First of all I will have to read you the trigger warnings, so there's death, there's dying, there's cancer, there's quite a high amount of metaphoric licence which some people I understand in this field may not be comfortable with because it's not strictly science and there's too much leopard print but that's not funny because you can't see the slides. Right, I'm just going to go for it without the slides everybody. Thank you ever so much for joining me, I do appreciate it. Right, my name is Ella, I am an engineer amongst many other things. I'm not a software engineer, which means I feel quite out of place to be honest at times this weekend. I don't know much about LEDs or NFTs or anything. I'm one of those boring mechanical engineers. Oh, yay, again, found my people. Cool, there's some thermodynamics coming up guys. Right, so I'm an engineer, I'm a project manager, I'm a speaker, I'm all sorts of things but the thing that I kind of want to talk to you about today is actually something that's very difficult to put on a list because there isn't a particularly great universally recognised word for and that's kind of why I asked in my padding about whether you listen to griefcast because griefster is the best word that we've found for it so far and it's still not a great word but I am a griefster so when I was 24 my partner died of cancer, there was a big picture of him because he really liked being the centre of attention even more than I do so I thought I was going to give him his moment of glory but unfortunately he will have to wait again but we met studying engineering, I was a master's student, he was doing his PhD, it wasn't love at first sight, this is not a poetic talk in that respect but we got together and within a couple of months he was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer for those of you that are not in the cancer club, stage 3 is locally advanced and possibly spread so the odds were fairly slim at that point, we did everything we could, I'm not going to say lost the battle because that's a whole nother talk that I will come back next year and have slides for he was given a terminal diagnosis the day before our second anniversary and he died within a week, he was four days away from starting a potentially groundbreaking clinical trial at the Royal Marsden, big shout out to them, he would have been patient 001 and maybe things would have been different but they weren't, funny gift of a disclaimer sign so everybody's experience of grief and death and trauma is going to be different so this talk is never intended to be a one size fits all version here's some steps I went through and now I'm fine, everybody's experience is different and from what I've understood of grief and bereavement is that everybody thinks that everybody's got it better people that have lost somebody through illness think it was probably better to have had it over in an accident and vice versa and I think the truth is there's no hierarchy to grief at all it's a bit like engineering, there isn't a hierarchy, there should be, but there isn't and there is science that underpins engineering but engineering is really interesting and complex and complicated because it's always different and I think everybody's death experience is very different and so when I was looking back on losing Craig it became apparent to me that my way of thinking about it actually really relied on engineering, the thing we were both studying actually it had a lot more in common than I thought it did so I started writing this engineers guide to grief and that is what I'm trying to present to you with those slides today so one of the first things you're taught as a mechanical engineer is the laws of thermodynamics hands up if you've done a bit of thermo in your time, cool, it's not without it's controversy I'm sure somebody's going to have a little bit about one of my explanations it's not without it's controversy and it's debate but this is for the purpose of metaphors, it's what I'm going to use today so for those of you that haven't been bored through a first year thermodynamics laws it's the branch of physical science that deals with the relationship between heat and work and energy it's really fundamental to many branches of physics and chemistry and engineering and the first law is quite poetic the first law of this fundamental segments is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed it only changes form so the energy in a system can be converted so when you switch on a light switch it feels like you're creating energy but you're not it's just electrical energy being converted into light and this just proves that in any process the total universe of the universe is the same, the energy is a closed system the universe is a closed system and so this is where my metaphors start to come in using, I'm just going to carry on casually like this that's alright don't worry we're all trying our best here so there's a very cool gif of a space cat kind of flying through the air looking kind of philosophical and the point I'm trying to make is that death is less scary when you think that actually we're all just energy and we're all jumbling about we've always been here forever and we always will be we're just changing forms oh ok we're going to do it like this ok so I'll show that gif at the end if we can but yes I can draw a certain amount of comfort from this idea that we're all just energy jumbling through changing forms death is actually a lot less scary when you think about it like that the second law of thermodynamics is that entropy the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum which sounds very poetic but entropy is the idea of disorder it's the amount of disorder that's in the universe so in thermodynamics an isolated system is one where heat or matter can't enter or exit a system's boundary the universe in itself is an isolated system and it's total entropy, that total amount of disorder it never ever decreases there's an equation, imagine it this essentially so this is just an aside because why not right now I have for ages been asking my partner in the front row to send me on a stand up comedy course or an improv course now I'm doing both right now so there's only one HDMI goes ok basically in any isolated system random processes lead to more disorder and if there is one thing I can tell you about grief it is disordered and it really only increases if you stay isolated so here is now a gif of Ross from Friends looking distressed in a messy room he went on a day there was a messy room I'm a mella nigger, it was a very iconic sequence so if the second law of thermodynamics is still a bit vague then it's like having a very messy bedroom something I was guilty of as a teenager if you leave it there's one down here, you can all come and climb down here right, if you don't clean and tidy your room it gets more disordered over time, it gets more messy and then when you eventually come and clean it the entropy or the disorder of the room that you're trying to clean does decrease but the entropy outside the room, the big heap of washing you lying exhausted at this point I don't care if you read my speaker notes I'm just happy we've got them without my speaker notes but it's fine, it's the Ross gif so what I was saying about the entropy of the system so you've cleaned the room, the entropy of the system in it in that room is now less it's looking nicer it's not disordered but outside of the system there is a lot more entropy there's heaps of washing everywhere, you are lying on the sofa in a big heap so the entropy has gone out of the room and it's now outside so it's basically thermodynamics version of a problem shared as a problem halved and I think that's really important with dealing with bereavement it's not something that can be gone through a loan you need another part of the universe to take some of your disordered entropy away from you I'm going to have to go really fast now to make up for this right so who here given this crowd has heard of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross yeah actually not as many as I thought that's cool so Elizabeth Kubler-Ross was a hospice pioneer a humanitarian and a psychologist and in 1969 she produced this so these were the five stages of grief denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance that might if you didn't know the term that's more common in pop science so she said this is the stages that either people who were dying themselves or those left behind would go through and so the day after Craig died I went on Amazon bought every single book about Kubler-Ross that I could on next day delivery except they arrived and the more I read about them the more I realised that actually in her later life she really really regretted writing this sequence because it was really misunderstood by most people like me trying to order the books we were looking for this checklist right doing a bit of denial call we're on to anger and I just wanted to get through it as quickly as possible in reality and what she did come to publish later in life was that actually it looked more like this as I said earlier in my panning I'm not a software engineer I had to get the man in the front row to write this for me but what it means is that actually the stages of grief are infinitely changing they change every single day and they're never going to stop it's not a five point checklist that you're going to complete and be okay with it just goes on forever so the third law of thermodynamics is this one if you're a perfect crystalline structure don't out me mechanical engineers I've only used a joke there but the third law of thermodynamics is that the entropy as it approaches absolute zero it will decrease but it will never actually get to zero so zero for those not in the know is the point where there's no molecular motion and as I said earlier motion and heat they're all the same actually so if there's no motion there's no heat it's cold in a less nerdy thermometer it's about minus 273 Celsius so it's pretty chilly but unless you are a perfect crystallised structure which last time I checked I am not I can never reach actual zero and I think that's what I found through my therapy journey so as I said I bought these books on day one they arrived on day two discovered wasn't very helpful it was in them so day three I phoned a therapist office and I cringe every time I think about this phone call so I phoned and I said hello I'm a very important engineer I have a busy job my boyfriend has died I need to get over this pretty quick cos I cannot be on a transatlantic flight looking up at some racing cars and just cry racing drivers don't like crying and yeah the lady was so calm and so polite and so caring to me and she said that's very nice I'd love to support you through this challenging time but unfortunately it's not just something you can get on with we don't usually start seeing people for therapy for at least three months because as prepared as you are in technical terms it's called anticipatory grief so if you know someone is going to die you do start grieving before they die as much as you think you're prepared you're probably not you're probably still in shock I said no it's fine as you said I'm an engineer I'm very smart we're the smartest part of the population and I always did my homework so I know but honestly I'm going to ace this again anybody who's got a therapist will probably also want to impress the therapist and that's an infinite loop and so yeah I said we need to just book that appointment I'm going to prove you wrong I didn't prove her wrong she was exactly right we started it was useless for three months I was up and down I was doing those five coobler os things every day my letter s my entry my disorder was off the charts so I'd really like to apologise to her she was pretty great but actually therapy was brilliant if I have one piece of practical advice for anybody here who is maybe going through bereavement now or is going to say thinking about it in the future but nice not what I meant really off doing this off the cuff now it is to go to therapy I had a real strange thing about not wanting to go to therapy because it's like a fluffy kind of science and engineering that wouldn't work for me but it genuinely changed everything it helped me understand what I was going through what the people around me was going through because that's something with grief is that everybody's relationship with that person was different and therefore how they grieve is different and you're all in this melting pot together and it also helped me maybe understand a little bit about maybe what Craig had gone through himself so please please go to therapy and you'll really help your entropy out so just before you were all going how am I doing for time sorry just because again it's all gone to pot cool now we can do this so again we're just going to lay it all out on the table here so I'd written some pithy line about before you all go back into the sunshine and I wrote that yesterday now you've all just come because it's raining and this is a pretty warm space this three laws of thermodynamics when you first start studying them and then unfortunately you aren't getting away because it turns out there's a zero if law yeah I know it I thought this as well zero if is not a word yeah it's a word so you can thank me and this man James Clark Maxwell next time you play Scrabble because it's a useful word of thermodynamics it's actually more of an observation than a law but it's so fundamental to the branch of science that they thought that's great let's whizz it up the list zero if most important so next time somebody says you're not first you can say yeah but I'm zero that's great so the zero if observation law is that if systems are in thermal equilibrium with each other there's a third one and one of them is in equilibrium with them as well they're all in equilibrium so if A equals B B equals C C also equals A when Craig first died I was 24 and I really felt very isolated all the stories I saw about death were like oh yes my granddad died my grandma's alone you can talk to my grandma and I'll be like yeah so that's very nice my grandfathers were very sweet but losing your husband in your 80s is very different to losing your partner when you're 24 I really struggled with language as well we weren't married so I felt I couldn't use the term widow that felt very loaded and I honestly fretted for weeks and weeks on end about whether I called in my ex-boyfriend but that didn't work because that made it sound like we'd split up for like a really frivolous thing and like not that just somebody had stopped breathing it's a bit more than that I tried late partner but that sounded like an overrunning solicitor so I just don't I still don't have the words so if any people have been through a similar thing have a word for it please honestly let me know at the end but now we've nearly a decade well more than a decade in the rearview mirror between that really isolating experience and now I think conversations changed a lot there's a lot more people talking about grief and death and I think that's really amazing because actually if I'm an A then there's probably some Bs in this audience and there's probably some Cs and we're actually all equal and I think we need to work together we're all equal in this sadness we're equal in our courage and our resilience and the strength that comes from these experiences and I think we need to talk about it more I think it's really important because there's such a stigma about talking about death and dying particularly in the UK and honestly I'm quite overwhelmed how many people have come to talk about it because honestly a lot of the time and again anybody that's experienced this as well will probably know it when you say oh somebody oh they died they just run away scared because they just don't know what to say to you so I think we need to have more conversations about it which brings me on to my final little origin story math joke so how this talk came about is a really good example of that so I do a lot of corporate speaking about being a woman in motorsport and this brought me to the attention of a TEDx event and they gave me an open brief because that's the literal point of TEDx problem was they were expecting some light fuzzy story about being touched on the bum by a racing driver and still doing some science and what they got was a first version of this talk quite different less the more composites based jokes but I sent it in it came back very heavily edited and by very heavily edited I mean all references to death dying or feeling sad were removed from the talk which didn't give me much to go on to be honest so I questioned it and I said I'm just a little bit confused because I thought the whole point of TEDx was like each your thing and this is definitely my thing and they said yeah but we're just a bit concerned that what if somebody's come for a nice day out and somebody has died recently and they feel sad and it ruins the event for them and I just thought hang on a minute we can use that trope about death and taxes being the only certain thing and I don't want to use it because we all know that Amazon doesn't pay their taxes so if we remove the taxes death is certain you know if I'm an A this Bs this Cs so I could have guaranteed that event organiser that there would be somebody there would be multiple somebody's in every room who's been through some sort of loss experience and so to me I didn't want to do the water down version where we don't talk about it and we reinforce this death is scary it's awful and to treat everybody with kid gloves because it doesn't do us any favours so my final this is the most UK possible slide so if you're not from the UK this was an advert for British Telecom in the late 80s early 90s and the tagline was it's good to talk which sort of brings me on to my final thing that I feel sums all of this metaphor and experience up is that we have to talk we have to talk to support each other we have to talk more openly and share our stories people realise that it is going to happen to them and they can be prepared because if you talk to each other if you have a think about what you might want to happen when the inevitable happens you do people like me the A's, the B's and the C's a really big favour because if you don't talk about death you don't think what you want to happen to yourself or your bits then you're relying on your A's and B's and C's to make some really big decisions when they're actually at their most vulnerable and that's really hard so if it seems a bit strange to have like a password manager that somebody knows the password for or do that weird setting on Facebook or Twitter where you can bequeath your account please go and do it because it does make it really hard for the people left behind also just please don't be afraid to talk to people who've been through a loss that disorder, that entropy that chaos can feel a lot and it can feel very isolating because of this stigma so offer a person a shoulder to cry on give them some frozen meals just to help look after them because they need it so promise this is the final one so I didn't do that on my TEDx event that was before the pandemic so this is about four or five years ago I then went to therapy for more as my dad would say it self-absorbed millennial purposes I just go to regular therapy not bereavement therapy now and during the pandemic like everybody I was just having a bit of an existential crisis about I was putting a lot of effort into things and other people weren't and the results weren't what I want them to be but when I put up effort in why doesn't the effort come out and my therapist is very wise and she said to me Ella feelings aren't equations you can't complete them or solve them it sounds very obvious and it's somewhat undermined some of my talk but I think it's a really important coder to this piece is that as much as I want to solve these problems I'm never gonna complete the proof I'm never gonna find X and I don't need to because actually if you give I just need the tools which therapy has given me to be able to work with what I've got and if there's anything about engineers that we can do is working with tools so go to therapy talk, get the tools and you can incorporate this into your life it wasn't the poetic ending I was aiming for but given the technical difficulties I'm just gonna let you get on with the light as I talk so yes I miss Craig very much I might have a glory moment in a second just get his picture up just so he can have his moment of fame but yeah so as much as I now know that I can't balance this equation I'm never gonna solve this situation I can still thank you I can still honestly he'd love this he'd absolutely love this so yeah as much as I now will have these tools I do still sneakily come back to that first law of thermodynamics and just imagine he's still just energy jumbling through here as I am so yeah thank you for coming to my just honestly this was so slick oh you're just recalling that thanks for coming to my not Ted talk and yeah thanks