May 6, 2025 • 60 mins
Our Guest:
Tony Stewart
https://www.tonystewartauthor.com/
I did a couple of episodes about grief and SEO found all of the managers with clients who talk about just that. So if it feels like we’re spending a lot of time talking about death lately, your correct. But in all fairness, losing someone or something significant in our lives can feel like a seismic event, leaving behind a landscape of grief, confusion, and a profound absence of joy. It can be a time when the very idea of happiness feels distant, even impossible. And it’s something we all have to experience over and over again.
But within the depths of this pain lies the potential for profound growth, a shift in perspective, and a renewed understanding of what truly holds value in our lives.
In this episode, we delve into the delicate and deeply personal journey of finding joy after loss. We're not talking about forgetting or replacing what was lost, but rather about gently creating space for light and meaning to re-enter your life. We explore practical tools and mindful approaches to navigate the complexities of grief, cultivate a healthier perspective, and reconnect with the things that truly nourish your soul.
Here's what we'll explore:
Resources Mentioned :
Tony Stewart
https://www.tonystewartauthor.com/
I did a couple of episodes about grief and SEO found all of the managers with clients who talk about just that. So if it feels like we’re spending a lot of time talking about death lately, your correct. But in all fairness, losing someone or something significant in our lives can feel like a seismic event, leaving behind a landscape of grief, confusion, and a profound absence of joy. It can be a time when the very idea of happiness feels distant, even impossible. And it’s something we all have to experience over and over again.
But within the depths of this pain lies the potential for profound growth, a shift in perspective, and a renewed understanding of what truly holds value in our lives.
In this episode, we delve into the delicate and deeply personal journey of finding joy after loss. We're not talking about forgetting or replacing what was lost, but rather about gently creating space for light and meaning to re-enter your life. We explore practical tools and mindful approaches to navigate the complexities of grief, cultivate a healthier perspective, and reconnect with the things that truly nourish your soul.
Here's what we'll explore:
- Understanding the Landscape of Grief: We acknowledge that grief is not linear and manifests differently for everyone. We'll discuss common emotions, the importance of allowing yourself to feel without judgment, and debunking the myth of "getting over" loss.
- The Power of Perspective Shifts: Loss can shatter our existing worldview. We'll explore how to intentionally shift your perspective, not to minimize your pain, but to find meaning and purpose even amidst sorrow. This includes examining your values, identifying what truly brought you joy before and exploring how those elements might evolve.
- Mindfulness as a Gentle Anchor: Mindfulness practices can be incredibly grounding during times of intense emotion. We'll introduce simple yet powerful techniques like mindful breathing, body scans, and present moment awareness to help you navigate difficult feelings without being overwhelmed and to appreciate small moments of peace.
- Cultivating Gratitude in the Face of Absence: It might seem counterintuitive, but intentionally focusing on what you do have, even amidst loss, can be a powerful pathway to finding glimmers of joy. We'll discuss practical ways to cultivate gratitude and appreciate the beauty that still exists in your life.
- Identifying What's Truly Important: Loss often forces us to re-evaluate our priorities. We'll guide you through exercises to identify your core values and what truly brings meaning and fulfillment. This can help you realign your energy and focus on activities and relationships that resonate deeply.
- Honoring the Past While Embracing the Present: Finding joy after loss isn't about forgetting. We'll discuss healthy ways to honor the memory of what was lost while actively engaging with the present moment and creating space for new experiences and connections.
- Practical Steps to Re-Engage with Joy: We'll offer tangible actions you can take to gently reintroduce joy into your life, whether it's through small acts of self-care, reconnecting with hobbies, spending time in nature, or nurturing meaningful relationships.
- Knowing When to Seek Support: Healing after loss is a unique journey, and sometimes professional support is essential. We'll discuss recognizing when it's time to reach out to therapists, support groups, or trusted friends and family.
Resources Mentioned :
- https://www.caringbridge.org/
- https://grief.com/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Yeah, I've actually I've been doing podcasts since twenty fifteen,
twenty sixteen. Whoa. But and it's just completely hit or miss.
Some days I come in here and I'm not nervous
at all, and other days I'm a nervous shreck and
sweating the whole time. It just kind of miss. Which
I've built the whole platform on mental health mostly, but
(00:26):
the deeper I got into that, the more I saw
all of the interconnectedness of all of the various modes
of healing. So you have we focus on mental health.
But and when I say we, I don't mean the podcast.
I mean like just society and culture goes okay, mental
health means you need.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
To meditate, meditate. I was just thinking, yeah, mindfulness, and.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yeah mindfulness, you know, stuff like that. But mental health
is interconnected to physical health, which is interconnected to the
health of your environment, your monetary availability and stability, your relationships.
So it just it's expanded and evolved to encompass all
(01:16):
of these things. But I really appreciate you coming on
today and well, thank you's with us.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I'm really happy to be here. And like I said,
before you hit record, you guide the conversation and I
am happy to talk in any direction that you want,
you know, relating to my experience of course, and that
I wrote about in my book.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Yeah, and you know that's how it should be. It's
just like you were saying earlier. Every podcast has its
own format of how it does things, and some of
them are really strict and they have all of these questions.
I have guests all the time want me to email
them the questions that I plan to ask them beforehand,
and I'm like, I don't have I don't do that.
I just kind of like show up as myself whoever
(01:57):
I am today, and I hope that the does the
same exact thing. But the thing with being new to
podcasting is it's actually quite a beautiful thing, and so
it's raw and it's real because you don't know what
to expect, and the people who've been doing it for
a really long time they have this script in their heads,
(02:18):
so they just kind of fall into character. I had
this guy a couple of weeks ago. When we first
got on the call. I was like, Oh, this is
gonna be so much fun. He's so chill, he's so cool,
he's so this is gonna be so much fun. As
soon as I hit record, his demeanor shifted into like lawyer,
(02:39):
political straight face and I'm like, oh man, And then
the same as we cut off the recording, he went
right back into his interesting stuff. I was like, man,
so that's that's a beautiful point to like just kind
of tell people you just show up as yourself is
whoever you are today, and it's good. It is absolutely
(03:02):
always good enough people can tell when you're putting on
a show.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Yeah, yeah, no, this is so, you know, Carrying the
Tigers my first book. And I'm not young. I mean
like I'm already retired from my normal life, career life
before this all happened to me, So I've never just
this last few weeks is when I finally started doing
a little bit of publicity for the book, which is
launching like right now. And I'd never done podcasts before.
(03:27):
And the first couple I went to, I had these
questions that my pr agent had sent out, like, here
are questions in case you in case you the host
don't know what you want to ask, and Tony can
talk about these, and I got all prepped and I
was really nervous, and after three or four of these conversations,
I discovered that no, exactly what you're talking about. It
(03:50):
goes best for you and for me, and I hope
for the listeners if we just follow this thing and
we go where you want to take it, because it's
your show and your vibe, and you've got listeners who
I'm in expecting to hear interesting conversations. So I'm up
for it. Here we go.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, So the book is about you and your journey
with your wife and en using her to cancer. Yes,
very heavy stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
It is very heavy stuff. I hope that reading the
book is not as heavy an experience as simply describing
it is. Otherwise very few people will ever read the
book I want to. The book is Carrying the Tiger,
but the subtitle is equally important. Yes, because it lays
out exactly what the journey is and I really wanted
(04:34):
this right on the cover. So Carrying the Tiger, living
with cancer, dying with grace, finding joy while grieving, which
is the journey I went through. It covers about eight
years of my life and it is more or less
what it says. The first part of it is it
(04:55):
starts on the day that we learned that Lynn, my
wife was Lynn was We learned that Lynn had tumors
that no one had expected in her lung and her
spine was already staged four cancer by the time we
knew she had cancer, and they said, you know, six months,
two years, it's in that kind of frame. We were very,
(05:18):
very lucky that we had more time than that. Had
some twists and turns, and it's all described in the book,
but we got into a clinical trial. It's funny, I
always say we and someone once stopped me and said, Tony,
it was your wife's cancer. But it was like the
two of us joined at the hip, holding hands through
this whole process, and I thought of it as we
(05:39):
She got into a clinical trial that extended her life
four or five years, but all kinds of other things
went wrong. So that's part one of the book is
like emotionally as well as physically, learning to live with
incurable cancer and the drugs that in her case, we took.
I mean everyone takes different. Everyone's treatment for cancer is different.
(06:00):
Her story is her story and my story. But there
were drugs, there were operations that went wrong, There were
lots of twists and turns, and then there were several
wonderful good years where we kind of had the best
of it where we had adjusted to having this death
sentence hanging over her, but it wasn't happening now. And
(06:20):
the sort of the side benefit of that is you
really do, like the grass gets greener, the flowers get
more vibrant, you really appreciate what you've got because you
know there's a time limit on it. We've all got
time limits on our lives. But we don't go through
life thinking that way.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
We don't think about it.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
No. No, Then eventually the cancer did beat the drugs,
as they had told us from the get go that
it would eventually happen. It was just a question of time,
and we had a very hard six months or a
year as the tumors started to grow. We tried various things,
no one could stop them. This is as if this
could have happened right at the beginning, if we hadn't
(06:57):
had that good luck. This is what often happens when
you have stage four cancer. They try things, you do chemo,
you do whatever, and it doesn't work and you die
in like a year. Well that's when our year happened.
But at the end of it, and all that time
we didn't think she was dying. We were just like,
can we find another treatment, can we get some more years?
And then we finally reached the point of deciding enough
(07:20):
is enough. Actually, I should say, with help from a wonderful,
caring physician who said, sometimes you have to say enough
is enough? And maybe now is that time a critical
moment in our lives. Linn said, yes. We stopped treatment.
We did home hospice for a couple of weeks. It
was only a few weeks, and then she died, and
(07:42):
those were two of the most beautiful weeks of my life,
the two most beautiful weeks of my life. And that's
right in the heart of the book. That's the dying
with grace. And even though it was only two weeks,
I consider it the emotional heart of the book and
I'm happy to talk about that. And then after that,
I had Part three of the book is finding joy
(08:05):
while grieving. I had naively thought that because Lynn's death
was kind of as good as it gets, meaning she
was with me, we managed to do home hospice, she
wasn't in a lot of extra pain. We talked to
each other, we talked about what it would be like
for her to die, not that we had any answers
we're not religious, I should say. I mean, we're both
(08:26):
kind of spiritual, so we don't say, oh, it just
goes black and there's nothing. Well, we don't know, but
we don't have the answers. We talked about that. She
asked me what was going to happen to me afterwards?
She gave me permission to have another relationship after she
was gone. This is you can't ask for more than
that as a spouse losing your beloved partner. And so
(08:48):
I naively thought, oh, this grief, I'm gonna grieve. I'm
gonna grieve, but maybe it'll be shorter, maybe it'll be shallower,
maybe maybe you know, maybe I'll dodge a bullet. And
oh my god. It does not work like that, or
it did not work like that for me. So I
got plunged into deep grief and I wrote about that,
(09:10):
and the last part of the book is sort of
coming out of that and then meeting someone else through grief,
talking sharing stories about our grief. She was a thousand
miles away. It's a series of coincidences that caused us
to meet and start these conversations. But we became very
attracted to each other, and I started having a relationship
(09:32):
with her while I was still deeply grieving Lynn. I mean,
it was just a few months which a lot of
our friends didn't understand. I didn't understand that I felt
incredibly conflicted and guilty and stuff. And then slowly we
found our way forward with a lot of ups and downs.
(09:53):
And although other things happen in the last part of
the book, that's the through line for the last part
of the book is finding my way to be able
to have a new love relationship while holding on to
my grief and my love for Lynn at the same time,
which was completely not easy. So that's the book. It's
a lot and so far, I should say, as we
(10:18):
record this interview, it's in pre release. It's had the
early sort of advance reviews and stuff, and they've been wonderful.
And I've got my early readers, some of whom have said, Wow, Tony,
this book really helped me a lot.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
So what's the really, fingers crossed, what's the release date?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
The release date is April twenty ninth.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Okay, so it'll be out by the time this comes out.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Yeah, that's what I kind of assumed. So but as
we talk here, I've got my fingers crossed, Like, I
don't know if this book will be read by three
hundred of my closest friends and about ten other people,
or if this book will actually be read by many
hundreds or thousands of people. The book to help other people,
and so that's why I'm having you know, Oh, it
(11:05):
helped me tremendously. It helped meus. Well, this is the thing.
The whole story of how this came about is like
an accident that came out of a kind of journaling.
Have you heard of Caringbridge Caringbridge dot org. No, caring
Bridge is a nonprofit organization and website, so carringbridge dot org.
(11:27):
So there's no advertising, it's entirely donation funded, and it's
a website which is like a stripped down Facebook sort
of thing, social media thing where you can set up
a site. When you are going through health challenges or
when you need support from your friends, you can set
up a site and you can make it public, semi public,
or as we did, private and private meant that only
(11:49):
the people you white list, you know, their email addresses
can access your site. So Lynn had a lot of
friends and like the day that she just that we
got this horrible phone call, this devastating phone call that
with these tumors. She started wanting to tell her friends,
and she wrote some emails and the email started flying
(12:11):
back and forth, and at this point we were like
launching into the whirlwind, the mailstream of when you first
have a diagnosis like this, you go from one doctor
to another and they refer you somewhere else, and all
this stuff was happening. We couldn't deal with all these emails.
So a friend told us about caring Bridge and said,
you can just post your updates there and we will
all read them in our own time and then we
(12:34):
can write comments back perfect And that's what we did,
starting on about day four, and it was started out
as a factual thing, and Lynn asked me to write them.
She was perfectly happy to talk to her friends about cancer.
She obviously wasn't keeping it a secret from her friends.
That didn't occur to her, and thank goodness it didn't,
because none of this story would have worked out this
(12:55):
way if she had just told like four people or ten.
But we got in the habit that I would write
a post like, oh, we went to the doctor today
and this is what they said, and this is what's
going to happen tomorrow? And they started out factual like that,
and Lynn would review the posts, and in the early
when we were dealing with like messy side effects like
(13:17):
like diarrhea or constipation, which all of which happened to her,
or pain, major amounts of pain, she had me trim
them out of the post, like there's a limit. I
want people to know I'm going through this, but I
don't want them to feel sorry for me. I don't
want them to go ugh. I don't want to be
like wallowing in self pity or sound like that.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
So we got in mid people hot it, but I
feel like hiding it, even though I understand wanting to
like not be the victim and not have people treat
you differently. And you need that community, You need the
people around you. You need to see them, you need
to give them the opportunity to help you.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Yes, this and that's just that's the biggest but it's
only even It was even more than that. So just
in the beginning part, in that first year or two,
writing these posts, everything you just said, I mean, the
people responding back. Lynn and I would sit there and
refresh the screen. We'd put up a post, and about
(14:21):
five minutes later we'd start refreshing the screen. Because this
was ten years ago, it didn't auto refresh at the time.
When new comments came in and the comments would start
to appear because it was like a push notification thing.
People would get an email and some of them would
immediately go look at the post. And it gave us
so much strength and joy, just these little simple things
like I'm with you and fingers crossed and I love
(14:43):
you and oh that stunds hard. And then over time
we started getting comments that were actually really useful, inspiring
suggestions help. People have been down this road before, and
they would tell us stuff about the drugs she was taking,
Oh when I did this, I did so and so
about when Lynn had hospital delirium, which is scary as anything,
(15:04):
and no one had told me to it, that it
was coming. And you know, I'm worried she's losing her mind.
She's worried that she's losing her mind. Someone one of
our friends writes, oh, yeah, when I was in the
hospital the third time she had a major condition, I
imagine this that and the other I thought my doctor's
kids were running down the hall. It just gave us
so much sort of peace and support. And then the
(15:27):
other layer, two more layers on top of that from
writing all these posts. One of them was because we
were putting all of these posts, all this information out
there in a pushway. When Lynn actually was in a
conversation with her friends, they didn't ask this stuff. They
might they might, yes, if they asked, Lynn would talk,
(15:51):
but they could talk about other things. They didn't need
to have the very first question be how are you
doing and go into a conversation about her cancer because
they knew it from reading it the night before. And
this made her interactions with her friends much more like
what they had always been, which is exactly what she wanted.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
And then the final huge thing for me, these things
became my therapy. They started factual, but I wrote these
posts for years, and after not too long, just a
few months, I was putting in how we felt and
what it felt like to go through the day when
you're living with the terminal diagnosis, and how scared we
were today and whatever, and it just it became my
(16:36):
single biggest therapy outlet, which was especially noticeable when we
went into hospice and Lynn was no longer able to
help write these things or look over my shoulder in
those last few weeks of her life. And then after
she died, this was the Lynn Cautula journal that just
happened to have been written by me. That's how I
(16:57):
always thought of it. I'm telling our friends about Lynn.
And then she died, and I wrote a post saying,
I guess that's it. Lynn died. Basically, you know, I'm
going to try and go on with my life. Good
luck to everyone. I didn't actually say that. I can't
remember what I said, but I basically wrote a goodbyepost,
and two days later I couldn't help myself. I wrote
(17:17):
a post basically saying I'm in agony here. The days
feel horrible, and I started journaling every day, letting out
what that day had felt like, and that at that
point the thing had transitioned from just telling my friend's
facts five eight years earlier to my personal spilling out
(17:38):
of the emotions that I'm going through trying to deal
with all of this deep grief, which became a treasure
trove years later when I went back and looked at
it and I had this journaling. I had never done
journaling in my life, but there it was, and also
letting out those emotions. It was as if I were
in a grief group. I should say I did also
have a therapy at the time, therapist at the time
(18:01):
who I was seeing, and then I started that because
of this whole journey. But on top of my weekly
conversations with my therapist, I was every night as if
I were in a grief group and it had been
my turn to talk where no one would interrupt you,
which I am. You know, it is kind of a
common part of group meetings. This was my turn, and
(18:25):
I sometimes would write two pages about what the day
was like, and I just spilled it all out, and
I got to say it. If anything helped me climb
out of my grief faster than I might have otherwise,
it would be that journaling, which I kept doing for
the next well for the next four years, but the
intense for the next six months it was still really intense,
(18:46):
a lot of a lot of posts, and then as
I started to feel a little better, they got further apart,
which you can just track that and say, oh, look,
it's it's obviously less important to him now because he's
not writing as often. It's feeling a little better.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
I'm a huge advocate for journaling. It sounds cliche at
this point because all of the therapists suggested, all of
the coaches, all of the personal development and growth and
all of the things healing, whatever, But it's so important
to process those emotions and find an outlet for them.
(19:26):
And writing words worked for me. Also, that was my thing.
And you know, for some people that might not be
their thing. They may get it out verbally, they may
be able to get it out through music or I
saw your Linn painted, Yes, that was her outlet.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
I'm sure totally.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah, just finding something that works for you is in
an ability to process these emotions because they're so big there.
Grief is all of reality crushing down on us. And
oh I've also heard that grief is love persevering. But
(20:18):
you know, the reality of life and being a human
is so unbelievably painful at its core, and stuff it
takes stuff like this too. We don't because you're right,
we don't. Coming back full circle to what we said earlier,
is that we all have this death sentence hanging above
our heads. We disassociate and avoid it and pretend it's
(20:43):
not there. You know, Oh, that's too heavy for me,
I'd like to keep it lighter, please. But and then
our society and culture kind of hides death away. You know,
we don't. There's we people don't want to talk about
about it, people want to even like with stuff like this,
(21:03):
there's people who most people would avoid the conversation of
it because they don't want to say the wrong thing.
They don't want to make you feel weird, they don't
want to make you feel bad. They want to try
to make you smile. They want to avoid it. They
want to and that's not really helpful either. So processing
(21:24):
it a little bit at a time helps to, you know,
transition you into it, but it really doesn't. Also we've
talked for you know, losing someone slowly or losing someone suddenly.
They're both terrible in different ways.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
In different ways. I had the slow experience I had,
you know, I started Lynn and I started mourning, grieving
the loss of our life and the life we had had.
The night of that first phone call, we had an
incredibly emotional conversation that night. We said, I love you
to each other more than we had. I really believe
(22:05):
this more than we had in our entire marriage. That's
because we were pretty unromantic. We called each other best friends,
but we didn't do Valentine's Day. We did a lot
of trips together, loved each other a lot, but we
just didn't say it. And the night that we got
that phone call, we started saying it to each other
like a lot and it carried with me all the
way through. But I had seven or eight years whatever
(22:28):
it was, to prepare for her death. Seven years and still,
you know, if anything, I'm gonna say, still, it hit
me like a ton of bricks, if anything, everyone's grief
is their own, Every grief is different. I've been studying.
I've been taking a course to become a certified grief
educator from the great David Kessler, who runs grief dot com,
(22:51):
which was a wonderful resource, one of several wonderful resources
for people who are grieving. But anyway, I've been taking
this course now as a result of writing book and
then having these conversations, and he makes it really clear,
everyone's grief is different. Everyone grieves in their own way.
Don't try and project your expectations onto someone else's grief.
(23:16):
But I certainly, before ever taking this course, wrote about
what I was finding in my grief, and I was
finding that the depth of my grief, if anything is related,
was related to the depth of my love. What you're grieving,
even when it's not about a death, most grief, I
(23:38):
would say, all, But I'm not I haven't finished the
course yet. But I tend to think that all grief
is in some way you're grieving the loss of something.
Say it may be the loss of in the case
of say a divorce, an unhappy divorce. It may be
the loss of the future you had imagined. It's both
(23:58):
the loss of the marriage, sure, but the thing that
really gets you is is the loss of the future
you had imagined. That's certainly what what got me. And
it and damn it, it happens even when you've had
eight years to prepare for it or seven years to
prepare for it.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
It does. It's kind of It doesn't lessen it, but
it's kind of Sometimes it's the difference between how well
you handle it or how will you don't? Right, I
think that's the biggest thing. The slow loss is what
I have experienced mostly in my life as well. So
(24:34):
you know, sometimes I'm I wonder if like just ripping
the band aid off would have been better, but also.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Well art, I'm I'm, I shook my head. I mean,
I'm sure hardly anyone will see the two of us.
I think most people listen to podcasts. But I was
shaking my head merely to say, I don't think there's
any right I mean, we're we're all plague ourselves with
the what ifs. Sure, and in in your case, it's
what if I had ripped the bandage off quickly? And
(25:04):
I shook my head, not to say that you would
have had any particular different outcome. I don't know what
it would have felt like to you. What I was
shaking my head about was this desire that the way
we plague ourselves with the what ifs, and there's no
answer to that. What happened is what happened. So sorry,
I mean I didn't I didn't want to make it
look like I was like disagreeing with you, as in.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
No, you're right, there is no right answer. It's just, yeah,
what happens whatever cards we get dealt, the cards that
we get dealt, and yes we have to kind of
figure it out from there, but it can be. I
took coming back to something you said earlier liberating, so
even though it's terrifying and it's dark, and it's heavy
(25:51):
in a way, that dark, heavy, terrifying overloom is always
there over all of us anyway, we just don't realize it.
We don't have like the quote unquote definitive because even
though you guys had the definitive diagnosis, they gave you
(26:11):
six months to a year and you got eight. Yeah,
so you know, we don't know, you know, any one
of us could be in a car accident tomorrow or
get that same diagnosis tomorrow. Everything's normal today and everything's
completely changed tomorrow. But if we took a little bit
(26:31):
of time to just recognize that that's something that we're
all eventually going to have to deal with in some
way form or another, it becomes really liberating to enjoy
your life, your time that you have now, and suddenly
things really fall into perspective of what actually matters and
what doesn't, and we become so much freer in ourselves,
(26:55):
in our bodies, in our relationships, in our lives, and
we find happiness. We no longer care about what that
person has or has or thinks or wants us to
do or you know, there's so many things where so
many of us are living our lives in according to
what's expected of us, per society, per culture, and family
(27:19):
and just all of the things, and a lot of us,
you know, we can spend our whole life living as
a people pleaser that's depressed on the inside, but you know,
putting on the show for everyone, and then wake up
in our forties and be like, well.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Crap, yes, I completely agree with everything you just said.
It certainly happened to me and to Lynn. I look
back on the years after her diagnosis. Okay, the first
part of it was pretty horrible because of physical things,
because the cancer had attacked her spine. She needed intensive radiation.
(27:58):
Then it stop from being paralyzed. That was in the
first two weeks, and then there were various other twists
and turns, and as I said, I think an operation
that went wrong and led to infection and all these
horrible things. But in between those, we were having exactly
the kind of experiences you're talking about. And even in
(28:19):
that horrible first two years, when there's a point in
the book it's actually one of my favorite. It's almost
like a little cliffhanger at the end of a paragraph.
It's like things are going well and Lynn and I
think that we'll have three months, six months, at least
a few months before things start to go wrong again.
It never occurs to us that will only have two weeks.
(28:42):
And then you turn the page to the next chapter
and you find out what started to go wrong in
the next two weeks later. But guess what those two weeks,
which I don't actually describe in the book, although I
do describe others, those two weeks were wonderful because once
you've realized how close you are to the edge, and
once in her case, you've defeated the things that are
(29:03):
causing you pain and keeping you in bed and been
able to get a portion of your life back. And
actually I want to riff on that for a second too.
But once you've been able to get that back, you
really appreciate it. It's like a truism or a cliche, but
it's totally true. The part I want to riff on
is we never got our whole life back. Sure what happened,
(29:27):
and I think it happened. It's very common is and
it happens with aging in some ways. A lot of
what you can say about having cancer, not counting the
specific operations and the drugs and things is like accelerated aging.
The things you think are going to happen to you
in twenty years or that you're going to not be
able to do anymore, guess what, you can't do them
anymore now or next year. Because Lynn's body was being impacted,
(29:49):
she never we couldn't travel. We used to travel a lot,
and now she never wanted to be more than an
hour away from her doctors. So the traveling consisted of
going from New York City where I am, where we were,
to New Jersey where we rented a summerhouse, and back
and forth. That was an hour and a half drive.
That's as far as she was willing to go. And
these things that had seemed so important to our lives,
(30:13):
going to India and Asia as we did many times,
and other things where we had these fantastic experiences, Guess what,
we didn't miss them because she was alive. We had
each other, we could enjoy the day, we could enjoy
the beauty of the day, or whatever nice thing happened,
or this conversation with our friend or petting the cap.
(30:34):
And that lasted even right into hospice, where she basically
at the end of it couldn't get out of bed.
Last few days. Just before dying, a person who's dying
in the sort of a natural way, as she did,
turns in on themselves, stops moving much, etc. But just
until almost those last few days, we were still having
(30:55):
little conversations. And she did say to me once, when
she was only going to live another she said, I
don't want to go yet. It was very sad. I mean,
my god, I started crying. But she was enjoying her life,
even when what was left of her life was this
tiny fragment of what it had been five or ten
years earlier. Still she wasn't in serious pain. I was
(31:20):
with her, The cats were with her. Our bedroom has
a beautiful view out the windows of the sky. I mean,
when you're lying in bed you see the sky. You
don't see what you would see if you were standing
at the window, and it was full of light and
air and love. And that was the last few days.
But that progression of starting with your whole life and
then having it narrowed down and narrow down, and more
(31:42):
and more of it gets taken away, where when you're
younger and healthier, you start thinking, oh, if that happened
to me, I'd commit suicide. I mean, but the hell
I wouldn't have any life left. It turns out that
when it actually happens to you, I would say, unless
you're in terrible pain or some other thing which would
change the equation. When this sort of constriction narrowing down
(32:04):
happens to you, you're still enjoying what you've got. In fact,
you enjoy it more than you did before.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
We did. There's a surrender and an acceptance that, you know,
a letting go a lot of people can't find, you know.
And this is the thing is like, uh, you know,
coming back to the mental health aspect of just life,
just regular people living life. It doesn't take these it
doesn't have to take these big things to put things
(32:32):
in perspective for you. You can realize that you're chasing things.
A lot of people were like, well, I'll be happy
when X y Z, I'll be happy when I get this,
when I get that job.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
When it's such an illusion.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Yes, yeah, yes, And that's what's keeping most of us,
that's what's keeping us not happy, is that when you
tied conditions to our happiness. But if we can learn
how to let go of all of that and just
kind of allow the freefall of life, because that's all
it is. It's the uh, it's an illusion of control.
(33:10):
None of us have control or any of this. We're
all just doing our best as we freefall, and that's
really all you can do. And if you learn how
to ride the freefall a little bit instead of struggling
and fighting against it, you know, like waves in an ocean,
well absolutely, and if you fight them, you drown.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
So you know, I just go ahead, I'm I'm just
dying to say listening to you talk talking about the
mental health, talking about everything you just said. This is
why I wrote Carrying the Tiger. This is the reason
I wrote this book was not to say it the
way you just said it, but rather to tell the
story of how that's exactly what happened to us. There
(33:55):
was there's I tried to just fill the book with
the details of the things that made me feel guilty,
the things that we were embarrassed about, the things that
we were ashamed about it first, and how just by
living we learned not to feel guilty, not to keep
it in. I mean, these are complicated stories. I had
(34:17):
a mini breakdown a year in because I was trying
too hard to hold everything together and take care of
Lynn while I still had a full time job, and
I wasn't sharing with her the inner anguish like maybe
it would be better if she died sooner rather than later.
I'm walking around with that thought in my head, not
every minute, and I'm supporting Lynn, and she's telling me
(34:39):
during that year that she's afraid that having to my
having to work so hard to support her is going
to break us apart, is going to push me away
from her. And I'm having thoughts in my head like
maybe it would be better if she did die sooner
rather than later, or God, I really wish being able
to have sex the way we used to which the
physical changes made changed our sex life considerably, and for
(35:02):
a year I didn't share them with her or anyone.
This is before I had a therapist. And then I
had a breakdown sobbing, in which I admitted to her
that I just couldn't do this anymore, and I told
her these kinds of things. We were sobbing on the
bed we had come back from an appointment with our
coats still on, and I just fell down and said
I can't do this anymore. And instead of pushing her away.
(35:24):
She actually pulled me to her and touched her forehead
to mine and said, I understand, really I do, and
then she encouraged me to get a therapist, among other
things to do. It wasn't the next sentence, but the
book is full of that kind of thing. The diarrhea
in a public place, the twists and turns of the treatment,
(35:47):
the hospice, all of that what I want, and then
my grief and my anguish and the complexity of the
new love, all of that. What I wanted to do
was take you on a journey where you would just
look over my shoulder while all these things happened to me,
and then you draw your own conclusions, but you'd see
for yourself that just as it happened, we lived those
(36:08):
years more or less the way you're talking. I look
back on those years, and yes, there were wrong decisions
we made, and yes there were times when like having
that breakdown, like I should have gotten help a year earlier,
and you know, we went down some path and it
didn't work out for us so well, a lot more
than just these examples, But at the end of the day,
(36:29):
when I look back, this was an example of all
that you can gain by accepting that this is this
is reality, and not being embarrassed, not being ashamed, not
holding it, in, letting your feelings out, letting your friends know.
There are so many examples in there where I put
(36:49):
up posts that would reveal something where I had been
really afraid to reveal it. And the first time I
ever told everyone that it felt like slogging through a
swamp and that we were depressed, and that was really
my whole post. I had nothing else to say. I
almost didn't press publish on the post because I had
never been that gloomy, and I was afraid of pushing
(37:11):
my friends away. Yeah, and instead we get these wonderful
comments back, thank you for sharing. Having cancer isn't just
good news. I'm really glad to know what's really going on,
and it brought everyone closer. So I filled the book
with these kinds of examples because they actually happened to us,
(37:31):
hoping that when you finish the book, you will have
appreciated exactly everything that you, Savannah, were just saying two
minutes ago, about being open and to the reality and
to the joys and the frustrations and just living.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Yeah, allowing yourself to be human.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Which is allowing yourself to be human equal parts.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
I don't like the words good and bad. Every things
just everything just is. You know, it's helpful or unhelpful,
it's pleasant or unpleasant, but it's not inherently good or bad.
It's just experiences, yes, and unfortunately most of the time
we need the miserable top of experiences in order to
(38:20):
find the happiness, you know, in order.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
To break out of the shell that we normally encase
ourselves in. That phrase just occurred to me that second.
It may not be the most profound thing ever said,
but yeah, this is like cracking the shell around me that,
you know, the protective shell, the self protective shell that
I had moved through life in and letting more in
(38:45):
and out.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Everybody does, because you know, our society and culture has
historically not we don't talk about emotions, we don't talk
about feelings. It has we're not emotionally available. We're not
we're not an inherently emotionally available culture. But to be fair,
I don't think that many cultures really are or have
(39:08):
been historically because we didn't really have time to be
so it makes sense, you know, it just all gets
pushed down because we don't have time, we don't have
the capacity. We have to work, we have to eat,
we have to feed everybody, we have to take care
of everybody. And so we're really just now getting to
a point in time and history where most of our
(39:31):
basic needs, most of everybody's basic needs. Not everybody by any.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Means, Yeah, no, but I get you.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Yeah, And then now, so now we it's Maslow's pyramid.
Are you familiar with Moslow's hierarchy?
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Yes, yes, with the yes I am, but you can
remind me because I've seen it and I remember the
different levels of need and said, but go ahead.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yeah, the foundation, the bottom part is just your basic
needs safety and security, food and water, shelter, And for
most of history, that's nobody could get past that. They
it took everything they had just to just to not
drown in fall out of that category. But you can't
(40:15):
move on up to the fulfillment and purpose and self
actuality until you get those basic needs met. So historically
we just we didn't have time for emotions. So trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma,
and zero processing and just taking it all in and
storing it in the body and lashing out and then
(40:39):
perpetuating and then the cycles, and if.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
You think about it, for a variety of reasons. I
never really related it to trauma. It's more of the
usual physical reasons. People died thirty five, forty forty five
years old. I mean forty five was an old person. Yeah,
it was most of human history.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
And we're just like, I don't think we're not actually
adults until like thirty two.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Just to pick a number. Yeah, well I remember, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
I'm thirty. I'll be thirty four next month. So I
only just started feeling.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Like an adult.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
Well, nobody I talked too feels the same way.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
I would say sometime in my thirties. Yeah, definitely not
your twenties. Definitely not my twenties, but I will say
it is continued. But then eventually, now I'm in my
sixties now, and I'm in the reverse sort of pattern
of hanging not hanging on. Like, I'm really proud that
soon i'll be seventy. It's like amazing to me, and
it means that I've had all these experiences, but I'm
(41:43):
also really happy that I'm still carrying around this core
of youthfulness in me. You know, at first, you're aspiring
to understand the world and live in the world and
be an adult in the world. And then comes the
But I want to hang on to that youthful stuff
because there's a real danger that you're going to let
go of it. I don't mean you personally. I think
I agree you're doing great stuff, but.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
I agree entirely. I've always said that age is a mindset,
and you can choose to be as young as you
want to be in your in your mental, emotional, internal world.
And we're just gonna, like, you know, we put too
much attachment on the physical body, thanks Hollywood and stuff.
(42:24):
But the physical body is going to morph, it's going
to shift, it's going to You're going to look different
all of the time. I always laugh about how my husband,
he looks completely different, like a completely different person, every
single year. You can put pictures of him beside each
(42:45):
other and you nearly can't even recognize him. He looks
a year for who knows how. I look the exact
same as I did when I was like five, more
or less like anybody who's ever like, you can recognize me.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
For many people, but obviously not. You reinforces the illusion
that we're not changing, so that when we do change.
It's a tragedy, yes.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Yes, but attaching that, you know, because people are always
chasing weight loss, and that's that's the big one. And
then like you know, plastic surgery, botox, there's all sorts
of things that people are chasing and no matter like
it may help temporarily, but I have found incredible happiness
(43:35):
and peace and fulfillment and just like all the things
I've always actually been looking for. Once I completely let
go of caring at all what I look like physically.
And I don't mean like let yourself go.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
I work out, I want to be healthy. I'm sure
you're doing things to be you know, get some exercise,
eat well, all the things one does to feel good.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Yeah, in your body, because that's all that really matters
is how you feel. So who cares how your body
looks on the outside. It's how well you're taking care
of it on the inside. It's all the mechanical stuff.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
You just reminded me of one of my favorite quotes.
I actually I attended a conference on happiness, an online conference.
Actually it was just a few months after Lynn died.
While I was grieving and I was trying to figure
out is it possible to have joy and grief at
the same time, which it turns out it totally is.
I lived it, and in the conference I learned that
happiness and unhappiness literally neurologically live in different parts of
(44:37):
your brain, and that therefore you can simultaneously have a
lot of happiness and a lot of unhappiness because they're
living in different parts of your brain, which was really
cool to learn. It's an illusion that it's in either or.
But during that conference, Deepak Chopra spoke and the one
thing I took away is happiness is chasing you. You
(45:02):
just have to slow down and let it catch you.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Yeah. I like that.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
I've been living with that ever since. Like, stop chasing
these things that you think will make you happy, which
in this part of our conversation you wich about your
body and looks and stuff. Way earlier you said something
about it that I also agree with about, you know, accomplishments.
These things will not make you happy. They may get
you more money, they may make you more secure in
(45:28):
your life, they may do all kinds of things. They
may make you a little less unhappy, they won't make
you happy. And the happiness comes from stopping and it's there.
It's there if you stop chasing all these things and
let it catch up with you.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yes, that's the magic behind meditation and mindfulness is just
slowing down. Because again, our culture and society. We can
make a drinking game out of how many times I
say culture and society in every episode. But all right,
always tighter, responsibly, the hustle culture. You know, we've been
(46:04):
programmed to achieve, achieve a produce, produce, be you know, productive,
and so we a lot of us, have tied our
self worth to how much we're able to do and produce.
And but in doing and producing we lose sight of
(46:25):
our relationships and our health. There's nothing on this planet
more important than our health and our relationships.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
Yes. So they're the two things that will most give
you happiness.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Yes, And you don't need any of the extra stuff
to cultivate them, you know, just put your phone down
and pay attention to the person in front of you.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Yeah, that's you know what I realized the other day. First,
First of all, I have been reading a lot of
Teak not Han, who I think is a wonderful Buddhist
monk writing on mindfulness. He's more than anyone he's the
person and who popularize that term and the concept in
this country, as I understand it a lot of other
people since then. But I was thinking, how in order
(47:10):
to get the word out about carrying the tiger, I've
done several of these podcast interview conversations, long form, really
fun conversations, and it occurred to me one day that
when I am in a conversation like this, I am
much more present than I am in my normal life
or when I'm just chatting with a friend. It's like
(47:31):
this focus. It's really being here, and I'm not trying
to brag. I'm just saying, in order to have this conversation,
I'm looking right at you, I'm listening to what you say,
I'm not thinking about anything else, And at the end,
I feel great because I've really been present for forty
five minutes or an hour or however long the conversation lasts.
(47:54):
Whereas in my normal day, if I'm sitting there talking
to my girlfriend or a friend, will wander thirty forty
fifty times by the end of that hour, and it's
not as satisfying when I let that happen.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Yeah, And to be fair, though, podcasting is a little
bit of a cheat code because we're still producing. So
Bob passes are.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Oh, yeah, we are, We absolutely are. You've got an
episode to produce, I've got a book to publicize, yest.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
And yet it's also I have genuinely, I mean, I
was not looking forward to going on quote the podcast circuit.
I thought, oh my gosh, I've got to go on
the I've got to remember to say all these cool
things about my book, and what's the point I want
to make blah blah blah. And I was nervous about it.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
It's intimidating one site, what it can be intimidating.
Speaker 2 (48:44):
Yeah, And instead I have enjoyed it so much that
I signed up for that grief education course after the
third or fourth one. I mean by it only happens
once a year, that particular course, and it just happened
that I saw something saying, oh, you know, last chance,
it's starts next week. But it was because of these
conversations that I realized that this is something I wanted
(49:06):
to do, which would never have occurred to me. You know,
you you started a podcast to try and change the
world in a small way, in your small way, make
the world a better place. I mean, I know those
are bigger words than you might use for your own podcast.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
Well. No, The funny thing is is that when I
first started it, that's exactly what I thought I was
trying to do. Was you know, I just read a
lot of books and was like I was taught I
couldn't find any any people in my real life world
that could really hang with me on these conversations. So
I was like, well, you know, for one, obviously people
(49:43):
don't know about any of this, so I need to
tell So I always refer back to the story of
I was driving down the road one day and there
was a turtle in the middle of the road, and
I just kept going, and I was like, man, I
hope somebody stops and helps that turtle. I hope that
turtle gets across the road before it gets hit. And
then I was like, well, shit, I guess I'm a
(50:06):
person who could do that. So that's kind of how
it got started. But yeah, we're like so many years
into it, it's like, wow, I think actually I was
being really selfish to start this. Like it's both. It's both,
as you know, duality exists in all things. But it's
been a solid source of therapy and coping for myself,
(50:30):
exploring these topics with other individuals who understand the topic
and can help not only me find ways to get
through whatever's going on, but to motivate and inspire other
people who may feel hopeless, like there is hope, there's
(50:52):
always yeah, yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
This is when I so I started writing the book
because people in their comments on caring Bridge said your
words are helping me, which was deeply meaningful. Sure, yes,
so I thought, okay, this was several years after Lynne
had died. I want to say that, like, I couldn't
(51:15):
do this the first few years. I tried, like six
months after she died, and I couldn't do it. Too emotional,
you know, revisiting all of that, printed out all of
caring bridge seven hundred pages my thing, and put it
in a box and ignored it for like four years.
But I started this process and I thought, oh, okay,
I'll like edit the posts and I'll create a little
(51:38):
thing with a spiral binding that I could get printed
at the copy shop across the street, and I can
make a PDF and I can distribute it to my friends.
And then I started to think, no, actually, maybe this
could help more people, but they're not going to read
it in that form, And so I did another pass.
It got bigger, and then I let some people read
it and they basically said, Wow, Tony, there is stuff
(51:59):
in here that's really helpful, but this, that, and the other.
So I went back and did another pass through it
and getting more and more invested in it, still thinking, Okay,
this is a book to change other people. I don't
mean change. Actually, that's way too grandiose to help other
people by sharing what we went through this stuff, I
(52:20):
said before sharing the details of what Lynn and I
went through in hopes that you can see it and
have your own ideas about it and maybe be better
prepared or better understand when stuff like that happens to you.
But I totally didn't anticipate that the process by the
time we get to now would be changing me. I
(52:41):
certainly didn't set out to be any kind of educator
on any of this stuff. I set out to write
the story because I knew this was really interesting. The
actually the arc of the story is really interesting, and
the fact that that new love came into my life
makes it like a fun book to read in a
way where it wouldn't be otherwise if it's ended with
death and sadness, even though that is life, but real
(53:03):
life includes you're still alive, you keep going. Stuff is
going to happen to you, and that makes it more
of the real journey of life. But I still thought,
I'm just sharing my little journey and people are going
to draw some conclusions from it. And then I go
and I start trying to talk about the book, thinking
I'm publicizing the book, but people want to talk to
(53:24):
me for real, what did this mean to you? And
so I have to start thinking, well, what did this
mean to you? And before you know it, I'm thinking,
this is really cool. This is exciting. To be able
to share with people what grief or cancer or whatever
felt like to me is actually really satisfying. And I
(53:46):
had no idea what I was going to do with
the rest of my life, and I still don't really
but no, I mean, who does. But you know, I'm
taking this three month course. There's one thousand people from
all over the world logging into this court. It's the
real deal. And at the end of that I will
be a quote certified grief educator, which doesn't I have
(54:06):
no idea what that means. I don't, you know, it's
just like, Okay, I'm going to have this nice little
tiny certificate, but I will know that much more and
I'll be that much more knowledgeable when I talk about
what happened to me, to be able to put it
into a bigger context and hopefully help more people. And
helping people turns out to be really satisfying.
Speaker 1 (54:26):
Yes, absolutely, and I wish the more people understood that.
But I'm glad that you didn't in the book with
her death and that you because that's where a lot
of people get stuck. You know, they have this thing
that happens in their life and then they don't know
how to move on from there. So I'm glad that
(54:47):
you were able to tell people how you moved on
from there and kept on keeping on the best you
could and how you know, No, it's not all sunshine
and roses no matter what you do. But nope, it
can get better. It will get better. Tell me about
the tottle because the tuttle is very powerful.
Speaker 2 (55:07):
Oh thank you?
Speaker 1 (55:08):
So.
Speaker 2 (55:10):
About a month in very righted back at the beginning,
a friend wrote Lynn an email. She didn't put this
on carrying bridge. She cuminly had heard about all of
this from carrying bridge, and she said, I'm so sorry
to hear what you're going through. In my tai Chi group,
we carry a tiger to help people who are facing
(55:31):
difficult challenges. The three motions of bending low, picking up
the tiger, and putting it on a hilltop far away
relieve the person of the burden, because a tiger is
not so scary when it's far away and small on
a hilltop. And Lynn wrote back saying, Wow, that's wonderful.
(55:54):
Could you carry some tigers for me? And would you
teach me how to carry tigers? I put that in
the book right away, without realizing what a great title
it was. That anecdote sat in the book and was
one of my favorite pages of the book for like
(56:14):
nine months or twelve months. Meanwhile, I had a sheet
of paper going or you know, on my computer where
I just kept trying out titles and they were all
like love and loss and caregiving, a Caregiver's Journey, I mean,
all of these things, and I just like, oh my god,
these suck. No, you know, I don't like them. I
wouldn't read this book, why would anyone else? And then
(56:36):
one day last summer, I was out riding my bike
in Acadia National Park in Maine, which is one of
the world's most beautiful and fun places to ride a bike,
and it just suddenly hit me. I mean, I wasn't
thinking about my you know how these things like when
you're in the shower and you have an idea out
of nowhere. I totally was not thinking about my title,
(56:58):
and I just had to slap my head and I
called out to Cordelia, my girlfriend, who was on the
other bike, Oh my god, I've got the title. And
it had been sitting in the book the whole time.
Speaker 1 (57:09):
That's why it happens. Uh. There's I love Eastern culture stuff.
I've always been a little obsessed with it. There's this
one spiritual symbol. It's uh, it's like a spiral and
then a line. I don't remember what it's called, and
I don't have any other ways to tell you about it,
but the I love how the spiral is like, the
(57:33):
more you go and you're trying to figure out the
answers and the whatever they are, the more you find
them as they reveal themselves, you find that you already
knew them, you know, And it's it's that whole like
all of the answers are within you. Yes they're so cliche,
but like when you start like getting into it, it's like, oh, okay,
(57:54):
I get it.
Speaker 2 (57:56):
And the story of that I just told is an
exact metaphor for you know, it's a I don't know
which is a metaphor for the other it's an example
for which that is the metaphor. Yes, it was exactly
like that.
Speaker 1 (58:07):
Absolutely, Well, thank you so much for all of this.
This has been a really good time.
Speaker 2 (58:12):
You're very welcome and it has for me too.
Speaker 1 (58:15):
Will link where they can get the book down low?
Do you want to tell them? Is you have a
web Yeah? You do have.
Speaker 2 (58:21):
Oh, I've got all of that. I've got. First of all,
the book is widely available pretty much anywhere you you know, Amazon,
Barnes Andnobles, which jor dot com, and its available but
as an ebook, an audiobook as well as print, so Audible, Spotify,
places like that for the audiobook. And I do have
(58:42):
a website. I'm pleased to say I built it myself.
That it is not an amateurish website. It is somewhere
in the middle. But I've spent months and months over
the last year adding things to it. It is Tonystewart
author dot com, and you'll learn a whole lot more
about the book. There's just all kinds of stuff there.
(59:03):
There's videos where I talk about the book. These are
the same videos that I'm now going to be posting
on social media now and then, you know, to publicize it.
But I made a whole set of little videos of
me talking about the book, and there's a photo gallery
of Lynn and me together and stuff like that. So
if you're curious Tonystewart author dot com, if you'd like
(59:23):
to just run out and go to Amazon and click
the buy button, I wouldn't object to that either.
Speaker 1 (59:28):
Sure, And your website is really nice. I created my
own also, and it's something I've always had a website
since like gosh, twenty ten probably, and I've always diauled
all of it. So I get really antsy on websites
(59:50):
that are poorly done, and yours is great. I have
no complaints.
Speaker 2 (59:54):
Well, thank you. I'm really glad to hear that, because
I don't get people giving me feedback about the cover
of the book and stuff many times, but no one
gives me feedback about the website. And I'm really happy
to hear that. So many hundreds of hours go into
something like that over time.
Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
Understand Yes, absolutely it does. It looks great, You've done
a great job. It's not It is easy, but it's
also not easy. It just you got to be the
person for it, you know, mm hmm. Not everybody can
do stuff like.
Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
That, but no, no, years ago, I was a filmmaker
and some of these it's like reviving some of those
skills and abilities in a different form, some of some
of that love.
Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
We're all artists, yeah. Websites are a work of art
self expression, just like your book is, just like movies are,
just like music, just like pagings, and just like a
podcast conversation, podcast conversation. Absolutely all right, we'll let everybody
go
Yeah, I've actually I've been doing podcasts since twenty fifteen,
twenty sixteen. Whoa. But and it's just completely hit or miss.
Some days I come in here and I'm not nervous
at all, and other days I'm a nervous shreck and
sweating the whole time. It just kind of miss. Which
I've built the whole platform on mental health mostly, but
(00:26):
the deeper I got into that, the more I saw
all of the interconnectedness of all of the various modes
of healing. So you have we focus on mental health.
But and when I say we, I don't mean the podcast.
I mean like just society and culture goes okay, mental
health means you need.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
To meditate, meditate. I was just thinking, yeah, mindfulness, and.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yeah mindfulness, you know, stuff like that. But mental health
is interconnected to physical health, which is interconnected to the
health of your environment, your monetary availability and stability, your relationships.
So it just it's expanded and evolved to encompass all
(01:16):
of these things. But I really appreciate you coming on
today and well, thank you's with us.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I'm really happy to be here. And like I said,
before you hit record, you guide the conversation and I
am happy to talk in any direction that you want,
you know, relating to my experience of course, and that
I wrote about in my book.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Yeah, and you know that's how it should be. It's
just like you were saying earlier. Every podcast has its
own format of how it does things, and some of
them are really strict and they have all of these questions.
I have guests all the time want me to email
them the questions that I plan to ask them beforehand,
and I'm like, I don't have I don't do that.
I just kind of like show up as myself whoever
(01:57):
I am today, and I hope that the does the
same exact thing. But the thing with being new to
podcasting is it's actually quite a beautiful thing, and so
it's raw and it's real because you don't know what
to expect, and the people who've been doing it for
a really long time they have this script in their heads,
(02:18):
so they just kind of fall into character. I had
this guy a couple of weeks ago. When we first
got on the call. I was like, Oh, this is
gonna be so much fun. He's so chill, he's so cool,
he's so this is gonna be so much fun. As
soon as I hit record, his demeanor shifted into like lawyer,
(02:39):
political straight face and I'm like, oh man, And then
the same as we cut off the recording, he went
right back into his interesting stuff. I was like, man,
so that's that's a beautiful point to like just kind
of tell people you just show up as yourself is
whoever you are today, and it's good. It is absolutely
(03:02):
always good enough people can tell when you're putting on
a show.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Yeah, yeah, no, this is so, you know, Carrying the
Tigers my first book. And I'm not young. I mean
like I'm already retired from my normal life, career life
before this all happened to me, So I've never just
this last few weeks is when I finally started doing
a little bit of publicity for the book, which is
launching like right now. And I'd never done podcasts before.
(03:27):
And the first couple I went to, I had these
questions that my pr agent had sent out, like, here
are questions in case you in case you the host
don't know what you want to ask, and Tony can
talk about these, and I got all prepped and I
was really nervous, and after three or four of these conversations,
I discovered that no, exactly what you're talking about. It
(03:50):
goes best for you and for me, and I hope
for the listeners if we just follow this thing and
we go where you want to take it, because it's
your show and your vibe, and you've got listeners who
I'm in expecting to hear interesting conversations. So I'm up
for it. Here we go.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, So the book is about you and your journey
with your wife and en using her to cancer. Yes,
very heavy stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
It is very heavy stuff. I hope that reading the
book is not as heavy an experience as simply describing
it is. Otherwise very few people will ever read the
book I want to. The book is Carrying the Tiger,
but the subtitle is equally important. Yes, because it lays
out exactly what the journey is and I really wanted
(04:34):
this right on the cover. So Carrying the Tiger, living
with cancer, dying with grace, finding joy while grieving, which
is the journey I went through. It covers about eight
years of my life and it is more or less
what it says. The first part of it is it
(04:55):
starts on the day that we learned that Lynn, my
wife was Lynn was We learned that Lynn had tumors
that no one had expected in her lung and her
spine was already staged four cancer by the time we
knew she had cancer, and they said, you know, six months,
two years, it's in that kind of frame. We were very,
(05:18):
very lucky that we had more time than that. Had
some twists and turns, and it's all described in the book,
but we got into a clinical trial. It's funny, I
always say we and someone once stopped me and said, Tony,
it was your wife's cancer. But it was like the
two of us joined at the hip, holding hands through
this whole process, and I thought of it as we
(05:39):
She got into a clinical trial that extended her life
four or five years, but all kinds of other things
went wrong. So that's part one of the book is
like emotionally as well as physically, learning to live with
incurable cancer and the drugs that in her case, we took.
I mean everyone takes different. Everyone's treatment for cancer is different.
(06:00):
Her story is her story and my story. But there
were drugs, there were operations that went wrong, There were
lots of twists and turns, and then there were several
wonderful good years where we kind of had the best
of it where we had adjusted to having this death
sentence hanging over her, but it wasn't happening now. And
(06:20):
the sort of the side benefit of that is you
really do, like the grass gets greener, the flowers get
more vibrant, you really appreciate what you've got because you
know there's a time limit on it. We've all got
time limits on our lives. But we don't go through
life thinking that way.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
We don't think about it.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
No. No, Then eventually the cancer did beat the drugs,
as they had told us from the get go that
it would eventually happen. It was just a question of time,
and we had a very hard six months or a
year as the tumors started to grow. We tried various things,
no one could stop them. This is as if this
could have happened right at the beginning, if we hadn't
(06:57):
had that good luck. This is what often happens when
you have stage four cancer. They try things, you do chemo,
you do whatever, and it doesn't work and you die
in like a year. Well that's when our year happened.
But at the end of it, and all that time
we didn't think she was dying. We were just like,
can we find another treatment, can we get some more years?
And then we finally reached the point of deciding enough
(07:20):
is enough. Actually, I should say, with help from a wonderful,
caring physician who said, sometimes you have to say enough
is enough? And maybe now is that time a critical
moment in our lives. Linn said, yes. We stopped treatment.
We did home hospice for a couple of weeks. It
was only a few weeks, and then she died, and
(07:42):
those were two of the most beautiful weeks of my life,
the two most beautiful weeks of my life. And that's
right in the heart of the book. That's the dying
with grace. And even though it was only two weeks,
I consider it the emotional heart of the book and
I'm happy to talk about that. And then after that,
I had Part three of the book is finding joy
(08:05):
while grieving. I had naively thought that because Lynn's death
was kind of as good as it gets, meaning she
was with me, we managed to do home hospice, she
wasn't in a lot of extra pain. We talked to
each other, we talked about what it would be like
for her to die, not that we had any answers
we're not religious, I should say. I mean, we're both
(08:26):
kind of spiritual, so we don't say, oh, it just
goes black and there's nothing. Well, we don't know, but
we don't have the answers. We talked about that. She
asked me what was going to happen to me afterwards?
She gave me permission to have another relationship after she
was gone. This is you can't ask for more than
that as a spouse losing your beloved partner. And so
(08:48):
I naively thought, oh, this grief, I'm gonna grieve. I'm
gonna grieve, but maybe it'll be shorter, maybe it'll be shallower,
maybe maybe you know, maybe I'll dodge a bullet. And
oh my god. It does not work like that, or
it did not work like that for me. So I
got plunged into deep grief and I wrote about that,
(09:10):
and the last part of the book is sort of
coming out of that and then meeting someone else through grief,
talking sharing stories about our grief. She was a thousand
miles away. It's a series of coincidences that caused us
to meet and start these conversations. But we became very
attracted to each other, and I started having a relationship
(09:32):
with her while I was still deeply grieving Lynn. I mean,
it was just a few months which a lot of
our friends didn't understand. I didn't understand that I felt
incredibly conflicted and guilty and stuff. And then slowly we
found our way forward with a lot of ups and downs.
(09:53):
And although other things happen in the last part of
the book, that's the through line for the last part
of the book is finding my way to be able
to have a new love relationship while holding on to
my grief and my love for Lynn at the same time,
which was completely not easy. So that's the book. It's
a lot and so far, I should say, as we
(10:18):
record this interview, it's in pre release. It's had the
early sort of advance reviews and stuff, and they've been wonderful.
And I've got my early readers, some of whom have said, Wow, Tony,
this book really helped me a lot.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
So what's the really, fingers crossed, what's the release date?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
The release date is April twenty ninth.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Okay, so it'll be out by the time this comes out.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Yeah, that's what I kind of assumed. So but as
we talk here, I've got my fingers crossed, Like, I
don't know if this book will be read by three
hundred of my closest friends and about ten other people,
or if this book will actually be read by many
hundreds or thousands of people. The book to help other people,
and so that's why I'm having you know, Oh, it
(11:05):
helped me tremendously. It helped meus. Well, this is the thing.
The whole story of how this came about is like
an accident that came out of a kind of journaling.
Have you heard of Caringbridge Caringbridge dot org. No, caring
Bridge is a nonprofit organization and website, so carringbridge dot org.
(11:27):
So there's no advertising, it's entirely donation funded, and it's
a website which is like a stripped down Facebook sort
of thing, social media thing where you can set up
a site. When you are going through health challenges or
when you need support from your friends, you can set
up a site and you can make it public, semi public,
or as we did, private and private meant that only
(11:49):
the people you white list, you know, their email addresses
can access your site. So Lynn had a lot of
friends and like the day that she just that we
got this horrible phone call, this devastating phone call that
with these tumors. She started wanting to tell her friends,
and she wrote some emails and the email started flying
(12:11):
back and forth, and at this point we were like
launching into the whirlwind, the mailstream of when you first
have a diagnosis like this, you go from one doctor
to another and they refer you somewhere else, and all
this stuff was happening. We couldn't deal with all these emails.
So a friend told us about caring Bridge and said,
you can just post your updates there and we will
all read them in our own time and then we
(12:34):
can write comments back perfect And that's what we did,
starting on about day four, and it was started out
as a factual thing, and Lynn asked me to write them.
She was perfectly happy to talk to her friends about cancer.
She obviously wasn't keeping it a secret from her friends.
That didn't occur to her, and thank goodness it didn't,
because none of this story would have worked out this
(12:55):
way if she had just told like four people or ten.
But we got in the habit that I would write
a post like, oh, we went to the doctor today
and this is what they said, and this is what's
going to happen tomorrow? And they started out factual like that,
and Lynn would review the posts, and in the early
when we were dealing with like messy side effects like
(13:17):
like diarrhea or constipation, which all of which happened to her,
or pain, major amounts of pain, she had me trim
them out of the post, like there's a limit. I
want people to know I'm going through this, but I
don't want them to feel sorry for me. I don't
want them to go ugh. I don't want to be
like wallowing in self pity or sound like that.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
So we got in mid people hot it, but I
feel like hiding it, even though I understand wanting to
like not be the victim and not have people treat
you differently. And you need that community, You need the
people around you. You need to see them, you need
to give them the opportunity to help you.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Yes, this and that's just that's the biggest but it's
only even It was even more than that. So just
in the beginning part, in that first year or two,
writing these posts, everything you just said, I mean, the
people responding back. Lynn and I would sit there and
refresh the screen. We'd put up a post, and about
(14:21):
five minutes later we'd start refreshing the screen. Because this
was ten years ago, it didn't auto refresh at the time.
When new comments came in and the comments would start
to appear because it was like a push notification thing.
People would get an email and some of them would
immediately go look at the post. And it gave us
so much strength and joy, just these little simple things
like I'm with you and fingers crossed and I love
(14:43):
you and oh that stunds hard. And then over time
we started getting comments that were actually really useful, inspiring
suggestions help. People have been down this road before, and
they would tell us stuff about the drugs she was taking,
Oh when I did this, I did so and so
about when Lynn had hospital delirium, which is scary as anything,
(15:04):
and no one had told me to it, that it
was coming. And you know, I'm worried she's losing her mind.
She's worried that she's losing her mind. Someone one of
our friends writes, oh, yeah, when I was in the
hospital the third time she had a major condition, I
imagine this that and the other I thought my doctor's
kids were running down the hall. It just gave us
so much sort of peace and support. And then the
(15:27):
other layer, two more layers on top of that from
writing all these posts. One of them was because we
were putting all of these posts, all this information out
there in a pushway. When Lynn actually was in a
conversation with her friends, they didn't ask this stuff. They
might they might, yes, if they asked, Lynn would talk,
(15:51):
but they could talk about other things. They didn't need
to have the very first question be how are you
doing and go into a conversation about her cancer because
they knew it from reading it the night before. And
this made her interactions with her friends much more like
what they had always been, which is exactly what she wanted.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
And then the final huge thing for me, these things
became my therapy. They started factual, but I wrote these
posts for years, and after not too long, just a
few months, I was putting in how we felt and
what it felt like to go through the day when
you're living with the terminal diagnosis, and how scared we
were today and whatever, and it just it became my
(16:36):
single biggest therapy outlet, which was especially noticeable when we
went into hospice and Lynn was no longer able to
help write these things or look over my shoulder in
those last few weeks of her life. And then after
she died, this was the Lynn Cautula journal that just
happened to have been written by me. That's how I
(16:57):
always thought of it. I'm telling our friends about Lynn.
And then she died, and I wrote a post saying,
I guess that's it. Lynn died. Basically, you know, I'm
going to try and go on with my life. Good
luck to everyone. I didn't actually say that. I can't
remember what I said, but I basically wrote a goodbyepost,
and two days later I couldn't help myself. I wrote
(17:17):
a post basically saying I'm in agony here. The days
feel horrible, and I started journaling every day, letting out
what that day had felt like, and that at that
point the thing had transitioned from just telling my friend's
facts five eight years earlier to my personal spilling out
(17:38):
of the emotions that I'm going through trying to deal
with all of this deep grief, which became a treasure
trove years later when I went back and looked at
it and I had this journaling. I had never done
journaling in my life, but there it was, and also
letting out those emotions. It was as if I were
in a grief group. I should say I did also
have a therapy at the time, therapist at the time
(18:01):
who I was seeing, and then I started that because
of this whole journey. But on top of my weekly
conversations with my therapist, I was every night as if
I were in a grief group and it had been
my turn to talk where no one would interrupt you,
which I am. You know, it is kind of a
common part of group meetings. This was my turn, and
(18:25):
I sometimes would write two pages about what the day
was like, and I just spilled it all out, and
I got to say it. If anything helped me climb
out of my grief faster than I might have otherwise,
it would be that journaling, which I kept doing for
the next well for the next four years, but the
intense for the next six months it was still really intense,
(18:46):
a lot of a lot of posts, and then as
I started to feel a little better, they got further apart,
which you can just track that and say, oh, look,
it's it's obviously less important to him now because he's
not writing as often. It's feeling a little better.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
I'm a huge advocate for journaling. It sounds cliche at
this point because all of the therapists suggested, all of
the coaches, all of the personal development and growth and
all of the things healing, whatever, But it's so important
to process those emotions and find an outlet for them.
(19:26):
And writing words worked for me. Also, that was my thing.
And you know, for some people that might not be
their thing. They may get it out verbally, they may
be able to get it out through music or I
saw your Linn painted, Yes, that was her outlet.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
I'm sure totally.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah, just finding something that works for you is in
an ability to process these emotions because they're so big there.
Grief is all of reality crushing down on us. And
oh I've also heard that grief is love persevering. But
(20:18):
you know, the reality of life and being a human
is so unbelievably painful at its core, and stuff it
takes stuff like this too. We don't because you're right,
we don't. Coming back full circle to what we said earlier,
is that we all have this death sentence hanging above
our heads. We disassociate and avoid it and pretend it's
(20:43):
not there. You know, Oh, that's too heavy for me,
I'd like to keep it lighter, please. But and then
our society and culture kind of hides death away. You know,
we don't. There's we people don't want to talk about
about it, people want to even like with stuff like this,
(21:03):
there's people who most people would avoid the conversation of
it because they don't want to say the wrong thing.
They don't want to make you feel weird, they don't
want to make you feel bad. They want to try
to make you smile. They want to avoid it. They
want to and that's not really helpful either. So processing
(21:24):
it a little bit at a time helps to, you know,
transition you into it, but it really doesn't. Also we've
talked for you know, losing someone slowly or losing someone suddenly.
They're both terrible in different ways.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
In different ways. I had the slow experience I had,
you know, I started Lynn and I started mourning, grieving
the loss of our life and the life we had had.
The night of that first phone call, we had an
incredibly emotional conversation that night. We said, I love you
to each other more than we had. I really believe
(22:05):
this more than we had in our entire marriage. That's
because we were pretty unromantic. We called each other best friends,
but we didn't do Valentine's Day. We did a lot
of trips together, loved each other a lot, but we
just didn't say it. And the night that we got
that phone call, we started saying it to each other
like a lot and it carried with me all the
way through. But I had seven or eight years whatever
(22:28):
it was, to prepare for her death. Seven years and still,
you know, if anything, I'm gonna say, still, it hit
me like a ton of bricks, if anything, everyone's grief
is their own, Every grief is different. I've been studying.
I've been taking a course to become a certified grief
educator from the great David Kessler, who runs grief dot com,
(22:51):
which was a wonderful resource, one of several wonderful resources
for people who are grieving. But anyway, I've been taking
this course now as a result of writing book and
then having these conversations, and he makes it really clear,
everyone's grief is different. Everyone grieves in their own way.
Don't try and project your expectations onto someone else's grief.
(23:16):
But I certainly, before ever taking this course, wrote about
what I was finding in my grief, and I was
finding that the depth of my grief, if anything is related,
was related to the depth of my love. What you're grieving,
even when it's not about a death, most grief, I
(23:38):
would say, all, But I'm not I haven't finished the
course yet. But I tend to think that all grief
is in some way you're grieving the loss of something.
Say it may be the loss of in the case
of say a divorce, an unhappy divorce. It may be
the loss of the future you had imagined. It's both
(23:58):
the loss of the marriage, sure, but the thing that
really gets you is is the loss of the future
you had imagined. That's certainly what what got me. And
it and damn it, it happens even when you've had
eight years to prepare for it or seven years to
prepare for it.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
It does. It's kind of It doesn't lessen it, but
it's kind of Sometimes it's the difference between how well
you handle it or how will you don't? Right, I
think that's the biggest thing. The slow loss is what
I have experienced mostly in my life as well. So
(24:34):
you know, sometimes I'm I wonder if like just ripping
the band aid off would have been better, but also.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Well art, I'm I'm, I shook my head. I mean,
I'm sure hardly anyone will see the two of us.
I think most people listen to podcasts. But I was
shaking my head merely to say, I don't think there's
any right I mean, we're we're all plague ourselves with
the what ifs. Sure, and in in your case, it's
what if I had ripped the bandage off quickly? And
(25:04):
I shook my head, not to say that you would
have had any particular different outcome. I don't know what
it would have felt like to you. What I was
shaking my head about was this desire that the way
we plague ourselves with the what ifs, and there's no
answer to that. What happened is what happened. So sorry,
I mean I didn't I didn't want to make it
look like I was like disagreeing with you, as in.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
No, you're right, there is no right answer. It's just, yeah,
what happens whatever cards we get dealt, the cards that
we get dealt, and yes we have to kind of
figure it out from there, but it can be. I
took coming back to something you said earlier liberating, so
even though it's terrifying and it's dark, and it's heavy
(25:51):
in a way, that dark, heavy, terrifying overloom is always
there over all of us anyway, we just don't realize it.
We don't have like the quote unquote definitive because even
though you guys had the definitive diagnosis, they gave you
(26:11):
six months to a year and you got eight. Yeah,
so you know, we don't know, you know, any one
of us could be in a car accident tomorrow or
get that same diagnosis tomorrow. Everything's normal today and everything's
completely changed tomorrow. But if we took a little bit
(26:31):
of time to just recognize that that's something that we're
all eventually going to have to deal with in some
way form or another, it becomes really liberating to enjoy
your life, your time that you have now, and suddenly
things really fall into perspective of what actually matters and
what doesn't, and we become so much freer in ourselves,
(26:55):
in our bodies, in our relationships, in our lives, and
we find happiness. We no longer care about what that
person has or has or thinks or wants us to
do or you know, there's so many things where so
many of us are living our lives in according to
what's expected of us, per society, per culture, and family
(27:19):
and just all of the things, and a lot of us,
you know, we can spend our whole life living as
a people pleaser that's depressed on the inside, but you know,
putting on the show for everyone, and then wake up
in our forties and be like, well.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Crap, yes, I completely agree with everything you just said.
It certainly happened to me and to Lynn. I look
back on the years after her diagnosis. Okay, the first
part of it was pretty horrible because of physical things,
because the cancer had attacked her spine. She needed intensive radiation.
(27:58):
Then it stop from being paralyzed. That was in the
first two weeks, and then there were various other twists
and turns, and as I said, I think an operation
that went wrong and led to infection and all these
horrible things. But in between those, we were having exactly
the kind of experiences you're talking about. And even in
(28:19):
that horrible first two years, when there's a point in
the book it's actually one of my favorite. It's almost
like a little cliffhanger at the end of a paragraph.
It's like things are going well and Lynn and I
think that we'll have three months, six months, at least
a few months before things start to go wrong again.
It never occurs to us that will only have two weeks.
(28:42):
And then you turn the page to the next chapter
and you find out what started to go wrong in
the next two weeks later. But guess what those two weeks,
which I don't actually describe in the book, although I
do describe others, those two weeks were wonderful because once
you've realized how close you are to the edge, and
once in her case, you've defeated the things that are
(29:03):
causing you pain and keeping you in bed and been
able to get a portion of your life back. And
actually I want to riff on that for a second too.
But once you've been able to get that back, you
really appreciate it. It's like a truism or a cliche, but
it's totally true. The part I want to riff on
is we never got our whole life back. Sure what happened,
(29:27):
and I think it happened. It's very common is and
it happens with aging in some ways. A lot of
what you can say about having cancer, not counting the
specific operations and the drugs and things is like accelerated aging.
The things you think are going to happen to you
in twenty years or that you're going to not be
able to do anymore, guess what, you can't do them
anymore now or next year. Because Lynn's body was being impacted,
(29:49):
she never we couldn't travel. We used to travel a lot,
and now she never wanted to be more than an
hour away from her doctors. So the traveling consisted of
going from New York City where I am, where we were,
to New Jersey where we rented a summerhouse, and back
and forth. That was an hour and a half drive.
That's as far as she was willing to go. And
these things that had seemed so important to our lives,
(30:13):
going to India and Asia as we did many times,
and other things where we had these fantastic experiences, Guess what,
we didn't miss them because she was alive. We had
each other, we could enjoy the day, we could enjoy
the beauty of the day, or whatever nice thing happened,
or this conversation with our friend or petting the cap.
(30:34):
And that lasted even right into hospice, where she basically
at the end of it couldn't get out of bed.
Last few days. Just before dying, a person who's dying
in the sort of a natural way, as she did,
turns in on themselves, stops moving much, etc. But just
until almost those last few days, we were still having
(30:55):
little conversations. And she did say to me once, when
she was only going to live another she said, I
don't want to go yet. It was very sad. I mean,
my god, I started crying. But she was enjoying her life,
even when what was left of her life was this
tiny fragment of what it had been five or ten
years earlier. Still she wasn't in serious pain. I was
(31:20):
with her, The cats were with her. Our bedroom has
a beautiful view out the windows of the sky. I mean,
when you're lying in bed you see the sky. You
don't see what you would see if you were standing
at the window, and it was full of light and
air and love. And that was the last few days.
But that progression of starting with your whole life and
then having it narrowed down and narrow down, and more
(31:42):
and more of it gets taken away, where when you're
younger and healthier, you start thinking, oh, if that happened
to me, I'd commit suicide. I mean, but the hell
I wouldn't have any life left. It turns out that
when it actually happens to you, I would say, unless
you're in terrible pain or some other thing which would
change the equation. When this sort of constriction narrowing down
(32:04):
happens to you, you're still enjoying what you've got. In fact,
you enjoy it more than you did before.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
We did. There's a surrender and an acceptance that, you know,
a letting go a lot of people can't find, you know.
And this is the thing is like, uh, you know,
coming back to the mental health aspect of just life,
just regular people living life. It doesn't take these it
doesn't have to take these big things to put things
(32:32):
in perspective for you. You can realize that you're chasing things.
A lot of people were like, well, I'll be happy
when X y Z, I'll be happy when I get this,
when I get that job.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
When it's such an illusion.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Yes, yeah, yes, And that's what's keeping most of us,
that's what's keeping us not happy, is that when you
tied conditions to our happiness. But if we can learn
how to let go of all of that and just
kind of allow the freefall of life, because that's all
it is. It's the uh, it's an illusion of control.
(33:10):
None of us have control or any of this. We're
all just doing our best as we freefall, and that's
really all you can do. And if you learn how
to ride the freefall a little bit instead of struggling
and fighting against it, you know, like waves in an ocean,
well absolutely, and if you fight them, you drown.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
So you know, I just go ahead, I'm I'm just
dying to say listening to you talk talking about the
mental health, talking about everything you just said. This is
why I wrote Carrying the Tiger. This is the reason
I wrote this book was not to say it the
way you just said it, but rather to tell the
story of how that's exactly what happened to us. There
(33:55):
was there's I tried to just fill the book with
the details of the things that made me feel guilty,
the things that we were embarrassed about, the things that
we were ashamed about it first, and how just by
living we learned not to feel guilty, not to keep
it in. I mean, these are complicated stories. I had
(34:17):
a mini breakdown a year in because I was trying
too hard to hold everything together and take care of
Lynn while I still had a full time job, and
I wasn't sharing with her the inner anguish like maybe
it would be better if she died sooner rather than later.
I'm walking around with that thought in my head, not
every minute, and I'm supporting Lynn, and she's telling me
(34:39):
during that year that she's afraid that having to my
having to work so hard to support her is going
to break us apart, is going to push me away
from her. And I'm having thoughts in my head like
maybe it would be better if she did die sooner
rather than later, or God, I really wish being able
to have sex the way we used to which the
physical changes made changed our sex life considerably, and for
(35:02):
a year I didn't share them with her or anyone.
This is before I had a therapist. And then I
had a breakdown sobbing, in which I admitted to her
that I just couldn't do this anymore, and I told
her these kinds of things. We were sobbing on the
bed we had come back from an appointment with our
coats still on, and I just fell down and said
I can't do this anymore. And instead of pushing her away.
(35:24):
She actually pulled me to her and touched her forehead
to mine and said, I understand, really I do, and
then she encouraged me to get a therapist, among other
things to do. It wasn't the next sentence, but the
book is full of that kind of thing. The diarrhea
in a public place, the twists and turns of the treatment,
(35:47):
the hospice, all of that what I want, and then
my grief and my anguish and the complexity of the
new love, all of that. What I wanted to do
was take you on a journey where you would just
look over my shoulder while all these things happened to me,
and then you draw your own conclusions, but you'd see
for yourself that just as it happened, we lived those
(36:08):
years more or less the way you're talking. I look
back on those years, and yes, there were wrong decisions
we made, and yes there were times when like having
that breakdown, like I should have gotten help a year earlier,
and you know, we went down some path and it
didn't work out for us so well, a lot more
than just these examples, But at the end of the day,
(36:29):
when I look back, this was an example of all
that you can gain by accepting that this is this
is reality, and not being embarrassed, not being ashamed, not
holding it, in, letting your feelings out, letting your friends know.
There are so many examples in there where I put
(36:49):
up posts that would reveal something where I had been
really afraid to reveal it. And the first time I
ever told everyone that it felt like slogging through a
swamp and that we were depressed, and that was really
my whole post. I had nothing else to say. I
almost didn't press publish on the post because I had
never been that gloomy, and I was afraid of pushing
(37:11):
my friends away. Yeah, and instead we get these wonderful
comments back, thank you for sharing. Having cancer isn't just
good news. I'm really glad to know what's really going on,
and it brought everyone closer. So I filled the book
with these kinds of examples because they actually happened to us,
(37:31):
hoping that when you finish the book, you will have
appreciated exactly everything that you, Savannah, were just saying two
minutes ago, about being open and to the reality and
to the joys and the frustrations and just living.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Yeah, allowing yourself to be human.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Which is allowing yourself to be human equal parts.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
I don't like the words good and bad. Every things
just everything just is. You know, it's helpful or unhelpful,
it's pleasant or unpleasant, but it's not inherently good or bad.
It's just experiences, yes, and unfortunately most of the time
we need the miserable top of experiences in order to
(38:20):
find the happiness, you know, in order.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
To break out of the shell that we normally encase
ourselves in. That phrase just occurred to me that second.
It may not be the most profound thing ever said,
but yeah, this is like cracking the shell around me that,
you know, the protective shell, the self protective shell that
I had moved through life in and letting more in
(38:45):
and out.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Everybody does, because you know, our society and culture has
historically not we don't talk about emotions, we don't talk
about feelings. It has we're not emotionally available. We're not
we're not an inherently emotionally available culture. But to be fair,
I don't think that many cultures really are or have
(39:08):
been historically because we didn't really have time to be
so it makes sense, you know, it just all gets
pushed down because we don't have time, we don't have
the capacity. We have to work, we have to eat,
we have to feed everybody, we have to take care
of everybody. And so we're really just now getting to
a point in time and history where most of our
(39:31):
basic needs, most of everybody's basic needs. Not everybody by any.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Means, Yeah, no, but I get you.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Yeah, And then now, so now we it's Maslow's pyramid.
Are you familiar with Moslow's hierarchy?
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Yes, yes, with the yes I am, but you can
remind me because I've seen it and I remember the
different levels of need and said, but go ahead.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yeah, the foundation, the bottom part is just your basic
needs safety and security, food and water, shelter, And for
most of history, that's nobody could get past that. They
it took everything they had just to just to not
drown in fall out of that category. But you can't
(40:15):
move on up to the fulfillment and purpose and self
actuality until you get those basic needs met. So historically
we just we didn't have time for emotions. So trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma,
and zero processing and just taking it all in and
storing it in the body and lashing out and then
(40:39):
perpetuating and then the cycles, and if.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
You think about it, for a variety of reasons. I
never really related it to trauma. It's more of the
usual physical reasons. People died thirty five, forty forty five
years old. I mean forty five was an old person. Yeah,
it was most of human history.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
And we're just like, I don't think we're not actually
adults until like thirty two.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Just to pick a number. Yeah, well I remember, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
I'm thirty. I'll be thirty four next month. So I
only just started feeling.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Like an adult.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
Well, nobody I talked too feels the same way.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
I would say sometime in my thirties. Yeah, definitely not
your twenties. Definitely not my twenties, but I will say
it is continued. But then eventually, now I'm in my
sixties now, and I'm in the reverse sort of pattern
of hanging not hanging on. Like, I'm really proud that
soon i'll be seventy. It's like amazing to me, and
it means that I've had all these experiences, but I'm
(41:43):
also really happy that I'm still carrying around this core
of youthfulness in me. You know, at first, you're aspiring
to understand the world and live in the world and
be an adult in the world. And then comes the
But I want to hang on to that youthful stuff
because there's a real danger that you're going to let
go of it. I don't mean you personally. I think
I agree you're doing great stuff, but.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
I agree entirely. I've always said that age is a mindset,
and you can choose to be as young as you
want to be in your in your mental, emotional, internal world.
And we're just gonna, like, you know, we put too
much attachment on the physical body, thanks Hollywood and stuff.
(42:24):
But the physical body is going to morph, it's going
to shift, it's going to You're going to look different
all of the time. I always laugh about how my husband,
he looks completely different, like a completely different person, every
single year. You can put pictures of him beside each
(42:45):
other and you nearly can't even recognize him. He looks
a year for who knows how. I look the exact
same as I did when I was like five, more
or less like anybody who's ever like, you can recognize me.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
For many people, but obviously not. You reinforces the illusion
that we're not changing, so that when we do change.
It's a tragedy, yes.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Yes, but attaching that, you know, because people are always
chasing weight loss, and that's that's the big one. And
then like you know, plastic surgery, botox, there's all sorts
of things that people are chasing and no matter like
it may help temporarily, but I have found incredible happiness
(43:35):
and peace and fulfillment and just like all the things
I've always actually been looking for. Once I completely let
go of caring at all what I look like physically.
And I don't mean like let yourself go.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
I work out, I want to be healthy. I'm sure
you're doing things to be you know, get some exercise,
eat well, all the things one does to feel good.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Yeah, in your body, because that's all that really matters
is how you feel. So who cares how your body
looks on the outside. It's how well you're taking care
of it on the inside. It's all the mechanical stuff.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
You just reminded me of one of my favorite quotes.
I actually I attended a conference on happiness, an online conference.
Actually it was just a few months after Lynn died.
While I was grieving and I was trying to figure
out is it possible to have joy and grief at
the same time, which it turns out it totally is.
I lived it, and in the conference I learned that
happiness and unhappiness literally neurologically live in different parts of
(44:37):
your brain, and that therefore you can simultaneously have a
lot of happiness and a lot of unhappiness because they're
living in different parts of your brain, which was really
cool to learn. It's an illusion that it's in either or.
But during that conference, Deepak Chopra spoke and the one
thing I took away is happiness is chasing you. You
(45:02):
just have to slow down and let it catch you.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Yeah. I like that.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
I've been living with that ever since. Like, stop chasing
these things that you think will make you happy, which
in this part of our conversation you wich about your
body and looks and stuff. Way earlier you said something
about it that I also agree with about, you know, accomplishments.
These things will not make you happy. They may get
you more money, they may make you more secure in
(45:28):
your life, they may do all kinds of things. They
may make you a little less unhappy, they won't make
you happy. And the happiness comes from stopping and it's there.
It's there if you stop chasing all these things and
let it catch up with you.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yes, that's the magic behind meditation and mindfulness is just
slowing down. Because again, our culture and society. We can
make a drinking game out of how many times I
say culture and society in every episode. But all right,
always tighter, responsibly, the hustle culture. You know, we've been
(46:04):
programmed to achieve, achieve a produce, produce, be you know, productive,
and so we a lot of us, have tied our
self worth to how much we're able to do and produce.
And but in doing and producing we lose sight of
(46:25):
our relationships and our health. There's nothing on this planet
more important than our health and our relationships.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
Yes. So they're the two things that will most give
you happiness.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Yes, And you don't need any of the extra stuff
to cultivate them, you know, just put your phone down
and pay attention to the person in front of you.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Yeah, that's you know what I realized the other day. First,
First of all, I have been reading a lot of
Teak not Han, who I think is a wonderful Buddhist
monk writing on mindfulness. He's more than anyone he's the
person and who popularize that term and the concept in
this country, as I understand it a lot of other
people since then. But I was thinking, how in order
(47:10):
to get the word out about carrying the tiger, I've
done several of these podcast interview conversations, long form, really
fun conversations, and it occurred to me one day that
when I am in a conversation like this, I am
much more present than I am in my normal life
or when I'm just chatting with a friend. It's like
(47:31):
this focus. It's really being here, and I'm not trying
to brag. I'm just saying, in order to have this conversation,
I'm looking right at you, I'm listening to what you say,
I'm not thinking about anything else, And at the end,
I feel great because I've really been present for forty
five minutes or an hour or however long the conversation lasts.
(47:54):
Whereas in my normal day, if I'm sitting there talking
to my girlfriend or a friend, will wander thirty forty
fifty times by the end of that hour, and it's
not as satisfying when I let that happen.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Yeah, And to be fair, though, podcasting is a little
bit of a cheat code because we're still producing. So
Bob passes are.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Oh, yeah, we are, We absolutely are. You've got an
episode to produce, I've got a book to publicize, yest.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
And yet it's also I have genuinely, I mean, I
was not looking forward to going on quote the podcast circuit.
I thought, oh my gosh, I've got to go on
the I've got to remember to say all these cool
things about my book, and what's the point I want
to make blah blah blah. And I was nervous about it.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
It's intimidating one site, what it can be intimidating.
Speaker 2 (48:44):
Yeah, And instead I have enjoyed it so much that
I signed up for that grief education course after the
third or fourth one. I mean by it only happens
once a year, that particular course, and it just happened
that I saw something saying, oh, you know, last chance,
it's starts next week. But it was because of these
conversations that I realized that this is something I wanted
(49:06):
to do, which would never have occurred to me. You know,
you you started a podcast to try and change the
world in a small way, in your small way, make
the world a better place. I mean, I know those
are bigger words than you might use for your own podcast.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
Well. No, The funny thing is is that when I
first started it, that's exactly what I thought I was
trying to do. Was you know, I just read a
lot of books and was like I was taught I
couldn't find any any people in my real life world
that could really hang with me on these conversations. So
I was like, well, you know, for one, obviously people
(49:43):
don't know about any of this, so I need to
tell So I always refer back to the story of
I was driving down the road one day and there
was a turtle in the middle of the road, and
I just kept going, and I was like, man, I
hope somebody stops and helps that turtle. I hope that
turtle gets across the road before it gets hit. And
then I was like, well, shit, I guess I'm a
(50:06):
person who could do that. So that's kind of how
it got started. But yeah, we're like so many years
into it, it's like, wow, I think actually I was
being really selfish to start this. Like it's both. It's both,
as you know, duality exists in all things. But it's
been a solid source of therapy and coping for myself,
(50:30):
exploring these topics with other individuals who understand the topic
and can help not only me find ways to get
through whatever's going on, but to motivate and inspire other
people who may feel hopeless, like there is hope, there's
(50:52):
always yeah, yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
This is when I so I started writing the book
because people in their comments on caring Bridge said your
words are helping me, which was deeply meaningful. Sure, yes,
so I thought, okay, this was several years after Lynne
had died. I want to say that, like, I couldn't
(51:15):
do this the first few years. I tried, like six
months after she died, and I couldn't do it. Too emotional,
you know, revisiting all of that, printed out all of
caring bridge seven hundred pages my thing, and put it
in a box and ignored it for like four years.
But I started this process and I thought, oh, okay,
I'll like edit the posts and I'll create a little
(51:38):
thing with a spiral binding that I could get printed
at the copy shop across the street, and I can
make a PDF and I can distribute it to my friends.
And then I started to think, no, actually, maybe this
could help more people, but they're not going to read
it in that form, And so I did another pass.
It got bigger, and then I let some people read
it and they basically said, Wow, Tony, there is stuff
(51:59):
in here that's really helpful, but this, that, and the other.
So I went back and did another pass through it
and getting more and more invested in it, still thinking, Okay,
this is a book to change other people. I don't
mean change. Actually, that's way too grandiose to help other
people by sharing what we went through this stuff, I
(52:20):
said before sharing the details of what Lynn and I
went through in hopes that you can see it and
have your own ideas about it and maybe be better
prepared or better understand when stuff like that happens to you.
But I totally didn't anticipate that the process by the
time we get to now would be changing me. I
(52:41):
certainly didn't set out to be any kind of educator
on any of this stuff. I set out to write
the story because I knew this was really interesting. The
actually the arc of the story is really interesting, and
the fact that that new love came into my life
makes it like a fun book to read in a
way where it wouldn't be otherwise if it's ended with
death and sadness, even though that is life, but real
(53:03):
life includes you're still alive, you keep going. Stuff is
going to happen to you, and that makes it more
of the real journey of life. But I still thought,
I'm just sharing my little journey and people are going
to draw some conclusions from it. And then I go
and I start trying to talk about the book, thinking
I'm publicizing the book, but people want to talk to
(53:24):
me for real, what did this mean to you? And
so I have to start thinking, well, what did this
mean to you? And before you know it, I'm thinking,
this is really cool. This is exciting. To be able
to share with people what grief or cancer or whatever
felt like to me is actually really satisfying. And I
(53:46):
had no idea what I was going to do with
the rest of my life, and I still don't really
but no, I mean, who does. But you know, I'm
taking this three month course. There's one thousand people from
all over the world logging into this court. It's the
real deal. And at the end of that I will
be a quote certified grief educator, which doesn't I have
(54:06):
no idea what that means. I don't, you know, it's
just like, Okay, I'm going to have this nice little
tiny certificate, but I will know that much more and
I'll be that much more knowledgeable when I talk about
what happened to me, to be able to put it
into a bigger context and hopefully help more people. And
helping people turns out to be really satisfying.
Speaker 1 (54:26):
Yes, absolutely, and I wish the more people understood that.
But I'm glad that you didn't in the book with
her death and that you because that's where a lot
of people get stuck. You know, they have this thing
that happens in their life and then they don't know
how to move on from there. So I'm glad that
(54:47):
you were able to tell people how you moved on
from there and kept on keeping on the best you
could and how you know, No, it's not all sunshine
and roses no matter what you do. But nope, it
can get better. It will get better. Tell me about
the tottle because the tuttle is very powerful.
Speaker 2 (55:07):
Oh thank you?
Speaker 1 (55:08):
So.
Speaker 2 (55:10):
About a month in very righted back at the beginning,
a friend wrote Lynn an email. She didn't put this
on carrying bridge. She cuminly had heard about all of
this from carrying bridge, and she said, I'm so sorry
to hear what you're going through. In my tai Chi group,
we carry a tiger to help people who are facing
(55:31):
difficult challenges. The three motions of bending low, picking up
the tiger, and putting it on a hilltop far away
relieve the person of the burden, because a tiger is
not so scary when it's far away and small on
a hilltop. And Lynn wrote back saying, Wow, that's wonderful.
(55:54):
Could you carry some tigers for me? And would you
teach me how to carry tigers? I put that in
the book right away, without realizing what a great title
it was. That anecdote sat in the book and was
one of my favorite pages of the book for like
(56:14):
nine months or twelve months. Meanwhile, I had a sheet
of paper going or you know, on my computer where
I just kept trying out titles and they were all
like love and loss and caregiving, a Caregiver's Journey, I mean,
all of these things, and I just like, oh my god,
these suck. No, you know, I don't like them. I
wouldn't read this book, why would anyone else? And then
(56:36):
one day last summer, I was out riding my bike
in Acadia National Park in Maine, which is one of
the world's most beautiful and fun places to ride a bike,
and it just suddenly hit me. I mean, I wasn't
thinking about my you know how these things like when
you're in the shower and you have an idea out
of nowhere. I totally was not thinking about my title,
(56:58):
and I just had to slap my head and I
called out to Cordelia, my girlfriend, who was on the
other bike, Oh my god, I've got the title. And
it had been sitting in the book the whole time.
Speaker 1 (57:09):
That's why it happens. Uh. There's I love Eastern culture stuff.
I've always been a little obsessed with it. There's this
one spiritual symbol. It's uh, it's like a spiral and
then a line. I don't remember what it's called, and
I don't have any other ways to tell you about it,
but the I love how the spiral is like, the
(57:33):
more you go and you're trying to figure out the
answers and the whatever they are, the more you find
them as they reveal themselves, you find that you already
knew them, you know, And it's it's that whole like
all of the answers are within you. Yes they're so cliche,
but like when you start like getting into it, it's like, oh, okay,
(57:54):
I get it.
Speaker 2 (57:56):
And the story of that I just told is an
exact metaphor for you know, it's a I don't know
which is a metaphor for the other it's an example
for which that is the metaphor. Yes, it was exactly
like that.
Speaker 1 (58:07):
Absolutely, Well, thank you so much for all of this.
This has been a really good time.
Speaker 2 (58:12):
You're very welcome and it has for me too.
Speaker 1 (58:15):
Will link where they can get the book down low?
Do you want to tell them? Is you have a
web Yeah? You do have.
Speaker 2 (58:21):
Oh, I've got all of that. I've got. First of all,
the book is widely available pretty much anywhere you you know, Amazon,
Barnes Andnobles, which jor dot com, and its available but
as an ebook, an audiobook as well as print, so Audible, Spotify,
places like that for the audiobook. And I do have
(58:42):
a website. I'm pleased to say I built it myself.
That it is not an amateurish website. It is somewhere
in the middle. But I've spent months and months over
the last year adding things to it. It is Tonystewart
author dot com, and you'll learn a whole lot more
about the book. There's just all kinds of stuff there.
(59:03):
There's videos where I talk about the book. These are
the same videos that I'm now going to be posting
on social media now and then, you know, to publicize it.
But I made a whole set of little videos of
me talking about the book, and there's a photo gallery
of Lynn and me together and stuff like that. So
if you're curious Tonystewart author dot com, if you'd like
(59:23):
to just run out and go to Amazon and click
the buy button, I wouldn't object to that either.
Speaker 1 (59:28):
Sure, And your website is really nice. I created my
own also, and it's something I've always had a website
since like gosh, twenty ten probably, and I've always diauled
all of it. So I get really antsy on websites
(59:50):
that are poorly done, and yours is great. I have
no complaints.
Speaker 2 (59:54):
Well, thank you. I'm really glad to hear that, because
I don't get people giving me feedback about the cover
of the book and stuff many times, but no one
gives me feedback about the website. And I'm really happy
to hear that. So many hundreds of hours go into
something like that over time.
Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
Understand Yes, absolutely it does. It looks great, You've done
a great job. It's not It is easy, but it's
also not easy. It just you got to be the
person for it, you know, mm hmm. Not everybody can
do stuff like.
Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
That, but no, no, years ago, I was a filmmaker
and some of these it's like reviving some of those
skills and abilities in a different form, some of some
of that love.
Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
We're all artists, yeah. Websites are a work of art
self expression, just like your book is, just like movies are,
just like music, just like pagings, and just like a
podcast conversation, podcast conversation. Absolutely all right, we'll let everybody
go
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