Mother's Alzheimer's, Son's Love: Edward Grinnan's Search for Answers

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. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Grief 2 Growth Podcast. I'm your host, Brian, and I'm truly delighted to have you here today. Today we have a very special guest. His name is Edward Grinnan. He's the editor-in-chief of Guidepost Publications, and is the author of the deeply moving, moving moving memoir, A Journey of Faith: A Mother's Alzheimer's, a Son's Love, and a Search for Answers. Before we get into our conversation with Edward, let me briefly introduce myself to you in case you don't know who I am. Again, I'm Brian D Smith, and I'm here to provide a safe and compassionate space for people that are navigating the journey of grief. My own experience with loss started with my daughter passing away 8 years ago at the age of 15. Her name is Shana, and that's led me on this path of discovery and understanding about the nature of life and death and all the things that we have to go through. So let's get back to Edward. Edward's— Edward Grinnan again. His latest book, he shares a deeply personal journey through his mother's illness and his unwavering love and support for her during her Alzheimer's journey. It's a touching tribute to his mother, exploring the bond of family and faith, and is testament to the enduring power of love. His impressive career spans over two decades at Guidepost Publications, where he currently holds the position of editor-in-chief and vice president. He's not only a seasoned professional, but he's also a gifted author with several inspirational books to his name. And his upcoming release is A Journey of Faith, and it promises to be a moving and enlightening read. So with that, I want to thank Edward for being here today and welcome you to Grief 2 Growth.

Thank you, Brian, and greetings to your audience. And I hope I live up to that very nice introduction you gave me.

Oh, I'm absolutely sure that you will. Um, I want to again thank you for being here. I want to tell everybody before we get started, we have a little bit of delay with the satellite. Edward lives in a very beautiful area, um, so it's the satellite reception is a little bit— so we're— might be a little delay, but we'll get through this and we'll try not to just talk over each other. Uh, Edward, I'd like for you if you could start by— I'm sure most of our audience is familiar with Guideposts magazine. I know millions of people read it, but for those who are not familiar with Guideposts, please tell us a little bit about the magazine and how you got started there.

Well, you know, it was founded in 1945 by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, and some of you may recognize that name. He wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, which is one of the seminal books of the 20th century for, you know, sort of linking self-empowerment with faith in God, sort of a— if you believe in yourself and you believe in God, then, then you can do great things for yourself. And Dr. Peel actually founded Guideposts Magazine about 8 years before he wrote The Power of Positive Thinking. I think a lot of his thinking was shaped by the experiences that he discovered in interviewing people for Guideposts Magazine. Guideposts Magazine was the original sort of user-generated content at a time when magazines tended to be a little bit up in the, you know, the audience was out there in the proscenium, you know, beyond the proscenium stage and you spoke to them. And Dr. Brian D. Smith and Pete Peele had the idea that everyday people from all walks of life, different faiths, you know, incredibly diverse gathering of people could tell their personal stories of faith in action and in their everyday lives. Not big conversion stories, but much smaller stories sometimes about how people overcame problems and found solutions by belief in themselves and belief in God. And that's the story of Guideposts magazine. It grew throughout the years and it reaches millions of people every issue. It has celebrities sometimes. Sometimes, but it has mostly everyday ordinary people sharing their struggles and their strengths, their hope, and their triumphs.

That's— it's an awesome magazine. I know it inspires a lot of people. Um, and I know Norman Vincent Peale was known for the power of positive thinking. Now, your, your memoir covers a disease though that we know of, Alzheimer's, that people don't recover from. So how— tell me how this played out as you were going through this, this experience with your mother going through Alzheimer's.

Well, you know, Alzheimer's, you know, I know sort of the subject of the topic of your podcast is grief. And, you know, in most cases, you know, people die relatively suddenly in our lives. We lose them. It's maybe it's expected. In Alzheimer's, it's kind of a journey of grief. For me, it was also a journey of faith. But you lose that person a little bit every day, every week, every month as you see them begin to sort of fade away. You know, this Alzheimer's that afflicted my mother seems to run in our family on the maternal side of the family. She had 3 sisters and 3 brothers, all 3 girls, all 3 daughters died in memory care. And one of the 3 brothers also had Alzheimer's or dementia. The other 2 brothers probably died too soon before they could have shown symptoms. And all of that seems to come from their, their father, my grandfather, who's the only grandparent I knew when he was way back in the '50s when I was a little kid and he was afflicted with dementia. You know, they didn't have a name for it, really. I mean, they just said, oh, he's dodi, he's senile, he's just, you know, old. And I, you know, he, whenever I visited him, you know, the thing he would do is be, he'd bestow a quarter on me, you know. So I was very, and then as the time passed, he'd sometimes forget that he gave me a quarter and he'd give me another one. And, you know, I'd go over there and he'd say, did I give you your quarter? And I'd And of course, as the kid that I was, I said, oh, of course not, you didn't give me a quarter. So I was loading up on quarters by the end, you know, but I, you know, I just thought it was a game that he was playing with me. I didn't realize the effect of that one little interpersonal exchange I had with him when I was just a little boy would sort of color the way I looked at life later on, and particularly when my mother, my mother got sick, you know, there the, you know, the very first signs, you know, and the very first signs really came from, from her church. You know, she was, she was a really smart woman. I mean, she had, you know, she was the daughter of a schoolteacher. She learned how to read before she even went to first grade. You know, she was one of these people who did, had two books going at any given time. Plus she did the cross, the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. She was a quiz show champion in the 1950s. You know, you know, she was really a smart, smart woman. And she did a lot of charity work and she was devoted to her church. And one of the things she did, you know, was a Catholic church, St. Owens in Birmingham, Michigan. And she, she would count the collection basket after daily Mass. And her job was to, you know, to count it up and fill out a deposit slip and take it to the bank. Saved a lot of trouble so that the pastor didn't have to do that. And, uh, one of the nuns, Sister Carolyn, called us at one point and said, you know, your mother is slipping up. She's— the deposit slips don't add up to the amount of money that she's taking to the bank, and it's causing some confusion. But I'll double-check her for you because we don't want her to— you know, she's very proud and she wants to be of use to her church and to her faith, so we're going to let her keep doing But we're gonna— I'm gonna double-check and go to the bank with her every day and make sure that deposit slip is correct. So we don't have any misunderstandings at the bank. You know, and she was also the church librarian. And again, around that same time, Sister Carol called us up and said, you know, your mother's having trouble reshelving the books, you know, the Dewey Decimal System is beginning to confuse her. And we're gonna take her off of that. She can still check books in and out of the front desk. So, you know, it was, you know, the, this, the— it was like almost a, like a strike of fear through me when I started to— knowing my family history, and we started to hearing those things about my mother. And I began thinking, there's no stopping this, you know, and it will go on until it's over. And that was just, you know, almost immediately I felt myself grieving for what I knew would be an inevitable loss. And along— but what's, you know, death is one thing, you know, because death is a full stop as far as life on Earth goes. But dealing with someone with a dementia like Alzheimer's or any of the related ones, you see them die a little bit. They go— you lose that person day by day by day, you know. They, they know it's a disinteg— it's a disaggregation of your cognitive abilities. You know, it begins to— the mind begins to fly apart in slow motion. And to see it was incredibly painful. But into the journey, I also found these, these moments of hope and beauty that were completely unexpected, which I think sometimes happens even when we are deep into grief. Where we, we have these bursts of, of beauty in our memories of our, of our loved one. In my mother's case, I found, you know, I found that, that as all of these things faded away, when I wasn't even sure she knew who I was, though she did, I know that now, um, the two things that seemed to survive the ravages of Alzheimer's were love and faith. And for some reason, they seem to survive even the onslaught of cognitive decline. And in the end, that was my mother— love and faith. And those two things are what makes— gave me such hope at the end. The last word my mother ever said to me, and she hadn't spoken for a while, and I I was talking, I was telling, I knew she was going to die soon. And I was telling her, I was apologizing, you know, for what a bad son I thought I had been. And I had been at times very bad. So we can talk about that. And the only thing she said, you know, was the last thing she said to me was love. That one word. Excuse me.

Yeah, that's, that's beautiful. That's beautiful to hear that, that, that that survived even, as you said, the onslaught of the disease. I know, with Alzheimer's, as I was telling you, I think before we start recording, I've gone through it, what I've gone through with my father-in-law. And we're going through it now with my, with my mother-in-law. And there is a, there's that anticipatory grief that we don't have with a lot of other things. And there's that losing the person. You know, it's one thing to lose their, lose the body, but to lose that, that mind and that connection, as I think a special kind of grief that we go through, as we see our loved one no longer who they were. So as you're going through that, and being that you're the editor of Guidepost magazine, how was that? How did that— how did your faith help you to cope with that? And, and this positive outlook, how did you maintain that?

It wasn't always positive, I'll tell you that. You know, to see someone's memories, you know, we are made of memories. I mean, that's really who we are. Everything we are is the function of our memory system. You know, it's how cognition functions. So to see those memories slip away like that, like watching a sailboat disappear slowly into a fog bank, is very difficult. And it was very difficult. I should tell you a little bit. You asked me how I came to Guy Fawkes Magazine. So when I came to Guideposts, I had never heard of it. You know, people are always shocked by the fact that, you know, I had no idea what Guideposts was. I thought it was a travel magazine. I think it sounds like a travel magazine. Maybe I can get a few trips out of this job. Um, if you substitute journey for travel, um, then that's what it's been for me. And I came to Guideposts And I was in a very bad state. I was, you know, pretty much a bottomed-out alcoholic. I had lost just about everything, you know, the most important relationships of my life. Everything was gone. I was hanging on by a thread, you know. And for a little time, a little bit before, I'd been in and out of— I, I slept in the streets. I, you know, there was a time when I begged for change so I could keep drinking. I would pick up cigarette butts and smoke them so I couldn't afford cigarettes. So anyway, I don't know how Guideposts got my resume. I was trying to get back on my feet at the time. I have no idea. But this recruiter called me and said, would you be interested in going to an interview at Guideposts magazine? I said, first of all, who are you? I've never heard of you and I don't know how you got my phone number. And secondly, what's Guideposts? And she said, well, your, your writing background may be of interest to them. So I was desperate and penniless and about to lose my apartment or get kicked out of my apartment. And, um, so I went in for the interview and it just, it was almost like I all of a sudden knew where I was for the first time in many years that I was in the right place. And I said to myself, I'll stick around for a year. I've been going to 12-step meetings at the time, and my sponsor said, just find a job, any job, hang on to it for a year while you work on your sobriety and you work on your spirituality and your relationship to a higher power, whether you believe in him or not, you know, act as if, and just do this. Okay, so Guy Post looked like a nice place to spend a year, you know, and that was in 1986. And You know, I got sober at Guideposts, and what kept me there was the beauty of the audience and their stories and what they went through in their lives and big emotions sometimes, you know, loss and grief, depression, people overcoming these things. And they almost like carried me during a time when I needed to be carried. The audience did. So I tell you this background because when my mother, some years later, when my mother began to suffer the symptoms of dementia, and I was— she was in Michigan with my brother and my sister and my sister-in-law, but I was in New York City, Manhattan, working at Guideposts. And it was— I was panic-stricken that I couldn't be there for my mother. There's no reason to think that I— she would never have wanted me to come back to Michigan to take care of her. That would have horrified her. Because she was so independent. But during, in the beginning part of that time, and I think this has to do with that anticipatory grief, that fear of losing her and knowing that I was going to, and it was going to be painful. I did start drinking again and, you know, and it took me back, not necessarily to the depths that I had been at when I first came to Gaiapos. But emotionally and spiritually, the depths were the same. Maybe not the outside, the loss of apartments and not having a place to live and having no money to eat. That wasn't it. But spiritually, you know, I lost my contact with God and I began drinking and drugging again for on and off for a couple years until I ended up in a detox. And I was really forced to confront the fact that I was trying to smother these feelings I was having about my mother. I tried to tell myself I was an alcoholic and I drank because I drank. That's what alcoholics do. And I saw a therapist in this facility and he said, let's talk about your mother. And I said, no, let's not talk about what she's going through. You know, it has nothing to do with what I'm going through. And he said, well, maybe it does. Maybe it's not an excuse for drinking and drugging, but it is a trigger. And that really began my journey. Towards hope and faith with my mother's illness, where I really began to accept it, accept that it was going to be painful and that I would go through that. And then, you know, I realized at that time, and you hate to say this about something as painful as grief and loss, but in my life, the only time I've really had significant spiritual and emotional growth is during the difficult times, during the struggle. When I'm happy and everything's fine and I just feel wonderful, that's great. But I don't experience all the spiritual growth and personal, you know, progress in those moments. I've always found it's in the moments and the struggles and the pain, which are just part of life and you can't get by them, is the place where you learn so much about yourself. And what I learned in my mother's illness and the prospect of losing her was that I could survive. I could survive that. 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 go deeper. Thoughts I don't always get to on 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. That's, that's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. And that's been my experience too, is that I think it's the human design, that when we're going through what we call good times, when things are fine, we don't experience that growth. It's when we're tested, when we're tried, when we're put through that trial by fire, that we realize how strong we are. And, and in fact, I believe we've become even stronger. I, I don't think that the, the pain of this world is a, is a, is a mistake. I don't think it's a bug. I think it's a feature. I think it's something that, you know, and I'm sure being the editor-in-chief of Guideposts for all those years, when people are writing their stories of, of triumph, they're overcoming something, right? I mean, that's, those are the people, those are the stories that you're publishing.

They're always, these are stories of overcoming and it's fascinating to see that can be overcoming something as small as learning to fit in at a new job, you know, and maybe facing your insecurities about that. And, or it could be facing the loss of a child or facing the loss of a spouse or a job, um, and overcoming that. But the, the, the interesting thing was if, if it's someone just trying to fit in at a new job and getting comfortable in their cubicle, or if it's someone trying to face a life crisis, the tools are the same. You know, the tools are, you know, of, you know, pushing down denial and letting go and, and just believing that there is a path for you to go forward. You know, so many times, you know, I've had a guy post stories in life in general. We think there's no way forward, you know, when we're trapped in those moments where life is really testing us. I like that word you use, testing. And we think there's no path forward. Um, you know, we find that path, and, and that path is, is an inspiration to others. And I think one of the most important things about Guy Post stories is the people who tell them want to help other people. It's not just a, you know, here's what happened to me. And, and the Guy Post audience, when we, we talk to them, we talk to them a lot, always say, oh boy, I can identify. You know, I can identify with what that person went through. Maybe I never went through anything like it, but I've gone through things that are— make— that remind me of that struggle. And I can, I can understand that there's light on the other side of that, that, that struggle.

You mentioned something, I think it's very important, that feeling that there's no path forward. When we go through the worst types of grief, I think that's the one thing we have in common, we feel like this is the one I'm not going to be able to survive. This is the one I'm not going to be able to overcome. And we, we get to what we feel like is the end of the road. And I'm wondering, did it feel like that for you? When your mother, when your mother got this diagnosis?

Later, you know, it, it sometimes felt like I was falling. It felt like I was just falling through space. And I didn't know where I would land if I was to survive the landing, you know. And it was my mother's strength that, that persisted throughout her disease. And the people who have— in your audience who have dealt with an Alzheimer's or dementia patient, and I know there are many of them because it affects millions and millions of families in this country, um, you know, know that that there is always a core of someone inside that person who seems so lost to us. You know what? You know, I found the most important thing with, with my mother was to be present, to live in the present. That this disease told me that I had to meet my mother in the present because that's all she had. She had the moment. The pinhole in time that she lived in because the past was being wiped out for her and she had no concept of the future. So I had to find how to meet her in that moment. And sometimes it was just being with her. Sometimes in the middle, you know, our tendencies when our loved ones begin to talk in a way that we think is irrational or unrealistic, like my mother would say that she had a conversation with someone that morning. And I'd say, oh, who? And it would be someone who's been dead for years.

Yeah.

My tendency as a son is to say, no, no, you didn't talk to that person. That person, don't you realize it? Don't you remember? They died 15 years ago. And I realized that that was the wrong thing to say. Totally the right thing to say. What took me a while to learn was, oh, well, how was that conversation? What did you just talk about? You know, and you know, in that moment, I was able to meet her where she was instead of trying to drag her back to where I was, which was, you know, someone without dementia. And I realized as we went through this process, this, this, this slow process of grief as I lost her and I lost her every day or every week or every month, you know, a little bit more that, you know, if I stayed in the present, I was there just with her, that sense of grief would lift. Because I couldn't love my mother if I was grieving her while she was still alive. Um, because grief will block out that we think, you know, I'm going to say something that I've said before and written about, and people sometimes don't agree, but grief can be a very selfish thing, you know, because it is It's so self-centered, you know, and, and it is a universal feeling that goes back. I mean, you can, you can find cave paintings and ancient hieroglyphs describing grief. It's part— it's very fundamental to the human condition. And even other, you know, higher order of mammals seem to suffer, you know, the period of grief. It's important to us to know that people matter to us so much that we will suffer and when they die and they leave us, when they go on. Um, but grief can also be a blocker, you know. And I, if I wanted to be there for my mother as she was dying, um, you know, I had to push through that, that grief, that sense of, you know, I've lost my mom, I've lost my mom, and just say, no, she's still here. And there's a way to reach out, and sometimes that's just holding a hand, sometimes just sitting there You know, during the last of my mother's time, I spent a lot of time just sitting with her, you know, and we didn't have to say anything. I just knew my presence meant something. And it's certainly her presence meant something to me. But it was all about being in the moment. So when I say grief is selfish, for me, sometimes it has been because it's so much about me. I mean, that's grief is your feelings, your emotions. That you're experiencing. And I always, you know, I remind myself to be cautious about that. That it is a process, one that we have to push ourselves through, and sometimes we get stuck.

Yeah, I think that was very, very well said. And I understand what you're saying. You know, I tell people there are I think there are two sides to grief. We grieve for ourselves, what we're losing. And we supposedly grieve for what our loved one has lost, especially in the case of death, when someone, when someone transitions to the next world. And I tell people, don't grieve for them, because they're okay. The people that are making that transition to the next world, they're, they're fine. And I was just— this, this happens to be, I guess, Dementia Day, because I interviewed someone earlier this morning who lost her mother to another form of dementia. And we were talking about one of the lessons that we get from this is being in the moment, you know, and so, and that's all we have with people with, with, with these diseases, with Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. They, they don't have the past, we can't go back to that. But we can learn to be in the moment, which is something that we can all use in our lives. So they're here, that's, I think it teaches us something.

Sure, it teaches us the power of the present, which is so important. You know, I live in New York City. I live down the street from the New York headquarters of the Franciscans. They have a beautiful church, the Church of St. Francis. And I would walk my dogs by them for a long time, for many years. I love the friars that come out and bless my dogs, you know. And that was always so wonderful to bring your dog for a blessing. Um, but I would talk to them about my mother, and especially after she died. And this one friar said to me, look, she's in a better place. Think of the suffering that has ended. Think of how, you know, she was a woman of tremendous faith, and she's moved on to something that is more wonderful than you can possibly imagine. So, you know, if you're grieving, grieve for yourself. Surely, but don't grieve for her because she's gone to something better. And you need to acknowledge that and let go, you know, because you can't keep her here. And in, in your grief, you're sort of trapping your mother— not in any, you know, ghost-like way, but you're sort of emotionally trapping your mother here when she's gone on, you know. And I know the pain that you're in, but you have to at least celebrate that she's with God. She's in a better place where she needs to be. And, you know, that helped me a lot. That kept me from slipping over the edge all the time and just sort of sitting down and saying, I can't, don't know what to do with myself.

Yeah, I think it's, it could, it's both things at once. The grief is a normal process that we have to go through. Um, It is, it's that love that honors that person. And it says how important that person to us and that perceived loss that, that we feel like we've lost them. So we can't, I don't think we can bypass that. I don't think it's part of being human. But we can always hold on to this idea also, at the same time, that they are, they're better off, they're out of the, out of the pain, their memories are back intact, they're You know, and I believe, and I'd like to ask your thoughts on this, you were saying your mother would talk about talking to deceased people. How do you feel about, about when people are going through this? And they're starting to say, so-and-so came to visit me yesterday?

And you mean, in a dementia patient having those sort of hallucinations? They are wandering through the maze of their minds. And if you ever look at a brain, you can see all the channels and squiggles, you know, and if I used to picture that my mother was wandering through that maze trying to find her past and find herself and it wasn't incorrect, you know, you tend, you know, particularly when that relationship between parent and child is suddenly flipped, you know, on its head, like the polarity of it completely changes and suddenly you're in charge of them. And you're telling them. It's so hard, you know. What I learned to resist, and, and so did my siblings and other people who loved my mother, was to go with that. You know, if they're having conversations with people that don't exist, that's fine. They're in their heads trying to work it out, and they're trying to find something and learn something, you know. And it is, however nonsensical It may seem to us that they're having that conversation and they're talking nonsense to us. There's a process that they're trying to figure something out and they're losing the capacity to figure these things out, but they're trying. And the best thing I could do was, was be there for my mother and let her know that it was all okay. You know, my mother, thank God, was never violent. She did not go through that period that some Alzheimer's and dementia patients go through where they're, they're really agitated and angry. And that's just them. They're just fighting the disease. That's all they're doing. And, you know, you, you've got to give them that. But fortunately, my mother never went through that period, but she went through a period where she was very difficult. And, and it was so sad for me to see her fight so hard about a disease that she knew was in her family. Um, even though there was a lot of denial in the beginning when she began to lose her memories and her cognition deteriorated. So to see her fight that hard was heartbreaking, but it was also something I had to learn to tell her not to stop doing. You know, just like it's a process, it's a journey, and that journey has bumps in the road for them, and you've got to go with them. It's just— it is an incredible test of empathy and compassion. Because as a, particularly as a child, you want things to be okay. I mean, this is your mother. This is, you came from her and you desperately want them not to have this disease and not, you know, it's so difficult because it's about cognition. It's about the brain. It's the mind. It's a brain disease. It's not insanity. It's not mental illness. It's a brain, organic brain disease. And it's, it takes them away from you. I, I hated that word Alzheimer's. I hated it. I didn't, and I hated what it was doing, you know, and I had to stop hating. I had to just, I learned how to be empathetic and compassionate to a degree that I never expected myself to be able to achieve. And, and it was by force. It wasn't because I'm a particularly good person, because I'm not. It was because I, I had to use it. I needed empathy to survive what my mother was going through and what would happen after she died.

Yeah, I think that tests like that, it— I think it's both things. We, we, we have a strength in us that we don't know that we have. And I think these tests bring it out of us. I think it also helps us to grow. I think we get stronger as we go through these trials. So I hear you talking about your mother and the Alzheimer's and how much you hate it. But I also see, you know, how you've developed, you know, through it. And you said you even went back and started drinking again, and then you overcame that again. I think every time we do that, we expand our capacity, we grow as a soul.

I think so too. And I, you know, it's, it seems sometimes it seems unfair that we have to go through the tough times to get to the good times. But that's the way the world is made. And, you know, you have to understand that that's where you live, and you can't change that. Oh, it's just, you know, it's a journey. And one of the reasons why I wrote the book A Journey of Faith was to give people hope. I mean, what people always said, say about Guideposts magazine is that they can read it every day and they get hope. They can read it first thing, you know, they can read it in line at the supermarket. And by that time they get checked out, they're their demons, their depression, their anxiety is lifted by listening to other people tell stories about how they overcame things. And I wanted this book to be that. I wanted it to tell people that, you know, in any situations that you're in, whether it's the loss of a loved one or just the loss of self, that you can get through it. There's hope. And, and, and beauty. And I wanted to inspire people who are going through difficult times that the difficult times don't last forever, and they're something that, that you learn and you go through and you get out the other side, and it's better. It gets better. It's one of the things that said today when I went to a 12-step program, I first started stop drinking, you know, I was a mess. And, you know, the old-timers would come up and they say, hey, It gets better. And that's all they said to me. But they were right. It does get better. Grief gets better, you know, and it, you know, and it's a pain. Well, I think grief makes you stronger when you, when you wrestle with it and then, and then get past it. You know, it's grief is like this, you know, visage on your path that's sort of blocking your way to go forward and you have to wrestle with it and then get through And one of the things for me that at first was painful in grief, but has helped me a lot, is just remembering good things about the person, how wonderful a life they had, and how much they brought into the world with them and left when they left the world. You know, their whole life was a blessing to themselves and to others and particularly to people you love. So those sorts of celebratory, you know, reminders, like, you know, I still laugh at things. I would see things on television my mother would make a remark about all these years later, and I'll sit there and laugh. That's what she would have said about this guy. You know, she would have liked him. You know, um, so it's, you know, it really is about grief as a form of love. I think, you know, and with all the positives and negatives of love, because love can make us crazy. Um, but grief is a form of love because you, because you, you grieve the loss of someone you love. In the end, I think really who we are is basically who we love. So loss is wrenching. Um, but part it's Grief is the price we pay for love.

Yeah.

Um, and the more you love that person, probably the harder you're going to grieve. And the grief is the last part of that love.

Yeah, I think I agree with that 100%. Grief is the price that we pay for love. Um, there's, you know, love is a risk. Whenever we, whenever we love anybody, anything, it's a risk because it can be it can be taken away. That's part of what makes it so precious. And then we have to decide, you know, is it worth me going through this? Is it, you know, but I think ultimately, most of us decide it's worth it, it's worth taking that risk. Even knowing that, you know, none of us lives forever. At some point, we're going to part with that loved one. But we, but we do it anyway.

Right? I mean, life would have no meaning without death. So it's not something we can turn off. And, you know, when we talk about love, you know, love isn't always a choice. Sometimes it is, but when it comes to your parents, it's not a choice. You're born loving them, right? No matter what happens, right? And a lot of those things is going to happen in your relationship with your parents, but you are born loving those two people. And so that's going to be part of your growth and your grief throughout from the, you know, the beginning to the end of your life. You know, and, you know, missing someone is not the same as grieving them either. I think it's okay to miss people who have gone on. Of course, you miss people who, you know, go on a world trip. Why not miss people who have died? But missing them is something different, I think, than grieving. And, you know, grieving is a real deep sense of loss.

Yes, yes. I often say to people, it's like we don't, we don't grieve someone when they go on a trip, you know, when your daughter goes away to college, like my daughter went away to college, and I was, I was upset, I was sad, I missed her, but I didn't grieve her. And I think the difference is, and this is where we can start to mitigate the grief, is when we understand they haven't really gone away, you know, we are going to see them again. And, and shifting that perspective, I think it can help to mitigate the grief and turn it into more of a missing them, more of a— and then like you said earlier, when it comes to the memories, the memories when someone first crosses over can be actually painful. And people will want to put the memories away and not remember. And sometimes people even— I don't want to see my loved one's picture because it's going to trigger me, it's going to, it's going to cause me to go through the whole grieving process again. But when I see my daughter's picture now, I smile. I love the memories of the time I had with her. And that's that transition we can make.

Right? I do. I keep a picture of my mother in my home office, just, you know, so it's not— it's like, okay, you know, she lived, she died, she loved you. And it was really good. And just don't be afraid of that, of that picture. And I remember, you know, when the moment she died, where— and I was not there, I had been there the last couple weeks, but I had to leave. And my brother and my sister were away. I gave them kind of some relief time and spent time with my mother. Just spent— took off from work and just spent time with her. But then I had to go, and she waited until they came back, you know, to die. But I was teaching a writer's workshop in Arizona, and that morning before the The day began that morning. I decided I want to go for a hike. I wanted to hike up a mountain. So I found this mountain outside, um, I forget where it was, was Southern Arizona. And, and, um, I got to the top of the mountain. I just felt overcome, just overcome, you know. I was breathless from the climb, and I lay down and just looked at the sun, and I felt this incredible feeling. It was like a swooning of the soul, like something was being lifted, a whooshing. It was physical. It was a physical thing. And then I had to get back to where we were meeting, and I climbed back down the hillside and the path. And I went back into our hotel, and there was a message for me. And I knew what that message was. I knew that my mother had died. And when I looked into it, it was at the exact same moment that I was on top of that mountain. I felt like she passed the way up.

Yeah, exactly. That's beautiful. Yeah, that's beautiful that you had that experience and were able to have that connection and feel her. I think sometimes people do, they stop by on the way out and they say goodbye., you know, to the world.

They do. Yeah. I, in Guidepost Magazine and, and somewhere other, we have Guidepost Magazine. We also have Angels on Earth Magazine, which is about people's encounters with angelic forces, not just angelic beings, but, and we have a magazine called Mysterious Waves. And there's so many stories in those magazines about people who have had some sort of, you know, relationship, experience you know, with a loved one who's gone on or who is passing. I mean, it's almost common. And people shouldn't be frightened or ashamed of it because I know people are sometimes scared to even talk about some of the things surrounding the death of a loved one. But there's all sorts of miracles that we are given, you know, to help us.

Yeah, absolutely. So I know before we started recording, you shared with me you've experienced another big loss in your life, you know, recently. Um, so I don't know how much you want to share about that, you know, because I know that's— again, you know, this— we go through these journeys, and I think sometimes we feel like, you know, the trials never stop coming. And frankly, I don't think they really do. But, um, so do you want to share about that?

I will talk about that a little bit because of the, the book, uh, The Journey of Faith, is about my mother's passing 20 years ago and how I processed since. I lost my wife Julie, um, a year ago in last January, June of 2022, and I lost her to suicide. And, you know, it, it was a shock, but to some extent it wasn't because Julie talked about it. You know, she had a disease, lupus, that had really crippled her and really diminished her life. And she had depression. And frankly, there was suicide in her family. And often there's a family history of suicide. And, you know, that's something I'm still processing. Like, Julie was a singer, a recording artist. And, you know, I have, you know, I heard, you know, a song of hers, Come On. I still can't listen to them, you know. I've got, you know, I don't know, 2,000 songs on my iPhone probably, but I still will skip when I hear Julie. And it's not that— I, I don't know why I do it, you know, but because I haven't quite processed it. And part of what made Julie beautiful was, was her recording career and her performance, her performances. And, and so that— and that's so much what I loved about her when I first met her. Her. Um, but when someone takes their life, when you love someone and they take their life, it's, it's really, you know, it is, it's hard not to blame yourself. It's, it's really hard not to be angry at them, even though you know, even though in Julie's case, she, you know, looking back, I think she prepared me for it. But it's, it's such a sudden and, you know, conscious. I mean, there are very few— we rarely decide to die. Few people decide to die. And that's what suicide is. It's a decision to end your life. And you can't get inside that decision of another person except to say you have to accept it. I mean, more than even my mother's death, you know, the challenge to accept that Julie made this decision. And I know that spiritually she was at peace. With it. I don't think it was done in a moment of crazy despair. I think she, thinking back, she had planned it and just decided her suffering physically and emotionally was so great that the only way to end the pain was to end her life. And I, you know, you just, you want to— I always want to turn the clock back. Could I have stopped it? Could I have talked her out of it? And that's all about not accepting. You know, and it's the hardest thing I've ever had to accept in my life, and I'm still trying to accept it. I'm still trying to say that— not that it's okay, not there yet— but that, that somehow there are things I don't understand and that, that happened, that I have to learn to accept that they happened, that this was part of my life, was to have You know, I was— Julie and I were married for 34 years, you know, and, and the fact that it's suicide, you know, there's a shame around suicide. Yes. The morning after, you know, I, and I, I don't know how the word got out, but, um, the obituary writer for the New York Times called me the next morning, and he had read about it. I don't somewhere online, Rolling Stone or The Guardian, I think, had reported Julie's death a little earlier. And he said, you know, that they'd like to do an obituary on Julie. And, you know, can you tell, you know, can you give us, you know, there's a lot of information about her online, but, um, can you tell us, you know, a little bit about her life? And, you know, and, and it had not been said in any of the previous reportings of Julie's death that she had taken her life. And I thought, I kept thinking, should I tell this guy, this obituary, you know, writer from the, you know, New York Times, that my wife actually took her own life? I think most of the stuff online had been that she had died of lupus, which was sort of true. Um, and I finally told him, I said, you know, she took her own life. That's how she actually died. It wasn't actually you know, lupus. So that was, you know, that was like in, in the midst of killing her, um, because her kidneys had begun to fail and she had not been able to walk very easily, um. And he said, well, we don't have to say that. We don't, you know, it's up to you. And, you know, I thought about it, and I know that, you know, Julie's brother had committed suicide almost exactly 10 years before she did. And, you know, he died kind of in this anonymous way. And it always bothered Julie that no one ever talked about the fact that Mickey took his life and that she thought that that was, you know, that that was the— that was shaming Mickey for doing that. It was, it was bringing shame. And so I said, no, I want to say how she died because I know there are other families out there and other people like me who are struggling with this and feeling guilty and feeling angry and feeling judgmental and all these— this world, this, this, this cyclone of emotions that you have to go through. And, you know, it's not something that should be hidden any more than Alzheimer's. I mean, it's, it's how she died. And, and there are families who need to know that you can talk about, you know, you, you can, you can talk about it. You can say the word suicide. It's, it's not You know, it's such a powerful and negative word because it's such a form of death that we don't accept, and we just don't want to accept it. And it is about acceptance. So, you know, so for the past year and a half, I've been, you know, I've been struggling through it. It's been, it's been up and down. Um, as I said, I don't know if I'll ever be able to listen to her music again, which is odd because people thought You know, some of my friends say, why? That's what I do. I listen to all the music, but it's really hard.

Now, I, I understand that. And I thank you, first of all, so much for being vulnerable and sharing that. Because I think it helps to lift the stigma around suicide, which I think is totally unwarranted. We need to try to understand people's motivations for doing things they do. And if we can't understand it, We have to accept it because it, you know, it is what it is. And you being so early in your grief, and I would say this is early in grief, 34-year marriage, and it's only been a year and a half. That's, that's early. So you're still in that shock mode. And it's still— I remember when my daughter passed away, we like to go to White Castle. It's a hamburger place in the Midwest.

Oh, yeah. I love White Castle.

I would take my daughter to White Castle, and my wife doesn't— didn't like the hamburger. So it was something that Shane and I did was special to us. And I remember the first time I was coming back from a grief counseling, I drove by the White Castle, and I just started crying. And then I would start— I almost thought about avoiding— I don't want to drive by it anymore, but it's 5 minutes from my house, so I'd have to go way out of my way not to drive by that place. But now I go, I drive by the White Castle, and I smile, you know. I remember the first time I took her there. And it's a happy memory. And I think the same way with, with Julie's music. I believe that one day, when you're ready, you'll, you'll put it back on and it'll, it'll trigger those, those good memories. But right now it's, I think it's just too early.

Yeah, that's what people tell me, you know, because I'm not smart enough to figure it out for myself. But people say, hey, you know, it's a process. You've written about it being a process. And now you're in the process. So, you know, take your own medicine, you know, understand that this isn't going away tomorrow. You know, this is not going away. It goes away when it goes away. You know, that grief, that sort of bursting through or wrestling that visage that's blocking our path. It's a process, you know, and everyone says it's a process, but it is. I mean, it's true. And, you know, You know, my last book was called Always by My Side. It was about all the dogs in my life. And Julie and I didn't have kids, we had dogs. And, you know, and so necessarily, as I've gone through all the dogs, they all, all the dogs, they all first die in the book. They have to, because, and you know, that's part of the heartache of being a dog owner is you outlive all but the last one. Right. No one grieves the death of a dog more than Julie. I mean, she loved— Julie loved animals more than she loved people. She said it openly, and she was not ashamed of saying that, you know. And, um, you know, she used to grieve the loss of our dogs so hard, you know. You know, and part of me wanted to say, would you stop it? You know, you're gonna have another dog, we'll have more joy. But then, you know, what So what I'm learning now is how wrong that was and how I can learn from how Julie grieved her mother's death, and particularly the death of some of our dearest, most lovable dogs, and watched her go through that. And it's almost like there's a path there for me. I mean, Julie did it. She learned, you know, and she let herself go completely. She surrendered to grief until she got through it. And I don't know if I'm that strong, but it's what I'm trying to do.

You know, the words surrender and acceptance keep coming up in our conversation, you know, and that's, I think that's, that's a really powerful lesson that we're, that we're here to learn, you know, and sometimes, you know, the word surrender gets a bad rap because it's like we're giving up and it's, it's not that at all. It's really, really more acceptance.

It really is. And you make an incredibly important point. There's a huge gulf between the word surrender and giving up. Because surrender, you know, surrender is a type of freedom that you achieve when you can surrender. Forgiveness, you know, and, you know, part of grief is forgiving the people who die because You know, we think, how could they leave us? You know, you have, you know, and forgiveness is one of the greatest forms of surrender, which you have to let go of that forgiveness. You know, I did. And I felt that way about my mother to some extent, you know, like, how could you? How could you die? You're my mother. You know, it's an absurd thought. But, but some of us can be very angry at the people people who, who've, who've gone on, who died. And certainly with Julie, you know, I, I had those moments of anger, like, you know, why did you do this? Why did you change our life like this? But I also know that Julie was suffering, you know. I knew how much she was suffering. I knew it. And, and not only that, but she was probably suffering more than I knew. And I knew she, and she was in a lot of pain, and she was sick of taking pain prescription pain medication. She didn't like the way it felt. There were many things about her life that were really intolerable to her, and just because they might be tolerable to me, I wasn't going through that. So that, that sense of being angry and judgmental, it, it doesn't go away just because I understand it, but at least I recognize it. And in, in that recognition, at some point, that recognition leads to surrender and acceptance. Yeah.

And that's the beginning of it. That's the beginning of it. And as we were saying, it is a process. As much as we might understand intellectually, none of us can bypass it. We have to go through, we have to go through it, we have to, we have to, you know, process it. And it's, it's deeply individual. And we have these irrational thoughts, we have anger at the person who left us, whether it's by Alzheimer's or it's by suicide. We have guilt, you know, should I have picked up on this? What if I'd done something different? Could I have stopped it? And it's, it's never our fault. But we have to go through that as humans, we have to wrestle with that.

Yeah, I'm, you know, that and that's where I am, you know, with Julie's death is, you know, there was nothing I could do to stop Alzheimer's. But in a way, I think that way about Julie, too. There was nothing I could ultimately could do. Right, because it was a decision. It was a decision, and she didn't do it to hurt me. There was no— it wasn't punitive. It was, I can't go on like this. And, and Julie would probably say, neither can you go on seeing me like this. Um, anyway, it is, it is, it is something that I'm, I'm just trying on a daily basis. You know, I still miss her. I still think about her. You know, and I think about the way she died and I feel guilt and shame. But those are, you know, those are selfish emotions, guilt and shame. And we are, you know, we rationalize and understand things intellectually. We are, you know, human beings have these big brains, you know, we have intellects. We've had emotions a lot longer than we've had intellect. We are emotional beings. We tell ourselves we're thinking, and we do think a lot about a lot of different things, but deep inside we are profoundly emotional people, right? And those emotions are what really determine who we are and how we navigate life and how we navigate loss. It's not an intellectual process.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, yeah, that's a lesson that I'm learning at this point in my life because I'm a very— I'm an engineer, very rational a person. I've always tried to think, think my way through everything, and I'm realizing, no, it's all about how you feel. Everything's about how we feel, how we feel about things. That's, that's the ultimate truth, is, is how we feel about things. And we, we use the intellect to rationalize our emotions, but the emotions are what they are.

Yeah, my intellect is here to try to explain my emotions to me. That's really what its chief function is. And also with other people too. But we are driven by our emotions, by our spirits. You know, we're driven by love. I'm glad love is not a rational thing. Love is by definition irrational. And, you know, if it were rational, it would not be as powerful. And if we didn't love, we wouldn't grieve. But who would trade love? Who would trade that? No one, I don't think. No, you want to be human, you have to love. And be loved and accepted. And that, that can be hard for people to just to accept the love.

Yeah, I remember many years ago, I got a pair of shoes and they're on the— they were graphic shoes and said, love is a gamble. And I thought they were cool shoes. That's why I bought them. But they had like a blackjack hand on them and said, love is a gamble. I thought it was really cute. And then when my, my daughter passed away, that's when I got the real meaning of that. That love is a gamble. When you, when you bring a child into this world, when you marry someone, even being born, as you said, we automatically love our parents. It's not even a choice. And it's, it's all a gamble. And it's all, and we all, you know, but getting a dog, I mean, we get dogs knowing that they're going to die, you know, and think about it. That's not rational at all.

No, and nothing's gonna love you more than a dog because they love unconditionally, and you're gonna lose that love. And it's, but it's the You know, and I've thought about that, and I wrote about it in that book. You know, we still do it, you know, because the love is so nourishing. To be loved and have creature love. And I think it's great to love someone who's not human, but to love almost as deeply as you love human beings, to extend that love, you know, to cross that boundary of species and find love on the other side of it. That's amazing. What a You know, what a miracle that is. You talk about the loss of a child. And, you know, my parents— I had a brother with Down syndrome who died when I was about 9. He was 12. I was the youngest. And he died under very mysterious circumstances. You know, the police never completely solved how he died. But he disappeared. And his body turned up a month later. So at a very early age, and then there's a couple of things I learned about grief. And, you know, one was, it was funny, you know, I guess I remember coming downstairs the morning after they found his body, and of course the house was just a shroud of grief. I mean, you could feel it, it was palpable, the grief and the mourning, um, at this end. And I You know, I tried to be cheerful. You know, I tried to smile and be cheerful. And my sister, who loved— I love my sister and was always good to me— she just cut me off. And I remember, you know, I felt guilty about that for years and years and years, that I was somehow trying to make everything better and try to like put a good face on, you know, the death of a child with Down syndrome, no less. Yeah. Um, was, you know, but I felt like, see my earliest, you know, relationship with grief in that little boy who came down the stairs that morning trying to act like everything was okay. And, you know, he could make a joke about something and then being shamed for it. My sister didn't mean to shame me. But I saw— I took it as shame. I carried that shame for decades, thinking— I thought about that all the time, that I had not grieved properly. And I, and really I didn't, but I was just a kid trying to make it better and making a horrible nightmare system. But you know, it's not my job as a 9-year-old to like to make a nightmare go away, right, for the family. But, but the second thing I learned looking back on that was that my parents' marriage survived it. And, and not just because they were devout Catholics who didn't really believe in divorce, but that doesn't really matter when Talk about the two things that break up a marriage almost for sure are one, the birth of a child with significant disabilities and the loss of a child, particularly that child. And my parents survived it. Their marriage, they were just as much in love and devoted to each other after that as before. And what I realized years later, having, you know, fallen away from faith and wandered off from any sort of religious belief, um, you know, one of the realizations of, of how wrong that was for me was that my mother's— my parents' marriage survived because of their faith. That's the only thing that kept them together. They shared the faith. They really believed that God protected them and loved them no matter what, no matter what happened. Without that faith, their marriage never would have survived. He'd probably be a totally different person.

Wow. Wow. That's— yeah, thank you for sharing that as well. I want to ask you, we start off, you talked about Norman Vincent Peale founding Guideposts. And I know, you know, he's most famous, or not most famous, but for me anyway, for his book, The Power of Positive Thinking. And I think sometimes people think, well, if I believe in this power of positive thinking, nothing bad will happen to me. And we've talked about the tragedy that befalls all of us. How do people that ascribe to that philosophy, how do we reconcile that with all the pain in the world?

Well, one thing I'll tell you a little bit more about Dr. Peel, and this is something I learned about him. I didn't know much about Dr. Peel when I came to work at Guideposts, and I actually got to know him. But he was a man who suffered from crippling anxiety, crippling self-doubt and insecurities. You know, and he was— when he eventually went to seminary, his advisor at seminary basically told him to leave. He said, look, you're a scared mouse. You act like a scared mouse. You know, you're never going to reach people and touch them and lift them up. You're never going to I'm going to do that because you don't have any confidence at all. And so that's really put him in this path. He was like a scientist who discovered what he thought was a cure, which was positive thinking. Tell myself that I deserve the best. God wants me to have the best. I have to learn to chase that. And he tried it out on himself and he found himself becoming this great order. And he was the best public speaker I ever saw in the pulpit or in a podium in front of a convention of businesspeople. He was the best speaker. And it was hard to believe that he was so— he had suffered such insecurity as a younger man. So that was his, you know, and Peel went through— he went through the Depression, World War II, you know, a lot of upheaval in society. And he thought positive thinking was, was the way to overcome the darkness of the world, not in some Pollyannish way that's disconnected from reality, but to realize, you know, you were put on earth, you know, with the prospect of having a good life, the prospect of having a good life. Um, but you had to go and get it. You had to believe that you could be happy and make a good life of yourself, that it was that so many people didn't think they could be happy. And his, you know, and in, in the American sort of, um, history of faith, I mean, you had the Catholic Church, which was a, you know, a big believer in original sin and the fall of man. And you had the Protestant puritanical part of the American character, which was that you know, that we are made up of base instincts that have to be overcome all the time. Start burning people at the stake, we'll get burned at the stake. I mean, it was a, you know, our American religious character was pretty dark. And I think Dr. Peale thought that, you know, God did not necessarily see us. I mean, he knew we were sinful, but he didn't hate us for being sinful. And, you know, he Peale always said, God loves you. Never forget that. That's the relationship you have with God, that he loves you. And if you can find that love and internalize it, you know, you can do good things. You can overcome incredible problems. But he believed you overcame those problems with thinking that you could, that giving yourself that confidence, and that confidence derived from God's love for you, not from some, you know, superhuman quality that you might have, but an extra-human quality, which was God's love, which you could draw on to overcome the darkness of the world. The world is always going to be light and dark. I think of, you know, the Earth day and night, the Earth rotating in the sunlight. You know, that's sort of the way that we are made and the world is made, that it goes from light to darkness to light to darkness. It's a duality that we'll never understand. Theologians and philosophers have tried to understand that why in a world that has so much beauty there is so much darkness and evil. And that is not a question that is there for us to know the answer. Um, that duality is just who the world is, and sometimes who we are too, you know. And that we can, you know, we can— I, I can be a really rotten person. I have been. And I understand that that's something for them to come. And I think most of us gone from doing really good things to sometimes doing not so good things, you know, and that's part of being human. And again, it does get back to surrendering to our humanness and to accepting that we can be better people. The reason why we can be better people is because we're not perfect to begin with. So there's always a road for improvement.

Awesome. Well, yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. And I'm glad I asked the question. I think that's a great way to kind of wrap up what we're talking about here today. Because it's really about how we come at the things that happen to us. It's not that if we think positive things that nothing, quote, bad will happen. But it's like, first of all, questioning, is this really bad? You know, what, what good might come of this? What growth could come of this? And of every incident that we look back through our lives, if we really think about it, we can probably find some way that we grew from it. Some way that we actually benefited from that thing.

I know, I think that's true. And that's what Dr. Peel would say, was that when you're faced with a difficult or even a bad situation, where's the good in there? Where can you find, chisel out that, that good and then grow it? You know, there's always hope. I mean, hope is, you know, I always thought Guy Fawkes was kind of a hope merchant. You know, the magazine You know, people read the stories and they say they give me hope because I've read about how someone was in a really tough situation and got through it and was bettered by it. Nobody wants to say that their suffering is necessary to be a better person. But, you know, it happens very much that way sometimes. You know, it happened for me.

Yeah.

You know, the— for my suffering came a lot of positive growth. That I never expected, and I dare not take any real credit for.

Well, I think we do have a choice, though. We do have a choice. We can sit down and give up when these things happen to us. We can choose, we can choose to become bitter about them. So I think there is, you know, it's funny, I was hearing someone the other day, they said, you know, well, it's not me doing it, it's God doing it, you know, through me. And that's, that gets into who's God and who am I, because we're, I think we're all one. And we are all parts of God. But yeah, we, we do have a choice. And I think that, um, and that's part of the, that's part of the, the joy of overcoming, you know. As people, we seek out challenges. Read an article the other day about a guy who was climbing Mount Everest and came across somebody else, and he had to stop and come down. He saved this guy's life. And you're like, well, why would you climb Mount Everest? Because that's who people are. We like challenges. We like to We like to overcome because we want to be able to get to the top no matter how tough it is. And, you know, you've shared with us today example after example of how you've overcome these difficulties in your life, and it, and it's made you into the person that you are today. So I want to thank you very much for being here and for being so open and vulnerable. And remind people of, of the name of your book, and if people can reach out to you, how can they find you?

All right. So I will tell you that the book is A Journey of Faith: A Mother's Alzheimer's, a Son's Love, and His Search for Answers. And that, that part of it, we didn't talk so much about answers because it doesn't— it's not really germane to our discussion today, but I have gone into like neurological studies now and to find out if some of the lapses I see in my own memory as I get older are indicative of Alzheimer's. And it's the question that the world's probably divided between people who want to know and people who don't want to know. And I've decided wanting to know is part of my being human. And so I'm on a search and a quest to find out, like, am I, am I looking at a future that that may include dementia, the same dementia that killed my mother. And how would I feel about that? And what would I do? I don't know, but I'm on that journey. In the book, um, it talks about— I talk about some of the neurological studies and the testing, the CAT scans and the MRIs I've gone through and what I found out. So, okay, that's part of the book too. That's part of the book too. Um, you can get A Journey of Faith at shopguideposts.org, and that's shopguideposts.org. Or you can, you know, just go on Amazon. Um, if you, if you get it from Guideposts, shopguideposts.org, you know, you get a couple free gifts, including, you know, um, access to some videos of me talking, if you haven't already sick of me. And you get a, um, a little booklet of my, my devotionals. I do write devotions for the company. And we also, we have something called Devoutly, which is a new digital product that we've launched. And you might look in, that's devoutly.org, and it's daily affirmations and stories and things that will make you feel positive, that will give you that positive energy, that positive spiritual energy that is a great way to start the day. So that's Devoutly.

Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been really—

Brian D Smith.

Yeah, I want to say this is, this is kind of personal for me, because I've gone through this with my father-in-law, I'm going through with my mother-in-law right now. And I've had two great conversations today with people who have been through this with their parents. This is something that we're all gonna— it's gonna touch us one way or the other, whether it's ourselves or parents or somebody that we know.

I know, you know, it's funny, it's, it's the number one fear of health, fear of people over the age of 50, the number one. Cancer, heart disease, they kill more. COVID still kills more, but it's the number one fear we have. We fear that loss of self. And it's, if you go all the way back to people in their, in their 20s, uh, in surveys, it's their third biggest fear, health fear, in their 20s. So it's, it's the specter of losing ourself is, is really frightening for a lot of people. But it's, it's something to be, you know, thought about, I guess. Yeah. And hope for a cure.

All right, well, thank you. Uh, enjoy the rest of your day.

Thank you, Brian D Smith. It's been great talking to you. Really, it's terrific. Thank you.

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