Navigating Grief and Choosing Love

In this episode, Lindsey shares her personal journey through grief following the loss of her mother-in-law, Julie, who passed away from pancreatic cancer. She discusses the complexities of grief, emphasizing that it encompasses more than just the loss of a loved one. The conversation explores the importance of vulnerability, the necessity of grieving, and the process of finding meaning in loss. Lindsey also highlights the support she and her family have received, the role of faith in their healing, and practical strategies for coping with grief. Ultimately, the episode serves as a reminder that while grief is painful, it is also a testament to the love shared with those who have passed.

Key Learnings:

• Grief is proof of our love.
• The only cure for grief is to grieve.
• Love changes its address.
• God is close to the brokenhearted.
• Grief is normal, natural, and necessary.
• Finding meaning is a continuous process.

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Transcript

Framing The Podcast’s Brain Focus

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Your brain is the powerhouse behind your life. On this podcast, we explore strategies to strengthen your connections, build resilience, and navigate life's ups and downs with a focus on brain health.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Discover how understanding and caring for your brain can transform your relationships and empower you to face any challenge with confidence.

Return After Loss And Thank-Yous

Honoring Julie And Hospice Support

Redefining Grief Beyond Death

The Three Ns Of Grief

Grief Bursts And Practical Coping

Vulnerability, Faith, And Support

Meaning-Making And Unspent Care

From Pain To Loving Memory

Guiding Truths For The Messy Middle

Brain Science Of Grief And Love

Health Update And Maintenance Therapy

Community Gratitude And What’s Next

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Get ready to brain it on. Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. It's so good to be back. It's been a couple months, and so for those of you who haven't seen our updates on social media, we have some difficult news to share. Over two months ago, we lost Thomas' mom, Julie. She was our incredible cancer club president. She was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer just three months before Thomas's leukemia diagnosis. And she was someone who was our rock. She was our fearless leader who really paved the way to show us what it looks like to show up and to navigate the incredibly challenging world of cancer treatment. She passed away at hospice house, and we are deeply grateful for the amazing hospice team who helped walk her home and provided really wonderful care for her at the end of her life. The loss that we feel is immense, and we knew that we couldn't just jump back into an episode without really acknowledging the weight and honestly the amount of time that we needed to start to process this chapter of our lives. We want to start also by offering a big thank you to everyone, our family, friends, people who follow us who've just reached out to share how much they love and support us during this challenging time. So thank you so much for that. We're going to be talking about grief today in this episode. We'll talk about the spectrum of grief, everything that we've learned so far. And Thomas and I are certainly in this continual learning phase of what it looks like to navigate grief. So we'd like to offer some things that we've learned so far and just kind of share where we're at. We're really in the messy middle of grief. And it's something that we are learning every day how to navigate. We have a wonderful counselor through hospice. Partners in Care is the organization where Julie received her hospice care through. And they offer grief counseling for 13 months after the patient passes away. And so the fact that they acknowledge that grief is something that's real and requires support is truly amazing that they offer that. And it's a free service. So we've been utilizing that and learning so much. Shout out to our wonderful counselor. I think we started grief counseling maybe a couple weeks after she passed. And it was such a wonderful support and scaffolding that helped us integrate what we were feeling into some key learnings and really just helped us navigate this part of the grieving process. One of the things that we learned at the very beginning is grief is so often misunderstood. People usually equate grief solely with losing a loved one, but the process is much wider than that. Grief is the loss of something or someone. So for those of you who are navigating a cancer diagnosis, I think you really know this deeply. There is this grief that comes with things that you lose during cancer treatment, the loss of your old life, the shifting of dreams like fertility or your career, the changes in social connections, the loss of what relationships used to be like. And so whether you're dealing with the loss of a family or friend or a life that you once planned, you're grieving. And you can acknowledge that and hold space for it. Now we'd like to dive into the three ends of grief. So this is a really powerful framework that has given us permission to truly lean into this process. It comes from a book series, Journeying Through Grief by Kenneth Hawke. And he says that there are three essential ends to understanding our grief. Number one, grief is normal. It is normal to be deeply affected by a significant personal loss. As I mentioned previously, that loss can be of a person that you love deeply or a life that you once envisioned, a dream that you once had. If you lose someone you love, it's normal to expect that loss to upend your world. We often put pressure on ourselves to move through this phase or basically get back to what our life was. But there is a reality that what you are feeling is completely normal. Allowing yourself to realize just how normal that is, I think is really powerful. Number two, the second N is that grief is natural. Grief is a completely human thing to do. It's built into us. We are created to grieve just as we are created to love. When we love and then we lose someone or something that we love, we grieve. It's a part of the human condition and it's something that we can't avoid. There's a sentence in the Bible, in fact, the shortest one, and it was he wept. And this is referring to Jesus crying and just being alongside people who were grieving. And in that part of the Bible, what happens is he actually goes to help heal and bring this person back to life. And yet, even though he knew that was going to happen, he paused and he grieved with these people. So weeping or being with someone when they're in that hard space is certainly necessary and natural and something that we find Jesus doing in the Bible. Number three, grief is necessary. Grief provides a healthy way to cope with the loss and everything it means to us. As the author of Journeying Through Grief notes, trying to ignore or avoid grief is ultimately not adaptive in the long term. He encourages us to give yourself permission to grieve. You're human, so let yourself be human. Sometimes people feel the tears welling up or the emotions start to flow, but then they shut off the faucet and try to hold their feelings back. And I can relate to this. I think, you know, being uh grocery shopping once, I went past the aisle that had uh Twinkies. And Julie loved Twinkies. This is something she really tried to avoid for a long time. But then her hospice nurse said, Hey, you can eat all the sugary things that really your body craves or would like, because towards the end of her life, food became something that was a challenge. I've heard this and read this in some of the grief literature that sometimes people will have something called a grief attack or a grief burst when all of a sudden you're kind of caught off guard by something triggering an emotional response. So walking by and seeing the Twinkies just caused this kind of grief burst where I felt the tears welling up. And certainly there's moments in our lives where that was not the optimal time when you're checking out at the grocery store and you're helping the cashier bag up your groceries, crying and having a deep moment could certainly be something that you could do. And it would probably model to the cashier that you're with that grief is natural and you're just being yourself, which is okay. And there's also times when, you know, when you're able to pause and say, I'm gonna process this later, which is good too. So I think sometimes we hear in the literature, cry, allow your emotions to flow. And also sometimes the most adaptive thing to do is to pause and remember, I'm gonna give myself time and space for this. There's something that was recommended about having some grief time. So maybe in the evening you tell yourself, okay, every night at 7:30 or 8 o'clock before I go to bed, I'm gonna process and allow myself, my brain, time to grieve and figure out where I am at today. My wonderful sister-in-law, the day that Julie passed away, she came to our house and she brought this big basket full of really calming, sweet items like a candle, you know, tea, a cozy blanket, different things that were really healing. And this beautiful card, which explained all of the items and how it could help provide calm and comfort. And one of the things was a beautiful journal. And so one of the things that's recommended is to journal and to allow yourself to process through writing. And that's such a powerful tool. And so different times I've used my grief time at night to uh write a letter to Julie saying, Julie, it's been one week without you. And here's some things we've felt. Or, you know, I think at the one-month mark, I wrote a letter saying, Julie, be so proud of your son. And I wrote about the ways in which Thomas has navigated his cancer treatment while simultaneously navigating the grief of losing his mom and one of his best friends. So getting yourself a journal to write about what's going on inside your emotional landscape can be really helpful. We also have a list of happy memories that we'll add to the grief journal. So we'll think about all the fun times we've had, you know, one of which was a memory when we took Julie to Disneyland when she was first diagnosed last year in 2024. One of our first questions to her oncologist was, can we take her to Disneyland this weekend? Because he had told her that she had to start chemotherapy the following week. And we did not know if this suggestion would be well received or not. We were expecting him to say, absolutely not. But instead, he said, absolutely yes. And in fact, you need to go to Adventureland first and make sure you get a dole whip. We were completely caught off guard that her oncologist was a Disney fan. And so we called him Dr. Disney. And that's one example of one of the things we put in our journal of, you know, happy experiences or happy memories was going to Disneyland with Julie. And she rented this wheelchair, electric wheelchair, or electric scooter, I guess you would call it. And it was really sweet because she would park it in different places and go and fill up her water bottle or go and get a snack. And sometimes the places where the wheelchair was parked was in spots where maybe other people walking by had to go around it and uh the stormtroopers in Galaxy's Edgeland had to uh walk around. Even Kyla Wren had to kind of step to the side of it. So that was a funny moment that we wrote about that just was a lot of joy. So we include letters to Julie, moments of joy, and also certainly prayers that we have that we share about where we're at and asking God for comfort and strength during this phase. In regard to crying as part of that necessary step to grief, Thomas's grandma, who used to be a social worker for hospice, said to remember that tears are a powerful reminder of the love you had. Tears are love. So as you're experiencing this deep emotional pain and you feel the tears come, knowing that that is an emotional response and it's really an indicator of the love that you shared can be something that is deeply comforting, I feel. The next thing I want to talk about is just the depth of vulnerability that comes with grief. Losing Julie has really been the sharp reminder of the profound vulnerability that we still live with in Thomas's cancer journey. And as you know, I love Brene Brown, so I couldn't do an episode without her. She defines vulnerability as having these three parts uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. So having Julie there as Thomas's cancer club president, who understood the language of blood counts, that support that we had from her and her checking in, wanting to know how each of his appointments went, if she wasn't feeling well enough to join us, was certainly something that was really helpful. And now that she's gone, just the risk and uncertainty and emotional exposure of Thomas' situation feels more acute because she's not there in our cancer club, at least on this side of heaven. One of the things as tangible evidence of her love is that she shared this beautiful journal. We came across it in her apartment as we were sorting and cleaning. And in this journal, she would write down all of Thomas's blood counts and notes. So whenever I would call her to give her an update, I did not realize this, but she had a journal where she would write his platelets and his hemoglobin and basically everything that I was sharing with her, she was documenting it because it was that important to her. And so it was such an amazing thing to see. Talk about tears. Thomas and I were basically ugly crying on the floor of her apartment. So it was amazing to see the love poured out onto paper and the proof of her depth of caring. And I think the vulnerability that Thomas and I both experience now with not having our cancer club president is definitely palpable. And so we're leaning into that vulnerability. We're using gratitude both for the ways in which we're so grateful for having her support and then so grateful for the people who are in our lives right now who are providing that, who are filling that void in a way, who are, you know, showing us love. Both of my parents flew from the East Coast to Oregon in order to be with us and provide that strength. So we have all kinds of people who are stepping up to help us in that role. Next, I want to talk about this concept of the change of address or the sixth stage of grief. So this is something that was really a lifeline for Thomas and for me. And this is from the work of David Kessler, who's a grief expert. He experienced such profound grief in his own life that when you read his book and his different articles he's written, you can really tell he's coming from a place of deep understanding, from losing his son to his mother and a variety of hard things. It's really helpful to read the work that he has. So he talks about grief. He says that grief is love with no place to go. It's all that unspent care and affection. So I think unspent care is something that's important for people to understand as part of the complexity of the grief they're feeling. Some examples of that unspent care that we have was just the daily energy that we used to pouring love into Julie's life. This is suddenly, and it was suddenly unspent and kind of floating, like, where do we put that? So all the time that we would spend driving around Bend looking for, you know, that elusive key lime pie or trying to find um different treats that sounded good to her. If she needed bandages or different medical supplies, we would go and get those and decide what fun movie are we going to watch tonight? So that's something, it's this unspent care that can be really hard for people. So finding a new way to channel that, there's something that is really important in Japanese culture, and it's called ikigai, and it's your meaning and it's your purpose in life, the things that you do that really reinforce what your purpose is, how you're helping others, and how you're fulfilling what you were designed to do. And so a big part of our world and our experience was being a support person for Julie and taking care of her. So that aspect of our ikigai is something that we had to redefine. What does that look like for us? So as love is finding a new home, searching for a new home, we have this unspent care. And then we also have what is this love that we shared with Julie look like now? So basically, I think what that looks like is finding a way to honor her. I think initially we wanted to jump right into the meaning stage, talking about her legacy and how we can make meaning out of all of this. But Kessler warns us of using meaning as a pole vault out of our grief work. So the healing process is not about closure. It's about continually finding ways to weave in meaning and to find, you know, your iki guy as you're learning what this next phase of life looks like. Being in the messy middle of grief, allowing yourself to feel it while also looking for a way to make that meaning is something that can be a both and. So something that we're trying to learn is how love changes its address from that person and their life on this earth to their purpose and to the way that we honor them. Thomas's cousin Will got this picture frame that was at Julie's house, but now it's our house. And it's one of those picture frames where people can upload photos, and it's really neat to see all of these happy memories of Julie, ones that are from when she was younger, you know, pictures of our Disneyland trips, photos that families have uploaded from their lives that she used to look at and gave her so much joy. It makes us smile. And then sometimes we see a picture and we're ugly crying a minute later. So I think one of the ultimate goals of the sixth stage of grief that David Kessler defines of making meaning or finding meaning is finding a way to remember the one that you lost with more love than pain. I think that's been true. You know, the the days following Julie's passing and even the weeks and months following her passing, there was so much pain in the tears. It would take your breath away at times. And as time has gone on, the pain kind of transitions into tears of love and tears of joy. And still, of course, you get those grief bursts, those little sneaker waves that come upon you and kind of catch you by surprise. And also, I've noticed a transition that as we see different pictures on this little memory slideshow, the way in which we respond emotionally is starting to change as I think about people who are in that immediate stage. They've just lost someone that they love deeply, knowing that the tears will still come. But as time goes on, there'll be just a different way in which they come, maybe more joy, more gratitude and appreciation, moving in a different direction from the initial deep pain, deep sorrow. It it changes, not in a way where it's it's no longer there, but it it's a little more easy or a little more palpable to integrate that love to changing that address to ah, this is where this person's love resides in my life. And it's something that I would encourage people to find comfort knowing that this is a phase and it will transition. Before we wrap up this solo episode, I almost didn't include a takeaway section because to offer this prescriptive list almost feels like it wouldn't honor the messy middle that we're in right now. But I do think that as I was synthesizing what we are experiencing, there were some things that I could compile that I would share kind of more as guiding truths that we're experiencing rather than make sure you do these tips. So here's some kind of powerful concepts that are keeping us tethered when the world can feel really challenging and things can feel shaky. Number one is that grief is proof of our love. When you cry, those tears are a sign of your love. It's a necessity and not a weakness. The second thing is that vulnerability is courage. Vulnerability is not a sign of weakness, but it's our greatest measure of strength. And when you show up in the mess, when you show up without trying to control the outcome, but rather just being vulnerable with your feelings, it's one of the bravest things that you can do. The next thing that we're learning is that the only cure for grief is to grieve. Allow this process to be as long and as complex as it needs to be, knowing that grief will change its form and it will find different phases and will integrate into your life in different ways. That leads to the concept of love changes its address. So we're not getting over the love or skipping to the next season, but we're finding a new home for the purpose, love, and legacy of that person of Julie's life. And finally, this ties into our faith, and that is that God is close to the brokenhearted. This is a truth that's rooted in our faith that gives us peace when everything else. Feel shaky. We remind ourselves that in the quietest, most painful moments, we are not alone. A verse in Psalms that says, the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. There was a moment where I was in the kitchen one night, I was getting Thomas' pills ready for the next day. And I was thinking about all the appointments we had the next day and how I wanted to make sure we were on time. And I always build in a little buffer time in between appointments. Maybe Thomas is getting infusions and I am driving to Starbucks to get us a peppermint latte as a little boost. And in those drives, that's when I would call Julie and tell her how Thomas's counts were. And so as I thought about the fact that I would not be calling her the next day, and that car ride from the cancer center to Starbucks would be quite quiet. I had this wave of grief hit me. And I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the cupboard. And I just said a prayer to God saying, Please help me in this moment. And I truly did feel that peace that surpasses understanding and just feeling that closeness. I think in these moments of discomfort, these moments of grief, that's when we can truly feel the love of others so much more deeply. And certainly as it is reflected in our faith journey, I feel the closest to God in these moments of profound loss and heartache. And it wouldn't be a brain it on podcast episode if we didn't have a little science, a little brain science in there. This is something that I think is important to keep in mind. The overwhelming pain that we feel, it's not just in our heads, it's a bodily response that comes from our brain, that comes from the way that we're hardwired. And it's because we're hardwired for connection. So when the tears come, if the crying feels endless, if you feel tightness in your chest, this is just your body and your brain doing the hard work. It's the essential work of loving someone through the phase of grief. This is a really beautiful quote that we are reminded of that we think of quite often. Contained within every storm is the rainbow at the end. Within every dark night is a sunrise, within every birth is death, and within every love is grief. The only way to have a life free from loss is to have a life free from love. And as difficult as it may be in times of loss, we all choose a life of love. Before I sign off, I want to give everyone a quick update on Thomas's journey. We normally start with a health highlight, so I want to make sure I include that before this episode is done. There is wonderful news that Thomas is in remission. He continues to be in remission. He had a bone marrow biopsy and a lumbar puncture in November, and both of those outcomes were really good. There is a caveat that the quality of the bone marrow sample was not optimal. And so they weren't really able to determine the cellularity of the marrow, and they weren't able to necessarily get the best indicator of where everything's at. And so in the next sample, there'll be more clarity that we'll really get a good sense of where things are at. But to the best of our knowledge, Thomas is in remission. Even though he's in remission, he started oral chemotherapy this week, and he'll be on that for one to two years. And a lot of folks have said, well, if he's in remission, why would he be doing chemotherapy? It's actually an important part of his cancer treatment. They first had the induction chemo, the first round of treatment last July. Then a patient goes through consolidation treatment, which is all the treatment that came before his transplant. And then there's maintenance therapy, which is typically, at least in Thomas' case, an oral chemotherapy that he'll be on several years just to make sure he has that durable remission. I was looking at our hand sanitizer bottle the other day and it says, you know, kills 99.9% of germs. And that's kind of the way it is with cancer treatment, at least in the context of Thomas's MPAL. Again, that's multiple phenotype acute leukemia. From what we can tell, is it's like 99.9% in remission. And yet there's always the chance that there's, you know, an undetectable level of cells that we can't see that could have some cancer markers. And so that's why they continue to do the chemotherapy. And his cancer is quite aggressive, which is why they continue to do that. We would love prayers for Thomas as he goes through this oral chemotherapy phase. It can cause fatigue, low blood counts, and these blisters on your hands and feet. And so we're going to be probably doing more blood infusions. And Thomas has to use a lot of lotion on his hands and feet to hopefully mitigate those blisters. He does not love using lotion, but it's something that he is learning to get more used to. So thank you again for all of your prayers as we navigate this next phase of his treatment. Finally, I just want to thank our community once again. You've reminded us every day that by allowing this process of grief to unfold in our lives, that we're not alone through it. So we're really thankful for all that you've done to show us your love and to help us make sure that we know that we're not alone. Thank you so much for giving us the space to be vulnerable. Hopefully, in our next episode, Thomas will be joining me and he'll be here to give his insights as we continue to grieve and as we continue to learn what honoring her love looks like in this next chapter of our life. Thanks so much for listening, and we will talk with you soon.