Nailing My Feet To The Floor With Catharine H. Murray

Catharine H. Murray's middle son, Chan, was diagnosed with a rare and complicated form of leukemia at the age of five. After Western medicine did all it could do, Catharine, her husband, and her three boys moved to a remote cabin in Thailand where Chan spent his final months. Today we're talking about her book Now You See the Sky, a beautiful memoir that recounts the devastating reality of the loss of her child... and how death asked her to "nail her feet to the floor" to stay pres

Transcript

Catherine,

I'm so thrilled to have you on the show today.

I tell my grief growers,

The listeners of this podcast,

That I get sent a lot of books.

A lot of authors come on and would like to be on the show,

Would like to have me read their books,

Would like to have them recommended.

And this is one that particularly struck me because it was less of a how-to and more of a memoir,

More of a very,

Very deep dive into your own personal experience.

And I'm so glad I got to have it in my backpack,

Carry it around with me.

It felt like something that was very precious.

And so I'm so excited to have you on to share your story today.

And I will ask you to start where we start all of our interviews on coming back,

And that is to share your lost story with us today.

All right.

Well,

My story started a long time ago.

I had moved from the US to Thailand to teach and I fell in love and married a local man.

And we had three sons and just had a really idyllic life.

And then suddenly our middle son,

Just after his fifth birthday,

Was diagnosed with leukemia.

So we were told that we should immediately go for treatment in Seattle,

Which we did.

And the doctors there told us that he had a very rare form,

Which required intensive chemo and bone marrow transplants and transplant.

And then he finally died nine months after the transplant.

So between the transplant and his death was an interesting time because the doctors in Seattle told us that once someone relapses after having a bone marrow transplant,

That their chances of survival are pretty much nil.

And they expected him to last no more than a couple months.

And I thought,

Oh,

I was of course devastated and I thought,

Well,

We need to do what the doctors say and be prepared for palliative care and morphine and whatever he needs until he dies.

And my son's father,

My husband at the time,

Had a different approach.

And he said,

No,

We're going to go back home to Thailand and we're going to really fight for his life and we're going to use traditional Eastern medicine and meditation and vitamins and do the best we can for him.

And my son,

His name is Chan,

He had grown up in Thailand,

So he really wanted to go home and be where he felt like he really belonged and be with family.

So after a bit of a struggle initially,

An internal struggle for me,

To realize that actually it made sense to fight for him,

We did go back to Thailand and moved up to a little tiny cabin where we lived because we thought it was the place that had the most,

Well,

It was a tiny cabin up on a mountain top in a very remote part of the country because we thought that something toxic in the environment had caused his illness.

And since Western medicine no longer had any help for us,

We thought maybe if we lived in a pristine place,

Perhaps his immune system would bounce back.

So those last,

We were there about nine months and then he finally did,

He had nine pretty good months and then he did finally die in our arms in our little cabin.

So yeah,

Just that those nine months were a pretty intense time for us.

And even though I knew he had a terminal illness,

We really felt like it was important to just to not ever give up on him.

So we really did keep fighting and we never knew when the end was going to come,

Of course,

But it did.

And that was the loss,

Losing an amazing little boy who fought really hard on his part as well.

I think the first direction that I want to go with this in the interview is it sounds like this is a different kind of lost story than we normally have on coming back in that there is a conflict between Eastern and Western ideals in how medicine works,

How illness works,

How we die.

Most of the guests that come on coming back are either here in the US or in Westernized society.

And so there's this perception of illness,

Treatment,

If treatment fails,

Hospice,

Death,

And then memorial services or funerals or things of that nature.

So can you speak more on how your time in Thailand changed,

Not only your perspective on illness and medicine,

But maybe death and dying as well?

So I feel fortunate that I had lived in Thailand for a good number of years before my son got sick.

I think it was a good 10 years or so.

And had really had been,

The man that I married was a local Thai person,

So I was really living within his extended family.

And I was able to learn a lot about the culture,

The local culture,

About Buddhism,

Which is the national religion of Thailand.

And through those years,

I developed a bit of an understanding,

Of course,

It's not nearly what I would like it to be,

But of this idea of mindfulness and being present and taking life moment by moment and being very aware of the temporary nature of all things,

Good and bad.

And that where there's life,

There's death.

So it doesn't mean that I was better prepared for his death in any way.

I mean,

His death was still a horrible experience for me,

It was still devastating.

But throughout his illness,

I feel like I had so much fear and worry and really sheer terror that I was going to lose this person that I loved so much.

I feel like having lived there and having practiced meditation and mindfulness,

At least I had the knowledge that one way to handle that much emotion and that much fear and that much worry and anxiety was to try to do my best to just continue to stay present.

I thought of it as like nailing my feet to the floor,

Just like,

Stop thinking about the future,

Stop imagining horrible,

Like his funeral and all terrible hole that would be left in our lives if he dies.

I would remind myself,

Nope,

That's not where you need to go.

You need to be right here right now.

What's happening right now in the room,

In your body?

What does he need?

What do your other children need?

So to me,

I'm grateful for having had a little experience there.

And again,

I think that really helped me get through that really hard time.

In terms of illness and death and healing,

I also realized and I think coming from the Western experience of having the oncologist say,

Your son has a terminal illness,

He's in relapse,

This is it,

He's going to die.

There's nothing we can do.

This is the end.

I had to learn to release the authority that they had.

I think in the Western,

Doctors in general are invested with so much authority.

We just believe that they know the answer.

And I had to really teach myself in those months after that diagnosis or prognosis that nobody knows exactly what's going to happen.

Nobody can tell the future that our bodies are renewing themselves every second.

We're always creating new cells.

We don't live in the same body we did a year ago,

Really.

So I say that because I feel like the Thai perspective traditionally doctors don't have.

I mean traditionally,

I think people have more of a sense of the mystery of things.

So I had to kind of learn that.

I had to kind of remind myself,

We only have today.

He could get well,

He could die.

There's nowhere to know either way.

And I don't have to know.

I just have to be present with who he is now,

What's happening right now.

Yeah,

So that's one answer.

Is there more?

CB Well,

I'm picking up on in the earliest pieces of your story,

It sounded like Chan was the final decision maker on whether or not you went home.

And I'm interested to know how much his perspective weighed on your decisions as parents on whether to continue the fight,

To continue trading,

To stay in Seattle,

To go back to Thailand,

Because there was,

There's a wrestling energetically happening in that.

CB I think,

You know,

When we're in Seattle,

The doctors were pretty,

Pretty clear about saying that there really wasn't anything we could do for him beyond palliative care.

You know,

They sort of painted pretty scary pictures of how much pain he in suffering,

How much more suffering he might have if we tried to continue to treat.

So I think I,

We had the idea from them that further treatment would be not a good idea.

But whether or not to stay in Seattle with the safety and the comfort and the familiarity of the hospital and the Western doctors and the very,

You know,

Advanced technology and comfort of being in the West,

Rather than going back to Thailand and trying something different,

That yeah,

That definitely was a little struggle.

But really,

Not for long.

I think it was just so clear to me that the Chan needed to be where Chan wanted to be and that he had wanted to be home.

He had missed his cousins,

He had missed his grandmother,

He had missed,

You know,

He said he wanted to get horses.

And that was something that we knew we could do in Thailand.

And I think we just felt like we could give him more of the life he wanted by going back home.

So that's what made us decide to do that.

One of the most impactful parts of your book for me is Chan's connection with the horses in Thailand,

Especially.

I'm doing a spoiler alert in the finishing chapters where they had their own kind of nuzzly horse nose way of saying goodbye to his body.

And I'm getting chills right now because that's something I think that even nature and animals are so in tune with our processes as humans.

I don't know,

That was just a moment that really,

Really struck me in the reading of your book,

Especially with horses.

Something about horses seemed to really stand out to him.

So I'm wondering,

I guess,

When did that start?

There seems to be this intense connection in life for him with these animals.

Oh,

Yeah,

That was kind of funny.

So when he was in the hospital in Seattle,

He was having inpatient chemotherapy for five weeks at a time,

And he wasn't allowed to see any other kids play with anybody else.

His brothers could come,

But you know,

It was very contained at the same time.

So I became someone who kind of browsed on the shelves of the video display and videos that were available,

Video library on the Children's Oncology Award,

And I picked up the Black Stallion.

Oh,

Good movie.

Oh,

Great movie.

It had a huge impact on him.

I mean,

Because of course the story is about this boy and this horse,

And the boy is struggling through something really life threatening and terrible and difficult,

And surviving the loss of his parents and being marooned on this island.

It's the horse that helps him,

The saints of his life,

And the relationship between the two of them is what keeps the boy going.

So that really impacted Chon.

In fact,

After the movie,

He kept asking everybody,

Have you seen the movie The Black Stallion?

I think we'd never heard of the word stallion on the scallion,

So that was funny.

So he wanted his own Black Stallion,

So he kept telling us.

When Make-A-Wish came to see us in Seattle and they asked Chon what he wanted,

What was his wish,

What was the one thing that he would want,

His first answer was a Black scallion.

Which they weren't able to grant,

But we knew when we went back to Thailand we'd be able to find him a horse or two.

So that's how that started.

I'm curious,

This is something that's been probing in my brain,

Is when you were first introducing your lost story,

You referred to the man that you married in Thailand as your then-husband.

So I'm wondering if Chon's death had an impact on your relationship and kind of what the state of your hearts were at that time and how that's extended into the future.

Oh yeah,

It absolutely had an impact.

I think we just had a really different ways of dealing with grief.

And I think for me,

After Chon died,

I found myself very quickly having a sense of my heart losing its softness,

Of my heart becoming hard.

And I could see it in the way I related to my children.

I could see myself just being irritable and angry and impatient.

And I had a sense that that was not something I could allow to happen.

And for me,

I don't know,

As an American,

As a woman,

As someone who'd had experience in peer counseling,

It was clear to me that I needed to be sure to grieve really intentionally,

To really feel the loss that I had experienced and process it and cry and rage and scream and whatever my body needed to do.

But it was important that I not run away from the grief and the pain.

And so I did.

I was very intentional about it.

I knew that I needed – sometimes I would get caught up and want to just stay really busy or want to knit or want to chop wood or exercise.

None of those things are destructive,

But I could tell when I was doing them in this sort of obsessive way,

In a way that was keeping me from stopping and letting the grief actually move through me,

As painful as that was.

So that was the way I grieved.

And my then-husband did it differently.

He was from a completely different gender,

A completely different cultural world,

A different religious outlook,

Everything.

And what I experienced was that,

To me,

I felt like he became more contracted and retreated.

And I felt eventually that there was just too much distance.

That's my interpretation.

Who knows?

No one can ever know what's really going on in another person's heart.

But I would say that was my experience of it.

And I think that ultimately led to our divorce was being separate like that.

I think this is more common in the grief sphere than people let on,

Is relationships transformed,

Torn apart.

Even slowly distanced,

I get this image of boats drifting away from each other over the ocean by grief,

Because grief is this force that acts within us in our own ways.

And yet at the same time,

Grief is a relationship that we can choose to,

Like you did,

To intentionally engage in or distance from.

But grief is a very,

Very,

Very intimate thing,

And yet it's also a universal occurrence.

So thank you for sharing that wisdom with us today,

Because it can't have been easy to have lost your middle child and then to have that energetic,

That drifting of losing your husband as well.

Yeah,

And I was really surprised when we did divorce at the extent and the amount of the grief over our son's death that brought up for me.

I mean,

I hadn't realized that the divorce itself would trigger so much of the old grief,

Because it was a good,

I think it was 10 years almost after his death that we divorced.

And I thought,

With grief,

You often think that you've moved past a certain stage or you think,

Okay,

I'm good now.

And that really blindsided me.

I had no idea that it would be so intensely painful and such a grief experience to divorce.

I thought it was more like,

All right,

I've made this really hard decision that's going to be hard on my family,

And we kind of move through this hard thing,

But I just didn't realize that it would be such an experience of grief.

But I also think ultimately feeling the intensity of the grief throughout the year or two after the divorce also really helped me move through and complete,

In a way,

The grieving over my son.

Does that make sense?

CB The word that's coming to me is sure.

Yes,

Because oftentimes,

I'm going to use a word that often comes up in grief recovery,

Which is regrieving.

And so new griefs can prompt regrieving of previous bosses,

Because they never truly leave us.

There's always like a 1% that's still lingering.

And so it makes perfect sense.

I mean,

I hosted a grief group in Chicago,

And this woman said that the death of her grandmother triggered a grief for her cat that she lost five years before.

And the death of her cat was like the most powerful loss in her life,

Because it was her only friend growing up.

And so it's interesting that as she continued to live on,

I mean,

20,

30 years after this cat's death,

As she was grieving new losses,

She was regrieving prior losses,

Especially this cat or this initial loss as well.

So that,

I mean,

My brain is totally making that connection.

When you phrase it that way of like,

Of course,

A divorce would bring up the grief from losing your son,

Not only because this was a child that you made together,

And your relationship was so intertwined with his death,

But because it is another powerful grief moment in the timeline of your life.

And I think also,

You know,

It's like,

When you've lost a child and there's a consideration of divorce,

That there's some,

I think for a long time I had this sense of like,

Well,

I can't,

It's like an added burden of,

You know,

My family's already experienced so much pain,

I can't possibly add more pain,

And I can't possibly,

You know,

Somehow like,

This is the only person who knows what I've been through,

You know,

As the father of my son,

This man is the only person who knows my story completely and who has experienced it like I did.

And I think it took me a long time to be able to realize,

Just because we were ending the relationship,

Just because there was a divorce,

It didn't negate everything that had happened.

It didn't mean our whole life hadn't happened and we hadn't had this beautiful experience and this beautiful family.

It's like,

I don't know,

It's kind of hard to articulate,

But there was a moment where I said,

Oh,

You know,

Everything still happened,

This doesn't invalidate the life we had together,

It's just a change in how we're going to do it going forward.

But it took me a long time to kind of realize that,

And once I did,

I felt like,

Oh okay,

It's okay,

It doesn't diminish or erase Chon in any way,

You know,

The fact that I'm getting divorced.

Yes,

I think it's so important that you're saying this,

And thank you again for putting it into words this way because hearing you speak about it,

There's like a societal perception of selfishness and divorce and like choosing to detonate the relationship.

And there's also like,

Well,

This is the only person who knows me and my grief this well,

How will I ever be able to find solace in another human again?

And then there's the societal perception of like,

You know,

They've already been through so much,

Let's just throw another torch on the fire,

Essentially.

And so I can totally hear you and understand how,

Yeah,

It takes a minute to recalibrate to this does not invalidate Chon's life,

This does not invalidate the fact that our relationship existed,

And this human will still exist in the world who has seen me through the most difficult loss of my life.

I think that's so incredible.

You know,

Often when I teach,

You know,

When I talk about grief,

And I teach workshops and give lectures,

I'm really always trying to say explicitly,

Grief doesn't just mean someone in your life has died,

You know,

I think,

Especially divorce is it's a huge grieving experience.

Some people say it's worse than a death,

Right,

Because it's so much messier in a way.

So I think it's important for people to give themselves credit and compassion and space,

You know,

To process a divorce with as much,

You know,

Love and compassion for themselves as if someone has died.

Because it's about just grief,

It's all grief.

It is.

And that's something that we strive to repeat over and over and over again here on coming back is that grief is not just death,

It is the end of or change in what was normal.

So this could be anything from,

You know,

Death,

Divorce,

Diagnosis to,

You know,

Losing a job or having to make a major move,

But something that has changed your life permanently,

Irreversibly forever,

And you can't ever go back to the before.

There's just the after they are forced to live in.

And it can be grief by choice,

Whether it's a divorce that's initiated or grief not by choice,

Like a death.

So,

Yes,

Grief comes in a lot of different configurations in the world.

I want to start moving in the direction of how your book,

Now You See the Sky,

Came into the world.

I wrote down the question,

Why a book of all the ways to tell your story?

Or why even the need to tell your story in the first place?

That's a great question.

Yeah.

So,

Well,

I've always loved to journal.

I've just always loved to write and write poetry.

But when Sean got really sick,

When we had those last nine months,

You know,

When we left Western medicine,

And we're really on our own to make decisions about his care,

There was so much anxiety for me and stress and,

You know,

The pain of seeing his pain and worry that journaling just became essential.

For me,

It was the way I processed all the hard feelings I was going through was by sitting down and just,

I mean,

And I really had to tear myself away from Sean because he didn't want me to go off and write.

He wanted me to sit with him and,

You know,

Rub his back and read to him.

But sometimes I just knew I had to get away and take care of myself.

And the way I did that was through journaling.

And also after he died,

I needed journaling.

It was absolutely essential in dealing with my grief and trying to,

Again,

Stay present from my family because I had two other little boys.

So when I felt really overwhelmed,

And just like I couldn't get out of bed or I couldn't,

You know,

Take them to the park or I couldn't smile or I couldn't cook or,

You know,

Couldn't go to work,

I would write.

I would sit down and I would just say,

Okay,

What's going on here?

You know,

And I would let myself just have all my feelings through writing.

I would just sort of pour everything out onto the keyboard.

So there was that.

And then,

You know,

After he died,

Of course,

I didn't want the world to lose him.

I wanted the world to know my little boy.

And I knew it was a beautiful story.

You know,

Who he was,

I wanted to tell the world,

You know.

So at first,

You know,

That was my initial motivation to write the story.

And then as it went on,

It became more about,

You know,

As I healed more and more,

I really felt less inclination and less urgency to tell the world about him.

And it became more that I wanted to share with the world the way that,

I think,

You know,

That the idea that people can heal,

That you can live through something really hard like that,

And then end up as a healed person,

You know,

That you can heal from grief,

From pain,

From intense loss.

And I wanted to share that with people.

I wanted to share,

You know,

The way that I,

The tools that I used to get through this.

And yeah,

So that's,

I'd say,

Why the book.

I think that's so,

As you're saying that I wanted people to know that it was possible,

That registers on a deep level with me because I know in the midst of my own grief,

Losing my mother,

I'm like,

This is not possible.

I'm never coming back from this.

I cannot,

There's not even a pinprick of light in my world.

And the discovery,

I spoke about this on the last episode actually,

Is that the discovery of books is what kind of started poking holes of light in the dark.

I'm like,

Oh my God,

Somebody's done this before.

And I don't,

You know,

And it's not that I was,

Grievers aren't ignorant to the fact that success stories,

Success stories,

Quote unquote,

But they're not ignorant to the fact that stories of coming back exist in the world,

But that reality of being healed or like society says like moving on or getting over,

Like blah,

Blah,

Blah,

That seems so far out of reach that just knowing that it's possible is enough.

And so I just absolutely love how you phrase that.

That speaks so true to,

I think what I and so many others faced in the midst of our grief and for a lot of listeners of our show are facing right now is I don't know how I'm going to do this.

And which is why books are so important.

We don't necessarily need to know how to,

We just need to know that you did.

And I think also,

You know,

That's,

I think that there's such,

There are,

There's such a glut of how to books,

You know,

When someone dies,

People want to help.

And,

You know,

We've all seen these books that are how to and psychological and step by step and formulaic.

And for most of us,

That just doesn't apply.

You know,

When you're in the midst of really deep grief,

You can't even begin to think about,

You know,

Following some step by step program about how to feel better.

But what does apply,

I think,

You know,

Is literature,

You know,

Hearing people's real stories and really,

You know,

Knowing that you're not the only one who's going through this.

And as writers,

You know,

We can articulate a pain and experience that a lot of people can't articulate.

So,

You know,

Then these books become really essential.

And I think,

You know,

That's why it's so,

I'm just so pleased to that my book is launching Ann Hood's imprint,

Which is,

It's called the Gracie Belt imprint,

And it's completely going to be books focusing on grief and loss.

So books like mine and Akasha Press and Ann Hood,

You know,

Ann Hood wrote Comfort,

Her journey through grief,

I believe about her daughter's death.

She had a daughter named Grace who died when she was five.

And anyway,

So Ann Hood is really brilliant,

I think,

To have decided that we need,

What people need is a line of books that are beautiful stories of grief and loss.

What I love is that alongside your book,

Which I received in the mail,

There was like a little printout that this was the first book being launched in the imprint series,

And that it was exclusively focused on grief.

But what I liked that Ann said on one of the,

Like the third or fourth page was that she's like,

I needed to do this because as a writer,

So many publishers have responded to me and said,

Nobody wants to publish books that are so sad.

And I'm like,

So sad,

This is reality.

So many of us are out here facing the hardest and darkest moments of our lives.

There is a desperate thirst,

I think,

For written word and conversations and resources for people who are grieving.

But it's funny because when you look at like the publishing or the money making side of it,

There's not money to be found in publishing grief books.

It's like politics,

How to self-help,

Even like celebrity memoirs or,

You know,

Coloring books,

Like things like that.

There's a lot of money there.

But as you know,

As a grief writer,

And as I know,

As a grief writer,

The money is not the point.

I really like that you said a conversation,

You know,

Because I think,

You know,

I get so many responses from readers and,

You know,

Just thanking me for being able to,

You know,

For them to share the journey.

And I had one recently,

Actually a woman in Latvia,

Through a friend who said that it was so helpful for her,

Her daughter has recently died,

To be in conversation with me as the writer,

Even though,

You know,

She just meant as she was reading through the book,

It felt like having a conversation with another mother who was experiencing this deep loss.

So I like the way I like that phrase of,

You know,

Books are like having a conversation.

Yeah,

I think that's one of my favorite parts about them.

And for me,

As somebody who often prefers to text over getting on the phone,

I'm like,

Oh,

I can like speak to you or have you speak to me without,

Sometimes it takes a lot of energy as a graver to sit in the same room with another human.

But to have the indirectness of a book is really powerful.

It's like a friend that's not in the room,

But is still a tremendous source of comfort and tools and just like,

This is kind of a heavy word,

But like higher wisdom,

Like you've been on the road before.

You know,

You're reading about someone who's been through what you've been through in a way.

And I think the other thing that's so important is,

You know,

It's funny,

It's almost paradoxical because people write to me and say,

Oh my God,

Thank you so much for this beautiful book.

It's just fantastic.

You know,

I just sobbed for hours.

You're thanking me because you know,

And you're sobbing it,

You know,

I think to initially people might wonder,

Well,

Why is that a good thing?

But I think,

You know,

As we know,

It's just so healing,

So healing to be able to access that well of grief that we all have,

Even if we haven't lost anyone,

You know,

Through death or divorce.

I mean,

We still there's still grief,

You know,

Just growing up is grief.

So I think it's just,

That's the great thing about books like this is that it allows you to access that pain that always needs to be processed.

You know,

I just feel like it's always a good chance.

Anytime you can cry,

Anytime you can release your moving forward in a good way.

You know,

When I give workshops or talks or readings,

I always tell people,

If you cry during this,

I totally welcome that.

You know,

I think it's good.

The more tears you get out,

The better.

And I also am clear,

It's clear to me that I'm not making you sad.

My story is making you sad.

My story is allowing you to access your own sadness that needs to come out and needs to be expressed and needs to be healed.

So to me,

That's the other thing that's good about reading these books that takes quite a bit of courage to read.

I think,

You know,

As you say,

There's not a lot of money,

You know,

More money in coloring books and celebrity,

You know,

Memoirs,

Because there aren't as many readers who have the bravery to go to these places.

That is just the perfect insight for grievers who are reading is that it takes courage to read.

It takes a tremendous amount to pick up a book and have kind of a faint idea of what's inside it and be like,

All right,

I'm signing up for this.

To be willing to,

You know,

To open up to that extent.

Yeah,

Absolutely.