Jay’s Perspective:

Hi everybody! I’m not writing much today. I’m just writing to ask you to read what my mom wrote because it’s amazing. If you follow our Instagram, you’ll know that she’s been having a rough time lately with the pandemic and grief. Writing this book is a blessing and a curse, because while it is healing for us, it also reignites old emotions. The combination of that with everything going on in the world with viruses and murder hornets and such is overwhelming sometimes. She was struggling greatly, so I told her to write it out. I know for me, I can’t always talk through my emotions. I find it easier to write than to speak, so advice I would give anyone is to write about how they are feeling. When my mom was done writing, I knew we had to share this with you all. My mom didn’t plan on sharing it, but I think this is something we all need to hear right now, regardless of whether or not you’re grieving. So without further ado, I present to you: My mom.

Shell’s Perspective:

As everyone may or may not be aware, Jay and I have started the journey of writing our book. We have been talking about it for years and finally decided to do it. We plan to share our journey of actually writing the book with you here on the blog. We have worked hard to get this blog up and running and we hope you are enjoying what we are sharing with you. It is sometimes strange because we write and post it and it goes out to this imaginary void in the internet-world, with the hopes that maybe one person will feel better after we post something. By sharing our journey, our hope is that if one person no longer feels alone or even just knows that we understand their pain, we have succeeded on our blog journey.

With that being said, allow me to share with you where I am currently at emotionally while writing this book. I am and have been going through a rough patch of emotions. The emotions and memories that are being sparked up can be quite harsh and painful.  I hope someone who is newly grieving reads this: THE PAIN YOU FEEL IN THE BEGINNING WILL NOT ALWAYS FEEL THIS INTENSE. What I am saying is that when my husband first died, it felt like I had died too. I felt emotionally out of control, lost, alone, scared, paralyzed by pain and deeply wounded. Here I am six years later, and I am actually allowing myself to relive the trauma to write this book. I can tell you that after six years it does still hurt, but grief is no longer paralyzing, full of fear or out of control. I have learned over these years how to CO-EXIST with my grief and how to NURTURE my grief when needed.

If you’re new to grief just know this will take some time and please be patient and kind to yourself. Yes, it hurts and yes it sucks but I PROMISE you it won’t always feel this intense. I PROMISE YOU THAT. I also used to think that if I didn’t hurt really bad then I would be disrespecting my dead husband or maybe that I didn’t love him enough. This is also not true. You will always grieve for them because you will forever love them. Your love for them never dies.

I remember the first time I laughed after he died. It was four months later and although laughing felt so good, it felt equally wrong. How could I be laughing when the love of my life was dead? But you see, it is okay to laugh because we are still living! It is important for us to keep living and to keep their memories alive. Finding that balance of living with grief is not an easy task; it takes time. Please allow yourself time to learn how to live with grief knowing that how you choose to live after your loss is your choice. Do what feels right for you. Over the years, when I had really bad griefy days, my normal response was to deactivate my social media, shut off my phone and hide until I feel better. We would usually escape to Disneyland and the beach for a few days. But due to the recent events of life, there is no escape. Now here I am again finding a new way to live with my grief. I have been struggling to figure this out, but with the help of Jay, we are navigating another new normal once again.

 As I continue the path of finding another new normal of living with my grief in a pandemic, I also take this time to reflect back on my journey with grief. Since my husband died, I have had several moments of falling down the rabbit hole with grief. But I rarely openly share them with anyone. I learned in the beginning of our grief that people stuck around for a bit after his death, but after a while people quickly start to move on. All the while, we were still left holding our shattered hearts, living each day feeling broken and trying to figure out how to put our lives back together.

We have done a surprisingly good job of rebuilding our lives so far. We have learned to stand on our own two feet and to never rely on or expect anything from others. It is a good and bad place to be, I guess. The good is being able to stand up and fix your own crap.  I know I will climb out of this rabbit hole and I know my daughter is here cheering me on. Maybe the bad part is that we have lost trust in humans. We have made a pact to never depend on anyone. But then again, I am not really sure why our pact would be bad thing. We have been deeply wounded by humans after my husband died, so protecting ourselves against other people’s actions cannot necessarily be a bad thing, right? Yes, I know that usually people do not try to go out of their way to hurt others, but it happens in this grief journey with raw emotions.

Another thing I wanted to share on our journey of writing this book: it has been quite the adventure. I whole heartedly believe it is a good idea for us to do this; however, it has stirred up so many emotions. I am having a difficult time with some of them, especially when I am questioning my mothering skills during those critical moments of also being a caretaker. There are moments when I have to ask Jay where she was during certain events of the story we are sharing. I feel bad because as her mom I should have known where she was, but I can’t remember at times and that makes me feel bad as a mom.  Jay and I will sit down and go over the timeline together and we both help each other remember things. In these moments we both just sit there in disbelief that this cancer journey was our life for fifteen long months. I find myself always apologizing during these moments because at the time I did not know where she was while I was being the caretaker to a sick my husband. Thankfully, we fill in the blanks together and extend grace to one another knowing the situation was impossible and neither of us neglected each other during this time; we were just trying to survive trauma.  

As I move on with more sharing, another thing this book has stirred up is my nightmares. The first year my husband died I had horrible night terrors. The nightmares I am getting now are not as bad the first-year ones, but it still quite disturbing. Which is another thing I will share; those get better too. I thought the nightmares/night terrors were going to be for the rest of my life, but that’s not true. They ended. But allowing the fifteen months of our cancer journey stuffed deep down inside of me out is what has prompted the nightmares, I am sure of that. I also know the nightmares will end one day, hopefully for good this time. But for now, I feel it is time to deal with everything that was stuffed down, write about it and release it. Sadly, in order to do that I am reliving all of those fifteen months. The emotions that are resurfacing are rough, but not as intense as they were six years ago! To the new grievers out there, remember that please!

Jay and I knew that the emotions were going to come up, but it is a little harder when there is no escape right now. Now I know why authors escape to a new place and write obsessively until the book is done, take a break and then return back home. We even discussed doing this but there is nowhere to go right now. Then we thought it is a perfect time to write the book and get it done since the “world” is shut down. I still agree with this decision, but it is harder than I thought it was going to be. I know I am strong and I will survive this and come out stronger. I am looking forward to sharing with you all the changes and healing from this journey of writing a book.

I also want to share another reason I am going through a rough patch: the pandemic. I know I am not alone in this and I know it is a difficult time for all of us.  I have had to recently stop watching the news and even more recently stay away from my personal social media accounts. I have found that watching people I care about resort to name calling and being evil to others due to their beliefs, thoughts and entitlement was breaking my heart and making me sick to my stomach. What is happening right now in the United States and how people are behaving is bewildering to me. I am deeply saddened by people’s actions. I have decided this is no longer healthy for my mental health. When you are dealing with compound grief sometimes things are felt on a deeper level.  The biggest take away I have learned over the years is how to protect myself, protect my grief, protect my heart and protect my mental health. At some point I found myself losing all hope in humanity and this had me devasted! That is not who I am. But with all these raw emotions resurfacing and the craziness going on due to the virus, it started to look and feel ugly outside of my home. This is not how I want to choose to live my life. I would rather see the good in people and choose happiness, kindness and love. I was feeling yucky inside, so I made the choice to walk away from the things that were influencing the yuck I was feeling. I am clinging and wishing to the depths of my core to see some hope and a glimmer of kindness in this world. It does exist; we have to look for it and believe it is there.

Writing this book, I am reliving all the people that are no longer a part of our lives.  I will say that Jay and I do not have many friends or family in our lives, and I am not saying this to have you feel sorry for us. In fact, when my husband died, I chose to walk away from so many people. The good thing is that I decided what I didn’t want that in my life, so I walked away from those people. See how the choices we make keep coming up? Making choices for ourselves to be better and healthy is always a good thing. In the last six years I have learned the art of ghosting and closing doors. I used to think people walked away from us. As I’ve grown over these last years, I came to the acknowledgement, thanks to my educational studies in my communication class with an amazing professor, that I was the one who shut these people out. To be honest, I am proud of this because I learned you get to choose who and what you want in your life. I learned that I was not a weak and feeble widow, I was strong and made decisions to protect myself and my child. Disfunction, drama, gossip and backstabbing were something I no longer wanted in my life. I made changes and I taught my daughter how to stand up for herself and take control of who and what she wanted in her life. Even if someone is blood related to you, you can still walk away if they treat you poorly. So, we did. Even though on some level it still stings, I am proud of our actions to stand up for what we believe in and what we are choosing our lives to become.

In our new life we have chosen simplicity, love, kindness, and peace. By choosing simplicity, love, kindness and peace I have found life in our home to be more peaceful. Although we cannot control what goes on outside of our home, we can control what happens inside our home and we choose the calmness we so desire daily. Maybe by the time this book is done the world will have opened up, people will go back to their lives and the ugliness I saw can end. I wish for more kindness to others and empathy. My biggest question always lurks in my mind, what ever happened to having empathy towards others???

People are dying in this pandemic. Jobs are being lost; business are closing which it truly breaks my heart. Life as knew it back in February will most likely never be the same. This reminds me of six years ago when our world stopped, and our entire life changed. Now our own personal hell has become the world’s hell. We just rebuilt our lives and were ready to live again only to be stopped once again, and now we are just waiting to see what has changed this time. Even now, when things do reopen and Jay and I get to escape to Disneyland, it will not be the same as before. It will be different. Heck, even my hair salon will be different. Everything has changed. Schools will be different, plus we all know the grocery stores are already different. This time the world stopped and everything changed, including people. The hate spewing, the acts of entitlement, protests, and whining over beaches being closed isn’t going to help matters at all. It saddens me that some people are treating life as an entitlement and not as a gift. I have tried so hard during this time to stay focused on the good and being grateful everyday for the things I do have. I have my health with all my new gray hair LOL! I have a home, my amazing daughter, she has her health, and we have our super fun pets all while grieving and missing my husband terribly. I think people get so caught up in what they cannot have that they forget what they do have. Now is the time to choose gratitude and kindness. The pandemic has changed things, but it won’t last forever. In my experience, it appears that the only things that last forever are death and love. I have survived tragic loss, a loss I never thought I would survive. Here I am living, thriving and trying to build a life we enjoy.  Yes, even though I have hit a little hiccup on this journey, I know will come out even stronger on the other side of this. Good can come out of tragedy and I am clinging to the hope of goodness that may arise from this pandemic while trying to not focus on the bad.

I am not sure how to end this post, and if it published it is because Jay read it and hit the publish button. I have no big words of wisdom or encouragement, just empathy, kindness and love that I can share with you all.  Funny, as I was writing the word wisdom it was just auto corrected to widow. Thanks for the reminder, laptop!  I guess what I can say is, extend kindness and empathy to each other. Please be kind to yourself. Everyone has a story and you never know what the person next to you or online may be going through. Life is not an entitlement, it is a gift! Be grateful for the little things you have. Be compassionate and understanding especially during these difficult times. You never know, the ones you love today may not be here tomorrow. Love on them today.  Know you are not alone in your grief! If someone is on your mind today, text them or call them, do not ignore the urge to reach out. You may be the one person that helps them, you never know. Never assume someone is okay, reach out! Kindness and love go a long way. Remember, May is Mental health awareness month. Spread kindness and love.

I have my daughter which I am grateful for everyday! I really only talk to one other person almost daily and she lives in Ohio, which is pretty far away from where I live. Thankfully, she is supporting me during this book journey. She is a widow too and gets what I am going through, for that I am grateful. If we take the time to look there is good in this world, there are things to be grateful for. I encourage you to look for them. Choose happiness, joy, kindness and love.

If you have read this far in my super long post, I say THANK YOU! Thank you for listening and thank you for coming along on my book writing journey.  I truly hope as you read this blog, you are safe and healthy. I am sending out good energy, kindness and love to each of you, as I journey on to discover more deep emotions from our cancer journey.

Remember, you’re not alone!

Peace and love to you!

Jay and Shell’s Tips:

• Know that the intense pain you feel immediately after your loss does not last.
• You are always going to grieve, but you learn to co-exist with your grief.
• Protect your grief, protect your heart, protect your mind. Handle your grief as you see fit. It’s your grief, no one else’s.
• You are not alone in your grief! There are other grievers out there who understand what you are going through.
• Be kind to yourself and others!
• Practice empathy for others. This will make you more compassionate to yourself as well!
• This pandemic will not last forever!
• Be grateful for what you do have.
• Look for the good in the world – it’s out there! You just have to be willing to look for it.

Aloha and gratitude,

Jay and Shell