This is Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dorny.
Hi, Let's be clear listeners. I am so honored to be here today. My name is Drenda medlady, and you probably know me from the Bravo World, The Real Health Face in New York City, Ultimate Girls Trip, and of course now Traders, and I feel very honored to be hosting this episode of Let's Be Clear. I never had the opportunity to meet Shannon Dorty, but I know that
she was an incredible actress. I was a huge fan, as was many and I thought it was amazing the way she was able to talk about her journey with the battling cancer and share it and help other people that are going through something similar, any sort of you know,
death or grief or battling any kind of illness. And I thought, like so many people that have gone through this, it was important for me to come on and talk about my journey with dealing with the loss of someone you love through sickness and just talk about grief a little bit, and how do we manage grief and is grief something that we should talk about?
Is grief? Is grief a dirty word?
I felt a little bit like that after Richard passed, I felt like I was embarrassed or ashamed or kind of had to keep it to myself. And I really love the fact that when I was able to have a moment with Carol on the show and we both had this similar experience of losing a partner and a husband, that it just opened up such a beautiful conversation with the world, and I just thought the response was incredible. So for me, I believe grief is something that you
sadly have to become friends with. It's one friend that you're going to visit at some point in your life. No one gets away from it, the loss of a family member, were a partner, a pet, any loved ones.
Grief is gonna come to.
You one day and you're gonna have to deal take that journey and learn how to deal with it and talk about it and get comfortable with it and try to understand it, and if you're lucky, find others that you can share the experience with.
So I think that it's important.
In psychology, they talk about the five stages of briefing, denial, angle, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And I really do think, you know, I didn't do a ton of therapy after Richard passed. I did a lot of my therapy on the journey. While he was passing. I had a lot of very honest conversations with Richard, which I think is very important. I think the best thing you can do when you are in the midst of being and shepherding someone to the end of their life is that you have to be
uncomfortably honest with each other. You know, you can't let fear take over, and you can't let and you can't be in denial over the inevitable, because it gives both parties peace and being Richard's caretaker till the end, you know, I felt like I had a lot of closure and I did a lot of the work that I needed to do to then prepare myself for the grieving part
of him no longer being part of me. So I do think that when you are dealing with someone that's ill and go, you know, not going to make it, that you have to have some very honest conversations and it puts both parties at peace. And it really is a beautiful thing. Because I once told someone that I think, beside you know, being intimate with Richard physically, the most intimate thing I had with Richard was our conversations doing
his journey, you know, to the other side. So they were just so one on one, so intense, so real, with no outdoor outside noise. So I would urge anybody that is going through this process of dealing with someone or being with someone that's ill, and to converse with them, ask questions, talk about their wants and needs, talk about your wants and needs, you know, the caretaker. I would say, when someone's dying, you're kind of you know, when someone's
sick and dying, you get sick too. Because it's very intense. It's very intense, and not to be underrated. I think the most challenging stage was the not knowing when it was going to happen, knowing it was going to happen, understanding that my husband wasn't going to get better, but there was no timeline, so days and nights and weeks just kind of ran into each other. And what happens is because you're going through this, you don't have any time for the outside world because it's all consuming.
So your world gets very.
Small, gets very organized, gets very focused, and the only things I could focus on, we're getting up getting to Richard, taking care of him and getting back home and taking care of my daughter. And you know, I didn't have time for frivolity. I really didn't have time for fun. Not that it wasn't there, and not that people didn't reach out, but you get into such a mindset and such a focus to make sure that you can because
you never know when it's gonna happen. So that's very frustrating, I think for a caretaker, because each day is on repeat, rinch wash repeat, rinch wash repeat. So I thought this the journeying with him, you know, everybody gets very tired, and I don't think you should be embarrassed as a caretaker say I'm tired and I don't want to do this anymore, and and like when is this.
Going to happen? And I know that sounds terrible, but it's part of it.
You know, we want caretakers and we want people in grief to be one certain way. There's sort of a description about how you must be or what it must look like, or how you must react and when you must start dating, and there's not there's no rule book for this. You don't understand it till you're in it and you don't know how to deal with it till you're in it. And for each person it's an individual experience.
So that's what I would say about that. Here is the good news and the bad news about a major loss in your life. The bad news is very clear what it is. You lose someone you love it and for me it was really the first time besides grandparents and things that were sort of a natural step of a journey of becoming an adult. You know, you lose your grandparents, it's very sad, but you'd understand it and you move on.
But when you lose someone suddenly, and you lose someone you very deeply, you love, very deeply, it changes you forever. It's a scar, it's a definite scar, and you are like, wow, the world looks different now, like this really does happen. And you don't get a lot of time.
You know, they if they pass on a Thursday, your Thursday night is when your new life starts, your new world starts. And there's a lot of first after someone dies that you just are so jarring. Like when you wake up it's the first time you know that you wake up alone.
It's the first.
Time you realize you're not gonna have coffee with them again. It's the first time where you look at their clothes in the closet and realize they're never going to be warned again. It's the first time you're thinking about paying bills. Everything becomes a first because now it's just you. So I think that is really an amazing thing. I mean, and it takes a long time. Grief takes a long time.
I was to someone yesterday they said, you know, one of the biggest questions I get about grief is how long does it take?
Like when will I feel better? And my answer to that always is is that grief never goes away. It just doesn't. It's you know, it's so big.
In the beginning, it's so overwhelming, and it just like blocks out everything else. But over time, as you kind of do the obvious things of you know, rearranging how your living space and get start to go out more and meet new people. And I think a lot of times I found this that a lot of times people don't end up hanging around with the same people they
did before. Sometimes it's just too painful. You know, when you were once a couple, you're now as single and it's easier to just go out and sort of recreate yourself. You know, not that your family and your really close friends don't stay close, but you sort of create a new world and you start to slow. You have to
go inward before you go outward. It's almost like you have to become a plant that has to you know, recede themselves back in the soil, and you come out a different flower a little bit, and you you know, you start to have new experiences, new first new, first time going on a holiday together, and you start to realize it's not so bad, and you start to have big all kinds of people around you. And you know, for me, I started doing television and that opened up a big world.
So it's not that the grief went away.
It's that I started to get bigger and bigger, so the grief became a little less. But there are always trick rea moments, and you know, I have them a lot because I feel like I'm very connected. I mean, of course the holidays.
You always feel these trickery moments when you visit them where you think they're resting, you know, in the rest place. For me, I go visit Richard at his gravesite, or when you just have a moment with a smell or a song or something comes in there, the immediate hensity waves back into you for a moment. But each time that happens, it gets it goes from being overwhelmingly terrible
to a gift. And I did say to someone that, you know, grief is kind of a gift because you until you experienced grief and go through it, you know, you don't realize that you really were so connected to someone and you had this love so much for this person and this devotion, and you watched him journey through his whole life. You were privy to that moment in his life when.
He left this earth that you know, it's a beautiful gift to have to have had that, because without that much love and without that much devotion, and with that much knowledge of knowing that you know, things do come to an end, you can't be so appreciative. I'm so appreciative, I'm more. I'm not more, or I'm just as much appreciative of the life that I had with Richard and the love I had with Richard.
Like it was, it just was. It was an amazing thing.
So to experience this grief and to know it's because a byproduct of something incredibly beautiful, wouldn't I wouldn't trade it again. I was someone said you could do it all over again, but it wasn't Richard. You married someone else, but they lived. I'll be honest with you, I don't know. I'd probably do it all over again with Richard because he lives with me forever. Going back to like I said, the grief, I don't think ever really goes away. You know,
it doesn't work like that. It's a it's like love doesn't ever go away. Love is just forever, right, So grief doesn't go away. But I think, you know, there's a lot of weirdness around grief. There's a lot of uncomfortableness for people. I don't know if it's if it taps into their mortality. So you know, a lot of people try to just work through it. They try to just like not deal with it by dealing with it.
And what I mean by that talking about it, feeling it, sharing it, and the people around you that aren't willing to journey with you, to do that as much as they would journey with you in a love affair, they have to journey with you here, and it's a really great time in your life to realize who really is part of your tribe, who really loves you, who really is going to stick by you, because you do have to journey through it.
You don't get over it.
It's not like a you know, a headache or a broken ankle.
It's part of the fabric of your life.
Now. If your life is a quilt and there's all kinds of different patches in the quilt, you know, there's a happy patch in the patch where you had a daughter, and then the pature you got married about you got divorced, the patch for this happened in this patch of good colors and bad colors and happy colors and sad colors. This becomes one of the patches. And you have to honor that part of your quilt because it's going to be there forever and it makes up who you are now.
So if people don't accept that, and people won't journey with you through it and listen and let you talk about it as many times as you want to, and they really aren't part of your quilt. I can tell
you that for a fact. When somebody said to me once, I'm so sick and tired of herring about Richard, and I chose to never speak to that person again, not just for the reason that they said it and it really pissed me off, but because I just thought it was the most horrifically insensitive thing, because it almost was said to shame the person, and you're already sensitive to it because you're now in this unique group called the grievers Club that you know, the secret society that I
thought it was very very cool when they said this, So if anyone doesn't feel like they will sit and chat with you and help you with the healing process where you get through it and you really.
Can't have them in your life.
I think that the grieving process changes everybody for the better, and I think that's because you realize that so few things are important, so few things are worth you getting upset about, that life is really precious, and that you get to really when you have suffered loss, you really get to understand that it's real, like everybody is going to pass away one day. There's there gonna be a day you wake up with one you love is not going to be there. And if you know this, you
tend to be more compassionate forgiving understanding. It's very humanizing to go through loss and go through grief, and you just don't waste your time dealing with a lot of bullshit because in that split second when that person leaves you, there's no going back, so.
You better make sure all that. I always say.
That's why every single day I try to call my parents, ever redebting, because if I did call them and the next morning something happened, because I know that could happen. I always leave things on a good note with people. I try to always leave things on a good note with it. I love you, I try to acknowledge people. I try to see people and see the world because you never know, and grief lets you know that you are on a timeline and everybody around you is on
a timeline. So I think there's a much bigger appreciation for life and love and things and experiences and seasons. I mean, every time a season comes, I think, oh, I'm so lucky to see this fall.
Look at that another Christmas. Oh my god, spring is here again, and the flowers are coming up, the rebirth of the flowers. So I think you get that bit of appreciativeness being a caretaker. I think I'm a natural candidate for being a caretaker, So when I took down
the rule of being the caretaker came very naturally. But what it did in the situation of being a caretaker for Richard was that now that my parents are older, or now that there's situations where I have to deal with my parents who are elderly, once you've gone through it, the panic is gone, because the fear is the fear of the unknown is gone. And I think it's made me more calm about dealing with situations and not being afraid to deal with the situations, being very honest about them.
I think that a lot of people go into situations and they only want to hear the positiveness of it.
But I think when you've gone, you've journeyed with someone until they move on to the next world, is that you you get very realistic very fast, because you're put in a position to make decisions that are sometimes difficult, to witness things that are very difficult, and you know, I think when you're once you've been a caretaker, you become much more realistic about life and realistic about expectations.
So and I just think it makes you a little more sensitive, you know, makes you much more sensitive to and that's everyone at the end of the day is the same. Like we go through life thinking, you know, this one's this and this one's that, but that at the end of the day, when it really comes to the end, we're really just all the same. And usually it's a you know, I thought, I remember thinking about Richard at the end.
You know, he's in that backless pair of pajamas. And I said to the person before they after he'd passed, I said, can we just keep his ring on for the night, and they said, nope, you can't even keep your wedding ring on. I thought, that's really it. We come in one way and we leave the same way, So, you know, makes you very real, right I say, I would say one hundred percent that I appreciate life more because of what I went through. It's made me less fearful.
It's made me much more aware of what this body really is, that it's just a body.
I'm not afraid. I'm not even so afraid of my I used to think when I was younger a person, Oh my god, I could never deal with my parents leeping. I could never deal with it. But now I know that they don't leave. I know that this is just a like a plant, like I'm I'm in love with my parents' soul.
I'm in love with their hearts. They have instilled such love in me. I'm in love with Richard and his soul.
Richard is just with me now in a different form, and I have access to them all the time now, So yes, it has has changed me. I don't I don't think that they are stuck in some graveyard. I don't think that they are stuck. I think they're everywhere now. And you have this incredible ability to cumulatively call on them.
You can call on them. I call them my great grandparents.
I call them, you know, I can call it anyone now because I know that I this is the body just leaves, so we forever, forever more have their love and you know, and their.
Soul is around me somewhere.
So and also I know it sounds corny, but I know one day that they'll come get me, like all that fear will happen. I'm gonna feel it's gonna I know someone's gonna come get me. If it's Richard, my parents, my grandparents, all of them together, my past dogs. I'm sure they'll all come, I'm sure. Like in life where I'm surrounded by people, I really believe it will be the same with death. They'll just come and get me and say, come on and join the party. You know,
cocktails a seven. You gotta come with us now. And that makes me. That puts me at ease.
See, lots of people can't let go of material things because they have a sentimental attachment. I don't struggle with that. I don't. I don't.
I'm not a person that really gets overly attached to sentimental things. You know, maybe a few specific things, like I have a picture of Richard that I keep in my bedroom here in New York. And but I don't believe that if God forbid something happen like the la fires and all that, you wouldn't I would feel bad. But I think all you need is right here, is in your heart. It's great to have sentimental things. They serve as reminders. But I'm not someone that gets really
stuck on all that stuff. I don't get beholden to them. You know, I just lost something recently, very important, and I just one day woke up and said, it's just a thing, you know, I can't get to There's so much more that I could lose that's so much more important. And I always think when you lose something, you should always say, you know, I hope someone really fantastic found it and has it and needs it more than I needed it, because.
I have to. I do believe in that. I think that life.
I do believe that you should jump into life like a swimming pool, like my swimming pool in the Berkshires. I think that it's very important that you should take on life, jump in feet first, experience it. Don't say no, because when you've been through this and you when you do lose someone you love and you do go through this period of brief and stuff, you realize the old saying's true, life is short and you should be be
open and not fearful. You should be open to new experiences and new people and just jump into that cold water feet first. Come from a place of yes, you never know who you're gonna meet. Don't be too hung up about what happened yesterday. Certainly, don't get too hung up of what was going to happen tomorrow, because God knows that could all change in a second, and just embrace this beautiful short time that we have on earth.
Yeah, like jumping into too a cold pool feet first.
So I want to just say a couple other things that I want to read, something that I send to everybody that.
Stuff yourself. I just want to say, give yourself for those of you that are.
Going through the process and of battling with an illness, for those of you taking care of someone that's battling, for those of you that have lost someone you know, be very kind to yourself. Surround yourself with really good people. Stay healthy, because I think there's a tendency to get for the caretaker, it's a tendency to get sick and get tired out.
Make sure you take care of yourself. Make still sure you still do stuff for yourself, Make sure you get sleep, Try to be engaged with your family. For those that have suffered lost and are going through grief, be gentle with yourself because it takes a minute and there's no right or wrong way. You know, feel free to cry, Feel free to talk to them, Feel free to be angry if you need to, if you want to, if you feel it's important for you, go speak to a professional.
I always think that's great. Surround yourself by loving people. Keep your life. You know, it's kind of simple for a while while you're refiguring out this new thing called a life without this person. But most of all, be kind to yourself and allow yourself to go through the process. And I promise you, I promise you it does. It's like it's a wild thing. You know, it's like a wild storm that's so crazy, and you just can't see through the storm and you don't know which way to turn,
and you can't see life behind it. And then you know, you wake up and the storm is stopped, and maybe it's still raining. But then you wake up and then there's no rain, and then you wake up and you know it's a little bit sunny. And then you wake up and it's maybe even a lot of bit sunny, and you find yourself. I remember about six four months after Richard passed, I was somewhere I would say this
to someone, allow yourself to do this. I was somewhere and I ran into someone on the street and they told me something and I started laughing, and I remember thinking, you can't bus like that's not part of the thing anymore, Like you've got to and you can you can start laughing and loving and dating and doing whatever you want to do or need to do to get through this grief. And I don't care if it's a day later, a week later, a month later, a year later. This is
your journey. It's no one else's business. No one should have an opinion about it unless they are there to shepherd you through the whole thing. They can't make decisions about who you want to see, who you want to date. Just do whatever it takes to make you happy and get through it because people will have a lot of opinion with very little application.
So that's don't want to say about that. But I just want to read this poem now.
I this palm I haven't actually laminated up in the Berkshire in cards, and I send it to people and you can use it or not use it. But let's let me just say that it's one of my favorite poems ever. Someone gave it to me after Richard passed, actually one of Richard's friend's oldest friends in Washington. It's by Henry Scott holland was written in eighteen forty seven. Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened.
Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we live so fondly together is untouched and unchanged. Whatever we were to each other that we are still are. Call me by my old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference in your tone, where no furforced air, solemnity or sorrow, as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile,
think of me, Pray for me. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of the shadow upon it. Life means all it is ever meant to each of us. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unspoken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident.
Why should I be out of your mind because I am out of your sight. I am but here waiting for you for an interval, somewhere very now near, just round the corner in the other room, and all as well. So that's what I think.
Everyone I loved, everyone I lost, They're just around the corner in the other room. And that's all I want to say about that. Thank you for having me today. It was such an honor to be here to all the let's be clear listeners, stay strong and stay healthy and stay loving.
I'm during the methi and that's what I have to say about that. M M