[MUSIC] We're now going to hear from Lucy Hone. Dr. Hone is a resilience researcher. She also was one of my students in our Master of Applied Positive Psychology Program here at Penn. She's from New Zealand, and she's going to talk to you about resilient grieving. Few years ago, her daughter, Abi, was tragically killed in a car accident. And through that devastating loss, Lucy explored what it takes to grieve resiliently. She dove into all that was known about grieving, and discovered that for her, what was known was missing some important things in her own grief process. And so, Lucy has written a book called, What Abi Taught Us, that's the title if you buy the book in New Zealand. If you buy the book here in the US, it's called resilient grieving, How to Live with Loss that Changes Everything. And in this book, Lucy talks about her own experience, grieving the loss of Abi. Her family's experience grieving the loss of Abi. And she gives us a practical guide to help us think about what resilient grieving looks like. And so you're going to hear in this segment Dr. Hone talk about the importance of identifying what you can control versus what you can't control. >> Hi, everyone from New Zealand. So my name is Dr. Lucy Hone, and I work at the Human Potential Center out of AUT in Auckland. I actually live in Christchurch. And I'm talking to you today because two and a half years ago I got that dreadful phone call from the police saying they were coming to see us. And to tell us that our daughter, 12-year-old little girl, beautiful Abi, had been killed in a tragic road accident. Where a driver had just driven straight through a stop sign and killed Abi along with her best friend, and Ella's mom Sully, who was a really dear friend of mine as well. So, we lost all three of them in that fraction of a second. So, as anyone will tell you who has experienced that phone call, your life stops and spins and you get all those physical sensations. And I remember thinking that my life path-forked at that moment, and I could see where I thought my life had been heading, and I could see my new life path. So really, since that day, have become really fascinated and sort of I'm developing this notion of resilient grieving. We decided, my husband Trevor and I, right from the outset, we decided that we weren't going to blame the driver. That no goods would come for us in blaming the driver. We were on a complete survival mission in those first few weeks, and I just knew instinctively that blaming the driver was a red herring, he's a bit part in this. I've always felt sorry for him actually. It was a mistake, we all make mistakes. It's a terribly costly mistake, but blaming him was only going to drag me down. And I wanted to really focus my energy and my attention on the things that we can change, not the things that we can't. So we work really hard on that too, and thinking about really the choices that we had to make, the things that we could do, and just ignoring the bits that we couldn't. We work really hard at not being victims, so we decided not to go to his trial. He went to court, and we intentionally, instead, decided to drive straight past the courtroom. And I can picture it now, seeing all the media outside the courtroom. It was a really big, and he was a foreign driver, sadly, and so there was a lot of media attention on that. And because we have a few incidents and deaths in New Zealand with foreign drivers, not knowing our silly roads. But we decided to drive straight past the courtroom and we went instead to our sons' schools, and spent time, that time specifically, the time that he was in the courtroom, talking to their teachers instead. Choosing to focus our attention on the things that we could do. So I think I've always had this little voice in my head that says choose life, not death. I felt we could have just got sucked down into a vortex of blame and pain and misery. And that wasn't going to help us as a family, and it wasn't going to help our boys. This issue of choice, I think I didn't at the beginning. No, that's not right, I think I did right from the beginning, I think, we've got to do this. There is a way, we have a choice over this. Right, actually, now that I think about it from those very first moments, I remember thinking, wow, jeepers. And really what I was thinking was, we going to have to choose that hard work again and again and again. And that is how it, that is how it feels. It isn't the life, obviously, that I would have chosen. I'd go as far as to say, it's really not the life I want to live but I don't have a choice in that, and here I am. So all I can do is choose the little things that can make it a little bit better each day. So whether that is dragging myself out of bed in the morning and going for a walk, whether it is phoning a friend, phoning my sister for a laugh. She makes me laugh more than anyone else. And whatever it is, the strategies that really I have found help me.
