004: Grief expert Meghan Riordan Jarvis on Pink Floyd and cutting the bullshit

The trauma therapist and author on her late mother's surprising love for The Wall—and a legacy that echoes through a house full of music.

Welcome to My Mum Loved This Song, a series of conversations about music and grief.

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As a rule, I would say I'm a fairly organised person who's not forgetful, doesn't lose things and has reasonable coordination. Am I tempting fate by writing this? Perhaps, but I'm doing so to say: I can always tell when my grief is getting more, well, griefy (if you know, you know—I've yet to find the right word for this snowballing feeling) because I become clumsy. I drop things, walk into walls, forget things, feel intense physical fatigue and generally like my head is stuffed with cotton wool. It took me years to make the connection between these very physical symptoms and the fact I was grieving. And one of the people who helped me figure it out was today's guest, Meghan Riordan Jarvis.

Meghan is a trauma therapist, author, podcast host and consultant who has decades of professional experience in grief and loss. You can read more about her work in the interview below, but one of her many areas of expertise is how grief can affect our brain and nervous system, and how we feel and experience that loss in our physical bodies as a result. Through Meghan's work I've learned to be able to observe and listen to those symptoms in my own body, knowing when to slow down and be extra gentle with myself. I'd really recommend Meghan's podcast episode with The Grief Gang's Amber Jeffrey (whose contribution to My Mum Loved This Song you can read here) if you want to learn more.

Already an expert in her world of work, Meghan thought she was well-prepared should the time come to navigate her own trauma. Then, when her parents passed away in quick succession, she faced the realisation that "you don't get to skip your own experience with loss."

Going into starting My Mum Loved This Song was a bit of a daunting experience. I knew I wanted to have these conversations, but would anyone want to have them with me?! This interview was the first one I did, and I'm so grateful to Meghan for her time and her illuminating knowledge.

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I hope you'll find something in here that helps. Thank you for reading.

Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your work?

I am a grief expert. I'm a trauma therapist, so I'm trained in lots of body-centred therapies to help move the energy of trauma through the body, and I use that through the lens of grief and loss. I've been in private practice in DC for 23 years, focusing on people who have significant symptoms that make living life hard, such as a hard time sleeping or eating, but also often their frame of mind, like not being able to see the world as an open place full of goodness.

I've done a lot of training, and I have a couple of master's degrees, and I thought I knew so much about grief and loss that as my life included more grief and loss, I'd be able to navigate it with a higher level of skill than other people. And while that was true to some degree, you don't get to skip your own experience with loss. My dad died in 2017 after a year-long battle with cancer, and then my mum died two years later, suddenly in her sleep when we were on vacation together.

With my dad's death, we knew it was coming. So because it was anticipated, it was more something that I participated in. He lived a distance from me, but I was able to travel to see him. And so every weekend I visited, my brain was learning. Oh, he is losing his life. He was smaller and less able to get around and less well. He progressively got worse until he died. It was really hard and sad, but it didn't feel like a tragedy. My dad was 80, and he was also a person who was in my life, but I didn't centre my life around him.

And then in 2019 my mum died suddenly. She had a short illness. What we thought was a stomach bug, I now think was a bleeding ulcer that went undetected. (Which I don't blame anyone for, it's very difficult to detect that.) But my experience with my mother's death was totally and wholly different and more like the experience that my clients have, in that I was completely overwhelmed by real terror in my body. In the instant that I understood that she'd died, I had strong ruminations, repetitive thoughts. The thought was that it was my fault that she had died, and it was relentless. And because I'm a therapist, and because I've sat with hundreds of clients who've had those experiences, I was like, "Oh, I know what this is." It's humbling to sit inside the space that your clients have really struggled in.

So, a couple of things about that. One, I knew that it could be okay. So even though it was terrifying, I had a crack of hope. I knew this was likely PTSD, probably something I wasn't going to be able to treat on my own. The thing that was miraculous was that because I'd been helping people in this space, I knew who to call and how to get help.

That's a real passion project of mine. There's grief that resolves on its own, that's hard to navigate but that you can build muscles to learn to carry. And then there's grief that needs treatment, and it's very difficult. We have some diagnoses over here like prolonged grief disorder. It's less about the length of time and more about the disruption to your central nervous system and whether you're able to recover. I could not recover on my own. I needed inpatient treatment and help, and then when I got out, I was like, wow, there's some stuff we do not talk about accurately. It was like reading books about a foreign country and then finally visiting there and being like, "they're not describing this mountain range correctly."

When I came out of treatment, I spent a lot of time reading. The way the brain works in trauma, for a lot of people, they can't read. But I couldn't stop reading. I read close to 200 books. And really, what I was looking for was somebody who'd written down all the things I felt needed to be said more plainly and concretely and with more real instruction. And, of course, there was nothing. So, I wrote a memoir about my personal experience, and then I wrote a clinical book, which is called Can Anyone Tell Me?: Essential Questions about Grief and Loss. It asks: Can anyone tell me why I can't eat? Can anyone tell me why I can't sleep? Can anyone tell me why I think that butterfly is my mum? Can anyone tell me why smart people say such stupid shit? It's really the whole gamut of what happens.

My mum died six months before Covid, so I took a bunch of time off to do treatment. I barely went back to work, and then Covid shut us all down. And so that's when I started writing, lecturing, talking and having a more instructional platform. I wanted less bullshit about grief and loss, less of the soft voices to make you feel better and holding space. Less of that and more like, it's kind of a street fight. You're gonna have to come up with some skills. Try it. If it doesn't work, leave it there and find something else.

I teach a curriculum for clinicians and in corporate settings called The Grief Mentor Method. It's built from six core concepts. And those concepts are everything anyone ever told me helped them in grief and loss, on a menu. And music is one of those. One of the things we talk about is the idea that in grief, there's novelty, there's this terrible change process that nobody wants. You've lost something you can't live without, but you must figure out how to live without it. And the novelty is the pain. Your brain doesn't know how to do this because it's never done it before. And so we discuss, what are the supportive practices? What are the things that can support you in your grief? And music is always one.

Who would you like to talk about today and can you tell me a bit about them?

My dad was a big opera fan and classical music fan, and when I was studying in high school I found music helped me study. So I had a period where my dad was giving me cassette tapes of classical music, which I really loved. But the person who really has such an imprint in my heart with music is my mum. There's so many stories.

I have five brothers and sisters. We lived rurally, and so we always were in the car listening to the radio. My mum liked a certain kind of genre of singer-songwriter music, and so I have a lot of that in my blood—her driving and singing these ballad-type songs, which I would say were in line with her personality. But as I got older, my brothers—who played guitar and sang, and I sang—we were sharing back with her music that we liked. And my mother became obsessed with Pink Floyd. She was, you know, sturdy shoes, sweater, if you think of a little librarian-type. Someone you'd assume didn't swear and probably went to church daily. She fit right into that lane, until Pink Floyd. When my parents built their house, at the time it was very cutting-edge, they built speakers into every room so she could listen to them. So many times I would drive up to her house, and you could feel the vibrations in the driveway from the music.

It's one of those things I just love, because it's so incongruous yet completely true. I think she began listening to Pink Floyd because my brothers liked Pink Floyd (also Jethro Tull, but really Pink Floyd). And then she just was like, "Oh, this is the greatest band that ever was." My family also has a deep passion for Crowded House. My oldest brother fell in love with their music. The lead singer is just an incredible musical artist. There's a lot of threads of that band in our lives. My husband and I even met at a Crowded House show here in DC. My mum also had a couple of total favourite Crowded House songs. She didn't know the names either, so she would say, "Is this the blue dress song?" ["Into Temptation"] Her joy about songs that she loved was so kid-like. I didn't get to really see that side of her when I was a kid, but when I was older, maybe when we didn't need her to be so instructional, she really showed us that side with her love of music.

I love that you could just hear it booming from the house.

Totally, driving up the driveway, you could feel it underneath you.

What's your mum's name?

Mary.

Thank you. Is there a particular Pink Floyd song you associate with Mary?

It was The Wall. So not really a song, the whole thing. Maybe it would be "Comfortably Numb," but it's more that she would turn it on and you had to sit there until the album was over. And it wasn't a background thing, she had the music on loud. Plus, she wasn't a huge fan of everything that they did, it was The Wall more than anything.

If you hear that music now, how does it make you feel?

Well, I don't listen to Pink Floyd. I don't dislike them, but I don't have a single album. So it always catches me somewhere. There are some things, like my mum wore a popular perfume and my dad wore a pretty popular cologne. And if I smell those things, it can really hurt. It can viscerally bring them back in a way that is like, my body misses them. With music it's more like it brings back a memory. Instead of a visceral memory, it's something that's in my head. It's a little titrated. So, when I hear a Pink Floyd song, or when I listen to Crowded House, it has more of a sweetness to it than some of the other visceral experiences of being pulled into the missing of them.

Also, my mum used to do this thing where she would confuse the words shit-faced and bullshit. And she would say, "Oh, I went to the library and I was so shit-faced that they didn't have my book." And then everyone would laugh, and she'd be like, "Oh, that's the drunk one." And then she would laugh at herself. She had an incredible laugh. She would laugh so hard and then you'd have to wait minutes for her to finish what she was saying, because she couldn't talk through her own laughter, which is a family trait. There's something about the fact that she loved Pink Floyd, which is not what you'd think when you met her. You would think it was a joke. And I just loved that. I love saying to people, "This is one of my mum's favourite songs." And people being like, "this is Pink Floyd's The Wall." I know! She loved it. Listened to it every day.

When you think of that memory, do you see her in a specific room in the house?

In the kitchen, in the evening after dinner. She'd listen to music when she was cleaning up. TV didn't play a big role in my life, so there wasn't one in the kitchen but she did have this incredible stereo system, one of those multi-CD players. Standing in the kitchen after dinner, tidying up and rocking out to this heavy, trippy music. That's how I think of her.

How do you honour your parents in your day-to-day?

I talk about them a lot, and I talk to my kids about them a lot. I openly grieve them, which keeps them on my mind and in my heart and consciousness. In terms of music, I think about how my mum loved music and shared it with us and made that a norm. When I met my husband, I had like 1,000 albums, and he had like 1,000 albums, so we had to get a big apartment because we had so much music. If I meet people who have no albums, I don't understand it. There's so much music in our house, and there's so much opportunity to do music with my kids. I think that's partly her legacy. It really came from her.

I think it's the same for me. If I'm ever lucky enough to have a family, I'd like to pass it down, too.

It's so fun. We drove across the country during Covid, and our kids were listening to Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande and Meghan Trainor. That's fine, I don't have anything against it, but I was like, now I'm going to introduce you to a band called Squeeze. Because we were in the car all day long, to have a container to be like, "This band is called Duran Duran, you're gonna love them." That was so fun. And it is really fun, one of my kids is like, "I'm gonna go upstairs and listen to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours." And I'm like, mmhmm! I taught you that. I gave you that. I'm so happy.

If you could share one tool for people who are grieving, what would it be?

I teach about this, so I know that this isn't true for everybody, but for me it's creating a narrative that's an ongoing story about what it's like to live—both with and without—my parents. And understanding that it's a perpetual line, of ebbs and flows, is really important and so I do that for myself. I write about it a lot, but I've also identified the people I can talk to about it a lot. It's not everybody.

I think about my grief symptoms almost like an allergic reaction. When there's a flare-up, I have people that I think of as being like the EpiPen. I reach out and they give me a little shot. "Of course, you're sad, of course, it's hard." That connection is so critical because it's easy to feel isolated in grief. Isolated is different to lonely. Lonely is like, I don't have as much connection as I would like. Isolation is when you feel cut-off from the rest of the world.

When you tell people it's going to be a hard week, or this anniversary is coming up or I have this meeting and I wish I could talk to my mum about it, you invite yourself into your reality a bit more. I can't call my mum, but I can call other people and tell them how much I wish I could call her. I have a thread with my friend and business partner Julianne and it's just like, "it is so stupid that my mum is dead." And she'll write back: "So stupid. Dumbest thing ever. Zero stars. Don't recommend." You know? And I don't even really tell her what I'm upset about, I just get the validation that she knows. She knows whatever it is that's happening, I wish my mum was here.