From Heartbreak To Wholeness With Kristine Carlson

Kristine Carlson’s husband was on a routine business trip when he died on a flight. The author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, Dr. Richard Carlson was—and still is—remembered in very public ways. This week, Kristine and I are talking about not getting the luxury of saying goodbye, dealing with the fear of being sucked under by sorrow, and the wild, impossible interaction Kristine and her daughters had on a flight years after her husband’s death.

Transcript

Grief Growers,

I'm honored to introduce you today to Christine Carlson,

Who has a remarkable story about the loss of her husband,

But then so much more beyond that.

So Christine,

Welcome to the show.

And if you could start us off with your lost story.

Thank you,

Shelby.

Yeah,

About almost 13 years ago now,

My late husband,

Dr.

Richard Carlson,

Best known for his work and his best-selling series,

The Don't Sweat the Small Stuff book series,

Got on a flight.

He was promoting his latest book.

He got on a flight.

It was a routine day of travel for him.

And on the descent of that flight,

He died suddenly from a pulmonary embolism at 45 years old.

And I was 43 at the time,

And our daughters were in high school.

And that's really the beginning of what I call my journey from heartbreak to wholeness.

I remember watching your TED Talk and hearing you tell this story for the first time and just the sheer shock of it,

The finding out of the news and the this can't be possible the way that that's happened.

I wonder if you can speak a little more to this idea of holy crap that was unexpected,

Because I think so many people who are listening have lost loved ones in ways where they've gotten the,

I don't know if I want to phrase it this way,

But the honor and the privilege of watching somebody slip away slowly,

They know it's coming.

And then there's the total opposite of that where it just happens literally in the blink of an eye.

You know,

Yeah,

It was,

I think in midlife,

We take for granted that we have a long life ahead of us.

And I certainly was in that place myself.

I didn't realize that anything was wrong with Richard,

Per se.

He had a back issue,

But he wasn't really acting super sick or anything.

And,

You know,

I think that kind of sudden loss,

It feels a lot like having your life just stop suddenly and just one day you're perfectly living this perfectly normal life that you know,

And the next moment it's just,

It's gone.

And it's like the rug is completely pulled out from under your feet and you have a really hard time finding the ground because for one thing,

For me,

You know,

Richard was traveling.

I never got to see him again.

And so he left the house the day before and I,

We never saw him again and we didn't get have the luxury of really saying goodbye.

And that's really hard.

That's a hard thing to reconcile.

It's traumatic.

So,

You know,

Loss in and of itself is traumatic,

But sudden loss is really true trauma.

And,

You know,

And my kids and I have had a healing journey and it's the journey that many people have in life,

You know,

And we all have to go through our losses.

We all will go through our losses.

And,

You know,

Sudden loss is different in the sense that,

You know,

Yeah,

You don't have that luxury of your goodbyes.

And that's,

That's tough because we're talking about,

You know,

For me,

It was my life partner,

My best friend,

The relationship that meant everything to me.

And we had been together for 25 years and I'd known him since I was 18 years old.

So it was,

And it was really traumatic for my daughters as well.

I'm wondering if this is safe or okay territory for you,

If we can delve into how you broke the news to them.

I'm immediately drawing some parallels in your story with Sheryl Sandberg's of option B and the CEO of Facebook whose husband died unexpectedly while they were on a vacation together.

And then she came,

She flew home alone and had to break the news to her kids.

And they were younger than your kids were,

But there's,

I mean,

Like we spoke about before we got on the mic,

Everybody comes back in different ways,

But the experience of grief is universal.

And at some point we're telling somebody,

We're breaking the news to somebody for the very first time.

Yeah,

Well,

And to Richard's parents who were both alive too,

You know,

And my parents and my siblings and everyone.

But to my kids,

Yeah,

It was,

It was horrible.

It was,

It was absolutely the most horrible part of the journey for me was to tell them that they,

You know,

Had lost their father.

And all I could say to them was that daddy's love is so big that no matter what,

You're going to feel him forever.

And I just,

You know,

They were 14 and 17 at the time and I just told them that something happened and on the flight and dad died and,

And you know,

I mean those moments,

We just all know,

You know,

They're,

They're just horrific.

And even to talk about it now,

It just,

It brings so much sadness to my heart because of course,

While I suffered,

Um,

Watching my kids suffer was probably the worst part of my loss was to know that my grandkids and my children were not going to have this amazing man as their father in life anymore.

But yet we have found ways in our journey to carry Richard forward.

And I feel like my grandkids ask about him all the time.

I have five grandkids now and they ask about him all the time.

And even the firstborn,

He knew him,

I don't know how,

But he knew him and he,

From the time he could talk,

He would see things around my house where I had left them and he would say,

That's pop pops.

And nobody ever told him,

You know,

Nobody ever told him that was grandpa.

So he just called him pop pop and he just knew.

So there's a way in which I feel like,

Um,

Richard's spirit has been very,

Very present and,

And I was right.

His love is so big and it's,

It's so big that it transcends the boundaries of time and space and,

And he's very present.

I think the word that came to me just now is inexplicable.

Like that's just inexplicable and so,

So cool.

And I know this is not,

This is a question that I grapple with a lot and one that we visit in bits and pieces on coming back.

So I'm,

I don't expect like a fractional answer when I ask this question,

But what piece of these,

These visits or these circumstances or synchronicities do you believe are them actually happening and how much of it is us willing them to happen or inviting them to happen?

Well,

I think,

Um,

Honestly,

Shelby,

I feel like,

Um,

Grace,

Which I considered divine love,

Um,

Is really present for us.

And the more that we surrender to the circumstances of what is and have less resistance to our grief and we allow our grief to be present,

We are present with our grief,

Especially in those times.

Um,

Is when I think back the early years,

You know,

Where I was in very deep grief and while I was very functional,

I was still living with very deep grief.

And I think of that as,

As divine love.

I think of it as grace and I think there's definitely an invitation that has to happen inside of us.

We have to be open to the signs of spirit,

Of grace,

Of love.

And when we're open to them,

We see them and they show up.

And that's,

That's really half the magic of life is to be open to receiving,

Um,

These synchronicities and these seeming coincidences that happen,

But you have to be awake for them,

Don't you?

I mean,

You have to be able to,

Um,

Put meaning,

You know,

And I always say that I don't think that life happens for a reason.

I believe that we as human beings find the reason why things happen and that we have to understand that this human journey we're on is not just a joy ride.

The human journey we're on is about being alive and being alive means that we feel joy and we feel sorrow.

And that's just,

That's part of the human experience.

That's part of it.

And part of it that as human beings,

You know,

We don't,

We don't want the sorrow part.

Nobody wants it.

But when it shows up,

I mean,

I think the more that you can embrace it and let it,

Um,

Let yourself be in it,

The more you're going to,

The easier you're going to get out of it.

What does embracing sorrow then look like for you?

Like how does that show up in your world?

Well,

For me,

It just,

It means a lot of surrender,

You know,

A lot of surrender to the feelings that show up and to not push them aside,

Not try and,

Um,

Not try and like busy myself through those feelings,

But to just allow myself to feel them once they're a feeling,

Just allow myself to feel them.

Allow myself my tears,

Allow myself laughter,

Allow myself any feeling I have.

If I feel anger,

Allow myself to yell and scream at the mirror,

The pillow,

You know,

I mean,

It doesn't matter what feeling it is,

Whether it's sorrow or any kind of feeling.

I think the more that we can allow ourselves to feel it,

The more that we will ultimately heal from it and allow it to mold and shape us into a better version of ourselves.

And I think denying your feelings is really denying one of the fundamental aspects of what it means to really be alive.

I wonder,

This question just popped in the front of my brain.

I have no idea where this came from,

But what would you say to somebody who feels like they need to deny their feelings in order to stay alive?

Well,

I'd say a couple of things.

I'd say that I think children feel that way a lot and teens feel that way a lot.

And I think it's because we're taught not to feel a lot of our culture.

And many cultures teach us that feelings aren't safe.

They make us vulnerable.

Showing your feelings makes you weak.

There's all sorts of societal norms that come into play where our feelings are concerned.

But the thing is,

I don't believe that feelings once they're inside of you,

Or once you feel them,

If you don't acknowledge them or you try to deny them,

I feel like they just stay or they turn into something else.

So I always think that if you're angry and you don't acknowledge your anger,

Then anger can turn to depression.

If you're sad and you don't allow for your sadness,

Then sadness can turn into anger.

And I never think of being in grief as being depressed.

I think of being in grief as being extremely expressed.

And I think when you can reach that level of awareness that your feelings are going to pass,

They pass like the weather.

And if you just allow yourself to be in your feelings,

If you watch children,

For example,

Children are the greatest examples of what it means to feel and then to move on very quickly once they feel their feelings.

You can see a child having a tantrum one moment and then the very next moment they're happy as can be and they're giggling.

So as adults,

We learned that it's not safe to be in our feelings.

We learned it's not safe to express our feelings.

And so therefore our feelings get kind of shoved under the rug and they turn into symptomatic things that we do to deny them and to numb out to them.

And I just think sometimes when you get really mature and you get really a deeper understanding,

You start to realize that feelings do go away and they change and they're constantly changing.

So I think that the fear of being sucked under and not being able to get air,

I think that's what most people are afraid of when they don't want to acknowledge their sorrow is they feel like if they go into it,

They're never going to come out.

But that's just simply not how it works physiologically and emotionally and mentally.

If you allow yourself to express it,

It does come out and it shifts and changes as it's meant to shift and change.

I think you hit the nail on the head that a big fear for people is like,

Once I go in,

There's no coming out and or the severity of this is so big,

It will break me.

Like I will become changed as a result of this.

And I mean,

In my world,

That's entirely possible and you will be changed.

And that's true.

I mean,

Nobody is ever the same after they go through loss.

They are changed and you are changed forever,

But it doesn't have to be a bitter change and it doesn't have to be a negative change.

I mean,

I look at the woman I am today and I'm so much more myself since I've been through a great loss than I ever knew how to be before I went through my loss.

And it's because I just allowed for this change to happen and I didn't resist it.

I didn't fight it.

I just stayed in it as long as I needed to in order to release it.

And I was just working with a woman on one of my retreats recently.

I had a retreat at the coast that I do three times a year and it's called What Now?

And this woman had that same fear and here she was five years into her grief.

And she realized at the retreat that she thought she was pretty good,

But she realized,

No,

She really hadn't allowed herself to feel her feelings.

And so I said,

You know,

What do you think is going to happen if you allow yourself to cry?

And she just said,

If I allow myself to cry,

I'm never going to stop crying.

And I said,

Well,

If you don't allow yourself to cry,

You're always going to feel like crying.

And so I said,

You know,

You've got,

You really have,

If you believe both of those things are true,

Then,

You know,

You absolutely must allow yourself to cry these tears out in small doses and release them.

And I said,

It's an emptying process and it's an emptying process that will allow your whole body to feel better.

And besides that,

You know,

I don't know if y'all are aware,

But if you cry tears of grief,

It's like the science of it says it's like an anti-aging formula on your face.

So different than,

Than tears of like just any other kinds of tears,

But grief tears,

They like have some chemicals in them that just like you make you look young.

That's reason enough for me to have a good cry now and then.

That's one of my favorite scientific studies that I've seen is,

Is looking at tears under a microscope and seeing the different structures of like happiness tears and angry tears and stress tears and grief tears.

And they're all different from each other,

Which I,

I never knew.

And I thought that was just really cool.

So that the anti-aging proper,

That's new information to me.

So that's actually really neat.

It's also like an immune system booster too.

Like really when you cry,

You boost your immune system.

And I really believe that's because you're,

You know,

You're rewarding your body rewards you for doing things that are healthy and good for it.

And crying is healthy.

It's very,

Very healthy.

And I tried to show these women at this retreat that crying is actually an act of strength.

It's not an act of weakness.

It takes courage to step into your grief,

Tremendous courage and tremendous bravery.

And in that sense,

When you step into your grief and walk that path,

You are the hero.

You really are the hero of your own journey.

I've heard two things about tears in my life.

The first one came from my grief recovery instructor who said that it's physiologically impossible for anyone to cry forever.

There are people who have like the hiccups for two or three years and they end up being in the Guinness Book of Records.

She's like,

There's not a Guinness Book of Records for crying.

There just isn't.

And that was really helpful being trained for the first time as somebody who was about to work with grieving people because I think there's a perception of the work that I do and probably the work that you do too is that we just sit in rooms full of people who are crying all the time and somehow that's exhausting.

I'm like,

No,

It's just A,

When people cry,

They're releasing energy and B,

It's impossible for them to do it forever.

There's so many other things that happen when we're talking about grief.

There's yelling,

There's whispering,

There's talking,

There's even laughing sometimes.

I want to circle back to something you were talking about earlier,

Just kind of as you were describing continuing to feel your husband around you when you were using these words of like spirit and grace and divine love and I'm wondering where that came from.

Like if it's something you were raised with and like knew to immediately expect upon his death or if it's something you kind of uncovered over time.

What a great question.

You know,

I was raised in a very evangelical Christian home,

So it isn't what I was raised with.

But you know,

I have to say that Richard and I really embarked on a spiritual journey together in college.

So we were very young when we learned how to meditate.

We really started visiting a guru in India,

Satya Sai Baba and studying that guru.

We studied a lot of philosophy,

A lot of religions.

And you know,

Honestly,

Shelby,

I've just kind of come up with the language that works for my own spiritual awareness now and it also feels very non-secular,

Very all-encompassing,

Very unifying.

I don't believe that God ever intended us to choose one religion to take us to God.

I believe that God is universal.

It's universal love.

He's divine love.

She's divine love.

God is an energy that is present in all of us.

And when I speak of grace,

I speak of divine love is grace to me.

Spirit is also grace.

So you know,

These are just interchangeable words that I believe that people can relate to on a universal level so that you're not,

You know,

One of the things that was really interesting about the Don't Spout the Small Stuff books is that so many times you and Richard would do a book signing or something and there'd be a Christian that would come up and they would say,

Oh my God,

You must be a Christian.

They would have had every chapter labeled with a hundred different verses in it from the Bible.

And then he'd go to another book signing and a Buddhist would come up and say,

Oh my God,

You must have been a Buddhist,

You know.

And the thing is when you find a way to speak about love and divine love,

I feel like what you're talking about is God,

The ever present energy of source which even in the Bible it says that God is in every living thing.

So when we talk in these terms,

It's a way of speaking universally to people so that you're not like shutting somebody down to your deeper message based on just the kind of language that you decide to speak because words are very defining sometimes.

And as an author and as having been a speaker and author for many,

Many,

Many years,

I feel like I've learned that you should probably keep your political beliefs to yourself,

Chris.

That's what I tell myself.

And you need to speak to people in a way that speaks to their hearts,

In a way that resonates with their hearts.

And so that's why I use that kind of language.

I think that makes a lot of sense.

And I like how it was this kind of a roundabout journey to get there as opposed to this is just what I learned,

So I think I'll keep it because grief has this tendency to make us question everything we were raised with,

Learned from others,

Tried to teach ourselves.

And so something kind of phenomenal happens,

I think at least my own experience where after loss,

There's like this reckoning with everything that we knew before and we have to decide if it still fits.

And if it fits,

It really fits in the aftermath because you've chosen it.

Yeah,

I agree with that.

I agree with that.

And I think sometimes even after we heal,

We come back to things.

I was just talking with a widow recently and she really went through a deep transformation and awakening and she had been Catholic.

And in her innocence,

She thought that she had to choose sort of the new path of meditation and maybe a more like I would say more Hindu Buddhist path and leave everything that she'd ever learned or felt in her relationship with God behind.

And I said to her,

I was like,

Mary,

You're just at a place where you're integrating all of it.

And if you feel like praying again,

Then pray and just pray in a way that feels really right to you now and pray to the same feeling that you had when you're a child and you felt this deep relationship with God.

You don't have to throw one out for another.

You just need to find a way in your own expression of what it means to be a spiritual being in a human form,

Find your own way through that.

And certainly like what you said,

Shelby,

Is very true.

In the whole mass of grief,

I mean,

You definitely throw some things out for a while and then you come back and sometimes there are things you just don't ever own again.

And that's perfectly okay because like we said earlier,

You're a changed person and you are going to be a changed person.

And that's how everyone responds to loss.

Nobody's the same after loss,

Not even Sheryl Sandberg.

You're right.

Hence the book,

Hence many other things after that.

I want to just say that really quickly,

That just totally hit me in my core,

What you said about,

If you want to still do these things,

You can.

And I wrote down as you were speaking,

We don't have to abandon who we were pre-grief.

And I think a lot of people think that there's my old life,

There's my new life,

Because I can never go back to life with the person.

I could never go back to my old self.

And in some bits that's true,

But at the same time,

I think there are threads of continuity.

There are practices that we like.

There are clothes that we still like to wear that are from that pre-grief world and realm.

And there's such a temptation.

I don't know whether it's out of anger or just severity or shock that there's this huge temptation to just throw the whole thing out and start totally over.

Yeah.

Well,

I think you have to give yourself permission,

Don't you?

To be who you are and allow that being to embrace your past,

Just like you would have allowed your being to embrace your past if you hadn't gone through this loss.

You know what I mean?

Past is an important part of who you are.

You don't have to completely throw it out.

And yet it's too painful for any of us to live in our past when we've gone through deep loss.

You just can't.

I can't.

I mean,

I still can't live in my memories too much.

I can visit my memories much more now than I could the first couple of years.

I couldn't even visit my memories or my future to the point at which I was afraid I was going to forget.

And that probably was one of my biggest fears was that I would forget this just joyful,

Happy,

Amazing,

Miraculous time of my life with the man I loved.

And yet when I healed,

I didn't forget.

When I healed,

It all came flooding back to me with the most amazing gratitude.

And that's when I really knew that I was healed and healing was that I could feel grateful for all that I have loved and I'm grateful for all of it,

Even the loss.

This so echoes another sentiment from a guest on the show,

I believe Sarah Nannan,

Who came on just a few episodes ago.

And she talked about having this feeling of being a child and baking cookies with her grandmother.

And that feeling of that golden,

Joyful nostalgia is now what comes rushing back when she thinks of her husband who died.

And I express this like almost like a jealousy or like a hope of like,

Maybe one day I'll get to that place,

But there's still things that are so painful that I don't have gingerbread feelings about them.

But at the same time,

I think this is so indicative of,

I know I'm in a good place.

I don't know what the word,

The descriptor you would use,

A stable place,

A solid place,

When I can look back and kind of conjure those feelings or be grateful for them.

And even since she said that,

Just even in the few weeks since she's come on the show,

I've looked back at my life and I've like,

I had my mom for 21 years.

I have never done anything else for 21 years of my life with the exception of my relationship with my dad.

That's it.

That's the only person relationship,

Job alignment that I've had in my life that's gone on for that long.

And so to see it through that lens,

As opposed to like,

In my early teens and 20s,

Switching jobs every year,

Like moving apartments every two or three years,

Like nothing seems long.

And then to put that in the lens of I got to spend 21 whole years with my mom is pretty radical.

Yeah,

That's beautiful.

It's a great way to frame it.

And it speaks of your healing that you can see it that way now.

I think I want to pivot in a totally different direction because you kind of have unique circumstances of losing a husband who was in some ways in the public eye through his books,

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff.

And so I wonder what your experience of loss or grief was like hearing from people who were influenced by his work,

Or if that was a reality at all,

If it's something you kept kind of quiet,

Or if it's something that you announced to the world and are continuing to make a part of his legacy.

Like how are you incorporating his death into his body of work?

Well,

That's,

That's a great question.

You know,

Right in the beginning of the first year I published a letter that Richard had written to me on our 18th wedding anniversary,

Answering the question,

If you had an hour to live and could make one phone call,

Who would it be to what would you say and why are you waiting?

And that was a question posed by Steven Levine in his book A Year to Live.

Richard was a big Steven Levine fan,

And Steven was a friend to him and to us.

And,

You know,

That letter was so beautiful.

It was a tribute to our lives and to our love and also to Richard,

And what really mattered to him.

And so I decided to publish that back as a little book in honor of him and with my response in it.

You know,

I Richard at the time of his death,

I don't know if you're aware of this,

But he was really considered the Western guru of happiness.

So he was very much in the public eye.

He was had a phenomenal,

You know,

Best selling series over at the time of his death.

I mean,

I don't know,

15 million copies of his book had already been sold.

And there's been almost 30 million sold since his death.

So,

You know,

It's,

It's been a phenomenal series and he's been touted by so many leaders in the industry and just so many people who are influencers today as being the person that really set them on their track.

Like he was a real pioneer,

Speaking of things in positive psychology and stuff that people just really weren't speaking of,

You know,

25,

30 years ago.

So that said,

It was pretty hard in the beginning because our community,

Especially the Bay Area,

You know,

The day of his memorial service,

Even though it was private,

There were 700 people there.

Only 200 of them were invited.

The roads all over the Bay Area,

People had signs out in front of their home.

Richard Carlson,

Rest in peace.

We love Richard Carlson.

Don't sweat the small stuff.

You know,

And I would always get,

People would see me and they would tell me their story of how they felt when they heard the news,

You know?

And at that time,

I mean,

It was pretty hard because,

You know,

I mean,

I was like,

I wanted to say,

Well,

I wanted to be,

You know,

In my heart.

I wasn't,

I was,

I was,

You know,

Feeling very violated by that,

You know,

Very much like,

I'm sorry,

But you couldn't have been as shocked as I was,

You know?

And that's kind of,

That's kind of a little bit how it is when you have somebody who's very public,

You know,

You're,

You're a little bit,

You're in a lot of a fishbowl in your grief and people are watching you and looking at you and you can't really go places that you usually go because you're going to bump into people that knew him and knew you and knew you together.

And so it's very much,

For me,

It was a matter of just isolating myself for a little while until I got stronger.

And,

And then just,

You know,

And trying to stay compassionate,

You know,

There was a time where I wasn't very compassionate with people.

I got mad when they would say things to me that were trite sayings,

You know,

And,

And I would get,

I would get mad,

You know,

Like,

Well,

I would be like,

What do you mean loss?

I'm sorry for your loss.

I didn't lose my car keys.

I mean,

My husband died,

You know,

I,

My,

My life is annihilated.

I'm like,

You know,

And these are the things that would come out of my mouth.

And of course,

As I've come back,

I realized people don't know what to say.

And they're just trying to speak from their heart.

And prior to my loss,

I probably said some things like that too.

So,

You know,

That's kind of what it was like it was,

It was hard for my kids,

You know,

In the sense of,

You know,

They really felt going back to school,

They were in a fishbowl with people watching them when wondering how they were doing it.

And,

And you gotta,

You know,

You have to,

He meant something deeper to a lot of people.

And,

You know,

The beautiful part of that also was the letters that were pouring from all over the world.

I mean,

Our website actually crashed because it,

It had too much traffic on it.

It was like hundreds of thousands of people were visiting our website.

And,

And,

You know,

The beauty of being prayed for like that is you feel the power of that prayer.

And I really did I,

I felt the uplifting power of that prayer.

And to this day,

I still get letters from people that are just shocked that he's passed away because they just read his book.

It's impacted them greatly.

And they go to the website to find out how they can write him a letter and then they find out he's gone.

They just can't believe it.

You know,

They're just stunned.

So that's kind of what it's like.

I want to thank you for sharing that with us because I think it's kind of like it's like you choose between the lesser of two evils,

But they're both not really beneficial.

There's on one hand,

There's people who've lost loved ones who are just known to them.

They're immediate friends and family,

Their workplaces,

Like they're not public figures in their own right.

And there's this dismay that like,

Why hasn't the world just stopped for this because my world has stopped.

And then there's the other side of it where there are celebrity death and deaths and known figures deaths.

And all of a sudden the whole world is acknowledging it.

It's like,

I wish all of this would just go away because everything's a reminder.

And so it's like,

There's no,

There's no winning it feels like.

And yet there are,

I don't want to say positives necessarily,

But there are bright spots in both,

Whether you're being constantly reminded of his legacy as a public figure and someone who's inspired a lot of people or on the other hand,

You kind of get a lot more of that internal solitude and space away from the public eye if your person was not somebody who was famous.

So I appreciate that perspective because it's not something,

I don't think it's something we've shared before here on coming back is this perspective of,

Yeah,

He was real famous and then he died.

And then there's a ripple effect from that.

Yeah,

Very loved,

Like deeply loved.

That was,

It was beautiful,

You know,

But nobody loved him like his family did.

You know what I mean?

Like,

So it's,

It's still,

It's a very personal loss even though it's very public.

So now I want to tilt and shift into your book,

Which has this line in there called,

That says from heartbreak to wholeness.

And I'm wondering how it is that you define or are starting to define wholeness for yourself as it relates to heartbreak,

Because I think there's this myth and grief of your grieving and then you're fixed.

And,

And I don't sense that your book and your work is anything like that at all.

No,

No.

Yeah.

I mean,

I feel like,

I feel like,

Well,

Grief changes its sting,

You know,

Like my daughter,

Jazz said it so beautifully once I asked her how she was feeling about her dad,

That she still miss him.

And,

You know,

She said it so just so wisely.

She said,

Mom,

I don't miss dad any less than I ever have,

But I'm used to what it feels like to miss him now.

And I think that's profound and I really impacted me in the way I knew I felt,

You know.

So here's what I think about wholeness,

You know,

For me,

Wholeness meant that I got to this place in my life where I really began to step onto my journey in the sense of really felt the ground again.

Started to realize that I had my own mission,

My own work to share with the world,

My own message to share,

Had really walked the hero's path back to joy,

Allowing my grief to take me on that path,

Allowing my grief to shape me and to make me better,

Not bitter,

And allowed my grief to really absolutely like Kahlil Gibran says to your joy is your greatest sorrow unmasked.

And that really resonated with me as a true seed of hope in my grief.

I mean,

I read that over and over again and knew that based on everything I ever learned that as I unmasked,

I hoped that as I allowed my grief,

My sorrow to unmask me that I would return to true joy.

And certainly that's what has happened.

And so wholeness to me,

Shelby,

Means that I am having this amazing love affair with my life.

And it's like,

I feel like I'm so in love with life itself that after my loss,

Everything just,

It's like the whole,

I could see the sky in different ways.

I could notice and feel trees in ways that I hadn't noticed and felt trees my whole life,

Even though I grew up in Oregon.

I just felt my life and felt everything so much more deeply.

I'm eternally more present than I ever was,

Even though I knew and I studied presence and I meditated my whole youth.

I still struggled with being really present,

But I know how to be really present in this life now.

And I really feel like that's what wholeness means to me.

It means fully integrated.

I think my journey was very much about discovering who I am as a woman alone and on my own.

I have had lovers and I have had healing companions and I've been in love since my husband died,

But I've never ever had partnership again and I've not even come close to that.

And part of that is because I think that my journey,

My individual journey has been about learning how to embrace life on my own and really be this very truly very feminine woman that my husband very much allowed me to be in the world and also carry on for him and have this full on career and make a hundred thousand decisions all the time that he might have made that really have helped me integrate my masculine and my feminine to where I might have deferred a lot of my masculine to him in our marriage,

Something I think a lot of people do very innocently.

But it's been an amazing opportunity and I think it's been my sole work to go through this loss.

It's been our sole contract between Richard and I and yet there's just tremendous love present.

I feel his love.

I feel love for him.

I feel very connected to him.

I've learned how to continue that relationship with him in a very healthy way.

It also allows me to date.

It allows me to live my life.

It allows me to be a nana.

It allows me to be a full-fledged woman and human being that's really comfortable on my own skin now,

Comfortable on my own,

Very independent and feeling very whole.

I wonder if before we ask where we can find you in your work,

If you can share a different kind of airplane story with us,

The Synchronicities event.

Yes,

This is just,

I mean,

This is just a beautiful,

Beautiful miracle that happened in my life.

So about two years after Richard's death,

We were visiting my parents in Eugene,

Oregon,

And we live in the Bay Area and we're flying back from Eugene on a very small commuter flight,

Myself and my daughters.

When we went up to the ticket agent,

The ticket agent was this lovely Polynesian man.

He said he was from Hawaii and he mentioned that we weren't seated together in our chairs in the airplane.

And he asked us if we minded and I said,

Oh no,

It's a short flight.

It was a 50 minute flight on a small jet.

And he said,

Well,

I'd like to have you seated together.

So he took it upon himself to reorganize our seats so that we were seated together on that flight.

And my daughters were seated in the window in the aisle and I was seated on the other side in the aisle.

And a man walked up and stood in front of us to get into the window side of my side.

And as my daughters looked up at him,

They let out this giggle.

Now my kids were 19 and 17,

So they weren't little kids.

You know what I mean?

They're like teenagers,

So they don't usually giggle when they look at somebody.

And I had this really odd feeling come over me.

I mean,

A chill right down my spine and I thought,

What is this?

And the man sat down next to me and I really wanted to talk to him.

I mean,

Really had a super strong urge to talk to him.

Well,

He pulled out his laptop and he started working and so of course I didn't bother him.

And then on the descent of the flight,

He put his laptop away and I still felt that very strong urge to talk to him.

And so I said,

Um,

Hey,

You know,

Is this a work day for you?

And he goes,

Oh yeah,

Yeah,

I'm really sorry.

I have a meeting this afternoon.

I'm going to have to,

Um,

I had to prepare.

I would have loved to have talked to you.

And,

And I said,

Oh yeah,

What are you doing in Eugene?

He said,

I was visiting my sister.

I go,

Yeah,

Family here.

I was visiting my family too.

And he said,

Oh,

Was it a work day for you?

And I said,

No,

But I'm a writer,

So I always have my computer with me.

And he said,

Well,

Um,

Have you been published?

Would you,

Would I know any of your work?

And I said,

Yeah,

You know,

You probably would,

You might be familiar with my late husband,

Dr.

Richard Carlson.

He wrote,

Don't sweat the small stuff.

Well,

The man looked at me and then looked away and he kind of started wiggling and he looked really uncomfortable and he,

And he was breathing deeply and he just,

You know,

Obviously something was wrong.

And I said,

Well,

What's wrong?

You know,

Did you know him?

And he goes,

No.

And I go,

Well,

What's wrong?

What?

And he goes,

Well,

Did he die on a flight to JFK a little over two years ago?

And I said,

Yeah,

But how did you know it was a JFK?

And he goes,

He just took a deep breath.

He goes,

Well,

I was on that flight.

I was seated directly behind him and I was the first to assist the crew.

I actually helped lift your husband's body out of the seat.

And I just gasped and I just burst into tears and I said,

Oh my God,

What are the chances of this?

What are the chances that we would meet like this?

And he said,

Oh my God,

There's no chances.

And he said,

You know,

I always wanted to tell you that your husband was peaceful.

He looked very peaceful and I wanted his family to know that.

And I said,

In my mind,

I was thinking,

Well,

I always wanted to know who was on that flight with him.

You know,

That was my deepest prayer at the time was to meet somebody who'd been on that flight with Richard because of course I couldn't be there and I never got to see him again.

So it was just this most amazing encounter.

And I,

You know,

I just looked at it like such an act of grace,

Such an act of spirit,

Such an act of divine love that we would have that experience that I would have that experience.

It was such a huge pivot in my healing.

And it was such a deep prayer of mine.

Such a deep longing was for me to meet somebody.

But not only did I meet somebody,

I met the man who helped to lift my husband's body out of his seat.

And I know my kids felt it and I know I felt it from the moment he stood in front of us.

And what's really eerie is that the guy that rearranged our seats had to have felt it too.

I didn't think about that,

But you're absolutely right.

He's responsible for the whole encounter.

Here you are,

You divine airplane matchmaker around together.

I remember watching your TED Talk and I told you before we got on the podcast today that I was folding laundry while I was doing it.

And so I was kind of doing some idle things around the house.

And as soon as you got to the conversation bit of that story where you're talking to him,

I stopped with a pair of socks in my hand and literally just watched and listened for how this was going to end.

Because these are the synchronous wild,

Unexplainable,

Intuitive things that happen to us in loss.

And if we're receptive to them,

Open to them,

I think they come.

I think they come.

I think they.

.

.

I don't know if these ideas are alive or if our loved ones are turning to us or whatever anyone listening believes to be true about that,

But there's something to be said about being receptive to it.

And that just totally blew me out of the water.

And I don't know if this was true for you,

But for me within the context of your story,

It also changed how I saw airplanes just as an inanimate object and a force in your life.

Yeah.

I know I lost my husband.

He was on a flight on the descent of that flight.

He died.

And here on the descent of another flight,

I received information that really helped me to live.

I mean,

It was pretty mind blowing.