Mother's Alzheimer's, Son's Love: Edward Grinnan's Search for Answers

Hi everybody, welcome to the Grief to Growth podcast. I'm your host, brian, and I'm truly delighted to have you here today. Today we have a very special guest. His name is Edward Grinnon. He's the editor-in-chief of Guidepost publication and is the author of the deeply moving memoir A Journey of Faith A Mother's Alzheimer's, a Son's Love and His Search for Answers.

Before we get into our conversation with Edward, let me briefly introduce myself to you in case you don't know who I am. Again, I'm Brian and I'm here to provide a safe and compassionate space for people that are navigating the journey of grief. My own experience with loss started with my daughter passing away eight years ago at the age of 15, her name is Shayna, and that's led me on this path of discovery and understanding about the nature of life and death and all the things that we have to go through. So let's get back to Edward.

Edward's Edward Grinnon again his latest book. He shares a deeply personal journey through his mother's illness and his unwavering love and support for her during her Alzheimer's journey. It's a touching tribute to his mother, exploring the bond of family and faith, and his testament to the enduring power of love. His impressive career spans over two decades, a guide post-publications, where he currently holds a position of editor-in-chief and vice president. He's not only a seasoned professional, but he's also a gifted author with several inspirational books to his name, and his upcoming release is A Journey of Faith, and it promises to be a moving and enlightening read. So with that, I wanna thank Edward for being here today and welcome you to Grief, to Growth.

Thank you, brian, and greetings to your audience, and I hope I live up to that very nice introduction you gave me.

Oh, I'm absolutely sure that you will. I wanna again thank you for being here. I wanna tell everybody before we get started, we have a little bit of delay with the satellite. Edward lives in a very beautiful area, so it's the satellite reception is a little bit, so we're it might be a little delay, but we'll get through this and we'll try not to just talk over each other, edward, like for you. If you could start by. I'm sure most of our audience is familiar with Guidepost Magazine. I know millions of people read it. But for those who are not familiar with Guidepost, please tell us a little bit about the magazine and how you got started there.

Well, it was founded in 1945 by Dr Norman Vincent Peale, and some of you may recognize that name. He wrote the Power of Positive Thinking, which is one of the seminal books of the 20th century for sort of linking self-empowerment with faith in God, sort of a if you believe in yourself and you believe in God, then you can do great things for yourself. And Dr Peale actually founded Guidepost Magazine about eight years before he wrote the Power of Positive Thinking. I think a lot of his thinking was shaped by the experiences that he discovered in interviewing people for Guidepost Magazine.

Guidepost Magazine was the original sort of user-generated content at a time when magazines tended to be a little bit up in the. You know the audience was out there in the proscenium, you know, beyond the proscenium stage and you spoke to them. And Dr Peale had the idea that everyday people from all walks of life, different faiths, you know incredibly diverse gathering of people who tell their personal stories of faith and action and in their everyday lives Not big conversion stories but much smaller stories sometimes about how people overcame problems. We found solutions by believing themselves and believing God. And that's the story of Guidepost Magazine. It grew throughout the years and it reaches millions of people, every issue. It has celebrity sometimes, but it has mostly everyday, ordinary people sharing their struggles, their strengths, their hope in their trials.

That's. It's an awesome magazine. I know it inspires a lot of people and I know Norman Vincent Peale was known for the power of positive thinking. Now your memoir covers a disease that we know of, alzheimer's that people don't recover from. So how tell me how this played out as you were going through this experience, with your mother going through Alzheimer's?

Well, alzheimer's I know. Sort of the subject of the topic of your podcast is grief, and in most cases people die relatively suddenly in our lives. We lose them. Maybe it's expected. In Alzheimer's it's kind of a journey of grief. For me it was also a journey of faith. But you lose that person a little bit every day, every week, every month, as you see them begin to sort of fade away.

This Alzheimer's that afflicted my mother seems to run in our family. On the maternal side of the family she had three sisters and three brothers. All three girls, all three daughters died in memory care and one of the three brothers also had Alzheimer's or dementia. The other two brothers probably died too soon before they could have shown symptoms, and all of that seems to come from their father. My grandfather was the only grandparent I knew when he was way back in the 50s, when I was a little kid, and he was afflicted with dementia. They didn't have a name for it, really. I mean they just said oh, he's Dodie, he's senile, he's just old. And whenever I visited him the thing he would do is he'd bestow a quarter on me. So I was very, and then, as the time passed, he'd sometimes forget that he gave me a quarter and he'd give me another one. And I'd go over there and he'd say, did I give you your quarter? And of course, as the kid that I was, I said, oh, of course not, you didn't give me a quarter. So I was loading up on quarters by the end, but I just thought it was a game that he was playing with me. I didn't realize the effect of that one little interpersonal exchange I had with him when I was just a little boy would sort of color the way I looked at life later on, in particularly when my mother got sick.

The very first signs and the very first signs really came from her church. She was a really smart woman. I mean, she was the daughter of a school teacher. She learned how to read before she even went to first grade. She was one of these people who did or had two books that's going at any given time. Plus she did the Cross, the New York Times Cross, the Red Puzzle and Ink. She was a quiz show champion in the 1950s.

She was really a smart woman and she did a lot of charity work and she was devoted to her church and one of the things she did was a Catholic church, st Owens, in Birmingham, michigan, and she would count the collection basket after Daily Mass and her job was to count it up and fill out a deposit slip and take it to the bank Saved a lot of trouble for so that the pastor didn't have to do that. And one of the non-sister, caroline, called us at one point and said your mother is slipping up. She's the deposit slips don't add up to the amount of money that she's taking to the bank and it's causing some confusion. But I'll double check her for you Because we don't want her to. She's very proud and she wants to be of use to her church and to her faith, so we're going to let her keep doing it, but I'm going to double check and go to the bank with her every day and make sure that the deposit slip is correct so we don't have any misunderstandings to the bank. And she was also the church librarian. And again around that same time, because Sister Caroline called us up and said your mother's having trouble reshuffing the books. The Dewey Decimal System is beginning to confuse her and we're going to take her off of that. She can still check books in and out at the front desk.

So it was almost like a strike of fear through me when I started knowing my family history and we started to hearing those things about my mother and I began thinking there's no stopping this and it will go on until it's over, and that was just. Almost immediately I felt myself grieving for what I knew would be an inevitable loss, and along with what's. Death is one thing, because death is a full stop as far as life on Earth goes. But dealing with someone with a dementia like Alzheimer's or any of the related ones, you see them die a little bit, they go. You lose that person day by day, by day. They know it's a disaggregation of your cognitive abilities. It begins to the mind begins to fly apart in slow motion and to see it was incredibly painful.

But into the journey I also found these moments of hope and beauty that were completely unexpected, which I think sometimes happens even when we are in deep integrity, where we have these bursts of beauty in our memories of our loved one.

In my mother's case, I found that as all of these things faded away, when I wasn't even sure she knew who I was, though she did, I know that now the two things that seemed to survive the ravages of Alzheimer's were love and faith, and for some reason or other they seemed to survive even the onslaught of cognitive decline. And in the end, that was my mother love and faith, and those two things are what gave me such hope at the end. The last word my mother ever said to me and she hadn't spoken for a while and I was telling her I knew she was going to die soon and I was telling her I was apologizing for what a bad son I thought I had been and I had been at times very bad. So we can talk about that and the only thing she said and it was the last thing she said to me was love. That one word, excuse me.

Yeah, that's beautiful. It's beautiful to hear that that survived, even, as you said, the onslaught of the disease. I know with Alzheimer's, as I was telling you, I think, before we start recording, I've gone through it with my father-in-law and we're going through it now with my mother-in-law, and there is that anticipatory grief that we don't have with a lot of other things and there's that losing the person. It's one thing to lose the body, but to lose that mind and that connection, as, I think, a special kind of grief that we go through as we see our loved one no longer who they were. So, as you're going through that, and being that you're the editor of Guidepost Magazine, how was that? How did your faith help you to cope with that and this positive outlook? How did you maintain that?

It wasn't always positive. I'll tell you that. You know to see someone's memories. We are made of memories. I mean, that's really who we are. Everything we are is the function of our memory system. You know, it's how cognition functions. So to see those memories slip away like that, like watching sailboat disappear slowly into a fog bank, is very difficult, and it was very difficult. I should tell you a little bit.

You asked me how I came to Guidepost Magazine. So when I came to Guidepost, I had never heard of it. You know, people are always shocked by the fact that. You know. I had no idea what Guidepost was. I thought it was a travel magazine. I think it sounds like a travel magazine. Maybe I can get a few trips out of this job. If you substitute journey for travel, then that's what it's been for me.

And I came to Guideposts and I was in a very bad state. I was, you know, pretty much a bottomed out alcoholic. I had lost just about everything. You know the most important relationships in my life. Everything was gone. I was hanging on by a thread, you know, and then for a little time, a little bit before I had been in and out of, I slept in the streets. You know, there was a time when I begged for change so I could keep drinking. I would pick up cigarette butts and smoke them, so I couldn't afford cigarettes. So anyway, I don't know how Guidepost got my resume.

I was trying to get back on my feet at the time, I have no idea. But this recruiter called me and said would you be interested in going to an interview at Guidepost Magazine? I said, first of all, who are you? I've never heard of you and I don't know how you got my phone number. And secondly, what's Guideposts? And she said well, you're writing back around me to be of interest to them. So I was desperate and penniless and about to lose my apartment or get kicked out of my apartment, and so I went in for the interview and it just. It was almost like I almost suddenly knew where I was for the first time in many years. That was in the right place. And I said to myself I'll stick around for a year. I've been going to 12 step meetings at the time and my sponsor said just find a job, any job, hang on to a free year where you can work on your sobriety and you work on your spirituality and your relationship to a higher power, whether you believe in him or not, act as if and just do it to yourself. Okay, so Guideposts are like a nice place to spend a year and that was in 1986.

And I got sober at Guideposts and what kept me there was the beauty of the audience and their stories and what they went through in their lives and big emotions, sometimes loss and grief, depression, people overcoming these things, and they almost like carried me during a time when I needed to be carried. The audience did so. I tell you this background because when my mother, some years later, when my mother began to suffer the symptoms of dementia and I was, she was in Michigan with my brother and my sister and my sister-in-law, but I was in New York City, manhattan, working at Guideposts and it was I was panic-stricken that I couldn't be there from my mother. There's no reason to think that I she would never have wanted me to come back to Michigan to take care of her. That would have horrified her because she was so independent. But during in the beginning part of that time and I think this has to do with that anticipatory grief, that fear of losing her and knowing that I was going to it was going to be painful.

I did start drinking again and, you know, and it took me back, not necessarily to the, to the depths that I had been at when I first came to Guideposts, but emotionally and spiritually the depths were the same. Maybe not the outside, the loss of apartments and not having a place to live and having no money, that wasn't it. But spiritually, you know, I'd lost my contact with God and I began drinking and drugging again for on and off for a couple of years, until I ended up in the detox and I was really forced to confront the fact that I was trying to smother these feelings I was having about my mother Trying to tell myself I was an alcoholic and I drank because I drank. That's what alcoholics do. And I saw a therapist in this facility and he said let's talk about your mother. And I said no, let's not talk about what she's going through. You know, it has nothing to do with what I'm going through. And he said well, maybe it does, maybe it's not an excuse for drinking and drugging, but it is a trigger.

And that really began my journey towards hope and faith with my mother's illness, where I really began to accept it, accept that it was going to be painful and that I would go through that. And then you know, I realized at that time and you know you hate to say this about something as painful as grief and loss but in my life the only time I've really had significant spiritual and emotional growth is during the difficult times, during the struggles, when I'm happy and everything's fine and I just feel wonderful. That's great. But I don't experience all the spiritual growth and personal, you know, progress in those moments. I've always found it's in the moments and the struggles and the pain which are just part of life and you can't get by them. It's the place where you learn so much about yourself and what I learned in my mother's illness and the prospect of losing her was that I could survive. I could survive that.

That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. And what I think it's been my experience too is that I think it's the human design that when we're going through what we call good times, when things are fine, we don't experience that growth. It's when we're tested, when we're tried, when we're put through that trial by fire, that we realize how strong we are and in fact, I believe we've become even stronger. I don't think that the pain of this world is a mistake. I don't think it's a bug, I think it's a feature, I think it's something that you know, and I'm sure, being the editor in chief of Gipus all those years. When people are writing their stories of triumph, they're overcoming something right. I mean, those are the people, those are the stories that you're publishing.

They're always. These are stories of overcoming, and it's fascinating to see that it can be overcoming something as small as learning to fit in at a new job, you know, and maybe facing your insecurities about that, and or it could be facing the loss of a child or facing the loss of a spouse or a job and overcoming that. The interesting thing was if someone's just trying to fit in at a new job and getting comfortable in their cubicle or if it's someone trying to face a life crisis, the tools are the same. You know the tools are. You know of. You know pushing down denial and letting go and just believing that there is a path for you to go forward.

So many times, you know, if I'm in Gipus stories and in life in general, we think there's no way, for you know, when we're trapped in those moments where life is really testing us I like that word you use testing and we think there's no path forward, you know we find that path and that path is an inspiration to others, and I think one of the most important things about Gipus stories is the people who tell them or want to help other people. It's not just you know. Here's what happened to me and the guy post-audi has. When we talk to them we talk to them a lot always say, oh boy, I can identify. You know, I can identify with what that person went through. Maybe I never went through anything like it, but I've gone through things that are that remind me of that struggle and I can understand that there's light on the other side of that struggle.

You mentioned something I think it's very important that feeling that there's no path forward when we go through the worst types of grief. I think that's the one thing we have in common. We feel like this is the one I'm not going to be able to survive, this is the one I'm not going to be able to overcome, and we get to, we feel like is the end of the road. And I'm wondering did it feel like that for you when your mother got this diagnosis?

Later, you know, it sometimes felt like I was falling. It felt like I was just falling through space and I didn't know where I would land if I was just behind the landing. You know, and it was my mother's strength that persisted throughout her disease, and the people who had in your audience who have dealt with Alzheimer's or dementia patient and I know there are many of them, but it's like millions and millions of families in this country, you know know that there is always a core of someone inside that person who seems so lost to us. You know, I found the most important thing with my mother was to be present, to live in the present. This disease told me that I had to meet my mother in the present because that's all she had. She had the moment, the pinhole in time that she lived in, because the past was being wiped out for her and she had no concept of the future. So I had to find how to meet her in that moment and sometimes it was just being with her, sometimes in the middle. You know our tendencies when our loved ones begin to talk in a way that we think is irrational or unrealistic, like my mother would say that she had a conversation with someone at that point and I'd say, oh, and it would be someone who's been dead for years.

My tendency as a son is to say no, no, you didn't talk to that person. That person, don't you realize that? Don't you remember? They died 15 years ago and I realized that that was the wrong thing to say. Totally the right thing to say it took me a while to learn was oh well, how was that conversation? What did just talk about? You know, and you know, in that moment I was being able to meet her where she was and sort of trying to drag her back to where I was, which was, you know, someone without dementia.

And I realized that, you know, in the process we went through this process, this slow process of grief, as I lost her, and I lost her every day or every week, every month. You know a little bit more than you know. If I stayed in the present, if I was there just with her, that sense of grief would lift, because I couldn't love my mother, if I was grieving her while she was still alive, because grief will block out that. We think. You know I'm going to say something that I said before and written about, and people sometimes don't agree.

But grief can be a very selfish thing, you know, because it is. It's so self centered, you know, and it is a universal feeling that goes back. I mean, you can, you can find cave paintings and ancient hieroglyphs describing grief, it's part, it's very fundamental to the human condition and even other, you know, higher order of mammals seem to suffer. You know the period of grief. It's important to us to know that people matter to us so much that we will suffer and when they die they leave us when they go on.

But grief can also be a blocker, you know, and I, if I wanted to be there for my mother as she was dying, you know I had to push through that, that grief, that sense of, you know, I've lost my mom. I've lost my mom and just say no, she's still here and there's a way to reach out, and sometimes that's just holding a hand, sometimes just sitting there. You know, during the last of my mother's time I spent a lot of time just sitting with her. You know, we didn't have to say anything, I just knew my presence meant something and it's certainly her presence on something to me, but it was all about being in the moment. So when I say grief is selfish for me. Sometimes it has been because it's so much about me. I mean, that's grief is your feelings, your emotions that you're experiencing, and I always, you know, I remind myself to be cautious about that that it's, that it is a process on one that we have to push ourselves through, and sometimes we get stuck.

Yeah, I think that was. That was very, very well said, and I understand what you're saying. You know, I tell people there are I think there are two sides to grief. We grieve for ourselves, what we're losing, and we supposedly grieve for what our loved one has lost, especially in the case of death, when someone, when someone transitions to the next world, and I tell people, don't grieve for them, because they're okay, the people that are making that transition to the next world, they're fine. And I was just.

This happens to be, I guess, dementia day, because I interviewed someone earlier this morning who lost her mother to another form of dementia and we were talking about one of the lessons that we get from this is being in the moment, you know, and so that's all we have with people with, with with these diseases, with Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. They, they don't have the past. We can't go back to that, but we can learn to be in the moment, which is something that we can all use in our lives. So they're, they're here, that's. I think it teaches us something.

Sure, it teaches us the power of the present, which is so important. And you know, I live in New York City. I live down the street from the New York headquarters of the Franciscans. They have a beautiful church, the Church of St Francis, and I would walk my dogs by them for a long time, for many years. I love the fires that come out and bless my dogs, you know, and that was there's always so wonderful to bring your dog for a blessing.

But I would talk to them about my mother, and especially after she died, and this one fire said to me look, she's in a better place. Think of the suffering that has ended, think of how, you know, she was a woman of tremendous faith and he's moved on to something that is more wonderful than you can possibly imagine. So, you know, if you're grieving grief for yourself, surely, but don't pray for her because she's gone to something better and you need to acknowledge that and let go. You know, because you can't keep her here. And in your grief you're sort of trapping your mother, not in any, you know, ghostlike way, but you're sort of emotionally trapping your mother here when she's gone on. You know, I know the pain that you're in, but you have to at least celebrate that she's with God, she's in a better place, where she needs to be, and you know that helped me a lot. That kept me from slipping over the edge all the time and just sort of sitting down and saying I can't, don't know what to do with myself.

Yeah, I think it's both things at once. The grief is a normal process that we have to go through. It's it is. It's that love, the honors that person and it says how important that person is, and that perceived loss, that that we feel like we've lost them. So we can't. I don't think we can bypass that. I don't think it's part of being human, but we can always hold on to this idea also, at the same time that they are, they're better off, they're. They're out of the, out of the pain. Their, their memories are back intact, they're. You know, and I believe, and I'd like to ask you your thoughts on this you were saying your mother would talk about talking to deceased people. How do you feel about, about when people are going through this and they're starting to say so-and-so? Came to visit me yesterday.

And you mean in a dementia patient having those sort of hallucinogenetic experiences. They are wandering through the maze of their mind and if you ever look at a brain you can see all the channels and squeals. You know, and if I used to picture that my mother was wandering through that maze trying to find her past and find herself and it wasn't incorrect, you know, you tend, you know, particularly when that relationship between parent and child is suddenly flipped, you know, on its head, like the polarity of it completely changes and suddenly you're in charge of them and you're telling them. It's so hard. You know, the reason I learned to resist, and so did my siblings and other people who loved my mother, was to go with that. You know, is there having conversations with people that don't exist? That's fine. They're in their heads, trying to work it out, and they're trying to find something and learn something, you know, and it is, however nonsensical it may seem to us that they're having that conversation and they're talking nonsense to us, there's a process that they're trying to figure something out and they're losing the capacity to figure these things out, but they're trying and the best thing I could do was be there for my mother and let her know that it was all okay.

You know, my mother, that God was never violent. She did not go through that period that some Alzheimer's and dementia patients go through, where they're really agitated and angry, and that's just them. They're just fighting the disease, that's all they're doing and you know you've got to give them that. But fortunately my mother never went through that period. But she went through a period where she was very difficult and it was so sad for me to see her fight so hard about a disease that she knew was in her family even though there's a lot of denial in the beginning, when she began to lose her memories and her cognition deteriorated. So to see her fight that hard was heartbreaking. But it was also something I had to learn to turn not to stop doing. You know, just like it's a process, it's a journey and that journey has bumps on the road for them and you've got to go with them. It's just.

It is an incredible test of empathy and compassion Because as a particularly as a child, you want things to be okay. I mean, this is your mother, this is you, came from her and you desperately want them not to have this disease and not. You know it's so difficult? Because it's about cognition, it's about the brain, it's the mind, it's a brain disease. It's not insanity, it's not mental illness, it's a brain, organic brain disease, and it's it takes them away from you. I, I hated that word Alzheimer's. I hated it, I didn't, and I hated what it was doing, you know, and I had to stop hating, I had to. Just, I learned how to be empathetic and compassionate to a degree that I never expected myself to be able to achieve, and and it was by force. It wasn't because I'm a particularly good person, because I'm not. It was because I, I had to use it. I needed empathy to survive. What was my mother was going through and what would happen after she died.

Yeah, I think that tests like that it I think it's, it's both things we, we we have a strength in us that we don't know that we have and I think these tests bring it out of us. I think it also helps us to grow. I think we get stronger as we go through these trials. So I hear you talking about your mother and the Alzheimer's and how much you hate it, but I also see you know how you've developed, you know through it and you, you, you said you even went back and started drinking again and then you overcame that again. And I think every time we do that, we, we expand our capacity, we grow as a soul.

I think so too. You know it's it. It seems sometimes it's unfair that we have to go through the tough times to get to the good times, but that's the way the world is made and you know. You have to understand that. That's where you live and you can't change that. Oh, it's just, you know it. It's a journey, and one of the reasons why I wrote the book, a journey of faith, was to give people hope. I mean what people always said, say about guy post magazine, and so they can read it every day and they get hope. They can read it first thing. You know, they can read it in line at the it's a supermarket and by that time they get checked out. Their, their Demons, their, their depression, their anxiety is Is is lifted by listening to other people tell stories about how they overcame things.

Mm-hmm and I wanted this book to be that. I wanted it to tell people that you know, in any situations that you're in whether it's the loss of a loved one or just a loss of self Did, you can get through it. There's hope and and and Beauty, and I wanted to inspire people who are going through difficult times that the difficult times don't last forever and there's something that Did you learn and you go through and you get out the other side and it's better, it gets better. There's one thing that said hey, when I went to a toss-up program, I first started to stop drinking. You know, I was a mess and you know the old-timers that come up and they say, hey, it gets better. That's all they said to me, but they were right, it does get better.

Grief gets better, you know. And it, you know, and it's a pain. Well, I think grief makes you stronger when you, when you wrestle with it and then and then get past it. You know it's grief is like this you know visage on your path, that sort of blocking your way to go forward, and you have to wrestle with it and then get through, and One of the things for me that at first was painful in grief but has has helped me a lot, just remembering good things about the person, how wonderful a life and how much they brought into the world with them and left when they left the world. You know they, you know their, their whole life was a blessing to themselves and to others and pretty to people you love. So those sorts of celebratory, you know reminders, like you know, I still laugh at things.

I would see things on television my mother would make a remark about all these years later and I, you know I'll sit there and laugh because that's what you would have said about this guy. You know she would. She wouldn't like them, you know. So it's, you know, and it really is about Grief is a form of love, I think you know, and with all the positive and negative of love, because love can make us crazy, but grief is a form of love because you, because you, you grieve the loss of someone you love. In the end, I think Really who we are is basically who we love. So loss is wrenching, but part it's grief is the price we pay for love and the more you love that person, probably the harder you're going to grieve and the grief is the last part of that love.

Yeah, I think I agree with that 100%. Grief is the price that we pay for love there's. You know, love is a risk. Whenever we, whenever we love anybody anything, it's a risk because it can be, it can be taken away. That's part of what makes it so precious. And then we have to decide, you know, is it worth me going through this, is it, you know? But I think ultimately most of us decide it's worth, it's worth taking that risk, even knowing that. You know, none of us lives forever. At some point we're we're going to part with that love one, but we, but we do it anyway, right?

I mean, life would have no meaning without death. So it's not something we can turn off. And you know, when we talk about love, you know Love isn't always a choice. Sometimes it is, but when it comes to your parents it's not a choice. You're born loving Right, no matter what happens, right, and lots of things going to happen in your relationship with your parents. But you are born loving those two people and so that's going to be part of your growth and your grief Throughout, from the, you know, the beginning to end of your life. You know, and you know missing someone is not the same as grieving them either. I think it's okay to miss people who've gone on. Of course you miss people who you know going on world trips. I don't miss people who have died. But Missing them is something different, I think, than grieving. You know, freezing them is a real deep sense of the loss.

Yes, yes, I often say to people it's like we don't.

We don't grieve someone when they go on a trip.

You know, when your daughter goes away the college like my daughter went away to college and I was I was upset, I was sad, I missed her, but I didn't grieve her. And I think the the differences and this is where we can start to mitigate the grief is when we understand to have it really gone away. You know we are going to see them again and and and shifting that perspective, I think it can help to mitigate the grief and turn it into more of a missing them, a more of a. And then, like you said earlier, when it comes to the memories, the memories when someone first crosses over can be actually painful and people will want to put the memories away and not remember, and sometimes people even I don't want to see my loved one's Picture because it's going to trigger me, it's going to, it's going to cause me to go through the whole grieving process again. But when I see my daughter's picture now I smile. I love the memories of the time I had with her and that's that transition we can make.

Right, I do. I keep a picture of my mother In my home office, just, you know, so it's not, it's like okay, you know she lived, she died, she loved you and it was really good, and just don't be afraid of that, of that picture. And I remember, you know, when, the moment she died, um, where, and I was not there. I had been there the last couple weeks but I had to to leave and my brother and my sister were away. I gave them kind of some relief time and spent time with my mother. I just spent things, took off from work and just spent time with her. But then I had to, I had to go and she waited until they came back, you know, to die, um, but I was in, I was teaching a writer's workshop in Arizona and that morning, before the the day began, that morning I said I want to go for hike, I wanted to hike up a mountain.

So I found this mountain outside um, I forget where it was, with southern Arizona and and, um, I got to the top of the mountain, I just felt overcome, I'm just overcome. You know, I was breathless from the climb and I lay down and just looked at the sun and I felt this incredible Feeling. It was like a sooning of the soul, like something that's being lifted or whooshing. It was, it was physical, it was a physical thing. And then I I had to get back To where we were meeting and I and I climbed back down the hill side in the path and I and I got, went back into our hotel and there was a message for me, and I knew what that message was. I knew that my mother had died, and and when I looked into it, it was at the exact same moment that I was on top of that mountain. I felt like she passed on the way up.

Yeah, exactly, that's beautiful. Yeah, that's beautiful that you, you had that experience and, uh, we're able to have that connection and and feel her. I think sometimes people do they. They stop by on the way out and they say goodbye, you know to the they do, and guy post magazine and and some of our other.

We have guy post magazine. We also have the angels on earth magazine, which is about people's encounters with angelic forces, not just angelic beings, but and we have a magazine called mysterious ways and there's so many stories in those magazines about people who had some sort of, you know, relationship Experience, you know, with the loved one who's gone on or who is passing. I mean, it's, it's almost common and people shouldn't be frightened or ashamed of, because I know people are sometimes Scared to even talk about some of the things Surrounding the death of a loved one. But there's all sorts of miracles that we are given, you know, to help us.

Yeah, absolutely so I know before we started recording you share with me. You've experienced another big loss in your life, you know recently. Um, so I don't know how much you want to share about that. You know, because I know that's again. You know this, we go through these journeys and I think sometimes we feel like, you know, the trials never stop coming and frankly, I don't think they really do. But, um, so Do you want to share about that?

I will talk about that a little bit because of the. The book the journey of faith is about my mother's passing 20 years ago and how.

I process sense. I lost my wife, julie um, a year ago, in last january, jenna, june of 2022, and I lost her to suicide and you know it was a shock that to some extent, it wasn't because Julie talked about it. You know she had a disease lupus that had really crippled her and really diminished her life and she had depression and, frankly, there was suicide in her family and often there's a family history of suicide and you know that's something I'm still processing. Like Julie was a singer, a recording artist, and you know I have, you know I heard, you know, a song and verse. Come on, I still can't listen to them. You know I've got, you know I don't know, 2,000 songs on my iPhone, probably, but I still will skip when I hear Julie. And it's not that I don't know why I do it, you know because, like, well, I haven't quite processed it and part of what made Julie beautiful was her recording career and her performance, her performances and so that, and that's so much what I loved about her when I first met her.

But when someone takes their life, when you love someone and they take their life, it's really, you know it is it's hard not to blame yourself, it's really hard not to be angry at them, even though you know, even though in Julie's case she, you know, looking back, I think she prepared me for it, but it's, it's such a sudden, and you know, conscious, I mean very few. We rarely decide to die. Few people decide to die, you know, and that's what suicide is. So decision and your life. And you can't get inside that decision of another person except to say you have to accept it. I mean more than even my mother's death. You know my challenge to accept that Julie made this decision and I know that spiritually she was at peace with it. I don't think it was done in a moment of crazy despair. I think she, thinking back, she had planned it and just decided her suffering, physically and emotionally, was so great, did the only way to end the pain was to end her life. And I, you know you, just, you want to. I always want to turn the clock back. Could I have stopped it, could I have talked her out of it? And that's all about not accepting, you know, and it's the hardest thing I've ever had to accept in my life and I'm still trying to accept, I'm still trying to say that now that it's okay, not there yet, but that that somehow there are things that I don't understand and that that happened, that I have to learn to accept that they haven't. That this was part of my life was how, you know, I was joined. I were married for 34 years, you know. And and the fact that it's suicide. You know there's a shame around suicide.

The morning after, you know, I I I don't know how the word got out, but the obituary writer for the New York Times called me the next morning. Then he'd read about it. I don't, somewhere online Rolling Stone or the Guardian, I think had reported Julie Stepp a little earlier and he said you know that they'd like to do an obituary in Julie, and you know, can you tell, you know, can you give us? You know, there's a lot of information about her online, but can you tell us? You know a little bit about her life and you know, and and it had not been said in any of the previous reportings of Julie Stepp that she had taken her life.

And I thought I kept thinking should I tell this guy this obituary? You know? Writer from the you know New York Times that my wife actually took her own life? I think most of the stuff online had been that she had died of lupus, which was sort of true. And I finally told him.

I said, you know, she took her own life.

That's how she actually died. It wasn't actually, you know, lupus. So that was, you know, that was like in the midst of killing her Because her kidneys had begun to fail and she had not been able to walk very easily. And he said well, we don't have to say that, we don't. You know it's up to you and you know I thought about it and I know that you know Julie's brother had committed suicide almost exactly 10 years before she did, and you know he died kind of in this anonymous way and it always bothered Julie that no one ever talked about the fact that Mickey took his life and that she thought that that was.

You know that that was, that was shaming Mickey for doing that.

It was, it was bringing shame, and so I said no, I want to say how she died, because I know there are other families out there and other people like me who are struggling with this and feeling guilty and feeling angry and feeling judgmental and all these, this world, this, this, this clone of emotions that you have to go through and you know it's not something that should be hidden anymore than Alzheimer's, I mean it's. It's how she died and and there are families who need to know that you can talk about it. You know you can. You can talk about it. You can say the word suicide it's not.

You know, it's such a powerful and negative word because it's such a form of death that we don't accept. We just don't want to accept it and it is about acceptance. So you know. So for the first year and a half I've been, you know I've been struggling through it. It's been, it's been up and down. Um, I said I don't know if I'll ever be able to listen to her music again, which is odd because people thought you know, some my friends say well, that's what I do, I don't listen to all of her music, but it's really hard.

No, I, I understand that, um, and and I thank you first of all so much for being vulnerable and sharing that um, because I think it helps to lift the stigma around suicide, which I think is totally unwarranted. Um, we need to try to understand people's motivations for doing things they do and if we can't understand it, we have to accept it because it you know, it is what it is, and and and you being so early in your grief and I would say this is early in grief 34 year marriage and it's only been a year and a half, that's, that's early. So you're still in that shock mode and it's still. I remember when my daughter passed away, we, we used to like to go to White Castle. It's a hamburger place in the Midwest.

Um so.

I would take my daughter to White Castle and my wife doesn't didn't like the hamburger, so it was something that Shane and I did was special to us. And I remember the first time I was coming back from a grief council and I drove by the White Castle and I just started crying and then I would start. I almost thought about avoiding I don't want to drive by it anymore but it's five minutes from my house so I'd have to go way out of my way and have to drive by that, that place. But now I drive by the White Castle and I smile. You know, I remember the first time I took her there and it's a happy memory, um, and I think it's the same way with with Julie's music. I believe that one day, when you're ready, you'll, you'll put it back on and it'll, it'll trigger those those good memories, but right now it's I think it's just too early.

Yeah, that's what people tell me, you know, cause I'm not smart enough to figure it out for myself. But people say, hey, you know, it's a process, You've written about it being a process and now you're in the process. So, you know, take your own medicine. You know, understand that this isn't going away tomorrow. You know this is not going away. It goes away when it goes away. You know that grief, that that sort of bursting through a wrestling, that visage that's blocking our path. It's a process, you know, and everyone says it's a process, but it is.

I mean, it's true, and you know, um, you know, my last book was always called, always by my side. It was about all the dogs in my life. And Julie and I didn't have kids, we had dogs, and you know, um, and so necessarily, as I went through all the dogs, they all, all the, they all first died in the book. They have to because and you know, that's probably the heartache of being a dog owner she outlived all but the last one, right? No one greets the death of a dog more than Julie. I mean, she loved Julie, loved animals more than she loved people. She said it openly and she was not ashamed of saying that.

You know and, um, you know she used to grieve the loss of our dogs so hard. You know, and you know, and part of me wanted to say would you stop it? You know you're not going to have another dog Well, I'm more joy, but then you know. So what I'm learning now is how wrong that was and how I can learn from how Julie grieved her mother's death and particularly the death of some of our dearest, most lovable dogs and and watched her go through that, and it's almost like there's a path there for me. I mean.

Julie did it, she learned, you know, and she let her go self-go completely. She, she surrendered to grief until she got through it. And I don't know if I'm that strong, but it's what I'm trying to do.

You know, the words surrender and acceptance keep coming up in our conversation. You know, and that's I think that's that's a really powerful lesson, that we're, that we're here to learn, you know, and sometimes you know. So the words surrender gets you to learn. It gets a bad rap because it's like we're giving up and it's it's not that at all. It's really really more acceptance.

It really is. You make it incredibly important. But there's a huge gulf between the word surrender and giving up, because surrender is a type of freedom that you achieve when you can surrender. Forgiveness, you know, and part of grief is forgiving the people who die because we think how could they leave us? You have to, you know, and forgiveness is one of the greatest forms of surrender, which you have to let go of. That forgiveness, you know, and I've felt that way about my mother to some extent.

You know, like how could you, how could you die? You're my mother, you know it's an absurd thought, but some of us can be very angry at the people who've gone on or who've died, and certainly with Julie, you know, I had those moments of anger, like you know, why did you do this? Why did you change our life like this? But I also know that Julie was suffering. You know, I knew how much she was suffering. I knew it. And not only that, but she was probably suffering more than I knew and I knew she was suffering and she was in a lot of pain and she was sick of taking pain medication, prescription pain medication. She didn't like what it felt. There were many things about her life that were really intolerable to her. And just because they might be tolerable to me, I wasn't going through that, so that that sense of being angry and judgmental it doesn't go away just because I understand it. But at least I've recognized it and in that recognition at some point that recognition leads to surrender and acceptance.

Yeah, and that's the beginning of it. And, as we were saying, it is a process. As much as we might understand it intellectually, none of us can bypass it. But we have to go through it, we have to process it and it's deeply individual and we have these irrational thoughts, we have anger at the person who left us, whether it's by Alzheimer's or it's by suicide. We have guilt. You know, should I have picked up on this? What if I'd done something different, could I have stopped it? And it's never our fault, but we have to go through that as humans. We have to wrestle with that.

Yeah, and that's where I am with Julie's death. There was nothing I could do to stop Alzheimer's. But in a way I think that way about Julie too. There was nothing I could ultimately could do Right. It was a decision, it was a decision, and she didn't do it to hurt me, it wasn't punitive, it was I can't go on like this, and Julie would probably say neither can you go on seeing me like this. Anyway, it is something that I'm just trying on a daily basis. I still miss her, I still think about her and I think about the way she died.

I feel guilt and shame, but those are selfish emotions, guilt and shame, and we rationalize and understand things in the lecture. We are human beings, have these big brains, we have intellects. We've had emotions a lot longer than we've had intellect. We are emotional beings. We tell ourselves for thinking and we do think a lot about a lot of different things, but deep inside we are profoundly emotional people and those emotions are what really determine who we are and how we navigate life and how we navigate loss. It's not an intellectual process.

Yeah, absolutely I think. Yeah, that's a lesson that I'm learning at this point in my life, because I'm a very I'm an engineer, I'm a very rational person. I've always tried to think my way through everything and I'm realizing no, it's all about how you feel. Everything's about how we feel, how we feel about things, because the ultimate truth is how we feel about things. We use the intellect to rationalize our emotions, but the emotions are what they are.

Yeah, my intellect is here to try to explain my emotions to me that's really what a sheet function is and also with other people too. But we are driven by our emotions, by our spirits. We're driven by love. I'm glad love is not a rational thing. Love is by definition irrational. And if it were rational it would not be as powerful. And if we didn't love, we wouldn't agree. But who would trade love? Who would trade that? No one, I don't think.

No.

If you want to be human, you have to love and be loved and accepted, and that can be hard for people to just to accept the love.

Yeah, I remember many years ago I got a pair of shoes and there were graphic shoes and I said love is a gamble. And I thought they were cool shoes so I bought them. But they had like a blackjack handle on them and said love is a gamble. I thought it was really cute and then when my daughter passed away, that's when I got the real meaning of that. That loves a gamble. When you bring a child into this world, when you marry someone, even being born, as you said, we automatically love our parents. It's not even a choice and it's all a gamble and it's all and we all. You know. But getting a dog I mean we get dogs knowing that they're going to die, you know and think about that's not rational at all.

No, and nothing's going to love you more than a dog, because they love unconditionally and you're going to lose that love. But it's the, you know, and I thought about them and I wrote about it in that book. You know we still do it because the love is so nourishing to be loved and have preacher love, and I think it's great to love someone who's not human but to love almost as deeply as you love human beings, to extend that love, you know, to cross that boundary of species and find love on the other side of it. That's amazing. What a you know, what a miracle that is. You talked about the loss of a child and you know my parents.

I had a brother with Down syndrome who died when I was about nine. He was 12. I was the youngest and he died under very mysterious circumstances. You know the police never completely solved how he died, but he disappeared and his body turned up a month later. So at a very early age I learned.

There's a couple of things I learned about grief and you know one was. It was funny, you know. I guess I remember coming downstairs the morning after they found his body and of course the house was just a shroud of grief. I mean you could feel that it was palpable, the grief in the morning at this end and I, you know, I tried to be cheerful, you know I tried to smile and be cheerful and my sister, who loved I love my sister and it was always good to be she just cut me off and I remember, you know, I felt guilty about that for years and years and years that I was somehow trying to make everything better and try to like, put a good face on.

You know, the death of a child, with Downsend no less, was, you know. But I felt like I see my earliest you know relationship with grief in that little boy who came down the stairs that morning trying to act like everything was okay and you know he could make a joke about something and then being shamed for it. My sister didn't mean to shame me, but I took it as shame. I carried that shame for decades, thinking. I thought about that all the time that I had to know not grieved properly and I and really I didn't, but I was just a kid trying to make it better and making a horrible nightmare system.

But you know it's not my job as a nine year old to like to make a nightmare go away for the family. But but the second thing I learned looking back on that was that my parents' marriage survived it, and not just because they were devout Catholics who didn't really believe in divorce, but that doesn't really matter. When you talk about the two things that break up a marriage almost for sure are one the birth of a child with significant disabilities and the loss of a child. That child and my parents survived it, their marriage. They were just as much in love and devoted to each other after that as before. And, and what I realized years later, having, you know, fallen away from faith and wandered off from any sort of religious belief, you know, one of the realizations of how wrong that was, I mean, was that my mother's, my parents' marriage survived because of their faith. That's the only thing that kept them together.

They shared the faith and they really believed that God protected them and loved them no matter what, no matter what happened. Without that faith, their marriage never would have survived.

if you're probably a totally different person, Wow, wow, that's yeah, thank you for sharing that as well. I want to ask you we start off. You talked about Norman Vincent Peale, founding Guide Post, and I know you know he's most famous, or not most famous, but for me anyway for his book the Power of Positive Thinking. And I think sometimes people think, well, if I believe in this power of positive thinking, bad will happen to me. And we talked about, we've talked about the tragedy that befalls all of us. How do people that ascribe to that philosophy? How do we reconcile that with all the pain in the world? Well, 回來.

Well, one thing I'll tell you a little bit more about Dr Peel, and this is something I learned about him. I didn't know much about Dr Peel when I came to work at Guidepost and I actually got to know him, but he was a man who suffered from crippling anxiety, crippling self-doubt and insecurities, you know, and he was. When he eventually went to seminary, his advisor at seminary basically told him to leave. He said look, you're a scared mouse. You act like a scared mouse. You know you're never going to reach people and touch them and lift them up. You're never going to do that because you don't have any confidence at all. And so that's really put him in this path. He was like a scientist who discovered what he thought was a cure, which was positive thinking. Tell myself that I deserve the best. God wants me to have the best. I have to learn to chase that. And he tried it out of himself and he found himself becoming this great order. And he was he's the best public speaker I ever saw in the pulpit or in a podium in front of a convention of business people. He was the best speaker and it was hard to believe that he was so. He had suffered such insecurity as a younger man. So that was his, you know.

And Peel went through. He went through the depression of World War II you know a lot of people in society and he thought positive thinking was was the way to overcome the darkness of the world, not in some Pollyannish way that's disconnected from reality, but to realize, you know, you were put on earth, you know, with the prospect of having a good life, the prospect of having a good life, but you had to go and get it. You had to believe that you could be happy and make a good life for yourself. That it was that so many people didn't think they could be happy. And his, you know, in the American sort of history of faith, I mean, you had the Catholic church, which was a, you know, a big believer in original sin and the fall of man, and you had the protestant, pure botanical part of the American character, which was that you know that we are made up of base instincts that have to be overcome. All the time we start burning people at the stake, we'll get burned at the stake. I mean it was, you know, the American religious character was pretty dark and I think Dr Peel thought that, you know, god did not necessarily see us. I mean he knew we were sinful, but he didn't hate us for being sinful.

And you know, peel always said God loves you. Never forget that. It's the relationship you have with God that he loves you. And if you can find that love and internalize it, you know you can do good things. You can overcome incredible problems. But he believed you overcame those problems with thinking that you could, that, giving yourself that confidence, that confidence derived from God's love for you, not from some. You know super human quality that you might have, but it's an extra human quality which was God's love you could draw on to overcome the darkness of the world.

The world is always going to be enlightened. I think of you know the Earth, day and night, the Earth rotating in the sunlight. You know that's sort of the way that we are made in, the world is made, that it goes from light to darkness, to light to darkness. It's a duality that we'll never understand.

Theologians and philosophers have tried to understand that why in a world that has so much beauty there is so much darkness and evil? And that is not a question that is there for us to know the answer. That duality is just who the world is and sometimes who we are too, you know, and that we can, you know we can. I can be a really rotten person. I have been, and I understand that that's something for the overcome, and I think most of us gone from doing really good things to sometimes doing not so good things. You know, and that's part of being human. And again, it does get back to, sir, to surrendering to our humaneness and to accepting that we can be better people. The reason why we can be better people is that they're not perfect to begin with, so there's always a road for improvement.

Awesome. Well, yeah, thank you so much for sharing that and I'm glad I asked the question. I think that's a great way to kind of wrap up what we're talking about here today, because it's really about how we come at the things that happen to us. It's not that if we think positive things that nothing quote bad will happen, but it's like, first of all, questioning is this really bad? You know what? What good might come of this, what growth could come of this and of every incident that we look back through our lives. If we really think about it, we can probably find some way that we grew from it, some way that we actually benefit it from a thing.

I know I think that's what Dr Peer would say was that when you're faced with a difficult or even a bad situation, where's the good in there? Where can you find, chisel out that that good and then grow it. You know there's always hope and hope is. You know I'm still a guy who's just kind of a hope merchant. You know the magazine. You know people read the stories and they say they give me hope because I read about how someone was in a really tough situation and got through it and was bettered by it. He wants to say that their suffering is necessary to be a better person. But you know it happens very much that way sometimes. You know it happened for me. You know, for my suffering came a lot of positive growth that I never expected and I dare not take any real credit for.

Well, I think we do have a choice, though we do have a choice. We can sit down and give up when these things happen to us. We can choose to become bitter about them. So I think there is. You know, it was funny, I was here and someone the other day. They said you know, well, it's not me doing it, it's God doing it. You know, through me, and that gets into who's God and who am I, because we're, I think we're all one and we are all parts of God. But, yeah, we do have a choice and I think that and that's part of the joy of overcoming. You know, as people we seek out challenges.

I read an article the other day, but a guy was climbing Mount Everest and came across somebody else and he had to stop and come down and he saved this guy life. Oh, yes, and you're like well, why would you climb Mount Everest? Because that's who people are. We like challenges, we like to, we like to overcome, because we want to be able to get to the top, no matter how tough it is. And you know you've shared with us today example after example of how you've overcome these difficulties in your life and it's made you into the person that you are today. So I want to thank you very much for being here and for being so open and vulnerable and remind people of the name of your book. And the people can reach out to you. How can they find you?

All right. So I will tell you that the book is a journey of faith, a mother's Alzheimer's, a son's love and his search for answers, and that part of it. We didn't talk so much about answers because it doesn't. It's not really germane to our discussion today, but I have gone into like neurological studies now and to find out if some of the lapses I see in my own memory as I get older are indicative of Alzheimer's. And it's the question that the world's probably divided between people who want to know and people don't want to know. And I've desired wanting to know is part of my being human, and so I'm on a search and a quest to find out like am I looking at a future that may include dementia the same dementia that killed my mother, and how would I feel about that and what would I do? I don't know, but I'm on that journey. In the book I talk about some of the neurological studies and the testing, the CAT scans and the MRIs that I've gone through and what I found out.

So, that's part of the book too. You can get a journey of faith at ShopGuidePostsorg and that's ShopGuidePostsorg, or you can, you know, use the thing. Just go on Amazon. If you get it from ShopGuidePostsorg, you know, you get a couple free gifts, including, you know, access to some videos of me talking, If you haven't already sick of me and you get a little booklet of my devotionals. I do write devotions for the company and we also. We have something called Devoutly, which is a new digital product that we've launched and you might look in. That's Devoutlyorg, and it's daily affirmations and stories and things that will make you feel positive. It will give you that positive energy, that positive spiritual energy that is a great way to start the day. So that's Devoutlyorg.

Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been really.

Hey, Brian, thank you.

Yeah, I want to say this is kind of personal for me, because I've gone through this with my father-in-law. I'm going through it with my mother-in-law right now and I've had two great conversations day with people who have been through this with their parents. This is something that we're all going to. It's going to touch us one way or the other, whether it's ourselves or our parents or somebody that we know.

I know it's funny. It's the number one fear, a health fear of people over the age of 50. The number one cancer, heart disease. They kill more. Covid still kills more, but it's the number one fear we have. We fear that loss of self and if you go all the way back to people in their 20s and surveys, it's their third biggest fear health fear in their 20s. So it's, the specter of losing ourself is really frightening for a lot of people, but it's something that we thought about, I guess, and hoped for a cure.

Thank you, enjoy the rest of your day.

Thank you, Brian. It's been great talking to you. Really, it's terrific. Thank you.