Navigating Loss and Embracing Life Again with Marie Scott

Marie Scott, the Creator and Founder of Happy and Healthy After Widowhood boasts an impressive resume as a best-selling author of three published books, with two more in the pipeline. She's also recognized internationally as a speaker and holds certifications as a Health and Grief Coach.

Following the loss of Dave, her husband of three decades, and her mother in the same year, Marie pursued education, laying the groundwork for her life-changing program: the 7 Steps to Healing After Loss. This roadmap offers guidance to widows and widowers, aiming to help them lead fulfilling lives filled with wellness, laughter, and the possibility of love once again.

Dave's battle with esophageal cancer was a poignant chapter, defined by his choice to prioritize quality of life over aggressive treatment. Through functional medicine, Marie addressed her own health issues, underscoring the transformative power of dietary choices.

Amidst the dual loss of her husband and mother to Alzheimer's, Marie found solace in practices like journaling and meditation. These experiences birthed the seven steps to healing, advocating for nurturing relationships and discovering new avenues of purpose.

Now embracing life with Jeff, Marie finds joy in shared interests like hunting, and savoring each moment together. Her journey stands as a testament to resilience, offering hope, gratitude, and encouragement to those navigating life's challenges after loss.

Website

https://www.mariescottwellness.com/ 

My Top 10 Grief-Busting Tips

https://www.mariescottwellness.com/media

Happy & Healthy after Widowhood / Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/happyandhealthywidow/

Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/mariescottwellness /

LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariescottwellness/ 

Contact

https://www.mariescottwellness.com/contact 

The book is referenced in the podcast episode.  Being Mortal by Atul Gawande 

https://atulgawande.com/book/being-mortal/ 

Transcript

[00:00:00] Marie: What I hope and pray for is that I can give others hope and inspiration that they can embrace life again. They can rise above the survivor's guilt and perhaps find love again. 

[00:00:12] Jill: Welcome back to Seeing Death Clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and end-of-life coach. Here on my show, I have conversations with guests.

[00:00:21] that explore the topics of death, dying, grief, and life itself. My goal is to create a space where you can challenge the ideas you might already have about these subjects. I want to encourage you to open your mind and consider perspectives beyond what you may currently believe to be true. In this episode, I talk with Marie Scott about her journey of love, loss, and resilience.

[00:00:44] Marie shares her touching story of meeting her late husband, Dave, and the beautiful life they built together. Functional medicine, journaling and meditation became a port and part of her healing after his death. This led to the development of the seven steps. To Healing After Loss, which include embracing healthy relationships and discovering new purposes in life.

[00:01:05] Finding love again. She now shares her life with Jeff cherishing Each moment together. Through her story, she hopes to inspire others to find hope, gratitude, and the courage to embrace life after loss. Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome Marie to the podcast. I am so happy you're on with me today.

[00:01:26] I'm really looking forward to this conversation and I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to talk to me. Thank you, Jill. I'm looking forward to it. So start us off with just a little bit of background, where you're from, where you grew up, any of the background information you want to share.

[00:01:40] Marie: Yeah, it's interesting. 

[00:01:41] Marie: I grew up in Rochester, New York, and it's funny. They, I learned later that it's the 10th cloudiest city in the United States. And that kind of made me aware that I have sad disease, which means you're in the 10th cloudiest city. Where are you going to see the sun? So I started traveling when I was 17 years old, because the only time I saw the sun was in the air.

[00:02:01] So my whole career was spent traveling and flying, and I was in technology for 30 years. And I met my late husband Dave on a ski trip. It was a single ski trip. It was a group called The Huggers. And I write about that in the book, how we actually met, and how this relationship just evolved from the first night we danced all night together.

[00:02:24] And it became just this wonderful, great story of life and love. And at almost 30 years, we were five months short of 30 years. When he passed away in 2018, he died in my arms and it was simultaneously the most beautiful moment of my life and the most devastating, I couldn't understand how, At that point, every single thing would become different, every single thing from eating to where you live to the circle of friends you had in the family, every single thing was different.

[00:02:55] So we had a wonderful, wonderful life. And one of the things that made me so happy about our life was he was actually retired for 20 years. He lived a great life and we used to just pack up the truck and head north for like a month. We had no kids, no pets, fake plants, and so we'd have this amazing adventure and we'd travel from South Carolina right up to Canada.

[00:03:17] I would do presentations. I was in sales at the time. I would do presentations and I would do consulting with my customers and we'd see family all up and down the road and have adventures everywhere we stopped. And when Dave died, it was like, wow, where, who am I, what am I going to do now? Where am I going to get that sense of wanting to embrace life again?

[00:03:37] And, uh, companionship. Cause I do believe we're social animals. And when Dave died, it ripped half my life out of me, ripped half my heart away. So it was really, really hard the first year and a half. 

[00:03:50] Jill: And imagine I've been married now, I guess going on 18 years. So I'm like, that's, Half of the amount of time that the two of you were together and I can't imagine how much my life would change if anything happened to my husband.

[00:04:03] Was it a sudden death or was he ill for a while? Were you expecting it? How did that happen? 

[00:04:08] Marie: Dave was a firefighter and he passed away from esophageal cancer and he was a firefighter in Mississauga, Canada. And that's deemed one of the 14 presumptive cancers that if you fall ill with these cancers, it's a line of duty death.

[00:04:23] So that's a whole other story in itself. He is honored on the wall of the National Firefighter Wall in Colorado Springs. His name is written on the wall in Toronto and Ottawa. So it was amazing that it was about six months before we had just moved into a new house of one level house right around the corner in our community in South Carolina.

[00:04:45] And Jill, what was amazing, the months leading up to that, he also had a part time passion of selling power tools, every man's dream, selling power tools. And so we had lots of stuff in the garage. And so between that move from around the corner, the garage stuff we hadn't unpacked in 20 years, all of a sudden he sold it.

[00:05:07] He cleaned the entire garage out. And then we moved around the corner during a hurricane. Uh, and the next month, he started feeling like he couldn't swallow. And so we thought, well, maybe it's just he needs to be stretched or something like that. And then one day in October, one month after we moved in about 10 o'clock and he had gone to bed and I was reading the paper in the sunroom and he said, honey, you gotta take me to the hospital because I think I'm having a heart attack.

[00:05:34] And I said, no, we're calling an ambulance. And he said, no, no, I think I'm all right. So. We went to the hospital. They went through all the tests and the CAT scan and the PET scan. And finally they discovered a tumor in his esophagus and it spread to his stomach and it was stage four. That was incredible.

[00:05:51] Going through an anticipatory grief, knowing that. His life was about to come to an end. You don't know when. It was, it was just incredible. And as time went on, he couldn't eat because he couldn't swallow. And I'd follow him around with these little paper cups cause he couldn't keep anything down, even water.

[00:06:10] And it was, it was a horrible, he chose no chemo. And everybody said, you got to do chemo, you got to do chemo. Well, he weighed the pros and cons of going through this horrific protocol to perhaps extend his life for six months when the original diagnosis was six. And he said, no, I'm not going to do it. In this one, we got a second opinion.

[00:06:32] She said, you must, you must shrink the tumor. And Dave said, why? She said, so you can eat. And he's like, but you've already told me I'm not going to want to eat because of the horrific protocol. I won't even be able to open the refrigerator because I've got no senses in my fingers and the cold and all the, so he said, no, I'm going to choose quality of life.

[00:06:50] And Jill, for the next six months, every morning, wake up, say good morning, good morning, beautiful. And then he say, I feel terrific until about two weeks before the end. And The night before, he was very restless, and my friend from Arizona, she's an ER nurse, I said, come up. You gave us one miracle when you helped Dave get over his first brain aneurysm.

[00:07:13] Maybe you got another miracle. She was about to make plans to go home the following Monday because she said, oh, he's fine, he's color's good. And the night before, He started swelling and his knees started turning black and he thought it was a blood clot because he had had two hip replacements, two knees.

[00:07:29] So he knew the signs of a blood clot. And I'll never forget. I got up out of bed and I sat in a sofa next to the bed and I remember him waking up, patting the side of the bed and he, and he, he woke up and he said, honey, where are you? He goes, I thought I was in heaven. You weren't there anymore. And the next morning he dyed my arms.

[00:07:47] Jill: Wow, I'm like a little choked up. It's really beautiful. And, you know, it's sad because you both seem like you really had a loving relationship when, so it is sad, but it's also beautiful that you were there with him up until that last moment and that he died in your arms. And I mean, personally, I actually really liked to hear that he chose quality of life.

[00:08:13] I see it really more than I'd like to think that people, they go through these treatments that barely extend their life and the life that they have is not good. It's really not the way that people would want to live. If you're dying from cancer, there's going to be some negative things that are going to come with that in and of itself.

[00:08:37] But I do hear often of the doctors. pushing the treatments. And I watched my grandmother go through treatments at 90 years old. And my mother just said to me not too long ago that she feels guilty that like we made grandma go through this. And I said, Well, first off, grandma did choose to go through the treatments, but the side effects that she had.

[00:09:01] We're so bad. She was in a lot of pain sometimes, and it was not pretty sometimes. And a lot of it was a reaction to the radiation and the like surgeries that they kept giving her where at 90 years old, maybe if we would have been there. a little bit better educated on what to ask the doctors as far as what is this treatment going to do?

[00:09:26] What kind of side effects is it going to extend my life? Is it going to save my life? They're very different questions there and there's very different answers and people might come to different conclusions if they knew to ask those questions. I'm happy to hear that he educated himself on what the side effects would be and then made the best decision for him.

[00:09:48] Yes. What he thought he wanted for the rest of his life. 

[00:09:51] Marie: And Jill, I'll tell you that I am happy and grateful that he made the decision on his own. He didn't have any guilt trips for me. We did a lot of research on if there was a cure, he definitely would have gone for chemo and radiation and surgery, but there was no chance of a cure.

[00:10:08] And our neighbors, dear friends, bought me this book called Being Mortal, and it took us a while before we could pick it up, but this book was written by an oncologist, talking about the unnatural ways that we extend life, just for the sake of extending life. No quality is ever mentioned, it's just that you must extend your life, but to what end?

[00:10:29] Jill: Yeah, that's a great book. I've read it and I'll put a link in the show notes for people. If you want to check out that book, I definitely recommend it. And I was surprised when I became a death doula that doctors did not have a better understanding of death and dying. And my guess is like when I would consider just like a normal person, general population person, I wasn't involved in healthcare at all.

[00:10:51] I thought, Oh, well, if that's part of life, as we all die, of course, doctors would be better with it. But they're not trained to, they're trained to extend life at all costs. And unfortunately, sometimes it's the patients that really suffer because of it. And I'm hopeful that that will start to change with time.

[00:11:11] And I've definitely talked to some guests that that's some of what they're doing, which is going out and educating the public or talking with doctors and nurses about. What actually happens at the end of life and why they need to be a little bit more willing to let people Make decisions not be like the doctor that you were saying that was like, no you have to do this No, people don't have to it's not a failing on the doctor's part either if somebody chooses to just go Go comfortably as comfortable as possible rather than doing the treatment.

[00:11:44] But unfortunately, I think humans, we, we get this feeling that it's a failure on our part if things don't turn out the way that we thought that they were going to. 

[00:11:54] Marie: My friend whose husband was also dying of cancer said he didn't really die the day they put him in the ground. He died the day they started chemo.

[00:12:04] And just the quality of life was totally gone and a horrific ending. And that's one of the reasons why I got into functional medicine because I have a horrible family history of disease. And I got into functional medicine to learn more about the link between cancer and food. And you've probably heard sugar feeds cancer and then the link between food and Alzheimer's and my mom passed of Alzheimer's the same year as I lost Dave.

[00:12:32] So it's a double whammy on the stress scale. My mom and my husband in the same year, six months apart. But it was so amazing to get into functional medicine and actually cure myself by just changing my food preferences. I was able to come off high blood pressure pills, high cholesterol. I reversed prediabetes and antidepressants because that's the first thing they give a grieving person is here.

[00:12:56] Take this drug. And it worried me. What Monday, because she was on. probably 15 pills up until the day she died. And it's like, there's no exit strategy. Once you get on a pill, they don't tell you when you're going to get off it. And so that's another type of existence if you're not healthy. And I was able to get off all meds and reverse prediabetes and lost 25 pounds that had been calling around for 20 years.

[00:13:21] So just by changing my food preferences and it's one of the things I teach and the seven steps to healing after loss is number one is food is medicine. So I love getting the word out that you can eat healthy and they told this Italian girl to give up tomatoes and pasta. And it's like, wow, what do you, no, I can't.

[00:13:39] And it's like, okay, I can do anything for six weeks. And Jill, six weeks, I was able to transform my health totally. And then I went back to school to become a functional medicine health coach. And that transformed my life. I started journaling and writing down all these great stories about Dave and I traveled the world and all of a sudden it turned into a book.

[00:13:57] And I thought, wow, this is pretty cool. And one thing I coach on as well, journaling is a great means of therapy. And I know you talk about journaling as well, just reliving the memories, the good, the bad, the ugly, it was very therapeutic. So the food 

[00:14:12] Jill: thing, right? I come from food service. That's my background before I became a death doula.

[00:14:18] And I remember when I first went away to culinary school, 18 years old, going to school, and we had like a class that talked briefly about nutrition and food and what is in all of the processed foods. And I was like, really horrified. At the things that we were consuming that people don't think about it.

[00:14:39] First off, people don't have access in a lot of cases to whole nutritional foods. I was lucky that my grandmother, she raised me. She was a great cook. So like I had never even had spaghetti sauce out of a jar. She made everything from scratch. So I started with a solid foundation. But there was still so many things that afterwards, I actually became vegetarian for a while.

[00:15:02] And my grandmother, I remember talking to her and she was like, but there's nothing wrong with eating meat. I said, well, grandma, you're thinking about, she grew up on a farm. I'm like, you had a cow. When they slaughtered the cow, you knew where it was raised. You knew what it was eating. You consumed all of it because you're not going to waste anything.

[00:15:20] I said, it's so different now. The way that these factories are run and all the antibiotics and all the stuff that they have to do to these animals to keep them healthy. It's just, I was so grossed out. Honestly, I really had a hard time. And now I eat meat, but not in large quantities. I still try to eat a lot of whole grains and vegetables and at 44 overall, I'm still fairly healthy.

[00:15:44] And my children, I try to talk to them about it. Because they're growing up in a society where there's access to a lot of junk, they, my husband and I are both chefs and they'll be like, Oh, this food is disgusting. And I'm like, get out of here. This food is not disgusting. My thing is what I keep trying to explain to them is that if you start with solid foundations on your eating habits, it's a lot better to prevent things from happening than to try to reverse things from happening.

[00:16:14] But again, they're still young, nine and 12. I really want them to understand that. Like you said, there's a lot of things that happen as we age that we just assume it happens with age. Well, no, it happens because of all these things that we've been doing to our bodies all of these years that can be in some cases helped by changes in what we're consuming.

[00:16:37] But ideally, let's just consume better foods now so that we don't have those things in the future. 

[00:16:43] Marie: And 

[00:16:43] Jill: teach 

[00:16:44] Marie: children that eating the rainbow can be fun. And getting healthy habits at a young age, I think, is the future of changing the food system. 

[00:16:53] Jill: Yeah, of course, because if they start demanding different foods, then that's what they'll start producing.

[00:16:59] Where now people buy the processed foods. And again, there's some privilege that comes with being able to have access to foods that are not overly processed. But in general, there's people that could buy foods that were not as processed, but they do because that's what they like, because that's what they grew up on.

[00:17:17] But I want to hear more about your, you said it's seven steps to healing? Yes. Yeah. Can you tell me more about that? I want to know what your seven steps are. 

[00:17:26] Marie: Yes. So when I went back to school, become a health coach, I thought I was just going to learn more about nutrition. I'm also a cook. I remember writing in my mom's obituary, mom instilled in all eight siblings, a love of cooking.

[00:17:38] And for some of us who love a baking, I wasn't a baker. I was definitely a cook. Dave and I shared this. I would cook every single night. I'd love being creative. And he called it my therapy. And I would be singing and dancing in the kitchen and whip up these great meals and So, okay, what have I got in the fridge?

[00:17:54] What have we got in the freezer? And then just create something. And in fact, it led me to the next book. It's well underway is cooking with a side of Kleenex because a lot of times widows and widowers, or even anybody who's an empty nester say, Oh, it's just me. I'll just have popcorn tonight. It led me to create and articulate the seven steps to healing.

[00:18:15] After loss, after becoming a coach and the very number one thing is food as medicine. And I teach and coach that eat organic if you can go to the dirty dozen on the, in the clean 15, because not everybody can afford everything organic, but definitely have organic blueberries and organic strawberries. And those are the highest pesticide covered things in the produce section.

[00:18:38] So there's lots of common sense in that, in that whole area about food as medicine. And I hope you can feel my passion for that because it's, and people, and when I first lost Dave used to say, what do you eat? What do you eat? Cause they saw this transformation, right? And went from a size 12 to size six.

[00:18:56] And it's like, what have you done? I said, just change what I eat. I shop around the perimeter. And try to eat organic grass fed beef and organic chicken. And I said, just come over the house and I'll cook. And so I had a lot of fun introducing other people on how to eat healthy. So that was kind of neat.

[00:19:12] The second step in the seven steps is incorporate movement. Because as a widow, the easy thing to do would be just crawl under the blankets and not get out of bed. And I remember one of my widows that I was coaching said, I feel like there's this big gray blanket wrapped around me. And I had such a vision from that.

[00:19:31] And I thought, try to move five minutes every hour and it doesn't have to be going to the gym. Just go outside and go for a walk, get in nature, getting your face in the sun, do gardening. Gardening is great exercise and just get out in nature. So incorporate movement is to me, a key ingredient to healing and also helps you lift the widow fog because widow fog is real.

[00:19:58] I mean, it's real. One of the chapters of my books is called Widowhood Wackiness. And some of the things I did in that early months, six, seven months were just not cool, dangerous as a matter of fact. So the next step is improve sleep. I remember being alone and sleeping without Dave. I just did a webinar on that.

[00:20:15] What do I do? Do I sleep on his side? Do I have pillow fights? Do I switch to the middle? And so getting a good night's sleep was very elusive, especially in the early days. You wake up with a busy head and wonder, where did my life go? What happened here? And just, Trying to figure out what was next. So getting a good night's sleep was definitely important.

[00:20:38] And then the next step, and this is interesting, is meditation. And I remember thinking all my whole life, I've had the combat for probably 15 years. And I remember my whole life saying, Oh, it's not for me. I can't quiet the monkey brain. But when I said, okay, I'm going to commit to this for 30 days. And I found an online course, and it's become a non negotiable part of every single morning.

[00:21:01] And I love even 10 minutes sitting with the Calm App, and I love Jay Shetty. He's so positive, and I love his voice. And so I take 17 minutes out of my morning, and I'll just sit and be quiet with myself, or with a guided meditation. The next one, we talked a little bit about survivor's guilt. And the step five is increased laughter.

[00:21:22] And I'll tell you, the first time I laughed out loud, I had to do a double take because I didn't know what that sound was. Because it was probably eight or nine months after Dave died and trying to navigate this new life. And that's the day I got my smile back and I thought Dave was more concerned about me embracing life again than he was about his own mortality.

[00:21:43] And getting my smile back was the number one most important thing. And I realized it wasn't about laughing. It's about getting over the guilt of laughing with Dave not there. So just getting over that, that survivor's guilt for that was huge. By that point, eight or nine months, the constant flood of tears and sobbing in the closet abated a little bit.

[00:22:04] And I'll tell you, I was always a very strong, independent woman. And then the early months, I never realized how much water you could push out through your eyeballs. It's like, my God, what is happening? It was like Niagara falls. And it was just a normal part of greeting that I embraced and accepted and meditation and getting my last deck helped that tremendously.

[00:22:26] The sixth step is surround yourself with healthy relationships is bad enough going through what you're going through. You don't need energy vampires sucking you down and being negative. And I call it unsubscribe to negative friends and family unsubscribe. And it's hard to do, especially if it's family, but you have to do that in order to heal because if you're being dragged down, it's hard to rise up and see the light again.

[00:22:52] So embrace healthy relationship. Finally, the last one is discover new purpose. For me, becoming a published author, three books now, I never dreamed that. But I found new purpose in becoming a coach and get the word out that it is possible to embrace life again. But you have to find new purpose, whether it's an old hobby.

[00:23:11] I remember doing a workshop in Tampa, and there's about 60 widowers in the room. And I talked to her, I said, what are some of your old hobbies? What'd you used to like to do? And someone said, kayaking. And I'm going to get back into that. And somebody else said, I'm going to get back into church singing.

[00:23:26] This woman sitting in the front row. Got up, grabbed my microphone, and started belting out the National Anthem. And it was, I'm gonna get back into singing. It was so cool. Gives me goosebumps to even think about that moment that she just grabbed, like, grabbing life by the horns and saying, yep, this is what I'm gonna do.

[00:23:43] So, the last step is find new purpose. 

[00:23:45] Jill: I'm actually thinking the connection in some ways between the finding new purpose and the survivor's guilt, because I'm thinking like, how cool is that, that you wrote those books and how, I guess, depending on your spiritual beliefs, your husband could actually still be very aware of what you're doing.

[00:24:03] But I know I'm thinking again for myself of all of the things that my husband would really be so proud and would want to be there to experience it. And then I would feel a little bit of guilt of being like, well, now I'm taking this experience and I'm writing books and I'm doing all these things. And I should feel ashamed because I'm using this experience.

[00:24:26] Experience. And it makes it seem like I'm happy he's dead. I can already think of all these things that would be going through my head. Yes. I could imagine that those two things in some ways are very tied together of like, it's great. I mean, I think it's amazing that you wrote the books after he died and that you found this whole, not that it's a new life, but you had to have a new life.

[00:24:47] Because a huge part of your life is now not there. But I don't know, is there anything that kind of comes up for you with those two things connected? Absolutely. 

[00:24:58] Marie: I never dreamed of doing this, but I actually found a psychic medium. And I thought, how do I make sense of this? And it was an amazing connection.

[00:25:07] It was in Orlando. And it was incredible. She knew things about Dave, that no human could ever fathom. And she just helped me realize that he was still at or by light, right by my side, and he was clapping his hands. She even shadowed my mom and she said, mom's doing this. Mom always did this. She rubbed her hands and glee and Oh, it gives me chills thinking about it, but meeting and then what happened when I healed my body, mind and soul, my heart opened.

[00:25:40] And in walk the second great love of my life. And I used to think this can't be real. I mean, my friend Lee would say to me, how do you rate? He knew David goes, how do you rate? Not only did you have one great love in your life, but now you've got two because he had met Jeff. And he said, most of us don't get one.

[00:25:58] So it's been an amazing second life, but I am so happy to know that Dave is right by my side and I still talk with Anne on a regular basis. And, you know, I used to ask her, is this too good to be true? I mean, what is this, this man that walked in my life? And it's amazing, amazing occurrence. The survivor's guilt is finally gone.

[00:26:20] And I will tell you though, the grief doesn't ever go away. People see Jeff and I, and they're like, Oh my gosh, how can you do this? I've had the best, forget the rest, and that's not what happened here. I remember the anniversary of Dave's dying, April 15th, the night before, Jeff said to me, he said, what are you doing tomorrow?

[00:26:37] So I'm going to do some writing, and I've got some calls, and I've got some work to do. He goes, no, you're going to the beach. You're going to Siesta Key in Sarasota. You're just going to go be with Dave. And he honors Dave to no end. I mean, I have a necklace that I wear all the time with Dave's ashes in it.

[00:26:54] And Jeff will say to me, where's Dave? How come you're not bringing him on this trip? And so it's so cool to be with someone who allows you to continue to process that grief and it still grabs me by the neck and throws me down. But the survivor's cult, thank God, has abated, knowing that I know Dave is happy for me and right by my side.

[00:27:14] I feel his presence everywhere. 

[00:27:16] Jill: And it's beautiful that you did find that second love. And as your friend pointed out, some people don't find one great love of their life. And so it really is amazing that you were able to open yourself up. But I think that's the key, is that it didn't just find you, you had to open yourself up to it, potentially knowing that you might lose this love of your life sooner than later, right?

[00:27:40] I mean, that's one of the things that I. Work with myself all the time is that as much as I like to think my husband and I are going to be in our 90s and we're going to die within a couple weeks of each other holding hands like that's the vision in my head, but I don't know. He's all the way across the country now.

[00:27:56] He's out in California. I'm in New Jersey. He's on a work trip. You know, we're recording this in September, even though I know it's not coming out for a while. But September 11th was yesterday. It was the anniversary of the September 11th. And how many people got on those planes thinking they were going home?

[00:28:15] You know, how many people had loved ones waiting for their loved ones to come home, thinking they're just flying. It's no big deal. We like to think that. We are immune to all of these things, but we're not. And it must be an interesting journey to get from that place of grieving and feeling that loss to then allowing yourself to open up to another great love.

[00:28:42] But that could also lead to another great loss. And we just don't know. 

[00:28:45] Marie: You don't know. You don't, you, you know, you no idea. And at 66 years old, I'm so fortunate to have my health and to have, have my love and to be able to do things. And I was reflecting a lot because 9 11, Dave was a firefighter. And so 9 11, when that happened, we were living in Virginia.

[00:29:03] And it was incredible. When he saw that tower come down, he knew. He knew what happened to all those firefighters going up and he knew that they were not coming down. So it took us a long time to get back to New York City because he just couldn't process it. So what's incredible about this week is 9 9 was Jeff's birthday.

[00:29:23] So we had a wonderful celebration on nine nine in a beautiful place in Maine called Deer Isle. And then nine 10, there's this documentary on that pictures I'd never seen. It was the firefighters documentary. It was on 60 minutes. And I've never seen some of these pictures and the stories from the firefighters who lost their lives and the families that went into firefighting after that, a nine 10 was our anniversary would have been 35 years.

[00:29:49] So 9 18, Jeff and I got married in Bar Harbor in 2022. So I mean, just amazing what September, so it's really cool being with you in September. Very reflective month. 

[00:30:04] Jill: It's my pleasure to have you on during such a important time in anniversaries of all kinds. Yeah. And just even thinking about September 11th, I still, it, it shakes me a little bit.

[00:30:17] I was in college when it happened and it just was so life changing. That was that reality check for me as a 20 something year old of like, Oh, Oh, like, it's not, it's not what I thought life was like. There's still big, scary things out there. Yes. Also, I'm thinking coming into a new relationship, did it change?

[00:30:41] The way that you show up every day in your relationship after, and I know I don't want to assume that there was times when you took your husband for granted when he was alive, but I feel like just as a human, sometimes we do take our loved ones for granted. They're here, they're annoying sometimes because we're humans, like you just kind of go through life.

[00:31:02] Did that change the way that you show up in a relationship now, the way that you view your 

[00:31:07] Marie: day to day life? That's a good question. I, that's a very good question. So what this relationship has done has transported me back into my twenties. Every single morning we wake up smiling and laughing and what a way to set the stage for the day.

[00:31:23] What a way to set intentions that life is going to be happy. And we embrace every moment. And I think meditation helps a lot and we embrace every moment. And we, Continue to discover new things. Jeff is an avid hunter. So we've spent our time between Sarasota, Florida, and outside of Bar Harbor, Maine. And one thing I did is I embraced his lifestyle.

[00:31:47] So as a hunter, I had my first deer burger here at camp four years ago. It's my fourth season here. And it was amazing. It was best quarantine ever, but embracing life and being in the moment. And making sure that disagreements don't last and you talk things through makes me more aware of communication and being able to talk differences.

[00:32:09] And so we're not snowbirds, we're hunting birds. And one thing I embrace is Jeff always talked about hunting week, hunting week, hunting week, and built an addition on the back of camp for the hunters. I had no idea what to expect. And so, I embraced his love of hunting, which I never dreamed I'd do in my life.

[00:32:26] But I think it's important to embrace others hobbies and interests. And so the Friday of hunting week, third week in November, all of a sudden, all these men arrived in Orange. 10 men in orange with rifles slung over their shoulders. And so I was doing Zoom calls for trying to finish the book. And I started to tell Whitney, if you see a guy coming up behind me with a rifle and orange on, don't worry.

[00:32:49] It's okay. I'm all right. It's just the hunters. But what was really cool is I got to cook for them. And I got to, became the chief cook, bought a washer and laundry. And we were all sharing one bathroom. Until Jeff finished the bathroom here. So you know the difference in life In between Jeff and I and and Dave, we never take anything for granted.

[00:33:08] We never take anything for granted, whether it's simple act of making coffee in the morning and we're both in our sixties, it's like this. This is an been an amazing connection, and what I hope and, and, and pray for is that I can give others hope and inspiration that they can embrace life again. They can rise above the survivor's guilt and perhaps find love again.

[00:33:31] Jill: And I'm sure you are doing that for others and can tell how passionate you are about your work and about your story. Part of my work as a death doula is. I'm trying to get people to live life that way without having to go through the loss, to understand that it could happen to any of us at any time. So don't take any of it for granted.

[00:33:54] And it has changed the way that I show up with my husband. When you were talking about making coffee in the morning, when we get up and we make our coffee and when it's nice out, we sit on the porch together and we might not. Be talking to each other, but just that experience of being together. And I will almost every time pause for a moment and look around and think to myself one day, this isn't going to be here.

[00:34:18] And again, hopefully we will be older when we die, but if nothing else, life changes. I meditate as well. I have a almost daily meditation practice. I need my meditation, but that's something that I learned through. really studying Buddhism and meditating is that life is always going to change. We can't stop it from changing.

[00:34:40] Our attachment to things not changing just causes us suffering. Yes. But if we could be aware and really present In the moment and just look around at the way that the sun is hitting the leaves or the look on your partner's face as they're reading something funny on their phone, like all those little details.

[00:34:58] And unfortunately, so many of us just get caught up in the arguments that we had with somebody or especially now with online, like somebody said something mean to me online and I'm thinking about what I'm going to respond back to them. And I'm not. aware at all at what is going on around me. And I want people to really be able to embrace life now while we have it, not wait until somebody that we love dies to think, Oh, I really need to embrace every moment because it could end.

[00:35:31] Marie: And to me, that's about gratitude. Gratitude for the little things, gratitude for this wonderful mushroom coffee that I'm drinking, gratitude for the rain that's falling on Abram's Pond, and just gratitude for the every single thing. I try to journal every day still, and three things grateful for in life and grateful for with myself and what I'm doing.

[00:35:52] And I think gratitude is the key. Grateful for every moment and being present in the moment. 

[00:35:57] Jill: Yeah. And gratitude can change the way that you feel. In the moment. And I sometimes there is things that go on with people. There's times when everything could be great around me, but inside I'm just I'm struggling, you know, and so I still try, though, at that moment to just be like, but you're here, you're alive, everybody around you is healthy, you have a house.

[00:36:20] a roof over your head, you have food, like, even just the small things, you know, like, if you could just find any little thing to be grateful for, it can help to shift some of the, I don't know, the funk that we get in as humans. I'll try to remind myself that if life was always easy, If life was always perfect, I would get bored.

[00:36:42] As much as sometimes I hate to even admit it, if things were just great all the time, I would get bored. I would be like, oh, this, I want some excitement. I want like something. And so then when things are exciting in a positive way, we get really happy. But when they're exciting and what we would consider a negative way, we're like, oh, this is terrible.

[00:37:03] Why does this have to happen? Honestly, We just need to embrace all of it and just be grateful for the journey that we're on because we have to experience all of it. It's part of being a human. Yes. Well, this has been amazing. We are coming up on our time, but I do want to give you a few moments. Tell us a little bit about your book or website, whatever you want to.

[00:37:24] And I will put links to all of it in the show notes. So it'll be super easy for people to find. But what do you want us to know about your The 

[00:37:30] Marie: most rewarding thing that I can do is get on a phone call with a widow or widower and within the space of our first initial call, help give them hope and inspiration that there is a path forward through grief and grief is a journey and no two journeys are alike.

[00:37:47] So the most rewarding thing for me is I have a private Facebook group. It's vetted. And I love getting on the phone with my widows and widowers and talking and hearing their story and saying their person's name and helping them realize they don't that they don't die when they're put in the ground they die the last time somebody says their name.

[00:38:07] So continue to say their name and I help coach them on ways to improve how they're feeling and ways to get over the loss. And so from there, the coaching program that I have, I also teach the seven steps to healing after loss, which is very, very cool, very well received. And I've also become a quasi dating coach because it was about a year and a half out and it's like, I've been sort of saying, I don't want to be alone the rest of my life.

[00:38:33] And I know I didn't, but I wanted to do it safely. So I've got programs that can help widows and widows get out there without going online, which is the scariest thing. So I'm anxious to get that word out. We just finished a retreat up here in Maine, Manifest Maine, and it was amazing. The, these women left here with just a new sense of life and purpose.

[00:38:56] And one of the widows who came up, it's the first trip she made since her husband died. So it's very, very honored to be her first. trip away. So now she's going to start doing other trips. And so coaching and teaching and writing my book is how I found meaning and humor in widowhood, firehouses, and organic vegetables.

[00:39:14] And it's been a wonderful path to go from journaling on airplane napkins and post it notes into this creation of the book. And I'm also speaking at hospice centers in Florida. I'm doing an adult wellness day with them. And it's very cool because as the keynote speaker, I talk about the seven steps. We do a deep dive into food as medicine.

[00:39:37] And so that's very rewarding work, just working with the hospices and giving hope for all kinds of loss that it's possible to embrace life again. So you can find me at Marie Scott wellness. all over social media, whether it's Instagram, Facebook. So please reach out, find me and get on the phone and let me hear your story and where you're at.

[00:39:59] Jill: And again, all those links will be in the show notes. So it'll be easy for people. If you want to find Marie, you can just go to the show notes, click on the links and thank you so much, Marie. It really was such a pleasure having you on today. Thank you, Jill. Appreciate it. Thank you for listening to this episode of seeing death clearly.

[00:40:17] Next week's episode is not the one that I had planned to release. I spent the last two weeks with my aunt in the ICU and two days ago, she died while I held her hand and talked to her. I recorded an episode of the podcast to share with listeners about my experience, what I learned, what I would like you all to know about what I did and what I wished I would have done differently.

[00:40:40] Overall, it was honestly one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. I'm sad that she's not with us anymore, but I'm so very grateful to have been able to be with her during this time of her life. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or family member who might find it interesting.

[00:40:56] Your support in spreading the podcast is greatly appreciated. Please consider subscribing on your Facebook page. platform and leaving a five star review. Your positive feedback helps recommend the podcast to others. The podcast also offers a paid subscription feature that allows you to financially support the show.

[00:41:12] Your contribution will help keep the podcast advertisement free, whether your donation is large or small, every amount counts. is valuable. I sincerely appreciate all of you for listening to the show and supporting me in any way you can. You can find a link in the show notes to subscribe to the paid monthly subscription, as well as a link to my Venmo if you prefer to make a one time contribution.

[00:41:33] Thank you, and I look forward to seeing you in next week's episode of Seeing Death Clearly.