Losing a Sister and Learning to Live With Loss with Lila Glasoe Francese

When Lila Glasoe Francese’s sister Carolyn was diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2015, life changed quickly. Carolyn underwent surgeries and a trial treatment before dying 13 months later at just 46 years old, leaving behind a seven-year-old son and a family learning how to live with an enormous loss.

In this episode of Seeing Death Clearly, Lila joins death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennen for a conversation about what grief actually looks like over time, not as something we simply move through and leave behind, but as something that continues to become part of our lives.

Lila shares what it was like to lose her sister, help raise Carolyn’s son, and redefine what family looked like alongside her husband and brother-in-law. Now, a decade after Carolyn’s death, grief can still appear unexpectedly through milestones, memories, scents, songs, and other reminders that bring the past immediately into the present.

Jill and Lila also talk about our culture’s discomfort with sadness and the pressure people can feel to be “okay” after loss. They explore why we need more honest conversations about illness, dying, caregiving, and grief and the importance of finding the people who are willing to show up and help when life becomes overwhelming.

Writing became one of the ways Lila processed her own experience. What began with journaling eventually grew into her books, The Situation: A Radical Journey Through Sisterhood and Life Amplified: The Search for Resilience After Loss. Sharing her story also opened the door for other people to share losses they had been carrying, demonstrating how storytelling can create connections around experiences that are often kept private.

The conversation also explores legacy, community, family, and what loss can teach us about the things we spend our lives accumulating compared with the people and relationships that ultimately matter most.

At the heart of this episode is something Jill has learned through many conversations with guests over the years: grief doesn’t simply end. We learn how to carry what we’ve lost while continuing to live, love, connect, and make meaning in the life that is still here.

00:00 Grief Changes You

01:51 Meet Lila and Her Story

02:27 Glioblastoma and Writing Through Loss

06:44 Sharing Stories Heals

11:00 Triggers and Sense Memories

15:17 Milestones Without Her

19:21 Redefining Family After Loss

23:05 Find the Helpers

26:58 Honest End of Life Talk

36:49 Living Fully and Letting Go

37:22 Stuff vs People

42:51 Books and Closing Thoughts

https://www.amazon.com/Situation-Radical-Journey-Thru-Sisterhood

https://www.instagram.com/lifeamplifiedbook/

https://lifeamplifiedbook.com/the-situation-a-radical-journey-thru-sisterhood/

Transcript

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[00:00:00] This sounds so ironic maybe to say, but that's the best part about grief and loss is that you do discover a whole new level of yourself that you never knew was accessible. That you never knew was there. 

Welcome back to Seeing Death Clearly. I'm your host Jill McClennen, a death doula and funeral celebrant.

On my show, I have conversations about death, dying, grief, and all the ways those experiences shape how we live. We talk about all things we're often taught to avoid, the realities of illness and caregiving, the messiness of grief, and what happens when life changes in ways we never expected. My hope is that by talking about these things openly they become a little less frightening, and we make more room for honest conversations about what really matters.

Today, I'm joined by Lila Glasoe Francese, whose writing began after her sister Carolyn was diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2015 and died 13 months later at just 46 years old. Laila and I talk about losing a sister, [00:01:00] raising Carolyn's young son, redefining family, and the way that grief continues to show up even a decade later in milestones, memories, and unexpected moments.

We also talk about our culture's discomfort with sadness, why honest end-of-life conversations matter, finding help when life falls apart, and what loss can teach us about the differences between the things we accumulate and the people we love. Laila shares how journaling became part of her own grieving process, eventually leading to her books The Situation: A Radical Journey Through Sisterhood and Life Amplified: The Search For Resilience After Loss.

This conversation comes back to something I've learned from so many of my guests over the years. Grief doesn't simply end. We learn how to carry what we lost while continuing to live, love, connect, and make meaning in a life that is still here. Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome, Laila, to the podcast.

Thank you for coming on today. I know you're in California. I'm in New Jersey. And so we are all the way across the country from each [00:02:00] other. But why don't you just tell me a little bit more about yourself, where you come from, anything you wanna share. 

Sure. Thank you, and thank you for having me. I am originally from Minnesota actually.

I live in California 'cause I fell in love with a Santa Barbara native, and now we live in Ojai, California. I was never initially a writer. I started out going to art school, and I have an interior design company. But in 2015 my sister was diagnosed with glioblastoma brain cancer. I'm not sure if you're familiar or your audience is with glioblastoma brain cancer, but it's one of the kinds of cancer than no one has ever lived from.

Tumors come back if you take them out more quickly and larger than they were before. So the normal life expectancy for someone without treatment is three months, and about a year if you are treated. So that changed, of course, the trajectory of my life And out of it, I started journaling [00:03:00] and I wrote my first book.

I now have my second book coming out. They both sort of have helped me in my healing process through grief. The first one really sort of as the tool of just making sense of it like a journal and bringing that journal to life and also reminiscing about stories with my sister and reflecting on our life together and how lucky I was to have that sisterhood.

And then the second book is sort of the discovery after the fact and it does... She's been gone for a decade now so- Mm-hmm ... it goes through that 10 years and really how in the depths of my grief I was able to find resiliency and I was also able to discover new things about myself. And that's, I have to say like this sounds so ironic maybe to say but that's the best part about grief and loss is that you do discover a [00:04:00] whole new level of yourself that you never knew was accessible, that you never knew was there.

I've been able to do that, so that has led me to this point today with you . 

I am looking forward to hearing more about all of that. But one thing I, I notice, and of course again, the people that I'm talking to are the ones that have moved through their grief, right? I'm not typically talking to people that are stuck in grief.

You know sometimes could be called complicated grief, whatever you wanna call it. But it does amaze me how many people I talk to that have lived through the worst types of loss that you can imagine, the worst types of death to loved ones that you can imagine, and they'll say, "It wasn't something that I would have ever choose to have gone through, but I am a much better person now than I was before.

I learned so much about myself. Now I have more purpose in life. I know what I'm meant to do." Just it's like this amazing transformation [00:05:00] that comes from a situation that nobody wants. Nobody wants to lose somebody that they love. But what some people do with it to me is just amazing. It shows this resiliency in humans that I don't often see when you're, you know, just in like the grocery store and you're listening to people complain about everything.

Yeah. So I love hearing that- Mm-hmm ... you experienced something that was tragic, but also it showed you so much about yourself. So yeah, I'm excited to hear all about it. 

I mean, I will say I never thought I'd write a book ever. I did have a very good education. My parents were both teachers and educators. Hmm.

So that was really important to them, and it felt really good to sort of exercise that again, and write something really purposeful too. When I wrote my first book, people didn't know about that diagnosis, and now that book is in [00:06:00] medical libraries. When my sister was diagnosed, I found one article that was three pages long about a woman's journey, and I was kind of in a panic about it 'cause I'm like, "Oh my gosh, what's the next year gonna look like?"

She moved in with me when she got sick, with her husband and her seven-year-old son, who then I continued to raise, and he's now in college, and he's in the second book quite a lot, and my journey with raising him. But it was really cool to see, like there was a writer in me, and also I started an art foundation.

My sister was an art dealer, and we thought we still want this connection with artists, and our community could use more support for artists. So I did that. Had she not passed away, I would have also never done that. That is the really cool thing, I think. And I also love the fact that the writing has allowed me to share my story because I think the best part that I was surprised with when I started sharing the story, and after the first book came out, and now that I'm talking about the second book with people, [00:07:00] people have told me their stories, and that's the thing that's so amazing.

I had one lady write me and she said, "I read your book and it was so great in helping me process what had happened in my early life." She said, "You know, when I was young no one really talked about death, and my mother died in bed next to me. She was taken away. I was sent to my father, who was no longer with her, and we never spoke about her again."

And she said, "Reading now about people's experiences of loss has helped me have closure with my own." I mean, that just wows me. That's amazing. Like, I'm so... You know, that's something you don't expect to do with your writing, and that's something that I think is so important. 

It's such a beautiful gift to be able to help somebody have healing and closure around...

Not that there's ever really closure around the death of a loved one, but there's something that that woman [00:08:00] now can feel in her life that she wasn't able to before. And I, I hate to hear stories like that about children that have lost parents. I've talked to grown adults- Yeah ... that will say same thing.

You know, where a parent, especially 'cause I guess back, you know, back in the day, as much as like you kinda, it's likes back in my day. But, you know, back when some people were younger, we just didn't talk about death and dying. And it was something that it happened, and especially with children, it was just kind of like it's better for the kids if we just don't talk about it.

And then they're now grown adults and they're like, "No, that was terrible. That was the worst thing that you could have done because it-" Yep "... negatively affected me." Especially a mother. Oh my gosh, and died in bed next to her? Like that's so sad. 

I think it also really shows us the power of shared story. Mm.

And that's what I love, and I've [00:09:00] said this before to friends, that the one thing that transcends our political beliefs, our sexuality, our race is that every human being has a story to share. 

Mm. 

And we all learn from those stories. And it's kind of our, I feel like our greatest asset is how we share our stories and being allowed and given permission to share them or wanting to share them, and there's so much power in it.

I know I read a lot of self-help stuff, right? Especially in the last decade I have, and I just always in my mind it sticks out Brene Brown saying sharing your story can lead you to the universal. And I, you know, sharing your journey I think which is a shared story can lead you to the universal, and I think that's so right.

And we've done it since the beginning of time. That's what cave drawings are, right? Shared stories that we look at 

You know, in the past there was the cave drawings but also stories were only shared [00:10:00] verbally. They were passed down from generation to generation. That's really where song came from because it's easier to remember a story and share it when it's to music right?

Yeah. And so yeah, it's so important to human beings to share stories. And you know your point too about regardless of our political beliefs or our race or our religion or whatever it is, we all have stories, and all of our human stories at the core are similar. We all want love. We all want acceptance. We all have death.

We all have grief in our life. We all have loss. And it feels to me that if we would listen to other people's stories and see that we have more in common than we have different, we would really be better off 'cause instead- Right ... we wanna focus on what's different about each other and- 

Yes ... 

which seems to add to problems not fix any problems.

Very true. Very true. I agree with [00:11:00] that. I think that one thing that I didn't realize too was about, and this kind of brings up the earlier point about how we all have different levels of being able to process. So I remember receiving a note from another woman that said, "My sister didn't tell me she was sick," and she was dying and her husband called me the night before she passed away to let me know she was passing and in hospice.

And she said, "I didn't even know how to process it and I don't feel like I did for so many years." That is something that was really intriguing to me especially writing the second book is what is our process with sharing the end of life with someone, right? And after their end of life, your podcast End Of Life Clarity like what is the, what is the new clarity that, that we have?

And I think what's so surprising is it's things that we don't even expect. Like [00:12:00] w- and I think the second or third chapter of the new book I talk about after my sister passed I went to go pick up some of the things she had in storage because when she got diagnosed she was moving. And we realized oh my gosh it's been like a year and we're paying this storage bill and her husband wasn't able to go down so my husband and I drove to like a PODS center and got her stuff out and I thought oh well good we'll just get her stuff and put it in the truck and easy, and I opened that box and I smelled her.

I smelled her perfume. I smelled the leather belts mixed in with her clothes in it I didn't realize that would be such a sense memory trigger, and that would bring up a whole new thing with me. And I realized one, I missed, I missed smelling her . She used to wear Jo Malone Orange Blossom perfume and I m- I missed that smell but it also really hit me fiercely.

You know? I, I had a, a just a visceral reaction [00:13:00] to it and I closed the boxes and I said, "I, I can't, I can't process this right now And I thought I was much further along in my, you know, acceptance of her death than I was because I hadn't had that sense. And I hadn't, I didn't realize I was missing not only her person, but how she smelled and her voice and all those things that are multilayered in loss 

There is so many layers to grief and we don't often talk about it.

It's not like that's something that you're gonna go around and talk to your friends about. Like, "You know what I did today?" Yeah "Opened this box from my sister and I miss the way she smells." So we're not talking about that, so when it does happen to us, we feel like there's something wrong, like we're not doing things correctly.

We're not grieving correctly. Like, all this complicates it, the fact that we don't talk about it. Because again, I'm somebody that talks to so many people about grief and I'm like, oh yeah, that's totally normal. That's [00:14:00] certainly natural. That happens to a lot of people. We don't realize that our grief will be triggered by walking by somebody that's wearing your sister's perfume.

And this could be 50 years after somebody died. Oh- It's not going to matter time when there's something that connects us to a person. I'll hear a song, I'll smell something. You know, just even like this season, this time of the year. For me, this is very connected to multiple family members in my life that I've lost.

Yes. And so to me, this is why I said before we got on the call, like, I was outside with my hands in the dirt because that connects me to multiple women in my life that have died because in the spring was when their favorite flowers would bloom. Mm. And it's like a, it's like a mixed thing. In some ways it's really beautiful and it makes me feel good, and then in other ways it does trigger some grief for me.

And then I get that little bit of sadness and loss and wishing they were still here. And I go through the whole [00:15:00] process. But- Right ... that's what grief is. It's a process. It's not gonna end. It's just gonna change and it's gonna shift and it will be triggered in unexpected times by things that we don't always expect that will trigger it for us.

Yes, I totally agree. And I think I also really saw that with my children and which, you know, I'm really lucky. I call my sister's son my son now and my daughter, I had one daughter, she had one son and my daughter calls him, you know, her brother. But that's the other thing is like we all think, oh we're, you know, we're good.

It's been a decade. And then he just graduated last year from high school. Hm. And we were all in tears, just missing who wasn't there. Yeah Missing who wasn't there, and then bringing him to college and missing again who wasn't there. So it's also those life moments when we're like, "Gosh, there's some loneliness there."

We- we feel alone in those moments with [00:16:00] who we could have been with at that time. And we were all kind of surprised with that because I feel like there had been enough years that passed that there were so many years when we couldn't talk about her and we would cry if we tried. But a decade later, there's so many great stories that we laugh about with her.

Or do you remember this funny time? And even when she was sick, she had a very limited vocabulary because of her brain being affected at the end of her life. Mm-hmm. And we had to play charades with her, and it was hilarious. Because we'd all like, whoever figures out what she wants first, you know, y- you get the kudos for the day.

And now we can look back at that and say like, "Do you remember that one morning when we were just trying to figure out she wanted a cup of coffee?" But it went like, we were like, "What? You want tickets?" It was just crazy. We can laugh about that now, and that's so great. But, but again, we are still also brought into that sadness, and it, that never dissipates.

And I doubt it will. 

No. Weddings, births of grandchildren. There's gonna potentially [00:17:00] be so many moments when her not being there is going to feel like a big loss, because it is a big loss. It's a loss for her. It's a loss for all of you. And culturally Something that I've been trying to work with on my own even personally is we have this sense that sadness is bad, that tears are bad, and that we wanna try to not feel it.

We want to numb it. Look at the rate of people using drugs and alcohol, whether it's legal drugs or illegal drugs, right? Yes. And we want to numb those things. And the more that I work with people that are dying, and the more that I talk to people that are grieving and they have that loss of somebody, the more I realize that all of this is what makes life life.

Mm-hmm. And that doesn't mean we have to love the fact that when we miss [00:18:00] somebody it makes us sad and we feel tears, but that's part of life. That's part of being a human. We can't have the joy and the happiness without also feeling some sadness and grief. It's really, you know, for me especially when I think of children 'cause, like, to me that's the biggest thing.

I'm not afraid of dying myself. Right. I don't wanna leave my children to have no mother, and I absolutely adore that you stepped in and you were able to just kind of rebuild that family for your son, and even for your daughter who now has a brother. Yeah. That's really beautiful. My kids would not have that if I were to unfortunately die at a younger age.

And so I just love that you're able to be that family now together while also still honoring her and talking about her and not pretending that it's not sad that he graduated high school and his mother wasn't there. So I think that's really beautiful that you're experiencing that together as a family.

It's not [00:19:00] ideal, but it's the situation you have. You can't change it, so make the best of it by telling the stories about the charades and also feeling the sadness when you feel it. 

We have an expression in our house. We say, "Oh, that moment was all the feels." Hmm. We say, "All the feels," right? The happiness, the joy, the sadness, all of it.

All the feels. But I really feel like the great part of that journey after her death was also what you are talking about, the redefining of family where my nephew's father was still in the picture but traveled a lot for work. And his father thought he would be better staying in your house so someone's there doing homework with him every day.

But the great part about that is I didn't realize also how much I would get to know my brother-in-law. Hm. So he would show up every day. He would pick up Matson to take him to school and then bring him back home and stay for dinner So here was somebody else that became [00:20:00] kind of also then a bonus dad for my daughter, just like my husband became a bonus dad.

My husband's name is Dines and Matson calls him Daddy Dines, and then he's got Dad. So it's, you know, and they're very different men, you know? My brother-in-law's a big computer guy. My husband's a sports kinda guy. So what's great is just redefining also family and becoming like it... There doesn't have to be one way that we define it.

We can all, we can be a five-person family now instead of two individual families. And I'll tell you, like the shocking part about that too is that COVID really helped with that because we became just all together every night having dinner in the pod that we all saw, and we hunkered down in that and actually became closer once again four years after Carolyn's death.

So that was really wonderful. And I have, I even go and vacation with my brother-in-law's parents without him. [00:21:00] So we've gotten bonus grandparents too. 

That's something too that we've lost so much of as a culture that I think would help us deal with the big milestones in life a little bit better. Having children is super lonely right now in our culture.

Somebody being sick and dying is super lonely in our culture, whether it's the person, the caregivers, grief afterwards because we've lost so much of that community of extended families. We're so individual now that in the past it wasn't that way. I even think back to my grandmother; she was one of 11 children- Oh

and you know, to like go through anything in life alone, it was not happening for them. I mean they were so intertwined. And now, even just a couple generations later, I'm doing the funeral service for my cousin who just died, and his children and I are the same age. [00:22:00] We spent a lot of time together when we were little because the older generation was still there, because they did everything together every holiday.

I mean, there was parties constantly. When I saw my cousin yesterday he's like, "How long has it been? Like 20 years?" I'm like, "Maybe not that long but close." Because - Yeah ... just the way that we are now with our culture we just, we're not able ... In some ways I guess it's because we move around so much. You know, the blessing is I've lived all over the country.

I used to live in California. I lived in Florida. I lived in Massachusetts. I mean I lived all over the country, but that also meant that I don't have those deep bonds with my family or even with a lotta those people because we move around so much and we've lost that and we need that in our humaneness, right?

We need to have that connection. So I love that you've just got this like beautiful extended family because family can be what we make it. It doesn't have to just be, I married this person and we had these kids and that's my family. Like [00:23:00] no, it can be a broader definition of family and it should be a broader definition.

I think too that leads to another great point of what has really helped in my journey has been the Mr. Rogers quote, 'Find the helpers.' Find people that can help you, right? So one thing that's great is my brother-in-law when I was suddenly going from a mother raising one child to trying to manage two was like, "I can drive to school.

You know, I can do school drop off and pick up." Oh fantastic. Great then I can concentrate on this, this, and this. So finding the helpers is huge. I also had a really good girlfriend who really stepped forward and was like, "Let's go do this let's go do this" Like plan things 'cause I feel like for a lot of years I was kind of just numb.

Mm. Like until the reality of this new life soaked in there was no... There were many mornings when I woke up like wait was that all a dream? I hope that was all a dream. [00:24:00] 

Oh. 

But it wasn't so it was great to have someone also leading the way when I needed it And have one friend step forward and say hey let's take the kids to the zoo today or lets-- Let's you and I go to this book reading Or she even got me to volunteer at a parenting center that helped new mothers learn how to deal with babies and I'll tell you it was so healing Because I got to go see this new life and focus on giving this new mother advice, right?

And just being like sharing my story of my motherhood with her when she's feeling like her struggle with her new motherhood is isolating and no one else has ever felt this insecure as a mom. It was so great to step into that volunteer role, and not think about myself for a little bit, and think about her and help her.

And I'm sure that's what you find too dealing with people going through [00:25:00] death and, and grief. It's so great for you to step in to what they're going through and experience it with them instead of just ruminating on your own losses. 

Yeah, I definitely have really ... I hate to use the word enjoy, but that was the first word that came to mind for me.

I have- Mm ... really enjoyed the connections I think is really what it is. The connections that I've made with people who are in the depths of loss and grief. Because even if somebody's not dead yet, we are still grieving them, right? Unless it's like a really sudden loss and we don't know it's coming. But if somebody's ill, even if we talk to people that are kind of in denial.

They're not really like, "Oh, no, no, no. Everything's gonna be fine. They're gonna get better." And the rest of us are like, "I don't really know if that's true." S- I think inside they still know. They still feel that anticipatory grief. But I [00:26:00] find that there's such a realness in people when they're at those points.

That- Yep ... I enjoy that connection that I can make with people because it's an honor for me, it's a gift for me to be included in their life, to be invited into their life. And I love real connections with people, and that's what I find in a lot of ways I don't get in real life. Because again, we're so individual.

And so it's so shallow in a lot of cases. The people that you meet around town or that you work with. Like, you're not really connecting on that deep level like you do when somebody's in those depths of death and grief and loss. I love that, and I really also know how special that is. And I don't take that lightly that people invite me into that space with them because it's sacred.

Sacred is like the word that comes up for me.

Well, it makes me think of the [00:27:00] prologue of my book starts with a quote, and I don't know it by heart, but about a thought that the Lakota Indians have in America. Lakota Sioux specifically in Minnesota, which is a big tribe from where I'm from, and they really believe that people who have experienced death have a new level of understanding that we can learn from, that we can take something from.

And I feel like I found the connection to that too, where after I wrote the first and second book and people kind of knew... I shared my story and people knew what I had been through. I had friends saying, "Hey, will you talk to my friend? Her husband's dying right now." And you're almost like, well, I'm, I'm not an expert, but I gue- you know, I guess I've gone through it.

Like, I can, I can, I can help. And actually realizing, you know what? I am so grateful for the gift of being able to talk about loss and death and grief. There was one friend of a woman who called me, and she just wanted to know about what [00:28:00] medical trials her husband could go into. And I knew her husband was dying, but it's almost like she didn't get to that point.

And I said to her, "Maria, has anyone said he's not gonna make it?" Mm-hmm. And it was silent, and she kinda needed someone to just say that. I think that being able to say that to another person also from a place of I've experienced loss and I'm here with you, and I'm gonna hold your hand while you come to that realization, is so powerful and such a beautiful moment of humanity 

Yeah, and there's actually two things there that I wanna make sure I follow up on because I think you said things that are really important in that first one about that idea of being an expert.

And to me especially with death and grief, I find that it isn't even what we know about it. [00:29:00] It's the comfort level that we have with being in the uncomfortable. You can't get that unless- 

That's a good point ... you experience it. Yep. Such a good point. Yeah. 

Right? So like we don't have to be an expert. We just have to be able to sit with people and allow them to feel their feelings and talk about it and just sometimes listen and not wanna like shut down the conversation or run away from it, to just be.

And there is this pressure again in our society like, "You don't know anything. You're not an expert in it." Well okay. I mean, what makes us an expert Right? But then you know your friend of like did anybody say to you he's not gonna make it. I get so frustrated when I even speak with medical professionals and they'll just keep like dancing around this idea of like death is not gonna happen.

And it's - Hmm ... like well what could try, let's do this, let's do that [00:30:00] and it's like well okay sure maybe the person wants to try those things but maybe if we were little bit more honest and we were to say hey look we can try them. It's probably not going help In some cases its actually going make the person feel worse and they're still gonna die anyway would people make the choice to try some these things Probably not.

But because we're not having that conversation ,I see people that are almost it's like torturing themselves Like the pain and suffering that I seem them going through where I'm like Maybe we could actually switch directions. It doesn't mean we're giving up .But we're focusing on something different.Like Having quality of life for however long that is.And so many people are not having that conversation and so the fact that you were able to say that to somebody That needed to hear it ...and Its not cruel..its not like youre like oh by the way [00:31:00] ..like hes acutally gonna die.you know Your Not Being Cruel About IT yeah but you're being Honest AND Real and People Need THAT Honesty 

I think too that I didn't realize before going through the whole experience with my sister's cancer that there is, and this is what you just brought up, a whole section of medical care that their job is hope And I think we think of our medical care in America as solution.

Mm-hmm. 

Well, so what if you're a doctor where there's never been a solution? Which I had never experienced before 'cause I never... First of all, I didn't know that there was a form of cancer you couldn't recover from and, or that no one had before. The research has gotten much better now, so I think that's on the precipice.

But I also didn't realize that there were doctors who every day had the courage to walk into a [00:32:00] practice where their job is to give hope. But as you say, it's such an important reminder to patients to realize how much hope do you wanna have? What's your limit What's your family's limit? How do you wanna use your time?

I mean, we knew that my sister was choosing to be treated. She had two brain surgeries and then like a follow-up one so technically three, and then she was just like, "I'm done." 

Mm. 

And when she was done, we then had to go into a different mode and we had to say to that doctor that said, "Well, we can still do this and this and this," "No, she's just done.

She's done. It's been a tough 13 months." And I never realized that y- you have to do that because I was always before thinking I go see other people to find the solution where I can find the solution [00:33:00] in myself. We can find the solution within our family if we talk about it. 

So your sister, you said she lived for 13 months after her diagnosis?

She did. She was part of a medical trial that had had some great results on some people. One gentleman lived an additional five years. Wow. She did not. She had glioblastoma giant malform which is ... She used to joke 'cause everything she did she did in life with such fervor that she said, "Of course I have the most intense form of glioblastoma."

Some people have tumors like peas. She had ones like, you know, ping pong balls, and then they just got bigger as they came back over time. So 13 months part of a medical trial that I think kept her alive. She was on a drug that they were trying at that time called Avastin which now is part of normal cancer treatment, and it did keep her alive for a while.

The hard part about that was that you... I felt like in that experience I could see her slowly [00:34:00] disappearing. By the end, you know, she had a 60 word vocabulary. She was picking clothes out to wear that she would never have worn. And I thought, "That's not really her so where is she?"Mm-hmm. I remember really thinking that like p- part of her had a foot in this life and part in the next, and I feel like that's been common with death experiences that I've heard from other people that you sort of feel like somebody's partway in this life and partway in the next wherever that may be.

But it was a big, big shift from the beginning of that 13 months till the end of it Definitely And 

how old was your sister when she died? 

She was only 46. 

Oh, yeah. That's so 

young. Yeah. So young, so young, and luckily had a really full life. Now when I look back, and that's also part of like the process of...

that I'm able to do now. When I look back at her life, she started an art gallery [00:35:00] at 18. Who does that? She had traveled around the world by the time she was 30. She had spoken at universities. She lived life. She did more in those 46 years than some people do in 80 or 90, so it made so much sense, and I felt like I couldn't say, "Oh gosh, she didn't do this or didn't do this."

I can say that she didn't get to experience finishing raising her child. And that's the biggest tragedy of it. But she did live life to its fullest, and she did leave a beautiful map and blueprint for life for him to look at of what she accomplished in her own life. 

Hmm. Yeah, 'cause you're right. There's a lot of accomplishments in 46 years when there are some people that I talk to that, yeah, even in 80 years they

You know, and again, that doesn't mean it's better or worse, but it also does, for somebody like me that is also very like, I don't know, I wanna leave my mark [00:36:00] in many different areas. That's just part of how I wanna live my life. Um, like all right, and I'm 47 now, so I'm like oof- 

A lot ... 

which is... Yeah, that definitely gives me some feels when I'm like I could have been, if I was your sister, I would've been dead already for a year.

And - 

Yeah ... 

you know, and I know some people, again, they hear me say that, and there's probably something that would seem very morbid, but to me, the more that I actually talk about death and I think about death and I go through the whole process, the more now, for the rest of my day, I'm gonna appreciate everything a little bit more knowing that your sister didn't get to be 47.

She didn't get to have spring that year. She didn't get to have that cup of coffee. She didn't get to have these things that she loved- Right ... because her life ended already at that point. So to me, it makes me more grateful for all of my moments in life 

Well, and you know I will say like after she passed away we started like eating off the [00:37:00] silver from grandma at night.

Yeah. 

We started using the good glasses we only used at Christmas because we all realized that life could be short- 

Mm-hmm ... 

and let's appreciate the beauty that we have in our life. Those little aspects don't, don't just take them out for a holiday. You know? Hmm. Have a fancy glass and some good silverware on a Wednesday night 

Yeah.

So yeah. A- That leads me into saying that the whole experience of dealing with grief also really made me think about our concept of stuff. And I think about that a lot anyway because I am an interior designer and I home stage a lot, and I go into people's houses at the sometimes end of their life when they're sizing down and they are getting rid of their stuff, and I realize how unimportant a lot of that is.

When my sister had two art galleries and this big career and was much more into fashion than me and collecting jewelry and things like [00:38:00] that, and when she died all of that came to me. And I realized all of this does not fulfill what I lost, right? It's great to have this but Is it as important as I thought it was when I thought, "Ooh, I gotta save my paycheck to buy that fancy purse," or...

No. None of it was. And so that's why again, that relates to use the fancy silverware, have the great handbag, but would we trade any of those things to have the person back in our life? 

Mm-mm. 

Mm-mm. No. So also big lessons on stuff. Mm-hmm. On collecting. On what we're gonna remember when we're at the end of our life.

It's not gonna be that handbag I had, it's gonna be the son I got to raise. 

The stuff is a ... It is a big thing because we all have a lot of stuff, and so much of it doesn't really mean anything to the people around us. My son likes to joke, and it's [00:39:00] really actually true- ... that almost everything in our house is from a dead person, which he's not wrong.

Including even like a lot of my plants, they're originally plants that came from my grandmother, so I keep them. But I have the silverware, I have the china from both my grandmother and my other grandmother, and I use them more regularly than either of them ever did, and I will sometimes laugh where I'm like, "Grandma's rolling over in her grave if she knew that I was using her good glasses on a Tuesday night-"

to put my iced tea in." Yeah. Because to her you didn't get them out unless it was like a fancy dinner. It was like everybody was coming over. But I don't know if I'm gonna make it to the next one, and I wanna use those glasses every time I use them. Every time I use either one of their plates. Now I mix them when I put them both on the table.

It's allowing me to still stay connected to them. When I look around my house, [00:40:00] to see the plant stand that I'm like, "Oh yeah, that was Grandma's and it used to be in our living room." I like that part of keeping things that were from other people. But there also was so much, and I really struggled with having to get rid of things because I felt so guilty.

I felt so bad giving away or donating to Goodwill things that I knew at some point at least were really important to both of my grandmothers. And the one it was even worse because we had to clean out her house quickly. We had to just get a dumpster and throw things away- Mm ... 'cause there just was so much stuff.

And that's why I'm a big advocate now. I tell people all the time, do that yourself. Don't leave that for your children or somebody else to have to deal with because it complicates our grief when we're having to sort through and get rid of and throw out things that you maybe [00:41:00] didn't even care about. But we don't know for sure, and all we know is it was yours, and we're grieving, and it leads to us feeling even worse.

I'll tell you in my home staging business, one lesson that I've learned is that when you can see the joy you are giving someone with things that you give away instead of after you pass away and you don't know who gets it, the joy that you s- are able to witness when you give them something is amazing.

And I slowly did that with, my sister didn't have my shoe size, and I have a really good friend who's also my hairdresser and was my sister's. She had the same shoe size as my sister, and I said, "Hey, I've got some really great shoes for you." She was like, "These are so fancy. Oh my gosh!" But there was so much joy in that.

And in a way I felt like my sister Carolyn was giving her that gift through me. That felt great I have to say I'm a little guilty. My husband got on me maybe like a year ago. He's like, "Honey, are you gonna throw out that cashmere bathrobe?" I'll tell [00:42:00] you, it's the last thing she bought me the last Christmas we were together, and it finally had holes in it.

It had rips in it. It was so balled-y. And I was like, "Oh." And he said a really profound thing to me. He was like, "You're not holding onto her by wearing that ratty robe. You're holding onto her because of all the stories you've shared with people about her, because of the art foundation you started in her name.

You don't need that robe." And I was like, "Oh my God, you're right." Like, you know, my Oprah aha moment. You're right. It's okay to throw away the robe with holes in it. Yeah. Because I'd written down this wonderful collection of not only moments I shared in her life with her, moments I shared with her while she was dying, but then the aftereffects of her death and the moments she gave me from her loss.

That's actually the perfect time because we are about at the end of our time. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about your books, where people can find the books, where they can find [00:43:00] you? And I'll put the links in the show notes. 

So my first book is called The Situation: A Radical Journey Through Sisterhood.

It flashes back on the 13 months Carolyn was dying in my home, and then every other chapter about our shared journey as women from four years old to 46 years old. And you can get that at amazon.com still. That's the easiest way, just online to order it. And then the second book is through Wildhouse Publications, my website, which is lifeamplified.com, and it's called Life Amplified: The Search for Resilience After Loss And it's also sort of set up like the first book, where it's based on the last decade of my life, but flashes back to unique stories I've had with parents, with my children, with my friends' children.

Talking about loss, but in a way that's like a story to read that maybe we [00:44:00] can learn more from than step by step by step. And each chapter has a subchapter called a volume because I love the title Life Amplified, and by the end of the book, this last subchapter is Volume 10. Because I hope that people will learn a little bit about how to seek resilience after loss and amplify their own life- Mm-hmm

which is h- understanding and identifying how has this experience changed you? How has it made your life greater? How has it made you do things you never would have done? And if you haven't done them yet, maybe reading the book will make you feel like, "I wanna amplify my own life. I'm gonna start now."

Mm-hmm. Yeah, 'cause it's never too late to start. 

Never too late. 

Yeah. I love that. I love that you wrote both books. And so you said the new book, it would be on your website or on the publisher's website. [00:45:00] The first book you can get on Amazon. 

Exactly. 

Thank you so much for coming on today. This was lovely. I wish we could keep on talking 'cause I think there's a lot to still talk about

We probably could. 

Yes. But this was perfect, and I will put all the links in the show notes. People can easily find you. But thanks so much for coming on today. 

Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for all that you are doing for people