How Do You Live With Grief When Love Never Ends? — With Tom Rose

What does grief really feel like when you’ve loved someone for a lifetime?

In this deeply moving episode of Soul Sync, I’m joined by Tom Rose, author of Balloon in a Box: Coping with Grief — a book born from the loss of his wife after nearly 60 years together.

This isn’t a clinical conversation about grief.

It’s a human one.

Tom shares what it was like to sit beside his wife in her final weeks… the silence that followed… and the “black period” that came after everything stopped.

We explore the emotional reality of loss — the thoughts, the anger, the confusion, and the moments that stay with you — as well as the unexpected turning point that changed how Tom began to live with his grief.

At the heart of this conversation is a simple but powerful idea:

Grief isn’t something you fix.
 It’s something you learn to carry.

Through his concept of a “balloon in a box,” Tom explains how grief doesn’t disappear — but over time, you begin to understand it… and even reshape your relationship with it.

Because as Tom says:

“Without love, there is no grief.”

This episode is for anyone who has lost someone…
 anyone supporting someone through loss…
 or anyone trying to make sense of the emotional weight that grief can bring.

🔊 What you’ll hear

•  What anticipatory grief really feels like 
•  The emotional reality of sitting with someone at the end of life 
•  The “black period” after loss — and why it’s normal 
•  Why you can’t “fix” grief (and shouldn’t try) 
•  The power of journaling in processing emotion 
•  The meaning behind “balloon in a box”
•  Why grief is really a journey of love 
•  How to support someone who is grieving 

👤 Who this episode is for

•  Anyone experiencing grief or loss 
•  Those supporting someone through bereavement 
•  People navigating life transitions or emotional change 
•  Listeners interested in the deeper emotional and spiritual aspects of life 

💡 Mentions & ideas

•  Journaling as emotional processing 
•  Letting grief be expressed, not suppressed 
•  Listening without trying to fix 
•  Reframing grief as love continuing 

🌿 Gentle note

This episode touches on themes of death, loss, and grief.
 Please listen at your own pace and take care of yourself if anything feels tender.

✨ Get in touch
If you have a story, experience, or idea you'd love to share on Soul Sync, I’d love to hear from you.
📩 Email: hello@jasonpaulmedium.com

🌐 Website: jasonpaulmedium.com

If you enjoy the podcast, please take a moment to leave a review — your feedback truly means the world to me and helps others discover the show. 💫

Transcript

— Intro: How Do You Live With Grief When Love Doesn’t End?

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello and welcome to the Soul Sync podcast. I'm Jason Paul. Now, today's episode is really about one question. How do you live with grief when love doesn't end? Because grief is something that at some point almost all of us will experience, and yet when it arrives, it can feel incredibly isolating. It can feel like the world has changed shape around you, like everything has lost its colour and like no one quite understands what's going on inside of you. So my guest today is Tom Rose. He's the author of a book called Balloon in a Box, Coping with Grief. And yet, what I found uh so powerful about Tom is that he doesn't speak about grief from theory, he speaks from lived experience. After losing his wife, someone he had spent nearly 60 years of his life with, Tom found himself navigating a depth of loss that most of us can only begin to imagine. And what came from that was not just pain, but insight. Not just heartbreak, but understanding. And in this conversation, we explore what grief actually feels like. Not the clinical version, not the textbook version, but the real human experience of it. We talk about anticipatory grief, the moments of leading up to loss, and then the silence that follows and the unexpected ways grief shows up in everyday life. Tom really does um share this in a really beautiful way, and um it was very powerful. And through the concept of his book, it really explores that something doesn't just disappear when someone dies as well. Tom talks about his journey of love, and also without love, there is no grief. So this is a gentle conversation, an honest one, and it's for anyone who's lost someone, you know, you might be supporting someone at the moment uh in such a situation. So on that note, I will leave you with this conversation. So, Thomas, Tom, welcome onto the SoulSync podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Well, it's a delight to have you here. I've been looking forward to talking to you. So, first of all, tell us about you and your story.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Well, you got three or four hours?

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Well, do you know I I I I I I could probably go for three or four hours. I'm not sure anyone else could know. Okay, but I guess your story really came to resonance, you know, five years ago.

— Living With Anticipatory Grief

— The Final Weeks & Hospice Experience

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Right. Well, uh, prior to the the whole thing is about by the book that I wrote after my wife passed away. But prior to my wife died, I was in the advertising and marketing business. In college, I was in theater arts and speaking and all that kind of stuff. But my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004 and 2005. At that time, we were doing a cooking show together on the local Fox uh affiliate. And when she we found out she had breast, we'd done we'd done the uh cooking thing for about 13 years. When we found out she had breast cancer, we we stopped the uh the TB. Uh and uh she had uh um chemo, massectomy, and everything in 2004, and again uh in 2005. But then everything was great. She uh was cancer free until 2017. 2017 it came back into chest wall, and they told her she had six to eight months and she lived two years. It was a tough time for us, knowing and anticipatory grief as we call it, knowing that it's going to happen. But you kind of blink it out for a while. You go along and everything seems to be feeling nice, you know, even though you know the ultimate thing is there. So we had a good year and a half or so together. Um, we still did the things, we still went out to dinner with our folks. She had a tube in her chest that we had to drain every two days, but uh, she was doing some some chemo and some radiation also, but but we still did things. I mean, she she sucked it up and she wanted to do things. In fact, about a month before she died, she was taking an elderly person to a neighboring town to have their eye exam. So she was still she was still active and doing things. So I guess to start that story, uh we uh had this chest tube, I said, and she was doing radiation that the cancer moved to the brain. And so we were doing radiation for that. And oh, we were I had to do this test tube every two days, and all of a sudden I was having a little trouble draining it. And so when we went to the doctor that day for the uh radiation treatment, I said, Hey doc, we're having trouble with this, you know, tube. I'm not, it's not draining like it always was. So he said, Well, let's skip the radiation, let's get you down to another department here. And he said, Let's get this taken care of before we move forward. I said, Okay. So, long story short, she admits, she's admitted to the hospital on a Monday. On Tuesday, it's plan A. On Wednesday, it's plan B. Thursday, it's plan A and B. On Friday, it's what plan are we going to do? On Saturday morning, she says to me, Tom, I'm done. I just want, I just want peace and quiet. I want no more poke and prodding. I don't want any more pills. I don't want any more radiation. I don't want any more chemo. I just want peace. So I told the nurse, I said, my wife has made a decision. She'd like to go into hospice. And the nurse said, Well, Monday, this is Saturday, she said, Monday, the hospice nurse will come in and explain everything to you. So now I race home and knowing that she's going to go into hospice, right? I've got to clean the house. So Saturday night and Sunday, I'm clean. I mean, this place was spotless. You know, you can eat off the bathroom floor because I know hospices coming, there's going to be people in the house. But go on Monday and Monday morning. The nurse comes in and uh she said, Mrs. Rose, she said, uh, you have two choices. You can stay here in the hospital for hospice, or you can go home. And my wife says, I want to stay here in the hospital. Now that was like a stab in the chest to me. I'm thinking, she doesn't want to be home with me. Now I know after we got into it that she did that for me. She didn't want me to have to do anything. In the hospital, the nurses did everything. All I had to do was be there. And I was there 24-7, basically. My family would come well in the afternoons about four o'clock and relieve me for a couple hours. I'd go home, shower, and eat. But I was there, you know, 20 hours, 22 hours a day. Interesting to me then was I couldn't watch TV. I couldn't read. All I could do was sit there and hold her hand and feel her pain. Now she was in hospice for three weeks. If you think about sitting for 18, 15, 20 hours a day and just thinking for three weeks, a lot of things in your life will change. You will discover things maybe about yourself that you really don't like. You know, we're all selfish. Didn't realize how selfish you are until you really think about it. I questioned all my beliefs. I didn't change them, I questioned them all. But so I sat there and I, you know, it just all I could do was think. So long story short, here on the she where she was in the hospice, I'm saying, for three weeks. The Thursday before she died. My my granddaughter's uh graduated from college with theater arts and singing. She's got a beautiful voice, does all kinds of plays and productions. And my wife had said, I won't get to see Amanda sing again. And so I I told the family that Amanda came that night. I came home to shower and everything. I guess she put a concert on for the whole wing of the hospital. She did about 20 songs and you know, so but anyway, I go back and uh, you know what in the hospital about 8, 8:30 at night, they turn the lights down and it gets real quiet. Now all of a sudden, my wife, now she's been there almost three weeks, nothing but pain pills and water. She sits up in bed and she looks at me and she points her finger at me and she says, We have to talk. Now, if you knew my wife when she said, We have to talk, uh, we're gonna talk.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

You're in trouble, Tom. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 8:35

So she says to me, she says, Oh, we talked about a lot of things. And she said, Now, look, I don't want all those videos and all the photographs and all that stuff at the at the funeral home. I just want what's in the green bag in the closet. I didn't know there was a green bag in the closet, but I did find it. But and so I said, Okay, and she said there's a close casket because I want everybody to remember me the way I was, not the way I'm now. And I said, Yeah, I understand. So we sat there a little bit and we talked a little more, and finally she takes my hand and she squeezes it, and she says, I love you. I'll see you in church. Now, I think it's just like a woman, she had to leave me with a command. She couldn't leave me with I love you. She had to zing me. She had to say, I'll see you in church. That's the last she said to me on that Thursday night. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, she passed away. So my last my last thing for my wife was a command. I had to go to church. I cannot, I cannot not go to church.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Was you pre but was you were you someone that always kind of attended church prior prior to that?

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Oh, yes, oh yeah. We're we're Catholic. We were Catholic, so we went to Mass every Sunday. And and and she was uh she was a she was a very good Catholic. I was yeah, you know, I'm there with her, you know. I'm much better now than I was before, probably. You're gonna hear something in the background. Do you hear it at all? Hear them mowing the grass.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

They just oh no, this is the the the the beauty of Zoom. I can't hear I can't hear anything. So all I can hear is your your lovely voice.

— The Reality of Loss & The Funeral Experience

— The “Black Period” After Loss

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Well well, good. So, anyhow, she passed on on Monday. I was there after I actually closed her eyes. I remember the nurse coming in and saying, I'm starting to get up, leave my nurse come in and said, Well, Mr. Rose, you can stay. I said, No reason to stay. She's not here, she's gone. So then is when it starts to well, it doesn't really start to set in yet because there's too many things happening. That's Monday evening. The family came in with me at here at the house, and we sat and talked, and I think we probably had a couple glasses of wine. And I went to bed and I think I really slept that night because I hadn't slept for three weeks. It's hard to sleep in a hospital in one of those chairs, you know, of those lounge chairs. And so Tuesday it's the funeral home making the arrangements, and Wednesday it's people calling and coming, and Thursday it was a visitation. Now, the visitation at the funeral home, we had about 450 people go through. That's where I started to learn lessons. I always remember before going to the going to the funeral home and standing in line and saying, What am I going to say when I get up there? You know, oh, he was a nice guy when maybe he really wasn't. All the things that were said to me, I know people meant well, but some of them were just crazy. You shouldn't, you know, he's saying, I I I in my book and and in my speaking things, I I tell people, hey, don't say this. Don't say, How are you doing? I I must have said, Oh, I'm okay, you know, 400 sometimes when I really wanted to tell them something else which I can't repeat, you know. People, people came and one person came up and said, Well, God needed her up there more than you needed her down here. I said, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm sorry. God's got old buds. I just wanted one, you know. People said, you know, just wild things. I I then say, you know, there's a whole bunch of nice things you can say, but the best thing you can say to somebody is, I love you. Give them a hug and say, I love you. When you say that, you say it. You say, I'm here for you, I'll do, yeah, blah, blah, blah. So I kind of learned those lessons with that. The next day, Friday's the funeral. And it's kind of a blur. It still is. They had just with Catholic Mass funeral afterwards, the typical funeral dinner in the school hall, you know, with the green bean casserole, as we say here. I don't know in England, but in the in the States, it's green bean casserole in slices of ham, you know. So it's everyone I've ever been to, there has to be that green bean casserole. But so we had that dinner, and then back at my house, and and it was in August, so it was a beautiful night, and I have a nice deck. My deck looks out over the golf course and over the cemetery, believe it or not. And a bunch of friends came, and again, I'm sure we drank several bottles of wine. The evening goes on and on, and people start to leave, and all of a sudden it's nine o'clock, and everybody's gone. And I'm sitting there by myself, and I'm going, I don't want to go in that house because she's not there. Now we've been together for 59 years, so it that's hard, you know.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

It's a very, very long time.

— The Emotional Turning Point

SPEAKER_01 13:34

So I finally managed to go in and go to bed. Got up the next morning, and I tell everybody that's when my black period began. Everything was black and white. I didn't care about anything. I kicked God out of my life. I said, get away from me. You didn't do what I wanted. Leave me alone, you know. I hit it from most people. I'm not my family, but my family was very patient. They let me, they didn't try to fix anything. They let me go. They were there for me. I knew that, but they didn't bug me. For four months I spent in my black period. Okay. I went out and played golf with my guys, and I went to dinner with some friends, but I wasn't there. I watched TV, but the old TV programs that I enjoyed and laughed at weren't funny anymore. Finally, if you could see my home, it's the open concept. It's actually a villa on the golf course as we call it here a villa. It's an open concept. So there's a kitchen, a countertop, bar top, bar stools, dining area to one direction, and living room to the other. Now, I told you earlier that my wife and I both cooked. So again, I was when I was in college, I studied theater arts and all that kind of stuff and movies. Now, if you were going to write a movie scene, you could write one on what happened. You have to picture this little old pathetic guy sitting at the counter with his dinner and his glass of wine and the bottle of bottle sitting there. Off to one direction is the fireplace going, okay? Over the other direction is Frank Sinatra singing on my stereo, okay? And it's November and it's cold and the wind's blowing, and the sleep nice is hitting the back window. Okay. So that's the scene. You gotta, you know, like I say, that'd be a great movie scene. You could have the camera looking at a lot of things. So I'm sitting there. I drank my glass of wine with dinner, and then I drank another one, and then hey, yeah, you know, you don't want to leave wine in that bottle. So I poured another glass of wine. And I I kind of I remember getting up and I think I was gonna walk to change the music, but I caught my foot on the bar stool next to him. Fell fortunately into the living room on the carpet. I'm laying there on the carpet and I'm thinking, what would she think of me? This pathetic guy, self-titty, and all the things I was doing to myself. Her favorite saying was, It is what it is. Put on your big boy pants and deal with it. I must have heard that I must have heard that 5,000 times in my life. Whenever I was down, something was wrong. She'd just grab a hold of my ear and say, Hey.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

That kind of really gives me a picture of her character with such a saying.

— Balloon in a Box: Understanding Grief

— Writing the Book & Helping Others

— What Grief Really Needs (Not Fixing, Just Listening)

SPEAKER_01 16:19

Yeah, yeah. So so anyway, I'm thinking that and I'm thinking, what would she think of me? Now, uh Jay said, I don't think I really cried. I mean, I'm sure I shed a tear at the funeral home and you know at the cemetery and places, but I hadn't really cried. I got up at night and sat in that chair, my chair, in front of the fireplace, and I cried. I cried bucket falls. I was ringing wet. I remember going to bed and thinking, oh, tomorrow is going to be miserable. I got up the next day and there was sunshine, there was color. And I knew I had to face grief. I had to take it on. I had to put on my big boy pants. And I thought, okay, okay, okay, but I don't know how I'm gonna do this. I said, hey God, you better come back because I think I'm gonna need you. But how how do we how how do I handle this grief? And someone had told me grief is like a ball in a box. When it bounces around in the in the box and touches a site, a memory comes back, it touches a corner, two or three emotions happen at once, hard to handle. But I'm thinking, you know what? No, no, no. It's more like a balloon in a box. Because if you've got a balloon on a string and you want to move, you want you want the balloon to move left and you move it, the balloon may go right. The balloon's hard to control. So I think, okay, that's what it is, and that's what I'm gonna do. That balloon is here on my finger, and I have to learn to control it. No one else can do it for me. In that balloon are all my memories, all my emotions, everything are in there, and I've got to learn to control it. And like I say, no one can help me. And so that's what I learned to do. It wasn't easy. I had my moments, but I have learned over the last actually it's just been a little over five years, two weeks ago, August 5th. I've learned to control a balloon. I've learned to control my grief. It's never going away. No one can fix it. Only me, and I just control it. And what I do is, what I've done is, I've gotten rid of most of the bad memories out of that balloon. The only thing I've kept there are the fun ones and the happy ones, and you know, getting getting married, uh, having a son, uh, a lot of things, doing the cooking things together. I I'll tell you a couple stories, I'll tell you a story. The uh like I say it was that was August and November, and after I had my I call that my epiphany that night, that you know, the next morning was my epiphany. All of a sudden I knew. And I was that was like two weeks before Thanksgiving. And my kids said to me, Hey dad, you go ahead and do the turkey like you always do. They always come to our house, it was a bigger place, yeah, easier to have a dinner. So, and they said, We're gonna bring everything else. And I said, Okay, so now you have to picture me at my little butcher block countertop with my turkey, and I'm stuffing it with the herbs and fruit and all the stuff I put in it. And you tie the legs, like tie the legs, and I get ready to I need somebody to put their finger on that knot. And it was the same thing every year. She'd always put her finger there, and then she'd always say, Who helped you tie your Boy Scout knots? And we get a big chuckle. Now, my wife was a brown-eyed brunette. And I believe one year I told her a little blue-eyed blonde, and I think I got a dishwright side of the face, you know. So I stood there that night, that Thanksgiving. I think I dropped a few little tears, but I also laughed. If you'd have walked in the house, you'd have probably hauled me off to the funny for him because you think this guy's really lost, and he's laughing, he's crying, you know. But those are the memories that come back, the little ones that you that you think you've forgotten about that all of a sudden come back. So, but because that was our life, we zinged each other. Like I say, she got the last one in when she said I have to go to church, but I'm kind of saving one. If I get up early, I you know, I do, I do, if I do get there and do find her, I got one for her. So that's that's where and then and then the well, the book. So what happens is this is November, get through the holiday season. I did everything like we always did. I decided I had to do that. Yeah, a good holiday season. Shortly after that, a friend called me, doctor friend from college, and uh he said, Well, I'm calling to see how you're doing, buddy. And uh, we talked. And he said, Are you journaling? And I said, Well, yeah, kind of. I said, I get up in the morning and I write down how I feel. That night I write down you know what happened during the day. And he says, Send me your notes. And he said, Doctor. I said, Well, dot, I said, they're not even sentences, punctual, just he said, sometimes they're just words. He said, Send them to me. So I sent them to him. About a week or two later, he called me and he said, Hey, buddy, he said, You've got to write a book. I said, Whoa, wait a minute, Doc. He said, We went to college together. You sat next to me in English class. You know I didn't pay attention, and I know you didn't pay attention. That's why you're a doctor. So we had a good chuckle, and he said, No, no, no, no. I'm serious. He said, You're you poured your guts out. And he said, People need to hear that. People need to hear what you're doing, how you're handling it. So now it's COVID year, right? You can't, I can't go any place, can't do anything. You know, I'm here in this place by myself. And it's later that year, it's winter, and uh So I thought, hey, what the heck out? Might as well write a book. Nothing else to do. Let's write a book. Okay. So I remember again. Now you're going to think I'm a winery one. Maybe I am. But I sat down one night at eight o'clock, my little glass of wine here. Eight o'clock, started typing, you know, typed a page, punctuation, fixed it, fixed the spelling, fixed the paragraph, fixed everything. You know, it's a beautiful page. And then I thought, you know, an author has to use big words. So I went to the thesaurus and I started changing words, you know. Got up the next morning and read it and thought, who the heck wrote this up? What does that word mean? I tried that a couple, two or three times with the same results. Finally, one night I decided again, I got my glass of wine. That's a crummy night, I remember. It's that same snow and sleep stop, okay? On the window. And uh I thought, no, write it like you would tell Chase. Write it like you would tell somebody, just the way you would talk about it. So I started in typing, and I didn't I didn't worry about punctuation, didn't worry about spelling, it just typed. It was three o'clock in the morning. And I had page after page after page. So a few months later, I was able to take those pages and other pages and my journal notes and things that people had talked to me about and told me. And so I wrote a book and called it Balloon in a Box.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

It's interesting what you say. You're you're a very good storyteller. And I think that you, you know, what what you said about journaling, I think that I found that to be very healing. People have told me to journal for a very long time, and it's only in the last four months that I've started doing it myself. Well, doing it regularly on a daily basis, and it's it's really helped me as well. When it I imagine the the process of writing that down was quite healing in itself for you. It was, it worked. And I I guess uh the you know, the people come across this show, you know, quite often because they're going through grief themselves. I guess what have you kind of uh learned about you know healing and accepting, and you know, what what lessons have you learned that are kind of contained within the book? I you know, when I asked this question on behalf of other people who you know are going through it themselves. Yeah.

— Grief Beyond Death: Life Transitions & Loss

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Well, I I guess uh the piece it together a little bit, which will explain a little bit and answer some of your those questions. What happened was I I wrote the book in and I got it done and I kind of read it. That's not too bad. Now I was an advertising marketing business all my life, so I know a printer. I thought, well, I'll print a couple hundred copies, give some away, maybe sell some, and that'll be it. Well, a local service organization asked me to come speak. And I thought, okay, I'll go speak. I kind of caught lightning in the bottle because 131 speeches later, I'm still telling the story. But what also what happened was I got cocky and thought, okay, I'm a writer now. People like my book. I'm a writer, so I'll write a novel. So I wrote a novel and I thought, but I'm not self-publishing this, I'm gonna find a publisher, which I did. And then he found out that I wrote the book, Balloon in a Box, and he said, I'd like to have that book. He said, I want you to change it. What I would like you to do is leave it the way it is, but at the end of each chapter, put down what you've learned over these speaking ages. In that time, I'd probably done 40 or 50. What you've learned talking to people. So answer your question. First of all, I I mentioned before, right? You can't fix it. Okay. So don't try. If somebody's grieving, don't try to fix it. Number two, I think I know what the griever needs. The griever needs to find the words, say the words, and know those words have been heard. That's all I wanted. I just wanted to say, folks, just wait, wait, wait, listen to me. My heart's broken. You know, just listen to me. I don't you don't have to talk to me. Just listen, let me go my God. Other thing I I've learned is grief is not just about losing a loved one. You can go through grief from retiring, you can go through grief from an illness, from all of a sudden a handicap comes along. I very interesting, there's a a group that I went and spoke to is called Living in Trans, the L-I-T-E Living in Transition every day. And it's a widespread kind of group. You have people in it that have lost spouses, lost loved ones, people just got out of jail, people recovering from drug or re drug rehab, divorces, all this group. Anyway, I went down and spoke to the group, and then the uh the man that runs the group said, May I use your book to for my grief group? I said, certainly, you go. So he called me one time and he said, Hey, uh, I've I've done three uh grief groups with your book, and it's really going well. I just wanted to thank you for allowing me to use the book. And he said, if you're ever down this um 50 miles from where I live, he said, if you're ever down this way, stop in. I, you know, we do it on Tuesday nights and everything. So I was that way one time and I thought, I'll just try. I didn't want to be part of it. I just went in, I sat back in the corner and listened. Now, see, this is a lesson that I learned that night. There, I could say there were about 12 people. Now, if you picture a man sitting close to the moderator who'd lost his, I lost his wife, and around the table, all these other people, drug rehab, you know, getting out of jail. And back at the back end of the table, almost caddy corner, like to the table where this guy was sitting, were two ladies that were divorced. And so that night he did he does journaling, is how he runs the class. He had everybody has a little book, and that night he wanted to talk about feelings, which is one of the chapters in my book. And he said, So, okay, so because he said for three minutes, let's everybody write down how we feel today. So everybody wrote and he got done and he he read his, and then he said, Anybody like to share? You don't have to, but would anybody like to share? And the and the man that lost his wife, but I think uh I think he'd been married 40 years or something like that. He read his, and then the one of the divorced ladies, clear at the other end of the table, read hers. They said the same thing. He he lost a life partner. She lost a life. Hers had been about 40 years too being married, and all of a sudden those 40 years were gone. Tried to forget, you know. So I that's that was the one of the interest things I learned. The other thing is everybody everybody has grief differently. Things happen differently, they feel differently, they don't go through the same thing. That's one of the things that I I think when when it first happened to me, I went online and I was looking for help. And most of the stuff I read was, I'll say, too clinical, too, too college professorish, you know, where they were standing up above you telling you, we know everything, you know nothing. And wait a minute, you know, I'm the one that's feeling it. How do I know nothing? You know, I found a couple good things, again, written by people who had gone through it. It's the old, I don't know whether you have it, but it's the old expression here is that if you can't, if you can't do it, you teach it. So yeah, kind of, you know, always tell our professors in college, you know, you can't really do it, you just teach it. So that was kind of the thing I got. So I thought, you know, that was part of the reason for writing the book, you know, write what, write what it really like for someone. Uh it's different for everybody. Again, I always say it's different for everyone, but the same. I mean, the the same ache, the same heartache, you know.

— Final Reflections: Grief as a Journey of Love

SPEAKER_00 30:19

Was the motivation of the book to help other people who are grieving, or was it more, you know, writing through your experiences of coping with grief, you know?

— Closing Thoughts

SPEAKER_01 30:31

Well, first of all, it was to get my buddy and my son off my back to write it. Okay. Just go ahead and do it, you know. I think when I got to doing the second edition and I started to write those things at the end of each chapter, what I've learned, and maybe, maybe something. I didn't I didn't change things. I probably expanded some things that I had. Yeah, it got to be, it got to be for me. But I I wrote in the book, if I helped one other person, I help. I help, you know, it's a success because I help myself. One of the one of the things that happens, Jason, is and and this has been kind of interesting to me. And somebody asked me about it the other day after a speaking engagement. Um, and they said, You do this, you've done this 130 times. Does it hurt to do it? Does it bring it all back? Do you, yeah, you know, is it because I'm telling the same things again? I'm I'm feeling, I feel when I do my speaking engagement and I talk about that, I talk about my story about the turkey, you know, my wife, about my wife saying, I love you, I'll I'll see you in church. I feel that all like it's just happening, okay? Because it's it's in my it's in my mind that was in my it's my it's emblazoned in my brain, you know, what I'm seeing. So yeah, so yes and no, I told the people, I said yes, it kind of does. After I do something and I get done and I get in the car, I usually have to decompress just a little bit. You know, wipe my mind out and say, okay, think about okay, tomorrow you're gonna do this and you're gonna play golf, and then you got dinner tomorrow night. And so you got to get what you just did in there feeling out of you again. So, yes, it does, but no, I it's well worth it. It's worth it for me, and it's worth it for other people. I get the stories of people telling me how I've helped them. I just got a letter here today from somebody that had my book, and it was a gentleman who lost his wife, and and he was telling me how much it helped to read the book to know what somebody else felt that what he was feeling was not wrong. That's the other thing. That's the other thing. See, I don't I don't call it a journey of grief. I call it a journey of love. Because without without love, there is no grief. You don't grieve for somebody you didn't love. So mine's a journey of love. So I tell people, hey, everybody's gonna go on the journey. Can't stop it for you, can't change it for you. But maybe what I can do is take a few bumps and potholes in the road of that journey out for you. So when you get to those, you don't feel like they're the only person that ever was there. The only person that ever got angry. Because some people get this. I've had people tell me they've never gotten angry. I got angry. I remember got and this was two years, probably.

SPEAKER_00 33:29

I think that's a very normal emotion, though. I would I would imagine. Yeah, you know, why me? Why this? What do you know? This is unfair. Um yeah, I can I can totally see that. I think it's um, you know, a beautiful thing that you've done writing this book. And when I was reading through all of the notes before we got talking today, I thought that was why I was so kind of keen to get you on the show because of you know the very subject matter. And you know, I think that it's you know a beautiful story, you know, hearing you sort of talk through that and the relationship that you had with your wife. Yeah, I can't imagine being a single man myself, Tom, what it's even like to be with someone more than five years. I think that's just a lot about my relationship history, let alone you know, the time that you and your wife spent together. So if people do want to find out more about the book, it will be in the show notes Balloon in a Box, Coping with Grief. And well, you should know the name of it because it's been behind you, Tom, the whole time. If you haven't got the name of it now, you never will. You know, there it is. I'm gonna ask you to close the show today with a final thought or a pearl of wisdom. What would you like to leave us on today, Tom?

SPEAKER_01 34:41

Well very simply, what I've learned is that life continues and you need to embrace the changes. That's basically.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

Very, very wise words. I think you can apply that in many different ways. And I think you made a very good point early on as well about you know, grief isn't always you know losing someone. You know, we can all experience grief in different ways. Tom, it's been lovely to have you on. Thank you so much for coming on to the Celsing podcast.

SPEAKER_01 35:21

Thank you, Jason.