Exploring Grief and Death Conversations with the Creator of Morbid Curiosity Kimberley Mead

In this episodeI talk with Kimberley Mead, a grief therapist who transitioned from a career in the arts at age 40. Kimberley  shares her journey into grief therapy and the development of her game, Morbid Curiosity, which has sparked transformative conversations about death. She discusses the importance of storytelling in grief therapy and how her game fosters deeper connections and meaningful conversations about mortality. 

The episode also highlights the profound impact of discussing death on personal relationships and societal attitudes towards grief. Jill and Kimberley  delve into the nuances of grief, the power of storytelling, and how addressing these themes can enrich our lives. 

The episode promises an insightful conversation that navigates grief with compassion and curiosity, encouraging listeners to explore conscious living and end-of-life planning. Tune in for a heartwarming and thought-provoking discussion about death, dying, and the legacy we leave behind.

00:00 Introduction to Seeing Death

00:36 Meet Kimberley Mead: From Arts to Grief Therapy

01:42 The Power of Storytelling in Grief Therapy

02:54 Personal Journeys and Career Changes

04:01 The Game of Morbid Curiosity

06:17 Understanding Grief and Pain

09:58 The Role of Pain in Healing

12:12 Engaging Conversations Through the Game

14:54 Creating Meaningful Connections

16:33 How the Game Works

24:08 Exploring Historical Perspectives on Privacy

24:56 Deep Conversations and Meaningful Connections

26:11 Embracing Death Positivity

27:47 Navigating Personal Loss and Memories

29:46 The Importance of Deep Friendships

31:09 Creating and Sharing the Morbid Curiosity Game

39:35 The Role of a Grief Therapist

41:48 Where to Find the Game and Workshops

44:13 Supporting the Podcast

https://www.morbidcuriositygame.com

https://www.facebook.com/morbidcuriositygame

https://www.instagram.com/morbidcuriositygame/

https://kmeadcounseling.com/

Transcript

Kimberley: [00:00:00] The cards also give this opportunity to start realizing these stories are gonna come up and why not tell them. And so it just gets us started storytelling again to start telling like, what is the world about? 

Jill: Welcome back to Seeing Death Clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and end of life.

Coach here on my show, I have conversations with guests that explore the topics of death, dying grief, and life itself. My goal is to create a space where you can challenge the ideas you might already have about these subjects. I want to encourage you to open your mind and consider perspectives beyond what you may currently believe to be true.

In this episode, I talk to Kimberley Mead. A grief therapist who transitioned from a career in the arts at age 40, Kimberley shares her journey into grief therapy, the development of her game, morbid curiosity, and the transformative conversations it has sparked. She discusses the importance of storytelling and grief therapy and how her game creates deeper connections and meaningful conversations about [00:01:00] death.

The discussion also touches on the profound impact of talking about death on personal relationships. And societal attitudes towards grief and mortality. Tune in for an insightful conversation about navigating grief, the power of storytelling, and the unexpected ways these themes can enrich our lives.

The audio in this episode starts off a little bit choppy, but we were able to fix it a few minutes in so it gets better, I promise. Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome, Kimberley to the podcast. Thank you for coming on with me. I appreciate you taking time outta your weekend to come and talk to me.

Why don't you just tell me a little about you, where you're from, anything like that that you wanna share. 

Kimberley: I'm thinking about this question, how to introduce myself. I think the biggest thing for me that runs through all of my work is being a person who is a storyteller and interested in gathering stories, being with people in their stories.

I am a grief therapist. I changed from being a full-time in the arts world. At about the age of 40, I [00:02:00] came into being a therapist, landed at a grief agency as both a grief and trauma therapist and. Have felt a calling to do that ever since. And from that I also ended up developing a game about death, which helps people to explore all things that are curious and all things that are storytelling, and I found a way to make it a game.

So that people could have that runway into these deeper conversations. It's playful and it's just been such a change for me as a person. My family did not talk about dying. I didn't go to funerals when I became an adult. I had this gap of ability in my forties. Coming into this made such a drastic change in my life and really not only removed fear, but added such a a layer.

Connection and relationships. That's why I really enjoy what I do and I have so 

Jill: it does change us. I don't think I knew that you were a grief therapist. I knew about the game, but I didn't realize that's the [00:03:00] work. You said you got into it and when you were 40, that's one of those careers that we have to feel called to.

It's certainly not for the light of heart to spend your time with people in that space. You have to know how to process on your own. You have to know how to process your own grief because a lot of times it will get triggered as well. That's really beautiful work that you do. I love that you, I'm a career changer as well.

About 40 years old. Same thing. Started off as a pastry chef. Also art. Now I work with people who are dying and I also work with Greece. I actually just last week took a training to become a funeral celebrant, and it was amazing. You're just gonna sit and listen to people's stories and then raped a ceremony basically to tell that story in front of a group of people.

I was like, oh, alright. I could do that. I'm real excited about this because I think we don't tell our [00:04:00] stories. Well, the 

Kimberley: game actually came out of working with littles. Adults at the grief Center, the littles were playful because they, you know, they, they inhabit the world so differently, but the adults who sometimes really did have dark questions just didn't know where to go with it.

They were very shut down. That's the part that, you know, I added in was this is really about storytelling and one of the deepest relationships, I got pain because of the game. We went to some de salons when order of the Good Death was running their larger desolate. I met Kaitlyn and one of the relationships that was there, which is so deep, and I consider her one of my deepest friendships.

She at the time was a hospice nurse, and that always stuck with me is her sharing how might she wanted these conversations to happen earlier on so that when we are facing our grief, when we're sitting in those goodbyes or forced into a goodbye. We're not as caught up. [00:05:00] The details. We wanna share that time for stories.

We wanna share that time for the relationship, the connection, the love that is pouring forth. And if we haven't started to have these conversations a little bit earlier that can really, she had witnessed it really got blocked. So she became such a deep relationship. She used to travel with us for the game.

And just one of the most joyous things that came out of it was I have friends now who are hospice nurses, funeral directors, and morticians every turn in my life when I have needed that world to appear because I'd started this project. I had people who came forward when my parents got ill, these people stepped forward at different times to help me.

We all became a community helping each other when things were hit. It was one of the greatest gifts. It's storytelling at the end. It's community. It's not blocked by, we don't talk about that or that isn't happening, so why are you talk to? It removes so quickly all of the surface. [00:06:00] Let's us go into this very heart to heart place with each other.

Even our game uses trivia so that our brainiacs the way to also be part of the conversation. If you haven't had a lot of death in your life, you might sometimes in some of these things feel a little intimidated or a little lost, but we want that storytelling aspect. And I found that's the biggest thing for people in grief therapy as well, is people get tired of listening to their stories.

People get tired of hearing. They think that. Grief and pain are the same thing, and grief and pain are related, but they're not the only thing that's inside of grief. So I think a lot of people's fear of hearing those stories as a grief therapist retired. 

Jill: I like that grief and pain are not the same thing, and that seems to me in my experience, working with people, something that leads to shame and a confusion for somebody that's grieving because they think.

I should be sad. I should be in pain and I'm not. I'm actually [00:07:00] relieved, or whatever it is. They don't wanna share that with people because they're getting judged for what? You're not sad, you're not grieving properly in people's eyes, but we can feel a variety of things around grief and around the death of somebody, the death of a pet, or.

The death of a career, right? As US career changers or as women. I'm in perimenopause. Like there's definitely some grief that's coming up for me that I wasn't expecting in this time of change for me leaving behind youth or whatever. Moving into this next phase, we don't really talk about all the different aspects of it, so I love that you put that kind of like that they're not the same.

Grief and pain are not the same. I love that it's 

Kimberley: difficult for people who are grieving. My experience has been when that pain, we start to feel the pain lesson, it leaves us potentially with this idea of we're also going to leave our loved one because the [00:08:00] pain is a very physical, palpable I am with my loved ones to some extent.

I think that's how it's viewed. I just said goodbye to one of my beloved dogs. This is probably the first time I've truly understood that my pain related to this is a finality. There's no, there's no walking this back. There's no regaining this. And I think that's part of grief is like there's a permanence to many goodbyes and the more permanent, such as death, the more of a truth of this person.

This situation doesn't happen again in any possible way. And feeling my pain that is related to the relationship and also at the same time feeling my deep love. And this is the first time really I've been able to embody myself that those two things are absolutely gonna walk together for a while, but when the pain starts to subside, start to have joy my other pup, and we go on a walk and I'm not necessarily just like in, you know, [00:09:00] I wasn't thinking of my other dog 24 7 when they were with me.

I was thinking of them alone of 24 7. But it is really interesting to start recognizing that, of course. Pain and loss are there, but also this deep love, many grievers. I think it's so hard to talk about those that we've lost because the pain is still very palpable. It's also hard to talk about when the pain starts to go away, as if that was a betrayal of our relationship.

A signal that it's lessened, and I really don't see it that way. I've witnessed it so often. People who, both in my personal life, but also that is not a truth, that your pain is. Your grief, your love, thereby when the pain diminishes somehow all of those things go with it. You can still grieve and you will deeply.

I do very much for my parents. It's not filled with the same type of palpable in the moment pain. 

Jill: It's making me think, and I want to try to collect my brain and put it out in words, right. How [00:10:00] we're such a pain avoidant society. We wanna numb pain, whether it's physical pain, right away, pop a pill, make that pain go away, go to the doctor, figure out how to make the pain go away.

And so when I think of grief, pain will probably be part of it. Even if you are relieved, even if you're not necessarily sad that somebody's gone, there is gonna be some pain attached with it. I wish that there was a way that we could use grief almost to honor the fact that we're human and that we feel things, that feeling things is important.

And I don't know if we could get there being in the society that we're in, where we numb pain so much. But also maybe if we could get better with our grief, then maybe we wouldn't feel the need to numb the other pain as well. Like maybe there's a way that we can use it. Almost like a circuit, right? That we work with our grief.

It makes it a little bit easier to deal with other pains, dealing with other pains. It makes it [00:11:00] easier to deal with grief and. Maybe we would heal as a society a little bit. I think we, I think 

Kimberley: it's interesting. I've had a couple clients in therapy and as we've gone through the process of them healing, they've expressed that they've wondered if the reason we avoid things like therapy is that we're gonna have to learn how to grieve.

We're going to have to learn that struggle is actually part of our mission. I always resist this element like you have to be in pain in order to grow as in like it can be interpreted as, well, you deserved this or, or you must go through hell in order to be a better person. I do think that we figure out how strong we are.

We figure out the complexities of things like grief and. Recovery and healing. And when we hold those together, I think it just does, it does soothe the path of healing. And so I've noticed like [00:12:00] in therapy, when we are working towards healing, there is a process of grieving no matter what the person is there with the topics, situations that I encounter.

I also find it interesting in our game when we originally. Set out the game and we, we would go sell it ourselves. We're not particularly great. People would walk by our table, but they would keep a distance. A friend of ours started asking an initial trivia question and it was death related. Usually our trivia question is, do you know the difference between the cemetery and a graveyard?

I don't know if I knew the difference. Actually. I love the answers because people come up with so many creative answers, but it stops them for a moment. I'd say 98% of people just kind of pause and you see them think. Probably about 50% of the people know the answer. Maybe I don't. I've never thought about, but if you do and if you don't, and those who do are so happy to share it.

And those who don't are like, Nope. They're really inquisitive. And so we tell [00:13:00] them. And the differences that a graveyard is connected to a church, it's sanctified ground sacred. It's the yard of the church, the graves of the church, and then a cemetery. And you think like Arlington National Cemetery, it is a cemetery that is like.

Related to a specific church yard and it's amazing. And then all of a sudden we see this change where people are like, and you see them come closer and they're like, tell me more. Tell me what else you got. Mm-hmm. And all of a sudden, you know, we'll introduce them then to a conversation question. 'cause we mix the two together so that this is easier on people.

You can get out of debt if you need to by using the trivia. And you can also go into stories. We'll introduce them to a trivia question. That opens the door to, let's have some real conversation. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Kimberley: It's, it's just really interesting that people think this is going to be filled too much with pain. And there is, I do not deny that there can be tears.

We've seen that in our game. I see that therapy, but in therapy I also see laughter, I see [00:14:00] longing. I see I'll tear up on occasional, have wet eyes, I guess would be a nice way to say it. And I remember asking my supervisor when I was new at this, like, is that wrong? And I've even had clients express things to me about it that they said, I think if I was telling you this deepest story about my life, particularly when there are tragic, painful losses, if there wasn't some glimmer of humanity in there, I'm not sure I could stay here.

And my supervisor said, what you're witnessing when that happens, to stay focused on your client, to stay focused in their story, not what's happening in your life, that is a reaction to the love. That is a reaction sometimes to pain. It is a reaction to the story that is now living in that moment that's shared between the two of you.

And I experienced that book in therapy with my friends obviously, 'cause they know we're gonna talk just now. Um, also in with the game, we have people and when they come up we have these [00:15:00] deep conversations and they're not usually about pain. The pain starts to subside, get to that deep story of love and anything else a person really needs to share in that moment.

It is a very sacred moment when people can bear that pain to get to the love and the elixir of grief itself, I think is, is in our society 'cause we're so the pain. So just wanna fix you. We wanna fix me. That when I think grief has a deeper place, which is tending to the pain, just tending and witnessing the love and trying to share it and connect and say, how do I get through this?

How do I get through this massive change, particularly in a world that at least in a lot of American modern culture, there's really no space to grieve. No waiting while it was grieving. So 

Jill: true. I do wanna know more about the game itself. I've seen the game at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. I think it's supposed to be mood, but I feel really dumb saying it that way.

Yes, I have seen the game there. Even before I got connected to you, I [00:16:00] saw it the years ago and I was like, oh, this is really cool. And like there was a couple little samples on the back and I talked to my kids about it. It was right. A really neat game. I did not purchase it at that time, but it's on the bucket list of my, again, my family.

We talk about death and dying so much that they're like, mom, no more. No more games about death. Please just tell us a little bit, you know the name, how many cards there are, how the game works. I know the death deck isn't really a game. That one's more of just conversations. Yours is actually more of a game.

You keep score. How's that work? So the 

Kimberley: game came from working with kids. Our initial versions, we did try to make it much more like, oh, it's a competition to become the grim reaper, or who's the most deaf, knowledgeable, and what we found quickly was people wanted rules, but then they wanted to forget them, which is fine.

Again, it's that like, here's a little bit to get you started. Then you realize you really didn't. But what we ended up doing, we had amazing people who [00:17:00] helped us with our initial game plays. We had theater people, writers, artists, a lot from that world, because that's my background as well as my husband's background.

We had originally been like, is anyone gonna be interested? And they were. So we created black cards that are trivia cards, and those cards move you more quickly. They are all sorts of tribute. They could be scientific terms, they could be history, they could be culture, they could be just anything that we could research, mythology, things about the body farm, anything that was death related.

And then we have conversation questions. Some are quirky. And some are more personal. I lay everything out in front of me and make sure that I have not waited it one direction or another so that the, it's just random which guard is chosen. The rules we came up with said you put both stacks side by side.

That way the group is controlling how fast or slow they're moving through topics. You go round robin. That person chooses what kind of card they want. They read it out. If you get [00:18:00] the trivia right, everybody gets a question for the storytelling one. The card is awarded because people wanted to know how to stop.

We said, okay, you get, uh, seven points and then you'll be the most mortgage for the evening. What we actually hope happens, and usually what we see happens is people get so involved in the conversation. These are starting points and a way to keep things moving, and they're a way to stay like, oh, let's, let's stay in the topic of death.

In this playful way, they start laughing and forget whether they're gonna keep score. We tried to balance it so that people can play the way they want, but they have a beginning and the end sometimes with this. You just need to know how do I start and how do I stop? We tried to make questions that our, our questions, we found out really quickly.

We had to have a a why this question. So we have basic internal rules for us before we release questions. It's like, do they promote the potential of a deeper conversation? They cannot be tabloid esque. So we [00:19:00] don't do things about serial killers. We don't do things that are unnecessarily gory. As far as we can tell, we wanna make sure it doesn't unnecessarily make you more afraid of doing this.

And those are the really basic ones. Like does it open conversation? And we don't wanna be in the tabloid world. If I'm gonna include a statistic, why? How does conversation branch off from there? We don't wanna push our version of, oh, that questions to create this one conversation. We wanna know, does it have the potential to open up conversation for people?

And stories telling in particular. And every time we've gotten feedback from both friends and strangers, because we sell it ourselves. And every time I get a little bit like, do I wanna keep this project going? I have these people come up and they just tell me how things work for them and I get re-energized.

Mm-hmm. So it's basically, you have cards, you pull cards. When you get things right, you get rewarded for that, and then you stop when you have seven points. That's the simplest version of it. What's beautiful is most people take it where they wanna take it, so a trivia [00:20:00] question might be something. And we do use multiple choice because we realized in our first gameplay, people don't wanna have the un.

Yeah, we want them to be rewarded and curious even in the multiple choice. And my husband came up with all the multiple choice. He's got a better sense of humor than I do. He's a historian. He's also in the arts. He's the lead singer for, um, Irish punk rock acting background, just like me. So we're holding from the sense of how do you create story?

How do you create these moments? We're inviting people in A trivia question might be something like, what is the difference between a cemetery and a graveyard? And then we'll have four potentials and you'll look at them and go, is it that? And we like people to be really like, huh, none of them are super easy.

If you're in this world, they're easier. And then conversation questions, which are my favorite that cause quite a stir early on between a couple of friends who played the game was if an artist asked you to destroy their unpublished works. Upon their death, would you do [00:21:00] so and why or why not? I got that question.

Most of the questions come from something that happened in our own life or something that we got fascinated by. That question comes because I knew a photographer, a very famous photographer when I was working in a photography gallery in Carmel, California, and this photographer on his 80th birthday burned all of his negatives.

He personally said, I do not want anyone touching my art. Or anything that isn't the way I wanted it released. We know this has come up because of princess estate. This comes up when we think about celebrities. I can't remember which author had his hard drive steamrolled, and it's a question like if you're an artist and you have all this art, but you have it released, it.

It creates a really big question for the people of what to do with it afterwards. So you have a lot of different ways that this can branch off. In regards to the question we saw that it caused a rift between two people. 'cause they had totally different answers. They did have this more heated discussion because they were both artists.

It was [00:22:00] fascinating how it can very quickly become personal. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Kimberley: I was in one recently and the quote unquote simple question of, is there anything unusual that you would like to be buried with? If you were to be, you know, or cremated with, and I was, we were at a going away party for a golf friend of ours playing the game, and my husband answered the question.

He said, my leather jacket, we've been doing this game together for nine years. And I didn't know that. I thought, I'm so glad to know that, that, and then I asked him, you know, privately, I said, tell me the story about this. I didn't realize. And I was so grateful because I had this rich conversation about.

Music and identity and belonging and why a leather jacket. For him, it was so important and I felt invited into his world to hear that. Hmm. So those are the type of questions we don't get into necessarily things like DNRs or how you would like. That last week, days, or hours to be, but those questions do happen.

Those answers do happen for people. Like, what [00:23:00] would you like playing? That came from us listening to the Andy Griffith show while a friend of ours was in his last hours, and I thought, I wonder what TV program people want on in the background, you know? And yeah. Why that one? He was very mad at one particular character, which was, I wish I knew the story, why he hated this one character.

Every time he came on, he would wake up just to. Swear at that one person. Beautiful storytelling, very heartfelt relationship I had with this individual. And yet it's not a story that would be easy to tell in any other place. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Kimberley: So the cards also give this opportunity to start realizing these stories are gonna come up and why not tell them?

And so it just gets us started. And yet again, having a way without being in therapy, without being at a funeral to start storytelling again. To start telling like, what is the world about? And I do think it makes us very aware. Of the preciousness of all of our relationships, our relationship with our own mortality as well, and that's one of the biggest changes too.

My relationships have gotten deeper, but my own [00:24:00] ability to connect to the world and to others has also grown and become much more peaceful and un rushed. 

Jill: So I actually have a Facebook group where I ask questions. My husband also is a history guy. And one of the questions that got a lot of discussion was he was listening to the biography of George Washington.

After his death, Martha Washington burned every letter written from him to her, and my husband went on and said, you know, what do you think about this? Some people were like, that's terrible. We should know these things. Other people were like, no, that's between them. We are not owed anything. About their personal life.

It was fascinating how different people's beliefs were about that topic, but that's why I love that group because I love the comments. I love the conversations. I love the things that people say. Even like you mentioned with your husband not knowing that [00:25:00] thing about the leather jacket, and I just feel like so many of our relationships are superficial.

I don't think it's on purpose. I think we've been taught to not talk about things that are deep at all, and I much prefer to talk about things like that. So when I have the opportunity, that's why I created a whole line of t-shirts that are quote unquote, death positive. It's partially because when I'm walking around, if I'm wearing a shirt that says something about living my life fully and it's got a skeleton, somebody will stop.

And be like, oh, that shirt's really cool. And then I'm like, oh, thanks. Made it myself. And we have a discussion and it's much deeper. It's much more meaningful to me to connect with people on that level, including the people that I think I know the best. When it comes down to it, there's things where I'm like, I had no idea.

So I love that you've been finding a similar. Experience [00:26:00] of that connection. I think there is something about having those conversations with people as well, that makes me appreciate my relationship with them a little bit differently. And just my relationship with humans in general because it allows me to have more compassion towards everybody knowing that we're all grieving, we're all afraid of dying, even though I'm okay with dying.

I'm still afraid of dying in a painful way or dying young and leaving my children. I still have my fears around death, even though I know that it's gonna happen and I'm okay with it. I'm not okay with how it could happen in some cases. I love that it's made me view the world and view people differently, and I just want everybody to think about it, to think about death, to think about dying their own.

Everybody else's, you know, have these conversations. And most of the time [00:27:00] the conversations aren't sad and overwhelming. Sometimes there'll be a tear here and there, especially if it's somebody that comes up to me out in public and says, you know, my wife died and left behind three young kids because that touches my pain, that touches my fear.

I'll get a little bit choked up sometimes, but most of the time it ends up just being a really lovely conversation and we laugh and have a good time and. Again, I connected to somebody in a way it would've never in the past, and I love that. 

Kimberley: It's one of the reasons why I really love your story about, here's this piece of history.

You're reading a biography about somebody. You share what somebody did. Everybody has an opinion. I don't think if I said to you, oh, I'm gonna give you a trivia question. It's surprising how fast these go into very personal places. Mm-hmm. When my parents died, they died about two weeks apart. Each one of them kept letters and cards, so they had s.

They had bags full, you know? And I was like, this seems so wrong to [00:28:00] destroy. Mm-hmm. I'm not gonna keep all of it. My mom had already curated some of her own journals. She had destroyed some stuff earlier on. She had actually told me at some point in the world, you know, she said, I wanna give these. To you and and your cousin.

And so I knew what to do with them, but all the cards and everything, I'm like, what do we do with this? I actually asked the mortician, could they be cremated with some of these? 

Jill: Okay. 

Kimberley: I think the only reason I had ever thought about all of these things was because of being in this world. And I thought, oh, I do know people who are mortician and they will tell me if this is possible, and they'll tell me why or why not.

And so both my parents were cremated with probably like a box full of cards. A couple of them I kept just as representations. Mm-hmm. Of their relationships in the world. The mortician, surprisingly enough because they understood who we were, figured out quickly that we could handle more serious things.

They even asked us, do you, you know, do you wanna know more about how, how we put the cards in? Do you want this as a box? Do you want it spread [00:29:00] over? They were able to share some information that maybe others couldn't. If I give you a trivia question that talks about this, it's amazing how fast.

Potentially some people are going to go about talking about their own experience, reading parents' journals, what they want done with their own journals. They might start thinking about that box of cards that it sits by the bed from previous relationships even. But it's interesting, a trivia question can lead to that.

Most of the time we don't get the opportunity. To explore these things, but once we start, just as you and I both know, this can be part of the fabric of your life from that point on. You know, I think you and I have talked about it like very briefly, like the idea of this is our soapbox. Yeah. I want people to have these conversations.

I want them to have the conversations because they are so rich and they're so touching, and I would miss out on so much of another person. If these don't happen, and I have missed out on people who have died, and only afterwards did I realize that the offer [00:30:00] of a deeper friendship was actually on the table, and I just didn't recognize it because we were a very isolated family.

So figuring out how to make these connections has been kind of an adult task for me. I regret not having those deeper relationships as I got to know other people around them and their widow, I was like, oh. I missed out on so much love and so many stories and I'm hearing them now and I want that person.

I can't have them. But it really like the, these activities of being in the grief world really make me want it for myself and want it for other people so we don't miss out. Like you get one shot and it's not supposed to be dire. It's supposed to be deep. And I think most of the people I meet in. The death world that are doing some type of work and that is very straightforwardly death worker work.

They're very aware of life. They're very much. Making space for their own [00:31:00] life, making space for others. And it's not from this, oh my God, I only have so much. Sometimes it's, this is so amazing. This is so rich. And that's the gift back that I really love. And it's why I chose the game not to be a therapy game.

'cause I didn't wanna spend my weekends doing therapy. But it doesn't mean, it doesn't lead to those conversations. It just means the who you, I've always said, who you play with determines the tone of the evening. Who you play with will determine. What type of conversations you have. Some people will be very much heady about it.

Some people will be debaters, some people will be personal storytellers, and that's the type of evening you'll have. But death workers are amazing to get together for these conversations. 

Jill: Yeah, I know. Nobody brings the party like a death worker. I think that's a good t-shirt. Actually, that could be a new T-shirt because it is.

True. Sometimes I forget how comfortable I am talking about death, that I don't care where I'm at if somebody says something. But there is times, who was I talking to recently? Oh, when I was at this funeral celebrant [00:32:00] training and it was all people that were funeral directors or you know, grief therapist or whatever, right.

And I said there is definitely times when people ask what I do for a living. And if I'm at a party, I just kind of wanna be at a party. I don't wanna talk about death. Yeah. So I just default back to like I'm a pastry chef, but then they wanna ask me about how to bake their cookies better, which is not much better.

Sometimes I'm like, I don't wanna talk about that either. I don't wanna talk about baking or death right now. I just wanna relax at a party. But most of the time I am really happy to talk about it because I don't want chitchat. Like, what do you do for a living? How old are your kids? I don't mind that, but.

I wanna get deeper with people. But then there's also the people that freak out and run away from me and they're like, I don't wanna talk to you. And I'm like, okay, I probably don't wanna talk to you either then because, and that's okay too. But I do find that it has changed my friendships, not exactly [00:33:00] in the same way as you, but in the sense that.

I don't know if it's because I was an only child. I need a little bit of alone time. I think some of it is just being hurt by friendships in the past. You know, I'm like nobody knows how to hurt a woman better than another woman. My biggest heartbreaks have not really been from men that I've dated. It's been from women.

So in a lot of cases, the last however many years, I've just kind of been like, I got like two friends. I'm fine. I don't need more. And so I just have shied away from connecting. Where now I think it is because in some ways I'm like, pain is part of life. So what if she says something later on or does something later on that hurts me?

Whatever. I'll survive it. It'll be fine. And I've opened myself up more to being vulnerable and saying to somebody, I think you're pretty cool. I really like you. And the friends that I do have, I tell them now that I love them on a [00:34:00] regular basis. It's not in a morbid way of, oh, because you might die at any point.

But also. It's kind of the truth. They might die at any point and I don't ever wanna think to myself, I really wish I would've told them how much I love them or how much they mean to me, or how cool I thought they were. Or even things like if I see somebody now and I'm like, I really like your dress. I think your dress is amazing.

I just feel that that makes such an impact on people. And there was always this part of me that kind of was reserved in that. Now I'm just like, whatever. I don't care if you think I'm weird because I told you your dress is pretty, or I don't care if you think I'm weird because I barely know you, but I think you're super cool.

Most of the time people receive it very well. I've never regretted saying it. 

Kimberley: I agree with you. I think anyone who hasn't yet gotten to the point where they talk about death, maybe not as much as we do, you may not realize how much it opens up the door to say things to people so that they feel [00:35:00] really seen.

I do the same thing and I never would've done that much before. I would've thought it like, oh wow, look at this person. They're so interesting. I just love how they interacted with their kiddo. I'm just witnessing it. But now when I think it's appropriate, I do wanna give them a gentle, like you're seen, like how you are in the world.

Whether it's, you know, you just walked in the room and Wow, I love your style. I love how you're showing up here. You are so welcomed. It is such a vitality that comes with knowing that you can talk about death and that this is a very. Precious moment of existence. We just had Robert Redford die and he played a character on the Twilight Zone.

That episode, I think was one of my early episodes of an Introduction to Death and Dying. 

Jill: Oh, 

Kimberley: okay. I don't wanna give away the whole episode, but it is about death and dying. Being the remarkable actor that he was. He brought such depth and gravitas to that particular episode later in [00:36:00] life. A dear friend of mine died on my birthday.

Suddenly out of the blue, she was a little bit older than me and I remembered our last conversation. I could hear her words right before we left. We hugged and her saying to me, I love you. 

Jill: Oh, 

Kimberley: and throughout life, like these gifts of how much beauty and love there is in the world, yes, you might die tomorrow.

But it's exactly what you said. You might die tomorrow. And I want you to know today, like I do get to have this today. I do get to have this richness, and that's part of why I keep the game going, why I continue. I've had people say, including people who have very extreme jobs or backgrounds, and they'll say, I don't know how you do what you do.

Yeah, and I'm like, wait a minute, you're a heart surgeon and you're telling me you don't know how I do what I do? Whoa, wait. Then I realized I've gotten used to speaking this way. I've gotten used to something that I didn't know when I was younger, would really. Like make me feel more alive. And [00:37:00] sometimes people from the outside don't realize it.

The game aspect was, how can I start this earlier for people so they have that lived experience. Maybe it's not all hard. Maybe it's not all pain. Maybe it's not all regret. There's also a lot of joy, a lot of love, a lot of laughter. We try to include a lot of laughter. Have you ever had to stifle a laugh while at a funeral?

Because sometimes we're not sure we can laugh. Yeah, my father-in-law's funeral, there was a car alarm that kept going off and no one in our group would claim it. Eventually, the people who were speaking about this wonderful man and his life and his legacy started introducing the car alarm as if as, as if it was Larry having part of the con like, Hey Larry, we get it.

You like to be part of the conversation. You're laughing 'cause Larry was a big laugher. You're laughing. We get it. Come and join us. There have to be ways to, in our current life, to become more familiar with this is really. A pathway to a richness and so, so it is really interesting to say there are [00:38:00] people, I think from the outside that once they join the fold, if we live long enough, we will all join this fold.

I would like to, my goal has always been to be more present for people, and I have been gifted that presence by people educating me about what was going to happen or being able to hold space when things did happen. I just wanted to add a way for people to do that. It is my soapbox, but it's also a way of living.

Now that it's so second nature, I do have to sometimes think to myself, or almost like if somebody were to tap you on the shoulder and go, maybe, maybe not. Are you checking in with the other person that they can do it? When people speak to me and I can see they've lost someone. Whether that be their beloved pet, whether that be a, a parent, a child, a friend, one of the things I always do is I gently ask, what was their name?

And it is such a doorway and permission you often for them to decide how much they wanna tell. But it also is an invitation because many people will say, okay, their name was [00:39:00] Sarah. They sort out if they want to fill in that storyline, but they can sense the invitation, and that's what I've always wanted to offer.

And I realized that's what I wanted when I was younger that I didn't have access to for a variety of reasons. My mom had a lot of loss when she was younger, and I think she got used to not going there. That was just her way. But as an adult, I needed a way. So I created something both through my professional life, but also just my personal passions.

And I like to create things. I am happiest when I am creating, learning someone's story or storytelling myself. It adds a lot of vitality for me. But I, I know when people have said like, how can you be a grief therapist? And I said, I find it the most remarkable part of what I do to hold. That person's loved one with them.

They're not alone in knowing this life and how it affected them, because they have another person who has said, I will join you. That's why I'm here. I don't get to have other parts of their life, but I [00:40:00] will help them carry. And then I know these people, oftentimes remarkable people. And when I say oftentimes, some people have very conflicted, difficult relationships.

Some people have been very. Injured by people who've died, but those who bring me like, oh, this was my husband, this was my child. I get to know a person I'm never actually gonna get to know. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Kimberley: And so I carry them with me. We have that saying that says, you know, you're not, you don't really die until the last time your name is uttered.

I feel like that's why, that's why there's something really remarkable about making space for death, for grief, for the for life is this is a story that will one day stop. Probably, like for me, I don't, I don't have children, so I'm not gonna have somebody speaking about their grandmother, their great-grandmother in the same way.

So my particular existence will probably be a smaller imprint. And that's okay because all these stories can keep going, but they become gentle echoes. And so I love [00:41:00] carrying these stories with people and teaching people how to do that in a way that doesn't feel instantly painful or overwhelming.

There's just gentler ways to learn that this is just a part of us. It is just going to be, and those are always the things about death when I'm researching them. My husband's much more capable of doing the darker stuff, so I'm like, you read this? I'm going this other direction with it. But I love that storytelling aspect that unfolding, that witnessing what's happening here.

Um, and so I capture that to some extent as a grief therapist with the game with a different weight. The game is, is oftentimes much more lighthearted and quirky. 

Jill: Oh my gosh, this is amazing. But we are getting to the end of our time. I looked up and I was like, oh, look at what I see. I told you it was gonna happen.

Where I get into the conversation. And here we are. So tell us where can we find your game? Anything that you wanna share, like a website, your social media, if people wanna reach out to you, and I will put links in the show notes. Let us know where people can find you. 

Kimberley: [00:42:00] Absolutely. So we do sell our game. We don't sell on Amazon.

We wanted to keep it personal. We sell our game ourselves on morbid curiosity game.com. And I'm the one who also checks all the emails. So if anyone has any questions or comments, they can always reach me directly through our website. We do have a Facebook page and I'm pretty sure I always get confused what we put it under.

I'm pretty sure it's more of a curiosity game and we do a little bit on, in. The Morbid Game. I'll get you links for these. Yeah, it's amazing. We're not the best at our marketing. We're the best at the conversations in the doing. We are carried, as you saw in the Mutter Museum. We're carried in the Chicago Surgical Museum.

We're also carried in the Houston Funeral Museum. We have a beautiful. Scattering of Oddity stores throughout the United States. We keep a very tight, morbid family. We know everybody where we are. We know the people by name. And that list is actually on our website. If you go like, where can I buy it? And you don't necessarily wanna pay for shipping and you wanna save anybody's close.

We do [00:43:00] encourage going to our morbid family, our morbid partners, and then me as a. Therapist, if anybody ever has any questions, I do workshops to help particularly other therapists get more familiar with their own grief. I have a workshop coming up in January for that, and it's k. Mead counseling.com. My first name has an extra pesky E in it, which my mother gifted me when they adopted me.

So it's Kimberley ey. So I just go by K Mead most of the time. So things get to me. It's a beautiful gift from my mom, but it is pesky. So K mead counseling. If anybody has any questions regarding the grief work or what it's like to be a grief therapist. 

Jill: Well, I'll for sure share all the links to the game.

This episode is gonna come out, so I'll try to make sure that I time it so that if people wanna sign up for your workshop, I'll put a link for the workshop in there as well. 

Kimberley: The workshop's a day Workshop, it's primarily for therapists to become more familiar with their own way of responding to grief, and then I'm hoping to turn it into a year long book and [00:44:00] discussion group.

Jill: Uh, that definitely keep me updated on that. If you get the book done, I'll have you back so we can talk about the book and promote that for you. Thank you 

Kimberley: so much 

Jill: for 

Kimberley: spending 

Jill: time 

Kimberley: together. 

Jill: I appreciate it. It was lovely. It 

Kimberley: was absolutely a joy. Thank you. 

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forward [00:45:00] to.