How Childhood Grief Became a Healing Story with Daryl McCullough

In this heartfelt episode, Daryl McCullough shares how childhood grief led him to create a story that now helps others navigate death, loss, and healing. What started as a middle school writing assignment after the death of his cousin became a lifelong journey of finding meaning in grief and honoring loved ones through storytelling. His children’s book, The Story of Tree and Cloud, began as a crayon-illustrated parable about connection and the enduring nature of spirit, written in the wake of that early loss.

Years later, when Daryl’s mother was dying of cancer, he found that very book carefully saved by her, a reminder of their shared love and the deeper threads of life, death, and legacy. That moment inspired him to turn his childhood story into a published book, beautifully illustrated by his aunt, to help children and adults alike process death in a gentle, natural way. Set in California’s oak trees and infused with universal spiritual ideas, the story reflects Daryl’s belief that life continues beyond physical form, whether through nature, memory, or something greater than ourselves.

Daryl speaks openly about caring for his mother through hospice, the power of legacy, and the healing that comes from making meaning out of grief. His second book, Chubby the Bear’s Big Choice, explores bullying, friendship, and self-worth—again using storytelling as a tool for conscious living and emotional healing. For Daryl, writing children’s books is not just about entertainment—it’s about helping people of all ages sit with life’s hardest moments and offering hope that we are never truly alone.

From working through childhood loss to donating his books to nursing homes and schools, Daryl’s mission is clear: to use art and story as a bridge between grief and growth. Through conscious living, love of nature, and honoring family legacy, he’s offering a path toward healing for anyone navigating the journey of life and death.

https://www.instagram.com/author_darylmc/

https://www.darylrmccullough.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Story-Tree-Cloud-Daryl-McCullough/dp/166571140X

Transcript

Daryl: [00:00:00] There's something extraordinary that keeps this planet going, keeps this earth living and breathing. It is a circle of life, the full sustainable cycle where that was a side mission of my goal is to kind of pay homage to that circle of life and to nature and to this sacred planet. 

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 author Daryl McCollough, who shares how the loss of his cousin at age 12 led him to write the first draft of The Story of Tree and Cloud, a parable [00:01:00] about connection, spirit, and life after loss, decades later, while caring for his mother. During her battle with cancer, Darryl rediscovered that childhood draft lovingly saved by his mother.

That moment inspired him to revisit the story. With beautiful new illustrations by his aunt Maryanne Smith. Together they created a gentle, nature filled book to help both children and adults navigate grief and change. The story of Tree and Cloud reminds us that life continues in many forms through memory, nature, and something greater than ourselves.

Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome, Darryl to the podcast. Thank you for coming on today. 

Daryl: Thank you, Jill. It's a pleasure to be here. Always happy to talk about my book. I actually have two books now. I am from. Rural Pennsylvania, York County, Southern York County, which is adjacent to Amish country.

It's a beautiful countryside and I grew up there, the youngest of a family of [00:02:00] five. I only moved out to go to college. I went to about a two hour away. Reding, Pennsylvania, Albright College, and I stayed there. Beyond my four years of getting my degree. I worked there for five years and then I was the alumni relations director.

Then I went back to graduate school and I came all the way up to California. So I packed up my car, kind of like the job family, and drove across the country, set up shop at USC, getting my graduate degree in communications management, and started working in pr the rest of my career. Was a 30 year career in public relations and marketing communications.

I'm still doing it today, but instead of leading Citizen Relations, which is a global firm that I led for many years, I started a new firm with my husband. George. 

Jill: I know you have written two books, which I definitely wanna talk about. I love the name of the first one, the Story of Tree and Cloud. Yes. I think that's really beautiful.

Where did you come up with that name for the [00:03:00] book? 

Daryl: Well, it's a long working title. The story goes that I was in middle school and I was in an English writing class. The teacher was teaching us the concept of metaphors, extended metaphors and parables, like the stories in the Bible that have a lesson to them.

The assignment was to go home and write. Or draw a story that has a deeper meaning. I had just lost my cousin to suicide just before that, and I was, I guess 12, 13 maybe. Struggling to process. The notion of suicide and loss, death, where someone goes and what happens to their spirit. Questions that a young person or any person frankly, has something moved me to make that the subject matter of my story.

So I started to. Write the story [00:04:00] and then I illustrated it with crayons and did it on oak tag, you know, cardboard paper and bound it with a shoestring. I have it somewhere in my boxes here. I wrote the first draft of the story and it was very touching, and the story basically was a metaphor, extended metaphor for what happens when someone leaves us.

I could not. Imagine that someone fully leaves us. That their soul, their spirit, that intangible thing beyond the body has to still be around us. That was the message, and it was allegorical, not religious. I didn't talk about heaven, although I did talk about the clouds, and that was what a 13-year-old thinks about heaven.

He pictured God and the pearly gates up in the clouds. The notion of a tree befriending a puddle. And then when the puddle dries up, it disappears and the tree has [00:05:00] lost his friend, the friend that was helping sustain her life. And then the puddle became a cloud and comes back to let the tree know that he's in a better place now.

That story really touched my family. Fast forward 40 years later when my mother was. Struggling and dying of cancer. I took some time off work and spent the end of days with her through hospice and I was able and very blessed to be able to have ho held her hand as she passed with my dad holding her face and singing to her in her last breath.

It was just a devastating loss. We were very close. The whole family was close. We had been taking turns, spending time during hospice, and it just happened to be me that was there at that moment. I'll never, ever underestimate the power of that. A few days later, we're cleaning up the house and putting things away.

It's a very challenging job to put away the things of someone who's passed, [00:06:00] and I was taking a break up in my childhood bedroom in my desk drawer on top of a stack of things. That I hadn't left. There was this placard, a little painted piece of wood that said, see or not, I'm with thee. The Bible verse underneath that was my little hand drawn with crayons, story from middle school about the story of tree and cloud.

My mom knew she was dying. She had kept that little book, that class assignment for my entire life, and she left it for me as a message. The pure love in that gesture touched me to the bottom of my heart. Many years later, she died in 2016. Nine years later, I am still very moved by that. I pulled that book out and shared it with my family and everybody said, we have to do something with this.

I was still running a global PR firm at the time. It became my life's goal [00:07:00] to turn that little hand drawn book into something that other people could share and hopefully help them process the notion of. Death as well. I asked my aunt. My mom's sister-in-law who's a talented artist, if she would take a look at my little sketches and if she could turn them into something more meaningful and beautiful for publication, she did.

I worked through probably 20 different drafts of the text and tried to tighten it up and clean it up and make the story complete, and worked with my publisher Archway to get it polished and ready for publication, and I got the story published and. It's now a book that anyone can have. It's been helping people of all ages, which was my intent.

My intent was, if this story can help one other person, I will have done my job. And I know it's helped many more children and adults who don't know where to turn it, how to process those first several stages of grief. And sometimes the last [00:08:00] stages of grief was not a linear process. So it's really been rewarding.

The feedback has been extraordinary and. I could talk about it for hours. 

Jill: Yeah, no, it's wonderful. I love when we have something like that. We birthed into the universe, right? It's like your baby and being able to talk about it for hours is a great feeling. I love that feeling. I. And I really like that idea of the puddle turning into the cloud.

I like visual. Visual helps me process things. And this idea of being able to see it as a puddle and still see it as a cloud, but it's in a different form and you interact with those things differently. It's less 

Daryl: tangible, but it's still there. 

Jill: Yeah, definitely less tangible but still there. And you know, that's how some people do believe the soul could actually still be with us on this plane.

We just can't see it anymore. I don't know if I believe that. I'm not sure what I believe. 

Daryl: I'm not sure, Jill, what I believe either. But I believe that all the world's [00:09:00] religions can't be wrong. That there's so many common threads between Christianity and Buddhism and Shintoism, and. Taoism, there's so many common threads between them that they can't be wrong.

There has to be some truth in that, and that was kind of what I wanted to amalgamate in this story and then set it in nature. I did not make these cartoon characters. I. I set it in nature. My mother loved coming to visit us in California. She loved the California oak tree, which is the main character. It was natural to set this on a hillside overlooking the ocean in California.

That's a little homage to both of my parents, and the circle of life is really so special. Whether you believe in God, there's something extraordinary that keeps this planet. Going, keeps this earth living and breathing. It is a circle of life, the full sustainable cycle where like in my book, the [00:10:00] Caterpillars that are munching on the trees leaves then die and become fertilizer to help her grow.

So they're not only eating her to help prune her, but they then become. The fertilizer in the soil that helped sustain her, and that is just another metaphor that I don't think kids are ever too young or too old to sit with. That was a side mission of my goal is to kind of pay homage to that circle of life and to nature.

And so this sacred planet that is being destroyed thoughtlessly. Mm-hmm. If we can raise. The next generation to be a little more conscious of that, there might be a fighting chance. Some say that it's too late. I don't know. Some say in 10 years it'll be too late. I don't know. I'm not a scientist, but I believe the scientists and I believe metaphors can help.

Young people learn, it sticks with them, and I know it. I've had little children come up who've read the [00:11:00] book, talking to me about their favorite characters beyond Puddle and Foley, and you know, some of them love the birds, the butterflies, the bees, the caterpillars. That just gives me joy because those side characters are truly what keep us alive.

If we wouldn't have bees, there would be no food. 

Jill: Yeah. I love all of that. I'm a big nature person myself and. That's one of the things that I do like about New Jersey. I actually lived in California for a while and I was in San Francisco and there wasn't a lot of change in the season. It was kind of like beautiful year round.

Everybody that would visit me in the summertime would be like, where's the shorts and t-shirts? I'm like, you're in San Francisco. You still need jeans in a coat. Like it doesn't matter that it's August. But here in Jersey we really see the season change and we're recording this right now, the beginning of March and like.

All my bulbs are starting to come up. It's my favorite time. 

Daryl: They're my favorite. And they're some of the sweetest [00:12:00] smelling Tyson. 

Jill: Oh yes, they are. I love them so much. I love that connection to the earth and to the cycles that we're always going through by being outside in nature and having like literally my hands in this ground and in the dirt and being able to really connect with it.

I feel like we've lost so much of that connection. We're destroying the planet. We don't put any worth on it other than what it can give us by cutting down the trees and using the lumber. I hope we are not too late. 

Daryl: I hope so. And 

Jill: I think a lot of that, one of my soap boxes is that the fear of death is really the root of so much of this.

Desire to control and to hoard and to have it be ours and to use it all up because we're just afraid of the inevitable. Yeah. Which is we're all gonna die. And if we could be more okay [00:13:00] with that. Part of being okay with that would be talking about it, reading books like yours, like you said, at any age, whether you're a child or a grownup.

In the long run, we're all still just a bunch of children and big people bodies. So I think if we can really connect with that, maybe we'd have a hope. But I don't know. Seems like right now we're kind of swinging back the other way. 

Daryl: There's a balance in that too. I'm trying to find some peace in the changes that we're facing right now.

Maybe as part of the greater equilibrium, we need to have that pendulum swing to the left and to the right. It's scary. I. It's mortifying. Embarrassing in some cases is things, the choices that are being made, but maybe it needs to get worse before it can get better. I do believe in a God, I believe in a higher power that's greater than me that's in control of this, and that's helped me live my life as a better human.

I just have to leave room for faith and trust that we're being taken care of. 

Jill: Hmm. [00:14:00] Yeah, I like that idea of. Because things did need to change, right? I will be the first person to admit things did need to change, you know? And so now you break a bunch of stuff. Now we just need to fix it, and hopefully it will be better.

My kids are 14 and 11 now. I don't know what kind of world we're gonna leave behind for them, but they're also part of the generation that can hopefully rebuild a better world for everybody. Everybody, all people. It doesn't matter what they look like or anything else, but we'll see how that goes. And I like to think of God sometimes.

I've heard it described that you could just imagine it as love, that it's just this energy of love that runs through all of us. And if we could try to imagine it. As just pure love, then sometimes that makes me feel a little better. 

Daryl: Right. The other concept I have in the book, it's a maybe a middle school science [00:15:00] class topic.

The fact that trees breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, that is such a magical. Thing that keeps the planet us alive. I worry that as science is under siege, does the next generation even learn that anymore? Does it sink in with them that that tree or that plant behind you or the one on my desk is actually giving me oxygen to keep me healthy and breathing?

These are fundamental facts. The whole notion of a fact right now is being challenged and it's really a frightening time. In some cases, climate change is honestly not my problem. It's not your problem, it's our children and grandchildren's problems. There's this saying, attributed to a Native American, we don't inherit the earth, we borrow 'em from our grandchildren.

Mm-hmm. And that really sits with me. You know, we have to pay this forward, or we're just leaving them. A disaster to deal with, or worse, we have to do something. 

Jill: I actually have a t-shirt where it's like two trees where their roots would be [00:16:00] together and then they branch out and how it actually looks like lungs, right?

Like if you look at the human lung, it's a very similar design pattern. 

Daryl: I'm obsessed with these little factoids about trees and forests and a group of trees. Their roots. Communicate with one another. If one of them needs more nitrogen because it has, uh, a fungus or something, the other trees will give up some of their nitrogen to let that tree have more.

I mean, it is incredible and the canopies of rainforest, the trees do not overlap with one another. They stop growing to allow enough light to stream it, and so that the floor of the rainforest can get sunlight. It's just magical. If you believe that just happened by accident, well good for you. I don't think it's an accident.

I think it's a perfect design. The fact that trees are communicating. Think about that before you cut one down. 

Jill: I [00:17:00] love to learn things like that. I think it is fascinating. I've seen pictures where they show the canopy where they meet up near each other and how they did time lapse looking up and you could see them even like the way that they move together.

I find it hard to see things like that and not feel God or presence or energy. Call it by whatever you want, right? But it's hard for me to see those things. Also look down on humans from a grander position. Watch the way that we move amongst each other. It's all the same. What if we are just one giant living organism, right?

The humans, the plants, the animals of humans, we're making a mess of a lot of it, which is unfortunate. That's what happens when you get smarter and bigger brains and you think you're better than everything else, and that you don't need everything else. We need all of this. We could not exist. If some, like you said, with bees, we used to have beehives.

We've had three [00:18:00] different hives at once, multiple times, and they keep collapsing and scientists don't really know why. Why do the bees just die off one day? We don't really know. But yet so many times you see people out there with their bugs spray. I watch my neighbors killing the weeds and spraying for all the bugs, and I'm like, please, can we stop trying to control everything?

Can we just let some things be natural the way that they're supposed to be? Even if it's an inconvenience? I think some of the weeds are beautiful. I have all kinds of things that other people are like, that's a weed. You need to pull it out. But then in the fall when my golden rod is this beautiful yellow and the bees flock to it, they're all over it.

I think that's gorgeous, but I know some of my neighbors don't. 

Daryl: Some of the folks that have bought a story of Tree Cloud for a child or for their family have come back to me and have bought boxes of them. This was something I didn't foresee happening. When someone passes a friend or a family member, flowers sometimes just don't seem [00:19:00] adequate.

So if someone had the idea to give. This book as a condolence rather than a card. The cards are like 10 bucks now. So for 20 bucks, people've been buying this book and giving it as a condolence to people who've lost a loved one. And that thrills me. I'd never envisioned that to be the case. I thought it would be a children's book, but it's being given adult to adult in time of loss.

And then the other use that I didn't expect was people have been giving it to nursing homes and helping. The elderly eased their transition. I've been asking people if I want to buy an extra one and donate to an elementary school donated, but someone said, I've been donating them to nursing homes. It touched me to my core.

If someone is doubting that in the end of their days, or if they're worried about leaving family behind and not knowing how to talk to them. If this could just be a tool to help people make that transition. My God, it is [00:20:00] just so special. I've just been touched, you know, after the Texas school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, I sent a box of the books with notes down to the Uvalde Library, and I didn't expect anything.

I just wanted them to have it because I felt like if it can touch one of those families, it's well worth it. About a month later. My cell phone rings and it's, don't recognize the number, but I happened to pick it up and it was the Uvalde librarian. She said, Darryl, I have to tell you, we got thousands of book donations after the shootings.

We couldn't give them all away. We just had so much outpouring of love, particularly in books. That's wonderful. Would expect no less. Humans are wonderful people under pressure, and she goes, but yours was the only one about grief and the only one. I wanted to make sure the families. Saw and had opportunity to take, and it's not the only book about grief.

It's not the only story that talks about an afterlife or the [00:21:00] circle of life to keep. Spirit's moving. The fact that this is touching people, it is very moving. I think we all need that comfort. We need to know that those around us are gonna be okay, and that we are okay with that idea of letting them be okay and that, that we can help communicate that and storytelling and art.

I think the, the illustrations are so special in this book. They're done by oil paintings. My aunt who painted them was 80 years old. She's 82 now. It's a family love tale and it was done to pay it forward, and I've been paid back millions of times since. I'm really grateful, and thank you for letting me talk about it.

Jill: The fact that you were able to send a gift to these parents that live with a grief that I hope to never experience, and I wish that no parent ever has to experience it ever again. That's really beautiful. Even the people in the nursing home that receive it, no matter who dies, it's [00:22:00] such a transformative time in our life when we're facing our own death or the death of a loved one.

You have a little piece of you as part of their story, and 

Daryl: honestly, a piece of my mom and my dad. 

Jill: Oh yeah. And your aunt, if she did all 

Daryl: the paintings and my aunt is a family affair. This particular copy of my book that I showed you. Is the one that I signed for my dad. Mm-hmm. And I am sad to say now I have that book because my dad passed two years ago.

I've lost both of my parents and there's nothing harder in life to process than, you know, not having, I. Your parents anymore. I heard stories about people saying you never get over it. It gets a little easier, but you never really shake the loss. And it is so true, even with the tools that I've given myself, it is still hard.

You just have to look for signs and it reminded me. When we were younger, both my parents were still alive. We were having a family picnic out in [00:23:00] the backyard. They live in a countryside in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania. We were having a picnic and a big family. There's five children and they're all married.

We're all married, and then there's you. Eight. Eight grandchildren and now umpteen great-grandchildren, cousins. So big party, this beautiful Calico cat comes bounding through my dad's garden and visits each person. A cat out in the wild comes up and literally rubs up against and greets each person at the picnic.

We had lost my sister-in-law, Janet, a few years before, and I don't know who said it or what even. Triggered them to say it, but someone said, 

Jill: huh, 

Daryl: that's Janet reincarnated. 

Jill: Oh, I love it. Because Janet 

Daryl: was the most loving person she was known for. Just giving these long, empathetic hugs. You know when someone hugs you and you just feel it.

She was that hugger in the family and she died at age [00:24:00] 50, 51, maybe so unexpectedly. And the fact that someone said that, that was Janet, we all kind of smiled and laughed, but we never forgot that notion and that cat adopted my parents. 

Jill: Wow. We'd 

Daryl: all moved outta the house by then. And so my parents didn't have anyone, and that cat just kept coming back.

And then one day I went home for Christmas and the cat was in the house eating food. And Mom, what is, you adopt her. And they called her kitty. And I said, she says, yeah, she adopted us. You know, she kept coming back and had done it with another house, and it took about a year, but they figured out that she would disappear for 12 hours and she was doing the same thing at another house down the block.

So Janet was getting around to Kitty's dying day. We said that was the spirit of my sister-in-law. After the LA fires in January, my husband and I were sitting in the living room and someone pinged us with a text of a link to Facebook, and there was this adoption center that said that they had [00:25:00] puppies that were displaced from the fires in Altadena.

We already had a dog. We didn't need another dog, but I love dogs. So I clicked on the link to look at these cute puppies and we were just saying, oh my God, look at this one. Look at this one. And clicked into the one and kept looking at others. It kept coming back to this one. Went ahead and called the adoption center.

She said, you need to fill out application. We need to see if you went through that whole process. Voila. Within a week we had this puppy. He's been on my lap the entire time. 

Jill: Oh God, he's so cute. Oh my gosh. And George. 

Daryl: George on the, I think a week into having him in our home. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Daryl: George said, this puppy is an old soul, and I'm there.

I know. She says, I've never had a nicer, more docile animal as a four month old puppy. It only wanted to console us to be on our lap, to sleep on our chest when we're watching TV to sit on our lap while we're working. And George said, I don't know. It's something different. She goes, maybe it's [00:26:00] your dad.

Yeah. I, I don't know that George even knew the story about Kitty or the backstory, but the fact that he said that Prince had the spirit of my dad was just extraordinary and may feel too airy fairy for some people, but. It works. It makes me feel better. It gives me comfort. And so what? It's not yours to judge.

This is my grief. And if I choose to accept this notion that some of the spirit of my dad is running through this precious new family member, I'm gonna hang on to that. 

Jill: Just about a year ago, my aunt died on March 14th last year on her birthday when she was dying, her daffodils were her favorite flower.

They lived in Pennsylvania, right? Yeah. And this time last year, they were much fuller than they are this year. This year they're a little bit behind that. By this time last year they were like full bloom. It's been 

Daryl: so cold. So they've 

Jill: been so cold. [00:27:00] And so, you know, the daffodils are blooming. And I was talking to her as she was literally dying, and I remember saying.

There's definitely something special when you're with somebody that's dying. Like it just, it does, it feels different. Everything feels different around you. And I had said to her, I don't know where you're gonna go. I was like, but I also feel like you're just gonna become part of everything in nature.

You're gonna become part of your favorite flower. You're gonna turn into some of the daffodils that are blooming right now. Her soul, her spirit, her essence, whatever you wanna call it. It's so much bigger than our little human body form. I could almost, in my mind, see it as she was dying, all of her spirit kind of dissipating, turning into a cloud almost.

Right. And becoming just part of everything. It doesn't seem crazy to me that somebody's spirit then also would be like. Yeah. You know, I'm hanging around by my person and they're gonna be taking on this little animal, this [00:28:00] being, and I'm gonna kinda like put more of me in there so that I could be with them and I can comfort them, and I can interact with them.

I mean, I don't know why not? Why is that any crazier to some people than thinking my soul's gonna go up into the sky and be with God in the clouds? I don't see why one thing makes more sense to somebody. Than something else, because to me, all of it seems like it could be possible. 

Daryl: I grew up with a Christian family.

We went to church on Sundays and Sunday school, and my parents wanted us to have that underpinning, and I'm really grateful for it. The very special thing that. I took away from, that occurred to me when I was in college. I went to a religious college, a Methodist school, Alberg College in Redding. One of the requirements of the college was that we took three courses of religion.

One of them was World Religion, one was far Eastern religion. I took this non-Western religion class with this professor who was a minister, a, a ordained minister in the Methodist Church. [00:29:00] He taught us. Buddhism, Shintoism Taoism, and we read the Baha Gita and the Dao of motorcycle maintenance and all these amazing books to help us learn the other concepts of world religions.

That is where I formed my worldview of spirituality. Like I said at the beginning of this interview, I think that they can't all be wrong, and there are gold threads that go through each of them. Muslim faith and Christianity all have similar kind of parables in their stories, you know? Mm-hmm. The Jewish faith leaves off and Christian faith picks up, and they're really intertwined and beautifully.

So if we could just amalgamate and take the best of them and. Allow it to help people find common space and common ideology we could bring us together. Wouldn't that be a beautiful world instead of this fighting and war? Think back through history. So many wars have been fought over religion or religious.

I. [00:30:00] Notions or religious prejudice. It's really a central piece. 

Jill: I grew up Catholic, but I've always been interested in other religions. I didn't go to school to learn about any of them, but I certainly have learned about a lot of them on my own just because I do think it's interesting and anytime I have a chance, I work with a lot of people that are Muslim, more like Muslim American than like Middle Eastern, Muslim, but you know, again, it's still the same basis.

Religion. I ask all kinds of questions every time it's a holiday. Anytime they say anything to each other, I'm always asking questions. I try not to be disrespectful. It's really more just out of genuine curiosity. I wanna understand why do they believe the things that they believe? Why do they celebrate the way that they celebrate?

Why do they fast? Like what is the whole thing? You 

Daryl: rarely need someone that doesn't wanna share that with you. We wanna share traditions, so it was important to me. It's important for me to share it with you. 

Jill: It's just interesting for me to talk about things like this. I don't wanna sit around and talk about sports.

People like to gossip [00:31:00] when they're at parties, but I wanna hear about your religious beliefs, cultural beliefs, traditions and rituals. That's what I find really beautiful in life, and that's what I like to talk about with people. Partially why I started a podcast where I talk about death of all things.

Bless you. Your second book, how did that one come about? 

Daryl: Sharp. The bear's big choice illustrated by my aunt Maryanne Smith. A story set in nature in California in the Redwood Forest. My mom and my dad were enthralled with as enthralled with as I am. Mm-hmm. We visited there together, we saw bears in the Sequoia National Park.

They came very close to us, scarily close to us, so Wow. Buoyed by the success of Story of Tree Cloud. A number of people said, so what's your second book? I mean, it is an inevitable question if they like something that you've done. I knew the feeling of touching people through storytelling, through all those things that I shared, the ways that I was being touched, it's given me back [00:32:00] more than I ever gave into the process.

And I said, you know what? I do have another story in me. It's about a. Boy who grew up different than others who was bullied because of his differences and didn't feel understood, appreciated, or valued. It created a lifelong undercurrent of pain that I had kept inside me, and who knows how that pain has manifested.

I have had a weight problem all my life from my earliest memories. I was the chubby kid shopping in the Husky department at the store. I. Have grown up gay and in rural Pennsylvania, had no role models to understand what that meant for me, much less what my future might hold or when I could start to live my true self.

So lots of layers to that. I decided to write this story may be autobiographical about [00:33:00] Chubby the bear who was picked on by his friends, but had other really special gifts. He befriended the bees. In doing so, he was able to get more honey than the other bears 'cause the bees shared their honey with him more than they shared with others.

He lived up in the tree on a swing and he really communed with nature more than the other bears and appreciation for other animals. The story is about him being picked on and how other animals, a wise beaver and a wise raccoon. Who are his best friends because the bears make fun of him. The beaver and the raccoon help him process how to manage this pain in his life.

They show concern, they give him advice, and then he processes all that and then makes a, makes a kind of a plan to possibly get back at his friends for treating him poorly. But to send a message to them so I won't divulge the story because it is in three small chapters [00:34:00] and takes about 15, 20 minutes to read the whole book.

There's an interesting kind of build to what his choice is and the choice that he makes. It has a happy ending, so I'll leave it at that sharp The Bears, big choices available at Amazon or Barnes and noble.com and or they can find me through my website and I will sign a copy and send it to you. So however you want to get that book.

Jill: That is so sweet and it makes me think too, you know, I feel like a lot of us were picked on and bullied for being different, right? If you don't fit in with what the people around you think you need to be, and you do get unfortunately picked on and bullied, and it doesn't end in childhood, right? That can go all the way through adulthood.

As an adult, I look back on some of my childhood and there's just such a feeling of grief that's tied with that as well, right? This loss of feeling safe and feeling joy and feeling happiness and feeling [00:35:00] the things that we want to associate childhood with that we didn't feel because of the way that we were treated by others.

At least for me, there's still part of me that likes being different, and I like being weird. Also, I don't like the way that people treat me because I'm different and weird now as an adult. I just try to stay away from those people as best as I can. We've learned the 

Daryl: mechanisms, haven't we? 

Jill: Exactly. You learn the coping mechanisms.

But I look back on my childhood and sometimes I really grieved for a little Jill that went through things and felt suicidal and felt like it was never gonna end. It was never gonna be better. I was never gonna feel. Good about existing in this world, and there's still times when I don't feel good about existing in this world.

I've learned to love the fact that I'm different and in some ways look at the people that do judge me with some compassion and understand that [00:36:00] sometimes I think that. Way that we treat people that are different is almost from a place of envy. They don't feel like they're the person that they're showing up as, right?

That they're hiding their real selves to fit in with the group versus being themselves. So I love that you wrote a book to hopefully help children not feel so alone when they're going through that self 

Daryl: isolation is such. Such a dangerous place to be. You don't see solutions. You only see the darkness and you only see the, the no end to this cycle.

The, the wise beaver that I mentioned is the spirit of my grandmother. Whenever we were trying to do something but we weren't very good at it, like I like to, I took piano lessons and I was never a good pianist, but I would sitting trying to plunk out music and my grandmother lived with us. And she had a, like a apartment that was next door to our house.

My grandmother would come over and she never had pianos in her life, but she could [00:37:00] sit down and play any hymn by ear perfectly and she'd do that for hours. Just a magical creature. She was, whenever I would be flunking out a really bad song, she'd just come and put her hand on my should and say, we all have our strengths here.

This might not be yours, but keep. Keep trying to find her, the quote of Bucky the Beaver in the book, the Turning point for Chubby that, you know, I do have other strengths. Maybe I am chubby, but I get more honey than the other bears, and that's my strength. The bees are my friends. They're not the friends of the other bears.

I can swing in the tree and the other bears in our group don't do that. It starts to kind of self-soothe with I. A mantra of going over his strengths. If I can help one child who's being bullied find their other strengths and allow that to help self-soothe, then that is the dream come true for that book.

And I know I have already just for cards and letters that I've gotten, 

Jill: I love it. It's a 

Daryl: shame that's still a problem today. But I think it sadly, [00:38:00] part of human nature, we, and they. It is always going to be a part of human nature. 

Jill: Well, again, it's that fear of death. We're afraid that the other person is going to kill us, right?

So like we have that separation and there's that anger and like, again, that's a whole soapbox. I could talk for like 10 hours about. But yeah. Thank you so much for coming on today. I will for sure put a link to your book. Is there anything else, a website or anything else that you wanna direct? I'll 

Daryl: feature it on my website.

Darrell R mccullough.com. 

Jill: Perfect. 

Daryl: Or you can follow my author page on Instagram, which is Instagram at author Daryl. 

Jill: I'll put links so people can easily click and get to you. Thank you so much. This was really interesting and I'm really happy that you wrote both of your books. I think they will. Have a grander impact than you will even ever know that that will all ripple out into the world.

Daryl: In this age of book bands, which don't get me started, that's a [00:39:00] whole nother hour, Jill, when good decent books are being banned for some specious ideology, even if you don't need a children's book in your life, buy one and donate it to a library or to a school, or to a nursing home because too many books are being banned and for no good reason.

Reading changed my life. It helped me expand my worldview. It's helped me set my own ideology. I just think books are the future of education, so buy a book and donate it. It doesn't have to be my book. Buy a book and donate it to someone who needs it. 

Jill: I love that. Thank you so much. 

Daryl: Thank you, Jill. Great talking with you.

Jill: In my next episode, Deborah Charman and Brian Wardell share their powerful stories of grief, caregiving, and finding purpose. After surviving suicide attempts, Brian became his mother's primary caregiver after his father's stroke, but that role soon consumed his life. When his mother died, the loss of that purpose sent him [00:40:00] into a deep depression, leading to a suicide attempt that changed everything.

Deborah worked in elder care supporting seniors through the challenges of aging and dying, having survived her own suicide attempt as a young woman. She understood Brian's pain when they met in 2020. Now they use their experiences to teach young people how to face emotional challenges and make healthy choices.

Their mission is to help others, especially children, find resilience and hope even in life's hardest moments. 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 valuable. I sincerely appreciate all of you for [00:41:00] 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.