Carrying the Tiger: A Love Story in the Face of Terminal Illness- Tony Stewart | EP 441

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Close your eyes and imagine. What are the things in life that cause us the greatest pain? The things that bring us grief are challenges, challenges designed to help us grow, to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried. But what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth. And I am your host, Brian D Smith. Hey there, I'm Brian, host of Grief 2 Growth. And whether this is your very first time joining us, or you've been with me for a while, I want to welcome you. This is a space where we ask life's deepest questions about who we are, why we're here, and where we're going. It's also a place to grow through grief and transform pain into purpose. Today's episode is one I know is going to speak to your heart. I'm honored to welcome Tony Stewart. Tony is the author of the beautifully written and profoundly moving memoir, Carrying the Tiger: Living with Cancer, Dying with Grace, Finding Joy While Grieving. Tony shares a remarkable story of his 6-year journey he took with his late wife Lynn after her sudden diagnosis with incurable cancer. It's a journey that deepened their love, challenged their strength, and ultimately revealed grace in the face— grace in the face of sorrow, I should say. But Carrying the Tiger is not a story just about dying. It's a story about living. Living fully, vulnerably, and courageously, even in the shadow of death. Through Tony's deeply honest and often raw reflections, we'll explore what it means to be present for a loved one at the end of life, how we can find joy amidst loss, and why embracing grief can lead us to a deeper sense of connection and even hope. We'll talk about the power of storytelling, why Tony felt compelled to share his experience so openly, and what it means for him now to be studying to become a certified grief educator. And I need to update that because Tony told me he got his certification last week. So Tony is a newly certified grief educator. If you've ever wondered how to live with an open heart through illness, through loss or uncertainty, or how to support someone who is, I hope this conversation will offer you insight, comfort and inspiration. So with that, I want to welcome Tony Stewart to Grief 2 Growth.

Thank you, Brian. That was a beautiful introduction. I really appreciate it.

I'm, I'm really glad to have you here. And, uh, what I always do when someone's coming on that's inspired by the, the passing or the transition of a loved one— I don't like to use the word lost because I don't believe they're lost— I want to ask you to tell us about Lynn.

Okay, well, Lynn Katula was absolutely the love of my— well, Excuse me, the love of my life. I met her, oh gosh, in 1985 at the Columbia University swimming pool when I was 29 and she was 39 and had this kind of funny interaction. I was on the rebound from a divorce and looking at all these people around me saying, can I prove to myself that I'm, that I'm desirable again? And I saw this cute woman in the swimming pool. Where you don't talk to other people in the swimming pool, happened to say a few words to her. She assumed that I was deeply attracted to her and pursuing her, made herself available the next day doing some leg stretches at the end of the pool. I fell for it and started talking to her, and 2 years later we were married.

Hmm.

She was a free spirit, an artist. She did have a day job, but she really did sell paintings and had many shows. Paintings of, um, that were out of fashion almost for her entire life. Still lives and landscapes, you know, vegetables on a tabletop. Not the sort of thing that most people would want to buy, but creating those paintings was what she lived for. She— you just couldn't stop her. And the day job, which was actually only a part-time job, enabled her to have the freedom to keep making paintings.

Mm-hmm.

We tried to have kids pretty quickly because she was already 39 when I met her. Did not— didn't work out. And then we decided not to keep pushing it, not to adopt, which was a critical choice, that, okay, if this is not going to happen for us, let's use the time and the money and the— and all that energy that's freed up and do things together. So over the next— we were together, we had been together, um, 29 years at the time this story starts, at the time that we discovered she had tumors. And during those 29 years, we traveled, oh, to India and Asia, places like that, for weeks at a time. Um, and we, we just had a wonderful life. I, I was much more, and am much more, of a kind of a typical, not quite a Type A personality, but I used to make movies, then I did software development, ran some international projects. It all sounds very big, but it actually, these are smaller scale than that. And Lynn was the artist. And she kept saying, I can't believe I'm so lucky to be with you that you're enabling, you know, I earned more money than she did for most of those years. And because of that, she had more time to paint. And I told her again and again, "No, you don't understand. The fact that you're able to paint means the world to me." Yeah. So that's the backstory.

Yeah, it sounds like you guys are very complementary to each other.

I think so. I think so. And very much yin and yang in the way I mentioned. Although also that free spirit, I think I'm more of a button-down person. So this is complementary. Her openness, her relaxation, And her insistence that I talk about my feelings, which drove me crazy in the early years of our marriage, but now has paid off at the end result. This book would not have been possible if she hadn't started out encouraging me to talk about my feelings. That just meant the world to me. That relaxed me and opened me up.

Yeah. So let's talk about Caring the Tiger. It's a very intriguing title. So where did the title come from?

So about 3 or 4 weeks after we learned that Lynn had these tumors, which she had incurable stage 4 nonsmoker's lung cancer. And the, so, uh, uh, which came out of nowhere from our point of view. Mm-hmm. As, as does happen to people. Lung cancer is one of those cancers that can sneak up on you with no symptoms that have anything to do with your lungs, uh, until it's already metastasized. And that's what happened to her. She had some other symptoms. We were seeing some doctors and no one put the two together that those other symptoms were actually being caused by her cancer.

Right.

Anyway, uh, after a few weeks into the whirlwind of trying to figure out what the hell to do about all of this and, and, and, and how to treat it, um, we had started posting about it on CaringBridge, which is a way to keep friends and family informed when you're going through a health crisis.

Mm-hmm.

And a friend heard about Lynn's cancer and wrote her an email. And in that email, the friend said, in my tai chi group, we carry a tiger for someone who is going through difficult circumstances. The three motions of bending low, picking up that tiger, and putting it on a hilltop far away make the tiger so much less scary and threatening. And Rin— Lynn wrote back, that's a beautiful image. Please carry some tigers for me. And could you teach me how to carry my own tiger? And that's—

that's beautiful.

Yeah, it is beautiful.

So when you mentioned that she was having some symptoms that we wouldn't think would be related to lung cancer, how did it present for her?

They were all digestive symptoms. She was, uh, she was having acid reflux, some diarrhea, generally having trouble holding her food down, had stopped enjoying eating, was losing weight, and we thought it was because she wasn't holding her food down.

Sure.

And because of all this traveling we had done, we knew that sometimes you pick up a bug somewhere, you know, like an amoeba or something that messes with your digestion.

Sure.

So all the doctors that we consulted and I love them all, listened to her symptoms and scoped her up, down, and sideways, basically from the belly button down.

Yeah.

And the only reason we even found out ultimately that this was lung cancer was because of a pain that started to grow in the middle of her back during this time, which started out small and just was steadily growing, growing, growing, little knot of pain in the middle of her back. And finally it became so annoying that it actually hurt her. And someone said, well, why don't we check that out? And that led to an MRI of her spine where they— the report came back. And this was— this is actually where the book starts. This is shattering. It was a Sunday afternoon. The phone rang. It was our GP, the one who had sent Lynn to a neurosurgeon, a friend of his, to look at her back. Not that we thought she needed surgery, but just because he was a friend who could do this. Sunday afternoon, we got a call from our doctor, and I could just hear Lynn's voice tighten in the other room. And he said, Lynn, the MRI report, which he was reading at home on a Sunday, shows that you've got tumors in your lung as well as in your spine. Hmm. You need to see an oncologist right away.

Wow.

And that was the start of our journey of the— when our lives turned upside down.

Yeah, absolutely. And that feeling, how did it feel in terms of— I don't even know what words to put into it. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but how did that feel?

It's funny because when I was writing that small section of Carrying the Tiger, I struggled with this. I ended up using almost no words and saying, "We are stunned." because I think that's actually what it was. It was a shattered, stunned kind of feeling at the moment. There's two parts to this. So at that moment, Lynn was at home. She had not wanted to go out. She felt really crummy, had felt crummy for days. And it turns out that having cancer anywhere in your body, untreated cancer, just can completely mess with your system. And you're not digesting your food and you're losing weight and all these things are going wrong, which we didn't know. So she didn't want to go out. She stayed there on her bed. She called her sister and she just sort of— she was drawing the cat at the time. That's what she liked to do when she was home. And she said, you go out, you go. Normally we would go swimming on a Sunday afternoon. I went swimming. I just had to get exercise and work this off.

Sure.

And I didn't know— neither of us knew what the hell was going to happen. But then when I came back, We sat together at the little kitchen table and we held hands and we spent like an hour telling each other how much we loved each other, how wonderful our marriage had been. I should stop for a second. We were not very demonstrative in our love. We didn't celebrate Valentine's Day. We thought that was a hokey thing that people did. We hardly ever said I love you. We traveled, we did all— we showed our love in many, many ways. In that one hour that night, I think we said "I love you" to each other more than we had in 30 years of marriage.

Wow.

And that's how it felt like. I don't know how much time we've got. We didn't have a diagnosis yet. We just had her GP saying, "You've got tumors. You need to see an oncologist." But it scared the hell out of us. Right. And that this love and affection and gripping each other's hands is what happened. Stay with us. We'll be right back.

You know, one of the hardest things about grief? Most of the people in your life just don't get it. They want you to be further along than you are. They get uncomfortable when you bring it up, so you stop bringing it up. And that's why I started writing. My Substack is where I go deeper. Thoughts I don't always get to in the podcast. Essays on consciousness, on continuing bonds, on what it actually means to carry loss and still build a life. The stuff that used to keep me up at night, written out in a way that I hope meets you in the morning. But here's what I didn't expect when I started it: the community that showed up. People who are doing exactly what you're doing— listening, learning, trying to find their footing. Readers who comment, who share their own stories, who remind each other that none of us are as alone in this as we feel. And that's what the Substack has become— a place to go deeper with me and to find your people. It's free to subscribe. Find me at grief2growth.com/substack. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/substack. Or just go to Substack and search for Grief to Growth. I hope to see you there. Wow.

I—

yes, that's— that's— I, I can— I can't imagine how, how, like you said, stunning that would be. Uh, my loss of my daughter was a sudden thing. Um, but as you, as you mentioned, you know, some people might say, well, you have cancer, that's not a sudden thing. But that diagnosis, you go from, you know, one minute your life is this, and then the next second your life is something completely different.

Absolutely. Absolutely. That day, that minute began the 7 years of dealing with her cancer, living with her cancer. She was incredibly lucky. We were incredibly lucky because most people with incurable stage 4 lung cancer of any type die within 2 years, often as little as 6 months.

Right, right.

Twists and turns in the— we managed in the course of a couple of months to find a clinical trial that was being done here in New York City. We are very lucky, we live in New York City. There's like 8 major cancer hospitals. Sloan Kettering, famous cancer place, all these things all around us. Ironically, we, we got to this clinical trial via a side journey to New Haven where I had a reference to— I had a referral to a friend of a friend who was an oncologist at Yale New Haven Hospital. We went up there for a second opinion, and he told us about this clinical trial that had a drug that might be perfect for Lynn. Wow. And then we scrambled and discovered that actually they were doing the same trial at Sloan-Kettering, a subway ride from our house. Um, and we got her into it, uh, and that drug extended her life by 5 years or so. Compared to the average. Wow. It was a new immunotherapy thing. What happened was, and I think I've read that this is extremely common, her, her tumors never went away. There was no remission. And from almost the first day, we had wonderful oncologists, wonderful doctors, and they consistently gave us the same message. We can't cure your cancer. You are going to be living with this for the rest of your life. The name of the game now is to try and have as much good life as we can. And it's really interesting how that message has changed, because 20 years ago, I think it was about, let's try and beat this thing and let's extend your life.

Right.

And they've acknowledged that there is a price to extending your life, and there is a point at which it's not worth it. There's a point at which you finally don't have enough life left, or you have too much pain or whatever, and it's not worth it. The game, the struggle is to find that balance of treatments or whatever that will allow you to continue to enjoy life. Not the way you used to. Our lives became much more constrained and it was largely because the thing had attacked her spine. Even the lung cancer, they held it down. We did an intensive radiation on her spine that zapped the tumors in her spine, killed them. Lifetime worth of radiation for your spine in 45 minutes.

Mm.

And just, just zap the hell out of the tumors in her spine. But her spine had been enough damaged so that even though the miracle drug held down her tumors, meaning we could see them, but they had stopped growing for 5 years. We had multiple hospitalizations and a good chunk of the book, the living with cancer part of the book, is partly about what it was like emotionally to live with the knowledge that you're— we all— that you're gonna die sooner than most people.

Yeah.

And that it could start growing at any minute.

Right.

But the medical stuff that's in the first half is largely about trying to treat her spine. Because all kinds of things happened, went wrong. We had various interactions with the medical establishment that I thought were really interesting, and I wanted to share those, as well as painful and difficult. And that's the first half of our story, is learning to live with cancer for those 5, 6 years.

And then, um, how— what was her quality of life like during that, that 5 to 7 years?

Um, it varied. For several years, especially the first few, it was one thing after another going wrong in her spine, which would require procedures, a lot of pain, fiddling with drugs, um, and in between and during the hard parts, she was either in the hospital for periods of time or at home as we tried to figure out How do we control the pain so that she can enjoy her life without being a zombie? Because she totally was not interested, as few people would be, in taking so many meds that she would just be a zombie. That isn't life.

Right.

Um, but it was basically a lot of that, and then going out and seeing her friends whenever she could, but then coming back and collapsing the next day.

Mm-hmm.

Because it took all of her energy to go out and do the normal things. I just want to say she was determined to have her normal life as much as she could. And those CaringBridge posts that I mentioned actually enabled that in a way we never anticipated, because I was writing about all of this on CaringBridge. In fact, the book Carrying the Tiger comes initially from all those CaringBridge posts that I wrote, although it is— it's a lot more than them, but it started with them. The result was that every day or two we were telling our friends what was going on with Lynn's cancer. And when she saw them in person, they didn't need to talk about her cancer. They didn't need to say, what's going on with your cancer?

Right.

Because they had read it the night before.

Right.

So she really could show up smiling and say, let's talk about these paintings if it was an art opening or something, or about our friends.

Wow.

And have exactly the kind of conversations she used to have.

Yeah.

And that was huge. What she hid from her friends was that the next day she might not get out of bed. Brian D Smith. Yeah. That was a couple of years. And then we had several beautiful years where we figured it out. She had rods in her back that were stabilizing her spine. We figured out a bunch of, a pattern of exactly which drugs to take that held the pain down enough that she could enjoy her day. And we had 2 or 3 years where the main constraints were that we, We refused to travel, which had been very important. She wanted to always be within an hour of her doctors. Mm. Because we'd already learned through the spinal things, things could go wrong on a dime. Mm. You just suddenly have something break in your back and you do not wanna be on the other side of the world. Plus the tumors could start growing or she could have an immunother— autoimmune reaction to the immunotherapy drug. All these reasons. So we constrained our life physically to be very close to New York City and the hospitals. We did go to the country some, but only an hour away.

Mm-hmm.

And I would say emotionally, that first year or two were incredibly hard on me. And I had a small nervous breakdown about a year in and collapsed crying, saying, I can't do this anymore, to her. And part of what I was holding in were things like part was emotional. My occasional thought, maybe it would be better if she died sooner rather than later. But part was physical. And this is why I wanted to say, because you asked, what were those years like? The other thought that I refused to tell her and held in for a year was, I really wish we could have sex the way we used to. But the physical changes in her body meant that although we continued to be intimate, we couldn't do the things we used to do, and we had to find other ways to be intimate with each other. And it was really actually kind of beautiful. Those 5 years, we got closer together than ever. But I really missed— like, her body was ravaged. Her body was ravaged. And we spent that time finding ways to live well despite that. And that's what those years were about. Yeah.

Well, I appreciate you sharing that, Tony, because, you know, when someone is going through something like that, you know, both people are impacted in different ways. And we often think about the person who's got the disease and what they're going through in that process, which is, of course, extremely important. But I've spoken with enough caregivers of people who have terminal diagnoses to know that it's very, very hard on the caregiver. Yes. And there can be, there can be anticipatory grief. There can be anger. There can be a sense of loss. There can be— I know that some people, sometimes the person that's got the has the illness will actually take their anger out on the closest person who happens to be the caregiver. So ironically, that person gets the brunt of it. So there's— it's a complicated thing that we go through. And I think for caregivers listening and who might be interested in reading the book, it may be important to know that what, you know, to normalize some of those things that people go through.

I actually, when I was deciding what to put in the book, In all three sections, the living with cancer, the dying with grace, which is about hospice, and then the grief part of it, learning to carry Lynn's heart. I call that last part, I Carry Your Heart. Anyway, when I was deciding what to put in the book, I specifically thought about what would I want someone else to see about what it was like for us so that they can normalize what they're going through. And I put in, like, you better believe that I— nowhere in CaringBridge did I talk about how I had collapsed sobbing on the bed.

Right.

But I needed that to be in the book because I wanted to show just how hard that first year was. Then I went and got a therapist. Lynn encouraged me to do that. So all these thoughts you have, you know, you're trying to support your partner and you're having these thoughts. And Lynn is saying, I was so afraid that my cancer would push you away from me. And I'm saying, no, darling, it never will. And I'm thinking maybe it would be better if she died sooner rather than later. I mean, it's— my therapist told me that is totally natural and hardly the, hardly the worst thing any of his clients had ever told him. But I needed a therapist where I could say that stuff out loud and he could say, it's okay, you still love Lynn. It doesn't mean you don't love Lynn. It just means that what you're going through is really hard. And between that and then the CaringBridge posts got more and more emotional and revealing, although I wasn't going that far in them. Yeah, so I was letting my feelings out to my cohort of friends, and they were writing these supportive comments back, which was huge, like having my own little support group. It was Lynn's support group very much, and it also became my support group because the first time I wrote a post saying, we're really depressed, this sucks, I— we feel like we're slogging through a swamp and we don't know how long this is going to last, and it's just miserable. I almost didn't publish the post. I was so afraid that it would push our friends away, like, like they only want to hear happy news, right? And instead we got these beautiful comments back, "Thank you so much for sharing what's really going on." And that encouraged me to keep doing that. And so between having the therapist and paying more attention to how much sleep I got and stuff, and, uh, being able to let out more of my emotions on CaringBridge, I made it through the next 5 years a lot better. Than I had made it through that first year.

Yeah, that's, that is, that's so important. And I'm glad, again, glad you shared that as well. And we, we started talking before, before we started recording, we talked about you becoming a certified grief educator. And one of the things we learned, we're going through that process, is it's so important to have our grief witnessed.

Yes.

And people, we think of grief as the loss of a person, but there's also the loss of health, the loss of relationship, the loss of the way we used to have sex, you know. Whatever, all these things are also grief events. And, you know, you discovered that having that therapist to witness and being able to talk to your friends to witness, there's something that's freeing about that, that's healing about that, that allowed you to then have the energy to come back and help Lynn through her process.

Very much so. And I look back on those 7 years as the most beautiful, wonderful years of my life and of our relationship. And I've often said that about the hospice part, which was only a few weeks and is amazing. If you're lucky enough to be with a loved one who is dying and who is able through, you know, not like your daughter, but who is able to die at home in hospice with you there, treasure it. It's amazing. It's— and we got so close by the last day. I could never have done that if I hadn't been— had the support you just talked about. Yeah, wouldn't have been able to be there for her in the same way.

So you go through, you go through this process and you know the cancer is kind of at bay, but it's always there. Um, when, when did it shift from like it's at bay to now we need to think about hospice?

Um, the, the, the last year of treatment prior to hospice was more like what most people go through in the beginning when they don't have a miracle, when they don't have a miracle drug, when they aren't lucky enough that something works that well for them. So in January 2020, which is 5 and a half years after initial diagnosis, um, we got a scan. I mean, at this point it was all routine. We had stopped— we knew it was hanging over our heads, but we had stopped worrying each time Lynn went for a scan, right? And she gets a scan and suddenly one of her tumors has doubled in size. From the previous scan a few months ago. Okay, so, but we don't all panic. The radiologist says, right, well, the drug is holding all the rest of them down. There were like 4 total, or 3. Um, it's holding the others down. Let's radiate that one, because although she couldn't have any more radiation in her spine, this was in her lung. Let's radiate that one, we'll zap it, and hopefully the drugs will continue to work. That, that one mutated in a way that beat the drugs. So we did that and COVID happened because now we're into March of 2020. Mm-hmm. Um, but we really thought this could be it, but we're now, we're nervous. And then over the next few months, as it was harder to get medical care without braving COVID, Lynn started feeling worse in various ways, getting tired. She had several pneumonia-like events that were the result of that radiation. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Every treatment we had had some kind of deleterious side effect.

Right.

And in that case, she was back in the hospital twice during COVID with a variant of pneumonia that she got from that radiation at a time when people all around her were dying from lung things.

Wow.

Scary as anything. But anyway, to, to make a long story short, over the next few months, the tumors started to proliferate and it was clear that they had beaten the drugs and metastasized and they were going into her bones. Hip bone, places like that. We found another clinical trial. I mean, we're at Sloan-Kettering now, which is the sort of place where they offer you clinical trials. They're in the business of researching treatments. So there was a new thing, and she signed up for it because that had gotten us— the last one had worked so well, we got 5 years of life. This one didn't work. Tumors kept growing, her body started breaking down, the pain got worse and worse. I write about a couple of months when it just— and I compressed this because who— no one would want to read a whole lot of pages about how horrible those couple of months were. When it's just the pain was going, her neck had broken, her back was breaking. Each of these is a vertebra breaking, I should say, in what I say had broken. And finally, we came back from a horrible day at the doctor's at the hospital. And got a phone call saying, "It's in your brain now. We can see that it's going into your brain. We want you—" These are the neurosurgeons called, and there's a very important point here. Neurosurgeons are like surgeons. They want to fix you. That's their whole— we love them, but that's— "Come back to the hospital first thing tomorrow morning. We need to start radiating your brain to slow down these tumors. Even waiting a few days will be too long." Wow. And Lynn said, I can't do it. I can't go back to the hospital tomorrow. I want a few more days at home. And she and I started having this conversation where I, much to my regret looking back, tried to talk her into going back in so that I could have more time with her. And then the phone rang and it was our oncologist, not a surgeon, whom we'd been with for years, saying he had the report. And sometimes you have to say enough is enough. And this might be that time. And it makes me cry every time I remember that he gave us permission to stop. Yeah. We'd been with him for 6 years. And Lynn said, yes, let's stop. And basically she was ready to die.

That's when we started hospice. That's, that decision, um, has got to be just so agonizing, you know, knowing that the whole struggle with that, with the cancer, and I'm just picturing the drugs holding it at bay, but it's always there. And then it breaks through. And you, again, that point where you say, "It's enough." What was that like for you and Lynn? I mean, you talked about the moment when you got the diagnosis and you held each other and you held hands and said, "I love you." What was it like when you made the decision that we're going to stop, you know, fighting this? It was basically the same again.

And I even write about this. Once again, we went into the kitchen and held hands just like 6 years ago. It's interesting that you should ask the question at these 2 critical moments. I mean, for Lynn, for me, this was again, it wasn't shattering because we'd spent 6 years in anticipatory grief, a word I didn't know at the time. Right. Um, and here it was going to happen. But it was the saddest day of my life because now here we spent 5, 6 years doing everything we could to extend her life and, and our relationship and our love for as long as we could. And now we're saying it's going to stop. And we sat again at the table and we again kept saying I love you, and this has been so wonderful, and I can't believe it. She did give me a gift that night, it turned out. We were talking about, what do you think this will be like to die? And what will happen to you, to me, Tony, after I— she asked me, what do you think will happen to you? And I said, I'll go through horrible, horrible grief that I can't imagine. But then in a few years, I imagine I'll start to come out of it. 'And I hope that, you know, I'll eventually find love again.' I mean, this was not an unheard of idea between us. And I was in my early 60s at the time. And she looked at me and she shook her head and said, 'I don't ever want you to have another girlfriend.' But then she immediately nodded her head and said, 'Yeah.' I want you to have another girlfriend. And then she shook her head to say, no, no, no, no, I don't ever want you to have another girlfriend. But then she ended on, yes, I want you to have another girlfriend. Oh, wow. She had— the tumors had gone into her brain. She had been speaking more slowly and haltingly for weeks, but we assumed it was because of pain. So she wasn't very verbal. We were having a conversation, but she didn't go on for paragraphs. Each sentence came at a cost. And those were the 4 sentences. And that last one is such a gift because, you know, from working with grieving people, that when your partner dies, it's hard to start another relationship under the best of circumstances. And if you haven't been explicitly given that permission, I can only imagine how much harder it must be. Having said that, I did eventually, in the book, the last part of the book is about how I navigated a new relationship. And it didn't matter that Lynn had given me that permission. I will say I still felt horribly guilty. Oh, wow. And I still spent years, it took, the last part of the book covers about 2 years after Lynn died, only in a much smaller number of pages, but still, because I wanted to tell a little bit of the story of what was like for me as I started to come out of the deepest part of the grief. And tried to figure out, was I going to be able to have this relationship that had fallen in my lap? Yeah. And it was very, very, very hard. And that's when I say, that's with Lynn's blessing. Hmm. What would it have been like if we had never talked about that?

Yeah. Were you able to get past that? I did. I did. Yeah.

Um, I'm still with Cordy now. Cordelia is her name. When you read the book, I mean, this is like a spoiler alert for our listeners. When you read the book, I stop just at the point, basically 2 years after Lynn died, when I found a way forward where I thought it will be possible for us to make this relationship work. And I don't like reading books that tie everything up in a neat bow. And besides, our lives keep going. Exactly. So I sort of, I stopped the story there, but here we are recording this interview several years later. And yeah, Cordy is very much in my life.

Yeah. So with Lynn, you talked about what was going to happen to you after she, after she passed. What did you talk about? What would happen with her or what that would be like for her? How was her feelings about death?

Yes. And here I should say to all the listeners, we were not religious. Lynn, neither of us believes in a formal religion with a structure of heaven and suchlike. But we're also not complete atheists, or at least not science-driven atheists. In other words, neither of us thinks that science has all the answers, which puts us in the very common boat of we don't know. And we talked about this early on, you know, in the first year, like, what do you think will happen? And at one point she— because she, she liked to joke. She liked to joke about her cancer. It wasn't all gloom and doom. And so one day she just turned to me and said, you know, it'd be a lot easier if I believed in heaven or something like, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it be? I think it would be a lot better if I believed in heaven. But, you know, she didn't and I didn't. But we didn't know whether she would just go to sleep and there's nothing, or whether after that there's a spirit, a soul, or some of ourselves that continues on. Mm-hmm. Um, I thought, and we talked about how the process would be a kind of a fading away, that the, the best we could hope for in hospice was that she would slowly get more and more tired and turn in on herself and kind of like going into a, a sleep. But, um, And of course, eventually— and I promised her in that same conversation, uh, that first night of hospice, I promised her that when she was ready, if she stopped— if even if she stopped being able to talk, because it seemed like she was already losing that ability— if she just kept her mouth shut, I would not force food or liquid, and I would know that she was saying, I'm ready to go. And essentially, that's exactly what happened. It played out over several weeks. We had beautiful conversations that got with fewer and fewer words, right? More, but the interactions were precious to me. And eventually one day she wouldn't even let me squirt a drop of water into her mouth. Mm-hmm. She died the next day.

It was time. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, this, this journey that you, you went on with Lynn, It sounds— well, it obviously changes you. These things change us. Yes. In what ways do you think you were changed by going through this process? I mean, finding love, you know, you said it's the second time having this relationship with her and then going through this process. How has that changed Tony?

The single biggest thing that I I think I'm much more emotionally open now than I was at the start. I'm much more aware of other people's grief and pain. I'm much more aware. Even before I took the grief education course, I was inherently aware because it worked for me, because it's what I needed, of the support you can give someone just by letting them talk and letting them tell you what it is that they feel they want to share. Of course, I've learned more since then, but there's something about that I now think, and it's going to sound like I have a swelled head, but I now think I go through the world more aware of and willing to just— of other people's pain and need in these ways and more willing to just stop and give them time. I'm not rushing forward and I'm not expecting to accomplish anything. That has been huge. And then this, the whole other aspect which started with Lynn, uh, early on in the living with cancer. And, and every time I say this, I feel like, well, this is a cliché, but you really— we really became more aware of the beauty all around us, of life, of nature. Um, of course we loved nature, but when you know that this could be your last spring you notice the buds and the flowers and the beautiful smells of spring more than you ever did. It doesn't happen every day. It's not like I can possibly, like anyone else, go through every single day being more aware of the beauty all around us. But it's in me in a way that it certainly never was.

Yeah. Well, Tony, back to, back to the book. And this is a question that I asked your publisher for some questions to ask you, because I know every book on grief is unique because our own lives are unique. But the question is, there are lots of books on grief. What's unique? What's different about Carrying the Tiger?

As far as I know, Carrying the Tiger is the only memoir that, first of all, it's in strict memoir form. Where the whole point of the book is you are looking over my shoulder for these experiences. I almost never pull back to, to, to draw conclusions. I want you to go through this process with me, drawing your own conclusions. But I'm— I've tried to put in the book all the information that would allow you to see what I did. And your conclusions may be different than mine, and the things you pick up on may be different than mine. But I tried to put in a little of everything. And it's the only one that I have found which covers all three of these phases. I mean, half of the book is not ostensibly about grief. It's about learning to live with cancer. Yeah. And, and there are memoirs about learning to live with cancer and even some beautiful memoirs by people who were dying and then died. But inherently, they don't continue for the part two of the story. This is what it's like to go through this whole journey as the partner Yeah, through the living with cancer and then through learning how to support a good death and what that feels like and how amazing that can be. And then the shattering grief, because I really— I foolishly thought that because all the rest of it had gone so well and Lynn had about as good a death as you could have, and we'd had these conversations, I really hoped that I wouldn't have to suffer through shattering grief. And, you know, no, it doesn't. Our love was deep. The grief was like plunging into an abyss. And I guess I'm— I imagine that a lot of your listeners to a podcast with grief in its name have been and are, and/or are going through their own grief. And I don't have to tell everyone how disorienting and confusing and nonlinear and shattering it feels like. But I figured I would have readers who don't know that. So I describe in detail what the first 2 months of my grief were like because I happened to have all these CaringBridge records and I was able to reconstruct them. Yeah. And, and then Cordy entered my life while I was still grieving Lynn so fiercely, while it was still so soon. And I was able to write about something that many people do get to go through, which is how do you integrate new love while holding on to your existing love when society will tell you that they should conflict with each other? And when part of your own brain is worrying that you're late wife is going to feel angry or like I'm cheating on her, you know, which is of course in my brain and not hers. Anyway, my book covers all of that, and it starts with Life Good, and it ends with me coming out and into the next part of my life. And I really haven't found any other memoir that does that. There's millions of books out there. There may well be some, but I don't know of it.

Yeah, well, I think that's a great answer. And I think it's really important to emphasize some of those differences because— and the other thing is interesting to me is like, a lot of men writing books like this, you know, I interview lots of people. Most of them are women. Most of the people that I talk to in my grief work are women. So what do you hope men can take away from your book?

I really hope that men will see how being as open as I was about my emotions paid off for me big time. And also, we'll see, as I've tried to do with all of it, that everything you go through is normal, quote unquote normal. I mean, I got stuff in there. I got— not in detail, but Lynn got diarrhea. The drugs gave Lynn such unpredictable diarrhea that she had it in public places a couple of times where she couldn't make it to the restroom quickly enough. I mean, this is horrible stuff. I want people who are going through that part of the cancer journey and are not sharing that fact, that sort of messy reality with anyone because they're embarrassed by it. I want them to read this book and see, no, I shouldn't be embarrassed by it. This guy, Tony Stewart, is sharing all of that stuff. Yeah. And he and Lynn came out okay. And for the guys, I want them to see how being open and emot— letting your emotions out and sharing them with your wife and sharing them with your friends against everything our culture teaches us actually paid off for me big time.

Yeah, that's what I hope they see. So Tony, you're— and Lynn passed when? It was 5 years ago?

Uh, 4 and a half. February 2021.

4 and a half years ago. So I— it's really weird in my work that I seem to get people in phases. It's for— I get a lot of parents who've lost children. Now I'm getting a lot of people who've lost spouses. And as I'm talking to you, I'm thinking about someone just lost her spouse a little bit over a year ago, uh, and it was the second love of her life, second, second marriage, and she thought this is, this is the one, this is the love of my life. And a question she asked me yesterday was like, I don't know if this was worth it, all the pain that I'm going through, you know. And it was kind of a rhetorical question, but right, for someone who's farther out now, can you help shed some light for those people who are in that, that intense pain, those first 6, 8, 10 months, year, and they're like, man, I don't know if this was worth it.

First, that makes me feel so sad, that sentence. Uh, I of course also— of course, not of course, everyone's grief is different— I went through the period of crying, sobbing, I wish I had died with you, I can't believe I'm here feeling like this. This is horrible. We should have gone together. I, I mean, I, I write about that because I want people who haven't been there— no, that is a part of how you feel. But the thing that I want to say, which I'm sure you, to grieving parents, can say— and by the way, my sister lost her son and is a grieving parent, um— it does get better. 2, 3, at some point and she's getting help, she's talking to you, she's, she's, she's, she's, she's doing everything she can, and no one knows how long it will take. But at some point, my memories of Lynn did turn that corner and start making me smile. And that is the most wonderful gift when you get that back. The problem is none of us can predict for any person how long it will take or how to get there. And, and she's still in the thick of it. I'm glad she's talking to you. Oh, I started to have another thing I wanted to say about that, and I lost it. So sorry. Yeah, no, thank you.

That's, that's a great answer. And I can, I can tell people that it always helps to hear that, you know, over and over again, because again, I think we all would agree that, you know, love is worth it. But there's that, there's that doubt that comes in the middle of the night when you wake up and the person's not there. That you've been with for, for decades, and, and you're, you know, you're used to sharing coffee with them in the morning, etc. And there's that little part of you that says, yeah, you know, may— maybe if we hadn't done— I wouldn't be having this pain, right? Right. But, but we, as you said, it is— we don't know when it's going to happen, and it's not like it's overnight. It's like, like you wake up one day and it's gone. It's just like one day you'll realize, like, things are getting a little bit brighter, things are getting a little bit better.

Yeah. And I realized what I was— what I forgot for a minute there is just to say, it's not like you turn a corner and all the memories make you smile. And it's not like you stop crying. Here I am, I'm 4 and a half years out from her death. I will grieve her for my whole life. I will carry her heart— her in my heart my whole life. I'm in a relationship. I'm in a happy relationship. I most recently cried for Lynn 3 days ago. Hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, thanks for sharing that. I think that's really important too, because just because you find another relationship doesn't mean you're replacing that person, because there's that, that fear people have. I don't want to replace them, and I'm never going to have anyone like them, right? Um, so Cordelia is a different person from Lynn, and never— I would assume, I'm not gonna put words in your mouth again, but is not replacing Lyn.

It's totally not replacing Lyn. And a part of what I write about, you know, we talk about displaced anger and the anger that you feel during grief, that many people feel during grief. I forgot to put it in my book after I started taking the course. I remembered all the times I was angry and I thought, damn, I didn't put my anger in there. But this whole business of the new person Adjusting to a new person, for me, there is a sort of a smokescreen of my emotions. I kept trying to reject Cordelia because of the way she was different. She is different from Lynn. She doesn't have the core strength of what Lynn and I had, which is a part of Lynn's personality that I was so relaxed with. This easy joking, telling, making silly comments. I put a few of them in the book so you can really get to get to know her. Yeah. That's not Cordelia. Of course, Cordelia has other strengths. Right. And in the early— in the first year or year and a half of my trying to go with this growing love that I had for Cordelia, every time I rejected her, I realized that I was rejecting her. I subsequently realized I was rejecting her because she's not Lynn. Yeah. But ultimately, the fact that she's not Lynn is what makes it work so well. I am not replacing Lynn. If Lynn is looking down on me, if there is a heaven or her spirit is able to see me, she knows. And I just said that Lynn has things that I will never get again. The things that I loved most about Lynn, no one else is ever going to give me those things. What the, the challenge was to become comfortable and open up and accept the things that Cordy can give me, which Lynn is not— was— yeah, it wasn't. It's, it's a different relationship. And that ultimately is how the two can exist in my heart simultaneously, like a little jigsaw puzzle.

Yeah, that was beautifully said. Thank you for that. Uh, well, we're coming to the end of our time. Um, so Tony, I'd like for you to remind people again of the name of your book, uh, where they can find it, and if you're open to people reaching out to you directly after someone listens to this, if there's a way people can find you.

Yes, the name of the book is Carrying the Tiger. It is in wide distribution. It is certainly on Amazon. But if you don't like to buy your books on Amazon or whatever, it's in all of the competitors to Amazon. It's in both print and ebook and audiobook narrated by me. So it's on, you know, Audible and Spotify, places like that, as well as an audiobook. My website is TonyStewartAuthor.com. Tony Stewart, like that race car driver who is younger than me and stole my name and made it famous. But yeah, TonyStewartAuthor.com. You can reach me one of two different ways. You can go to TonyStewartAuthor.com and fill in the contact form, and that will send me an email. Or you can just email me, Tony@TonyStewartAuthor.com. And yes, I would be happy to respond to an email from someone who heard this conversation or read the book and wants to talk to me about it. Of course, I'd love that.

Awesome. Well, Tony, again, thanks for being here. Thanks for sharing so openly about your experience. Thanks for sharing Lynn with us and enjoy the rest of your afternoon. You too, Brian.

Thank you very much. All right. Have a good one.

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