Transcript 0:00 Welcome to The Crone Stories. I'm Karen. Each episode, I sit with a woman in the middle of her life, and she tells me what she's been through, the grief, the fracture, and the becoming on the other side. 0:14 Then I shape what she gives me into a story, and I read it back. This is one of those stories. Welcome back to the second episode of The Crone Stories. 0:29 This is the first one that we have a story, and today's story is from Angie. Before I tell you about Angie and her story, 0:39 I want to sit with you for a few minutes on the subject of grief, because grief, it's what the episode stands on. And most of us were never taught the first thing about it. And here is what almost nobody says out loud. 0:58 We treat grief like a problem to be solved, something you pass through on a schedule and come out on the other side, somehow repaired to normal, to the person that you were before. We give it a few weeks, 1:16 maybe a few months if the loss was large, and then quietly the world expects us to be done. And that's not how it works. That's not how it has ever worked. 1:30 In the 1960s, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross published a book called On Death and Dying. She had been sitting at the bedsides of people in hospitals, had mostly stopped speaking to the ones who were dying, 1:46 and she wrote down what she heard in those rooms. Out of that came five words you almost certainly come across when you're dealing with death and dying and grief. 1:59 Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The five stages of grief. They've been repeated on television, on films, and in the mouths of well-meaning people for over 50 years. 2:16 But the two things that get lost is that Kubler-Ross was writing about people facing their own death, not the people who got left behind. The map was drawn out for the dying, 2:34 and the rest of it just borrowed it for grieving. The second is the part that she said later, once those five stages that she had created took on a life of their own. She said they were never meant to be a line. 2:53 Never meant to be steps you climb in order one after the other until you reach the top and you're finished. People do not grieve in a straight line. 3:07 You can wake up in something close to peace on a Tuesday and be flattened out by Friday. And neither one means you're doing it wrong. It just means that you are grieving. 3:24 It means that you are a person who loved someone. Grief doesn't move in a straight line. And it does not look the same for any two people. For one woman, it's tears. 3:43 For another, it is a tidiness that will not quit. A house scrubbed at three in the morning. For another, it's anger she can't explain or a numbness that lasts for years. There is no correct version. 4:01 There's only yours. And before we go any further, we tend to reserve the word grief to death. But grief is bigger. It's bigger than that. You can grieve a home that has been burned, a marriage that ended, 4:19 a body that no longer does what it used to do, a version of your life you were sure you were going to get. Any real loss can open the same door. The house you can no longer walk back into 4:37 is its own kind of goodbye. There's a writer that I really like. His name's Scott Galloway, who said something about grief that really kind of struck me. He calls grief a receipt for love. 4:52 The pain you feel after a loss, he says, sits in direct proportion to how much you loved the person. And he's really honest when he says he hasn't gotten over losing his mother and that he doesn't want to. 5:10 We are not trying to get over the people we love. We are learning to carry them. The woman you are about to meet, Angie, 5:20 in the span of a very short time, only a few years, she lost almost everyone who once defined her. I watched a good deal of it happen from a bit of a distance. And I remember wondering 5:38 how one person could be asked to carry so much and still be standing. Here is the thing I have come to believe and the reason I wanted to open with grief before I open with her. 5:55 When grief arrives, you can spend enormous energy trying to keep it at the door. Most of us do, at least at first. But If you let it in, 6:10 if you let it all the way in, it does not leave you the way it found you. It changes you, not on a timeline, not in a season. 6:25 Sometimes the changing takes years, and it keeps going long after everyone around you has assumed the worst is over. The work of grief is slow. 6:40 The life on the other side is not the life you had before. It can't be. The people are gone and you are someone new. I am not going to tell you the loss was a gift. 6:58 Losing the people you love does not feel like a gift. It's a loss, and it stays a loss. But the grieving is different from the loss. The loss is what is taken. 7:14 The grieving is what you do with the space it leaves. And the grieving, if given room, can become the opening. 7:27 It clears away everything you thought you had to be, everything you were performing, and in the space it leaves something that gets revealed. This is what happened to Angie, and this is her story. 7:45 I've called Angie's story The Woman Underneath. When Angie sat down with me, she had just lost her Uncle Joe. Fresh grief, 7:59 the kind that is still raw at the edges, the kind that has not yet found its place to live in you. And she said something at the beginning of our conversation that felt very poignant to me. 8:15 She said, "Grief does not always stay buried. It waits. And when a new loss arrives, it opens every old room back up again. All the doors you thought you had closed, 8:31 all the rooms you thought you had finished walking through, you walk back in and everyone is still there." That felt like a really honest way to talk about grief, 8:47 and I think it might be the only honest way to start and begin Angie's story. Because what I am about to tell you is not the story of someone who has finished grieving. 9:01 It's a story of a woman who has lost almost every person who once defined her, who has learned over many years how to live alongside what she has lost. 9:17 Not behind it, not past it, but alongside of it. This is her story. I have known Angie a long time. Not closely for all of it. We were peripheral to each other in high school, 9:33 the way you are with someone whose name you knew but whose life you did not. Years later, we found each other again. This time she was a client of mine. She sat in my reflexology chair for years, 9:50 and through that we became good friends. I watched her come through the door at different stages of her life that kept asking way too much of her. I watched her on Facebook. I watched her lose her brother. 10:07 I watched her lose her father. I watched her lose her mother and her mother's partner. I watched her house burn down. I watched all of this, and I remember thinking more than once, 10:25 how can one woman keep being asked to carry this? How in the heck is she still standing? And then much later, I watched her start to write, and that's a big part of Angie's story that I wanna tell you. 10:44 Not the catalog of losses, although those matter, and we will sit with them, but what happened underneath, what got revealed, the woman who was always there, 10:59 who finally got the room to show herself because every other identity in her life had been taken away. Angie has written about the first morning after her brother Dan had died, her older brother, 11:16 48 years old, a stroke no one saw coming. She has written about how grief does not break your heart, it breaks your body. 11:28 How her knees buckled, her stomach collapsed inward as though a horse had kicked her clean through the center of her being. She has written about walking out of the hospital and noticing that the world had not stopped, 11:45 that the cars were still moving, that people were still posting photos of their dinner. "Everything looked exactly as it had the day before," she wrote. "Everything except me." 11:59 I want to take you back before that morning, because to understand what Dan's death did to her, you have to understand who Angie was beside him. She was not the center of her family. 12:12 She told me this plainly without bitterness. She was the whimsical one. The one always on to the next idea. 12:21 She and Dan lived on the same street for years, and there were times her mother would walk right past her door and visit Dan first. Dan had a pull. Angie was harder to pin down. 12:35 And yet, when something went wrong, when someone was hurting, when someone needed a real conversation about a real problem, Angie was the one they came to. Not always the most seen, but often the one they held on to. 12:50 That's something I want you to hold on to too, because it's the truth underneath the whole story. Dan was a pusher, not in a cruel way, in the way of someone who refuses to let the people he loves stay small. 13:06 He got people skydiving when they were afraid of heights, swimming in cold water when all they wanted to do was stay safely on the shore. He looked at the thing you were most afraid of and said, "Just try it." 13:24 It drove Angie crazy sometimes, but she told me, "Every time he pushed me past my comfort zone, I saw growth after." She saw it not only in herself, but she saw it in everyone else too. 13:40 There was something else they shared, although neither of them ever quite spoke it out loud to each other. Dan was a gay man who spent much of his life not fully claiming that. 13:52 He came out in his 30s, but for years before that, and in quieter ways even after, he carried a part of himself that he kept guarded. And Angie carried a secret of her own. For her whole life, she had wanted to write. 14:09 She had taken courses behind everyone's back. She filled journals and short stories and kept them hidden. She never told anyone. Not her parents, not Dan. 14:24 A brother and a sister closer than most siblings ever get to be. Mirrors to each other in ways they did not yet have the language for. 14:35 Both holding the truest parts of themselves behind a door no one else was allowed to open. Neither one knowing how completely the other would have understood. 14:47 In the year before Dan died, something began to change in him. The brother who had pushed everyone else past their fear became quietly very afraid. His anxiety grew. 14:59 His blood pressure spiked in ways the doctor could not explain. He began to fear death every single day. And then one morning, the body that had been breaking down without anyone seeing completely gave way. 15:18 Angie has written about the four days that followed. Four days of machines breathing for him while she searched his face for any sign that he might come back. Four days suspended between knowing and not knowing. 15:34 And then a question no family is ever prepared to answer. "There is no language," she wrote, "for the moment you agree to let someone you love leave this world. It does not feel like a decision. 15:49 It feels like surrendering to something already decided." The morning after Dan died, Angie stood at her window hollowed out. She did not want to move forward. She did not want to be the strong one. 16:03 She did not in that moment want to go on. She told me with no performance in her voice that even her daughter did not make her want to stay. Dan was her person. He was her protector, her anchor, her safe witness. 16:20 They were supposed to grow old together, grieve their parents together, sit on a porch together someday. And then her Apple Music shuffled. A song came on through the television. 16:34 The volume seemed to surge as if the room itself was telling her to listen. Home by Philip Phillips. A year earlier, she and Dan had sat together on the couch watching American Idol. 16:49 Angie had been a Philip Phillips biggest fan, and Dan, ever the skeptic, had teased her endlessly for it. 16:56 Of all the millions of songs that could have played that morning, it was the one artist that they had playfully argued over. She walked over to the television. 17:06 The lyrics went straight into the hollow places in her chest. The singer told her she was not alone. She knew it was him. She looked outside. A rainbow, vivid, unmistakable, stretched across the morning sky. 17:24 Her brother, who had carried his truth quietly for so long, finding a way to tell her that somehow, impossibly, he was still with her. "It was not comfort," she said. "It was not closure. It 17:42 was presence." What I want you to understand is that Angie did not get time to fall apart. Her father had Parkinson's. Losing his son fractured something in him that never healed. 17:57 Two years after Dan died, her father went in the freezing water at the local pier. Angie does not believe he wanted to leave. She believes he simply could no longer stay. And then her mother needed her. 18:13 Her mother's heart was functioning at a 22%. Major heart attack at some point. Angie knew exactly when it happened. She had watched her mother lean down at Dan's hospital bed and kiss her son's cheek and say goodbye. 18:30 A mother should never have to decide to take away the life she gave. Losing him broke her mother's heart, literally. 18:42 Over the next year, Angie became her caregiver, not in the abstract sense, in the daily, physical, unglamorous reality of it, feeding her when she could no longer feed herself, 18:55 helping her stand when her legs no longer trusted her, changing her when dignity became something illness no longer allowed. 19:06 She watched the strongest woman she had ever known disappear inside a body that could no longer hold her. I asked Angie when she became the strong one. She said there was no ceremony, no moment of decision. 19:20 It just became necessary. And when I asked her if anyone was taking care of her during that time, her voice softened. "Yes and no," she said. There were people, but it was like a tree along a hike, 19:37 not the destination, just something you lean against for a minute to catch your breath. The tree does not bring you joy because you still have the rest of the hill to climb. I love the way she brought that image to life. 19:55 That is the truth of being the strong one. You're grateful for the trees, but you keep climbing alone. 20:03 At one point in our conversation, I asked her whether she had actually grieved Dan in those years that she was caring for everyone else. She told me something I think many people can relate to. 20:15 "When I was younger," she said, "every time an animal died, I would replace it with a new one because I did not want to deal with the sadness of the old one. The joy of bringing the new one in covered the grief. 20:29 When Dan died, I jumped into being the caregiver for my dad, then for my mom. It was kind of like getting a new pet. I could put the feeling aside and jump into the role. I could just deal with it later." 20:45 It was not avoidance, it was survival, because there was no room left to collapse. Her mother died five days before her 75th birthday. 20:58 Angie stood in her mother's empty house, touching the walls her mother had touched, and felt the word daughter become past tense. 21:06 Two months later, her mother's partner, Frank, fell and lay on the floor for 24 hours before someone found him. Cancer had been spreading silently through his body. 21:17 He was airlifted to Toronto, paralyzed from the neck down. There was nothing to be done. When they brought him home, he asked three questions. Where was the house key? Where would his little dog Milo go? 21:34 And the third one that Angie cannot remember now. She told me grief stole it right out of her memory. That happens, I think. In the middle of so much loss, the mind protects you by letting some things go. 21:51 Simple questions, practical ones, quiet business of a life being wrapped up. Within minutes of hearing the answers, he was gone. It began to feel, she told me, like loss had become the only language life spoke. 22:08 The year that followed was a numbing year. She moved through it like someone underwater. Work, home. She does not remember much else. Until the night the lightning struck her home. 22:24 September 9th, 2016, 3:00 in the morning, fire taking hold of the only physical space that still held the echoes of everyone she had lost. Photographs, the belongings, the objects that carried them. 22:42 Angie has written about this moment, and I want to read it the way she wrote it because no one could say it better than she did. 22:49 "As the fire took hold, forcing me out of the only physical space that still held the echoes of the life I had lost, I felt a strange manic clarity. The smell of smoke filled the air. 23:04 Everything that remained of them, photos, belongings, memories made solid, was burning or about to." She walked out to the back patio and dropped to her knees. 23:16 She pulled a white tissue from her pocket and she waved it at the sky. Tiny, desperate white flag. "Please," she screamed into the heat and the dark, "stop. I am strong enough now. 23:35 Is this it? Is this the grand finale?" She told me she felt almost a comedy about it in the moment, that no one would believe this one person had been through this much, 23:50 that the universe had tipped from tragedy into something almost absurd. But there was something else underneath, and she could feel it even then, a strange manic freedom. 24:06 Because when everything familiar is gone, there are no roles left to perform, no identities left to inhabit. There is only you and the question of who you will become. 24:23 A few months after Dan died, in those earliest days when she could still not look at the rest of her life without him in it, Angie contacted a medium. She went for Dan. She needed to know he was okay. 24:39 He'd been so afraid of dying in the last year, and she needed proof that he was at peace. What she got was something entirely different. 24:49 The medium told her that Dan was with her, that he would walk on her right side for the rest of her life, and then she paused. "Your grandmother is here," she said. 25:00 "She wants you to know you are only using 40% of your talents." Angie thought she meant her painting. She had recently started again as a hobby. The medium shook her head. "Nope, it is the 60% you are not using. 25:18 It is the book, the book you have always wanted to write." Angie's heart began to race because she had never spoken those words aloud to another person, not to her parents, not to Dan, not to anyone. 25:34 Her first instinct was to deny it, to say, "I don't know what you're talking about. Never wanted to write a book." Something stopped her. Because Dan was 48 when his world stopped. 48. 25:50 If life could be taken that quickly, what was she doing denying her own passion? She told me, "I did not have the luxury of someday anymore. 26:00 If I was going to become the person I was meant to be, I had to start before the next storm hit." There is a moment Angie remembers from around that time. 26:12 She was backing her car into the garage at her old house when she smelled him. Dan's scent, clean, particular, unmistakably him. She sat in the car, afraid to move. 26:26 She looked over at the passenger seat as if he might be sitting there. "Is that you?" she said out loud. "Telling me to write? Giving me the green light?" She sat there until the scent faded, 26:42 and then she went inside and looked up creative writing courses. She enrolled in a program at the U of T. She started slowly. She knew almost from the beginning the first book had to be about Dan, 26:58 a story about a man navigating a world that did not always have room for his truth. She could write it because she understood. She had been carrying her own. 27:10 Writing became the place where grief could exist outside of her. Not an escape. She was very clear with me about that. "It was not a replacement," she said. "It was a place I could let the emotions be." 27:26 For a long time, even as the pages grew, even as the first book took shape, Angie still called herself someone who wanted to be a writer. The shift came slowly. 27:38 She read Stephen King's book on writing and felt for the first time that someone was describing exactly how her brain worked. That's me, she thought. I think like that. 27:49 She listened to a podcast where a man said the very first thing you have to do is believe it yourself. When someone asks what you do, you say, "I am a writer." Not I want to be, not I'm trying to be. I am. 28:05 And still, even when her first book arrived in her hands, even when a local television crew came to her home to interview her, even when the interviewer asked her what she thought Dan would say if he was here now, 28:19 and she broke completely, even then she told me something I think about anyone who has ever doubted themselves will recognize. "Even now," she said, "I'm not sure I always believe it. 28:35 I feel like I need an agent and a traditional publisher to actually call myself a writer. It feels like I'm lying." And then quieter, "But, but I have two published books. I have awards. 28:46 What more do I need to call myself a writer?" What more indeed? Now when someone asks her what she does, she makes herself say it. "I am a writer." Because no one else is going to believe it unless she does. 29:01 Near the end of our conversation, I asked Angie whether she ever mourns the woman she was before all the losses. Her answer surprised me. "No," she said. "I'm actually mad at her," 29:15 mad at the version of her who knew her own truth and did not live it, who hid, who waited, who said someday. But she did not say it in anger. "I needed that person to become who I am now," she said. 29:32 And then she said something many of us feel but aren't necessarily brave enough to say out loud. "If someone offered to give me back everyone, but I had to give up who I have become, I don't think I would take it. 29:49 I don't think I'd trade." Not because she doesn't love them. She would give anything for one more day, one more year, 29:59 but she believes something now about where they are and where she is that brings her a strange comfort. 30:07 "They're with me every day," she said, "and I feel like they are in a better spot now because they can finally see the real me without ego getting in the way." 30:18 I asked her what grief had taught her about love, and she did not pause. "That it's unconditional, that material things mean nothing. Spend time with the people you love. 30:32 If you're thinking of them, call them, send a text, don't delay." And then quieter, "I always thought I had time." I asked her what most people misunderstand about grief. She said, "That you have to get over it. 30:50 You don't. You learn to live with it. It becomes a kind of low hum in the background, always there, and that's okay. Because grief to me is now love. The love I had for them is what became the grief. 31:07 They are with me in it every day." She told me that on anniversaries and birthdays sometimes she lights a candle and celebrates, and sometimes she sits in the dark and lets herself feel the absence. 31:21 Both are honoring, both are love. I have known Angie a long time, and sitting on the other side of all of it, getting to be the one to put words around her becoming, I want to tell you what I've come to believe. 31:38 Angie's story is not a story about how much one woman can lose. It's a story about what gets revealed when everything you thought you had to be is taken away. 31:50 She was the whimsical one, the scattered one, the one that was always onto the next thing, the one people quietly underestimated and quietly leaned on at the same time. 32:02 And underneath all of that, behind a door no one had ever been invited to open, she was a woman who carried a secret dream her whole life. It took losing everyone to open that door. 32:16 At the very end of our conversation, I asked Angie the question that had been sitting quietly underneath everything she had shared, "Who are you now when the roles are gone?" [laughs] She did not pause. 32:29 She said, "I'm Angie," and she laughed a little when she said it, that beautiful, full laugh that she carries everywhere with her, 32:39 because she knows how simple it sounds, and she also knows how many years it took to earn it. She's a writer. She's a publisher now too, building her own press, because of course she is. 32:53 That also is the thing she was always moving towards. She's a woman who has been through what would flatten most people and is still funny, is still goofy, still curious, still herself in a way that is unmistakable. 33:07 She was no longer Angie the younger sister. She was no longer Angie the daughter. She was no longer Angie the strong one. She was Angie. 33:17 And somewhere in whatever way love continues, there's still a brother who pushes people past their comfort zone, who convinced them to jump when they were afraid, who said, "Just try it. Just go. 33:31 Just be the thing you already are." And this time she finally is. And that is Angie's story as I came to know it. Now I want you to hear from her directly. 33:46 I asked her a few questions, and these are her answers in her own voice. Hello. Hello. How are you? I'm good. How are you? Good, good, good. Good, good. Life is good for you? Life is great. 34:02 Yeah, it's been really good actually. It's, uh, busy though. Busy. [laughs] Yeah? Well, that's good. Well, let's get to the questions. So the first one was how did you feel hearing your own story? I was very emotional. 34:15 I was crying when I heard my own story. It was like looking in this mirror, you know, and realizing, holy shit, I've been through a lot of hell. [laughs] 'Cause I think when you go through it you don't really, 34:33 you know, necessarily see it, you know, 'cause you're trying to survive, right? Yeah, there was parts that made me feel really warm and, uh, parts that made me ache, of course. 34:45 But, you know, mostly it was how far I've come. Life gets busy, and you don't always see how far you've come either. And I felt... I think the most important thing is I felt really heard. 34:58 I felt like you understood my story. I felt like you really felt it, like really, really felt it, and you understood me from that story and where I've come and how I've come out of it. So that's how it made me feel. 35:14 I just... It was beautiful. I just... I kept rereading it because it was like, wow, [laughs] she got it. She actually really got it. And I did, I felt heard. Good. 35:27 Yours was really helpful because you had written the story, right? Yeah. And, and I know you, right? Yeah. So it was, um... it had those elements and that context to it. 35:37 But it's funny because I just recorded, re- just recorded it now, and reading it, like I was trying to keep from being emotional. [laughs] Aw. Right? 35:47 Because, yeah, when you read it and you read through it, so it's different when you just read it on paper but when you say it out loud. So I think... 35:54 I really believe that your story will be s- very helpful to a lot of people. Um- Good... one, because, uh, I think the trajectory of where we went with your story was to show that you don't have to stay in grief, right? 36:08 Yes, exactly. I think that that will help a lot of people sort of understand, you know, when they're having good days that that's not not honoring their... whoever they lost. So I think that that's important. 36:22 I agree, and I, and I... That's why I like to tell my story, 'cause I'm hoping that it will help others. 36:29 That's the most That's what helped me a lot actually in the grief, d- going through it, was people were reaching out and saying, "God, I've just lost so and so, and I don't know how you managed to get through all of what you've been through. 36:44 You are an inspiration. I keep going because you got through it, so I can get through it." That is very empowering to me. 36:51 That almost makes it worth it, you know, the, the deaths too, to know that that gave that purpose then, right? 36:59 And not that we always need purpose, but it just helps us to stay grounded, I think, when there's some purpose in things. So, uh, you know, I really... I, I'm, I'm hoping that it will help people, for sure. Yeah. 37:14 That's awesome. And, uh, where are you right now, and what's, what's kind of going on in your life at this present moment? Well, I have finally stepped into my own purpose. Um, 37:32 it's alive in me right now, this purpose. You know, I always lived my life for everybody else. 37:40 I would do what they thought I wanted to do, or I would spend my time helping them to achieve their purpose, or I was always... Because I love to give, and that makes me feel energized. 37:55 But your batteries run out eventually if you don't continue to do your own purpose. Yeah. 38:01 So now that I've lost everybody and I did find that writer and I found the person that was meant to be, I'm e- I'm exploding and I'm now trying to live the life I feel like I was meant to. Great. 38:17 Doing the, you know, the pod- the, the podcasts or doing the, the reels and trying to reach people and let them know that their story also matters, that they don't have to hold onto it inside. 38:30 They don't have to be smaller, be quieter. They can explode, too. They can live their purpose in their life. Um- Mm-hmm... so I'm hoping that will help. And then I'm also, uh, 38:44 you know, this, starting this press, the Raven Lane Press, and trying to allow a platform for those stories to be told, to be heard. Mm-hmm. Traditional publishing houses don't always allow for certain truths to be told. 39:01 So I want Raven Lane Press to be that. I want it to be either true crime or true child trafficking stories or sacrificing, uh, satanic sacrifices, or just... 39:16 And not to exploit it and not to sensationalize it, but to give it a voice and to let those people know they've been heard, too. Mm-hmm. Um, so that's kind of where I'm at at this point. 39:28 I just wanna give voice to the voiceless, I guess. Yeah. You know? That's amazing. Yeah. I love watching- Here's-... your work because of that. Yeah, for sure. Thank you. 39:36 Um, and we will put all that in the show notes, so we'll have, like, your Instagram, but also Raven Lane Press if anybody's looking to, you know, get their novel or their book out there, um, just to even connect with you in that. 39:49 Because I th- I think, uh, many women in our range of life do feel like they have a book in them, and they may have had a book in them their whole life. 39:59 And I know that, like, you're, you wanna kind of stick to a genre, but by the same token too, you know, there's, there's that, 'cause I know that you're... 40:06 W- the writing thing is, is, is coming to fruition to help people and all of that. So I think that's awesome. Yeah. But- And I also... It's very important to me to have Raven Lane Press 40:20 have a good reputation in the sense of publishing quality- Yeah... not just taking a story for the sake of taking a story. It has to fit. It has to match. Uh, and the writing has to be... 40:34 I mean, we can fix it through edits, but I don't want someone... I don't want AI-written stuff. Right... and I don't want somebody who... It can be edited by AI, it can certainly be cleaned up- Mm-hmm... 40:44 or the ideas bounced off AI, but I don't want an AI novel. I want- Right. Yeah... you know, I, I want somebody's heart on a page- Good... because that's what helps people, right? Yeah. I agree. 40:57 That's what will help the people that have lived their story. And I also will publish just fiction, just crime, mystery, thriller fiction too. That's great. But I still want a message within that. 41:11 Like, I, you know, I, I don't want it- Yeah... to be a, you know, a, a Friday the 13th slasher bullshit. I, I want there to have a purpose or a meaning behind it. So if that can give any context. 41:24 You know, i- it's important to me to do light work. It's important to me to expose the dark into the light, and that's what a raven does. Right. And so for me, it's very important for the quality to be there, too. Yeah. 41:38 Oh, for sure. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that, that matters so much, right? Like, the- Yeah... the quality of what's... But, uh, yeah, so I think that's amazing what you're doing there. 41:48 And then the third and final question is, if somebody is, like, a few steps behind you or this is their life right now, if they've just had loss, or even if they've had loss and they now don't know where to go, what would your advice be? 42:07 Or what would you direct people to? Uh, I would first and foremost want them to know that their story does matter and that they're not alone in their story. 42:17 There's many people who are living and experiencing the same thing right now, no matter what that grief story or trauma story looks like. And it's, doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be-... happy. 42:33 It doesn't have to be put together. It can look messy. It can look very messy. It, it's theirs. It's their own story, you know? Right. And they can feel very alone in that, but they don't have to be alone in that. 42:48 Of course, there's always gonna be a loneliness to your own story because no one can truly understand how you're feeling. People can relate, definitely can relate. Oh. And like I said, I, you know- Yeah... 43:00 their story might be very important because somebody else needs to hear it, you know? And- Yeah... to get through it, just put one foot in front of the other and be gentle with yourself. Always be gentle with yourself. 43:14 There's no timeframe on it. You don't have to reach a certain stage by a certain time. 43:21 Um, there are days I still fall apart, and it's been 14 years for my brother and, you know, 13 for my dad and 12 for my mom or whatever. But I still will have those days. Mm-hmm. And I just allow myself to have them. 43:38 Yeah. And sometimes what hap- what helps me is to be the observer, not the victim. So I'll look at it and say, "Okay, I'm feeling such and such today. 43:49 Okay, then I'm feeling that, so let's just roll with it today," and be gentle. Yeah. 43:55 Yeah, that allowing a lot of times is, is a, the key that can help unlock the door, is to allow whatever's coming in is to come in, not to push it away. Yes. And I think that came through in your story quite a bit. Yeah. 44:09 So. Good. So I think it's wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I just, I wanna thank you so much for, you know, you didn't know anything about what I was trying to do or, [laughs] 44:20 or what I was trying to bring to light, and you said yes right off the hop. So I just, like, appreciate you so much, uh, for doing that and sharing your story because I do think that it will help a lot of people. 44:34 And, uh, it will bring different ways of, of dealing with grief, and that it isn't just this, you know, linear space, uh, for people. So I appreciate so much that you were able to share with me. 44:48 Well, and right back at you for what you're doing, you know, to allow a platform for people to share and a safe space for their stories to live because so many times it's a scary space. 45:04 And to have somebody as beautiful as you, both inner- Mm... and outer, to hold that for them, that's beautiful. So thank you for allowing that to happen. Thank you. That's very kind. Thank you. 45:20 [laughs] Before we close, I'd like to sit with you for a few minutes. If now is not the time, that's all right. You can come back to this part later or not at all. 45:33 But if you have a few quiet minutes and you're somewhere you can settle, I would like to do this together. Let your breath become slow and deep. Feel it pulling into your belly and allowing the expansion, 45:53 and then allowing that exhale to fall out and let go. After that, just allow your breath to be normal. Allow it to find its own space, 46:11 the way it does when no one's asking anything of you. Somewhere in your body may be a loss. Maybe it's a person. Maybe it's more than one. 46:29 Maybe it wasn't a person at all. A home, a marriage, a friendship that quietly ended, a body that used to do what you asked of it, a life you were sure you were going to get. 46:50 It came up while you were listening to Angie's story, and it's all right that it did. I'm not going to ask you to do anything with it. 47:02 I'm not going to ask you to make peace or find the meaning or be grateful for what it taught you. Not here. Not today. 47:15 I am only going to ask you to let it be in the room with you for a moment. Allow it to sit alongside of you, not behind you, not past you, 47:34 but alongside. Let it come. Whoever it is, whatever it is, you do not have to hold it tightly. You do not have to push it away. 47:53 Just let it be here, the way you would let someone just sit beside you without needing to fill the silence. Notice where you feel it most. 48:12 Most of us feel grief somewhere in our body before we feel it anywhere else. The chest, the throat, the pit of the stomach. There is no wrong answer. Just notice. 48:35 If you are feeling an ache right now, it's not that there is something wrong with you. It's the shape your love takes now. And it's proof that your love mattered, that they mattered, that it was real. 48:56 Grief in the end is love. The love that you had for them is what became the grief. And they are with you in it every day. You do not have to get over it. 49:16 Allow it to become a low hum in your background, always there, and that is okay. You get to live alongside of it. 49:33 Not behind it, not past it, alongside of it. And allowing yourself to just let the exhale release. 49:53 Breathing into your body and exhaling. Feeling what you feel. Allow it to be on the breath. 50:12 And when you're ready, you can bring yourself back to the room. Begin to move some of your fingers or toes. 50:27 Just reestablish yourself back into your body. Feel the chair underneath you or the ground beneath your feet or your hands where they're resting. 50:44 You are still here. You are still becoming. And whatever you have lost is within you in that becoming every day. 51:01 Thank you for sitting with me. Thank you for sitting with her. So that was The Crone Stories. Thank you so much to my guest for trusting me with her story. If something in it found you today, 51:19 send this episode to one woman you can name. New stories happen every other Friday. You can find us on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, and also at karenamy.com. In love, light, and laughter, Karen. 51:37 [outro music]
