When the waves of grief crash upon us, how do we stay afloat in an ocean of sorrow? CJ Infantino with The Day After Podcast , a widowed father who has steered through the storm of losing his spouse, joins us to illuminate the hidden intricacies of grief, sharing his voyage from darkness to finding a beacon of hope. He confronts the societal currents that urge us to 'move on,' advocating for a more understanding and active engagement with grief, which does not simply fade with time but evolves as we navigate our new realities.
The conversation isn't confined to shared experiences; it casts a light on therapeutic innovations that might pave the road to recovery. CJ shares the profound relief he found in somatic therapy and biofield tuning, offering insights on connecting with our bodies and minds to foster healing. Through this intimate exchange, we hope to extend a lifeline of solace and guidance for those who find themselves adrift in the vast expanse of bereavement, ensuring that no one has to navigate these waters alone.
SeniorLivingGuide.com Podcast sponsored by TransMed Care Long Distance Medical Transportation
The background music is written, performed and produced exclusively by purple-planet.com.
https://www.purple-planet.com/
*SeniorLivingGuide.com Webinars and Podcast represents the opinions and expertise of our guests. The content here is for informational and educational purposes. It does not necessarily represent the views, recommendations, opinions or advice of Fairfax Publishing/SeniorLivingGuide.com or its employees
When the waves of grief crash upon us, how do we stay afloat in an ocean of sorrow? CJ Infantino with The Day After Podcast , a widowed father who has steered through the storm of losing his spouse, joins us to illuminate the hidden intricacies of grief, sharing his voyage from darkness to finding a beacon of hope. He confronts the societal currents that urge us to 'move on,' advocating for a more understanding and active engagement with grief, which does not simply fade with time but evolves as we navigate our new realities.
The conversation isn't confined to shared experiences; it casts a light on therapeutic innovations that might pave the road to recovery. CJ shares the profound relief he found in somatic therapy and biofield tuning, offering insights on connecting with our bodies and minds to foster healing. Through this intimate exchange, we hope to extend a lifeline of solace and guidance for those who find themselves adrift in the vast expanse of bereavement, ensuring that no one has to navigate these waters alone.
SeniorLivingGuide.com Podcast sponsored by TransMed Care Long Distance Medical Transportation
The background music is written, performed and produced exclusively by purple-planet.com.
https://www.purple-planet.com/
*SeniorLivingGuide.com Webinars and Podcast represents the opinions and expertise of our guests. The content here is for informational and educational purposes. It does not necessarily represent the views, recommendations, opinions or advice of Fairfax Publishing/SeniorLivingGuide.com or its employees
SeniorLivingGuide. com Podcast offers solutions and resources to create the best quality of life as we age. And now let's welcome your host, Darleen Mahoney.
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Darleen Mahoney:Thank you for joining us on this SeniorLivingGuidecom podcast. We are joined today by CJ, who's going to share his journey on navigating grief. If you are experiencing grief with someone that potentially is still living and or have experienced grief of past loved ones, this is an episode that hopefully will provide you resources and ways to navigate that in a positive way. Thank you for listening. And we are joined today with CJ Infantino. He is an ex-Silicon Valley engineer turned writer, filmmaker, podcast producer, fashion designer and speaker. After losing his wife to cancer, he became a solo widowed dad to three kiddos, which transformed his life and purpose. Motivated by this journey, cj left a successful tech career behind and dedicated himself to helping others navigating grief and loss. He also co-hosts the podcast the Day After, which is a podcast dedicated to sharing stories and navigating grief. I am so excited to have you today, cj.
CJ Infantino:Thanks for having me.
Darleen Mahoney:Absolutely so a little background for our listeners. You and I met at Podfest in Orlando, florida, and it's just a get together for people to learn different things about podcasting. But while you're there you get to meet all these different podcasters and connect with them in a different way, and you and I we probably talked for like an hour.
CJ Infantino:Yeah, quite a while. Yeah, After the panel, it was great.
Darleen Mahoney:Yeah, and we just talked about your podcast and then we really got deep into the grief side of you know what your podcast is about and really what you're very passionate about, and I found that so relatable after losing, you know, two parents in a very short period of time and we just shared so much story and it was like, oh my gosh, someone can relate to me.
CJ Infantino:Yeah.
Darleen Mahoney:That's what I loved about it is I was listening to you and I felt the same way, but I don't know that people really understand how to navigate and process grief, because one of the things you mentioned is that you know your wife passed away and within a short period of time, everyone made you kind of feel, I guess, that you should be bouncing back, getting over and moving on. But that's not the case. That's not the reality.
CJ Infantino:That's right, yeah, yeah, absolutely, and it's just like this sense that time is going to heal these wounds.
CJ Infantino:But with grief I mean anybody who's experienced like a really profound loss, a close loss. Do you understand that that grief stays with you for the rest of your life and the only thing that changes is our relationship to it, and time is only one factor in that is our relationship to it, and time is only one factor in that it's really confronting it and learning to heal from it and being willing to go into the depths of it to understand it. But yeah, we are so conditioned as a society and as a world to say, well, time has passed, so therefore you should be better, and I don't want to hear your grief because it brings me down. No, not everybody's like that, that's a generalization, but that is like the general consensus of like, okay, you're back to who you were, so let's just go back to the way that life was. But life is completely different for me and while you know you're still navigating potentially the loss that I had, like your life has moved on.
Darleen Mahoney:Mine has not, because my whole world has changed right and I think people, they want you to move on because they don't know how to, they don't know what to say. It's like when someone passes away. What do you say? Do you know? You you'd send sympathy or prayers or what have you, but it's hard because you just you don't want to say something wrong, um, you don't want to overstep, um. And then I know a lot of times people offer you know what can I do, but they don't really put out what you can do it. And then people experiencing the grief, they don't want to ask people to do things for them either. So I think that's probably what it is, just not wanting to deal with it themselves.
CJ Infantino:Yeah.
Darleen Mahoney:Even as you're dealing with it.
CJ Infantino:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a very confronting thing. It's one of the lowest, heaviest emotions that we experience in this life is grief, and I mean it's just like, you see, this reaction that people have when they attend a funeral, or like they're confronted with death. There is this visceral reaction that anybody has walking into there, where you realize that we are all going to die, that we have this mortality, and if it's a young loss, then you realize like we are not guaranteed anything Right. So it can be very confronting. And now, if you were, like trying to go somebody who's experiencing this profound loss, it's that much more so because you're seeing it in somebody that you either care about or you're close with or that you know. So, yeah, you're just like what do I say to that person? What do I do? And also like what is coming up in me, which I think a lot of people don't even recognize. That stuff is coming up in them that's confronting them, that is causing them to react in a way that maybe is not so helpful to the person that's grieving.
Darleen Mahoney:It's like out of sight, out of mind. If I don't acknowledge it, it's not going to happen. One of my very best girlfriends died of ovarian cancer at 37. And I honestly, I was like I never want to hear that again. I don't want to hear anyone talk about ovarian cancer. I just want it to go away. I'm going to block it out of everything in my world, my mind, everything, because it was such an aggressive, horrible disease that happened very quickly in someone so young, which just didn't make any sense to me. And then the craziness of it all is that was the first time I had heard of ovarian cancer. And then my own mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and that's what she eventually passed away from. And I'm like going. I don't want this in my life anymore. I don't want I mean cancer in general, but the ovarian cancer was just. It plugged my world for two very significant people in my life.
CJ Infantino:Yeah, that's a lot.
Darleen Mahoney:I think it's hard and you know, even with the death of my friend, who was really my very first significant loss in my life, I would have nightmares, I would dream about her. I mean it just, and I every time I still think about her and I still talk to her on occasion.
CJ Infantino:Yes.
Darleen Mahoney:You know ESP wise, but you know because there's something that will never die about her and one thing with her being so young is she never aged past the 37, which I'm significantly older than that now, and I'm aging, but she just, I still remember her like young and beautiful and amazing. So those are still how I see her.
CJ Infantino:Yeah, yeah, they become forever young. Like I'm now older than my wife I wasn't. She was always older than me by three months and she would always joke with me about it, but it was like I remember the first time being like, holy shit, I'm older than her now and, like you said in my mind because there is no other way to imagine her she is always going to be 35. She will always be young and I am the one that is now aging.
Darleen Mahoney:Yeah, yeah, young, beautiful, fantastic mama. Yeah yeah, all those wonderful things. So just a little bit about how you got to where you are and how you are processing your grief and how you are dealing with it, because I know that a lot of our listeners are caregivers of their family, their seniors, which may not be fantastic health wise. And then, just in general, I think we're all experiencing a grief in different ways at different times of our lives. So tell me a little bit about where you're at today and how you got there.
CJ Infantino:Big question, so I will try to keep it brief, but it's been a journey. So I'm about three and a half years into this, so she passed away in 2020, almost exactly a year before she passed, my dad passed from lung cancer and then, six months after my wife passed, my son had a nerve tumor in his neck. It's benign. He's okay now. He just got a scan a couple of years ago, so he's good. But it has caused quite a bit of what I'm now understanding as caregiver PTSD, which is a term that I just heard like two weeks ago, but I think it encompasses all of the experience of watching somebody slowly fade away from cancer. She was diagnosed five and a half years, so in 2015, before she died, and that left its mark on me, where there is this extreme health anxiety. Where I used to be at the doctors all the time, I would do everything preventative, like I was like on top of it, and now to stay on top of it requires an enormous amount of effort, because there is fear that is unlike anything I've experienced before, because I'm convinced that I will die, because people around me are dying young, watching my wife die. One of the progressions of her cancer was potential blindness. So if I'm out in the sun, I look at like a white fence and you get like kind of the shadows in your eyes or like the brightness in your eyes, I immediately go into panic and I'm like I'm going blind, like all these leftover things that like nobody really talks about happen when you're watching somebody literally die, and that compounded the grief because not only was I feeling this like deep sense of loss and then having to care for my kids and then watching my kids go through their own health issues and seeing how their grief has affected them, I also now have like this health anxiety, this anxiety of like I'm dying, like these are rational thoughts. So it's been a very, very short, but very long journey and things that I've done, like I mean therapy. I've I've done many modalities of therapy. I mean I was in therapy before this as well. I've been in therapy for about 16 years now. So it's been it's been kind of a lifelong thing for me, and finding people in my life who are able to hold it, hold my grief and support me in that has also been a really, really key thing for me, because not everybody is able to sit with you Like we were talking earlier. It's like most people just want you to be better so they can like enjoy you again and move forward.
CJ Infantino:But when you have a significant loss, there is this sense that you die with that person, and I did. I died with my wife and I became somebody new, and I have been spending three and a half years figuring out who am I right. I was with my wife and I became somebody new, and I have been spending three and a half years figuring out who am I right? I was with my wife since I was 18 years old. We had 18 years together. Like she was my high school sweetheart, she was my world, she was my everything, like I adore her. I still adore her. She was incredible and it was always Ariana and CJ. And then she died and I just became CJ. So I was like who am I? What am I now? What are the things that I like? Because did I like this thing? Because it was something her and I did and I just enjoyed being with her, letting go of the old ways that you used to be and grieving the loss of who you used to be, grieving the loss of the future you thought you would have with that person and just confronting that in a way where you unfortunately have to re-experience that pain over and over and over again.
CJ Infantino:And her death was a very physical thing for me. I felt it physically in my body, feeling her die, and I can't explain it, but it was one of the most horrific, painful things that I've ever gone through and I've had to re-experience that in varying degrees many, many, many times over the past three and a half years. But that's what it's been taking for me to heal and to grow in my grief. So where I'm at now is the grief is still persistent. My ability to hold it has grown and the relationship that I have to my wife has grown and changed.
CJ Infantino:So, like you mentioned, you talk to your friend every once in a while. I still talk to my wife daily. I talk to my dad daily, like in my mind, like whether they can hear me or not or whether, whatever's happening. I get to experience them in this new relationship that I've developed over the past three and a half years with them and I think for the first time very recently, like within the past few months, I now finally have a sense of like they're here, they're with me, they're helping me, they're leading me on this journey and the things that I'm doing. And that was a huge, significant shift for me, because I went from I am utterly isolated and alone to well I now feel them present with me and they will guide me and they will lead me and they will help me. So it's been a big shift. Now things continuously come up. You know my kids. They're going to re-experience that grief in new ways that I will never understand, because as they grow and they have these milestones for them, like, they're experiencing this with a new mind, with a new maturity.
CJ Infantino:You know, at sports events I had one of my children. We were at a tournament and I noticed that something was off with them when they were competing. So I pulled them aside and I knew, I just knew that it was something with their grief, but they didn't really quite understand that yet. And you know, we're in the hallway and we're talking for like 20 minutes and crying together and holding each other, and then you kind of like you got to like shake it off and go back in so they can compete and like that's the reality of my life now.
CJ Infantino:So it's, it was this driving force of like. If I don't heal, if I'm not going to continuously heal, if I'm not going to allow myself to re-experience that pain so that way I can heal from it, then I will never be able to show up for my kids in the way that I want to and I won't be able to show up for myself in the way that I want to and the mission that I have on this life or you know, to have a hope and a future again, because it was gone, quite literally, I couldn't even imagine it. So now it's being colored in again and that's, you know, the high level of kind of where it's at right now.
Darleen Mahoney:So you know what? I think we're going to take a quick break for our podcast sponsors, TransMedCare Long Distance Medical Transportation.
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Darleen Mahoney:You know, one thing you mentioned is a lot of people don't realize or maybe they do, I don't know that grief is a physical pain. It's not just a mental or a sadness. It can literally engulf your entire body. It can cause anxiety attacks. I know that I experienced that after the death of my parents. I was a caregiver for my dad who had dementia, and it was almost like this roller coaster. And then also like looking at all the things that happened while he was still alive and you're just in my mom, still alive.
Darleen Mahoney:You just all these different things that you could have done differently or maybe didn't take advantage of spending more time with someone when you had the opportunity, and all that will literally come back to physically engulf you. I mean, I can remember and I know I shared this with you and it's very personal, but I can remember like crying in the car and then cleaning it up and then moving on with my day because I needed. That was my favorite place, that you know. Honestly, the shower is pretty nice too, but it's those are like the two go-tos, so that you aren't putting your grief onto other people. Because I was so worried about doing that. I wanted to recover and make it go away, so I didn't have to feel the physical pain. So I did that by appearing that I was fine and doing okay, and in reality you aren't, and that's okay.
CJ Infantino:Right, it is okay.
Darleen Mahoney:One thing you mentioned is surrounding yourself with people that you could confide in and rely on. Do you feel like you've shrunk your base of people in your life and not saying that it's a bad thing, but just kind of choosing who the important people are that you truly have a connection with and that's where you spend the majority of your time?
CJ Infantino:That's a really good question. The answer is sort of. So I never had a huge circle. I'm kind of an introvert, so my circle wasn't quite that, it wasn't that big.
CJ Infantino:But after she died there was this really weird effect where I was just like I don't want to be around anybody who knew me. With her. It was too hard and there was something where I'm like I just need to be around new people who don't have that expectation of who I was. So that started to happen and then over time I like you, I was like well, grief is my own right, like essentially, like what I took from everything you were sharing was like the experience I had of like my grief was my own. That's what I learned, that's what the world told me. You keep it to you. You show up to work. I don't want to know about anything, just get your work done. Or come here let's laugh, let's hang out.
CJ Infantino:So I had this experience and I and I started to isolate where I was like I will cry, in the car, in the shower, I will cry alone. You know, like my nightly routine was just I get in bed, put on music and I just cried. And I kind of still do that a little bit right now, but that, like that, became my routine. So it took years, a couple of years, to find those people. Like I had to actively go into spaces to where those people might exist, where I'm like, okay, they're safe, they're safe, they're not.
CJ Infantino:And once I found them, yeah, like I held on to them and it did. It did shrink in the sense that there are just a few that I'm willing to show up completely like raw and, hey, I need help. It's a little bit of a weird thing to say because I'm very open in public and my writing and all social media, but, like, I still have a reserve of emotions that are only for specific people in my life and the very few emotions that are only for specific people in my life and the very few. So I do have kind of this like ring, these rings of people where you know there's maybe two or three that I'm like when I'm really in it, I can go to them and they're going to know how to handle it and they're going to be willing to sit in it with me. That did shrink and then I've learned, maybe more so, the boundaries that I need to have with the different circles in my life more than anything, but it takes a lot of effort to find those people, but it's worth it.
Darleen Mahoney:You know, as a woman and not that I'm saying it's anything different than a man, but you always you know you're strong for your kids, you're strong for your family, you have to be strong. You know I'm the pack mule. When we go anywhere, I literally feel like I could not be damaged emotionally, I could not show it because I am woman. Hear me. War, I can do this, I can power through it.
Darleen Mahoney:You do carry, I think sometimes and not that men don't as well but you carry that burden on you so that you're not imposing it on other people. And you do kind of realize that the people in the circle of people that you're with especially, I think, as you get older, in general anyway, people that are really important, that you really have a connection to that are really your good friends, are the ones that you choose to spend time with and other people that are acquaintances. You'll do some stuff, but there's no like true commitment, no, no emotional attachment, even in friendships, when I think that you're not getting that in return and you can be, like you said, raw in front of your people that you're around.
CJ Infantino:So yeah, absolutely.
Darleen Mahoney:You know, you said you've mentioned therapy, so so, and you've been in therapy for a long time, do you feel like that that's a good solution and that? Is there a specific therapist that does better with grief, or just a general?
CJ Infantino:Yeah, another really good question. So I have done many, many modalities. I have a sister who's a therapist, so her and I are constantly talking about this stuff because it's such a big interest of mine and obviously hers. I think it depends on the person. Now I have opinions of what I think is super helpful or based on my experience and then the different supporting things around that as well.
CJ Infantino:So one of the most effective therapies that I have participated in, especially for my grief, is called somatic therapy. It's becoming more well known, I think, now, but what it is is it's the body work, so it's all felt sense as opposed to talk therapy. So there's different meditations, different exercises. It's just a different way of working with emotion, because one book that I know almost everybody who's ever done therapy probably knows is the Body Keeps the Score, and it's so true that our bodies hold on to that trauma and it holds on to everything that we go through. And for me, what drove me to it was two things. One we're talking about like finding these spaces In addition to therapy. I needed to find a space where I can process my grief and have others who can support me in it, and those are really hard to find, like extremely hard to find, that are safe spaces.
Darleen Mahoney:So have you looked at like support groups? I feel like, especially for our listeners who are like a little bit older, taking care of their family that's a little bit older and having that support, yeah.
CJ Infantino:I think there are really hard to find good ones, but I think they're extremely useful and necessary Because oftentimes at least what I found specifically with younger widows and widowers is the groups either weren't productive in the sense that there wasn't, we weren't all wanting to go in the direction of healing, so they can get a little bit maybe just a little bit off track. And then you also need to have somebody who can lead it, who has able to keep very strong boundaries with the group. Right, because oftentimes you know, for whatever reason, you can have an individual who wants to consume the space in the group in a way that's very unhealthy for the group. Right, it's not about the group anymore, it becomes about that individual or setting clear intentions, becomes about that individual or setting clear intentions. So, like I've been in a lot of different types of groups where experiencing like this is the intention of what we're doing here, to make sure that we're all on the same page Like if you can't show up into a group, even in a friendship of like, here's the clear intentions and boundaries and the things that we want to experience in this relationship and in group is just a relationship, then things can go off track very quickly. So I think having those agreements together in any form of a relationship or any group, is absolutely necessary for productive healing and kind of having that shared experience. So I do think that they are very useful, but go into it with this expectation of watching for these agreements being set, this intention being set, and if you feel that the group is not serving you, it is 100% okay to leave and go find a group that will.
CJ Infantino:So I ended up finding this specific men's group where I knew the leader for years and years. We did a conference together and I just randomly was like I'm going to go. He just opened up the in-person groups in Texas after the pandemic and at that point I was like if I don't do something, I'm never going to come out of this. So I went and I won't go into all the details, but it was my first experience doing somatic therapy. There's the leader that I knew and then this, this old, older gentleman who specialized in and it was four days and it was the most intense weekend of my entire life. It was literally like 40 years of therapy in four days and it like completely shifted the space that I was allowing for my grief and it was so so, so, so, so, intense. But out of that I met a couple of men, one of which I'm extremely close with now, who is always there when I need who I can be like, hey, this is exactly what's happening and he understands how to handle it. So that was my first entry into it. And then I found somebody locally where I live right now and I worked with her for a year.
CJ Infantino:And the reason why I went to somatic therapy is because there was this disconnect between me and my body. So, like I mentioned, I had this like horrible or have this horrible health anxiety. It is getting better. The problem was I only saw my body as a thing to kill me. So I was completely disconnected. And when you're disconnected from your body, like you are no longer like feeling, you're just like have this weird, either anxious attachment to it or or something, and I was like I need to, I need to get back into it. That's what somatic therapy did for me. It allowed me to process this grief, it allowed me to experience these wildly vivid imagery and, like it was, every session was so profound and like life-changing for me. It was unreal and I loved it. I loved every minute of it. It was hard, it was painful but it was. It was incredible, so that that was huge. And I did that along with just your normal either talk therapy or CBT or DBT and all those things. So those were in the and then the support groups, like those are kind of the the mix of things that I've did.
CJ Infantino:There's other things that I've been trying now this thing called biofield tuning, and that's been really really interesting because the idea is our bodies are mechanical, electrical and chemical right, but we're typically only dealing with the mechanical and chemical. Biofield works on your electric field, so the electricity that keeps everything going and all of that. And it's a little bit esoteric, it's a little bit out there, but I'm game to try anything. I'm always experimenting to see, like, what resonates and what doesn't, and this has been pretty effective. I've been doing it for three months now.
CJ Infantino:So I would just say, like, try as much as you're have access to and what resonates with you, and just don't stop. And if something's not working, it's okay to be like this isn't working, maybe it will later, like, maybe that's not what you need now, but like, keep trying, keep exploring and understand what is it that's presenting? How is grief presenting in you? Right, like you mentioned, you have a lot of people who are caregivers to older folks. Like that's still intense grief and you're still watching a human go through this suffering and that will have an impact on you. So, like, pay attention to where is that presenting in your body and in your mind and then figure out okay, well, how can I plug in something that might work on that specific thing and be willing to go into the depths of that and you'll come out. You'll come out stronger and you'll come out a different version of yourself.
Darleen Mahoney:So I have two points, well, actually maybe three. It's called sympathetic, is that what you said?
CJ Infantino:Somatic S-O-M-A-T-I-C. I believe you spell it yeah.
Darleen Mahoney:I'm going to definitely check that out and that's primarily a physical type therapy.
CJ Infantino:Yeah, I mean you're talking, but then you're doing body work, so it could be meditations where you're sinking in your body. Yeah, there's just different exercises they do yeah.
Darleen Mahoney:Well, that makes sense because you know one thing I mentioned that it takes a physical, like emotional, like toll on your insides, but it definitely can take such a physical toll, so releasing whatever that does. I'm not an expert by any means, but I do know that even with me, just exercising or honestly walking or running can absolutely clear my head and put me in a totally different mind space. And that's just in a general setting. You know you had mentioned why you're taking care of a senior that you know maybe experiencing health problems or cognitive decline is one of the biggest ones. You experience grief.
Darleen Mahoney:We did a podcast not that long ago, experiencing grief with those still living, and it was a podcast that we honestly had started out and it was supposed to be about something totally different. And then we started talking about that and I had, like, this flow of emotion come through me because I did not realize it but I experienced that I did not know that's what it was, because you see the person that you knew prior to being sick or having cognitive issues or whatever the case may be, and they're leaving, that person's not existing anymore and so you're grieving that process because you can't fix it and it's still continuing and I think that that's so important to acknowledge that it's okay and to acknowledge that that exists, because I didn't know that it was a thing and then I realized it really and truly is, and I'm sure that you experienced that significantly with your wife as she was declining.
CJ Infantino:Yeah, anticipatory grief, it's definitely a real thing.
Darleen Mahoney:Anticipatory grief. There you go, it has a name.
CJ Infantino:Yeah, absolutely yeah, it's hard. It's hard to watch, it's hard to watch the human spirit leave a body. Yeah, and that's what's happening. You know, like every step of the way, I was losing a piece of the woman that I was in love with and I had to relearn. How do you like relearn to? You know, our, our marriage and our relationship had to constantly be redefined every step of the way. You know, over the past, over the five and a half years. So, yeah, for sure it's hard.
Darleen Mahoney:And how frustrating for her, because I'm sure she was having physical issues that forbid her from doing the things that she wanted to do Get up, make lunch for the kids, do whatever. She wasn't able to do those things and that's just. That's got to be just a heartbreaking thing to experience, but also to watch.
CJ Infantino:Yeah, 100%.
Darleen Mahoney:Well, before we sign off, is there anything else that you wanted to share that you feel like would be beneficial to those that are experiencing? You know, the grief with someone still living and or post? I mean, it's been some time since your wife passed away and you're still working through it, and that's absolutely not abnormal.
CJ Infantino:That's right. Yeah, it's not.
Darleen Mahoney:So I think it's important to acknowledge that, that.
CJ Infantino:So I think it's important to acknowledge that. Yeah, I would say give yourself grace, and by that I mean don't worry about forgiving yourself, or that you're beating yourself up, or that you're experiencing weird emotions or that you have these crazy thoughts that come into your mind, because watching somebody fade away from you and then losing them is going to take you down many, many, many paths, you know emotionally, spiritually, physically, and all of that's okay, as long as you can continue to show up for yourself. And the best definition of resilience because I hated that word, absolutely hated it and when people would tell me you're strong, you're so resilient, I would push back and it would infuriate me, and my therapist at the time gave me the best reframe ever, and it was resilience is showing up every day, in whatever capacity you have. And I think if you can be willing to show up every day for yourself and for your loved ones, in whatever capacity you have, and understand that this is a journey and that things will change and things that you once thought were true might not be true and like it will continue to morph and change, and you will find your way if you allow yourself to keep being honest and keep showing yourself love and keep showing yourself kindness in all of the things that you're going to go through and just know that you have to confront your grief.
CJ Infantino:And it's also okay if you don't want to right away. Like there's so many people that I've interviewed. They're like it took me 20 years, it took me five years, it took me 10 years, it took me two years. I didn't want anything to do with it. That's also normal and that's also okay. It's okay Like it's hard. You just went through something horrific. Why would you want to continue experiencing that? It makes sense to numb out, but give yourself that grace to know that this is your journey and it doesn't have to look like anybody else's.
Darleen Mahoney:That's perfect, it's your journey. Thank you so much for joining us today. Cj on this podcast.
CJ Infantino:Yeah, thanks for having me.
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