Recovery Matters Podcast 6-14-22

Sandy: Hi, honey. It's just the two of us this morning.

Phil: Does that frighten you?

Sandy: No.

Phil: Oh, good.

Sandy: You don't scare me anymore

Phil: anymore? I don't think you scare me anymore. Cause you don't have your big corporate office where you used to scare me.

Sandy: I know. That was really surprising back then.

Phil: Yeah. Well you became like a new person, a different person.

Sandy: Yeah. In the workplace. I would be a leader and at home, I would be completely submissive to your ...desires and wishes.

Phil: So we're here solo

Sandy: duo.

Phil: Yeah. And at this stage in our life, I think there's a big topic. You both, you and I don't really want to talk about, but think we probably should.

Sandy: Yeah. So just recently, just a few months ago, you lost both your parents within 48 hours.

Phil: And the strange part too being, they were divorced for 40 plus years and died like 48 hours almost to the minute, right.

Sandy: From completely different reasons and their progression towards those final days, started around the same time for four, five months prior.

Phil: Well, it was, and I'm interested. So when do you think my, my mother's progression started?

Sandy: Yeah. So your mom was, well, your mom had very serious diseases and ailments probably for her last. 30 years. Right. And kept surviving them.

Phil: Tough. She's tough.

Sandy: Very tough. But the kind of the deal breaker was she was bumped into, by a car and a grocery store parking lot and just couldn't rebound from that.

Phil: And then she was at 88 and my dad was 87 and had along, we think. Probably four or five, six years of progressive dementia. Alzheimer's

Sandy: yeah.

Phil: Yeah. But all of that sped up for him around November, December the same time she was hit by the car and they both went to the hospital and they both went to short-term rehab. And then your mom moved into. Assisted living then got hospice care and your dad went back home under the care and love of his wife and got hospice care and then they chose the same week to leave us

Phil: well. And you know, 88 and 87 62, they've been part of my life for 62 years, obviously. Right. They've both had good lives, I would say overall, you know and there's so many issues here around grief and our recovery principles. So I'm interested to see where this conversation goes because recently I I wanted to process some of the issues with a therapist or a counselor and I signed up and I got somebody that was like, frankly appalling in a lot of ways. So I'm not quite sure what that was about, but here we are a few days later, you and I to talk about it and we talk a lot in our car rides down, back and forth to the beach and process this I think I want to start by asking you a question. As we are pretty much pretty close to bedside with both the deaths, right. And seeing how the funerals and the services played out, how our kids responded. What have you learned? And you also have a lot of other grief in your life. So, yeah, and my sister was a huge part of all this as well, and this played an amazing role. So what have you learned?

Sandy: Well, can I first start maybe by recapping my experiences a little bit.

Phil: Of course,

Sandy: I think it comes out of accumulation. So when I was 39, my father passed away. He was 86 and over the next 10 years, my sister died from, so my father died from congenital heart failure. He was someone similar to your mom who had a major, major illness or disease. At every stage of my life, but I came along the scene. He was 48 when I was born. So I came along the scene later in life. But it, but, so that was kind of expected his age and what his body had been through. My sister had leukemia and survived it. Had radiation induced dementia. And in my mind, she died of dehydration living in a nursing home, but in my mind, she died of the side effects of that disease. And then my brother died of melanoma. And then, so that then my mom,

Phil: well, since you're kind of recapping how everybody died, I'm not quite sure why you're talking about how they died. But your brother was agent orange in Vietnam, right?

Sandy: Right.

Phil: Yeah. That was where the melanoma came from.

Sandy: Yeah. Yeah. And it was sharing cause you had shared how your parents,...