Episode 8 Coffee Chats: Margy Brill, LSW on the Ebb & Flow of Grief

Coffee chats are back! In this episode, Ramya talks with Margy Brill, LSW on her grief experiences, how that brought her to her work as a therapist, how she talks about grief with her clients, and how we might reframe our ideas around navigating grief.

Margy’s upcoming workshop on January 26th, 2025, is an offering for adults (18+) who are actively navigating the death of a loved one, and are seeking support and tools to normalize, validate, and process their grief emotions and loss experiences. Learn more here.

Find Margy’s three-part blog series exploring grief and loss here.

Interview transcript {edited for clarity}

Ramya (she/her): Okay, here we go. All right, hello. Today, I have the wonderful Margie with me for our coffee chat. And really the purpose of this is just to get to know you a little better and understand how you got here, what you do for your work, who you work with, that kind of thing. So I'll let you introduce yourself a little bit and then tell us about your journey here.

Margy (she/her): Sounds great. Thanks, Ramya, Thanks for holding the space for this. I've been looking forward to chatting with you more… 

Ramya: I know! 

Margy: So yeah, I'm Margy. I'm one of our therapists here at Room to Breathe. I've been here for about a year and a half and going into therapy work was my - is my -  second career. I was working with education nonprofits for about eight or nine years or so prior to coming into this space. 

Ramya: I didn’t know that about you.

Margy: Yes, yes, I - Yeah. You know, this is actually a great opportunity for me to share why, you know, I sort of made that transition, and how that influences the work that I do, and how I go about the work.

So when I was an undergrad, I went to Kalamazoo College in Michigan, and I was studying anthropology and sociology. I was really drawn to those areas of study, and thought I wanted to go into social research, and was, you know, really invested and into that and, you know, really curious about people and systems and society and how they all, you know, interact and intersect.

The summer before my senior year of college, I was doing a social research internship. It was a fairly dry topic. I was studying, like integrating quantitative and qualitative research methods into cross-cultural studies. And it was, you know, I was kind of nerding out about it and enjoying it, figuring out what I thought. And then I had something unimaginable happen. My best friend of 21 years passed away in a hiking accident, unexpectedly.

Ramya: Oh my gosh.

Margy: And yeah, it really changed the course of my life. I was having a really - after she passed, and she was like a sister to me. We had the same birthday. We knew each other for years. Grew up together, and we had just turned 21 years old. 

Ramya: Oh man.  

Margy: And I had a really difficult time processing and coping. I didn't. I had, I had not been to therapy before that time in a formal context. I didn't know what, even how to talk about, how I was feeling, what was normal, what wasn't. I was given books about the stages of grief, and didn't feel like that was really aligned with my experience at all. And then I went into my senior year just feeling pretty lost. I had a lot of support from friends and family, but I just felt off in a way that was really hard to describe, and I felt really, really uninspired by the work I was doing - research. 

Ramya: Everything just got, like, shaken up, right? Like, your whole world was off kilter at that point. 

Margy: Yes, yes. Like, what is my identity? Who am I without this person also thinking about mortality in a way that I had not been confronted with yet. Made me question a lot, and so I found myself that year, really feeling drawn to connection with people, and it felt almost like my research work, I couldn't connect with it in the same way, I needed human - for me, I've always I've been a people person my whole life. I'm an extrovert. I love talking with people. I love being around people, that gives me energy. And so I was needing and craving more connection.

And so that really did shape, you know, Jillian, my friend. Her name is Jillian. Jillian's death really shaped what I sought out in terms of kind of careers and next steps after undergrad. So I graduated, and I ended up going to work for this wonderful education nonprofit and work directly with students who were all first in their families to go to college, and like Pell Grant eligible, and did a lot of support on like the college application, financial aid, career planning process. And I loved it. I loved that work. Loved working directly with students, and, long story short, basically continued in that education nonprofit path for like almost a decade following, worked with a couple different organizations, did some program management, team management, kind of student recruitment, sort of took on different roles within these organizations, but really loved being able to work with people, and was finding, as I went through that path, that I was really - as I was going more into program management, I was having that, almost like that same feeling that I had an undergrad where I was thinking, I really feel like I am losing my connection to working directly with people as I was going into management. And I was also feeling really drawn through my own mental health journey and exploration, and my own exploration of grief and loss and having some more losses happen, particularly death losses. You know that I really wanted to focus more on mental health in the work that I was doing, and that was why I went back to grad school. I started to get my master's in social work part time as I was working in the nonprofit space, and then kind of emphasized, and sort of was able to take different classes and do different trainings on grief and loss work. So I didn't have a formal specialization in that, but I was really personally interested, and took what I was able to take and just learned as much as I could learn. And so now fast forward to being at Room to Breathe. That's something that I've really been drawn to focus on clinically, and I have found it really valuable to do both individual and group work when it comes to processing grief, particularly grief after someone dies, because we just, we don't have enough spaces for that. 

Ramya: No, I really don't think we do. 

Margy: Particularly - yeah. 

Ramya: And I think talking about death and all kinds of loss is something that still has such a stigma in our society to talk about. And like sometimes death in particular, I don't know about you, about coming from my culture and like, my experience, it's kind of like, if we talk about it, then it means it's going to happen sooner. Or like, we're like, willing it into reality, or, like, speaking it into the universe. And so then it's going to happen. Or in a certain culture -

Margy: Absolutely.

Ramya: - talk about, like, you know, if you have all of your like, ducks in a row here, that that means the universe is just going to go ahead and take you kind of thing. It's like talking about death, and so I really appreciate being able to sit down and talk to you about your thoughts on it, how it applies to clinical work, but how can also kind of reduce that stigma and talk about it like it's just another thing in life that we have to deal with.

Margy: Yes, I'm so glad you brought that up Ramya because this is something that I talk about with a lot of people, right? It's - we are terrified of talking about death in our - in many cultures, in some not, not the case, it's very openly talked about. But in, you know, especially in our, like, westernized, you know, capitalistic culture in many parts of the US. We, you know, well, we see grief as a sign of weakness. We pathologize it so we try to avoid and hide that away, right? It's not productive. It's, you know, it's - you're more vulnerable when you're grieving. We're kind of messaged to overcome it and get past it. And the irony that I talk about with people, and that I've come to learn myself, is that there's so much in life, pretty much everything in life is uncertain, which is scary to say out loud. The one thing that we're all guaranteed is that we're all going to die someday.

Ramya: There's actually very little really that we control, right? 

Margy: Yeah, yeah. And it feels even saying that it's like, Whoa. That's, you know, that feels really abrupt to say out loud. But also, can that be something instead that can be empowering and it gets to a place of being able to get to that point, right? But…Can that be something that brings us together? Can that be a point of connection, and if we know that at this, at some point that that's going to happen to us and to people that we love, can that be something that we can talk about and plan around and have - 

Ramya: - another way of connection, maybe like an increased sense of connection. 

Margy: Connection. There's a universality in death and a universality and grief that I don't think we tap into enough. It doesn't mean we're gonna all have every loss, every death. The way we all grieve is so different. It doesn't mean we're going to feel all of it the same, or that we're going to experience it all the same, but just like we all - many people can tap into like, or relate to this idea of love. It's the same with grief, we grieve because we love, and vice versa. It's like we, we don't often talk about that sort of dialectic in westernized cultures, but it's, it's both exists, it's part of the human experience.

And we want to, of course, we want to focus on love and being alive and everything that comes with that. But the reality is, we know that this, this other part, is going to be a piece of all of this too, and how can we use that to also connect and to offer each other support and to access empowerment. This is something that I talk about with with people a lot too, is exactly what you said earlier Ramya, it's like, it's ironic that there's so many things that we do talk about kind of planning for that we do, like, you know, getting an immunization to prevent something or, you know, we'll talk about protective measures with safe sex. It's like talking about that, talking about sex doesn't mean you're going to get pregnant. 

Ramya: Right. 

Margy: Talking about death doesn't mean you're going to die. And I took that from, I heard this like great TED talk one time about death planning, but for some reason, you know, we've made that more taboo. And it's interesting how, in a lot of my group and individual work that I do with people who have navigated a death loss or are anticipating the death of someone in their life coming up, how liberating it can feel to be able to connect to that universality of experience and be able to name it and to also put into perspective. The other thing that - the image I really like to use is like thinking about, kind of zooming out a bit, and thinking that we're all sort of a part of this movie that's playing, which is life, and we're all this kind of tiny part of it, and the movie is just going to continue happening, and we come in and out of it.

And so that's another thing that we talk about. Is like, what do we want to make? Yeah, to make count in this part of the movie that we're in. And and also, are there things that we want to plan for or communicate to loved ones about that we would like to have as a part of our death experience. And what can that look like? There's death doulas that can literally support with this work. And we don’t often tap into those resources. 

Ramya: Yeah, I had a professor at school that actually is a death doula.

Margy: Really? Oh that’s so cool.

Ramya: Yeah, when I was studying, there's a course called death, dying and bereavement, and it opened my brain, my eyes, like everything, to a whole other type of experience. And talking about mortality and death and how humans grieve. And in a way, like hearing you talk about all of this brings up for me that if it wasn't this idea that life is finite, that there is an end, we wouldn't be able to have this connection, this love, this vulnerability, all those other happy, joyous moments. 

Because for me, it almost feels like they're worth more knowing that we're not always going to have them in the same way. You know what I mean?

Margy: Yes, that’s beautiful. 

Ramya: Like would the happy moments, would the joyous moments mean as much if you knew, like, it would go on for forever, or would it just be stagnant? Would we get bored? Or would we just get complacent, almost, and not assign as much value and meaning and connection to them? I feel like we keep coming back to that word. 

Margy: Yes, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I also, I mean, I think it's important to distinguish too that - and to make space and hold space for all the feelings that come up, like it doesn't mean that we're saying we're eager or even ready to, quote, unquote die at any point. 

Ramya: Sure. 

Margy: It's not saying that we're necessarily welcoming that, it's more saying that we know at some point this will happen. We hope, as it will for many people, that it will be many years from now, but it is thinking about yeah, like in the present with the time that I have what is important to me, like, how do I want to live today? Who do I want to surround myself with?

Ramya: Yeah. 

Margy: And being able to yeah, connect to that, or tap into that.

Ramya: Hmm, switching gears just a little bit. How does grief work look like for you as a clinician, as in, you know, what is it like to work with you if people are seeking out grief counseling or group therapy for grief group, that kind of thing.

Margy: Thank you for asking that. Yeah, I, you know, I really take a holistic approach in all of my grief work, whether it's individual or group work. And I frame all of my work kind of in sort of the model I mentioned earlier, of kind of debunking this westernized view of grief and really trying to normalize grief as honestly a process and as something that is continuous, and something that doesn't have a beginning or an end, and instead ebbing and flowing. And so something that I talk with people a lot about in the work that I do is, you know how to make sure that we're processing and allowing space for the ebb and flow of grief, and not, you know, not seeing it as this, “We're overcoming stages”, but more we're moving through them. We're bouncing back and forth. We're ebbing and flowing.

So doing a lot of work on that, you know, identifying emotions that we're feeling, identifying different areas of our life, that those are showing up or perhaps affecting functioning, and how to be able to allow ourselves space to move through that. And I always say like moving grief through our body is something that I focus a lot on in my work, setting aside, you know, intentional time aside every day to do that. And of course, this is individualized. Looks different for every person. Like what that might entail.

The other thing that I do, and with a lot of my work, two things I wanted to say, one is the most important thing in grief work, especially as a therapist, is holding space and just meeting people where they're at. Grief is so - it looks different for everybody. There is no right or wrong. I don't know how many times I emphasize, but we're messaged so often right that, oh, it's been a year. You should be at this point by then. Oh, it's been X number of months. We love to kind of quantify time and set timelines around grief, and that's something you'll often hear from me, if you're working with me, of okay, let's talk about where this narrative is coming from, and let's reframe this. And so we do a lot, do a lot of that work. 

And the other thing I really like to bring into my work that I do is, and I do this both with individuals and groups, is I really do like to look at grief through a relational lens and thinking about our, perhaps our attachment wounds that we have. Or what our relationship was like with the person who died or with other people in our life, and how that's affecting our grief process. So thinking, you know a lot about we don't have to, of course, limit to attachment styles, but if you know we were to use that framework thinking, okay, this person who died, perhaps I had more of an avoidant attachment with this person. How is that affecting how I am grieving the death of this person? Am I wanting to avoid my grief? And how is that? What is that looking like? Does that feel good? Is that serving me in a way that I need right now? Or is that impacting my functioning in a way that's making it really hard to also just care for myself, like take care of my basic needs right now? Sure, and what are ways that I can, you know, process that or be able to offer, what can it look like to offer myself, you know, permission, or what support do I need? Or who are the grief partners that I can tap into that can support me in being able to also feel my grief emotions and let them come through my body.

So that's some of the kind of frameworks and some of the the tools that I use in my work.

Ramya: I have a question for you, just out of curiosity. The things that I've had people ask me before is, how do you as a clinician or as just a person, navigate experiences around grief, bereavement, where one might feel relieved that someone's not around anymore,

Margy: Oh, my goodness, yes. 

Ramya: Or relief that someone has died or has, like, left your life in one way or another.

Margy: Oh, Ramya, this comes up so much, and it's actually, I think I talk with people about different kinds of - I almost see that as a type of guilt that then often accompanies that relief, where you talk about, you know, joy guilt or relief guilt of - I feel guilty because I am, I feel so much lighter now that this person is gone, or I am relieved for many different reasons that that could come up. And so, you know, that is so normal. It's so normal. I hear it so often, both where relief can be like a predominant emotion that someone's feeling, or it can be a - I'm oscillating back and forth between devastation and sadness and then relief. And I hear that a lot with perhaps people who have died from like a terminal illness, or there was a lot of sort of that anticipatory grief caregiving that was leading up to this person passing. And there's this relief that a person is no longer physically suffering. There's a relief in the responsibility of the person who may have been caregiving to be able to tend to themselves and care for themselves a bit more.

There can also be the other relief that I also talk with folks about that's I had a really complicated relationship with this person who died. 

Ramya: Sure, I'm thinking from, like, a trauma lens too, of like - 

Margy: Absolutely.

Ramya: - an abuser is is gone, right? Or is dead or incarcerated, or, you know, whatever. 

Margy: Yes, yeah. And it's interesting, because I, when I've worked with folks that have been in that position, absolutely hear the relief, do a lot of validating around that, especially when it feels like they can't or not, are not allowed to express that because of the you know, responses they may get that disenfranchised grief they may get from people to say, oh, like you, it's wrong to say that you're relieved after someone dies. And on the flip side of that, I've also talked with people who have had someone in their life die, who perhaps there had been abuse of some kind or another trauma, and they feel deeply sad and don't…maybe have some relief, but sadness is what's feeling predominant, and then they feel disenfranchised about that, because people are like, Why would you be sad? This person was horrible. 

Ramya: Mhmm.

Margy: We're really, we don't often when it comes to grief responses, it feels like more often than not, from a larger societal lens, we don't often really make space for the different emotions that people feel and really give permission for that. And it’s all valid. 

Ramya: We really don’t, whether it's about grief or trauma or anything really…I'm learning.

Margy: Yeah, yeah, and it's so complicated. It's complicated as a human to sit with that, that duality of like, I'm relieved and I'm heartbroken, and that's confusing, and both of those…

Ramya: And that both exist at the same time, that all of the feelings can exist, no matter how contradictory they may feel. 

Margy: Yeah, there's this graphic. I have a couple blog posts I've written about grief, and in one of them, I did like an exploring grief and loss series last summer. And I think one of the maybe part two of that I can't remember, but there's this graphic, and I show this a lot in my groups and in the grief workshops that I do, there's this wonderful graphic circulating that's, I don't know if you've seen this Ramya, but there's like, two side by side images. One of them is like the stages of grief that we’re messaged. And it has this, like, you know, very clear line going through all the stages. And then it has my experience. And it just is this, like jumbled, crazy squiggly line. 

Ramya: Yeah, I haven’t seen that before actually, I’ll have to look it up.

Margy: And I show this to people. Everyone's like, I usually start my groups with this being in one of the first sessions that we do. And everyone's like, yes, that is my experience. Not this, you know, yeah, beautiful straight line of yes, I am in shock and denial, and then I'm angry, and then I'm bargaining, and then I'm depressed. And now I have accepted this loss in a year timeline. Like, no. We wish, that would be helpful.

Ramya: There's probably, like, so many sub steps, like in between all of those that vary from person to person, experience to experience, right?

Margy: Absolutely, yes. 

Ramya: It's not just these five stages. 

Margy: No, no, no, I can't tell you the number of times I've had someone come to me and say, Why am I angry still? It's been a year, or like, I thought I was moving towards acceptance, and now I'm angry. I’m like, yep, that is normal. Let's talk about where the - and I love to say too, like, what is your grief trying to tell you, why is this anger coming up right now? And let's get curious about that and explore why, why that's happening, because it's coming up for a reason. And, yeah, let's talk about it. Let's, let's talk about what the root and, you know, unpack that more. It's here for a reason. What is it trying to tell you? And how can we, you know, not even necessarily, make sense of it, but just how can we continue to reflect on that and explore? 

Ramya: Yeah.

Margy: But love that graphic. Highly recommend checking it out. I feel like that is a really good graphic also for how I approach the work. It is messy and it's a lot of normalizing that and grief being a process, not linear, and not something that we overcome, we learn to move through it and with it.

Ramya: Sounds like you're really speaking to - it's not something that really goes away, but rather the way that we carry it through our lives changes. 

Margy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because when we tell ourselves that we're going to get over it, or when we message that, which we message that in a lot of ways in society. even with the bereavement days that we give… that could be a whole other segment, the number of people I talk to that say I thought I should be over this by now, because I was given three days of bereavement, and I'm expected to come back to work and be productive. 

Ramya: Three days, that’s comical. 

Margy: I know. And that's like, if an organization is being generous, too. Which is so, yeah, not okay, but. But of course, this is why we feel like we, you know, should be overcoming, and we're constantly when we're in grief feeling like we're doing something wrong. 

Ramya: Mm, hmm. Or that even there’s a right and wrong way to do it to begin with! 

Margy: Right, right. Yeah, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who created these five stages of grief, she didn’t even create them with the intention for them to be used for people who are in bereavement, she created them for people who are actively dying. Of processing their death coming up, people who are terminally ill. And then it sort of took on a life of its own, which actually was not something that she had intended and she’s since said woah woah woah like this is kind of gone out of control, I did not intend for this to happen. So no hard feelings towards Kubler Ross, appreciate what she’s done, offered so much to the grief world and that was not her intention but it’s been like really - we kind of took it and ran with it in this society and it’s been often messaged in that way of these are the stages to overcome. So I think there’s been a lot more work to reframe that but I - that’s often still even in work places like if people are given bereavement support it’s often like here’s a book on the stages of grief and so, you know, we’re continuing to reinforce that. 

Ramya: Yeah, I think we have a long way to go still in society about how we -

Margy: We do.

Ramya: - Frame grief, death, how we talk about it, how we move through it, how we carry it, all of those things. 

Margy: Yeah and like you said Ramya it’s - I do say this and I’ve said this in different, like, written spaces and also in my clinical work but I love to use this analogy that I had learned from Andrea Gibson, they’re a poet, and they posted this beautiful video on their Instagram one time talking about how grief - going through grief is like stitching a wound and so gives the description of, you know, we - and I’ll take it in the context of having someone die in our life, but someone dies and that creates a permanent wound that we have and we’ll always have a scar. But thinking of grief as like we’re always stitching the wound. And Andrea said the up and down place is often the most healing place to be. So really thinking of it as like the goal is not to get rid of this. We’re always going to have this and in some ways it’s beautiful, it’s like this person is always going to have a place in our life. Thinking about continuing bonds with that person, that’s a big part of also the work that I do. But we’re thinking about - it’s really the process which is where we’re healing, where we’re learning how to integrate this loss into our life in a new way. Integrating, not recovering from it or moving past it. And so I love that imagery. I think about that a lot of like we’re just stiching the wound. And sometimes it’s painful and sometimes it’s relieving. And so that’s something that - that image is something that I find very grounding that I also use a lot in my work. 

Ramya: I love that. I’m looking at the time here too, I feel like that would be a good stopping, maybe pausing point. For anyone listening or watching please let us know if you want a part two, because there’s so many different ways that we could go with this so we’d love to have more feedback to keep sharing her experience. 

Let’s just do - if there was one thing you want people to take away from our chat today what would it be? 

Margy: I would love for anyone who has had a loved one die, or is actively grieving or mourning, I just want you to know that there is no right or wrong way to feel. Everything that you feel is valid and normal and I encourage you to continue finding connection and support, whether it’s friends, family, community, a grief group, a therapist, it’s so important to be in community and to find connection in grief. So that is what I would offer to you. You’re doing a great job. 

Ramya: That’s awesome. And then on a lighter note, how bout we just end with a fun fact or something interesting about you, to bring people in, whatever you want to share. Put you on the spot here. 

Margy: I love it. I am a huge music fan. I have a lot of musicians in my family and a fun fact about me is I play the trumpet.

Ramya: Oooh I didn’t know that about you either, I’m learning so much about you today! 

Margy: Yes, I don’t play as much, probably to the happiness of my upstairs neighbors, I don’t play as much as I used to. But I for many years played in different community bands and I played through adolescence, high school, college. I love the trumpet, I love trumpet if it ever shows up in music it’s already a song I know I’m going to like. 

Ramya: That’s so cool.

Margy: Yeah, that's a fun fact about me. 

Ramya: That’s awesome. Okay well, let’s wrap up there for today. Thank you so much Margy for sitting down and talking about your experience about getting here, about grief work, what you have to offer, and let’s see if we can plan for a part two cause I know there’s a whole lot of things we didn’t even touch. 

Margy: That would be great, I would love that. Thank you so much for holding the space. 

Ramya: Of course. Alright everybody thanks for listening, see you next time.