When We Learn to Grieve Together, We Learn to Live Better
A conversation with certified Grief Educator, TEDx speaker, and paradigm disruptor Suzanne Jabour
”I don’t believe everything happens for a reason, like my son’s death, but when things do happen, we get to decide how to respond. I decided that I’m going to take what I’ve learned and help other people with grief. That’s what I get to have and that is just pure magic.” ~ Suzanne Jabour
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Suzanne Jabour is changing narratives around how we talk about and navigate grief.
I am changing narratives on how to live, love, and lead from your full self i.e. no longer fitting ourselves into boxes built by others.
Both working to disrupt and shift broken paradigms to help the collective as a whole and doing it with realness, rawness, humor, and enough honesty and specificity that people can actually relate to and use it.
Suzanne and I have been in a number of circles, masterminds, groups, and inside The Unruly Collective for over a year and a half but what I didn’t realize until this conversation is how deeply aligned our missions are and our whys behind them.
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The whole entire reason behind The Unruly Collective
Something Suzanne said that landed extra hard for me…
Grief isn’t just about the BIG things and giving yourself the space and grace to acknowledge the smaller things helps prepare you for the bigger things which guess what…NO ONE gets to escape from in their life.
🙈 The product launch that flopped.
🙈 The Q2 goals which carried over from Q4 into Q1 and now Q2.
🙈 The relationship that quietly dissipated.
🙈 Who you thought you’d be by now.
🙈 The 1-star review on your podcast.
🙈 The collaboration that went sideways.
🙈 The group text that started leaving you out of it.
🙈 Your MIL undermining you in front of the kids and your husband not having your back.
When we practice naming and sitting with those losses together, we build the capacity to show up for each other when the bigger ones come.
And that is what The Unruly Collective is all about. Not just grief but to practice the full, complicated, beautiful mess of being a whole-ass human being.
The human behind the leader — the mom, the executive, the friend, the sister, the partner, the daughter, and any other roles you play.
And doing it in community with other whole human beings showing up in their full, complicated, beautiful messes because THAT is how we collectively support each other to live full and rich lives, having the impact only we can create.
Inside our chat
We cover a LOT of ground and it all matters:
Why grief is a systems-level problem and not a personal failing
What actually happens in the brain and body when you’re grieving (the real symptoms nobody tells you about)
The six-month mark when the world expects you to be ”over it” and what that actually costs grievers
Why grocery stores are genuinely the most hostile environment for someone who is grieving (you’ll never look at an abandoned cart the same way)
How the small losses are the practice ground for the big ones
Why ”anything you need, just ask” is the most unhelpful thing you can say to a grieving person and what to say instead
The connection between grief work, selfishness, and finally putting yourself at the top of the list
Why the systems that were never working for us are starting to crack and why Suzanne and I are both full of hope anyway (highly recommend Becky Mollenkamp’s live where we dive into this much deeper!)
Holding paradox and nuances, the both/and, and the breakdown that leads to the breakthrough.
And I get real about my own grief this year which has been tremendous with the unexpected loss of two dear co-workers, saying goodbye to our heart dog (our 12-yo newf Nuuska), and the inhumane treatment by ICE and devastation of our neighbors and neighborhoods throughout the Twin Cities and other cities and towns around the US.
I’ve not had the brain space to intentionally grow We the Unruly this year as planned AND I’m proud of how I’ve given myself the space and grace to process my grief.
Both can be true.
2026 has been a year collectively and we’re not even halfway there.
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What do you get to have the rest of your life?
Skip ahead to 39:27 if you listen to nothing else.
I ask Suzanne what she gets to have the rest of her life because she chose to turn the most devastating thing that has ever happened to her into a mission.
Her answer is in two parts — personal and collective — and the second will wreck you in the best possible way.
”I love those moments when people say it helped me in a moment I was really struggling. That’s what I get to have on the collective level. And that is just pure magic.” ~ Suzanne Jabour
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The way we approach grief is harmful and it’s on us to shift it
👀 The expectation that you’ll be FINE in three to six months.
👀 The silence we’re supposed to maintain about the losses that don’t look catastrophic from the outside.
👀 The isolation we create by accident when we don’t know how to show up for each other.
==> This is a collective failure that we’ve learned to take on as individual failures instead and fixing it starts exactly the way Suzanne is fixing it: by talking about grief like it’s as normal as the latest true crime documentary we’re watching on Netflix.
Because it is.
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Before you go — one question for the comments:
Suzanne talked about how we’re all experiencing various levels of grief all the time and how naming it, even in the small losses, changes everything.
What is a loss you’ve never called grief or given yourself the permission to process?
Because maybe it’s time to name it out loud.
If you enjoyed today’s post, please consider sharing it with someone who loves being part of changing narratives and shifting paradigms because that shit is needed now more than fucking ever.