah. I mean, sure. But don't do that every day for like weeks and weeks.

Right. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think me and my friends got together and got really good and plowed after we got the news about my buddy. Yeah. But we weren't in there every night. But Chuck insists to avoid alcohol.

My advice is to avoid it after one time. Yes. But okay. So in addition to avoiding drugs and alcohol, eating right and getting regular exercise, just the standard stuff. What was that also in? Jet lag? Yeah.

I think every time it's anything. There are like some really good suggestions to dealing with grief. If you find yourself overwhelmed by a profound sense of sadness, there are things out there that you can do to make yourself feel better. You can write a letter to the deceased. That's said to help. Scriptbooking? Yeah.

Why not? Throwing yourself in to say making a memorial, like those roadside memorials or a video clip show. Who knows? Yeah. When my friend did a video, because his family put together a website, like a memorial website, and I had video footage back then of him, and I did a little video for the family. But it ended up really being like a great thing for me.

It made you feel better. Absolutely. Yeah. So basically putting yourself into a project where you're thinking about this person. I imagine, and this isn't an article, this is just me doing some armchair psychology, but I imagine it forces you to remember good things about the person. And so during this time when you're possibly a little more emotionally fragile than usual, you are being reminded of positive memories, positive things as well.

So maybe that's why that would help, but it definitely does help. For sure. Because when you're going through and doing like a scrapbook, it's these great memories and these pictures, and it's not... You are remembering the good stuff and the life, which is I think how everyone wants to be remembered. Sure. It's like these great lives that we have, exactly. You want to be remembered as alive?

Yeah. I mean, I'm one of those people that always wants my funeral to be a little bit more of an upbeat affair as much as it can be. Whereas some people like, no man, I want people really sad. Right, yeah. I want to be mourned for days. Yeah. Not me.

Yeah. So you want the upbeat affair? Yeah. Okay. You want to be remembered as one of me, but not like G.G. Allen's funeral. I have to research that one. I can only imagine what it was like. Yeah.

Pretty hardcore. Pretty much. Okay. Yeah. Did they inject his corpse with heroin? No. He's buried naked though. He lived naked.

It was... Yeah. You can do some research if you feel like. Okay. Man, he died in a horrible way, didn't they find him murdered in an alley naked and never found the murderer? No. I think he killed himself. He was murdered.

Or OD'd. I thought he was like stabbed to death. No, I don't think so. He used to threaten to kill himself on stage. That was his big thing, was that he's like one day it's going to happen. I thought his big thing was like pooping on stage. Well, he did that a lot too. Yeah.

He kept that promise. Man. Sidebar on G.G. Allen. Who knew G.G. Allen was going to show up in the grief episode? For real. Another thing you can do to, I guess, kind of help through the grief processes to throw yourself into a project that you think the deceased might appreciate? Yeah.

Or some organization they might have been affiliated with. Right. That's what I meant. Yeah. Yeah. Like if you lose someone to cancer, maybe get involved with the Kuhnwin Foundation or one of the other groups. Or apparently, Madmothers Against Drunk Driving was founded in memory of a deceased person.

Absolutely. Killed by a drunk driver, one way to imagine. Right. There's just a lot of stuff out there that you can do yourself. A lot of people pretty much immediately go to therapy, at least initially, to get a little help, to get some insight, some advice, whatever. That's not necessarily the case for everybody. They've definitely found that therapy is not even necessarily helpful for everybody.

Right. There's a lot of people out there who probably wonder if they're dead inside because they don't grieve like supposedly everyone else does. That study after study is finding that actually, people who go through significant grief is a fairly small portion of people who experience a loss. Yeah. Didn't we have a study in here? Yeah.

Right here. Yeah. What they do generally is they track groups of widows and widowers for a period of time. Right. And just have them remark about how they're feeling on a day-to-day basis. This one was for up to five years, I think, and between 26 and 65% had no significant symptoms in the initial years after the loss. Yeah.

And only 9 to 41% did, and there's a big variability there, but they said it's partially from how the symptoms were measured. And in another study, they found that about 21% experienced what you could diagnose as depression after the loss, and only about 11% had trouble with it, couldn't shake it after six to 18 months, I believe. Right. And 10% of people who lost a spouse felt relief. These were people that had reported being unhappy in their marriage.

So there's that. Those are the ones that dance on their spouses' grave. I guess so. And I don't necessarily think it's that cold, but there could be some mild relief if you weren't genuinely, weren't happy in your marriage, and it doesn't mean you're dancing on graves and partying, but it might just be like, all right, well, now I can go move to Cabo San Lucas like I always wanted to. And hang out with Sammy Hagar.

But my wife hates the ocean. And now I can do that. Right. And my wife also hated Sammy Hagar, but I'm going to go hang out with them. Yeah, they also think that men may grieve heavier even though it's a long belief that women do, but I think a study like that is sort of silly. It's so variable from person to person. I don't know.

Right. But we say all this to point out that if you don't experience what other people would recognize as grief, there's nothing wrong with you any more than there is if you experience grief. Exactly. What psychiatry and psychology have started to pay a little more attention to is what's been termed complicated grief. Yeah, that's pretty interesting.

It is technically if you go say several months to where your life is really, really interrupted, you can't sleep, you can't eat, you're having trouble focusing on anything but the death of this person, the loss of them. Yeah, you start to seriously doubt things very important in your life, maybe like religion even. Right. Like I've lost a child, like there can't be a God, that kind of stuff. Right.

Conversely, if you can't even mention the person's name or hear the person's name, basically if your life is disrupted for many months, then basically everybody from the Mayo Clinic to the APA says maybe you should go see somebody about this. Yeah, because it can also manifest itself in aggression and violence, self-destructive, physical self-destruction. So it can complicate it as an understatement here for this kind of grief, I think. So there's different kinds. If you go see a counselor with what's considered normal grief, they're probably going to help

you let go of the person while still honoring their memory and recognizing them and the impact that they had on your life, but to get out there and live your own life. They're going to try to reach the same goal if you have complicated grief, but they're going to do it a different way and they're probably going to encourage you to really form an even greater bond with the person now that they're deceased that you can nurture and hold on to and carry around with you. That makes sense to me in this case. It's not like you can't tell a parent who has lost a child and you need to work through

this and get over it. And that's actually one of the risk factors for complicated grief is the death of a child, the death of somebody that you were possibly codependent on and very, very close to. Or the sudden death usually from trauma, say like a murder or something like that. Those are risk factors for complicated grief. So I would imagine that if you had a loved one who was murdered, you probably are already getting some sort of professional attention and if you're not, maybe you should. Well yeah, and what we're basically talking about was the difference between grief and

trauma. And when you've experienced it to that degree, trauma is a whole different deal. They'd say it feels unreal and it can be terrifying, terror is the most common emotion. It's common if you have dreams about a deceased loved one, but if you're having traumatizing dreams about yourself being endangered, then you've crossed the line from grief into trauma and complicated grief. Heavy stuff. It is very heavy.

Losing a pet is, for some people, a very, very, very big deal. And other people, well people that aren't into pets at all don't get it. And then some people that do have pets are just more equipped to deal with the loss of a pet and not like it's a loss of a human. But for people like me and Jerry over there, I know that losing a pet is like equivalent to losing a family member. And the grieving process is about the same, I would imagine, if it's that impactful. And my advice is you should talk to other people who have similar feelings, because

one of the things that can be toughest about losing a pet is when you talk to people who don't have pets and don't think it's that big of a deal to lose a pet, and that can make things a lot worse. Well they say that if you do experience the loss of a pet and you find that you're grieving over it, you should go ahead with the grief. Yeah. Don't feel embarrassed or dumb for that. Of course not.

Go lie down in the doghouse and cry. All right. Like a six-year-old. Yeah. You got anything else? I ran across one thing. There was a guy in 1983 named Paul Rosenblatt who carried out a study of I think like 56 Victorian diaries of people who had experienced loss.

Oh, interesting. And so grief is definitely cultural and also historically bound too. Like he found that the goal for these diarists was to keep the person alive around them all the time. Like they would try to sense the person around them or maybe sit in their favorite chair because they could tell that they were still there in some way or whatever. And that under those circumstances, he found that grief never really seemed to ever go away, that it was something that they carried around for the rest of their lives.

And in fact, one of the things that the Victorians did was they would wear black for a year, I believe. And then dark colors after that, especially if you were a widow. On the anniversary you wear black too, right? I think so. And you were expected to carry around this grief for the rest of your life. And one of the things they also did that actually is still around today was bereavement photography, which is post-mortem photography.

Yeah, we've done a thing on that. Have we? Yeah. And we did, didn't we? Yeah. And we got an email just as recently as today from a woman who lost a child and had a cast made of the baby's hands and feet. And she said that it was something that has very much helped her through.

I didn't read that one yet. Yeah. It was a gift from the hospital to help them through their grief. And the hospital said, you might not want it now, but we really encourage you to have this done. And we'll pay for it because years from now you may really be happy that you have it. She said they were absolutely right. Wow, that's really great.

What was that email in reference to? Death masks? Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah. But it just happened to come in today when we were researching grief. Wow. Yeah.

That's about it, I guess, huh? Yeah. That's it. Grief. We touched on every single thing possible. What a downer. Um, yeah, I guess if you want to learn more about grief, you can type that word into the search bar, HowStuffWorks.com, remember I before E, except after C. Chuck, hold on, let's

take a message break, huh? On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so

we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Josh, you can, by the way, to jump back, look into more grief on our website or you could go to Google and look at a pygmy goats. That helps too. That's what I would say. All right.

So now, uh, not listening to mail, Josh, today we have administrative details. Nice Chuck. Well done. All right. So we're going to, this is going to be an ongoing thing because as usual, they stack up. Well, man, we have very busy work schedules and we like to say thanks to as many people as possible.

So those of you who don't know, administrative details is a segment that replaces listener mail in which we read out thank yous to fans who have sent us stuff tokens. Yeah. Anything. Yep. Um, for example, a postcard of Rapa Nui from Ryan Confer. Thank you for that. Nice.

That's Easter Island. Okay. Um, Jacob Ward, uh, sent us Yellowstone Park shirts, postcards, info cards, hats. Oh yeah. Because he works there. Yeah. That was a pretty sweet gift. And he gets a discount.

Um, thanks to Shanti Diva for the postcard of the monkey knots. Casey Herring sent us cookies and they were delicious. Yeah. Which cookies? The delicious one. Okay. Not this crappy ones. Um, we got a wedding invitation from Rachel and John Reed.

Oh yeah. Congratulations. I'm surprised no one's asked us to officiate. Great. I'd do that. Oh man. You just opened the floodgates. Um, hitch safe, inventor Tim Freeman sent us a hitch safe.

And that is a little thing that you stick in your trailer hitch if you have a truck, pickup truck, and it's got a little key and this hollowed out and you can like put your wallet and stuff in there if you go kayaking and lock it up. I didn't see this. Well, because you don't have a pickup truck. Oh, okay. You get a trailer hitch buddy. You can, we'll split the hitch.

Okay. We'll share. Yeah. Um, let's see. A Christmas card and postcards plural from Becca Evans at a UCSC. All right. Uh, Justin Norman. Um, send us an Ergo desk and iPad holder and I'm actually using the one for the laptop

on my desk. It's quite lovely and it's handmade wood and you can find that at wood bold.com. Yeah. That's really a sight to behold. Yeah. It's amazing. It looks like plastic. Right.

But it's wood. Yeah. Yeah. It's a Christmas postcard from a Davini B who for some reason was dressed as Wilford from the TV show Wilford. So thank you. Davini. Uh, Laurie and Leonard sent us some yummy chocolates from Figus in Marshfield, Wisconsin.

Yeah. Yeah. It was lovely. Um, we got a copy of the book brushing the teeth of Elvis's monkey and a nice letter from Nurse Beth. So thank you for that. Uh, you know what? I'm going to go ahead and bust through my books here.

We got how colon. By how we do anything means everything by Dove Seidman. We got Swing Colon, the search my father Louis Prima by Alan Gerstle. Science nearly explained by Dick Maxwell. Yeah. And that is on Amazon and Kindle. The vampire combat manual from our buddy Roger Ma who sent us the zombie combat manual. Yeah.

And I imagine pretty soon we're going to have a werewolf combat manual. I would hope so. Unless Roger's getting lazy. And Trunculus, which is a children's book from Sean Antoniak and Matthew Antoniak. That was sweet. That was like a graphic novel. Yeah. And they sent us some cool stickers from 811graphics.com.

Yeah. So those are my books. Nice. Um, let's see. What else? Uh, we got another postcard from Rapa Nui from Emily B. That rhymes. Wow. Yeah.

Uh, we got tri-fold wallets from tri-fold tri-hold from tri-fold wallets. Yeah. Nice, man. Yeah. Uh, you should get paid for this. There's a dude named Lars C. who kind of went all over the place and he went to Los Cobos, Los Cabos, of course, Sammy Hergar's place, Seattle, Philadelphia, Calgary, Montreal, Nova Scotia and he kind of took us with him and sent us postcards along the way.

So thanks a lot, Lars. Uh, Aaron Cooper, thank you for your cool foam core poster versions of some of your best stuff you should know, Photoshop jobs. Yes. That's not the first time they sent those either. So thanks a lot, Aaron. It's regular. Coop.

Um, we got a nice postogram from Michael Storer. Carolyn Larson. It's in his magnetic skulls. Yeah. Those are awesome. They are very cool. Like a day of the dead skulls of her own art, I believe. I think so.

Um, I've got her down too and I have her website. It is, um, I believe carolinlarsonart.com. If I come across it, I'll correct myself if that's wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's right. Okay. And then you pick one more good one and then we'll pick this up again. Jennifer Dunaway sent us a knitted tree scarf and this is just the scarf that you go and you pick a tree and you put a little scarf on it and it's pretty darn cute and it makes

the city more beautiful. Nice. So thank you Jennifer Dunaway for that. Um, and then, uh, I got a nice handmade birthday card for me specifically from, uh, S-Y-S-K family member Courtney Hoover, so thanks a lot for that Courtney. And that's administrative details for this week. Part one. Uh, as far as this list goes, we've got this for the next six months.

And I am right. It is carolinlarsonart, C-A-R-O-L-I-N-E-L-A-R-S-E-N-R-T dot com. Yeah. Get a tree scarf. Yeah. That's what I say. And a skull magnet. All right.

Oh, okay. Let's see, if you want to, uh, tweet to us, you can join us on Twitter at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff you should know. You can send us a good old fashioned website visit to stuff you should know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.