Real Talk with Life After Grief Chris
Real Talk with Life After Grief Chris
Finding Light in Darkness
Chris pulls back the curtain on his deeply personal grief journey in this powerful inaugural episode that sets the foundation for what listeners can expect from "Real Talk with Life After Grief Chris." With remarkable candor, Chris reveals how his life has been shaped by a series of profound losses—beginning with his mother's devastating cancer diagnosis in 1994, through years as her caregiver during her Alzheimer's battle, to losing both parents within months of each other in 2008.
Through raw storytelling, Chris walks us through the financial complexities that accompanied his grief, including managing nursing home costs of $5,000 monthly as a twenty-something, becoming his mother's power of attorney, and making critical end-of-life decisions. He doesn't shy away from the emotional toll these experiences took, describing his descent to "rock bottom" with anxiety and depression after compounding losses. Yet his journey takes a transformative turn through grief counseling, spiritual connection, and personal growth practices that helped him rebuild.
Perhaps most poignantly, Chris shares his most profound grief experience—losing one of his twin sons at birth in 2012—and how this became his family's first true experience with "life after grief" as they welcomed their surviving son Eli, followed by another son years later. Now a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® and Certified Financial Transitionist®, Chris combines his personal grief journey with professional expertise to guide others through the financial maze that often accompanies loss. Whether you're navigating grief yourself or an advisor seeking to better serve clients in transition, subscribe to hear Chris's unique perspective on finding meaning, making sound financial decisions, and building a life after devastating loss.
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Welcome to Real Talk with Life After Grief Chris, where we talk about relevant issues as it relates to individuals in grief as they navigate finances and the advisors who help them. We help clients in grief navigate financial matters. We also teach advisors how to emotionally and financially work with clients in grief through an unparalleled process. This week's episode is sponsored by Life After Grief Financial Planning and Life After Grief Consulting. Folks hope and support for life after grief and hopefully, a little education along the way. Let me go into some of my background and real life experience and some of this will make sense. I've been a griever since 1994. I've been a caregiver since 2000. I've been a financial planner since 2003. I've been a certified financial planner since 2011. I've been a life after griever since 2013. I've been a hospice volunteer since 2017. And I have been a certified financial transitionist since 2021. A certified financial transitionist basically I'm trained to help clients navigate through major life events and the financial transitions that accompany them, and I formally got my bachelor's in education with a minor in business at the University of Florida and I specialized in psychology.
Speaker 1:Now for the meat of the inaugural episode. So many folks know some things about me and I'd like to kind of go into detail of what makes Chris Chris. So in 1994, my mother was formally diagnosed with breast cancer. My father was the one to give me the news and my father was a very calming force in my life and he downplayed the significance of the diagnosis. I would later find out that my mother's cancer was very significant and it would have life altering changes on me, my brother, my dad and my mom. So in 1994, after I graduated from high school, I went off to college and shortly thereafter my mother and father separated. They didn't separate because they wanted to. They separated because my mother's cancer was progressing at a rapid pace. Because my mother's cancer was progressing at a rapid pace, she went to MD Anderson in Houston because it was recommended that she have a bone marrow transplant along with the radiation and chemotherapy.
Speaker 1:And you can imagine what I felt like and what my father felt like. And my brother, who was in the Midwest, he felt completely helpless and I had feelings of despair. I was crying, I was depressed. My dad's feelings, he was very depressed and he felt very alone. And there was one time he called me and it was out of his character and he asked me to come home me and it was out of his character, and he asked me to come home and he was crying on the phone and he just felt. I felt that he was in a moment of despair and didn't know we know where to turn. So he turned to me. You know I went home and we walked through a lot of things, you know. Shortly thereafter my mother came back and things seemed to get back on track. You know things that I visually saw of my mother she lost all of her hair and she was very weak, but things seemed to get back on track. You know things that I visually saw of my mother she lost all of her hair and she was very weak, but she seemed to gather her strength.
Speaker 1:For the next couple of years, and shortly after I graduated, before 2000, I had started noticing some odd behavior from my mother. My mother seemed to, you know, either forget things or she would seem to really exaggerate on things that are transpiring. I remember very distinctly one time that she said that her and my father were going to get a divorce. My parents were married for 40 years and that was the furthest thing from my mind, and really my father's mind. But I also realized my father was becoming increasingly agitated with my mother. My father was a very patient person.
Speaker 1:So in the year 2000, I was well into my career and I was a manager at a local Bank of America here in Orlando and I got a call from my father. And what transpired from that phone call wouldn't forever change the trajectory of all of our lives. The cancer was one thing, but this next event really changed things. My mother was at a medical provider and was having a what I would call a psychotic episode. My father called the ambulance and the fire department came and they attempted to get my mother out of my parents' car and no one could get her out of the car and my father asked me to come and I got there and my mother was just speaking basically in tongues is the best way I could describe it I was the only one that was able to get her out of the car, to convince her to get out of the car, and she went to the hospital and after a couple of days in the hospital, they Baker acted my mother, and so if you don't know what that means, it's basically they hold you under supervision and they medicate you while they evaluate your psychiatric wherewithal.
Speaker 1:Over the next eight years or so, we would be dealing with my mother and her Alzheimer's, which we came to ultimately find out. I would become the secondary caregiver. My father was my mother's primary caregiver, but I was overseeing the entire operation. Basically and you know things that I would go through I had to learn about their finances, I had to go to a lot of doctor's appointments and I was now acting as a parent for both of my folks. My mother was in and out of the hospital. My father was also in and out of the hospital during this time due to, you know, his various ailments and the overwhelming stress that happened with my mom.
Speaker 1:And then, also during this period, I had a lot of bad advice from professionals, specifically elder care attorneys. I learned a lot by fire. I also became my mother's power of attorney. My wife and I purchased their home. You know we did that in anticipation of my parents running out of money and to avoid any conflict with my brother, you know, in regards to any assets that were left over.
Speaker 1:And then we also had to deal with respite caregivers. My father ultimately needed a break, a lot, and we needed someone to be with my mother 24, seven, and my father was attempting to work and earn a living at this time, and you know, fast forward, you know getting through a lot of that I learned a tremendous amount. One of the things that I took away was, ultimately, how to recharge, how to separate myself from situations, and then how to be extremely efficient at time management. Extremely efficient at time management, you can imagine. All of those things were wrapped up into one, and so, in May of 2008, my mother went to the hospital. We could no longer care for her at home. She had another episode and she was in a situation to where she may have been harmful to herself and, as a result of going to the hospital, she was placed in a nursing home. So we also had to figure that out very quickly. And then the expense that came along with the nursing home. The nursing home that we selected was $5,000 a month, and the $5,000 a month was at my expense, and you can imagine how daunting that was for a 20 something year old. But again, I learned by fire and there were some things that I did in advance of that to make sure that my mother could have the best possible care.
Speaker 1:And in May of 2008, when she went to the hospital. She had a couple of lesions on her spine. Her cancer came back. It came back roughly 14 years after it was in remission and in August of 2008, she had probably 12 to 15 lesions on her spine. I very distinctly remember the doctor when my mother entered the hospital this final time, saying that her cancer was going to be slow moving and it ultimately was not. It was very fast moving and they could put her on medications and things like that to slow the progression. Ultimately, the doctor was wrong.
Speaker 1:In August my mother passed away and some of the other decisions and the information that I found out was my mother didn't want to be on life support. We had a family meeting to discover that, nor did my father, and there was a situation to where my mother stopped eating and my father wanted to put a feeding tube in my mother and I had to be the one to come to my father and say that we need to honor her wishes. You can imagine that was a very difficult conversation between my father and I. Ultimately, you know, I made that decision and I have no regrets because it was what my mother wanted, but I did have to. You know the nurse called me the hospice nurse and let me know first that my mother had passed, and then I had to give that information to my father and that was disseminated to the rest of my family. So over the next couple of months, you know, I was trying to help my dad progress in life, but I also had to remember that, you know, he just lost his spouse at 40 years and my father was still living in the house and the house was becoming a financial burden for me and my wife. My father had no income at this point and I was going to have to move my father out of his home. Even though my wife and I purchased it, it was still my mother and father's home and I was in the discovery phase of finding someplace close to us.
Speaker 1:And then my father ended up passing away in November of 2008. He passed away, ultimately, from an infection that he had and the infection, you know, led to, ultimately, a heart attack. And I had some guilt around that situation because while he was in the hospital, the doctors said that they needed to change a port in his arm and I gave him the go ahead and his body couldn't it couldn't rebound from the surgery. I had a lot of guilt because I made that decision but it was ultimately in the best interest for my father, his infection. The doctors that said to me he probably would have passed away shortly thereafter.
Speaker 1:Anyways, then after you know can imagine, after that situation I had to deal with the house. I had to deal with the house, I had to renovate the house, I had to make the decision to rent it or sell it, and that was at the bottom of the housing market. So I decided to rent the house Fast forward. A year and a half later my paternal grandmother passed away and she had a know kind of had to go through the dynamics of vetting a nursing home and finding a nursing home. However, she was in a different state and my brother was kind of managing that situation while I was managing it from afar. That was a very difficult situation, as you can imagine.
Speaker 1:It was so soon after my parents passed and the day that I came back from my grandmother's funeral I got several phone calls and text messages from my neighbor saying that the police are raiding your parents' house. You can imagine the thoughts and the emotion that was going through my mind. I asked my neighbor to give the police officer my phone number. The police officer called me and said that we suspect that one of the tenants in the home were housing large amounts of marijuana. And that was news to me. If anyone knows me or knows about me, I've never done any drugs, any kind of drugs at all, and had no idea how this situation kind of evolved. And I just asked the police officers please don't damage the house. Luckily, I had surrounded myself prior to that point by good friends and professionals, one of which was a defense attorney who helped me through the situation, and one was a real estate attorney. So we dealt with that situation appropriately.
Speaker 1:And then I got on to the next phase of life and, as you can imagine, I had to put all of my grief on hold to deal with the financial implications of my parents passing and then immediately move on to the situation of grief with my grandmother. After the situation with my grandmother, I hit rock bottom bottom. As you can well imagine, I had extreme bouts of anxiety, I had extreme bouts of depression and I didn't know where to go. I utilized alcohol to numb the pain and I got to a point where that was no longer effective. So I sought out my personal priest who I've known since I was a teenager, and he recommended that I go to group grief counseling. And in group grief counseling I realized that I was very young to have these experiences first and foremost. But the experiences that I was going through were normal. They normalized what I was going through and they said that ultimately, your experiences are going to help other people and their experiences in life.
Speaker 1:What I also did was go on a medical missionary trip to Ghana. It was 10 days of healing and completely giving to others, one of the best trips of my life and I would do it in a heartbeat again. My support system helped me. I had a lot of people that I needed to say sorry to. I affected a lot of people during that time of my anger pain negatively, and I also went on a church retreat focusing on men and I was very introspective in my life and my focus in life and what I need to do to help other people. I also began journaling during this time, which was a relief from some of the anxiety that I felt, and I still do that today if I reach situations that I need help through. So all of this set me up for what I would say was the hardest grief situation in my life.
Speaker 1:My wife and I were expecting twins and in 2012, one of my twins was born early and he ultimately did not survive. If you know anything about twins, once one twin is born, the other twin normally follows, and it was a situation to where my second son he didn't want to leave the womb he came I think he was about a week late and he was a medical miracle. That was my wife and I's first experience with life after grief. My son, eli, who was a twin, who is living his name has biblical significance and then we had our third son two years later, gideon, and he, you know, further exemplified our life after grief, and my wife and I never looked back and you can imagine there were several grief decisions that I had to make, and you know my wife had to make, and probably one of the hardest situations, the most heart-wrenching decisions my wife and I had to ever make was to tell our boys about their brother, and their response was so emblematic of everything that we went through. They simply said why didn't you tell us earlier? My wife and I learned a lot about ourselves and how each other grieves at that moment and it brought us as a family a lot closer together, and we talk about my oldest son, who is no longer with us. His name was Christopher Clorse.
Speaker 1:It really brought things with grief full circle, and now I use my experiences, my knowledge and my education to help grieving families and, frankly, their advisors overcome obstacles so they too can experience life after grief. And ultimately, these experiences have led me to this blog and you know I really want to help other people to experience what I've experienced. I've had a long road and not every day is rosy, but I continue to fight through and I have a tremendous support system God, first and foremost, my family, my friends. You may have pulled out some things from this podcast, like financial decisions and times of grief, support systems, experience, recharging, self-help resources and tips and, frankly, resiliency, and I've utilized a lot of that information for a future podcast. Some of the ones in the future that you can expect to hear how do I grieve, normalcy and timelines, what to say and what not to say to a griever, elder care, helpful hints, family dysfunction, vetting the Dreaded Nursing Home, the Sandwich Generation. And then in each of the podcasts there are going to be various links to specific information and where to get them. Those are just some of the podcasts that you can look forward to.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, my experience and education can go to help you through your experience through grief and also if you're an advisor, you know and you have nowhere to go to help your client, you can start here. You know. You can really find ways to help your clients navigate grief. I really hope you learn a lot along the way and I hope you enjoy the ride and please feel free to share this podcast, or any ones to come, with your family, friends or colleagues. See you on the next episode.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to our podcast. If you are a client and are looking to work directly with me, chris and or my firm, head on over to Life After Grief FP. That is, life After Grief FP. The FP is for financialplanningcom. If you are an advisor looking to emotionally and financially work with your client in grief, or if you are a client looking to get your advisor's head in the game, head on over to lifeaftergriefconsultingcom. That is lifeaftergriefconsultingcom. Any information referenced in this week's podcast will be located here in the podcast section and, as always, please feel free to share this week's podcast with any friend, family member or colleague. Thanks for listening. See you next week on the next episode.