Be Well Presents: A Coping Conversation - "Love"

Are you in need of Love? Listen in to our Coping Conversation with Jean, who shares her powerful story of  Love.

Announcement: This episode includes a discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing thoughts of self harm, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1800-273-8255. It's free, confidential and available 24/7. Listener discretion is advised. 

Kevin: Welcome. I'm Chaplain Kevin and today I'm talking with Jean, whose life has been filled with memories of love and loss. She describes her journey with its many highs and many lows. And yet, even in her lowest lows, she found a way to keep on loving. This is “Coping”. 

Hi, Jean. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I'm so glad to have you and I'm excited to hear more about your story. 

Jean: Kevin, it's great to be here with you. Thank you for inviting me.

Kevin: It's great to have you. So, as I was reading your story, one of the main themes that came up for me was this idea of love. How do you define love? What does that word mean to you?

Jean: I think for me, love. I'm going to give you the analogy and compare it to a merry go round, a carousel at a park, an amusement park, where everyone's excited to go and to participate with family and friends. And you get on that carousel and it goes round and round and round and up and down and up and down. And for me, that's what love is. It's a continuous circle, but with lots of ups and lots of downs.

Kevin: That's so true. Ups and downs and all the rounds. Where in your life has love been like a merry go round?

Jean: I just have to say, being the middle child of five, I was always in the center of the merry go round, and it was an active, fun place to grow up. And yet we had I think the biggest down would be when my youngest brother, who had just turned 19, was killed in a motorcycle accident. Actually, the night before he died, he had come to the college where I was teaching and we went and saw a movie together that night and I remember asking him, “So what are you going to do when you graduate and when you really grow up?” And he started laughing and he said, “You know, I've had a rough supplemental years that I have taken mom and dad and all of you through.” 

He said, “But I know that I am in the palm of God's hand. I'm excited about my future.” So fast forward, not even 24 hours later, get a call from home saying that my dear brother was dead and he died at a very young age, just before he was graduating from high school. 

No one's ever prepared for losing a loved one. And right after that, I jumped into a relationship with a man that everything looked good on the outside and found out less than a year into the marriage that he had chosen another person for the last five years. And I went through that loss and that broken relationship and the grief that that took me through. And I can say I was on the very bottom rung of the carousel at that point of my life.. 

Kevin: You have this loss of your brother, and then soon after this relationship with some unfaithfulness. How did you pick yourself up from that point on?

Jean: It was sort of my mindset then to get my house in order to prepare my my heart and my my mind and my body to to really be prepared for whatever the future held for me. Where it took me it took me to India. Not Indiana. It took me to South India. How did that happen? I listened to a young guy share a story about helping people in India and in Sri Lanka and Nepal and Bangladesh. And he was working with the poorest of the poor. And I thought, wow, I'm going to give that guy some money. I'm going to say some prayers for this guy. And I'll never go. Well, fast forward. I did go. 

We married the following year. We went to India the following year. We lived in and out of India for 30 years. And my beloved soulmate, Chip, he taught me how to love, and he taught me how to look out past when I was really down. And he always called it navel gazing. He said, “Stop looking at your navel. Look out, look up, look over. There's always someone that you can lift up.” And he took me on many carousel rides, some emotional rides, and some amusement parks. 

Kevin: Tell me a little bit about those emotional carousel rides that he brought you on.

Jean: We sent our children, our three kids to boarding school. The only downside is that it was about 8 hours drive. And I'm going to tell you, every time we went, we had at least two flat tires. So the roads were not good. And I remember that was another very low time I just had said to Chip, “We have spent these years with the kids with us. I don't want to send them all three to boarding school. It's just too hard for me.” Before I went to bed that night, I just started praying, and I just said,” God, give me peace that they'll be okay.“ And then fast forward two weeks later, actually seems like yesterday, which is amazing. 

We received a call late Sunday night, and it was from my oldest daughter, Tetura. And she said, “Mama, there's something definitely wrong with Naomi.” And I said, “What do you mean?” She said, "She's been throwing up. She's been very sick. I think she's lost probably 20 pounds in two weeks, and there's something wrong with her.” We got another phone call from the nurse saying that “it looks like your daughter has juvenile diabetes. Do you have any of that in your family?” We're like, no, we don't. And they said, well, we're going to try to get her down to a hospital, and we're not sure if she'll make it through the night, down through the mountain to the hospital in Cumbator, but we are going to do our best. So we advise that you leave and you meet us at the hospital. And we did get to the hospital, and we thought she had lost 20 pounds in two weeks. And she was tiny, tiny to begin with. She looked like a little skeleton in a makeshift ICU. 

Jean: We stayed there one night. Chip had gone back to boarding school to see the kids and spend some time with them. We were ten days in the hospital, and while we were there, Chip said that he was talking to Naomi. 

He was saying, “So how do we make lemons? We've got all these lemons. How are we going to make some lemonade?” So they were sort of laughing and really upset about this new health challenge that Naomi would be having the rest of her life. And we just felt like that was a big low for us. And yet, at the same time, we knew that that invisible disability would open up doors of relationships for us that we never, ever expected, and it would give us another part of compassion for people that are struggling. 

They were talking about that, and then that's when we saw 9/11 happen on the television. That really shook us back into the reality of the world. And, like, yes, our worlds are important. But even though we were down, there were hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people devastated as a result of that horrible situation. 

It's interesting. The next day, we lived in a Shihai community in Bangalore, and we had several Muslim families that came to our gate, and they were saying, “Please, please, we're so sorry what happened. Don't blame us.” And you see, when you work with families affected by disabilities, it doesn't matter what the religion is, it doesn't matter what the gender is, it doesn't matter what the economic status is, because disability hits us all at some point. 

Kevin: We'll be right back. 

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Kevin: Welcome back. How is your daughter's health today?

Jean: Thank you for asking, Kevin. Naomi's remarkable. I tell her when I grow up, I want to be just like her. And the fact that she's so resilient and her health? She's on a medical device that she gets insulin 24/7. She's actually worked for that company for twelve years now and is a huge advocate. She's written four books as a result of this situation in her life with type one diabetes and just a real advocate for people. 

She's amazing. I marvel at all three of my kids and tell each one different aspects. I want to grow up and be like them one day.

Kevin: So after this medical crisis with your daughter, where did the carousel life take you guys next? 

Jean: Our son Noah was thriving. It looked like he was thriving. We thought he was thriving in the fashion industry, working with celebrities. It all looked good on the surface, but we realized quickly that he was drinking a lot, he was doing drugs, and he was getting pulled into this downward spiral of depression and overeating it. And during that time, it was very, very hard because talk about a carousel, our horses were going up and down, up and down, up and down. And there was a time nine years ago that Noah decided that life wasn't worth living. 

He was standing on a beautiful penthouse ledge in downtown L. A. And ready to step off of it. And he didn't, yet he didn't change immediately after that. It was several months after that that he decided, “I'm done with this business. I'm done with my life of over abuse, with food and drinking.” And today he's a nutritionist living overseas in Bali and has a thriving business. But we went through a lot during that time. I can just say that that's been a real blessing to know that he took something that was broken and began to help other people. 

And I think that's what our family's done. All three of our children do something with their careers that are reaching into other people's lives. That's a huge up for me. That's your legacy in the lives of your children. And speaking of legacies, about five years ago, Chip and I decided we would come back to the United States and that we would do writing together, we would do teaching together. So that was heartbreaking to leave. 

And I can just say that the legacy that we wanted to build together, God had a different plan. And what I mean by that is that we started noticing that Chip thought he had kidney stones. He did an X-ray.  Yes, there were kidney stones. But then we were told we needed an MRI. But when the MRI came back, then we were asked to go meet with the specialist. When we met with the specialist, he showed us that there was some cloudiness over this kidney, and he wanted to do an exploratory surgery. 

Jean: Exploratory surgery showed that there was something serious there. So he said, we are going to have to do major surgery. We went in and. June. And that's when they came back and they said that there was a sarcoma. We need to identify it. They said this is rare. We've never seen this in a 64 year-old man. Three weeks after that, the cancer had come back on the kidney wall. And so the doctor said, "It's spreading.” 

So he did some more tests, and things never go as fast as you want them to do in many ways. Then we were looking into the very first part of August, and that's when the doctor just said, “This cancer is going everywhere.” And he said, “I wouldn't even recommend chemo.” And Chip had said, I will not do chemo. People around us were like, you have to do this. You have to do this. And we said, no, we just have to be in agreement with each other and what we will go forward with. 

He knew that was just going to be too much for him. Well and he was like, Why? And he said, Doctor, how much time do you think I have? And he said, I don't know, Chip. He said, It could be two months. It could be six months. And I remember asking him, well, our kids are coming back from India for Thanksgiving. And he looked at me and he said, I think they should come now. Came home and we waited a couple of days just processing it before we talked to our children. 

And immediately the kids were able to come in from India. And we were all together. Hospice came in that week, and yeah, Chip was with us in six weeks. And then he passed away. Ten weeks later, he passed away.

Kevin: Wow. So what do you say to those who may be struggling with love and loss right now? What advice do you have for them?

Jean: I think the best advice I can give is. Just lower your expectations of yourself, take care of yourself, rest more. You see, I will always have a hole in my heart for my beloved husband. And yes, there's a Band Aid there, there's a healing there, but that part that's been ripped apart from me, that it should be there.

When we love hard, we lose hard. Another thing I would just say is you're going through loss to loosen your grip. Loosen your grip on your children, on your careers, on your things, on your spouse, on your parents. Loosen your grip and have your hands open to love more. And the more we can open our hands instead of tightly holding things and we can really let go, that only then I think, can we have pure joy and experience. Love beyond measure.

Kevin: And what do you say to those who may be on a really low part of their carousel ride? How do they find their way back up again?

Jean: Probably my best advice is to quote my husband: “Stop navel gazing, stop looking at yourself, look out straight, look around you, and then look up”. And sometimes I will just walk outside and just look up. I just will look up. I'll look up at the sky, I look up at the trees, I look up at birds, I look up at clouds, or at night, look up at stars. And something about looking up gives me more hope. 

And I would tell people that are lowest where you are on the carousel of life, there's always hope. Hope is the best of things.

Kevin: Well, Jean, thank you so much for our time together today. I really appreciate your whimsical definition of love and how that plays out, even when there's loss. Thank you. Thank you so much for your story today.

Jean: You're so welcome, Kevin. Thank you for allowing me to share part of my story today. I'm just grateful to be able to share, and I hope that those that are listening today will be able to keep looking up.