Have you ever felt stuck, lost or stagnant? Like you’re trapped in a box, particularly a grief box, and can’t get out? The answer to our freedom was right in front of us the whole time, the ocean; yet we were so trapped in our limiting beliefs that we couldn’t see what was right in front of our faces.

In the last seven weeks, we realized that we’ve been putting ourselves in a box. Sure the box seemed safe and comforting, but it was also limiting and we were getting antsy. We were ready to start growing, evolving, and changing our lives. We wanted to get in touch with our truest selves and start pursuing our passions such as our love for the ocean… But how do you do that while trapped in a grief box? How do you live your best life when you don’t even know what it looks like?

You don’t. That’s why we acknowledged the box, thanked it for its time, and started to break out and chuck it out the window. Is it scary to do that? Yeah. But it’s also totally worth it. We are not experts in this and we still have so much more to learn. Yet, since we became aware of these limiting beliefs and habits, we have started to release them little by little. Already, our lives have transformed so much since we started releasing our self-imposed, “boxy” limits. Read on to hear our personal stories and experiences with our grief and this self-imposed “grief box”.

Shell here!

Six years ago, I remember being in a grief fog. I remember living in constant fear of what was going to become of me and Jay. I remember the grief hurting so much that some days it just hurt to move, to breathe and even think. I felt as though grief gobbled me up and it was paralyzing.

As I reflect back on those pains, I can see how far we have come. It still hurts but it’s no longer paralyzing. At least not daily. There are moments that will stop me in my tracks or send down into a crying fetal position, but they are rare and further apart.

Grief and I have learned to coexist together. I know some may not like that term, but once I accepted grief was always going to be a part of my life we almost got along better. Sure, I don’t like grief, who does?

Now I call grief my old friend. We have been through quite the journey together. I almost feel like I need to give it another name, the plain name “grief” almost sounds boring. But we all know grief is far from boring.

One thing I have discovered is that my grief and I have always found a common ground I go to in order to soothe my grief: the ocean.

In my six years of grief and even the fifteen months of our cancer journey, I would go to the beach to find solace. I would go to find comfort. I knew the minute I saw the ocean it would grab my soul and remind me that no matter what happened, everything would be okay.

There are many days where I would sit on the beach and cry my heart out! During the cancer journey, the beach and the shower were the only two places I felt safe enough to go to cry.

After Art’s death, I would sit on the beach and try to talk to him. I would also sit and cry, wondering what I was supposed to do without him.

Each time, I would just sit on the sand and cry, staring at the magical waves. I would become mesmerized by the beauty of crashing waves knowing that the ocean survives many storms and she always keeps going.

I could see the power of the ocean. I could feel the energy of the ocean. I always feel as though I can release whatever I am thinking or feeling, and she could wash it away. As if she is taking the burden I carry on land and washing my troubles out to sea. I believe this isn’t a trouble for my friend the ocean because she is so magical and powerful!

The day Art died, we drove to the beach so fast that I’m pretty sure we made people’s heads spin. Seriously, they took his body at 6:30am and we were out the door, bags packed, car loaded and on the road by 8:00am! We were gone! Where did we go? The beach. We spent around twenty days at the beach and we never wanted to come back.

Our trips in the last six years, no matter where we went in world; whether it was by plane, car or ship it was always at the beach or on the ocean.

Our day trips end up at the beach. Our travels end up at the beach. When we can’t be at the beach, our home was remodeled into a beach cottage. You better believe our tv plays YouTube of the ocean practically all day. We even sleep to the sounds of ocean every night.

Most recently, we both fell in love with oceanography and have changed our majors accordingly to each of our specific loves. These include the ocean waves, volcanoes, plate tectonics, tsunamis, erosion, rock formations and sea life!

It’s as if we have been walking around in a daze working hard to rebuild our lives. We were struggling with making choices for our futures. We were struggling with where to live or where to go to school. We were even struggling with possible career choices and found ourselves limiting our own choices. The entire time the answer had been right in front of us: The OCEAN!

It’s almost funny, but we feel as though we can say: “We are one with the ocean and the ocean is one with us.” Sounds corny, I know. But what we have been searching for has been right in front of us this whole time.

What is even more magical, as we now know the ocean is our life, we are seeing doors open for us. We are seeing opportunities for us to go and live a life we never thought possible.

We have been trapped in our grief box! We have been living a life with our eyes closed because grief wouldn’t let us see the opportunities.

Grief is a part of our lives, but we are MORE than grief. Grief doesn’t own us; grief doesn’t define us.

Grief can be tricky.

Grief can trap you.

Grief can isolate you.

Grief can even lie to you.

What I mean by that is that when grief consumes you, you feel so devastated by the loss of your loved one, you cannot see anything else that life has to offer. It can take you down a lonely road and somehow grief can convince you that this is all there is for you… grief! See what a tricky little booger grief is!

But no!!! We are more than our grief! We are in control of our grief. We get to choose our feelings. We get to choose the type of life we want to live. We get to choose where we want to live and how we want to live.

I’m not saying we will never feel sad or miss our loved ones. I’m just saying we get the opportunity to not let grief control our lives! Doors started to open for me and Jay once we took a step back and realized that we have the power over our grief.

We walked out of the trapped grief box we were living in. We looked around and finally saw what was right in front of us the whole time, opportunities of living a great life even with grief!!!

We can choose to live the best life with grief. We are allowed to be happy! It is our birthright to be happy, joyous and full of love. It is okay to laugh, to make plans and to enjoy every second of our lives.

As my old friend grief sits next to me, sometimes I can feel her holding onto me too tight. Those days where her grip is tight, I remind myself that I am okay. Grief can grab me and hold me tight, but it is not always like that. Sometimes I loosen her grip and tell her, “Not today grief, I got this!” I continually remind myself better days are coming. I repeat an affirmation of, “All is well and I am okay,” practically a million times in one day. It really helps with my daily grief.

As I venture into my new educational direction of science, I am reminded that there is an equal opposite reaction to everything we do in life. We have to remember when we love deep, we will grieve deep. When we are sad, we will understand true joy. When we cry, we will be able to enjoy laughter. When we have dark days, we can now enjoy bright days. We can’t enjoy one without the other.

As grievers, I know it is not always easy, but we must understand our deep grief is just our deep love. We also have to learn to extend kindness and grace to ourselves as we navigate our journey of grief.

I often wonder if Art came back today, would he like the new life we have built? Would he agree or even like the choices we are making in our new life? Would he like our choices in our educational and career choices? It’s always weird to think this way, because his journey on this planet is what led us to our journey today. I am grateful to him for being a great husband, being a great dad and for believing in us when he was dying. He said over and over again that he was never worried about us. He said, “My love, I hope you can see what I see one day. Just how amazing you and Jay are. I am not worried; you and our daughter will be just fine without me.”

Here I am almost seven years without him and I have to say, he was right! We are okay without him. Would we prefer him here? Absolutely! But the reality is that he is not here. I think the greatest honor we can give him is to live our lives to the fullest, believing him and his words of strength. We are better than okay, we are on the journey of a lifetime! Which includes the ocean of course!!!

Thank you to our Art! Art, a man in our life who is forever loved and never forgotten. A man to whom we are forever grateful because we wouldn’t be where we are today without him!

Some of my tips:

Always believe in yourself!

Always dream big! This is your life after grief; you can make it whatever you want it to be. Pursue new or old passions. Know that you are capable of anything!

Know that you are more than your grief! Grief does not own you and grief does not define you. It hurts, but there is more to you than the pain. Remember that you are a living, breathing person with wants, needs, desires, passions, dreams, and you are capable of feeling more than just grief.

Never give up! Rebuilding our lives with grief is hard. There is a learning curve. Staying motivated can be difficult since we live with so much pain. It is tiring, but we got this. Day by day, we can do this. One step at a time. Take breaks and practice self-care, but do not give up on pursuing your happiness! It is possible and worth it!

Be kind to yourself! Forever and always, give yourself the gift of kindness and self-compassion.

Practice daily affirmations! They seriously work! They help with practicing self-love, rewiring our brains to be more positive, they’ve improved my confidence, and so much more. You can make affirmations for anything! Make your own, write them down, get affirmation books or listen to YouTube videos with positive affirmations. We highly recommend Yoga with Kassandra on YouTube; she has some AMAZING affirmation meditations and yoga!

Trust. Slowly let go, release your fears and expectations for your future, and trust you have the strength to rebuild a new life that you love! 😘

Jay Here!

When I was little, I wanted to be a chemist. I wanted to be a lot of different things at different points in my early youth, but chemistry was the coolest thing to my little second grade mind!

I wanted to know how things work. I understood that you can mix things to make a chemical reaction, and I wanted to know why. It was maddening when my school continued to teach basic science like the water cycle and how plants grow. Over, and over, and over again.

It became so repetitive that I lost interest in science as a whole. School made it so boring!

I’d been singing since I was five and acting since I was seven. That was never boring! There was always something fun to do. New characters to embody, cast mates to meet, songs to learn. I thought I found my passion in life. Surely, I could never love anything like I love theatre!

When my dad had cancer, the theatre community was there for me. I had some amazing friends in my theatre group. They helped take me to and from rehearsal, home and the hospital. My weekly acting classes at SCR were my escape. For two hours every week, I could go pretend to be somebody else… even when I wasn’t working a scene. I didn’t tell anyone about my dad, and it’s not like anyone’s going to randomly ask if your dad has cancer. For those two hours, I was just me. I wasn’t the girl with the sick dad, I wasn’t someone who had to be rushed to and from places, and I wasn’t the girl who was up late the night before because her dad couldn’t stop vomiting. I was just Jay, the shy girl who was a really good actress and singer with some serious stage presence.

I decided I wanted to do this for a living. I wanted to be on Broadway! I thought I found my purpose and path in life, and I wasn’t going to let go of it. Everything in life was uncertain when my dad was sick, but at least I could plan my future out to a T.

My dad was my biggest cheerleader, besides my mom. Before he got sick, he was the one volunteering at the theatre and making friends with all the parents. I should say that my mom still loved and supported me just as much as my dad! Her style was more to show up in workout clothes, go to the gym while I was in rehearsal and then pick me up and have fun conversations/sing all the way home. My dad was the social butterfly, more than my mom or I ever were!

The point is: he believed in my talent and supported me. I remember riding in his truck, affectionately called the Hoopty. A song by Kelly Clarkson or Pink would play and he’d tell me that I’d be able to sing like that. He’d talk about me going on concert tours one day and releasing music albums. The only album I cared to be a part of was an Original Broadway Recording, but his enthusiasm was contagious.

I don’t remember a lot from when my dad was on hospice, but there’s a few things I remember crystal clear. One of them is my dad’s frail hand holding mine, his sunken yellow eyes looking at me somehow still full of love, and his raspy voice saying, “Promise me you’ll never give up on your dreams. You can do anything you set your mind to.”

Well, what the heck was I supposed to do with that a few years later when I didn’t want to seriously pursue a singing career anymore?

It was getting to be too much. I put too much pressure on myself because I knew that making a living in that industry was rough, so I had to be my best. The problem was that I was pushing myself too hard and sucking all the fun out of it. I didn’t enjoy it anymore because of that. The pressure was ruining it.

I needed to pull back, and there are many reasons this was difficult for me. One of the main ones is that I felt I was giving up, and then I would hear my dad in the back of my brain telling me not to give up.

I had to realize in my own time that he just wanted me to be happy. He never would have wanted me to make myself so miserable over something I used to love.

I pulled back and started to think of musical theatre as more of a fun hobby instead. The funny thing is, that’s when my abilities started to improve the most. I was finally having fun again!

So the thing I’d been doing my whole life and expected to pursue as an adult became a hobby. Now what?

Could I ever find something I loved as much again? If so, how do I not ruin that? Is there any career that I could pursue and enjoy?

I remembered my ninth grade Earth Sciences class of all things. When I first heard I had to take that class, I groaned. I thought it would be a repeat of everything I had already learned in my earlier science classes.

What happened shocked me. As we learned about the formation of the different types of rocks, tectonic plates, carbon dating and volcanoes, I was actually… interested. I thoroughly wanted to learn these things. I looked forward to class, and even studying!

I started to wonder if I could be happy as a geologist. The answer was yes, but I felt like that wasn’t the whole picture. I was missing a piece of the puzzle.

My junior year of high school, I took a marine science class. Once again, I found myself enjoying class! I wanted to learn this stuff! I was thoroughly interested and happy in the class.

At the end of the semester, our teacher told us about possible career paths in marine science. That’s when I saw it for the first time: marine geology.

Woah. I didn’t even know that was a thing! My first thought was, “Is that really a thing I can actually do?” I still sometimes just look at it in awe. How can studying volcanoes and tectonic plates in the ocean be real? That’s way too good to be true!

But it most certainly is true. I kept it on the back burner, questioning. I was a performing arts kid. How could I make this drastic switch to STEM? I was apprehensive about what that would entail. Maybe I should go into history or English instead.

Well, I learned I thoroughly do not enjoy reading a lot of literature. History is somewhat interesting, but the only mildly intriguing parts are about ancient cultures and historical disasters. Still, I wanted to keep my options open.

Then my mom decided to enroll in an oceanography class for six weeks. The syllabus said they’d begin by discussing geology, and I asked if I could crash her zoom lectures. Everyday, I woke up two hours early to go sit in lecture for fun.

My interest was sparked again in a way history just doesn’t do for me. I felt like a second grader again; I wanted to understand how and why these things worked. I wanted to experiment and play with these concepts.

I continued showing up at the lectures, even after the professor finished his discussion on marine geology. While nothing holds quite the excitement of plate tectonics, I still found myself wanting to learn about the structure and properties of water. I wanted to learn about waves and ocean circulation. I was having fun!

You know, acting wasn’t always the best part of my weekly SCR classes. The theatre is near the beach, so often times my mom and I would go to the beach before or after class and watch the waves. As my mom said in her post: the ocean is so deeply ingrained in our lives.

I read somewhere once that our brain decides what we remember based on how relevant the information seems to our daily lives. You don’t remember every little detail about every day; your brain chooses to forget what it perceives as irrelevant information and only stores useful information. I think I read this in school, but don’t quote me on it. I just think the idea of it is relevant to this. If we retain information that’s relevant to our lives, what could be more relevant to me and my mom than the ocean?

I don’t know if I’ll change my mind later. Maybe I’ll find something I love even more; I’m not putting myself in a box. I’ve limited myself to only one future pathway before, theatre, and those self-imposed limitations didn’t really work out very well for me when I had a mid-life crisis at 16.

I just know that for right now, I found something I really enjoy and it feels pretty dam good. I’m just going to sit back, enjoy the moment of finding something I love, and geek out over rocks.

Jay’s Tips:

• Don’t put yourself in a box. Certainty may seem appealing, but she’s a real bi*ch if that box starts crumbling.
• Adopt a growth mindset. You don’t have to read Carol Dweck’s book on it, but at least take the time to watch her 10 minute Stanford YouTube video explaining. A growth mindset is how I got out of my mid-life crisis funk and embraced that nothing in life is certain, and that’s okay.
• NOTHING IN LIFE IS CERTAIN. Change is all around us. As the wise ole rat Remy from Ratatouille says, “Change is nature.” The only thing we can really control is our reaction to things.
• A hard lesson I’m still processing: We don’t know everything. Ouch, it hurt to type that, but it’s true. There are so many possibilities, so many worlds we may never explore if we insist upon being stagnant in our own knowledge base.
• Be open to learning. Do research. Ask questions. Learn about yourself, your core values, your likes and dislikes, and any new opportunities that may bring you joy. Be open to receiving new knowledge, because you never know where it may lead.
• Speak positively to yourself, no matter what! You are an amazing survivor in this crazy world, just trying your best. Be kind, empathetic and compassionate to yourself.💕

Alright, that’s all I’ve got for you, folks! (She says, probably hundreds of words later.) I’m honestly not the best at conclusions, but the basics I want to say is that you’re amazing and you are worth the effort of truly pursuing a peaceful, joyful life.

Peace out! ✌🏼☮️

Aloha and gratitude,

Jay and Shell