Bits and Pieces with Dr. Joanne Cacciatore
E-Motion Founder Myra Sack joined grief therapist and author of Bearing the Unbearable Dr. Joanne Cacciatore for a conversation on Bits and Pieces, Dr. Jo’s YouTube show, to discuss Myra’s memoir Fifty-seven Fridays.
Watch the full conversation or reflect on the excerpts below:
Dr. Jo on the memoir
“It’s a beautiful, beautiful, tender, painful, poignant book about Havi’s life and Havi’s death.”
On the name Fifty-seven Fridays
“We really began ritualizing our grieving a few days after Havi was diagnosed. It was this idea that came to us about how we might be able to celebrate, honor, be with Havi in a meaningful way more often than just celebrating a birthday every year. Because she wasn’t going to get many birthdays. So we crafted this concept, we just intuited it, it was cellular that we would combine a birthday with the Sabbath, with Shabbat, and call them Shabbirthdays and we would celebrate the shit out of her. Not pretend the pain away, and only invite people who could see her as sacred and not scary. We ended up having 57 of those Shabbirthdays. It was a way for us to move with the hardest thing and to move one week to the next, which was the only time horizon that I could stomach.”
On ritual
“The power of ritual, for me, took the form of making a blueberry smoothie for every day for a year after Havi died. I needed to hear the blender that I had heard when she was alive, to continuing Shabbirthdays, so that our weeks were anchored in that rhythm. Having rhythm in a day in a week is healing. Not healing not in the sort of sense that we heal and it's over, but healing in the sense that we've gone through a rotation of consciousness. It reminds us that we need that.”
On movement
“I think that sort of physical expression of what is going on in our emotional landscape has been one of the things that has helped me sustain what is such an exhausting and ultimately harrowing journey.”
On heartbreak
“I hope that the book first could serve as some companion, some source of safety, some source of feeling seen, feeling like that shattered part of you deserves to be shattered and deserves to be honored. Deserves to be known and understood by people who should be showing up for you. Second that the person who has died in your life deserves to be known. Known by people who never had the chance to meet them. That never knew, weren’t part of their biography because their life was cut short. And that it inspires each of us, you, to tell your story and share your person so that the community of people who can come to know and love them grows.
An excerpt from the book
“From the day of Hav's diagnosis to the day of her death I paid closer attention to everything around me than before. I kept my eyes on the only thing that mattered, and let the rest of the world blur and then fade to the periphery. And you know what I missed? Nothing. Because paying attention to the things that matter is the only thing that matters. Family. Nature. Long meals. Slow dancing. Laughter. Yet our noisy world is confusing and distracting and celebrates superficiality over authenticity. So we get lost in comparisons of whose house is nicer, who gets the better promotion, how incredible that family's trip to Hawaii looks, and their pictures on Instagram. Even after holding Havi through seizures, and then lying there trembling as she took her last breath on my chest in our bed, I still worry about whether I stack up or not. I still get insecure about the promotions I notice other people posting on their LinkedIn profiles. Promotions that I'm not getting. I still wonder whether I'm achieving enough. The tug of the world of the living takes its toll, and so does the world of the privileged, where ambition and ego seem to get the better of us if we aren't paying close attention. If we don't welcome the bigger world.”