Love, Loss, and Living Again with Tony Stewart, author of Carrying the Tiger

Tony Stewart joined the podcast to share his powerful story about love, loss, and healing after the death of his wife, Lynn. In his new book, Carrying the Tiger: Living with Cancer, Dying with Grace, Finding Joy While Grieving, Tony tells the story of Lynn’s sudden cancer diagnosis, their emotional journey through treatment, and the deep lessons they learned about life, love, and letting go. After Lynn’s death, Tony faced overwhelming grief, but over time, he found a way to live again and even to welcome new love into his life.

He shared how their world changed overnight when Lynn was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Through clinical trials, hospital stays, and hard choices, they carved out several more meaningful years together. One of the most touching parts of Tony’s story is the two final weeks they spent together in home hospice, which he describes as some of the most sacred and beautiful days of his life.

Throughout the journey, Tony kept an online journal on CaringBridge.org, writing updates for friends and family. Over time, these posts grew into deep reflections about love, grief, and resilience. After Lynn’s death, friends encouraged him to turn his writing into a book. Carrying the Tiger brings together those raw and honest stories, offering a heartfelt look at grief and the surprising truth that sorrow and joy can live side by side.

Tony also spoke about his life before and after Lynn, his creative work, and how building a new relationship while grieving taught him that healing doesn’t mean forgetting. 

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Transcript

Tony: [00:00:00] Death is a transition to another form. Everything dies. Nothing is permanent, but we go through our lives assuming that whatever we've got and whoever we are is the way we're going to be tomorrow and the day after when actually change is happening all the time. 

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 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 Tony Stewart about his new book, Carrying the Tiger, Living with Cancer, Dying with Grace, Finding Joy While Grieving. Tony shares the deeply personal story of his wife, Lynn, whose unexpected stage four cancer diagnosis turn their world upside down. Tony describes those final weeks as some of the most sacred moments of his life.

We also discussed Tony's journey through grief. His creative life and how he found new love without erasing the past. His story is a powerful reminder that even after unimaginable loss, it is still possible to live and love fully. Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome, Tony to the podcast.

Thank you so much for coming on today. Can you start us off, just tell us a little bit about who you are outside of the story that you're gonna share with us about your book, but like where did you grow up? Anything like that you wanna tell us about? 

Tony: Sure. And thank you, Jill, for having me on your program and for having such wonderful conversations, and I'm looking forward to ours.

I am 69 years old, so I've had a pretty full life. I've lived in New York City almost all of my life in an apartment where I look out at the Hudson River. I. The part of Manhattan that you would enjoy living in as opposed to the part that's usually on TV [00:02:00] shows and movies that's also crowded and frenetic.

I've been a filmmaker, I've been a writer, I've been a computer guy. I've done all kinds of things. But the main thing that happened was that 35 or more years ago, I met a lovely woman named Lynn Catula and we married, I, I married and spent some really interesting decades with her. She was a painter, an artist that was the heart of her life.

She had a day job for part of the time, but mostly she was making paintings and I loved helping her have that life even as I did things. I had started out creative early on with, wrote a book that was not published. I wrote a book. I made movies that were produced, small documentary type. Films. I was a very creative guy when she met me, and then I promptly fell in love with computers and started writing computer software.

She accused me of pulling a bait and switch on her, laughing that she had met this artist and now I was doing other things. We spent many decades, we traveled together every year for weeks or even a [00:03:00] month at a time in India, Southeast Asia. I don't mean for 35 years, I mean later in our lives. And then about 10 years ago, she got cancer.

Which we did not appreciate at the beginning, which turned out to be non-smokers lung cancer that had metastasized to her spine and was already stage four. By the time we heard about it. Our lives changed on a dime 10 years ago, last fall. I remember sitting with her in the kitchen. The conversation we had that night, so tearful and joyous, remembering what we'd had and tearful like, I don't know how much longer we're gonna have this as we set out on what I will now call our odyssey.

At the time we thought that she might only have, well, that night we had no idea. We didn't even know that it was stage four. But we quickly found out we. Assumed that like most other people with metastasized lung cancer, she might have six months, she might have two years, and this is with chemo and [00:04:00] everything, but probably not more than that.

We threw ourselves into the medical system, trying to find ways to have as much life together as we could. We were very lucky. We got into a clinical trial that actually worked for Lynn. And extended her life by about four more years. Although there were tremendous ups and downs during those years.

Hospitalizations, all kinds of things happened after about six years from when we first learned she had cancer. The drug stopped working. We had an extremely difficult, I would even call it torturous few months as we tried to find our way back to the kind of equilibrium that we had had. Six years earlier when different drugs did work.

Eventually one night we realized, she realized with some help from one of our doctors, which was a blessing, that it was time to stop treatment, so we elected to do home [00:05:00] hospice. Lynn came, well, she was home and we spent two weeks here. In fact, she was much closer to dying than we realized. She only lived another two weeks.

Those two weeks, which are the heart of my story, those two weeks are two of the most special weeks of my entire life, helping Lynn find her way to wherever she was going, leaving me. Then she died beside me here in our bed, and I went into shattering grief. I lived with that for the next few years as I slowly found my way out of that.

Quite complicated because fairly early on I met someone else through grieving, through talking about grief. She wasn't even in this city, but we did start to have a relationship while I was still crying for Lynn every day. And so I had to figure out, [00:06:00] stumble out, stumble through the process of figuring out how to integrate joy.

With my grief and discovered what I guess that other people who have been on your program knew already or have learned for themselves that joy and grief actually can coexist. They are not opposites. I journaled through this entire 10 year period, uh, on a website called CaringBridge, where you can post health information for your friends and keep in touch with them.

Starting almost the day we first got the phone call saying that Lynn had tumors and progressing onwards. I don't have a history of journaling. I started doing this specifically to keep in touch with our friends. I was writing posts for our friends every day or two with Lynn's blessing. She could have written them herself, but she didn't want to.

I would draft them. She would look over my shoulder, read the post, say, okay, but take this part out. Take that part out. I don't want them to know it hurt that much. I don't wanna mention the diarrhea. Okay. Just say, I felt uncomfortable as we reached the point where the cancer progressed. Lynn could no [00:07:00] longer write the post.

She didn't have the energy. It attacked her body in so many ways. I was writing these things all by myself, and I was increasingly writing about my feelings, which just happened organically during the course of these many years of writing posts. And friends in their comments, their responses to these. We had about 200 people reading the posts.

By the time Lynn died. All friends, it was a closed, private group, private website. Friends kept saying, I love reading what you're writing, Tony. It's helping me. Please keep writing. So I did, and I wrote through my grief as I tried to figure out what was going on with me, and I wrote through the complexity of meeting Cordelia, the woman who came into my life.

Later, as I became less tearful and less sorrowful, the post grew further and further apart. Eventually I stopped, and about a year ago, which was three and a half years after Lynn died, I decided to make these posts into a book. I [00:08:00] spent the last year writing it. It's called Carrying the Tiger. It covers everything that I just said.

It also has flashbacks. You learn about us, you learn about our travels, all sorts of things. I'm here today because I have found the process of writing this book, not just cathartic, but transformative in ways I didn't anticipate. I've become really in touch with this whole world of. Trying to share stories about death and loss and grief.

The first half of my book is about living with cancer. The subtitle of the book is Carrying the Tiger, living With Cancer, dying With Grace, finding Joy while Grieving. That's the full title of the book. I wrote it because I think we don't talk about these things enough. Which I know is the premise of your entire podcast.

As I started to send it to beta readers to see if they thought [00:09:00] it was good enough that I should publish it, I was getting responses back, like Tony, this book helped me transition through the loss of my best friend, and then my brother and his wife. I know it will help many other people. I had no idea that this.

Acquaintance of mine who had agreed to read my book was going to have that kind of response to it. So I became invested in the idea that sharing this story could help people. Now I'm on what I guess you would call a book tour in this modern age. You sit at home and talk about it, and I'm finding that this is changing me.

Just two weeks ago, I signed up for a course by David Kessler to become a certified grief educator. I'm three weeks into that course not knowing what I will do with the rest of my life. I'm don't have any particular goal or expectation, but I just wanna know more about this so that when people ask me what did I go through, I can put it [00:10:00] in a bigger context and here we are.

Jill: That is lovely. I'm so glad you're taking that course because David does so many wonderful resources and I'm on his email list, so I'm always getting the information. I know that he does that course and that's wonderful that you're taking it. So many people that I meet that do this work, you come into end of life or grief work.

From a personal experience, this isn't typically something that somebody wakes up and they say, you know what? I wanna be a grief counselor or a death doula. We've usually gone through the experience and then realized how we could have used help in some of these areas. Yes, and grief is one of the ones that I didn't expect that I would be working with people with grief, but you know, death and grief, they are so tied together, even though we grief things that aren't necessarily the death of a human person.

Tony: Yes, 

Jill: there's a lot of other grief out there, but the way that we don't process our grief, I. Is [00:11:00] so unhealthy. It seems like that's one of the quote unquote problems in our society. So many of us are walking around with this grief that we don't know what to do with, and then not even realizing it's grief and it's coming out as anger.

We think we're angry at this person when really we're just having a grief response and we don't understand that that's what it is. We need more people going out talking about grief and working with people who are grieving. I did read, I didn't end up finishing your whole book. Life is Crazy. I didn't read part of your book and you know, I love when I get to read a book and feel like I get to know the people in the story outside of just the story of their sickness and their death and the grief.

So I did like that. You mentioned how you and Lynnette, and she was significantly older than you, right? 10 years or so. Yes, yes. Yeah. 10 years better than you, which is very unusual. You know, you don't see that too often in a relationship. There was a lot of things I enjoyed. Reading about the two of [00:12:00] you, I almost feel like I know you guys, which I'm sure is an interesting place for you to be.

On the other side of that. People read your book and kind of know you in a way that you don't know them because they're gonna, in a lot of cases, be strangers to you. So it's. Interesting. I think when I talk to authors that you're willing to put yourself in such a vulnerable position to help other people to share yourself and to share your story.

I think it's beautiful. I'm so glad you wrote it. I know you also were pretty active on your social media. I follow you now on Instagram, so it definitely seems like you're really putting yourself out there. What part of that do you enjoy the most? Do you know? Do you go out and you get to like talk about your wife in a way that you wouldn't normally be able to daily?

What about that? Do you really find a pleasurable experience? 

Tony: I'm finding a surprising amount of this pleasurable in terms of the emotional quality of it. I've always been an introvert. Who wanted to be [00:13:00] recognized for being good at what I did. I was a filmmaker who did not go to Hollywood. I made my movies here in New York City.

They were smaller things for colleges and universities that we were hired to make films for. But I always had this fantasy that I could go to Hollywood and people would recognize. I never wanted to be famous in that way, but recognize that I had something to give them and something to offer. And here I am 45 years later finding that I have stumbled into this project, which I then worked like hell on for a year to create, to turn all those caring bridge posts into a book carrying the Tiger.

That is what you said, and thank you for those nice words. Something that you would want to read and get to know us, and I've gone and done it as we're recording this interview. The book launch is still two weeks away. So the orders that are coming in are pre-orders. I'm talking to podcasters, doing a few of them with the [00:14:00] expectation that this will come out later and more people will learn about this book in the future.

But the small interactions that I've had, the taste of this that I've had has been so fulfilling because I have now done something to help other people. And I hope that it does help other people. I don't expect to make money on this book. Books like this don't normally sell all that much, and now I've hired a publicist and done things that cost me a lot of money.

I'll just be really happy if I get half of that money back because the whole idea was to share my story and see if it could help people. I'm learning with each conversation, with each review that the book gets. And it has gotten some fantastic reviews from places like Publishers Weekly that review these things before they come out.

I'm learning that I've done it, so that's incredibly satisfying and is making me really happy. And also the idea that I've. Find myself in a world where talking [00:15:00] about dying and talking about grief, which is why I wrote the book, may actually be something I continue doing for the next few years and not just for a few months, which is what I originally thought.

And then if we put all of that aside, there's the part of me that is a writer and filmmaker, and I am fanatical about my craft. I spent a year crafting this book to make it something that someone who did not know me or Lynn would want to read and enjoy, even with a subject matter that announces itself right on the front cover that you're going to go through dying in grief.

And now with the talking like the publicity for this has caused me to be more active on social media than I ever was before. I've discovered that things like videos are actually really what people wanna see. It's not just still pictures. So just in the last few weeks I've started making videos, of which there is only one out there that you may have seen.

But I'm planning to [00:16:00] post most of the rest of them closer to the day of the launch in which I talk about the book. I sit by the bed where Lynn died and I talk about what that meant and some other things. I have these videos and oh my gosh. Not only do I think that they really explain something about why death and dying and grief are actually, dare I say it, empowering as well as very special experiences.

Grief is more complicated. Death, certainly being with someone while they die, helping someone die. But I was right back being a filmmaker again, editing the little thing, choosing which part to put in, putting words on top of it, and that is feeding me. In a way where for 30 or 40 years I didn't do it. I was very happy in a lot of the other things I did.

I did some very cool things, but now I am back at the things I did when I was in my teens and my twenties and thought I was gonna be a professional filmmaker, and I'm really digging it. 

Jill: That is wonderful. You're getting back to the artistic part of you that Lynn [00:17:00] said you had lost, and I wonder if sometimes I think about this with my grandmother.

I got into this work because I took care of my grandmother at the end of her life. And I think if only she were here to see. Where her death took me and took my career, and this podcast would've never existed. Mm-hmm. If I wouldn't have taken care of my grandmother at the end of her life. So I wonder what she would think.

Sometimes I wonder if Lynn is looking down from somewhere. I don't know. I don't know where we go. I don't know what happens. Who knows? Right. But if Lynn's looking down somewhere and thinking, thank you. You finally got back to your art. Look at this one positive thing that came out of it. So I like that idea.

At least I like the think at least that she's looking at you and happy to see you getting back to your art form. 

Tony: I like to think that too. I think that, uh, in a bigger way, what Lynn wanted for me was that I should find happiness again. In fact, she was explicit about it. One of the most touching. Moments, and I think I even recorded in one of [00:18:00] those videos of me talking about it during hospice.

During those two weeks when the cancer had gone into her brain, she was basically fading away from me for the two weeks. Increasingly unable to find words and talking more slowly. But right at the beginning, the night that we decided or she decided to stop treatment, we sat. At the little kitchen table in our small New York City apartment, kitchen and held hands, and we talked about what we thought the next two weeks were gonna be like.

We didn't know it was two weeks. The next few weeks were gonna be like what it would be like for her to die. And we guessed at it and speculated what it would feel like for her, and then what would happen to me afterwards. And so I said. I don't know. I guess I'll be incredibly horribly sad for some number of years, and then eventually I hope that I find another person and have another relationship.

And [00:19:00] she nodded and said, yeah, I want you to have another girlfriend. And then immediately she shook her head and said, no, I don't ever want you to have another girlfriend. Then she nodded her head and said, yeah, I want you to have another girlfriend. And then she shook her head and said, no, I don't ever want you to have a girlfriend.

And then finally she nodded and said, yes, I want you to have another girlfriend. She was telling me she wanted to hold onto me forever and me to hold onto her in my heart, but also to find love and happiness and joy again, which was one of the greatest gifts that anyone ever gave me, and which I have to say did not make it easier.

Well, it probably did make it easier. Once I met Cordelia, but it was no panacea. It didn't mean that as soon as I met someone else, it all. In fact, it took us several years with me trying to get through my guilt, the feeling of cheating on Lynn, the feeling that Cordelia was not Lynn and all these things when you meet someone new, the [00:20:00] ghost of my beloved wife was like in the apartment with us, and I spent a couple of years trying to work through that.

Jill: Hmm. Yeah, that's a interesting point that. You know, there's this idea of the person's never gonna take the place of your loved one that has died, but there's always gonna be that little part of us that's gonna be measuring them to the person whether we want to or not. It's not a conscious thing, it's the human thing, but I think it's beautiful that you were able to process that and work through it and.

Not, and again, maybe in some times you maybe still projected it onto Cordelia, but overall you were able to realize it for what it was and work through it and process it. And you said she was also grieving as well when you met? 

Tony: She was grieving, but as you talked about how we, we grieve for many things.

Her husband of 30 some odd years had just told her that he wanted a divorce. At the time that I met her, she was an acquaintance. There's a [00:21:00] long story. It's in the book of how it is. We came to be talking to each other because the last part of carrying the tiger, finding joy, while grieving is very much about this stretch with Cordelia, but she was grieving.

The impending loss of her marriage. I'm not far enough along in my understanding of grief to claim to be any kind of expert, but one thing that I really do feel is that when you're grieving, you're grieving the loss of the future that is now not going to happen. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Tony: Lynn and I were really clear. I was grieving the loss of Lynn and the loss of our relationship and the loss of having this fun buddy, best friend in the apartment with me.

All kinds of things, and she was grieving the loss of everything in this world and moving on to somewhere else. And I should say that neither Lynn nor I is religious, but we are perfectly willing to believe that we don't know what the somewhere else might be. [00:22:00] Cordelia was grieving the future she had imagined, and it was a huge loss.

When we started talking, we were just talking about what it felt like to be deeply grieving. That's how we connected. I. And then eventually one day she said, and this was still by phone. She lived in Minneapolis. I, I live in New York City, 1200 miles apart. She said, Tony, are you feeling what I'm feeling?

Because I'm getting a huge crush on you. 

Jill: Oh. 

Tony: Which was sweet. And one of the bravest things that anyone has ever said to me to put herself out there like that, I admitted, yeah, I am too. And then we started to. Move towards acting on that. That was four years ago, and I just noticed in the last few weeks that I've become really comfortable with Cordelia.

I'm no longer comparing her to Lynn. 

Jill: Hmm. 

Tony: We are four years out. The book stops [00:23:00] two years into this process when it becomes clear that I'm on a trajectory where this might work. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Tony: But there's still plenty of bumping and annoying each other. And of course that happens in life anyway. I mean, in a long-term relationship you do annoy each other.

But I just started noticing like the other day, like, oh, I'm really enjoying Cordelia for who she is now. And that was a journey in itself. 

Jill: Yeah, I'm sure it was quite the journey and that grief over what we thought the world was gonna be like. There's a term for that assumptive world grief, where we assume that life is gonna look a certain way, right?

We're married, we have our spouse. This is what my life is gonna look like, and whether it's divorce or death. The first time that I realized. Assu of World Grief was during lockdown of 2020. Mm-hmm. There was like, my daughter was in kindergarten at the time, which thinking [00:24:00] about it now, I'm like, oh my God, she was still such a baby.

She was so little. And I'm not one of those people that is like super sentimental about some of the things like kindergarten graduation, but I realized that she was not gonna have that. And I started to feel so sad about it and then thinking, well that's weird. It's not that big of a deal considering everything that's going on.

And then I was making myself feel shame and guilt and like, how could you be feeling so bad about something so stupid? And then I remembered a book I'd been reading at the time and I thought, I think what I'm feeling is that term that I just recently read about assumptive world grief. That it's just that the world I thought I was gonna be living in.

Is not what's happening, and that's okay. It's okay to feel those feelings and to feel the sadness over the fact that it's not what you expected it was gonna be. And I think sometimes in situations like divorce, even if you know it's the right thing, there's [00:25:00] still gonna be that grief because it's not what we thought life was gonna look like as humans, we'd get attached.

To our belief of what we thought life was gonna look like. For some reason, that term is one of my favorite things I learned about in the grieving world because it seems so applicable to so many different situations that we grieve that again, we don't realize that it's grief. It's feels like it's maybe something else when really it is just grief over what we thought.

Having to let go of that idea of what we expected life was gonna be like. 

Tony: I think that's really important. Yeah, recently Cordelia brought into my life the teachings of the Buddhist sage, Tik Han, who died a year or two ago and popularized the term mindfulness and the concept of mindfulness, probably more than any other single person.

And now it's ubiquitous and you hear about it everywhere. I didn't know where it came from. I had done some breathing meditation at one time or another. I love meditation and I don't do it nearly enough, [00:26:00] but same. But we've been reading some of. Thi Na Han's. Short sayings. He's got various books out that are like normal books, but he also have books that are just a paragraph or two on a page, and then another one on the next page, each of which is just some kind of teaching or saying in normal language, not, not like special religious or Buddhist speak.

One of the most important concepts that comes up again and again of, of Buddhism. I don't claim to be a Buddhist here. I'm just claiming to follow these. Sayings is that nothing is permanent. Everything is changing. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Tony: In my words, not his death is a transition to another form. Basically everything dies, rocks die.

Cordelia is a geologist, Cordelia's degree was in geology. She works in various other forms of, of, of nature related work now. But she's talked to me sometimes about how if you look at a long enough timescale, the rocks are [00:27:00] changing too. This rock will not be the same at some point. Nothing is permanent, but we go through our lives assuming that whatever we've got and whoever we are is the way we're going to be tomorrow and the day after when actually change is happening all the time.

A big loss is a huge change that happens in a really obvious way, but small losses. I'm 69, still quite strong and energetic, but I can't do what I did five years ago and 10 years ago, much less when I was in my thirties. That's tiny incremental loss, and you don't even notice it. But if you are attached to the sense that who you are is who you're going to be and what you have is what you're going to have.

Most of us are the times that life violates that are the times that you feel most shattered, grieved, et [00:28:00] cetera. I don't like making generalizations about grief or about anyone's experience. A, everyone's grief is their own and everyone's experience is their own. And B, I've only been taking that course for three weeks, and most of my knowledge is about what I went through.

But I do believe that we need to find ways if not to let go of. All of these beliefs, most of us are not going to be the Buddha, but at least to roll with them to understand that this is the world we live in. Change is constant. Everything I have, I'm going to lose one way or another. Let me enjoy it while I've got it.

Let me love it. Let me not be sad in anticipation. Let me not have anticipatory grief, but let me also not be, not have my worldview shaken and shattered. I. When things do change and bad things happen. 

Jill: In my experience, I've studied on my own. I didn't go to school for it, but I've studied on my own many different [00:29:00] religions trying to find my own path, right?

Trying to find what worked for me. And so I dabbled in lots of different religions along the way, but the Buddhist seemed to have the best grasp on how to live life. Like it really does seem like their teachings just have been the only thing that have allowed me to really live my life. In a way that I understand myself and humans and our experience better than any of the other religions have ever shown me.

I'm not sure about their beliefs about the afterlife though. Like I'm definitely still kind of like, I'm not sure about this reincarnation thing 

Tony: I should say. TE does not say anything on that subject. That's not part of where he's coming from. Yeah, whether he believes it or not. In all the words of his that I've read, there's no reincarnation.

I will say that. In the days, immediately after Lynn died, several things happened, which were frequently, uh, I'm gonna hear 

Jill: about those things. 

Tony: Two things. The one is more just sort of beautiful. Literally, she died at [00:30:00] 8:00 PM They took her body away at midnight, my sister and her husband came to this apartment.

They said, you can't be alone when they take the body away, and they were here sleeping in another room, and then like 4:00 AM I woke up and I, I couldn't sleep. I looked out my window. And there was this huge golden reddish glow, full moon setting, directly outside my window over New Jersey and the Hudson River.

I have lived in this apartment 30 something years, and at that moment thought, I've never seen the moon set there like this before. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Tony: And I thought, oh my gosh, that's Lynn. That's Lynn talking to me. That's Lynn shining on me. That's easy enough to explain, to say, well, I'm just not usually up at 4:00 AM in the right cycle of the moon, whatever.

And since then I have in fact seen the moon set in that exact spot at five or six in the morning, once or twice in the four years since then, a few days later, while crying [00:31:00] constantly. I turned out to be a big crier. I had no idea I could cry that much. I was looking for a photo, a specific photo of me and Lynn that.

Had been taken by a colleague at work when she came there for a party or some event of the two of us in a hallway, and I had my arm around her and we're both smiling at the camera, and another colleague had then snuck into my office. I had it pinned to a bulletin board, had snuck into my office and put it in a frame that she had bought.

So it would sit on my desk. It looked beautiful. We closed that facility. I brought all my stuff home, like in a cardboard box kind of thing. From that. I had several offices, worked in several locations, and two days after Lynn died, I went looking for that photo look all over the apartment. I can't find it anywhere, and I just felt, oh, well, I've lost it.

I'll never have it. It made me terribly sad. It wasn't gonna break me, but half an hour later, the phone rang. [00:32:00] It was a colleague who shared my office, whom I had not spoken with in six months, who did not know that Lynn had died. She called to ask some trivial work-related question. I answered her question.

I told her that Lynn had died and she went, oh no. I think of you guys often when I look at that lovely photo on your desk. I said, what? And she said, yeah, I found it in a drawer here. I pulled it out and put it on the desk. I look at the two of you every day. So I start sobbing. She promises to send me the photo because I didn't take that photo.

I don't have a digital or any copy of that photo. She took a snapped shot of it in its frame and texted it to me about half an hour later. Okay. You tell me. How did that happen? How did that happen? 

Jill: Yeah, and those are the stories that I'm like, I don't know if it was me and if I had [00:33:00] died and I was aware of what my husband was doing, and I knew that he was looking for that photo and I knew where it was.

I'd like tap that person on the shoulder. Like just, Hey, call Steven. He just, he, you need to call Steven Exactly. Just, just plant the little seed in there for them to call and then make it so that the whole thing happened. Yes, I 100% believe that if it's possible. I would do that. I love it. I think that's amazing.

And you have that picture in your book, right? Is that one of the ones in your book? Yes. 

Tony: That picture is in the book. 

Jill: I know that picture. I saw that picture 

Tony: because I tell that exact story in the book. It was okay, I 

Jill: did read that. Then I'm like, I know this somehow. But yeah, I love that. And it is a great picture of the two of you.

I looked at the photo. For a little bit because I wanted to really see her and see her face and see the two of you together. I feel like that helps me know people. I did spend a few moments really looking at it and looking at your body language. I love photographs, so I actually do love that picture. And people, if you're [00:34:00] reading the book, you'll see the photo.

Tony: Yep, yep. Carrying the tiger. I put photos all through the book if you. Read it on a Kindle or buy the paperback. They're all in black and white. If you have an E-reader in color, they are in fact in color. They're just coming out in black and white in whatever the device or book you're reading, and they're all on my website.

Tony Stewart author.com if you wanna see the photos. I have found some people who have not read the book, have gone to the website and then shot me an email since the book isn't out yet. These are by definition be people who know how to reach me saying, wow, I really love those photos. I really felt in touch with you and 

Jill: Lynn.

Hmm. 

Tony: I'm so glad I put them in the book. I wasn't going to do it because I thought all these things are gonna be in black and white. They're not gonna look good. 

Jill: I love photos though, so I'm glad you put them in. Now your book comes out, you said in about two weeks it's gonna be available digital. Do you have an audio book?

What's the plan for the book? Where could people find [00:35:00] it when it does come out? 

Tony: Well, first I wanna say it comes out on April 29th. If, I don't know when this podcast, when this conversation that we're having will actually air, if it's after the 29th, the book is already out. It is everywhere that I could get a book.

It's available as print. Ebook and audiobook. I read it myself. Exactly where I'm sitting talking to you, which was a very moving experience, I have to say. 

Jill: I was just gonna ask that. How was that experience reading the book? 

Tony: Hold that question. 'cause I want to talk about that. To answer your question, it's available on Amazon, of course, but it's available in all these places.

The audio is available on Audible and Spotify. The ebook is available. Barnes and Nobles has all of them. bookshop.org if you wanna support independent bookstores. It has both versions of the print. There is a hardcover. I'm not expecting anyone to do the hardcover. I don't make more money on the hardcover.

I did that because I know a few people who would like to have a hardcover, [00:36:00] so I wanted to make that available also so that maybe it'll go into libraries. If the book has a life, I'm hoping. A long life. I'm hoping that it will go into libraries, and I know they want the ebook and hardcovers because they're more durable, so I made that available.

I do want to talk about recording the audio book because it took me by surprise how meaningful it was. The way the whole process of making the book worked was I wrote those journals in real time on CaringBridge over those 10 years. I knew by the end of that time that I really wanted to make this into a book.

Primarily because I was encouraged by the comments that people had written on Caring Bridget. I printed out 700 pages, including comments shortly after Lynn died, thinking I would start working on the book, and it was just way too soon. I could barely read it. I was just sobbing. I put it that box on the floor of my office and it sat there for the next three or four years.

Then eventually I was ready. It called to me and one day I just had to start. I did it. I started working on the [00:37:00] book, took me a year, multiple iterations. That's a whole other conversation. But during the course of the year, I made this progression as an author from living the experiences to crafting the book.

They're two different things. At first it was so emotional, but by the latter few months it was all about, is this the right word? Should I switch it to this other word? Does this sentence go here? Do I need this scene? Have I said enough about that? And I wasn't feeling it the same way I was my own editor, which is so much of book writing, editing, to try and make it something that other people will enjoy reading.

So I come out of that and I go into January, February of this year, almost in the publicity phase, and I thought. This is a memoir. I love reading this. I wanna make an audiobook. In January when Cordelia was not here, she still has her house in Minneapolis and comes and goes. I was alone in the apartment for a week.

I set up a recording [00:38:00] studio by hanging sleeping bags around where I'm sitting to trap the echoes and pillows and things like that, and I sat where I am now for a week. Recording this thing in long sessions. I kept redoing sentences and paragraphs to make it as good as I could, and now I wasn't editing it anymore.

The words were locked in. I was experiencing them and trying to make them come alive in my voice, and oh my God, the feelings and the memories came flooding in. It was such. A rich emotional experience for me to get back in touch with this book. Not as a book, but as the life I had lived, the set of experiences that I had and is still with me, that is actually brought it back to me, and within a month or two, I was being asked to appear on podcasts and talk about it.

And instead of it being a stale and sterile experience, [00:39:00] it was now very much alive and in my heart again. The audiobook brought me that. 

Jill: Yeah, that's really lovely. I teach a class called Serve Safe about food safety, and I read from that book out loud fairly regularly, but it is difficult to read something out loud and have it sound good and flow and not trip up over the words, and that is a skill in and of itself.

I can imagine if it's something so personal and full of emotions. That it could be almost like a cathartic experience. Verbalizing and saying the words out loud is a whole different process than thinking it in your mind. Even writing it out, typing it out. That's why sometimes when I say to people, part of when I work with people around death, anxiety, and grief, when I help them create rituals and things, I'll say, if you want to say it to me, if you wanna write a letter to your dead dad that you're still mad at.

And read it [00:40:00] out loud to me to have that experience because there's something different when we're verbally saying it. When we're hearing ourselves say it, it's a whole different process. I like that you brought that up, that it was a emotional experience, but it sounds like a really beautiful way to bring you back to it as well as to express it.

Tony: It felt that way for me through the writing. I would read the book out loud. And I read the whole book out loud to Cordelia. At one point, she read several drafts in the normal sense and listened to an entire draft, even though I did not plan to make an audiobook at that point, I had read that it helps your writing to read it out loud, and it really did.

I, I found that you see it on the page one way, and when you read it out loud, you learn something about it. But even then it was still craft, how do I craft this paragraph? I was in the process of, it was still a fluid thing. I could change anything [00:41:00] and so it was calling to me to second guess everything that was in it.

Reading the audio book. I couldn't do that, and it put me right in it. 

Jill: Beautiful. Well, we're coming up on the end of our time. Time does fly right? It goes by sometimes. So I know you mentioned your website already, but I'll give you a couple minutes, talk about where people can find you if you want 'em to go to your website, your social media, anything like that.

Tony: So the easiest way to find all of my links, of course, you'll probably put them in the show notes, but I will, my website is tony stewart author.com, or you can search for Carrying the Tiger and you'll find the website comes up pretty quickly. I am on multiple social medias. I'm not a huge social media person except that I'm really getting into it For this project, first and foremost, I would say Instagram.

You'll find all my social links in the header of my website. So if you're on Instagram, I'm definitely there. I'm gonna be putting up these little [00:42:00] videos I've been making around April 29th. I'm also on Facebook. I actually have two accounts on Facebook, 'cause I've been there for a long time. But I was told when doing a book you need to create an author account so that people who would not be comfortable asking to be my friend on my personal account can follow me as an author.

Mm-hmm. There's a link to that in the header. I've been writing some stories on Substack, so I have a Substack account. Which you can get to if you wanna read some of the things I've written, because I've really loved writing. I fell back in love with writing, and I found I wanted to keep publishing things.

This last month or so, I've been so busy with interviews and creating videos. I haven't written anything in a few weeks. I have a LinkedIn account, which goes back many years for more business relationships, and all of those links are there@tonystewartauthor.com. As well as, of course, a link to buy the book.

You can buy it directly from me and I'll sign it, or you can buy it from all the usual stores like we already said. 

Jill: Yeah, I'll put the links in the show [00:43:00] notes and keep an eye out for those videos in April. Doing the one, like sitting next to the bed sounds really interesting. It's gonna bring me deeper into the story to see some of those places that you.

Experienced part of the story, and so I'm looking forward to your videos, so I'm for sure gonna go on Instagram and look for those. When it's time, I will put all the links in the show notes so people can easily find you. And I really appreciate you taking your time out of your morning today to talk to me and to share your story about you and Lynn and Cordelia and through your whole journey.

So thank you so much, Tony. 

Tony: You are very welcome, Jill. This has been a great conversation. Thanks for that. 

Jill: In my next episode, I sit down with my friend and fellow death doula, Morgan Everett. I. Who shares how her journey began after caring for her mother through illness and death. After her mom died, Morgan decided to become a death doula and has been building her practice, Heron's Flight in Bucks County, [00:44:00] Pennsylvania, ever since.

Our conversation explores what it means to be a death doula, the importance of working alongside hospice and palliative care, and the emotional and practical realities of this work. We talk honestly about the challenges of making a living and the ongoing effort to communicate the value of this care.

This conversation offers a real look into the heart and the hustle behind doula work and the relationships that make it so meaningful. This is a great episode for anyone thinking about becoming a death doula are wanting to better understand what we do. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or family member who might.

Find it interesting. Your support in spreading the podcast is greatly appreciated. Please consider subscribing on your favorite podcast 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.

Your contribution will help keep the podcast advertisement free, whether your donation is large or small, every amount. Is [00:45:00] 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.

Thank you and I look forward to seeing you in next week's episode of Seeing Death. Clearly.