CHAPTER 1

MY STORY

This is a love story about two people. You may know people just like them, or you might be just like them. It is the story of how these two people loved each other with all their hearts and together faced the hardest thing they had ever faced: a cancer diagnosis with a terminal prognosis. Join Marty (my wife) and Marv (that’s me) in our race to savor each day and all it had to offer. Come along on our journey as we faced the hard stuff head-on, while keeping love and joy alive.

Walk with me while I share stories, experiences and insights from my own tremendous loss and deeply-felt grief process. Learn what I have learned, some of which is conventional but some that is decidedly unconventional—and all of which is, hopefully, inspirational. Come along to explore your own resiliency to recover from loss and what it means to live a full life while staying aware of the impermanence of all that we know.

In each chapter, our deeply wise grief counselor, Carol GoldfainDavis, tells us what is most important to know about each challenge we face during and after a loss. From her years as a grief counselor, she offers practical wisdom for how we can build, access and restore the resiliency we tap into each time we experience a loss. She gives us guidance on how we can move from loss through grief and how to recover to fully embrace life once again.

WHAT DID I BRING?

What did I bring to the experience of Marty’s cancer and death? I brought an open heart wildly in love with Marty. We had been together for eighteen years when we got the phone call telling us that she had cancer, and that it had metastasized in her brain and bones. We had lived together with a commitment to share everything, hold nothing back, face reality no matter what it was. We built a successful business, parented children from previous marriages, and practiced Zen meditation and mindfulness.

I came from a normal, albeit dysfunctional, family. My home was in a rural part of Iowa, just outside a small county seat town in the middle of cornfields. Both of my sets of grandparents, and most of their friends, were farmers. My parents were typical depression-era children who grew up with a sense of scarcity and an overwhelming, primary focus on economic security.

I remember sitting in my chair at the lunch table and my Mom telling me how much money a particular family had. In my own childlike way—I was about seven years old at the time—I asked why that was important. She replied that the amount in your bank account was what you are worth. I asked if I was only worth $35 because that is all I had in my account. She said, ‘Yes.’

I was not like my family, nor was I liked by them. Even as a very young child I believed in the common humanity of everyone and rejected my family’s prejudices toward people who were different from us. The day I started kindergarten, I went to the water fountain to get a drink. My Mom told me not to touch it with my lips because an ‘Indian kid’ may have drunk from it. I knew all the way through my being that she was wrong to think that way.

I grew up with Native American kids and my best friend in junior and senior high was from the only African American family in the county. On trips, my family would find me talking with strangers no matter what they looked like. I loved people as a child. On a trip to New York City when I was four years old, my folks lost track of me in the hotel lobby. They found me speaking with a family from Spain. The family did not speak English and, of course, I didn’t speak Spanish. That happened often with me, and I could see that it embarrassed my family.

As a child, I overheard family members talking about me in terms that were so critical, I wondered if they might send me away. I was an outlier, to say the least, but I knew all along that the way I felt about people was right.

Overall, though, I had a decent childhood. I played outside every day. In the summers, I was out the door shortly after sunrise and back again after sunset, coming in and out of the screen door for meals. During high school, I played sports, took home 12 varsity letters, earned gas money working on farms and dated farmers’ daughters.

Growing up in small-town Iowa was a great experience. I hunted and fished, baled hay, and had great friendships. In that stable, rural setting I was witness to the cycles of life in the annual planting and harvesting of the crops, in livestock raised and sent on to become a food source, and in the lives of people, too. The cycle of life and the impermanence of life was everywhere and obvious. When I was in the second grade, two of my classmates, twins, were killed in a tractor accident. My grandparents passed away and I heard about the murders of Bobby and John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.

There were other hard parts. My brother, who was five years older than me, beat me up roughly once a week from the time I was five. I guess that is why I grew up fighting bullies. If there was someone bullying another kid of lesser strength, I intervened with fists flying. I was a tough kid and never lost those fights. As a consequence, I spent a good bit of time in the principal’s office at school. When I was fifteen and finally able to stand up to my brother, I stopped his bullying with a well-landed punch on his nose. I really hated bullies, and still do.

All of this led to a kind of inner strength and resiliency in the face of being ostracized and rejected. Somehow, I never saw myself as a victim, and I think that eliminated what could have been a serious barrier to inner strength.

I’d had failed marriages due to a lack of self-awareness, but I raised two wonderful children under those circumstances, had a successful 20-year career in government, and managed to earn an undergraduate degree in political science and economics and a graduate degree in theology. By the time Marty and I met, I had started practicing Zen meditation and done a lot of work on myself. I was ready for a successful relationship with an incredibly loving, intellectually and emotionally intelligent, wise and beautiful woman.

What I wasn’t prepared for was Marty dying from cancer. Cancer was the one bully that I could not defeat.

It was these notions—our common humanity, the impermanence of all living things, the urgency to live life fully and to face death as part of life—that had built my internal reservoir of resiliency to face Marty’s cancer and her certain death. Being loved so well by Marty Weidner for 19 years kept that reservoir full and overflowing.

We all face losses and the longer we live, the more of those losses we will experience. How we face and recover from them has everything to do with the health and vibrancy of the life we live.

Please join me as I tell you about the journey Marty and I shared and what I learned along the way about human resiliency in the face of great loss.

CHAPTER 1, COUNSELOR’S RESPONSE

In this chapter: Marv writes about his childhood and the years building his career and a family. He tells us about the bullying he experienced as a child, the rejection he felt by his family and about his failed marriages. We learn about the joy he experienced when he fell in love with Marty—only to lose her to cancer. Acknowledging the previous “losses” is part of the grieving process for his wife of 19 years.

Importance: Grief is cumulative. If we have losses from our past that are still unresolved and painful, it’s important to notice what those losses are. It will bring insight to our present situation to revisit them—with a trusted friend or a counselor—and specifically identify them. The helpfulness comes from seeing similarities in the feelings of sadness we hold for the past losses as they compare to the current events. These feelings feed into some seemingly simplistic but usually very powerful conclusions that create our beliefs.

Clinical insights: When we experience loss, our bodies react. Many symptoms of loss experienced throughout our lives can rest within our bodies for decades unaddressed but, as we experience consecutive similar events, we are sure to be reminded of sadness from our past. Triggers —familiar sights, sounds or feelings—can send us directly back to old, deep wounds. Your body may remind you through physical sensations.

“Common complaints include fatigue and inability to sleep well. . . . waking up at night and not being able to get back to sleep. The body also reacts to the fight by giving us signals, registering sensations that are symbols of the conflict that is ensuing.” Thomas Golden, Swallowed by a Snake.

This is particularly true of men. Grief affects the cognitive state, and men in particular report a decline in their capacity to concentrate and a loss of short term memory. Others experience their lowest levels of self-esteem.

Grief work is counter to the western way of thinking because it requires the griever to take time to pay attention to their feelings, to ‘hold on to’ those emotions, and to process the loss, usually while being required to return to work within a matter of days or a short week. The question for a grieving person is ‘Do you have the skills to manage the accumulation of emotions you’re feeling, especially if you are aware that you’re holding on to past losses, and can you regulate your response to sadness?’ The importance of this is in making sure the grieving person has the ability to remain safe and healthy.

Suggestions: Those of you experiencing loss now, allow...