In this episode, I sit down with two fabulous and funny podcast hosts, Anita Coyle and Mel Shore, founders of the Widow We Do Now? podcast. They share their experiences of widowhood, both the parts that are isolating and pieces that have lifted them up. How might you help a friend who is newly widowed after a long period as a caregiver? Or a coworker who loses a partner suddenly? What about if someone wasn’t legally married, but intended to spend their life with someone, who then dies? What the heck is the word for that? We all need education in this area, to better understand ourselves and to be better prepared to offer support to others.

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Transcript:

Hi, I am Diane Hullett, and you’re listening to the Best Life Best Death podcast, and today, very excitedly. My guests are two other podcasters, so Anita Coyle and Mel Shore, who have a podcast called Wait for It Widow, we do now. You can’t go wrong with that kind of title. So welcome Anita and Mel. You know, I got your name from Jennifer O’Brien and she said this was a real resource for her in her experience of being a widow.

And there’s so much I think about losing a partner that is just incredibly isolating and also incredibly has the potential for incredible community around it. That’s what I’m seeing in the work I do of, you know, observing kind of from the out. Side, because I’m not widowed at this point. So tell me, you know, introduce yourselves, how’d you get into this work and this podcast, and what brought you here?

We had husbands that died and then I met Anita and forced her to start a podcast and I said, if you show up, I’ll edit and behold she named it widow. We do now and here we are. How many years has it been? Five. Wow that we’ve been podcasting. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. So husbands died before then. And there’s also this great backstory that you grew up seven houses apart from each other, but didn’t know each other because you know when your children two years age, differences like the moon.

So obviously you didn’t know each other, but then you reconnected. Yeah. And Anita had really scary hair and I was scared of her. And I’m the younger of the two, so, but. Mel ran into my mailbox with her car once, so really I should have been scared of her. Well, and really, wait a minute. I thought Mel was the one who always had changing hair colors.

So pot kettle Mel’s husband died before mine. So in 2018, is that right Mel? Scott, stop. My husband 2017. We always have to ask each other. Oh yeah. My husband died in November of 2017. We had been married almost two years and he, why? How did he die? Now? You gotta talk. He to talk. Gotta tell people. Oh, okay.

For the people who are interested, the way that Scott died is he went to have a tonsillectomy and a deviated septum surgery for sleep apnea. Three days later he died while we’re covering. So there you go. It was super shocking. Infection or just, Nope, not even, just nobody knows. It says hypo hypoxia on the death certificate.

So he stopped breathing. Wow. Mel, what a shock. And you were, you were how old? Not very, I was 35 when he died and he was 39. Amazing. Yeah. And Anita, what about you? So. My husband died in 2019, so Mel’s about a year and. Three or four months ahead of me in the widow journey. And my husband just dropped dead one day.

A sudden cardiac death was swimming laps in his heart, decided it didn’t wanna participate in this life anymore. So I was also a sudden death widow and had no reason to expect that to be part of my life. Unlike Mel, I was married for almost 20 years. So we have four kids. So Mel and I share a lot of.

Similar experiences, but then also we have vastly different experiences in widowhood as well. So, right. Yours was a longer marriage and had kids that you had to and navigate all that with. But on the other hand, I can imagine Mel’s, I mean, it would’ve felt just unbelievably lonely. Just like, wait, wait, we just barely got this off the ground.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it was my second marriage because. My first marriage was when I was 19 ish, 20, and that didn’t work out at all. So then I was single for, for a while I think 10 or 12 years or something. So nothing had worked out dating wise and I was getting ready to be done with the whole thing. And then here comes Scott, this great guy.

Everything. Found a place we get married. Then he dies. Thanks a lot. Oh geez. And on your podcast, are your guests mainly widows or other grief oriented people? Yeah, we, we generally speak to people who are widowed and we have a broad kind of definition of widow. There are a lot of people who will find that some groups won’t count you if you were not actually married with a piece of paper, so, or L-G-B-T-Q or you know, all sorts of different.

Experiences. We try and gather everybody together into that terrible title, but widowed people. And then sometimes grief professionals will talk to them too. You must hear a huge range of stories. I mean, I’ve, I’ve spoken with a couple of widows, I know a few people who’ve created, you know, kind of communities around that.

And, and it, it, it is just, it is a club. Seems like such a cheesy way to say it, but it’s, it is a, it is a. Transition that either you have stepped over that or you have not. And I love that inclusive kind of definition. The, the one that Jennifer O’Brien and I were talking about was this, you know, naming like the person you intend to spend the rest of your life with.

Like, that’s your partner. If that person dies, then you’re widowed. I think there’s no other, there is no other good word for it. It should be like. You know the Eskimos in snow, there should be like 50 words for the different types of widows, but so far there aren’t. We had a contest actually about that because there were so many people who had lost their partner, but they weren’t technically married or say they had even been together way longer than Scott and I who were legally married had been.

So we had a a poll and we’re like, what do you want to be called? And let’s all. Let’s all submit some names and we had some really good and, and funny and kinda kind of cute names and they eventually, the audience came up with Unwto. Oh yeah, that’s good. I’m Unwto. Yeah. Yeah, that works. So, I mean, really only makes sense in terms of our listeners and our podcast since, you know, we’re not the whole entire world, but for those that not yet are a part of it yet?

Not yet. Not yet. Well, yeah. The weird thing is, is that we kind of hope that we’re not, you know, we have this really strange podcast premise where we’re like, we hope you don’t need to listen to us. Right? We hope we’re not popular, because then that means that you have experienced the worst thing, right?

That you can imagine. Right. And I think we have this sort of weird thing of like, like widow, like, oh, they’re over 70 and they’re gray haired and like this little old lady. And obviously that’s just not the case, unfortunately. Yeah, I was 38 and Mel was 35. So both in our thirties. We’ve had people in our group though that are in their twenties.

And then we also, we embrace people who are in their sixties and seventies as well. It’s just everybody has a different path in widowhood and we’re just here for all of ’em. Yep. And that’s how we started is because I know from my experience, I didn’t know anybody that had gone through anything remotely like what I had.

And so I just kept observing what was going on in my life and was like, what is this? This is so weird. Like there, this is doesn’t happen. And then Anita became widowed and we started texting and we had the same kind of kind of dark humor about things and observations, and that’s how we ultimately.

Started the podcast. Yeah. Finding someone who, who not just sort of empathizes, but like a hundred percent gets it and then kinda have a dark edge to it. Now, now you found a soulmate and a podcast cohost. Right. We also termed something for each other. We called widow wives because we both had gone through the same thing.

So we’re like, we’re not married, obviously, ’cause our, our person is dead, but we connect on this level that nobody else can. And so we had kind of become a support system. I love widow wives. Like a work boss or like, yeah, I’ve got my deaf colleague wives. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one of our listeners actually, after we started the podcast, she emailed us and she said, I’m really jealous.

I want a widow wife. And so then that pushed us into starting a Facebook group called The Widow Wives Club. And when you said. The term club wasn’t a good term, but our little tagline for that is the the club with the most outrageous membership fee and it’s the death of your, your partner. So now we have a, a worldwide.

Facebook kind of support group for all of our widow wives, and they’re men in there too, so don’t get confused. Mm-hmm. That, that’s incredible. That was, I was gonna ask you about that, about community. I mean, I think one of the reasons people start podcasts is because they feel they have a voice to speak to a wider community, and clearly you found that with each other and then had the opportunity to kind of say, this might go bigger.

So, yeah. So then you’ve built a community on Facebook and what’s, what’s that community like now? They’re amazing actually. I learned so much from them. It’s really interesting to kind of watch the ebbs. You know, people will come in as we call ’em baby, you know, widow babies. They’ve just barely lost their spouse or their partner.

They come in, they’re just like, help me. And then you kind of watch over time and then they turn around and then they are helping the new widow babies and they’re saying, oh, this is what I did in that situation. And of course you feel that way and, and. You know, keep going. You’re doing a good job. And this is hard.

And just like a lot of validation and help and empathy and there’s something so powerful at being with a group of people who, you know. Get it because the world at large, when you talk about it, they can, they can try, they can try and step in those shoes, but you just can’t until you’ve done it. So even though everybody’s circumstances are different, you know that everybody there has paid that same membership price and, and gets it.

Yeah, I first had that experience with an adoption group. My kids are adopted and you know, there are just simply things that people who have an adopted child or they’re an adult adoptee, there’s just like a shorthand for that. That’s just different than anybody else. So I can talk to other parents, I can talk to a friend who are, you know, sympathetic or empathetic, but it is not the same.

So I know the value of that kind of community that really, really gets it. It’s so valuable and I, I sometimes think like. What did people do before Facebook? You know, before the internet, I guess maybe you would’ve had a, if you were lucky, you stumbled on a friend in town that you could have coffee with, something like that.

Or maybe at retirement centers, but you wouldn’t have been hanging around there. So how would that have made any sense? So the fact that now we can create communities, I mean. I just, I always encourage listeners to find a community and if you look for a community and you don’t see one that suits, you find a different one because there are so many different angles out there, and some of them have dark humor like yours.

Right. It’s interesting because we have a couple friends from Sweden, Norway, that area of the world, and those countries are not known for. Going out into the wild and reaching out for, you know, and starting communities and, and doing things like that with regard to stuff like widowhood. And so we asked one of our friends who lives there, how in the world did you cope before you found people on the internet like us?

Like surely you’ve gotta have people around you. And she’s like, no, it’s only the internet. Because I mean, if you go to your a church, like, she’s like, I’m not a church goer, but. If there’s a church and if I go there, then it’s probably just the old people, no offense to the old people, but she was in her thirties and she’s like, I’ve been looking for people my own age.

And so widowhood is so interesting because it doesn’t discriminate and does not. Have anything to do with your location. Like you can be as remote, you know, as Sweden up at the top, where you could be somewhere like New York City and there’s a, you know, maybe a higher rate of widows. And so it’s not something that’s necessarily easy to find.

In physical proximity. Yeah. Yeah. Really. I don’t know how people did it before. I think they probably just kept their mouth shut and were like, I’ll just grieve alone and wear black. That’s, that’s why they wore the like black costumes, you know? They were like, leave me alone. I’ve that made talk to tell you.

Yeah. I always thought that made a lot of sense. I thought, yeah, the, the old Greek fisher women, they, they had the thing where black for a year whale. I mean, I don’t know, there’s something about we’re, we’re missing those kind of like clear cut rituals that say this happened to me. Right. And I think that’s a thing about it.

Like, you go, you go to the gym or you go to the grocery store in your normal clothes and your husband just died after a tonsillectomy. Like, are you kidding me? So how do we. I don’t know single that like we’re a badge or a No, we, we have fix that. We have shirts. We have shirts that say, be nice. My husband is dead.

And I wear that anytime I have to go to the airport with my four kids and get them to security. ’cause I’m just like everybody back off like this is hard. Leave me. Leave me alone. And it’s kind of funny ’cause people are like, I don’t, I don’t know what to do with that information that I’m seeing. Are you serious?

You know, on the shirt we have other shirts. Can I laugh at that? Yeah. Or should I cry or should I walk away slowly? Right. That’s so, but you’re like, just put it on the shirt, man. Just say it because this is hard. And you don’t want people to be like, oh, she’s lost control of those kids. Or, oh, where’s the man who’s taking care of things?

I have lost control of those kids. Yes, absolutely. And it’s also interesting too, because. No matter what you do, somebody is going to be judgmental about it. And so even the fact that we might say I’m a widow, you, you get some pushback from that no matter what. And people have an opinion on if you’re grieving the right way or wrong way, or how long you should be doing that.

And so you’re kind of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. So might as well wear the shirt. Might as well wear the shirt. I know there’s a, there’s a great woman in this field named Dana Frost who has a project called the Forest Joy Project. Yep. And she said she went to, maybe it was a church or something in a widow’s group.

And they were, they like, they were kind of. The whole subject of sex came up and it was very complex and she was like, I’m in my thirties, or I think she was, and she was like, I’m definitely having sex again. So like, this is not the place for me if we can’t just talk about that. So very, very different needs at different ages and for different people.

Yeah, absolutely. We know Dana Dana’s been on our podcast, so Small, small Widow world. Yeah, small widow world. And religion comes up often too. ’cause you know, a lot of people rely on their faith to help get them through. Or some people, their relationship with their faith changes after they’ve become widowed because they’re like, well, how come I didn’t get my miracle?

Or some that we have in our group are atheists and, and we’ve tried to make our space. For everybody. And so we, we kind of try to not monitor that like sensor and say, you can’t say this or you can’t say that. But we really try to make it an equal playing field. So it’s like this is, look at these similarities that we all have.

How can we support each other regardless of background, right. Regardless of the differences. ’cause there’s those two and everyone is so unique. I’m also reminded of, when you talked about the t-shirt, there’s a video that I always reference, which is. A street scene with people walking down the street like in a big city, New York or Chicago or Salt Lake or whatever.

People are walking down the street and you’re looking at this street scene with all these pedestrians, and then it changes and it’s the same scene, but everyone is wearing a t-shirt that says who they lost. Hmm. Right. My father, my sister, my two best friends, like whatever it is, and it gave me such a great visual.

I’m super visual, so I just love that visual that we’re all walking around with grief. And it’s unseen most of the time. But what happens when we illuminate it and name it and some people back away? As you said, some people are incredibly uncomfortable and some people lean in. But as a society we just, we just don’t know what to do with it.

Yeah. You’re, you’re totally right. And nowadays I lean in to that. If I know somebody has lost a person, you know, I ask them, tell me about them. What’s their name? You know, I’m not as guarded as I used to be. But on the flip side of that, people expect that once you have experienced loss, that you know what to say.

And it’s not true. Like it’s still hard to say the right thing. Mel and I both agree that you should. Try, try something, you know, and knowing that you’re probably not gonna say the right thing. ’cause there there isn’t a right thing. Everybody’s so different. But I, I, yeah, it, you just feel like I should be better at this by now.

But you’re still not, it still is uncomfortable and it still takes some effort to try and engage and do it in a meaningful and sensitive way. And also I think the thing that I’ve noticed is the quote, best way to try and help somebody is to really work on your own intuition and empathy so that then you can be receptive to however that person that is in need of help might respond, but it’s trial and error.

Like you could offend someone so hard if you, you know, just say, how are you today? I can’t believe they asked me how I’m doing. You know, of course I’m not. Okay. And it’s like, I get it. Totally get it. Yeah. Someone just said to me the other day that they were in some situation and they said, well, I just don’t know what to say to her.

And I said, say anything. I said, you can, you can’t just, just what you’re saying, just lean in and say something, reach out in some way. You can’t make the wrong gesture. The only wrong gesture is backing up. I don’t know what to say. When somebody has a, a huge life event like this and. Right. Right now with the world as it is, you have digital media, which you can send to people.

You can send a text, which means you don’t have to walk to their house, you don’t have to see them. So I, there’s kind of no excuse for not reaching out. ’cause reaching out could just be sending a text and if someone doesn’t respond, that’s okay. And if you wanna do something more, you could drop something on their doorstep if you’re around them, but you still don’t have to see them.

So if you’re scared, there are things you can do to kind of facilitate your, your fear, I guess. And then there’s everything from that, from people just going into other people’s houses and saying, I’m doing the dishes. Deal with it. Go take a nap. Right. The other thing that pops in my head, like it’s really, it’s sort of both directions.

I think that the grievers don’t always know what to say or how to reach out, and the people outside of that don’t know what to say or how to reach out. What, what gets in the way of grieving men or women or whatever. Reaching out and looking for community, whether online or in person, fatigue, feeling like a burden.

Yeah, exhaustion beyond belief, like beyond fatigue. I know that that’s for some, for some people, and then some people don’t want to be called a widow. They have really strong feelings about the label, so I think just depends on the level of acceptance and maybe how comfortable or familiar people are with technology.

I know for me, I’m not a joiner of things, and so I don’t know if I would join a group. If I weren’t running a group, right. If you hadn’t started it, you wouldn’t be in it. So yeah, and that’s something that’s actually been really fascinating to learn through this process in interviewing all of our, our widowed friends and experts.

I’m an introvert and I like to spend time being away from people and kind of collecting my energy back. Not that I don’t love people, it just takes some something from me, but I’ve. Been surprised and also kind of annoyed at myself that the thing that helps the most is community. And it’s true all the research points there and personal experience, so they’re super important.

So even if people don’t think they’re a joiner of something, I. I suggest trying it. You can lurk or creep around if you want, but it might help just, you know, if you don’t wanna interact, you can at least see how other people are doing. Yeah. Or just knowing that other people exist in that same space is sometimes helpful too.

But like Mel said, sometimes it’s a bandwidth issue, like I’ve got all of these things I need to do and how do I prioritize and how do I use my energy? And also my brain isn’t working. How do you know? How do I find my way into a group? How do I even know I need that, that that needs to be the priority now?

It’s just very, very messy in, especially in the beginning. Yeah. There’s no clear path about what you should be doing and how you should be doing it. And the beginning has no timeframe on it, like the beginning for whatever your beginning is. Right, right. Yeah. Wow. What do, what do you wish you knew before this happened?

Gosh. I, I wish I just bought pre shredded cheese from the get go. ’cause I was shredding my own cheese. And honestly, like, quite honestly, that happened. Somebody bought me a. Bag of shredded cheese, and I was like, why have I been doing this the hard way my whole life? So that’s, you know, that’s the biggest takeaway for me.

Yeah, that’s big. I, I bought some pretty chopped onions yesterday, I think 3 99 and oh, I was so happy when I just dumped those into the pan and started making soup. I was like, that was worth every penny of those $4 to get those paid. It would’ve taken me, gosh, at least three minutes to check. I know. I know.

Mm-hmm. But honestly, it’s really interesting because I go back to my life before and I try to kind of extrapolate where I would be now if I was on that same trajectory and I’ve lost, I can’t anymore. I’m so much different. On such a different path than I was when my husband was alive, that it’s like I’m a completely different person and the old person’s not coming back, and I never can get back on that path.

Like it’s not, no matter how many left turns I take, I’m not coming back to that path. And it’s just a new, it’s a new path and it’s a new me and it’s a new family of ours and, and it, it’s not a bad one now. It used to be one that didn’t feel happy at all, but. We’re getting there. That’s, that’s like this whole other loss, right?

You lose your partner, you lose your beloved, you lose the guy you like, and you also lose what was potential in that relationship and what was in you, like the trajectory you were on just takes a fork and it’s never the same that, that strikes me as a loss. That kind of keeps on giving. Yeah. I think the things that I wish I had known was.

To talk to my husband and say, will you get life insurance? That would’ve been great. I didn’t. We didn’t have any. And so I was left with a couple of hospital bills ’cause he was outta state when he died. Like two funeral homes, all this stuff. And you don’t talk about those things when you’re 35 and 38.

But you know, now I’m the missionary for everybody get life insurance. And then I wish that I had known that there was. Such extreme exhaustion and that that’s normal and that there would be secondary losses. People who don’t wanna be part of your life. People who might say harmful things when they think they’re just trying to be helpful.

And then I choose to have them not part of my life, or just what you don’t realize is you, it’s not just the person. Has died and everything stays the same. Everything’s a system. And so one person being, I guess, kind of deleted from that, it shifts everything else. And the only, the only thing that everybody has in common is that that person is out of their lives, but all the relationships are relative to that.

So everything changes like the, the. Dead person’s friends and then maybe your friends or the family and in-law things, it’s really, really tricky and I think a lot of people are blindsided by, by that. We’ve had a lot of kind of heartbreaking stories of, of those things happening with in some of our widow community stories.

So it’s a thing that happens and some people are like, I wish I had known that there was more loss than just my person. From the death of my person. Yeah. Yeah. I love that you named it really like every relationship touched by that person changes. So your husband’s mother had a huge loss, but you and her just had like a short relationship in some ways.

Right? And so yeah, all those relationships shifting and changing. Ha. Well, what other resources are there that you have come across that you really like? Obviously the Widow We do Now podcast and the Widow we do now community except, wait, what’s it called on Facebook? Widow Wives Club. Widow Wives Club.

Yeah. Love it. Something that Mel and I have really had a lot of fun doing is they have Camp Widow, which is like, you know, scout camp for widows, but way better. There’s no sleeping intents. Those are held soaring Spirits International is a group that puts those on, and that’s been really fantastic.

We recommend that to a lot of people. There are, there are other resources that are more local, but that’s a, a big kind of national one that a lot of people have access to. And if people are looking for. Books My favorite so far book about grieving is by Dr. Lucy Hohn and before her daughter died in a car accident, she was already a researcher on resilience and grieving.

So she had already had a lot of of the tools, but then here she is living her worst nightmare of her daughter being killed. And a lot of the things and the ways that she puts things down in her book really it resonates with, with a broken mind, I guess, you know, when you’re going through those things. So that’s something that’s helpful.

And also if people are not quite sure of what’s going on with their own brain and body, this is like a little academic sounding, but the body keeps the score. Best book. It’s a hard read if your brain is broken and, and the audio book is not fun either. But the information in there is super helpful because it helps you realize different people’s responses to trauma and grief, and it helps you to not think you’re that crazy.

I mean, we’re all crazy, let’s be honest. But, but it’s like, oh, okay. This is a response. And that really for me, has helped me to be more in tune with my body. Something that was. For me, also kind of annoying to learn is how important yoga and all of the calming down meditations are. And it’s true, your body has gone through so much stress.

So anything out there that I would say people can, can kind of connect to. I like yoga with Adrian. But anything that gets your body calm down. You know, there’s not just one specific channel or or person, but those kinds of things are so important and take it from somebody who likes to be like high key all the time and like, go do action sports.

It’s like your body will tell you years later, I’m going through it right now, and just listen to your body. All the time. That’s, that’s so good, Mel. I think that’s a really interesting one. Both the body keeps the score and this, this idea that we are so inundated and dysregulated most of the time in our speedy so-called productive culture.

And so tapping into those quieter spaces and finding out what that feels like rather than operating at this high key thing of either. I like to be busy, so I’m numbing myself out or I’m going fast so I don’t have to go there, or whatever the thing is. Like that’s really, those are really powerful. What was the first na, the name of the first book, if you remember?

Resilient, grieving by Dr. Lucy. Hone, resilient, grieving, fabulous. Those are, those are such good resources. I also found the. Body keeps the scorebook kind of a slog. I don’t know why it’s a slog, because the information in it was so fascinating and I think about that book probably often, you know, once a week at least it comes up in some way.

But interesting that it, it’s a bit of a slog to get through and yet. Once you understand it, you have a different relationship to those high key and low key moments. And the extreme fatigue of grieving, I think is a great thing to underscore for people. ’cause people do, I, I know one friend about a year after her loss, she know, she was saying, I don’t know what’s wrong with me still.

And she just still had grief brain. Yeah. A lot of times when people go through a super shocking and sudden loss, like Anita and I have, it’s hard sometimes to focus your eyes and read on stuff or to retain. And so by the time I started reading, body Keeps the score. I think I was so driven by finding information to explain whatever I was dealing with, and sometimes that meant.

For one day, I only read one paragraph and I had to start it over four times. I actually took notes like I guess you would in college, which I never took notes in college. I’m a musician, whatever. But I, I kind of approached it that way and just that feedback to myself of like. Trying to comprehend the information, writing it down and kind of having some of it soak in, you know, a lot of it’s left me, I have to go, go back and read it.

That helps you to heal. So kind of can be pulling double duty, giving you information that you might not retain, but also helping you kind of, kind of get those systems kind of in order with your body and your brain, even naming what you went through as a trauma. Right, because I think sometimes we get stuck in like, trauma is certain things.

That was trauma. That was a huge trauma. That kind of sudden news. Probably any sudden death is a trauma ’cause it’s just fast. Yeah. I found out on text message, which I do not recommend, I. Don’t anybody ever do that. That’s my PSA thanks ever, ever, ever. Nope. We, and we also, you know, this, you bring up a sudden death versus a long-term death, and we’ve had many discussions about, you know, which one is better And there isn’t, there isn’t a better one.

But I think how we’ve kind of come to categorize it is, is that there’s, there’s like a certain amount of pain that you’re gonna go through with a death, and it’s going to either be. You’re gonna have it for a long period of time, kind of doled out in small teaspoon increments, or you’re gonna have it thrown in your face all at once.

And so both of you are gonna ultimately have the same amount of awfulness. It’s just gonna be how, it’s, how it’s given to you, whether it’s all at once or you know, a little bit of the time, whether it’s hydrated out a bit and Yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah, even at the end, even if you have had a long-term illness, people are also like, well, okay, I thought I was prepared.

Then I was not prepared. And then they get, you know, a big blast of that pain also. Yeah, I think there’s, that seems like real truth. You sort of think you’re ready, but you’re never ready for that last breath. Yeah. Oh well. Okay. The last breath. Aw. Tell us again how people can find out about you. So we’re on all the podcast platforms, widow, we do now, and then the Widow Wives Club is on Facebook.

We are very, what’s the right word? Protective. And so we make people prove that they’re a widow to get into our group. So we ask them questions and if you don’t answer ’em, you’re not getting in. Just don’t be offended. We just are trying to be protective. Sometimes Nigerian princes apply, so that’s why we have to really highly monitor and we have a team of widowed people that helps us with those things.

And sometimes, you know it, it’s hard because the person who actually is a widow, we’re like, Hey, Kay, here are the things that we require. And sometimes that’s too much at the time. So some, you know, we’ll work with people if they’re having a hard time. Feels like a little bit of a barrier, but it’s intended to be a gatekeeper with good reason.

Yeah. You dont put the Nigerian princess in there fishing around. Yeah. Right. No, thank you. Exactly. Exactly. Well, I love that you’ve been podcasting for five years and that you, you know, you’re truly difficult life experiences brought you together and you’ve just made something profound out of it that can touch other people.

That’s really, really powerful. I. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Trite words, you know, they’re trite words, but they’re real. We have no better way. We do not. Well, thanks so much for joining me. You’ve been listening to the Best Life Best Death podcast. As always, you can find out more about the work I do at Best Life.

Best death.com. Thanks so much for listening.