So I kind of disappeared. If you were listening to the Catholic Reef podcast earlier this summer, you probably noticed that I released my last episode, and then there was just nothing. I didn't tell you I was taking a break. I didn't record a season finale. I didn't even really make the decision to stop recording for the summer. Life just happened. And now my kids are back in school. I have what I jokingly call free time again. And I'm finally sitting down behind this microphone and this camera. I will admit I have been putting this off a little bit because I wasn't quite sure how to come back after leaving so suddenly without announcement. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe I don't need some big explanation. Because sometimes life doesn't go according to the plan we had for it. And if there's anything grief has taught me, that is definitely it. We make plans and God laughs, right? So I am back. I am really excited about what is coming. And I guess this officially makes this season two of the Catholic Grief Podcast. Let's get started. Welcome to the Catholic Grief Podcast. I'm Jenny Berba. After walking through profound loss, I discovered that grief and faith are not enemies. In this space, we speak openly about grieving. We bring our grief to the foot of the cross, anchor ourselves in Scripture and the sacraments, and gently rebuild with Christ at the center. If you are carrying sorrow, you are seeing it here. Let's walk this path together. Before I get into everything that has been happening and what I have planned for this next season, let's pray. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing us back together and for being present through every season of our lives, even the seasons that don't go according to plan. I ask you to be especially close today to everyone listening who is carrying grief. Meet them exactly where they are. If they are tired, give them rest. If they feel stuck, help them see the next step. If they have stepped away from you or from something you place on their heart, give them the courage to return without feeling like they have failed. Help me to speak the words that you need me to speak today, and allow this podcast to reach the people who need to hear it. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. In the name of the Father, name of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Where have I been? As I said at the beginning, I did not intentionally plan this break. I had to get a full-time job to help our family income, and I knew we had our family vacation coming up, and that summer was going to be so crazy busy. But I don't think I ever sat down and thought about this is the end of season one, and I'll be back again at the end of August. I probably should have thought that through, but I didn't. Summer came, we traveled, we had a blast spending time with friends and family. And anyone who has kids home for summer vacation knows that your normal schedule just goes completely out the window. I realized how long it had actually been since I released an episode. And then I got stuck. I think it was more because the longer I waited, the bigger coming back started to feel. And I needed to have some sort of explanation for why I just disappeared. And then I realized I was creating this huge obstacle for myself that didn't really need to exist. I could just come back. That actually got me thinking about how often we do this in other areas of our lives too, especially when we are grieving. Maybe you were journaling every day and then stopped. Maybe you had gotten into a really good habit of going to daily mass, and then life just changed and got in the way, and you haven't been in a while. Maybe you were seeing a counselor or going to a grief group or spending time creating, exercising, praying, getting outside, whatever it was that you knew was helping you. And somehow you just got away from it. You don't really even know how. Then enough time passes that returning feels uncomfortable. We tell ourselves that we have to start all over again, or we feel guilty because we weren't consistent. So instead of going back to the thing that was helping us, we avoid it. I think I was doing a little bit of that with this podcast. And I don't think we always have to look at it as starting over. Sometimes we just return and keep moving forward from where we are now. There is a reason, Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verse 1 tells us, for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. There really are different seasons of our lives. And I think one of the things I have had to learn through everything I have experienced is that not every season is going to have the same capacity. I have had seasons where I could take on a million different things and somehow keep all of the balls in the air. And then I have had seasons where getting through the basic things that needed to be done, that was enough. Grief definitely taught me that. After Sean died, there were times when I had to concentrate so hard on simply being present for my children and getting through the day that expecting myself to accomplish anything beyond that would have been ridiculous. Then there were other times when working, creating, writing, or going out and doing something new was exactly what I needed because those things helped pull me out of the fog. Those needs changed. My capacity changed. And I changed. I think sometimes we are too hard on ourselves because we expect ourselves to function exactly the same way, regardless of what season we are living through. So maybe I needed this break. I spent time with my husband and my kids. We traveled across the country. But now that school has started again and our family is settling back into a routine, I feel ready to come back to this. Not because I have everything perfectly planned, I definitely do not, but I know I still have things I want to talk about, people I want you to meet, and conversations that I think need to happen in the Catholic free space. One of the things I realized while I was away is that I spent quite a bit of time at the end of the first season talking about widowhood. And obviously, widowhood is always going to be a part of this podcast because it's a huge part of my story, and one of the main reasons I started talking about grief in the first place. But grief is so much bigger than widowhood. There are so many different losses that we experience throughout our lives. And there are also so many different ways that grief affects us emotionally, spiritually, and even creatively. And that brings me to something I have talked about in pieces, but I have never really taken the time to explain here on the podcast, which is creative resilience. Creative resilience has become such an important part of the work that I'm doing now. And I realized that I keep mentioning it without really sitting down and telling you what I mean by it, where it came from, and why I believe creativity can be such a powerful tool when you are walking through grief. I didn't sit down after Sean died and say, I'm going to create a grief framework. That is definitely not how it happened. It came out of looking back at my own life and recognizing the things that really helped me survive and eventually move forward through some very difficult losses. I have always been creative. I have sewn, designed, written, drawn, made things with my hands, and found so many different ways of creating throughout my entire life. But it took me a long time to recognize that creativity was doing more for me than simply giving me something fun to do. It gave me somewhere to put things I didn't always have words for, a way to express myself without having words. Sometimes I could sit down with my Bible and journal and write through what I was feeling. Other times I couldn't. Sometimes I needed to make something. Sometimes I needed to draw. Eventually, I started recognizing the connection between creativity, reflection, prayer, scripture, and the way I had worked through my grief. That became the foundation for creative resilience. I want to talk so much more about that this season because one of the things I want people to understand is that you absolutely do not have to consider yourself an artist to use creativity as part of your healing. I hear people say, but I'm not creative. I'm not an artist all the time. And I don't really believe that. Maybe you can't draw a realistic portrait. Neither can most people. I struggle with that. That doesn't mean you aren't creative. Creativity can look like writing, decorating, gardening, cooking, music, photography, anything you can do working with your hands, arranging flowers, making a collage, doing interior design, decorating cakes, or simply taking a blank piece of paper and putting your feelings onto it however they come out, even if it's a little doodle. The finished product really isn't the point. It is what happens during the process that matters. And I am so excited to spend more time talking about that here. I also want to bring more guests onto the podcast this season. I have met so many amazing people in this grief world. And one of the things I enjoyed most about the first season was getting to sit down with other people and hear their grief stories. Because one of the things I have said from the beginning is that grief is different yet similar. Our losses can look completely different. But then someone says something about what grief felt like for them, and suddenly you think, yes, that! I know exactly what you mean. So my plan for season two is to alternate as much as possible between solo episodes and interviews. One week you'll hear from me, and the next week I want to bring you another voice from the grief world. Whether that is someone sharing their own experience, a Catholic leader, a priest, or someone who works professionally with people who are grieving. There is someone who can help us understand another part of grief. And I already have the first interview scheduled for next week. I will be sitting down with someone who runs a grief magazine, a virtual grief magazine, and has created a space specifically for people to share their stories and talk honestly about loss. She's also one of the women I am working with right now, along with my previous guest, Nicole Haugen, on something I am so excited about. The three of us are hosting at the Foot of the Cross an immersive Catholic grief workshop. This is a completely virtual event created specifically for Catholics who are grieving. And I think one of the reasons I'm so excited about it is because each of us brings something different to the table. We have different experiences with grief, we have different ways of serving people who are grieving, we have different gifts, but all three of us believe very strongly that there needs to be more space within the Catholic community for honest conversations about grief. Because faith doesn't remove grief. I think sometimes Catholics can unintentionally make grieving people feel like they shouldn't be struggling as much as they are. Because we know what we believe about death. We believe in eternal life, we believe in the resurrection, we believe that Christ conquered death, and we believe in redemptive suffering. And all of that is true. But we also miss the person who used to sit next to us. We miss their voice. We miss touching them. We miss the plans we had with them. We miss the ordinary Tuesday afternoon things that nobody else even knew mattered. Faith gives our grief somewhere to go, but it doesn't mean the grief isn't real. That is really the heart behind at the foot of the cross. We are not asking people to pretend the cross isn't heavy. We are creating a place where we can acknowledge what we are carrying and bring it to Christ. I will tell you more about the work job over the next few weeks, and you'll get to meet Eileen, another one of my co-hosts, in the next episode. Moving forward, I think that is where I am right now. I didn't intentionally end season one. I didn't intentionally take a long break, and I certainly didn't have some beautifully organized transition plan for season two. But maybe I don't need one. I am here now, and if you have been listening since the beginning, thank you for coming back. If you found the podcast sometime during the break, and this is the first new episode showing up in your feed, welcome. I'm so glad you're here. There is a lot I want to explore this season, and I am especially excited about widening the conversation beyond my own story and allowing more people to come in and talk about what grief has looked like in their lives. Because none of us is going to experience grief exactly the same way. There isn't one timeline, there isn't one correct way to feel, there isn't one thing you can do that suddenly makes everything better. But there are things that help. There are people who can walk beside us, there are ways to process what we are carrying. And above all, there is Christ. I know from my own life that God can do things with our suffering that we simply cannot see while we are standing in the middle of the storm. I could not have looked at some of my darkest moments of my grief and imagined where God was eventually going to be leading me. I couldn't see this podcast. I couldn't see creative resilience. I couldn't see the people I would eventually meet and the life that I would now be living because of my story. I couldn't see the way God would take things I never would have chosen for myself and somehow use them to allow me to sit here and walk alongside someone else. That doesn't mean I'm grateful that those losses happened. I think that that is a very important distinction to make. We bring him the real thing, the sadness, the anger, the questions, the love, the memories, the things we understand, and the things we still don't understand. And we allow him to work with all of it. So that is what we're going to keep doing here. Welcome back. Season two is officially happening, and I am really glad you're here with me. Next week, I'll be sharing my conversation with Eileen, one of my At the Foot of the Cross co-hosts. And then the following week, I'm finally going to sit down and really talk to you more about creative resilience and what it is, where it came from, and how I believe creativity can help us process things that sometimes words simply cannot reach. I think it's going to be a really great season. Thank you for being here. Thank you for coming back. And thank you for allowing me to continue sharing this journey with you. If you know someone who is grieving and you think this podcast could help them, please share it with them. Subscribe or follow wherever you are listening so you don't miss the next conversations we have coming up. And as always, I am praying for you that Christ is near, you are not alone. And I love you all. Talk to you soon.