In this episode, I chat with Jennifer O’Brien, author of The Hospice Doctor’s Widow: An Art Journal of Caregiving and Grief and also Care Boss. (More on that one in another episode!) This book is a deeply moving art journal that captures Jennifer’s experience as a caregiver during her husband Bob Lemberg’s ordeal with metastatic cancer. With digital collages, heartfelt reflections, and Bob’s insights as a hospice doctor himself, Jennifer shares her experience so that others can see a way in and through. We talk about the shifting nature of hope in end-of-life situations, the comfort that comes from shared experiences, and practical advice for caregivers. Beyond the book, Jennifer discusses the importance of community—through widow support groups and other connections—and how art helped her navigate the hardest moments of life and loss.

⁠http://jenniferaobrien.com⁠

⁠https://www.instagram.com/hospicedoctorswidow/⁠

⁠https://www.facebook.com/hospicedrswidow⁠

⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-o-brien-msod-a3b9491/⁠

⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtgYD1bAJ3igJKNtVb25c-Q⁠

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Diane Hullet and you’re listening to the Best Life, Best Death Podcast. Today I’m talking with Jennifer O’Brien, leader in the end of life field, writer, author, artist, so many things. Hi Jennifer, welcome. Hi, thank you so much, Diane. You know, you and I talked, gosh, quite a while ago now, back on podcast number 98 for Best Life, Best Death, and we were talking about your book, The Hospice Doctor’s Widow, and to me, this book is a love letter, and that’s why I thought it was just a perfect topic for this week of conversation.

Middle of February in 2025. Yes, I am thrilled to talk about this. So the original Hospice Doctor’s Widow was a journal, an art journal. If you’re wondering what an art journal is, it’s kind of like a regular journal. Only you create art and then you make your journal notes. It’s on top of the art or beside the art, that kind of thing.

Um, it was an art journal that I started keeping when my late husband, Bob Lemberg, who was himself a hospice and palliative care physician, he was diagnosed with a renal clear cell carcinoma that was already Metastatic to several sites in his body and at a stage for at the time it was diagnosed. Um, he lived for 22 months and while I was his.

Only caregiver. Um, I kept this journal. I created these pages using digital collage because, well, purely for self care was the, was the main reason it was, it was my outlet that allowed me to keep my thoughts and my emotions and, and so forth. It also allowed me to document in a most unusual way. Some of Bob’s wisdom because we were in a situation where we needed to turn his experience and wisdom as a hospice and palliative care physician on to ourselves.

And so I really wanted to document some of what, you know, what that was, what his experience and wisdom was in the, in the field of end of life. And so I did. Uh, I. I created these digital collages. Of course, when he got very sick and I didn’t have a lot of time, I would just do regular notes in a regular paper journal.

And then, um, I continued with the art journaling for about a year after his death, at which point I was doing a, uh, interim CEO position for a large multi specialty practice here in Little Rock, Arkansas, and a neurologist that I worked with there. One day we were, you know, sitting and talking as you do with your colleagues and he was, um, stressed because he was in the process of diagnosing three different patients with ALS, uh, which is a terminal diagnosis.

So the next day I brought in my art journal. I, by this time, had, uh, used a vacation picture book software, you know, where you drop your vacation photos into this. software and they send you a book with, you know, about your vacation. Well, I used one of those to drop these JPEGs in and, and had, by this time, have a physical, a physical book.

I brought it into him the day after that conversation about the ALS patients. He took it home, he came back the next day and said, You’re not getting your journal back. I will be loaning it to these three patients and you need to figure, and their spouses. He said, you need to figure out how to get this thing published because would really help a lot of family caregivers to read about and look at these journal entries about what you went through.

Well, that was super compelling, right? One of the, one of the things, the, You know, way we know that we’re finally learning how to carry our grief is we start to feel this sense of, I’d like to find some meaning in this. I’d like to help others. Um, and I was at that stage and this, you know, advice from this physician who was very experienced in dealing with these kinds of diagnoses.

Yeah, I just, yeah, I went, I went to work on that right away and was lucky enough to find a small publisher that. took a chance on it, um, and it was published as The Hospice Doctor’s, uh, Widow, and it has been successful in that it has won awards, but perhaps more importantly, yes, but perhaps more importantly, um, it has helped thousands of people, of family caregivers and people and grievers.

I had the opportunity to do a 2nd edition recently, and so I made some distinct changes to it. I started with the subtitle. It used to be called the hospice doctor’s widow. A journal, and this apparently caused some confusion among people, potential buyers of the book who thought it was going to be a blank journal.

So now the subtitle is it’s the hospice doctor’s widow. An art journal of caregiving and grief, um, because I, I just think that’s more descriptive, you know, um, that’s what it is. It’s better, I guess, just with experience, right? You get, you get smarter, um, the other 2 big differences in the 2nd edition are there’s a lovely, um.

Uh, forward written by Elizabeth Copland, who is a playwright, a screenwriter. She is the founder of the grief dialogues, which is all about how art comes out of grief. Um, and she is a Pulitzer nominee, which is, I was lucky enough to see the play that she wrote that was, um, nominated for a Pulitzer, um, called Till Death.

Anyway. She wrote a lovely, lovely foreword, um, for, for the book, uh, that I, I just couldn’t be more, um, proud to have it in, in the book and it just warms my heart. Um, and then the other big change is that at the end of the book, there are now nine additional art journal entries. They are all at the end, they are all after loss and grief, um, based art journal entries.

Um, so the book used to end with a page that took the words hope and peace and sort of looked at how those words came together and how those words came apart. Um, yes, that’s it right there. And, um, and now it, it, it, it, like there’s another page. Page after that. In fact, there are 9 pages after that. Um, yes, and we can certainly talk about each and every 1 of them or a couple of them if you want to.

But the last page is now a page that illustrates and says love is greater than death. Which has been a bit of a, uh, well, it’s kind of an epiphany of mine a few months ago, maybe, maybe close to a year ago now when people talk about when people who are inexperienced with grief, look at a griever and don’t.

We don’t want to talk about the person who died because somehow that might not be okay. When in reality, most of us really want to talk about our person who died. Um, somehow there’s this notion that we’re supposed to get over it. Um, you don’t get over your love for your living husband. So why on earth would you get over your love for your dead one?

Um, and, and that. And what, what came through to me was how much greater love is than death. Um, similarly, I worked through that and, and this is not in the book, but separately in, in a little video I made for my social media, you know, uh, death is greater than remission, death is greater than a healthy lifestyle.

Death is greater than a cure. Um, death is greater than financial stability. All of these things. love is greater than death. Um, and so anyway, that’s a, a super important message, um, that I share with lots of grievers in the world. And, uh, like I said, why, why don’t we, why don’t you tell me your thoughts or, or, or let, let me know what you want to do in terms of those additional pages or any other questions about the book.

Yeah, I just love hearing about it again. When I first heard of your book and ordered your book, you know, my reaction was kind of like, well, wow, that’s kind of an expensive book, not realizing it was this oversized, beautiful art book. Um, and when it arrived, I poured through it because there’s something so moving about the way, you know, you use emails, like a page looks like an email and the emails kind of tell the practical, uh, what’s happening.

You know, sort of, they were emails to family or friends or whatever, I assume, kind of updating people and those emails in the book serve as this kind of backbone structure that says, this is how things are moving on that sort of plane. But the art journal pieces where you’re collaging and putting, putting words together.

capture something about your feelings that I just hadn’t quite seen in another way. And this is why I think art and poetry are so moving because they’re just so succinct. It’s so different than a narrative book would have been about your and Bob’s experience. Not that that might not have been absolutely beautiful, but this is just really different.

One of the ones that I think is great is that you, You pop out this hope for the best and prepare for the worst, which is, you know, kind of a, I don’t know, like a Ben Franklin S kind of statement or something, right? Like some, somebody said that sounds like something a grandmother, a depression era person would have said, you know, hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

You write your own twist to it, which is, you said the best and the worst change over time. At first, the best may be a cure. And the worst is death, but then the best may become laughter and appreciation, and the worst is pain and suffering. So in just a succinct little way, you very adroitly kind of change our experience of what that means, because I think there’s so much in the trajectory of an illness that has to do with these metaphors like hope and fighting, and kind of language that Doesn’t always take us through the whole trajectory.

And in fact, I love you and I were both at Endwell in November of 2024, and there was a chaplain who spoke named J. S. Park, and he had a beautiful phrase where he talked about, we have to relocate hope. At the, at the end of life, you know, we’ve maybe been hoping for a cure, hoping for remission at some point in the trajectory of a disease or the trajectory of a life, we have to relocate our hope from being about cure to being about doing this as best we can doing this with some grace, doing this with some laughter.

And hopefully minimizing pain and suffering, right? So an idea of, um, the way you take a phrase like that and kind of move it. And then I’ve shown this to several other people. And I think another 1 that’s really moving to folks is the 1 where you talk about, we’re going through 2 different processes. He is dying.

I am surviving, and again, I think that’s just one of those kinds of places that you illuminate for people through your experience and then sharing it in this kind of format that’s just very different than a narrative. So those are just kind of 2 of the pages that I love, but I love the, I love the backbone of the emails kind of anchoring me to the story of what’s happening, the narrative, if you will, and then you’re, you know, Deep thoughts, which I’m guessing at the time you made some of these, you did not think you’d be sharing them widely, you know, precisely.

Yeah, like, no, I did not create it as yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to read that one? Sure. It says, sometimes I wish I would be diagnosed with cancer and beat him to the finish line. Yeah. Yeah. I think you’re not the only person who has had that thought. I’m certain I’m not, um, that, and I think that’s been one of the, um, most wonderful aspects about putting this journal out into the world.

Cause I can tell you it’s not all wonderful. It’s, it’s very hard to take. The journal you kept during the saddest time in your life and share it with the world and talk about it. a lot. Um, you know, I mean, in some ways it keeps me connected to Bob. In other ways, it’s, it’s painful and it, you know, continues to be painful.

But one of the ways that this, that’s been so, uh, rewarding about and made it totally worth it to do that. Is the validation that people who are going through the caregiving experience currently, or have lost their person following a caregiving experience, um, the validation that they feel from things like reading, reading that and going, you know, Oh my gosh, that’s exactly how I feel or how I have felt before.

And, um, that, that means everything because, uh, that’s one of the things as I grieved continue to grieve, but especially in that more acute phase of, of grieving and getting involved in this end of life space, I’ve, I’ve learned a lot about my grief and other people’s grief and. One of the most powerful things when you participate, let’s say, in a group of widowed people, or other people who have lost a sibling, that sort of thing, is hearing that other people experienced the same thoughts and feelings.

And that’s actually in, um, a couple of the new journal entries, the after loss journal entries, is The validation that feeling of validation when you learn that, oh, yeah, I’m not the only one who has experienced this thought or this feeling and just so comforting. So comforting to know that you’re not alone.

Huge little bit about I know you’re part of several different kind of widow forums. What is that? Facebook? Is that where where do you find places that are meaningful as a widow? Um, yeah, there are, there are several of them. Soaring Spirits International is for widowed people. I love that organization because they define the widowed person as if the person you were planning on spending the rest of your life with died, then you belong here.

So that’s different than some widow organizations. Only are open to women who were in legal heterosexual marriages. At the time their husband died, um, whereas there’s people who lose their person during the engage, you know, as a fiance rather than that doesn’t make them any less of a widow and there are people in same sex relationships that lose their person.

They are widowed people, you know, that, that they’re just, there’s no way to discount that. And I love Soaring Spirits because it is open to all those what, what are normally excluded from, from these types of organizations. I’m also a huge fan of a podcast called Widow We Do Now. It is by two young, young widows, Anita and Mel out of Utah.

They both lost their husbands. Suddenly at very young age, and they have done an. remarkable job exploring being a widow and how do we, how do we find meaning and how do we go on and, and, and looking at what have been historically some of the problems with how the world views widows. Uh, they’re, they’re just amazing.

And in addition to the podcast, they have a group on Facebook called the widow. We do now widow wives club. It’s called widow wives, but it’s open to. Men and women in all sorts of relations, you know, it’s similar to soaring spirits. They do not discriminate. You do have to share the obituary. That’s the other thing to be really careful of for widowed people.

Widowed people are. are indeed vulnerable, they are also seen as vulnerable and therefore prey from lots of scammers. I cannot tell you the number of, uh, so called friend requests I get from what are clearly fake, you know, accounts that have some dashingly good looking, uh, military leader of some sort or physician who wants to be My friend, it’s ridiculous.

It’s ridiculous. That just, anyway, so. That’s a cautionary. Yeah, be careful of that because you are vulnerable, but sowing spirits. What do we do now? There’s wings for widows, which I also I’m not as familiar with that one But I but what I love About them is that they have created a system to offer free financial advice for widows, um, which is another huge thing that happens is, you know, sometimes very suddenly you do not have the primary source of income.

To the household, um, if none of the preparation end of life preparation has been done, you may literally have an empty bank account for a good period of time. And it’s just a, you know, and sometimes, you know, there’s kids, there’s all kinds of stuff that need to needs to be navigated. So that’s really great.

Also, this is not widow specific, but there is a burgeoning field of what are called after loss professionals that I am a big fan of, and these are the folks that know all of the paperwork and the administrative details to do after someone dies, and you can hire them to help you sort through it and, uh, you know, Bob and I Did all that before he died very, very thoroughly, but most people don’t.

And these after loss professionals are just an incredible resource. Oh, I’m so glad you brought those up. I think that’s really important. The I’m remembering that in the 1st part of this book is a wonderful what I think is a wonderful list of everything that you and Bob did to prepare and kind of some PS.

Here’s what we missed. And you just are very clear about what made a huge difference to that. And I think, you know, again, you can find that list in various places, lists like that, but there’s something about coming across it in this art book that really weaves it as not just a dry to do list, but really this living, breathing list that will make your world as a caregiver and a griever, A little simpler if you work your way down that and I remember one of them was putting the utilities in your name like that just made everything simpler because you could just do it quickly.

And if you had to do it after he died, it was just so much more. Yeah. No, that was one of the things I missed. I did not put the utilities in my name. It did not occur to me. I was, I was the administrative leader in the marriage. I paid all the bills. I did all the paperwork. So it never occurred to me that I needed to put those utilities, including the cell phone accounts, in my name.

I will tell you that Making a phone call to the utility when your spouse has died to have them remove your spouse from the account may well be the first layer of hell. Maybe the second layer. I mean, I think it’s down there. Yeah. Yeah, it may. You know, you know what? Maybe it’s down there further. I don’t know.

But it is. Pure hell. It is hard to get on the phone and tell somebody, your husband, just tell a stranger that your husband just died. Well, wait, you’re assuming you got through to an actual person that you could tell that to, which, which there’s some layers of hell before that even happened. Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely. Right. Um, that is certainly true. And then they inevitably say, I’m going to need to talk to the account holder. I just told you, he died. I mean, I, with AT& T, I probably spent a total of four hours on the phone with them before I was able to get our cell phones. Accounts his closed and and mine put in my name and, you know, the remaining account put in my name for hours.

Not kidding. What would it have been? Otherwise, maybe a phone call, maybe a half an hour or something, but they would have the account holder would have gotten on the phone. And, oh, if Bob were, if we had done this before Bob died, it would have been minutes. Minutes. He would have, you know, I would have had him right there, put him on the phone.

He would have said, please put this account in my wife’s name. And we would have been done in a matter of minutes. Minutes. Incredible. Not only did it take four hours, but it’s, it’s four hours of sheer hell. Like just having to say, then, well, then you’re gonna have to talk to this person. Okay. And then you have to do it all over again with someone else.

It is amazing to me that the utilities have not, I mean, it’s, yeah, it happens to everyone. Yeah. Wow. And I do, you know, certainly validation, like a death certificate. I get it, right. Because people do screwy things to each other and calling it, calling a cell phone company and saying my ex girlfriend croaked, you know, to just to get her phone turned off.

I could see some Jerk doing that so certainly I get I get that. It’s not it’s not necessarily, you know, uh, a no brainer or an option on the, you know, on the automatic menu, but the idea that it takes. So much to do. It is just astounding to me. Absolutely astounding. This listeners is the dark side of our Valentine episode.

This is the, this is the dark underbelly of modern love. That’s right. The dark underbelly of modern love. This is the tough part. Well, yeah, yeah. Let’s look at a couple of these pages that you added to the book. I absolutely love this one. Which is called and, and, yep, it’s called that but the words and, and are on it.

And you say laughing and learning, grieving and healing, joyful and longing, weary and determined, eager and content. It’s not or, it’s not but, it’s and, it’s almost always and, and I think boy that just speaks to the duality and the difficulty in love and life and caregiving and death and illness. There’s so many conflicting feelings and feelings happening all at the same time.

It’s rarely a straight line. Well, and I think that’s a great, um, it’s a, it’s a fact it’s almost always and in fact, as you find yourself starting to say the word, but, or the word, or, especially, but, but seems to negate whatever you said before it, um, which is, which is not what, what’s true, what’s true.

Anyway, when you find yourself starting to say, but. Or, or replace it with and, and I guarantee you, it will be accurate, it will, and, and it will be lovely, you know, it’ll be, it’ll be better, um, uh, both for the accuracy and, and for the poetry of it. It’s like it builds instead of cutting. Yes. You also have a beautiful page here about creating.

Do you want to read that one? Yes. Uh, it says, uh, the ecstatic relief that comes from reading, connecting, sharing, listening, and learning. It’s not just me. others experience the same. Yeah, that’s that. Just learning that you’re not the only one is, um, is so helpful. So comforting. It’s not just me that, you know, that’s so.

And the power you found in connecting to yourself through creating, I think, has been such a big part of your path through your life, probably, but particularly through this kind of multi, you know, what’s it been, seven years? Almost 8. It’ll be, uh, it’ll be 8 on the 19th. Um, just just a few days away. Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. No. I think that’s a great point that the actually the page right right before the one that I just read. Is part of a series of 3 that I did and it sort of has this. Woman standing in a window in the sky on a cloud and beneath her hangs both the blossoms and the fruit of a lemon tree. Um, and that came from reading somewhere on on the Internet.

I read this thing that said the blossom must die for the fruit to grow, which is of course true and, but it was also offered, it felt like when I read it on whatever I read it on, it felt like this sort of trite offering that, you know, well, you, you, you got to go through the rough stuff in order for the, So the real fruit or whatever, it just, it just irritated me and I found myself thinking, I want both.

I want the blossom and I want the fruit and why can’t I have both? So I did this collage and this journal entry to give myself both the blossom and the fruit and this beautiful woman, you know, standing above, you know, just kind of, it was about me being alone. But me creating this impossible situation of both the blossom and the fruit and, um, Bringing myself comfort in that defying this, this trite little something or other that the world was offering me that just wasn’t acceptable.

Um, and that the beauty of of. creating something that digs deep into that, digs deep into the emotion and the resistance to that, and then create something that is, I think, beautiful, you know, and attractive to look at. Um, so yeah, I, I love that aspect of art journaling. It also strikes me as that that page is, is very related to the final page.

Which is love is greater than death. And tell us a little bit about the style. This is a very graphic style. There’s a wonderful kind of crayon red heart with a greater than sign with a beautiful skull. And say some about where that kind of graphic piece has come from for you. Because your, your work is widely varied, I think.

Like some of it is these beautiful, realistic botanicals. And then some is more this kind of, uh, uh, more, I don’t know, visually graphic style, I almost want to call it. It’s like, I love New York kind of that. Yeah. Thank you for noticing that. That actually came out of, um, speaking of New York, uh, I guess it was a year, year and a half ago, I visited New York.

Um, I have, uh, Young woman there who is very dear to me. She’s, she’s a niece. She’s a niece from my first husband, so ex-husband, niece. Um, but we still, we still consider ourselves aunt and niece. And she took me to the studio slash gallery of a very well-known artist, uh, who goes between Brooklyn and Tokyo, and his name is.

Steve Powers. He goes by Espo. I think is his sort of, um, handle. And he does a lot of public stuff. He does a lot of very graphic, um, almost like signs, um, um, kind of thing. And I was really moved. This is a completely different style of art from what I was doing, but the messages were so clear. And, uh, I, I absolutely, you know, sort of Fell in love with the style and he, uh, he’s a, he was there and he said, you know, what artists do you follow?

And I was able to tell him about an artist called Noma Bar, who I, whose work I absolutely love. He had not heard of Noma Bar and he was thrilled with that. And he was also, um, very much sharing, you know, the whole steel like an artist, um, uh, approach, You know, basically being inspired by someone else’s art and then, and then emulating or, or incorporating a new style.

So after I visited his gallery, um, and met him, I just found myself completely taken with this much crisper style. None of it is in the Hospice Doctor’s Widow quite as crisp as I, as I got, but that one that you, you point out that this, this, that’s where. This very simple heart greater than sign skull, uh, came from, you know, to be able to say love is greater than death using these three symbols.

Um, and then I have since also gotten very much, this is so funny, into sticker, uh, sticker creation. And Someone I don’t know who I need to look this up quite frankly, but someone said the sticker is the most efficient for art form and I kind of believe that and I’ve done a series of sticker sticker art stickers that are lots of grief based lots of, um, you know, end of life planning kind of stuff and did a sticker.

The love is greater than death in a in a crisper, more graphic form that that I absolutely love. Yeah, yeah. So, so thank you for asking about that because, um, he, he was a, he continues to be a great inspiration and it’s always fun to find other artists that, you know, inspire you and, and get you pushing yourself in a direction that you wouldn’t have otherwise gone in.

I love it. I love steel like an artist and I love what you’ve done with the second edition of the Hospice Doctor’s Widow and we’re going to have another conversation about your new book Care Boss and in Care Boss is another one of your little graphics, which is the at sign circle with a peace sign circle and they’re kind of entwined and I love that one too.

So the idea of at peace. So Jennifer O’Brien, artist, author, woo, leader, really appreciate your time. People can find out more about you at Jennifer A. O’Brien dot com O’Brien with an IEN, so Jennifer A. O’Brien dot com. And there you can find both this fantastic book Care Boss, which we’ll talk about later, and the Hospice Doctor’s Widow, an Art Journal of Caregiving and Grief, which.

Again, I thought, let’s put this up the week of Valentine’s Day because the whole piece is just a love letter to Bob and to yourself and to the experience of his life and death and being human. Absolutely. Well, thanks for joining me, Jennifer. You have been listening to the Best Life, Best Death podcast, and I’m your host, Diane Hullett.

Thanks for listening.