This is Victoria of theunleashedheart.com and ou're listening to grieving oices, a podcast for hurting earts who desire to be heard. r anyone who wants to learn how o better support loved ones xperiencing loss. As a 30 plus ear griever in advanced grief ecovery methods specialist, I now how badly the conversation round grief needs to change. hrough this podcast, I aim to ducate gravers and non gravers like, spread hope and inspire ompassion toward those hurting.
astly, by providing my heart ith yours and this platform, rievers had the opportunity to hare their wisdom and stories f loss and resiliency. How bout we talk about grief like e talked about the weather? et's get started. Hi, there. hank you for tuning in to rieving voices today. This is pisode 57, takeaways and eflections. And today I'm going o be talking about Episode 55 ith Larry Indiviglia called hoice and Chance and, Episode 7 with Michel St. Jean Widows
Walking the Path of umulative Loss. As I was hinking about these two pisodes, the one thought that ame to my mind was, especially hen talking about Larry's pisode is, his life by choice r is it by chance? And specially in grief, many people ay say that everything happens or a reason. And as a griever, ou don't want to hear that. You on't want to hear that there's ome reason why your loved one s no longer with you. That's he last thing that you really
ant to hear. Have you ever hought about though how the oments that happen in your ife, how they come to be? So uch of what we experience is ecause we made a choice, ecause we chose something that ad an impact and there's cause nd effect. So you make one hoice, and this thing happens, ou make another choice and this ther thing happens. But like in arry's story, it really evolved around making the hoice to take a chance. And for arry it was taking a chance on
ove. But if you really think bout it aren't all of the osses we experience in our ives, due to making a choice to ither commit to that person or ove to that place or befriend hat person, it all comes back o taking the chance, making the hoice and taking the chance. nd like I said, whether that be ove or that be a friendship, or move. We all make these hoices. Larry shared how he ook a chance on love and ended p having an eight month elationship with a woman who ltimately passed away of
ancer. And he would do it all ver again in a heartbeat. And I hink for any Grievers out here, I'll speak for myself, I ould rather have had that xperience of loving that person nd being loved in return than ever at all. And especially as parent, which is the greatest ove I think anyone could ever ossibly have the privilege of xperiencing. I don't know what t's like to lose a child, but I
o feel for myself. And I think ny parent would say this, that ou would rather have had that hild in your life than I've ever had them in your life at ll. If they were to pass away, f you were to lose them. Love n all its forms is a great eacher for us. And that's where think a lot of people can use he phrase, "everything happens or a reason", a nd I struggle ith that. I struggle with that hrase because I don't feel like here has to be a reason for us
o to grow or evolve. But I do eel like we are presented with xperiences that shaped us, and challenged us, and it's what we decide to do in those moments. It's what we choose to do in those moments. It's essentially what freewill is, having the ability to choose. And we can choose to grow from those experiences, or we can choose to lay in decay, like one of my future guests shares in her episode coming up, when you lay, you decay. I've never forgotten it when she said
it. And so Larry shares his love and loss. And, as does my other guest, Michelle St. Jane, in Episode 56, she took a chance to fall in love, she first took a chance to leave her family of origin to go all by herself, I believe, 16-17 years old. And to see the world, she wanted to see the world, she ended up falling in love, again, took a chance, ended up getting married and having children with him. And he ended up passing away, very
suddenly, and unexpectedly. And there was one part of her episode that really stuck out to me something she said, "I hear your heartbeat". When she's talking about her husband, she said, "I hear your heartbeat but you're already gone". It's in the hospital realizing that, although he's there, physically, His heart is beating. But he's already gone. He was brain dead, he had an aneurysm in his lungs. And she had to make the choice to take him off life support.
And raise a nine- month-old, a five-year-old, and a six-year-old on her own. And I know many women end up in this position, many husbands, and many significant others end up in this position of you know, of loss and then are having to raise children or even just carry on without children. It's like, there's no manual for that. There's no manual for grief. And she said grief, it helps us to know the direction we want to go in. And I completely agree if we're open to it, but we have to be open to
it. We have to be open to what it's telling us, to what our bodies are telling us as we're going through this emotional roller coaster. I do want to highlight one thing she said and she mentioned during her episode, she mentioned about the stages of grief and I just want to reiterate that there are no stages of grief. I actually have Ken Ross, Elisabeth Kubler Ross' son, who will be on my podcast
coming up. And we're going to tackle this very topic of the stages of grief because it's as mother's work that was misinterpreted about the stages. So anyway, I just want to reiterate that there are no stages. Her work was about terminal illness and these phases that people go through when they're diagnosed. And that's not saying that people don't have anger and they don't have denial and all these things in grief. There's just not this linear path of grief in the form
of stages. Another common thing that Michelle brought up during her episode that many Grievers experiences around the same time every year, when that loss occurred, you have these same familiar feelings that come out of the woodwork. They can appear out of nowhere seemingly, and she said every year or three days in October, when her husband had gone into coma. Even 25 years later, she said she still had those same angry thoughts and feelings and it was
pulled back to the past. Again, every year, post his death, she had a choice to be pulled back to that past again. And eventually she did find a way to not find herself in that position again. But again, it comes back to making a choice, she had to make a choice to look at another October in a different way, experience October in a different way. And it was through this cumulative healing, all these different things she was doing that helped her find her way out of that ru
t every year. And so I really encourage you to listen to her episode on how she managed to find her way through all those October's and where she's at today, because I think it's a really great illustration of a woman who has endured many different types of losses, which are cumulative, every loss, it's cumulative, it stacks up on each other. And we have an opportunity to learn from these things. And it's not to say that happened for a reason, so you
could learn these lessons. It's just life, it's just life, it seems like such a simplified thing to say, like this just life, like there are so many people I've met and come across who will say that death is just a part of life. Well, that's life, right? And some of the people that say that, truth be told, haven't experienced a lot of loss or trauma either. And so, we have to be careful, because words matter. The words matter that we say, especially to Grievers and around Grievers,
and about grief. I want to circle back to Larry's story about love and loss because there are many people who, if presented with that same situation would have turned the other way, would have walked away. And how about the love of his life who took a chance to go on a dating website knowing full well that she had cancer and taking a chance in doing that.
Knowing her worth as a human being despite what she was going through with her health, that love was the answer, love was something that could carry her through her days, love was the antidote to what she was going to experience. And I commend, first of all, the awareness of knowing your own worth as a human being, because we're all worthy of love, right? Regardless of what we're experiencing, who we are on the outside what we look like, we're all worthy of love, even if we
have stage four cancer. And so I think it's incredible that she found somebody who was willing to walk beside her in that. And so I commended Larry in that episode, because that takes a lot of personal commitment to stick beside somebody through their good days and their bad days when essentially you really don't know each other really well. Right? It's not like they were married for 15-20 years, and then she developed cancer
diagnosis. So I just found the story itself pretty incredible that he was willing to go extra mile with her in the love that he wanted to give her, and she to him. I think it's a beautiful thing. And if people who are going through something like that can find the worth in themselves, to take a chance on themselves, and then find someone to take a chance on them. I think it's an absolutely beautiful thing but it makes you really think about if you're not someone who is
opening your heart to love. Why is that? I mean, there's fear and rejection. And certainly I'm sure many people or she had people rejecting her, when once they found out she had cancer, or maybe that was what she led the conversation with. And they were like, I'm gone. Or maybe she gave them an out. Maybe upon meeting or talking, she said, "Hey, I just want to let you know I have stage four cancer, totally understand if you don't want to, you know, walk with me through this". I'm thinking
back. And I'm just curious how many times that happened. But if you're going through cancer right now, if you're experiencing a diagnosis now, and you don't have love in your life, maybe let this story inspire you to take a chance on yourself, to allow somebody to take a chance on you, too. One of the things that Larry said was "you can't unconditionally love, if you don't love yourself
first". And I do think it probably takes an incredible sense of self love, for someone to have that love to give someone that you kind of learn to know, through cancer. So, I encourage you to listen to that episode if you need a little inspiration in the love department. And even if you don't, it could be friendship, too. You don't have to walk away from a friendship if someone gets diagnosed with cancer because you're scared, or because you're fearful, you don't know what to say. Just be
honest about those things. "I don't know what to say, I'm afraid what's going to come up for me if I sit with you through this?", Because that's natural, that's normal. Does it take a special person to sit with someone through the most trying and challenging times?, Of course it does. Is it especially challenging too during cancer treatments and all of these things that someone is going through, plus the emotional roller coaster for them? It is,
absolutely it is. How beautiful of an experience it can be and what you could miss out on. Larry said "the ability to choose his hope for the future". That is the hope, the fact that you have the ability to choose. And I've said it several times in my latest posts on Instagram but grief makes you feel like you don't have a choice. But we always do, we always do. Because even doing nothing is making a choice. The greatest thing you'll ever learn is to love and
be loved in return. And I think that was a great message from Larry's episode. And I will end it there. Thank you for tuning in to today's episode. And before I go, I want to share that I have a new energy quiz. You can learn your energy type. And if you go to my website, www.theunleashedheart.com, the link is in the show notes. You will find a link to the energy
quiz under the Reiki tab. So if you go under services, and then Reiki and then you'll see energy type, just click there and to get started to find your energy type. It takes less than two minutes and you get a handy dandy document to download that helps you uplevel your energy and find also what nurtures and leaks too. So check that out while you're on my website. And again, the link will be in the show notes to my website for
that. And until next time, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life, much love. From my heart to you yours. Thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, please share it because Sharing is caring. And until next time, give and share compassion by being hurt with yours. And if you're hurting know that what you're feeling is normal and natural. Much love my friend.