August 15, 2025 • 40 mins
In this episode, Nina Lockwood speaks with Carole Heaney about what happens when life takes a turn you didn’t expect.
Carole is a death doula and advocate for dignified deaths, helping individuals and families create sacred, meaningful experiences at life’s end. With over 20 years as an oncology nurse and nursing administrator; wife, and mother, Carole has a lifetime of experience dealing first hand with the challenges that death and dying bring.They talk about grief, identity, and the experience of starting over. Carole shares her personal story of loss and what she discovered as she began to rebuild her life. Together, they explore how to move forward when the old path no longer fits — and what it means to trust yourself through change.
🌐 Guest website: https://caroleheaney.com/
📘 Explore The Happiness Handbook: https://rpb.li/xM6n 🌐 Learn more at: https://ninalockwood.com
#CaroleHeaney #GetYourHappyBack #GriefHealing #LifeAfterLoss
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
This is Nina Lockwood. Welcome to Get Your Happy Back, stories and insights
that will inspire you to find new sources of happiness in your own life.
Hello and welcome to Get Your Happy Back. And today we're doing something a little bit different.
I want to introduce you to Carol Heaney. Good morning, Carol. Good morning, Nina.
(00:22):
We usually talk about happiness from a standpoint of what we're doing in life
and identifying our values, and it's all about living and doing.
But this conversation will be a little bit different because we're going to
talk about death and dying and really the mystery of it all and coming to terms with endings.
(00:44):
I am just going to say this about Carol.
She has over 45 years of nursing expertise, and she is now a death doula.
And I'm going to let Carol describe it because I'm sure you can do it ever so much better than I can.
I'll turn it over to you, and then we'll just dive in and see what happens.
Great. Thanks, Nina. It's so good to be here. I love talking with you.
(01:08):
I've always valued that.
Thanks. And you're inviting me to be here. But yeah, I've been in healthcare.
I hate to say that it's over 45 years, but it is. It's been a long time.
The beauty of that is that it has taken me, the facets of my work have been
clinician, research, administrator, educator.
I have not been in a boring place in my work for all the years that I was doing
(01:31):
and now doing as a small business entrepreneur and working with people in an
area that I really feel passionate about.
But I think what I think about is that every aspect of my career and my work
has brought me to this place.
It's been the every stone that I've stepped on has unknowingly,
(01:52):
not knowingly, not conscious, not selected.
It just happened that way, has brought me to this space of being as an advocate
for death literacy, because we live in a world that is so afraid to talk about death, about dying.
And in fact, in Western culture, we think it's still an option,
the idea of how we can support people who are grieving if we are better at talking about death and dying.
(02:16):
And so for me, everything led up to this in ways that I would have,
when I think back on it, I could have never planned it better.
And the irony is that early in my nursing career, I was in maternal child health.
So I was an OBGYN, that's what we called it back then, and labor delivery,
nursery, all of that work. And I was a Lamaze instructor for over 18 years.
(02:38):
And that was in the 70s when nobody was allowed in the delivery room.
Women didn't get to make decisions about their births. Most of our OBGYNs were men.
I look at that then and said, well, that was my advocacy work then.
But the correlation between the birth-death piece, there's the same coin, just two sides. Right.
(03:02):
Because you look at a new mom or a mom who's anticipating a birth and so forth.
There's so much unknown.
There's so much new learning. There's so much mystery. There's so much fear.
The same exists in the death experience. I often sort of I get chills sometimes
when I think about, oh, my God, how did I get here? That's how I got here.
(03:23):
So there's obviously this other element for me that wasn't known as I was in
that space of advocating for others.
And obviously, in my nursing work, obviously, you're always advocating for others.
But they're both spiritual and life-changing events.
You know, being pregnant, bearing a child.
(03:45):
And then, obviously, the death experience as well is they're spiritual experiences
and they're obviously life-changing. So that's kind of what brought me to this space.
When I made a decision back in the 90s, late 80s, 90s, on what path I wanted
to select for my graduate work, I immediately thought, oh, of course, maternal child health.
(04:06):
But then I stopped and said, no, I don't think that is the way to go.
My mom had just died. She was 52.
She had cancer. And I just felt like to honor her, I chose oncology.
And then, of course, not knowing how much choosing oncology would impact my life,
because probably one of the most significant things in my life that changed
(04:30):
the way I viewed the world, my own awakened and conscious state,
was the death of my 40-year-old husband.
I was going to ask you if you would talk about that. Well, my husband was 42
when he died, but he was 41 when he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer.
He lived 100 days from diagnosis to death.
We had two children, and I was a vice president of a hospital at the time.
(04:55):
I had been very involved in creating the support of an oncology program and
hospice-like rooms in our medical surgical area because we didn't have official hospice back then.
Nothing challenged me more, even just in the diagnosis for him of how to be
(05:16):
present in a way I didn't know how to be.
And of course, the loss was so impactful in so many ways.
But I will say it shifted my entire world.
And not just the notion of no longer having that person in my life, which that was enough.
But then it really challenged me to question my nursing background,
(05:39):
my training, my education.
And it shifted for me. This paradigm shift was monumental, moving into a holistic
nursing model and became certified as a holistic nurse.
But the idea that healing is not curing or curing is not healing,
that becoming whole doesn't mean you will not die of your disease.
(06:03):
Being whole is being healed.
But it does not mean you will not die. And so that cure-oriented conventional.
Healthcare system that I grew up in suddenly had a flip. That was big. Oh, I bet it was.
Everything. Oh my gosh. I would love to hear your thoughts about how do we become
(06:26):
equipped to handle Handle transitions with love and resilience and presence,
as you're saying, and equanimity.
Because we live in this society that, as we talked about earlier,
death is a taboo. We don't talk about it.
We have a culture, a youth culture, that puts so much attention on being young and accomplishing.
(06:51):
And then there's this medicalization, as you're referring to, of life, right?
That the be all and end all is to extend life.
But that doesn't make sense in the big picture. So just share something about
your experience with all of this.
Well, and of course, the idea that curing is the be all end all.
(07:11):
Let's face it. If I'm in a car accident or I have a trauma, take me to that
ER because I know that they know what they're doing and they can make that work, right?
Even my own recent experience with open heart surgery. Okay,
okay, we can fix that. We know how to fix that.
Okay, you can fix that. I'll take that cure, right?
That doesn't mean that I am guaranteed any more life because it doesn't stop
(07:35):
my goal to being healed, which is being whole, right?
So I think getting back to your question that how do we deal with those endings
as they happen, whatever they are, because if you're in a car accident or have a trauma.
There's an ending to a life you knew, right? Doesn't matter.
There's a whole new world in front of you, a whole new life in front of you.
(07:57):
And I think when it comes to grief and death and dying, we also experience that
same ending of even just the notion of it, just being diagnosed with cancer
changed our lives, my husband and our lives, right?
I can remember thinking the the day he got that diagnosis, life will never be the same.
(08:17):
Never. Not knowing when, what, whatever, but it will never be the same.
And the truth is then you're dealing with that as a loss and then coping with
whatever the situation is.
And the thing that I learned, I didn't know it then because I didn't have the tools.
I just didn't have the tools. What my holistic nursing training brought me was the tools.
(08:39):
It was a four-year study of really integrating into my life what healing truly
means energetically, physically, spiritually, all of that was,
I only have this moment right here.
This is all I've got right now. And my husband actually, my late husband actually
taught me that too while he was dying.
(09:00):
It was this, we're here, we're in it. I can remember leaving the doctor's office
after he got the diagnosis and looking at him and saying, what now?
And he said, well, we have to go grocery shopping. We have to get some milk
and some bread. And what?
It was a powerful message, right? But the being in the now, being in the here
and now, Now, that is a challenge to do in our lives with so much noise,
(09:24):
so much background, things that we get,
like you said earlier, that we perceive success as the accomplishment of something,
that happiness is the accomplishment of something.
We actually, I think, do ourselves an injustice by seeking happiness in a way that is a thing.
And actually, some good studies have been done on, especially with women,
(09:48):
on their notion of happiness is being positive.
Yet, when they accomplish something, the way in which they assessed how they
accomplished that destroyed the happiness value. Oh, my gosh.
That's shocking. knocking, right? That it actually took on so many negative
(10:10):
connotations because they judged how that went and they couldn't really be happy
with it, even though they entered into it as a way of achieving happiness.
So that in so many respects, we kind of look at this obsession of happiness,
making it actually can make us less content with our lives.
And then when we're less content with our lives, we don't really acknowledge
(10:35):
a lot of what's happening around us.
So we're no longer living in the now, right? Yeah.
So I think the idea of endings is really, they're beginnings and endings,
same coin, birth and death, same coin.
We still have to be present wherever it is.
I know every year when I go for my mammogram, I go through all those head things.
(10:57):
And then I sit in that waiting room. I just say, I'm in this moment.
I'm right here. I'm right now. That's all I can have.
Such a good point to make, such a good point to make.
Somehow this conversation, I mean, it's very emotional to me.
I was remembering when my mother was in her decline, she had congestive heart failure and COPD.
(11:20):
So at a certain point, she really couldn't have a conversation because she wasn't
getting any oxygen to her brain.
So she wasn't, she could say yes or no, she understood you, but she really couldn't
respond with anything more than that.
And this idea of clearing the decks in terms of letting go of whatever issues
(11:43):
you've had with someone or even with yourself if it's a diagnosis that you get,
there was a moment when I was taking care of her and she had done something that I found annoying.
Unlike mothers and daughters can. Of course, right?
So there was some exchange that I went off to another room because I didn't
(12:07):
want to dump that energy on her.
And I came back in and offered her something to eat or drink.
And she put her hand on my cheek.
And it was such a powerful moment.
It was in that moment where all of my so-called issues, mother issues,
you know, are gone in an instant in that moment. And if I hadn't been present
(12:30):
to it, I would have brushed it off.
But it was so powerful, that moment of connection in the face as we're talking
about this unknown experience that is surrounding us and at one point is going to have closure.
And if we're not present, you were talking, and I'd love you to talk more about
(12:50):
this, about going into that room and being immersed in mystery.
Yeah, I volunteer at the Joan Nicole Prince Home, which is a social model home for the dying.
And when I walk into that house, I just feel like the concrete ways in which
I am being in the world, right, which we all know and attach to, lift.
(13:12):
And what surrounds me and wraps me and embraces and envelops me is this sense
of mystery that I'm here in a space with two people, one or two people,
usually there's not more than two,
that are planning to leave this world in the physical sense and leave.
(13:32):
There's so much that I'm open to being and learning and growing with them.
But that sense of mystery is right there. It's sort of any potential thing.
Just when people say things sometimes, I was having a conversation with a student
who volunteers there yesterday, and I was asking her about how that volunteering
(13:54):
has impacted her as a young woman. She's 21.
And she said, I'll just never forget when, let's say, John said to me,
she asked him, do you want the television on?
And he said, I don't know, ask everybody in the room.
And she didn't understand it at the moment that everybody in the room,
(14:15):
he was seeing everybody in the room.
And that is real, right? There's so much mystery in that beautiful space,
that lucidity, but yet there's this mystery of that veil that gets thinner and thinner and thinner.
And it's such a privilege to be in that space.
(14:36):
Oh, yes. I'm so glad that you said that. You know, when I've had this happen
a couple of times, and again, I'm going to reference my mother,
was when she was getting close to her passing, when she could still speak.
She said to me, I just saw my mother. Is that weird?
Yes. And it was, she was in this liminal space where the hardness of what we
(15:03):
see as a reality was fading, as you were talking about a veil.
It was to a point where she was aware of other things that her normal reality
perception would not have allowed her to see.
And rather than acknowledging that, like I could have said, oh,
that's ridiculous, right?
But often people do. They do all the time.
(15:26):
So excellent book by Dr. Christopher Kerr, who is the medical director of the
Hospice of Buffalo, which is an amazing hospice. But he wrote a book.
He was a cardiac doc, ICU doc who was getting just burned out by that world
and decided to become a PRN doc for hospice.
And of course, no idea what it is, but I'm sorry, as needed on locum tenens, right?
(15:51):
They call them in as needed, right? Or on the weekends or whatever.
Real world cardiac, real hard, concrete ways in which we approach how we care for patients, right?
He got into the hospice space and it just changed his world.
And he wrote a beautiful book called Death is But a Dream.
And it's all of the experiences they had with residents, gas patients around
(16:16):
this death experience that you're talking about.
That really opened people's eyes to, yeah, there is more there.
I will share this story. This might make me a little emotional, but it's okay.
At the time that my husband was dying, we had a lot of family around.
And I asked, I could tell he was getting very restless.
(16:36):
And I just asked that they go into the family room so that we could just have
a little space and that energy could kind of dissipate and calm down a bit.
Actually, when I asked everyone to to leave the room. And I was by myself and
I thought, oh God, I don't know what I'm going to do now.
Literally walking down the hallway was our NP, Edie, who was also my husband's
(16:59):
person who was working with him with Reiki and energy work and all of that throughout his illness.
And she said, I had an appointment with Tom today and he wasn't there.
So I just took a chance and came here. And she came in the room and she said,
why don't you ground him at the head and I'll I ground him at his feet after
I grounded him at the head.
(17:19):
And I said, is there anything you need right now? And he said,
well, the music stopped.
And I said, oh, okay. And I'll never listen to it again, but it's Enya, right?
And I said, oh, I'll turn the music back on. And it wasn't shortly after that,
Edie was helping him to kind of release this energy.
And out of his mouth comes, isn't it beautiful how everyone came to see Tom today? day.
(17:44):
Amazing. There was a space.
He was moving into that space. I know it was my mother telling him that.
And just moments later, he took his last breath.
And so for me, that brings such comfort. And that's what Dr. Cara is saying.
This can be comforting to hear these things because they stay with you after
(18:05):
your loss, right? And they're so powerful.
I can hear the words. I can see it. I can hear it. I can feel it.
It never has left. So, so powerful that you were really present enough to know
what she was saying and that you didn't try to discourage her from that or try
to change what was actually happening for her. Right.
(18:28):
You go away from that space.
So, yeah, there's the beauty of that mystery, right? That brings me joy when
we talk about happiness.
And I think about happiness. I think about what serves my well-being.
And I am only the only person. It's a subjective thing, right?
I'm the only person who can determine what my well-being is.
(18:48):
And so when I asked that question about, well, what serves my well-being?
This is one of those things that serves my well-being.
And it just feels so natural to be in this space as a doula,
as a guide, but mostly as an advocate to talk with people about the conversation
that no one wants to have.
And that when we are in that space of talking about that, we have the ability
(19:12):
to really affect our lives that we're living right now.
It shifts and changes how we behave in life when we start to examine how if
I were told that I had three months to live, what physically,
emotionally, mentally, spiritually, practically would I want different in my life?
Usually a death brings that where we stop and we examine what does this mean for my life now?
(19:37):
And it often impacts us in a very positive.
Positive way, that we can bring more peace into our lives, more love into our lives.
And I think that death and grief are this just constant expansion of love.
It's always expanding. And I see that over and over when families reunite in
(19:57):
a place where they weren't united before, and they are capable of seeing that
there's love beyond those differences,
or that they are open enough to forgive.
And that, for me, is how I bring about well-being, right?
And for me, that subjective interpretation of well-being is in relationships, in connections.
(20:22):
And, you know, they flow. Nothing is ever steady state.
It fluctuates, right? We'll have insight, and it might shift how we think about
something and do something differently as a result.
So we often tend to shift and change our lives as a result of a death or someone dying, a loss.
It may not be a death. It might be a job. It might be a spouse.
(20:45):
It might be a relationship.
It doesn't matter. We have a loss every single second. I'll never have this second with you again.
This is the last time, right? Have another one and how can I, right?
So we have the ability to create that sense of well-being for ourselves based
on what we value, what's important to us.
(21:06):
And for me, that's the grounding of happiness.
Totally with you on that. And as you were talking about this recognition of
love beyond the immediate experience,
it just conjured this image for me of walking down, you know,
how people talk about these near-death experiences where they go through a tunnel and then.
(21:30):
Something amazing happens. But in this instance, I was thinking for people who
are addressing or are willing to address this topic,
it's like going through the fear and the anxiety about talking about something
like this for many people is like going through a dark tunnel.
And then when you are able to let go of some of that fear and realize it's a
(21:55):
good thing to be be talking about this and exploring it,
that's when you start to experience the love as a pervasive state,
for lack of a better word, that it's constant.
And I think when we can take our eyes off of what's immediately in front of
us, our to-do list or whatever we think is very important that must be done
(22:18):
or in order for me to look a certain way,
whatever our requirement is at the moment.
Just putting that aside for a present moment, we start to realize it's not just
about those little things.
It's about, as you're talking about, it's about connection.
It's about a permanence that goes beyond the physical.
(22:39):
May not be the best way to express it, but there is a reality that holds us
through the whole birth, life, death experience, that continuum of being, whatever we call it.
And I just see this so much, and I'm sure you do too,
where this conversation about life and death and coming to terms with endings
(23:03):
is so hard for so many people because they don't anticipate change, They don't expect it.
And yet every time we turn around, something changes.
Exactly. And I think that one's ability as a human to live with knowing impermanence is very hard.
(23:25):
That this is nothing here is guaranteed. Nothing here is a certainty.
And that's living in impermanence and it's hard for most of us to do and we
have to constantly be, I constantly find myself pulling myself back into.
No, that's not forever. Hey, deal with it. What's right here and right now.
(23:47):
Sometimes I find myself becoming really, really introverted on all that personal.
I just want a space that I don't, I just want to spend it in this space of nothing
because it actually helps me to acclimate to more impermanence that has a factor
for me and being able to realize that, yeah, Yeah, nothing here is certain.
(24:09):
And I think really importantly that our young people, our young folks coming
up, and I love talking with these students that most of them are from Union College.
Actually, some of the volunteers are medical students from Albany Med and getting
their bead on how all of this is affecting them.
And it's beautiful because they're getting it.
(24:31):
And I think that generation, that those that are much younger than I am,
they will be able to focus more on the here and now because there's a different
set of values that they were brought up with that we were shifting through.
Like so many, sometimes I have to wonder what generation I'm in.
(24:51):
Am I my mom's generation?
She was born in the late 20s. Or am I in mine? I was born in the mid 50s.
Or my children or my grandchildren. children.
So sometimes I have to kind of like, whoa, it's like a time warp that's in front
of me. And which one am I in?
And I see myself in every one of them. Kind of weird. But anyway,
yeah. So I think the idea of impermanence is really...
(25:14):
A challenging, challenging thing. As I said to you, I'm doing a study of the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, and it's intense, but it's so enlightening in so many ways.
So it'll take me a long time to figure it out, but I feel like it's the right
place for me to be right now in my study.
That's the other thing I love about actually being, I think it's always been,
(25:35):
growth mindset has always been part of me, learning new things and not being afraid to learned.
I'm 70 years old and I'm ready to just take on whatever else I need to want
to learn and have the beauty and the freedom to do that.
And even though I have more time behind me than I do in front of me,
the richest part is right now and what's in front of me.
The richest part, the richest part, because I can embrace whatever I want and
(26:01):
God bless that I can, that I live in a country and a place that I can do that.
And so, for me, that growth is like a lifeblood.
So powerful. In an earlier podcast with, I think it was Janet Tanguay,
we were talking about, she was talking about her experience in expressive arts
(26:25):
therapy, where you create something and then you destroy it.
And it leads, you know, that, oh, no, this was so perfect the way it was, you know,
And I came back with the example of the Buddhists who create those sand mandalas days and weeks,
and they're on their knees and they're cross-legged and they're using those
(26:48):
little straws and a tiny little sand, and then they sweep it all away.
They're not attached. No, and that's the impermanence, right?
Yeah, and they're not attached to it. And while they are doing it.
They are meditative in every grain of sand that they're using to create that mandala.
(27:09):
And the beauty of that is not just the obvious lesson, which is nothing is intended
to be here forever, and that we don't have to attach to things.
So when we do, that's when we struggle with our impermanence,
when we keep attaching to things.
I facilitate virtual grief groups, And I and many of these folks are in their early phases of grief.
(27:34):
And so when I'm listening to them, I keep coming back to their hearts will shift.
Everything will begin to shift for them when that chaos has a chance to settle.
And there's this new set of eyes looking at their world.
And that takes time. and I feel like the talking with people about how they
(27:54):
grieve and how others see them grieving is really critical because that's how we bring an awareness.
It's our mental health when we're grieving. It's really critical and how people
approach that can have effect.
In fact, one of the women last night said, I just want to take people by the
hair when they say things to me like he's in a better place.
Oh, but you have another daughter or nonsense.
(28:17):
And I appreciate that so much. And all I can say is it's about grace,
allowing some, because we learn in that too.
Wow. I'd love you to speak a little bit about this mythologizing of the grief timeline.
It seems that there is why, again, you wonder, this is the case, that.
(28:40):
Grief is supposed to have a beginning and an end, right? And then you're supposed to be over it.
Yeah, that's so interesting, isn't it? And I think my Elizabeth Kubler-Ross is one of my heroes.
I always get a little annoyed when people keep referring to her stages of grief,
which was never what she intended.
That was designed for people who were diagnosed with a life-threatening illness
(29:01):
on how they grow into the illness and so forth, right?
It wasn't intended. and someone converted it all to the stages of grief as if
there's a beginning and the end. And there is not.
I've actually stopped using the word the grief journey because journey implies
a destination, an end, and a beginning and an end, and that you're going to get there.
And the truth is, the best visual I can create is that you have this,
(29:27):
a jar, imagine a mason jar, and there's a ball inside the mason jar,
a big round, dark circle. and it fills that mason jar.
And then there's another mason jar, but the mason jar is a little bigger and
the ball doesn't take quite as much space.
And then the next mason jar is even bigger and the ball looks even smaller,
but it's the same size ball.
(29:48):
It's just in a larger, more open space.
And for me, that's how I see, feel, experience grief is that I am growing around it.
And it It does not mean that the grief, the dark circle is dark and sad all the time.
It isn't because it can bring us so much insight, so much joy,
(30:10):
so much love that as we grow around it and it stays with us, there's no end.
But people who are grieving mourning the early loss after the early time of
loss think, you're going to tell me I'm going to feel like this forever? No. The point is...
It is something that helps you create space for yourself, for others,
(30:35):
a love in your life, expanding.
I feel like grief is an expanding love all the time.
Ah, Lordy, only more of us could really take that in.
And that's the idea of the advocacy for me. So I see advocacy.
First of all, I love that the death doula movement is growing and leaps and
(30:55):
bounds, and a lot of young people coming into it as well. but seeing it as an
important place to be in service.
And actually, it was after I wrote my first children's book,
The Cardinal's Gift, a true story of finding hope in grief that kept this growth piece going for me.
And that was 26 years after my husband died that I published that book.
(31:17):
I wrote that book out of a personal experience and I just wrote it down on the
computer and said to my husband, make sure that when I die, my kids get to see
this. And that was how long ago it was.
And then I realized one day, wait, I rank it.
I got to do something with this. And then during COVID, I did.
But the idea that from that, even 26 years later, I had new grief experiences
(31:41):
and growth experiences from writing that book that were related to my grief
that I had no idea existed.
And because of it, it kind of led me to this new stone to step on,
which was how we support others in grief.
How do we shift the consciousness of society around it being okay to talk about.
(32:04):
Death, to talk about dying, talk about grieving, to talk about life,
which is why I started my monthly kitchen table talks with Carol because I thought, just bring up a topic.
Let's talk about whatever it is related.
And it opens up this door that says, it's okay to talk about this, right?
You can talk about it with your friends and, well, you better be thinking about
(32:25):
this. It's not going to go away.
Or, hey, how do I want to plan for that? I just completed my,
what I call Carol's Last Waves, and it was my document to my family of what
to do at the time that I'm dying.
And I'm just assuming that I didn't have a tragic, traumatic death,
but that I have this space where I have the opportunity to do that.
(32:47):
And at the end, I wrote, if this sounds kind of controlling, it is.
They were my wishes, right? And I thought, that's a gift I'm giving them by
putting that on paper and being really explicit and giving them the links and
telling them where they can find this and find that.
And in writing it, for me, it was like, wow, you know, I've been meaning to do that.
(33:10):
Yeah, I got a note to self, right? It opens up other doors and it brings us
joy in other ways and well-being.
I feel good that I have put that document in my knockbox and I know that my family will read it.
They can be comforted by knowing they were able to fulfill my wishes.
Right. And you made it easier for them. Right.
(33:33):
It's like, okay, their grief can be supported by, well, you know,
we got mom what she wanted and this is what was important for her and I'm really
glad we were able to do that.
So the role of death and happiness is significant in that it helps,
you know, I say, begin with the end in mind. It changes how we live.
(33:56):
Wow, that is another one of your many powerful statements today.
Well, in truth, I think we keep avoiding it.
My sister, my older sister, who was only 11 months older than I, died two years ago.
And I've had the beauty of getting to know her beautiful daughter,
my niece, and through all of that.
(34:17):
And in the irony, though, for me of having that gift of love come from my sister's
death, it's a perfect example.
And it happens all the time. And I think when we begin to see that the balance
of life is these ups, these downs, there's a general sense about who we are.
(34:38):
And when we don't feel, when I don't feel balanced in that, it's like,
I want to say, I need to right the ship. And I don't mean right wrong.
I mean, we need to get it righted. If you, if you boat, you know that you have
to right the ship when it begins to heel too far to the port or heel too far
to the starboard, you have to get it righted.
And when we know and intuit within ourselves and keep a tab on that energy and
(35:04):
identify the sort of things that many of us see as, quote unquote,
not being happy, I see that just as, oh, I'm needing to right the ship a bit.
What's going on? Step back. Pay attention.
Well, maybe this is what I need to do right now. It's just going to be in that space.
And I'll be in that space for as long as I need to be in that space.
(35:24):
Getting comfortable with that takes time but what a gift that we can give ourselves
that we don't have to feel as if we have to be a specific way all the time or that.
Our words are constantly being interpreted in such a way that have no meaning.
(35:44):
The second children's book I wrote was called Lily Tames Her Worries,
and it's about my niece and her anxiety.
And what I try to impart is that we all, our brains are designed to do that
anxiety thing, right? Our brains are designed.
Now, how can we kind of befriend that amygdala and put our prefrontal cortex
(36:05):
in charge instead Instead, and understanding what it means and stepping back
and saying, hmm, I feel like something's happening here.
I can feel I use heebie-jeebies as the term.
The heebie-jeebies are coming on me. What does that mean? And then just knowing
that there's only one thing to do right now, and that's to stop and breathe.
And then you can decide what action to take. But everybody does it.
(36:27):
There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing you have to fix.
You don't need to constantly, you don't need to be feeling like you have to
fix it for good. It's in our lives.
And learning to notice is critical here.
It took me a long time to learn to notice. Just notice.
That is the key to everything, isn't it? It's a superpower, man.
(36:47):
And I think kids learning to notice is so incredible.
I had a family of nine. I was one of seven children.
And noticing was not a skill set I learned.
Until much later in life, much later in life.
And I think about that. And it's sort of this role that each one of us plays in that family.
(37:10):
And seven people that you're constantly in interaction with all the time. It was impossible.
Wish I'd known that skill then. Well, you do now.
Thank you so much. I suppose this is contrary to what people might think if
if you're having a conversation about death and dying, but I feel very joyful.
(37:31):
You're highlighting the beauty
and the mystery and the joy in this whole journey of life, if you will.
Can you share with us where people can find you, where they can find your kitchen
table talks, your books, get in touch with you directly? That would be great.
Sure. My website is the easiest place to do that. And that's carolheny.com.
(37:54):
And I have a Facebook page as well, and an Instagram page. My Instagram page
is healing underscore press.
All of that's been redirected now to carolhaney.com. That's where my events are and so forth.
And right now, I'm really focusing on this conversation, starting the conversation.
And that, if nothing else, a family dinner, a family celebration,
(38:17):
and it doesn't have to be about death.
It can be asking the honoree, you know, what is one of the most important times
of your life? Or do you have any regrets?
Or what are you most proud of? Because that's how you get to know people when
you're talking about advanced directives and nobody wants to talk about advanced directives.
That's how you get to know people. So for me right now, the conversation is critical, right?
(38:41):
Wherever I can have the conversation, I'm going to have the conversation.
I do public talks as well.
And I I love that. But my kitchen table talks really are, they're enlightening.
We laughed so much at our last kitchen table talk.
People are a little interested in talking about what's this about, right?
I'm talking about death anyway. It's my version of a death cafe without saying that.
(39:06):
People get wigged out about death cafes. CarolHaney.com is the best way.
And my kitchen table talks are the fourth Wednesday of every month.
And they're free and they're virtual. and I love having them.
So join our conversation.
Oh, that's great. Well, I hope everyone who's listening does do that because
Carol, as you can tell by this conversation, is brilliant.
(39:28):
She's got so much expertise and importantly, so much love that she is sharing with all of us.
So thank you again, Carol, for joining me today.
Oh, and thanks for having me, Nina. It was delightful. I'm doing the work that you do.
I appreciate you because I think you're that, that other advocate out there
for all these different conversations.
(39:49):
Thank you so much. Thank you. And for those of you who are either listening
or watching, thank you so much
for being here and we will see you on the next episode. So bye for now.
Music.
This is Nina Lockwood. Welcome to Get Your Happy Back, stories and insights
that will inspire you to find new sources of happiness in your own life.
Hello and welcome to Get Your Happy Back. And today we're doing something a little bit different.
I want to introduce you to Carol Heaney. Good morning, Carol. Good morning, Nina.
(00:22):
We usually talk about happiness from a standpoint of what we're doing in life
and identifying our values, and it's all about living and doing.
But this conversation will be a little bit different because we're going to
talk about death and dying and really the mystery of it all and coming to terms with endings.
(00:44):
I am just going to say this about Carol.
She has over 45 years of nursing expertise, and she is now a death doula.
And I'm going to let Carol describe it because I'm sure you can do it ever so much better than I can.
I'll turn it over to you, and then we'll just dive in and see what happens.
Great. Thanks, Nina. It's so good to be here. I love talking with you.
(01:08):
I've always valued that.
Thanks. And you're inviting me to be here. But yeah, I've been in healthcare.
I hate to say that it's over 45 years, but it is. It's been a long time.
The beauty of that is that it has taken me, the facets of my work have been
clinician, research, administrator, educator.
I have not been in a boring place in my work for all the years that I was doing
(01:31):
and now doing as a small business entrepreneur and working with people in an
area that I really feel passionate about.
But I think what I think about is that every aspect of my career and my work
has brought me to this place.
It's been the every stone that I've stepped on has unknowingly,
(01:52):
not knowingly, not conscious, not selected.
It just happened that way, has brought me to this space of being as an advocate
for death literacy, because we live in a world that is so afraid to talk about death, about dying.
And in fact, in Western culture, we think it's still an option,
the idea of how we can support people who are grieving if we are better at talking about death and dying.
(02:16):
And so for me, everything led up to this in ways that I would have,
when I think back on it, I could have never planned it better.
And the irony is that early in my nursing career, I was in maternal child health.
So I was an OBGYN, that's what we called it back then, and labor delivery,
nursery, all of that work. And I was a Lamaze instructor for over 18 years.
(02:38):
And that was in the 70s when nobody was allowed in the delivery room.
Women didn't get to make decisions about their births. Most of our OBGYNs were men.
I look at that then and said, well, that was my advocacy work then.
But the correlation between the birth-death piece, there's the same coin, just two sides. Right.
(03:02):
Because you look at a new mom or a mom who's anticipating a birth and so forth.
There's so much unknown.
There's so much new learning. There's so much mystery. There's so much fear.
The same exists in the death experience. I often sort of I get chills sometimes
when I think about, oh, my God, how did I get here? That's how I got here.
(03:23):
So there's obviously this other element for me that wasn't known as I was in
that space of advocating for others.
And obviously, in my nursing work, obviously, you're always advocating for others.
But they're both spiritual and life-changing events.
You know, being pregnant, bearing a child.
(03:45):
And then, obviously, the death experience as well is they're spiritual experiences
and they're obviously life-changing. So that's kind of what brought me to this space.
When I made a decision back in the 90s, late 80s, 90s, on what path I wanted
to select for my graduate work, I immediately thought, oh, of course, maternal child health.
(04:06):
But then I stopped and said, no, I don't think that is the way to go.
My mom had just died. She was 52.
She had cancer. And I just felt like to honor her, I chose oncology.
And then, of course, not knowing how much choosing oncology would impact my life,
because probably one of the most significant things in my life that changed
(04:30):
the way I viewed the world, my own awakened and conscious state,
was the death of my 40-year-old husband.
I was going to ask you if you would talk about that. Well, my husband was 42
when he died, but he was 41 when he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer.
He lived 100 days from diagnosis to death.
We had two children, and I was a vice president of a hospital at the time.
(04:55):
I had been very involved in creating the support of an oncology program and
hospice-like rooms in our medical surgical area because we didn't have official hospice back then.
Nothing challenged me more, even just in the diagnosis for him of how to be
(05:16):
present in a way I didn't know how to be.
And of course, the loss was so impactful in so many ways.
But I will say it shifted my entire world.
And not just the notion of no longer having that person in my life, which that was enough.
But then it really challenged me to question my nursing background,
(05:39):
my training, my education.
And it shifted for me. This paradigm shift was monumental, moving into a holistic
nursing model and became certified as a holistic nurse.
But the idea that healing is not curing or curing is not healing,
that becoming whole doesn't mean you will not die of your disease.
(06:03):
Being whole is being healed.
But it does not mean you will not die. And so that cure-oriented conventional.
Healthcare system that I grew up in suddenly had a flip. That was big. Oh, I bet it was.
Everything. Oh my gosh. I would love to hear your thoughts about how do we become
(06:26):
equipped to handle Handle transitions with love and resilience and presence,
as you're saying, and equanimity.
Because we live in this society that, as we talked about earlier,
death is a taboo. We don't talk about it.
We have a culture, a youth culture, that puts so much attention on being young and accomplishing.
(06:51):
And then there's this medicalization, as you're referring to, of life, right?
That the be all and end all is to extend life.
But that doesn't make sense in the big picture. So just share something about
your experience with all of this.
Well, and of course, the idea that curing is the be all end all.
(07:11):
Let's face it. If I'm in a car accident or I have a trauma, take me to that
ER because I know that they know what they're doing and they can make that work, right?
Even my own recent experience with open heart surgery. Okay,
okay, we can fix that. We know how to fix that.
Okay, you can fix that. I'll take that cure, right?
That doesn't mean that I am guaranteed any more life because it doesn't stop
(07:35):
my goal to being healed, which is being whole, right?
So I think getting back to your question that how do we deal with those endings
as they happen, whatever they are, because if you're in a car accident or have a trauma.
There's an ending to a life you knew, right? Doesn't matter.
There's a whole new world in front of you, a whole new life in front of you.
(07:57):
And I think when it comes to grief and death and dying, we also experience that
same ending of even just the notion of it, just being diagnosed with cancer
changed our lives, my husband and our lives, right?
I can remember thinking the the day he got that diagnosis, life will never be the same.
(08:17):
Never. Not knowing when, what, whatever, but it will never be the same.
And the truth is then you're dealing with that as a loss and then coping with
whatever the situation is.
And the thing that I learned, I didn't know it then because I didn't have the tools.
I just didn't have the tools. What my holistic nursing training brought me was the tools.
(08:39):
It was a four-year study of really integrating into my life what healing truly
means energetically, physically, spiritually, all of that was,
I only have this moment right here.
This is all I've got right now. And my husband actually, my late husband actually
taught me that too while he was dying.
(09:00):
It was this, we're here, we're in it. I can remember leaving the doctor's office
after he got the diagnosis and looking at him and saying, what now?
And he said, well, we have to go grocery shopping. We have to get some milk
and some bread. And what?
It was a powerful message, right? But the being in the now, being in the here
and now, Now, that is a challenge to do in our lives with so much noise,
(09:24):
so much background, things that we get,
like you said earlier, that we perceive success as the accomplishment of something,
that happiness is the accomplishment of something.
We actually, I think, do ourselves an injustice by seeking happiness in a way that is a thing.
And actually, some good studies have been done on, especially with women,
(09:48):
on their notion of happiness is being positive.
Yet, when they accomplish something, the way in which they assessed how they
accomplished that destroyed the happiness value. Oh, my gosh.
That's shocking. knocking, right? That it actually took on so many negative
(10:10):
connotations because they judged how that went and they couldn't really be happy
with it, even though they entered into it as a way of achieving happiness.
So that in so many respects, we kind of look at this obsession of happiness,
making it actually can make us less content with our lives.
And then when we're less content with our lives, we don't really acknowledge
(10:35):
a lot of what's happening around us.
So we're no longer living in the now, right? Yeah.
So I think the idea of endings is really, they're beginnings and endings,
same coin, birth and death, same coin.
We still have to be present wherever it is.
I know every year when I go for my mammogram, I go through all those head things.
(10:57):
And then I sit in that waiting room. I just say, I'm in this moment.
I'm right here. I'm right now. That's all I can have.
Such a good point to make, such a good point to make.
Somehow this conversation, I mean, it's very emotional to me.
I was remembering when my mother was in her decline, she had congestive heart failure and COPD.
(11:20):
So at a certain point, she really couldn't have a conversation because she wasn't
getting any oxygen to her brain.
So she wasn't, she could say yes or no, she understood you, but she really couldn't
respond with anything more than that.
And this idea of clearing the decks in terms of letting go of whatever issues
(11:43):
you've had with someone or even with yourself if it's a diagnosis that you get,
there was a moment when I was taking care of her and she had done something that I found annoying.
Unlike mothers and daughters can. Of course, right?
So there was some exchange that I went off to another room because I didn't
(12:07):
want to dump that energy on her.
And I came back in and offered her something to eat or drink.
And she put her hand on my cheek.
And it was such a powerful moment.
It was in that moment where all of my so-called issues, mother issues,
you know, are gone in an instant in that moment. And if I hadn't been present
(12:30):
to it, I would have brushed it off.
But it was so powerful, that moment of connection in the face as we're talking
about this unknown experience that is surrounding us and at one point is going to have closure.
And if we're not present, you were talking, and I'd love you to talk more about
(12:50):
this, about going into that room and being immersed in mystery.
Yeah, I volunteer at the Joan Nicole Prince Home, which is a social model home for the dying.
And when I walk into that house, I just feel like the concrete ways in which
I am being in the world, right, which we all know and attach to, lift.
(13:12):
And what surrounds me and wraps me and embraces and envelops me is this sense
of mystery that I'm here in a space with two people, one or two people,
usually there's not more than two,
that are planning to leave this world in the physical sense and leave.
(13:32):
There's so much that I'm open to being and learning and growing with them.
But that sense of mystery is right there. It's sort of any potential thing.
Just when people say things sometimes, I was having a conversation with a student
who volunteers there yesterday, and I was asking her about how that volunteering
(13:54):
has impacted her as a young woman. She's 21.
And she said, I'll just never forget when, let's say, John said to me,
she asked him, do you want the television on?
And he said, I don't know, ask everybody in the room.
And she didn't understand it at the moment that everybody in the room,
(14:15):
he was seeing everybody in the room.
And that is real, right? There's so much mystery in that beautiful space,
that lucidity, but yet there's this mystery of that veil that gets thinner and thinner and thinner.
And it's such a privilege to be in that space.
(14:36):
Oh, yes. I'm so glad that you said that. You know, when I've had this happen
a couple of times, and again, I'm going to reference my mother,
was when she was getting close to her passing, when she could still speak.
She said to me, I just saw my mother. Is that weird?
Yes. And it was, she was in this liminal space where the hardness of what we
(15:03):
see as a reality was fading, as you were talking about a veil.
It was to a point where she was aware of other things that her normal reality
perception would not have allowed her to see.
And rather than acknowledging that, like I could have said, oh,
that's ridiculous, right?
But often people do. They do all the time.
(15:26):
So excellent book by Dr. Christopher Kerr, who is the medical director of the
Hospice of Buffalo, which is an amazing hospice. But he wrote a book.
He was a cardiac doc, ICU doc who was getting just burned out by that world
and decided to become a PRN doc for hospice.
And of course, no idea what it is, but I'm sorry, as needed on locum tenens, right?
(15:51):
They call them in as needed, right? Or on the weekends or whatever.
Real world cardiac, real hard, concrete ways in which we approach how we care for patients, right?
He got into the hospice space and it just changed his world.
And he wrote a beautiful book called Death is But a Dream.
And it's all of the experiences they had with residents, gas patients around
(16:16):
this death experience that you're talking about.
That really opened people's eyes to, yeah, there is more there.
I will share this story. This might make me a little emotional, but it's okay.
At the time that my husband was dying, we had a lot of family around.
And I asked, I could tell he was getting very restless.
(16:36):
And I just asked that they go into the family room so that we could just have
a little space and that energy could kind of dissipate and calm down a bit.
Actually, when I asked everyone to to leave the room. And I was by myself and
I thought, oh God, I don't know what I'm going to do now.
Literally walking down the hallway was our NP, Edie, who was also my husband's
(16:59):
person who was working with him with Reiki and energy work and all of that throughout his illness.
And she said, I had an appointment with Tom today and he wasn't there.
So I just took a chance and came here. And she came in the room and she said,
why don't you ground him at the head and I'll I ground him at his feet after
I grounded him at the head.
(17:19):
And I said, is there anything you need right now? And he said,
well, the music stopped.
And I said, oh, okay. And I'll never listen to it again, but it's Enya, right?
And I said, oh, I'll turn the music back on. And it wasn't shortly after that,
Edie was helping him to kind of release this energy.
And out of his mouth comes, isn't it beautiful how everyone came to see Tom today? day.
(17:44):
Amazing. There was a space.
He was moving into that space. I know it was my mother telling him that.
And just moments later, he took his last breath.
And so for me, that brings such comfort. And that's what Dr. Cara is saying.
This can be comforting to hear these things because they stay with you after
(18:05):
your loss, right? And they're so powerful.
I can hear the words. I can see it. I can hear it. I can feel it.
It never has left. So, so powerful that you were really present enough to know
what she was saying and that you didn't try to discourage her from that or try
to change what was actually happening for her. Right.
(18:28):
You go away from that space.
So, yeah, there's the beauty of that mystery, right? That brings me joy when
we talk about happiness.
And I think about happiness. I think about what serves my well-being.
And I am only the only person. It's a subjective thing, right?
I'm the only person who can determine what my well-being is.
(18:48):
And so when I asked that question about, well, what serves my well-being?
This is one of those things that serves my well-being.
And it just feels so natural to be in this space as a doula,
as a guide, but mostly as an advocate to talk with people about the conversation
that no one wants to have.
And that when we are in that space of talking about that, we have the ability
(19:12):
to really affect our lives that we're living right now.
It shifts and changes how we behave in life when we start to examine how if
I were told that I had three months to live, what physically,
emotionally, mentally, spiritually, practically would I want different in my life?
Usually a death brings that where we stop and we examine what does this mean for my life now?
(19:37):
And it often impacts us in a very positive.
Positive way, that we can bring more peace into our lives, more love into our lives.
And I think that death and grief are this just constant expansion of love.
It's always expanding. And I see that over and over when families reunite in
(19:57):
a place where they weren't united before, and they are capable of seeing that
there's love beyond those differences,
or that they are open enough to forgive.
And that, for me, is how I bring about well-being, right?
And for me, that subjective interpretation of well-being is in relationships, in connections.
(20:22):
And, you know, they flow. Nothing is ever steady state.
It fluctuates, right? We'll have insight, and it might shift how we think about
something and do something differently as a result.
So we often tend to shift and change our lives as a result of a death or someone dying, a loss.
It may not be a death. It might be a job. It might be a spouse.
(20:45):
It might be a relationship.
It doesn't matter. We have a loss every single second. I'll never have this second with you again.
This is the last time, right? Have another one and how can I, right?
So we have the ability to create that sense of well-being for ourselves based
on what we value, what's important to us.
(21:06):
And for me, that's the grounding of happiness.
Totally with you on that. And as you were talking about this recognition of
love beyond the immediate experience,
it just conjured this image for me of walking down, you know,
how people talk about these near-death experiences where they go through a tunnel and then.
(21:30):
Something amazing happens. But in this instance, I was thinking for people who
are addressing or are willing to address this topic,
it's like going through the fear and the anxiety about talking about something
like this for many people is like going through a dark tunnel.
And then when you are able to let go of some of that fear and realize it's a
(21:55):
good thing to be be talking about this and exploring it,
that's when you start to experience the love as a pervasive state,
for lack of a better word, that it's constant.
And I think when we can take our eyes off of what's immediately in front of
us, our to-do list or whatever we think is very important that must be done
(22:18):
or in order for me to look a certain way,
whatever our requirement is at the moment.
Just putting that aside for a present moment, we start to realize it's not just
about those little things.
It's about, as you're talking about, it's about connection.
It's about a permanence that goes beyond the physical.
(22:39):
May not be the best way to express it, but there is a reality that holds us
through the whole birth, life, death experience, that continuum of being, whatever we call it.
And I just see this so much, and I'm sure you do too,
where this conversation about life and death and coming to terms with endings
(23:03):
is so hard for so many people because they don't anticipate change, They don't expect it.
And yet every time we turn around, something changes.
Exactly. And I think that one's ability as a human to live with knowing impermanence is very hard.
(23:25):
That this is nothing here is guaranteed. Nothing here is a certainty.
And that's living in impermanence and it's hard for most of us to do and we
have to constantly be, I constantly find myself pulling myself back into.
No, that's not forever. Hey, deal with it. What's right here and right now.
(23:47):
Sometimes I find myself becoming really, really introverted on all that personal.
I just want a space that I don't, I just want to spend it in this space of nothing
because it actually helps me to acclimate to more impermanence that has a factor
for me and being able to realize that, yeah, Yeah, nothing here is certain.
(24:09):
And I think really importantly that our young people, our young folks coming
up, and I love talking with these students that most of them are from Union College.
Actually, some of the volunteers are medical students from Albany Med and getting
their bead on how all of this is affecting them.
And it's beautiful because they're getting it.
(24:31):
And I think that generation, that those that are much younger than I am,
they will be able to focus more on the here and now because there's a different
set of values that they were brought up with that we were shifting through.
Like so many, sometimes I have to wonder what generation I'm in.
(24:51):
Am I my mom's generation?
She was born in the late 20s. Or am I in mine? I was born in the mid 50s.
Or my children or my grandchildren. children.
So sometimes I have to kind of like, whoa, it's like a time warp that's in front
of me. And which one am I in?
And I see myself in every one of them. Kind of weird. But anyway,
yeah. So I think the idea of impermanence is really...
(25:14):
A challenging, challenging thing. As I said to you, I'm doing a study of the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, and it's intense, but it's so enlightening in so many ways.
So it'll take me a long time to figure it out, but I feel like it's the right
place for me to be right now in my study.
That's the other thing I love about actually being, I think it's always been,
(25:35):
growth mindset has always been part of me, learning new things and not being afraid to learned.
I'm 70 years old and I'm ready to just take on whatever else I need to want
to learn and have the beauty and the freedom to do that.
And even though I have more time behind me than I do in front of me,
the richest part is right now and what's in front of me.
The richest part, the richest part, because I can embrace whatever I want and
(26:01):
God bless that I can, that I live in a country and a place that I can do that.
And so, for me, that growth is like a lifeblood.
So powerful. In an earlier podcast with, I think it was Janet Tanguay,
we were talking about, she was talking about her experience in expressive arts
(26:25):
therapy, where you create something and then you destroy it.
And it leads, you know, that, oh, no, this was so perfect the way it was, you know,
And I came back with the example of the Buddhists who create those sand mandalas days and weeks,
and they're on their knees and they're cross-legged and they're using those
(26:48):
little straws and a tiny little sand, and then they sweep it all away.
They're not attached. No, and that's the impermanence, right?
Yeah, and they're not attached to it. And while they are doing it.
They are meditative in every grain of sand that they're using to create that mandala.
(27:09):
And the beauty of that is not just the obvious lesson, which is nothing is intended
to be here forever, and that we don't have to attach to things.
So when we do, that's when we struggle with our impermanence,
when we keep attaching to things.
I facilitate virtual grief groups, And I and many of these folks are in their early phases of grief.
(27:34):
And so when I'm listening to them, I keep coming back to their hearts will shift.
Everything will begin to shift for them when that chaos has a chance to settle.
And there's this new set of eyes looking at their world.
And that takes time. and I feel like the talking with people about how they
(27:54):
grieve and how others see them grieving is really critical because that's how we bring an awareness.
It's our mental health when we're grieving. It's really critical and how people
approach that can have effect.
In fact, one of the women last night said, I just want to take people by the
hair when they say things to me like he's in a better place.
Oh, but you have another daughter or nonsense.
(28:17):
And I appreciate that so much. And all I can say is it's about grace,
allowing some, because we learn in that too.
Wow. I'd love you to speak a little bit about this mythologizing of the grief timeline.
It seems that there is why, again, you wonder, this is the case, that.
(28:40):
Grief is supposed to have a beginning and an end, right? And then you're supposed to be over it.
Yeah, that's so interesting, isn't it? And I think my Elizabeth Kubler-Ross is one of my heroes.
I always get a little annoyed when people keep referring to her stages of grief,
which was never what she intended.
That was designed for people who were diagnosed with a life-threatening illness
(29:01):
on how they grow into the illness and so forth, right?
It wasn't intended. and someone converted it all to the stages of grief as if
there's a beginning and the end. And there is not.
I've actually stopped using the word the grief journey because journey implies
a destination, an end, and a beginning and an end, and that you're going to get there.
And the truth is, the best visual I can create is that you have this,
(29:27):
a jar, imagine a mason jar, and there's a ball inside the mason jar,
a big round, dark circle. and it fills that mason jar.
And then there's another mason jar, but the mason jar is a little bigger and
the ball doesn't take quite as much space.
And then the next mason jar is even bigger and the ball looks even smaller,
but it's the same size ball.
(29:48):
It's just in a larger, more open space.
And for me, that's how I see, feel, experience grief is that I am growing around it.
And it It does not mean that the grief, the dark circle is dark and sad all the time.
It isn't because it can bring us so much insight, so much joy,
(30:10):
so much love that as we grow around it and it stays with us, there's no end.
But people who are grieving mourning the early loss after the early time of
loss think, you're going to tell me I'm going to feel like this forever? No. The point is...
It is something that helps you create space for yourself, for others,
(30:35):
a love in your life, expanding.
I feel like grief is an expanding love all the time.
Ah, Lordy, only more of us could really take that in.
And that's the idea of the advocacy for me. So I see advocacy.
First of all, I love that the death doula movement is growing and leaps and
(30:55):
bounds, and a lot of young people coming into it as well. but seeing it as an
important place to be in service.
And actually, it was after I wrote my first children's book,
The Cardinal's Gift, a true story of finding hope in grief that kept this growth piece going for me.
And that was 26 years after my husband died that I published that book.
(31:17):
I wrote that book out of a personal experience and I just wrote it down on the
computer and said to my husband, make sure that when I die, my kids get to see
this. And that was how long ago it was.
And then I realized one day, wait, I rank it.
I got to do something with this. And then during COVID, I did.
But the idea that from that, even 26 years later, I had new grief experiences
(31:41):
and growth experiences from writing that book that were related to my grief
that I had no idea existed.
And because of it, it kind of led me to this new stone to step on,
which was how we support others in grief.
How do we shift the consciousness of society around it being okay to talk about.
(32:04):
Death, to talk about dying, talk about grieving, to talk about life,
which is why I started my monthly kitchen table talks with Carol because I thought, just bring up a topic.
Let's talk about whatever it is related.
And it opens up this door that says, it's okay to talk about this, right?
You can talk about it with your friends and, well, you better be thinking about
(32:25):
this. It's not going to go away.
Or, hey, how do I want to plan for that? I just completed my,
what I call Carol's Last Waves, and it was my document to my family of what
to do at the time that I'm dying.
And I'm just assuming that I didn't have a tragic, traumatic death,
but that I have this space where I have the opportunity to do that.
(32:47):
And at the end, I wrote, if this sounds kind of controlling, it is.
They were my wishes, right? And I thought, that's a gift I'm giving them by
putting that on paper and being really explicit and giving them the links and
telling them where they can find this and find that.
And in writing it, for me, it was like, wow, you know, I've been meaning to do that.
(33:10):
Yeah, I got a note to self, right? It opens up other doors and it brings us
joy in other ways and well-being.
I feel good that I have put that document in my knockbox and I know that my family will read it.
They can be comforted by knowing they were able to fulfill my wishes.
Right. And you made it easier for them. Right.
(33:33):
It's like, okay, their grief can be supported by, well, you know,
we got mom what she wanted and this is what was important for her and I'm really
glad we were able to do that.
So the role of death and happiness is significant in that it helps,
you know, I say, begin with the end in mind. It changes how we live.
(33:56):
Wow, that is another one of your many powerful statements today.
Well, in truth, I think we keep avoiding it.
My sister, my older sister, who was only 11 months older than I, died two years ago.
And I've had the beauty of getting to know her beautiful daughter,
my niece, and through all of that.
(34:17):
And in the irony, though, for me of having that gift of love come from my sister's
death, it's a perfect example.
And it happens all the time. And I think when we begin to see that the balance
of life is these ups, these downs, there's a general sense about who we are.
(34:38):
And when we don't feel, when I don't feel balanced in that, it's like,
I want to say, I need to right the ship. And I don't mean right wrong.
I mean, we need to get it righted. If you, if you boat, you know that you have
to right the ship when it begins to heel too far to the port or heel too far
to the starboard, you have to get it righted.
And when we know and intuit within ourselves and keep a tab on that energy and
(35:04):
identify the sort of things that many of us see as, quote unquote,
not being happy, I see that just as, oh, I'm needing to right the ship a bit.
What's going on? Step back. Pay attention.
Well, maybe this is what I need to do right now. It's just going to be in that space.
And I'll be in that space for as long as I need to be in that space.
(35:24):
Getting comfortable with that takes time but what a gift that we can give ourselves
that we don't have to feel as if we have to be a specific way all the time or that.
Our words are constantly being interpreted in such a way that have no meaning.
(35:44):
The second children's book I wrote was called Lily Tames Her Worries,
and it's about my niece and her anxiety.
And what I try to impart is that we all, our brains are designed to do that
anxiety thing, right? Our brains are designed.
Now, how can we kind of befriend that amygdala and put our prefrontal cortex
(36:05):
in charge instead Instead, and understanding what it means and stepping back
and saying, hmm, I feel like something's happening here.
I can feel I use heebie-jeebies as the term.
The heebie-jeebies are coming on me. What does that mean? And then just knowing
that there's only one thing to do right now, and that's to stop and breathe.
And then you can decide what action to take. But everybody does it.
(36:27):
There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing you have to fix.
You don't need to constantly, you don't need to be feeling like you have to
fix it for good. It's in our lives.
And learning to notice is critical here.
It took me a long time to learn to notice. Just notice.
That is the key to everything, isn't it? It's a superpower, man.
(36:47):
And I think kids learning to notice is so incredible.
I had a family of nine. I was one of seven children.
And noticing was not a skill set I learned.
Until much later in life, much later in life.
And I think about that. And it's sort of this role that each one of us plays in that family.
(37:10):
And seven people that you're constantly in interaction with all the time. It was impossible.
Wish I'd known that skill then. Well, you do now.
Thank you so much. I suppose this is contrary to what people might think if
if you're having a conversation about death and dying, but I feel very joyful.
(37:31):
You're highlighting the beauty
and the mystery and the joy in this whole journey of life, if you will.
Can you share with us where people can find you, where they can find your kitchen
table talks, your books, get in touch with you directly? That would be great.
Sure. My website is the easiest place to do that. And that's carolheny.com.
(37:54):
And I have a Facebook page as well, and an Instagram page. My Instagram page
is healing underscore press.
All of that's been redirected now to carolhaney.com. That's where my events are and so forth.
And right now, I'm really focusing on this conversation, starting the conversation.
And that, if nothing else, a family dinner, a family celebration,
(38:17):
and it doesn't have to be about death.
It can be asking the honoree, you know, what is one of the most important times
of your life? Or do you have any regrets?
Or what are you most proud of? Because that's how you get to know people when
you're talking about advanced directives and nobody wants to talk about advanced directives.
That's how you get to know people. So for me right now, the conversation is critical, right?
(38:41):
Wherever I can have the conversation, I'm going to have the conversation.
I do public talks as well.
And I I love that. But my kitchen table talks really are, they're enlightening.
We laughed so much at our last kitchen table talk.
People are a little interested in talking about what's this about, right?
I'm talking about death anyway. It's my version of a death cafe without saying that.
(39:06):
People get wigged out about death cafes. CarolHaney.com is the best way.
And my kitchen table talks are the fourth Wednesday of every month.
And they're free and they're virtual. and I love having them.
So join our conversation.
Oh, that's great. Well, I hope everyone who's listening does do that because
Carol, as you can tell by this conversation, is brilliant.
(39:28):
She's got so much expertise and importantly, so much love that she is sharing with all of us.
So thank you again, Carol, for joining me today.
Oh, and thanks for having me, Nina. It was delightful. I'm doing the work that you do.
I appreciate you because I think you're that, that other advocate out there
for all these different conversations.
(39:49):
Thank you so much. Thank you. And for those of you who are either listening
or watching, thank you so much
for being here and we will see you on the next episode. So bye for now.
Music.
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