Takeaways & Reflections | Does Everything Happen for a Reason?
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
Does everything happen for a reason?
How much of our lives is left to chance, and how much of it is a reflection of our choices?
I explore these questions in this week’s episode and more. Larry and Michelle shared their stories of love and loss and, although their stories of grief are vastly different, there are a few things incredibly similar in their stories: The willingness to love and be loved.
Listen to this week’s episode and reflect on the choices you’ve made, the chances you’ve taken, and the beautiful gifts that you’ve gained as a result.
RESOURCES:
- Ep. 55 | Larry Indiviglia
- Ep. 56 | Michelle St Jane
- Energy Quiz on The Unleashed Heart.com
CONNECT:
Hi, there. Thank you for tuning in to grieving voices today. This is Episode 57, takeaways and reflections. And today I’m going to be talking about Episode 55 with Larry Indiviglia called Choice and Chance and, Episode 57 with Michel St. Jean Widows Don’t Sleep: Walking the Path of Cumulative Loss.
Making Choice to Take a Chance
As I was thinking about these two episodes, the one thought that came to my mind was, especially when talking about Larry’s episode is, his life by choice or is it by chance? And especially in grief, many people may say that everything happens for a reason. And as a griever, you don’t want to hear that. You don’t want to hear that there’s some reason why your loved one is no longer with you. That’s the last thing that you really want to hear. Have you ever thought about though how the moments that happen in your life, how they come to be? So much of what we experience is because we made a choice, because we chose something that had an impact and there’s cause and effect. So you make one choice, and this thing happens, you make another choice and this other thing happens. But like in Larry’s story, it really revolved around making the choice to take a chance. And for Larry it was taking a chance on love. But if you really think about it aren’t all of the losses we experience in our lives, due to making a choice to either commit to that person or move to that place or befriend that person, it all comes back to taking the chance, making the choice and taking the chance. And like I said, whether that be love or that be a friendship, or a move. We all make these choices. Larry shared how he took a chance on love and ended up having an eight month relationship with a woman who ultimately passed away of cancer. And he would do it all over again in a heartbeat. And I think for any Grievers out there, I’ll speak for myself, I would rather have had that experience of loving that person and being loved in return than never at all.
Freewill is Having the Ability to Choose
And especially as a parent, which is the greatest love I think anyone could ever possibly have the privilege of experiencing. I don’t know what it’s like to lose a child, but I do feel for myself. And I think any parent would say this, that you would rather have had that child in your life than I’ve never had them in your life at all. If they were to pass away, if you were to lose them. Love in all its forms is a great teacher for us. And that’s where I think a lot of people can use the phrase, “everything happens for a reason“, and I struggle with that. I struggle with that phrase because I don’t feel like there has to be a reason for us to to grow or evolve. But I do feel like we are presented with experiences that shaped and challenged us, and it’s what we decide to do in those moments. It’s what we choose to do in those moments. It’s essentially what freewill is, having the ability to choose. And we can choose to grow from those experiences, or we can choose to lay in decay, like one of my future guests shares in her episode coming up, when you lay, you decay. I’ve never forgotten it when she said it. And so Larry shares his love and loss.
There are No Stages of Grief
And, as does my other guest, Michelle St. Jane, in Episode 56, she took a chance to fall in love, she first took a chance to leave her family of origin to go all by herself, I believe, 16-17 years old. And to see the world, she wanted to see the world, she ended up falling in love, again, took a chance, ended up getting married and having children with him. And he ended up passing away, very suddenly, and unexpectedly. And there was one part of her episode that really stuck out to me something she said, “I hear your heartbeat”. When she’s talking about her husband, she said, “I hear your heartbeat but you’re already gone”. It’s in the hospital realizing that, although he’s there, physically, His heart is beating. But he’s already gone. He was brain dead, he had an aneurysm in his lungs. And she had to make the choice to take him off life support. And raise a nine- month-old, a five-year-old, and a six-year-old on her own. And I know many women end up in this position, many husbands, and many significant others end up in this position of you know, of loss and then are having to raise children or even just carry on without children. It’s like, there’s no manual for that. There’s no manual for grief. And she said, “grief helps us to know the direction we want to go in”. And I completely agree if we’re open to it, but we have to be open to it. We have to be open to what it’s telling us, to what our bodies are telling us as we’re going through this emotional roller coaster. I do want to highlight one thing she said and she mentioned during her episode, she mentioned about the stages of grief and I just want to reiterate that there are no stages of grief.
I actually have Ken Ross, Elisabeth Kubler Ross’ son, who will be on my podcast coming up. And we’re going to tackle this very topic of the stages of grief because it’s as mother’s work that was misinterpreted about the stages. So anyway, I just want to reiterate that there are no stages. Her work was about terminal illness and these phases that people go through when they’re diagnosed. And that’s not saying that people don’t have anger and they don’t have denial and all these things in grief. There’s just not this linear path of grief in the form of stages. Another common thing that Michelle brought up during her episode that many Grievers experiences around the same time every year, when that loss occurred, you have these same familiar feelings that come out of the woodwork. They can appear out of nowhere seemingly, and she said every year or three days in October, when her husband had gone into coma. Even 25 years later, she said she still had those same angry thoughts and feelings and it was pulled back to the past. Again, every year, she had a choice to be pulled back to that past again. And eventually she did find a way to not find herself in that position again. But again, it comes back to making a choice, she had to make a choice to look at another October in a different way, experience October in a different way. And it was through this cumulative healing, all these different things she was doing that helped her find her way out of that rut every year.
Every Loss is Cumulative
And so I really encourage you to listen to her episode on how she managed to find her way through all those October’s and where she’s at today, because I think it’s a really great illustration of a woman who has endured many different types of losses, which are cumulative, every loss, it’s cumulative, it stacks up on each other. And we have an opportunity to learn from these things. And it’s not to say that happened for a reason, so you could learn these lessons. It’s just life, it’s just life, it seems like such a simplified thing to say, like this just life, like there are so many people I’ve met and come across who will say that death is just a part of life. Well, that’s life, right? And some of the people say that, truth be told, haven’t experienced a lot of loss or trauma either. And so, we have to be careful, because words matter. The words matter that we say, especially to Grievers and around Grievers, and about grief.
I want to circle back to Larry’s story about love and loss because there are many people who, if presented with that same situation would have turned the other way, would have walked away. And how about the love of his life who took a chance to go on a dating website knowing full well that she had cancer and taking a chance in doing that. Knowing her worth as a human being despite what she was going through with her health, that love was the answer, love was something that could carry her through her days, love was the antidote to what she was going to experience. And I commend, first of all, the awareness of knowing your own worth as a human being, because we’re all worthy of love, right? Regardless of what we’re experiencing, who we are on the outside what we look like, we’re all worthy of love, even if we have stage four cancer. And so I think it’s incredible that she found somebody who was willing to walk beside her in that. And so I commended Larry in that episode, because it takes a lot of personal commitment to stick beside somebody through their good days and their bad days when essentially you really don’t know each other really well. Right? It’s not like they were married for 15-20 years, and then she developed cancer diagnosis. So I just found the story itself pretty incredible that he was willing to go extra mile with her in the love that he wanted to give her, and she to him. I think it’s a beautiful thing.
To Love and Be Loved in Return
And if people who are going through something like that can find the worth in themselves, to take a chance on themselves, and then find someone to take a chance on them. I think it’s an absolutely beautiful thing but it makes you really think about if you’re not someone who is opening your heart to love. Why is that? I mean, there’s fear and rejection. And certainly I’m sure many people or she had people rejecting her, when once they found out she had cancer, or maybe that was what she led the conversation with. And they were like, I’m gone. Or maybe she gave them an out. Maybe upon meeting or talking, she said, “Hey, I just want to let you know I have stage four cancer, totally understand if you don’t want to, you know, walk with me through this“. I’m thinking back. And I’m just curious how many times that happened. But if you’re going through cancer right now, if you’re experiencing a diagnosis now, and you don’t have love in your life, maybe let this story inspire you to take a chance on yourself, to allow somebody to take a chance on you, too. One of the things that Larry said was “you can’t unconditionally love, if you don’t love yourself first“. And I do think it probably takes an incredible sense of self love, for someone to have that love to give someone that you kind of learn to know, through cancer. So, I encourage you to listen to that episode if you need a little inspiration in the love department. And even if you don’t, it could be friendship, too. You don’t have to walk away from a friendship if someone gets diagnosed with cancer because you’re scared, or because you’re fearful, you don’t know what to say. Just be honest about those things. “I don’t know what to say, I’m afraid what’s going to come up for me if I sit with you through this?“, Because that’s natural, that’s normal. Does it take a special person to sit with someone through the most trying and challenging times?, Of course it does. Is it especially challenging too during cancer treatments and all of these things that someone is going through, plus the emotional roller coaster for them? It is, absolutely it is. How beautiful of an experience it can be and what you could miss out on. Larry said “the ability to choose his hope for the future“. That is the hope, the fact that you have the ability to choose. And I’ve said it several times in my latest posts on Instagram but grief makes you feel like you don’t have a choice. But we always do, we always do. Because even doing nothing is making a choice. The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved in return. And I think that was a great message from Larry’s episode. And I will end it there.
P.S. I want to share that I have a new energy quiz. You can learn your energy type. And if you go to my website, https://www.theunleashedheart.com, the link is in the show notes. You will find a link to the energy quiz under the Reiki tab. So if you go under services, and then Reiki and then you’ll see energy type, just click there and to get started to find your energy type. It takes less than two minutes and you get a handy dandy document to download that helps you up level your energy and find also what nurtures and leaks too.
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