Grief is a natural response to loss, not a condition that has to be cured. Gili also talks about a quiet grief that people don’t always speak about: over a breakup, over an illness, over a child with special needs. Pain that gets pushed down doesn’t disappear. It seeps deeper into the body and does damage, physically and emotionally. You have to give it room and feel it, because that’s the only way to go through it instead of staying stuck.
With someone who is grieving, it’s better to avoid “everything will pass” or “this is for the good.” You can tell them that this is probably the hardest thing they will ever go through, that it isn’t fair, that you wish it had never happened, and that you’re right there beside them. Just be present.
When the sadness is too big, Gili suggests not fighting it. According to the Tanya, you don’t deny your feelings. You set aside a fixed time every day to deal with them, to cry and to let the pain out, and afterward you go back to your routine and put your attention on the beauty in the world. During the period when her son was on a ventilator in the hospital, instead of connecting to the pain and the loss the way people expected of her, she chose to connect to joy, to health and to miracles, and that is what happened in the end. For her, “there is nothing more whole than a broken heart” isn’t about the person who hurt you. It’s the understanding that you created this reality yourself through your own thoughts, and that from there you can create something else.
One episode was written after the only son of Shai, a close friend of hers, was murdered in a terror attack. Their friendship had started in an argument on Facebook and turned into three years of heart-to-heart conversations without the two of them ever meeting. When she heard about it and couldn’t reach him, she drove to Kiryat Arba to meet him face to face for the first time. Gili describes a deep crisis of faith there, in the face of the question of where divine providence (hashgacha pratit) was, and she remembers the story of Job and God’s answer, which offers no comfort and only asks a question back. And one morning, on a walk with her dog, she found an abandoned children’s book on a bench, with a question in it about whether you can feel joy and sadness in the same moment.
Someone close to you died, or you lost something that mattered to you, and you don't know what to do with it. There's denial, there's anger, there are moments when you're sure you're fine now, and then it comes at you again with no warning. Gili says there's no right order for getting through it, and that not everyone goes through all of the stages, and that doesn't mean something is wrong with you. She also mentions that there is such a thing as quiet grief, the kind people don't always see or ask about, and that when you push the pain down it doesn't disappear. It just moves to a different place in the body.
Questions this episode answers
What can I say to someone who lost a person close to them, something that will really comfort them and not sound empty?
Everything you believed in collapses all at once. One question, simple and brutal: where were you? And no answer to it settles anything. Gili Man Wolner knows that moment from up close. After a close friend of hers lost his only son in a terror attack, there was no room for tidy words of comfort, or for answers that put the world back in order. There was only staying inside the pain, without running away from it.
Questions this episode answers
How did the connection between Gili and Shai start, and how did it grow?
What did Gili find there that morning, and why did it touch her so much?
What did Gili do when she heard about the attack and tried to reach Shai?
It hurts right now. It really hurts, and sometimes it seems as if the world outside has turned as ugly as whatever is going on inside. It is tempting to want to run away from it, but the way Gili sees it, a time like this is exactly when we have to come back to ourselves again and again. Here she takes apart the saying that there is nothing more whole than a broken heart, and in her words the real break is not in what other people did to us, but in realizing that we created this reality ourselves.
Questions this episode answers
What does "there is nothing more whole than a broken heart" mean? Why is it supposedly a good thing that your heart is broken?