Welcome to Hope Thru Grief with your cohosts Marshall Adler and Steve Smelski. As we discuss our journeys through grief from the loss of our sons and loved ones,
Hope Thru Grief will focus on different aspects of the grief process. We will address many of the current issues of loss facing society today. And we'll speak with many others. Interesting guests concerning their journey through grief.
New episodes will be published every Thursday morning.
Hello, this is Marshall Adler. I'd like to thank you so much for listening to today's episode with my good friend and cohost Steve Smelski. We're going to be talking today about the early components of grief. So before we go any further, I'd just like to, again, introduce my good friend and cohost Steve Smelski, who will be talking about his early stages of grief today.
Hello everybody. How are you today?
Steve today's episode is very important for our audience to hear the journey that you and your wonderful wife, Shelly went through concerning the loss of your son, Jordan. I know this will be a difficult episode for both of us to do together, but I think it will be very informative and very helpful for the audience. So what I'd like you to do is if you could please tell us what happened the day that you and Shelly were with Jordan when he passed away
That day was July 2nd, 2014. We were at the ICU room that they gave Jordan a couple of days before we hadn't had much sleep for three, three and a half days. And we tried to get a little bit of sleep and they woke us up that morning and said we had to make a difficult choice. Jordan's vitals had dropped so low. They weren't sure they could keep him alive until the drug that was sent on a flight from the CDC in Atlanta was going to make it to Orlando for Jordan.
So they ask us to make a decision on whether to manually resuscitate Jordan. And so we'd reached out, talked to our family, Shelley reached out with hers and they all said, we're sorry, we can't help you with that decision, you guys have to make that. All the way through the ordea it never occurred to us that we were going to lose Jordan because doctors are awesome and they can save anybody. So up until this moment, I know to preserve his tonight's Shelly.
And I probably had some doubts, but we wouldn't share it with each other. We're trying to stay positive thinking that we're going to pull through this and Jordan would be okay when he came in and said they couldn't keep his vitals high enough for the drug to arrive there and we'd have to manually resuscitate, um, How do you make that choice? It's like, you're saying, okay, we give up, we're going to let them go. We asked the doctor, if it had been your son, what would you do? Would you do it?
Would you manually resuscitate and have somebody compress his chest for a couple hours? And he said, no. So we looked at each other and we both started crying and we said, um, all right, we're not going to. And he said, well, you need to call your family and anybody that's going to come in with you because he doesn't have much time left. You've got maybe 30 minutes. So I can called my family and Shelly called hers.
And a couple of her friends called him and said, If you're going to come in, you, you need to come right now. And it wasn't 35 or 40 minutes later that we're all in the room. They got into ICU, everybody's crying. We're all trying to keep it together. And they had tried cooling Jordan's body to slow down the amoeba. And so they had this vest on that had water. Things through a cooling his body down until like 90 degrees.
And Shelly asked then if they could remove everything off his body, he had a couple IVs and he had the respirator tube down his throat and the cooling tubes. So they took everything off. And then I was on one side, she was on the other. I remember saying how much I loved him. And when he went into, he went into it coma after he had a seizure on Monday night. And I remember them telling us that. Even when they're in a coma, they can hear things.
So make sure you keep talking to him or whispering in his ear, letting him know you're there, letting him know you're there, hold his hand, squeeze it. And so that's what we were trying to do. So for the last two days, we've been whispering in his ear that we're not giving up. We're not going anywhere. He's got to keep fighting and I know it's hard too, to realize that they're going to die in just a few minutes. And you, you trying to think, what do I do? What do I even say to him?
So we both told him we loved him in his ear. They turned off the ventilator, uh, remove the tube. And we both gave him hugs and squeezed his hands and told him how much we loved him. We, we never said goodbye. We told them how much we loved him. That was the most important thing. And that's the part we wanted him to hear last and then we gave everybody else a turn.
Steve, how are you and Shelley not only emotionally, but physically able to survive. The ordeal of Jordan's passing?
Part of it is we were awarded down from lack of sleep. So we took Jordan in on Sunday morning and we were up Sunday night. We were up Monday night because he had the seizure were down in ICU all early Tuesday morning. And then he went into surgery late on Tuesday night, just before, early Tuesday morning. So. Part of it was the lack of sleep. It's hard to think. It's hard to concentrate. That might've been a blessing because I think I physically would have felt sick.
Like I was going to get sick to my stomach. We were tired. We were, it was starting to sink in that he wasn't going to make it. He wasn't going to come home with us and we didn't want to think anything past that. It is gut wrenching. It's, it's awful. You just, you just want to fall in somebody's arms and just cry it all out. And you know, it'll be a week before you stop.
How long did you and Shelley stay at the hospital after Jordan passed away?
Great question. We've had a few people ask us that. I don't, I don't think it was 20 minutes. When Shelly's dad had passed away, her brother, Rick had to take her away from her dad and out of the room. And she was in there quite a while where their dad with Jordan, um, after he took his last breath, his heart stopped. The doctor listened to his heart. We stepped back and he declared him dead. We, we both took turns on each side with him.
We gave him hugs and kissed him on the hedge and whispered in his ear how much we loved him. But it's not very long before the skin turns, it starts to turn color it's, um, becomes opaque and chalky type. So we let him, everybody else have their turn. And I know Shelly's brother Rick was thinking, well, I don't know how to, I don't know how to get her out. And, um, Shelly said that at that time, She heard Jordan say to her justice.
Clearly, if he'd been standing in the room next to us, mom, go home. And before we got our second turn with him, um, she looked at me and we walked up and I grabbed his hand and I kissed him again. And she goes, I want to go home. So I said, okay, the doctors hadn't come back in. They had gone down, they were going to give us time with Jordan. Um, they had given us an ICU room and a bed to sleep in right next store cause they weren't that busy. And we kept coming in and out to make decisions.
And we all went next door. They helped us gather up our things in suitcase. And we said, okay. And we walked by his door on the way out. We gave one last look and we left and we walked down, went out through the secure door, out to the waiting room, lobby down the elevator an shelley stayed upstairs in the waiting room where the other girls. And I went down with the guys to get the car. As we came down, the elevator, it opened up and Jordan's best friend Jayden was there with his dad.
They were checking in at the desk to come up to see him and I remember Johnny looking at me, we were probably 30 yards away. And when he saw us come walking out together with suitcases, he knew he just bowed his head. And I walked up to Jayden. I said, He loved you like a brother. I gave him a hug. Johnny gave me a hug and we walked out to the parking garage to get the car, brought it around. And Shelly come down after that.
Steve, how did you get home from the hospital after Jordan passed away?
Well, we didn't drive. I know that .Shelley's brother, Rick drove us and I sat in the passenger seat. We couldn't comprehend any, we didn't even know a day. It was, we'd been in the hospital for four days. We weren't sure what day it was. It must have been maybe 7:30 or 8:00. And the strangest thing happened as we approached Altima and I-4 driving home, the sun was so bright that morning.
There was a couple layers of clouds below the sun and it, it like was a magnifying glass in, and I were like, wow, look at that sun. It is so bright. Other than that, I don't remember anything else. So the drive home, all I knew was I couldn't drive.
What did you do when you got home and realized it will never be the same since now jordan would never be home with you and Shelly again?
I don't think that it really sunk in some of the people that have been there had texted other people. Jordan was in about four days, ICU for three. So everybody knew he was sick. Nobody knew how sick nobody knew if he was going to make it or not. But they had texted some of our friends. We had people waiting at the house. By the time we got home, it was like maybe, maybe eight o'clock in the morning. And I don't think he really think about that he's not coming. You're just, you're in denial.
You can't believe it's happened. It doesn't seem real. And we went in the house and we immediately went in his bedroom and got up on his bed and, uh, I think that day we had 40 or 50 people stop by. A lot of them didn't get there till 10 or 11 in the morning. We had people that stayed so till late. We had family stay with us that night and everybody wanted to sit on his bed.
We had like seven or eight people and Jordan had a King bed and we're all just sitting on the bed talking and I can't describe how much his presence you felt in the room right after. People come in and talk to us and they'd leave and they'd come back. They go, wow. I want to be in here. I can feel his presence. And so we all sat there and talked about him for hours, Shelly and I didn't, we didn't get off his bed for a few hours, even when people came.
So the door, somebody else would go let him in.
How are you able to prepare for the funeral? And what happened after everybody left your house after the funeral was over?
Jordan died. I think that year it was on a Wednesday morning. Uh, we had people we must have six or eight people stay Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The funeral was the following Thursday. So it was a little over a week. Um, our company was awesome. Cisco, flew in some of our family, they took care of things that were helping us out every step of the way we had some of the people we worked with that were at Cisco, they were there helping us, helping get people into the house and watching
us watching over us.That first night we had probably six or eight people stay. And I think by the weekend, more people come in from out of town, we probably had 16 or 18 people stay that first weekend. We had the funeral, the following Thursday, um, I think people stayed through the next weekend. So we went, had people with us for 10 or 12 days and they stayed overnight. And it was the strangest feeling saying goodbye to those last couple, because we knew we were going to be alone.
And we knew how, how, how cold and quiet the room and the house is going to be.
Steve, as you know, my mother and my son Matt died within two days of each other. So had to do two funerals, two obituaries and two eulogies, which as crazy as it sounds. It actually helped me get through the loss of my son, Matt and my mother passing away within two days. My mother's eulogy was actually written when she was in hospice and I was by her bedside, literally her death bed. She was in hospice for 16 days.
And for 14 of those days, I was with her and planned out, writing her eulogy and preparing for a funeral on the 14th day is when we found out that Matt passed away. Writing Matt's eulogy was an entirely different experience because my mother's passing was expected and Matt'ss passing was completely unexpected.
And I knew that my mother and Matt both deserved the best tribute I could give them for the wonderful lives that they had led and the fact that I was under time pressure and time constraints actually was a good thing to distract my attention from the fact that I just lost my mother and my son within 24 hours.
I can't imagine going through to that close together with a mother and a son. I don't know how you got through it or actually did the eulogies. We had a hard time concentrating. When we picked out the funeral home, we had six people go with us. There were eight of us. We took two cars. They all came in. I know they thought it was strange, but Shelly and I couldn't make a decision. We didn't know what was the right thing to do.
We didn't, if they hadn't been there to help us with what went in the paper and make the decision. I'm not sure we could have got through that part. So it was kind of a democracy. We voted and they proposed it and we're like, what do you think? We're like, okay, that sounds good. Okay. How many say if it was a majority, that's what we went with. Did you have any help writing the eulogies? That was very, very difficult for us.
I had no help writing the eulogies for my mother or for Matt. I knew that my mother's eulogy was easier because I was preparing for her passing when she was at hospice. Maths was more difficult because the time constraints were much more compressed. Matt passed away on Sunday. July 22nd. My mother passed away on Tuesday, July 24th. We had my mother's funeral on Thursday, July 26. And on that following Sunday is when we had Matt's funeral.
And many of Matt's lifelong friends showed up, but also many of my, and my wife's Debbie's lifelong friends showed up who did not know Matt. So I felt it was incumbent upon me to give the best tribute to Matt by explaining what his life consisted of to the many people at the funeral that did not know him. And because of that, I was very very dedicated to give the tribute to Matt that his life deserved.
He was as kind loving, incredibly generous person, but was also an incredible encyclopedia of moving knowledge. So to try to have people that have known Matt understand what his life was about. I went through these YouTube classic movie videos to make sure that I got the quotes from three different movie absolutely correct for his eulogy.
One of the movies that I used was the movie Ghost, which if you remember, it was Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore that were lovers in New York City when Patrick Swayze was murdered. And Debbie Moore is trying to find out who murdered Patrick Swayze. And it's also in jeopardy herself because the murderer is trying to kill her. And Patrick Swayze as a ghost is not able to communicate with Debbie Moore until she is safe.
And at the end of the movie, he's going to the other side and the quote that I want to make sure I got correct for the movie to use at Matt's funeral as part of his eulogy was where Patrick Swayze is going to the other side, living this, leaving this planet and tells Demi Moore that he loves her, he always loved her and that the loving side, you take it with you and that was something that I know Matt would have wanted because we loved him. We always loved him.
I do believe that love inside was taken with him. The other movie quote that I used was from the Wizard of Oz. We've all seen the Wizard of Oz, where the wizard at the end of the movie is giving the tin man a plastic heart that he never had. And the wizard is telling the tin man that the heart will never be functional useful until it could be, be made on broken, which obviously can't be good. We all get our hearts broken.
But the quote that I used was where the wizard told the tin man, that a heart is not judged by how much you're loved, but by how much you loved by others. And I closed Matts eulogy with the statement that based on the life that he lived and the number of people that loved him, his life would have made the tin man and the wizard of Oz so proud.
And the last movie that I just mentioned was The Perfect Storm dealing with the movie with, uh, Mark Walberg, George Clooney, a true story about fishermen that are in Atlantic storm, that results in the sinking of their boat and at the end of the movie where they both know they're in the boat, they're not going to survive it. Mark Walberg turns to the captain, George Clooney and says, Hey, skipper, we put up hell the fight. And George Clooney looks at and says, yeah, but let's get outta here.
And they go swim into the ocean and obviously pass away. And that was an important quote to me for Matt's eulogy because whatever Matt went through in life, he always would quote that, that he gave his best shot and put up a hell of a fight, which is all we could do on this planet. So that is how I was able to get through writing those eulogies for my mother. And for Matt. How were you able to survive the funeral? And were you able to deliver the eulogy for Jordan?
I'll say right now we did not share Jordan's eulogy. We asked pastor Harvey Carpenter to actually give the eulogy, which Jordan had written himself from a class project. I couldn't have gotten up. And he asked me if I wanted to. And I said, no, I don't. I don't think I want to get up. The one thing I will say about being there with Jordan, we held his hands. We said, I love you. We had a very hard time forgetting what happened.
From the last three days for those first two or three months, I don't think I would call it a flashback, but when our mind wandered, we would go back to something that happened at the hospital and it would bring back all those emotions after about four months, Shelley said I've had to try and forget it. I don't, I don't want to go back there. It is so painful. I can't do that.
It wasn't until after we started the foundation and we had to talk about that, that we actually went back and revisited those first few months. It was easier not to go there and think of anything else, but what happened in the hospital. I guess for us, that was the hardest part at the beginning was to forget. Yet, yes, we were there with him and that part, we're glad we were. It was the first three or four months after they were very difficult.
When did you realize that you needed help to survive with your grief?
I would say after the first couple of weeks and people left and we had four or five days at the house alone without Jordan that we realized we were in trouble. We, we didn't know why we felt the way we did the first two weeks. Shelly and I were on the same page with our grief. I just knew that she was having a hard moment. I go find her, um, she just knew when I was struggling with something and she'd come find me at the house after the first two weeks, we weren't together.
We didn't realize that men and women grieve differently. And we didn't realize that everybody's grief journey is their own journey. It's unique. Nobody can tell you how you should do it. We realized that we needed help. We didn't understand why one was crying and the other one wasn't. And then when one was crying, how come you're not crying? Didn't you love him as much as I did? I don't understand why you're acting the way you are.
It's so many things you don't understand early in the grief that we, um, I think we reached out through our company and they gave us, um, they said, okay, you can go see a counselor. And we decided to see a counselor and, um, At least we had somebody to talk to, to share with. We cried a lot. Uh, I don't think first eight or 10 sessions, we could get through a session without breaking into tears and having a hard time struggling through.
Why did you decide to go to Grief Share to help you survive your grief journey?
I don't think we felt like we were getting better. It wasn't. It wasn't discussing grief. It's like, well, are you moving forward? Are you feeling better? How are you feeling? It's like, what do you mean how I feel? I feel awful. I don't want to be here. This is where I don't, I don't want to be here without her son. We, um, we found out that one of the pastors here in town had lost his son and Shelly reached out and tried to set up appointment.
And he met with us a few days later and we realized that he had some of the same feelings that we did. We asked him a few questions and he told us about a program at his church. So it was called Grief Share. And we call actually I called the next day and spoke to the person that was leading the group and he invited us to come. It was the halfway point. Actually a little bit past, he said this next meeting, isn't for you, but I want you to come. I don't want you to, to wait a week or two.
And so we showed up on Monday night.
How did you feel going into your first Grief Share meeting?
We were scared. We were worried we couldn't keep it together long enough to get through the two hour meeting. We came into the middle and it was a large group. There was probably 35 or 40 people there. Yeah. They all knew each other because they've been going for 10 weeks. We didn't know anybody. Nobody, we didn't recognize one face. And it was only the person that I spoke with on the phone and he came over and thanked us for coming. And he said, you guys are my heroes today for coming in.
I know how difficult it is to come in feeling like you ar into a group that's already started.
Were you able to speak at the first Grief Share meeting? Not very much. I think I was able to say that we lost Jordan and what his name was and Shelly could say her name. She couldn't, she couldn't talk about Jordan. So first meeting was very tough. Steve, I want to tell you that you and Shelly helped me and Debbie so much when we went to our first grief share meeting, you showed us that you could not only survive, but thrive through the grief process with elegance, eloquence, and grac.
This was so important for us to see a couple like you who had experienced the loss of their son and were able to not only help yourselves to the grief process, but we're actually able to help others. And again, we cannot thank you enough for the wonderful help you gave us. Do you go through our journey of grief
I remember that first night you and Debbie came in. I was glad that you showed up. I couldn't believe that you showed up because it was two weeks since Matt's passing, but I remember being there. And at that point, I don't think I could have ever foreseen us leading a grief group and, and trying to help others. We couldn't help ourselves. And that first few meetings, I struggled with several different things and they covered some of them.
We had missed several early meetings, which covered some of their early things in grief. So I was playing catch up the whole time, but, um, I struggled with the anger part. I struggled with the why question and, um, I don't think four years prior to you coming in, I could have envisioned us being where you saw us.
When and why did you decide to help others survive the grief process?
We were a ways down the road before we even thought we could help anybody. We went through the grief program two and a half times. And we're going to sign up for another one because you go through those 15 or 16 or 17 weeks as a group, you get to know some other people. It's a very safe environment. Everybody there has lost somebody. If you start crying, it's not a problem because they probably did it before you did. So it was a safe environment. And then we go eight weeks without the program.
And that's hard to make it through two months without some type of support mechanism. And we signed, we were going to sign it for a fourth time and they said, you can come back, but we'd like you to help facilitate. And we said, no, we said we can't do that. And they're like, why not? Let me sit. We can't help anybody. We can't help ourselves. It's hard enough to get up and come in here as a participant. How can we get up and help others? So we were part of the facilitator team.
We didn't lead, they had somebody they put with each of us and we learned, and we kept quiet and we add something when it came up and after about a year of that two different sessions, we started to feel more comfortable. And then by the end of that second year of helping to watch somebody come in where it's early grief, and you can't even say your loved one's name in front of the group to where those people ended up 16 weeks later.
It made us want to come back every single time to be a part of it because we know what that's like when you can't even say your loved one's name and to see the transformation, it actually feels good to see somebody else come through that and you get them out of the depths of their grief, where they can actually start to function again. It's a long time before you get that confidence back.
Where you can actually do something, go out and go to a meeting with new people that that's tough and it takes a while.
Steve, I want to thank you so much for sharing your story of the early components of the grief process and how you and Shelly were able to come out with hope and a desire to help others on their journey through grief. I cannot thank you enough for all the help that you've given me and Debbie with our journey through grief, you have been a guiding light, a friend, and a good role model for us to go from the early components of grief through the grief process.
To a point of hope and helping others. And again, I can't thank you enough for doing this.
Thank you, Marshall. We all need help.
I want to thank you so much for sharing with our listening audience, how you and Shelly dealt with their early components of the grief process. You have shown that although grief never ends there i always hope that can be achieved with love and kindness to yourself, your loved ones and other people. You can help deal with their grief journey. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. And we hope that the information we gave you today was informative and helpful.
We look forward to being with you during our next episode. Thank you so much and talk to you soon.
Thank you for joining us on Hope Thru Grief with your cohost Marshall Adler and Steve Smelski.
We hope our episode today was helpful and informative. Since we are not medical or mental health professionals. We cannot and will not provide any medical, psychological, or mental health advice. Therefore, if you or anyone, you know, requires medical or mental health treatment, please contact a medical or mental health professional immediately.