A Boundless Authenticity podcast.
Welcome back to another episode of Boundless Authenticity. This episode is for anyone going through it, if you've suffered a loss or are just facing adversity. My guest today is Vicky Paris Goodman, the author of To Sam with Love, a surviving spouse's story of inspired grief. After the death in twenty nineteen of her husband, Sam, the love of her life, she was unexpectedly flooded with optimism and presented with a host of possibilities for an exciting and meaningful future.
She received valuable insights, seemingly coming from an outside source, enabling her to conceive a more realistic and uplifting understanding of adversity and loss. She knows these concepts wire free others to face the passing of a loved one with a far more optimistic outlook. Having lived most of her life in the Los Angeles area, Miss Goodman now resides in the mountains of sen Arizona. She's a retired mechanical engineer.
She sings and plays violin semi professionally, and for over twenty years she served a Long Beach, California area newspaper as a theater critic. She has just completed her second book, Speed Bumps and Other Impediments to Life in the Fast Lane, a slightly self deprecating memoir on the trials of life of a type A personality. Go to inspiredbrief dot com to purchase Sam with Love at a discount, to subscribe to Vicky's free belief Shifting three episode audio series, and
to contact Vicki and read her blog. And while I'm here, I have to say thank you again to all of the new subscribers and followers, and I just want to remind you that if you aren't currently a follower of the show, go ahead and do so now. Boundless Authenticity is available on Spreaker, Spotify, Apple, Rumble, and sometimes YouTube when they aren't punishing me for being a bad boy. However, I highly reckoon men using the Speaker app as it is free to listen and no sign it required. All
you have to do is just hit play. So how's it going great?
I really want to thank you for having me on your terrific show, Jehan, and I'm really excited.
Yeah, yeah, I'm glad he contacted me. This is right up my alley because I've been wanting to focus more on this subject, So I'll let you have the floor. How'd you get into this situation?
Yeah, back in twenty seventeen when my husband Sam and I moved to our our basically where we decided to retire in Arizona. You know, we moved into our house. We were so excited, and then we got his terminal cancer diagnosis, and you know, we both bucked up. He lived another two years, did really well. For a year and a half of that, you couldn't tell he was sick, you know, he was still eating well, working out, you know,
doing great. Was really only the last six months or so where he declined and after Sam passed, even though I'm a survivor type basically not particularly optimistic compared with most people, not pessimistic, kind of middle of the road,
but I was flooded with optimism. And it was on the day he passed, which seemed a little unseemly, you know, and my first instinct was to push it away, but I thought, you know, I was so strong during our two year ordeal from diagnosis to his passing, and I took good care of him, you know, toward the end when he needed taking care of and I thought, you know, if good things want to come my way, even this
soon after Sam's passing, maybe I should let them. And that started me on the road to a lot of really good things, opportunities that I felt motivated to embrace, insights that really gave me clarity and put me on this path to get those same insights out to others so they can benefit from them as well. And we can talk more about those serendipitous events were occurring, you know, at a pretty fast clip for a while after Sam passed, almost like he was sending me messages, you know, and
you know, all of it put together. I decided to call it inspired grief because it was just so inspiring and I was grieving over his loss and mostly the changes that had happened to my life from him not being here with me anymore. But so many things happened in a timely fashion after he passed that I felt, I feel like I'm being transformed. For one thing, I was raised very secular in a very secular family, and some years before Sam passed, I had decided there must
be a higher power. All of this around us could not have happened spontaneously on its own. But I'd never taken my belief in a higher power. Very far, it remained very rudimentary. But after Sam passed, suddenly I wanted to know if he was still around and if so where I was offered by the hospice we used. I was offered meetings with their chaplain about once a month for a year after Sam passed, and I said yes
to that. And the first thing I asked her in our first meeting was tell me about the afterlife, and she did give me some really insightful thoughts on that. But the best thing she did was she recommended that I read the story of a secular neurosurgeon who had had a near death experience. And after reading his story, I found it so compelling, so convincing, that it took me the rest of the way to fully believing in
God and an afterlife. And that is probably the single most important thing that happened soon after Sam passed to start me on this mission of mine with the insights and the opportunities and now me working very hard actually
to get to get the message out. Because let me just give you give you one example of one of the insight sites I received, and it's not even in the book, because this one came after I published the book, And I published the book two years after Sam passed, so the insights were still coming, and some of the most powerful ones came after I published the book, you know,
two and a half, three years after Sam passed. And probably the most stunning of those insights, Well, I'll ask, I'll tell you in the form of a question, is death really tragic? And I say no, if you believe in a loving God and a beautiful beyond words after life, and if God has a plan for each one of us, and if your loved one passes ahead of you, I mean someone's got to you know. It's pretty rare for two people to you know, die in a plane crash together,
or in a car crash or something. Usually one passes ahead of the other. So the way I look at it now is Sam that God's plan was for Sam to pass ahead of me. Now Sam is in this beautiful place, He's still around, just in a different way. And God's plan for me was to continue in this earthly life for some amount of time which we don't know. And I am tasked with learning more, experiencing more, and maybe even teaching others while I'm here. And so I
don't see that as tragic at all. I see Sam getting to go to this beautiful place as cause for celebration, as crazy as that might, Sam, given the way we're conditioned in our culture to think of.
Death, so you ended that with the right thing is conditioning. We're told to act a fool pretty much, and find that a lot about that makes the death of the person about me. You know what I'm saying really selfish and I don't think that that's a healthy response to that scenario whatsoever. So I find what you're saying to be quite fascinating. And again with that societal conditioning, then that kind of shines the light on the quality of
relationship that you had with the person. Are you grieving because you're guilty that you didn't treat the person well? While because a lot of people I've seen will just be like in tears forever about it and they won't really resolve anything that's going on in their heads. It just continues for anything up to a lifetime until they eventually die. And that doesn't make any sense to me. And it's almost like they're beyond any kind of conversation
about it. They're not open to changing the way that they feel or feeling better or doing better or any of those things. And then it also shines to light on Okay, well, how do you actually end up loving this person that has passed? Is the way that you love them a container? Is it some kind of a prison that you put them in yourself? Because that doesn't sound a lot like anything that's very free to have that kind of reaction. Am I making sense?
Absolutely? You're making sense, you know. We You're right about the guilt. There's a lot of guilt, not so much. It might have something to do with the way they treated the person, you know, when they were living. You know, none of us have perfect relationships, and there is a lot of guilt around that. But I think most of the guilt with people who have lost a loved one who was very important to them is more about am I getting the grief right? Am I? You know? How
long should I do this for? You know, in order to honor this person? You know, I don't want to shorten it too much, because you know, then I'm not honoring them properly. All of this this conditioning that tells us to look at it this way, it makes no sense. And what I find really interesting is when I say, is death really tragic? I say no, There are more people with this belief system loving God, beautiful beyond words afterlife. There are more people with that belief system who nod
their heads knowingly. And I'm thinking, well, if you know this, why do you not connect the dots? Make that connection that from what you're you're saying, you know.
To.
Excuse me, to how you're grieving or how you're treating someone else who has suffered a loss. You know. I'd like to start a movement to get people to connect those dots so that we're so that the way we react to a death is more aligned with our belief system. But death really isn't tragic.
Yeah, it's just so much more healthy to feel whatever is that's going on and try to move on from that then make it into something that's bigger than what it is. It affects people around you negatively, and it's not doing you any goodness either. It's really just subtractive, and I don't feel like the process of grieving needs to be subtractive to your energy whatsoever. It's hard. We know that there's going to be things that come up.
Like you said when you were realizing the impact that your husband on you and you know you will miss him, right, yeah, yeah.
You know there are so many people who get stuck in grief, as we have alluded to already, Jehan And uh, you know, sometimes it last week, sometimes months, sometimes years, or as you as you pointed out, sometimes sometimes people do this for the rest of their lives until they pass. And I look at it as such a waste of time and energy and what they could have done with their lives. So here we are with this new belief system. And so what does that mean I'm not going to
feel bad about losing my loved one? Well, yes and no, because I think what we do need to grieve, or at least process, is the fact that your life has changed when you lose someone, especially someone who's shared your you know, big part of your life with you, like your home for example. So you lose a spouse and everything changes, you know, And as human beings, we're a little bit afraid, most of us, of the unknown, you know, the uncertainty of what life is going to look like now,
and so you know, we're uncomfortable with that. And you know, there are people who tell I know because they told me this and others I've spoken to who have lost a loved one. You know, there are people who will tell us keep yourself so busy that you don't have time to think or feel, you know, in order to avoid the pain of the loss. And I knew that that was bad advice, however well intended, so I ignored it.
What I did instead, and this worked really well for me, and I think it can work really well for everyone who is in this position. So what you do. You don't expect to feel wonderful because of the uncertain and you know, this person, even though they might still be around, this person you lost, they're not there in the way they were. You have to process this. So what I did and it worked so well, was I I created a balance between what I call activity and quiet time,
you know. So I started doing things immediately. Opportunities were coming my way. I grasped them and thought, why not, you know, why not do some things that I've never done before? And so I did them. You know, I started singing, and it turned out I could sing, you know. I auditioned for to be in a play at our local playhouse. I'd never done that before. I reviewed theater for years but I'd never actually acted, you know, and
all these things worked out really well. So I was doing those things, but I also made sure that there was that there was time to just sit or or read, or take a walk or a height so that I could process what had happened in my life, and over time I did. Now. One interesting thing I noticed through this process was that when I'd be out having fun, you know, lunch with a friend or going to karaoke or whatever it is I was doing that was fun and satisfying, I'd come home and I'd feel empty inside.
And I realized that that was very likely due to the fact that Sam wasn't here anymore to either do the thing with me or to hear me tell them about it. When I got home, and I thought, Okay, what this means is things are going to be good, but they're not going to be great, and they might not be great for a long time to come. And I realized I had no control over that aspect, so I just accepted it. So this is the way I proceeded on, and I don't think it came for me.
I think God was leading me into this next chapter of life in a way that worked so beautifully for me, and it made me closer to this God that I had just just begun believing in very strongly. And so, you know, here I was having this experience, it was almost like like God was saying, you know what, thank you for coming so quickly to your faith in me. I'm going to do something for you, and I'm going to make this process as positive and inspiring as possible.
And so, you know, here I sit, five and a half years after sam past getting the message out. You know, I'm not a real selfless person because of some things that happened in my childhood that we need not get into. You know, I kind of found it necessary to grasp for control and I became a little self involved, i think, growing up, you know, just to try and survive what was going on in my family. And so I'm not a real selfless type, you know, and I've always felt
a little guilty about that. You know, people are volunteering in the community and doing you know, for the homeless or for the hungry, or you know, whatever it is. And you know, I'm here, I am writing books and you know, doing other things. Well. When I started, when I started going on various podcasts like your own Jahan. It was not something I necessarily wanted to do at first, but it felt so right because I thought, Wow, I've felt so guilty for so many years that I don't
do anything to give back, and here I am. I have found a way to give back. So here I am in my retirement, you know, when I could be taking my dog on two or three walks a day instead of just one, you know, from getting on podcasts to try and get this message out because I just feel so strongly it can help others, and it feels so good and right. The more I do it, the better, the better, the more right it seems.
Yeah, I understand what you're saying completely and totally. When you were talking about processing it, that's the thing that keeps us all stuck in any situation, any weird emotion. We don't want to process it. And the longer you stay like that, the more it causes you pain. I was just telling someone else in relation to a different subject, that the conditioning that we receive on this planet is pretty much centered to dissociating from one thing or another.
But there's no real insight or anything to be gained in just sitting around beating yourself over the head. Whenever you have any kind of tough situation that you have
to deal with. Life is happening. You don't have a choice, and you could either sit there and cry about things at infinitum, or you can learn to process the things that are going on in your head, understand that it takes a long time, and just move on with what you have to do, because the rest of the world is not going to weigh on you to get over
whatever is you have to get over. And granted, it's your right to get over in whatever time period you see fit, but it's not necessary to drag anything out. So I'm just wondering what tips you can give to anyone that feels like life is against them.
That's a good one, you know. I think I think what you're describing as sort of a victim mentality, and I think a lot of people who suffer loss and adversity do feel like victims. And one thing is this is yet another of the insights that I was with which I was blessed after I wrote the book, and
that that was that the God. Part of God's plan is to present us with challenges in order for us to learn lessons I'm fully convinced of this because I've noticed that if I finally stop resisting the lesson, God seems to move on to try and teach me something else rather than the same type of challenge over and over again. So, you know, my advice to people is, when you face adversity, whether it's something trivial or something truly you know, earth shattering, think about God's intended takeaway.
What is he trying to teach me? And learn that lesson? And he won't stop trying to teach you lessons, but he might stop trying to teach you that one, So you know, it's yeah, yeah, So that's my best advice for people. You know, get out of the victim mentality. What am I supposed to learn from this? Yeah?
That makes ask Yeah, I agree with you. You just have to get out of that feeling of being helpless and get off of that hamster wheel that you can find yourself on. And you know, are there any other bits of insight that you would like to share that we can look forward to insight of the book.
Well, the book isn't loaded with insights, to be honest. The book is more of a a It's more of an example of one woman's far more positive and optimistic than expected experience of moving into the next chapter after losing the love of her life. That was me, of course, and that that's the book. The insights are all in three episode audio series that I that I recorded, because, as I said, most of the most of the best insights came to me after after I wrote the book.
So those are free online and we can talk about that at the end. But I would like to tell you about some more of those insights that I had, because I think it's very helpful to people, if that's okay with you, Jehan. You know, they're described more fully in the audio episodes. But one of the things I
think people people expect or not expect. I think we all have this idea and many of us, many of us believe that there's an ideal life in terms of relationships, and that is you meet someone, let's say, in your twenties, you get married, and you both live into your eighties or nineties, you know, having been married to the same person for you know, six or seventy years, and that's the ideal I thought that, you know, and what occurred to me, this is such a good insight and I
don't take credit for any of these insights were These were insights with which I was blessed by God. You know, I'm not that good, so you know these came to me. It's almost like I'm the messenger about the ideal life that I just described. It occurred to me that that
is one one way some people spend their lives. But who's to say that a life that's lived more in chapters or segments isn't just just as valuable, just as ideal, maybe even better, because maybe there's more opportunity if if you live your life in chapters, maybe maybe two or three of those chapters with different in relationship with different people. You know, maybe you get married twice or three times, or you know you're or you're in a significant relationship
in one of these chapters. You know, who's to say that isn't equally ideal to being married to one person you know, for sixty or seventy years. You know, we make that assumption, but I'm not sure why we do. And I think it's so important to understand that if if you wind up divorcing, or if your loved wine your spouse passes away in their forties or fifties instead
of in their eighties or nineties. And now you're faced with another chapter that you don't feel like you've failed to live out that ideal life, because there is no ideal life, and it's so freeing to realize that you haven't failed. If you divorce, or if your loved one passes away far earlier than expected, it just means that you were meant to do something else, and you may as well enter that new chapter of life as soon as possible and get going with it and see what wonderful,
exciting and inspiring things might happen. And they will. So that's one one thing that occurred to me. I call it one of the insights that was so great because of how freeing it was. Another thing was if with the afterlife is so beautiful, and as so many people who have had near death experiences have related, if it's so, if there's a love there that is so powerful that
we can't like here on earth. If that's the case, then when we feel guilty about moving on into another relationship after losing our spouse, let's say it occurs to me, there aren't any negative emotions in the afterlife, there's no ag there's no there's no jealousy, There's only love. And when these these souls experience that unbelievable love, all they want for their loved ones here on earth is the same. They want them to be happy until they come and
join them in the afterlife. They want them to find as much love and satisfaction as possible. So the guilt need not need not be there for those left behind. So there's guilt. You know, you brought up guilt first, Jehan, But there's so many different ways in which we feel guilty over over loss, and none of them, it turns out, really are valid.
Yeah, so this just came to me. If Sam was to read your book, what do you think he would say to you?
Great question, No one spar asked me that. I think I think really proud of it. I think he'd be proud of both my books, actually, but I think he probably he was a very funny man. He'd probably say, I'm the most boring guy on the planet. How come you spent a third of the book talking about me, you know, the first third. He'd probably say something like that. Yeah, he was a character.
He was Oh gosh, yeah, yeah, that's really great. So Vicky is there anything else you'd like to say?
Well, you know what we could do, Johan, I could, I could tell I could tell you about some of some of the serendipitous events that occurred. One was especially well, two of them were especially striking. Do you mind if I do that before we finish up? I think they're good stories. One of them, Okaya's Sam had a favorite flower. He loved sunflowers. Used to bring them home from the grocery store sometimes, you know, and put them in a vace.
He loved sunflowers. So and his celebration of life that I had about a month and a half after his passing, I arranged to have sunflowers on all the tables. So I'm on my way to this venue where I'm going to be holding this celebration of life for Sam, and suddenly there's this cartoonish blue car in front of me, kind of a car, kind of a silly little blue car. I don't even know what it was, but it struck me that it looked like a cartoon and not a
real car. And coming up from the roof of that car was a plastic flower, and it was bent back to me, so I could see that it wasn't just any flower. It was plastic sunflower. And I thought, you don't think I've ever seen a flower coming up from the roof of a car. What are the chances that I'd be behind a car or half mile from my destination that has, you know, where there's going to be
an event for you know, honoring Sam. What are the chances that I see a plastic sunflower under those circumstances coming up from the roof of this car. And pretty soon the little car turned off in another direction, not headed toward that venue anymore, and I thought, that must be the first message I'm getting from Sam to tell
me that I'm on the right track or something. I don't know what he was trying to tell me, but at least maybe he was just trying to tell me, Hey, I'm here and I can't wait to see my celebration of life. You know, maybe that's all it was. I think the most stunning thing that happened. And this is still happening, by the way, and it's how I know Sam is still around. Soon after he passed, I would go to bed at night, turn out the lights, and while I was just kind of relaxing before falling asleep.
About three to five minutes after turning out the lights, I would see a kind of a smoky grayish white thing sort of just gently floating around or kind of going in and out in my view, I guess you'd say. But most of the time it was so subtle I wasn't really sure it was there, and I actually said
to myself, this is pathetic. Why are you imagining something just to give yourself the comfort of believing that Sam is, you know, somehow visiting you after you turn out the lights at night or something, so, you know, I was even kind heart on myself with regard to that. But sometimes it was vivid enough that it was hard to ignore, and I'd think, huh, that's not so subtle. Anyway. This is going on most nights, not all, but most nights for a few months, and then suddenly one night it
changes color. It becomes kind of a neon yellow green, and I thought, well, that's interesting, because even though it's pretty subtle, I've never even thought to imagine it changing color before. I don't think I'm imagining this. And then sometimes it would be, you know, really vivid, and five and a half years later, I'm still getting visits from
the neon yellow green thing. But I guess the most stunning part of the story is I had started to pray to God, or I didn't actually pray, I would just sort of talk to God every night before bed. Well about a year after Sam passed, and I've been seeing the neon yellow green thing most nights. I said to God early in the day. Never talked to God early in the day, very rarely, but on this occasion, I said, God, I never ask you for anything for myself,
but I'm going to make an exception to that. Today. I'm really growing weary of wondering if the neon yellow green thing is some sort of a manifestation of Sam's soul. So if it, if it is Sam, would you please just make it more vivid than ever or make it move differently than it usually does tonight after I go to bed. And if it's not Sam, would you just kind of give me jet black, which will be, you know,
the really decisive absence of the phenomenon. And I figured, you know, if I get what I usually see, you know, just sort of a cloudy nothingness when you're going to sleep, I figured, you know, then God had chose not to not to do what I'd asked, and I'd be no worse off. So that night, you know, I'm getting ready for bed, and I'm thinking, what have I done? What if I get jet black? Am I ready to find out that this happened Sam all this time? And I thought, well,
I can't stay up forever. So I go to bed and I turn out the light. And instead of just kind of laying there for three to five minutes and then the thing coming and gently moving around, the second
I turned out the lights, it was there. For the first time ever, it was there, and it was very vivid, and instead of floating gently around, it shot across my view about four or five times horizontally and then poof gone And I burst into tears and I thanked God, and I said I would never question the identity of the apparition again. And I still get those visits almost every night.
Well, what exactly did that do for you? What did that give your perspective? And you know, how did it feel? Did fail your soul? Did it did it make you want to have a stronger belief in God? Didn't make you question other things in your life?
Like?
What did it do? Because there's a lot of people that have these experiences and they do different stuff with it, and I'm always surprised to hear what they.
Say, I'm sorry, you said. There's a lot of.
Yeah, I'm sorry. There's an internet thing happening here, it seems. And I said, there's a lot of people that they have these experiences and they do different things with them, and I'm always curious as to what they say.
Yeah, Well, you know, it's funny, I can't really communicate with Well, I can communicate with Sam, but he can't really communicate with me, at least not in a way that I have found if I could ask him a yes or no question and maybe get maybe get some sort of a signal or something. So in that sense, it's not very satisfying at all. But I think what I've always loved to be apparition is that it's just what it means to me is that Sam is there. He's still with me, he hasn't given up on me.
He's in the afterlife doing whatever he does there, and he's and he he has stayed with he has stayed with me. Is he is making these visits, I guess you'd say, just to let me know he's there, and that's really powerful for me. That's really all. Mostly, mostly what I need from him is just to know he's there.
And so I get that, you know, and I'm so glad God or maybe it was Sam, or maybe the two of them together chose to give me the blessing of knowing it really was Sam that night when I had asked God to.
Verify the fact. Okay, well, Vicky, let's grab this thing up.
You can get my book to Sam with Love, a Surviving Spouse's Story of Inspired Grief, and subscribe to my audio episodes, which are free at inspired grief dot com. Get the book, get the audio episodes. Very powerful combination, and thank you so much for having me.
Johan, Well, thanks for being here on the Boundless Authenticity Podcast. You're listening to the Boundless Authenticity Podcast, where we discuss everything related to the evolution of human consciousness.
At the very leasy.
You need to understand that the United States builds bunkers, which are basical cities on your ground every three months.
Basically, dream into your self conscious. It is your love, intuition, you, creativity.
And imagination, unshamed from conscious saison and ligate.
All your life.
And soul.
If I have a consciousness section algy your cultures of aguety of the writy. We live in a multi dimensional reality, whether it comes through essitary information in.
The spiritual realms or the upho people.
Experiences, or mainstream and put the physics, and through natrem science, and now realizing that parallel dimensions probably exists.
We're all spiritual means, we're all having these human experiences. We've heard that phrase over and over and over, but what does that really mean?
And all of the questions of why do we have these answers inside of ourselves. We're ultimately studying the nature of what it is to be human, good and evil, our psychology, how were fitting our health. That's why I love Bruce Lee's great quote all knowledge is ultimately self knowledge.