Real Talk with Life After Grief Chris
Real Talk with Life After Grief Chris
From ICU Nurse to Grief Coach: When Pain Becomes Your Purpose
Grief transforms us in ways we never anticipate - sometimes leading us directly into our life's purpose. Lisa McFarland joins Chris to share her extraordinary journey through child loss and how she discovered unexpected meaning on the other side.
After losing her daughter Alexis to a rare genetic bone marrow disease, Lisa took an unusual path: she became a pediatric ICU nurse. This decision marked the beginning of a series of career transitions as she navigated raising her son Zachary, who lives with the same condition that took his sister's life. Through each pivot - from nursing to legal consulting to corporate leadership - Lisa was unconsciously searching for healing.
The conversation delves into what Lisa calls the "grief cloud" - that state where we shut down emotionally to avoid pain. She describes waking consistently at 3AM, finally realizing these moments weren't insomnia but opportunities when her defenses were down enough to hear her true self. These middle-of-the-night revelations eventually led her to make profound life changes, including leaving her marriage and corporate career.
Chris and Lisa explore particularly sensitive territory around medical mistakes and whether to pursue litigation after a loss. Their nuanced discussion offers valuable perspective for anyone facing similar difficult decisions. They share insights about differentiating between happiness (fleeting and situational) versus joy (a deeper, more sustainable state) and how proper self-care creates the foundation for authentic healing.
What makes this episode especially powerful is the connection between two people who've experienced similar profound losses but found different pathways forward. Their conversation demonstrates how sharing our grief stories creates space for others to feel less alone in theirs.
Whether you're navigating personal grief, supporting someone who is, or working professionally with grieving clients, this episode offers both practical wisdom and emotional resonance that will stay with you long after listening.
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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. Hello and welcome to another episode of Real Talk with Life After Grief, chris.
Speaker 1:In today's podcast, I have the pleasure of introducing a mother who has thrived through significant grief from child loss. You're going to hear her story and how her experiences have helped to shape her, inevitably to help some other folks, myself included. I learn a lot from other people and I've learned a lot from. Lisa is who I'm going to be interviewing today, and in a previous podcast I've spoken about my experience with losing a child, and Lisa and I share that in common. She's a really dynamic lady who has traveled to the other side of grief and now has dedicated her life to helping others. We have some definitive similarities with some very stark differences. I want to introduce you formally to Lisa McFarland. Hi, lisa, and welcome to the show. How are you?
Speaker 2:Hey, Chris, I'm great Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. Lisa disclosed to me that she is a freshman being interviewed in the podcast world. Lisa actually has her own podcast, but this is the first time she's been interviewed, so yay for me. I get to get her feet wet.
Speaker 2:The inaugural episode right.
Speaker 1:Yes, the inaugural episode. So I promise I won't bite you, and if I do, then it's par for the course.
Speaker 2:Perfect.
Speaker 1:Lisa, I want you to tell us in all seriousness, I want you to tell us about yourself, your journey, anything that you kind of want to disclose. I think it's very important for folks that know me, but you kind of an extension of me, who has, like I said, some different experiences and you've had a long road, so to speak.
Speaker 2:Yes, sir, I thank you. I have had a long road and I'm happy to share it. This is how we always say the club that we wish nobody belonged to. But here we are, wish that I didn't know some of the things that I know. But the benefit of sharing them is that they hopefully carry some value and can help you know, help somebody else.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I started my family young. I was in a corporate training program out of college and our first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, which isn't all that uncommon, but I thought that, you know, that was kind of out of the way. Then we were blessed with the pregnancy of our daughter, who was born in August of 1996, and then later died in 1997 due to a bone marrow disease that we later found out was genetic. But we didn't know right away. So when we lost our daughter in 97, alexis, we did genetic counseling and tried to spend about a year understanding what had happened. And it's a very complicated. She had a very complicated body. But at some point Children's National Medical said yeah, you guys, this was a fluke, you know, go for it. So we fired up the team bus and had our son, zach, and soon after his birth which was very traumatic, and he was in the NICU for quite a while. Then we started to see a lot of similarities between the kids, like on x-ray their bones looked like they had rickets but they didn't, and certain liver function tests were out of whack, even though it wasn't connected to a particular source. So we started seeing some of these things and, before long, of course, realized there had to be a connection between the kids and that this had to be another presentation of a genetic disease. So we knew the folks at Children's already and from there we started a journey with our son, zachary, who's about to turn 23. Both of our children have had Schwachman-Diamond syndrome or we believe that is their ultimate diagnosis, which is a genetic condition. Diamond Syndrome or we believe that is their ultimate diagnosis, which is a genetic condition. When our son was born, we thought that we would lose him at a very young age, the same way we had lost his sister. And we also knew that bone marrow transplant was the number one way to get ahead of this bone marrow disease and Zach should rear its ugly head and thought you know, for that and many reasons, just because we wanted more children, we thought having another child was a really good idea, and when our son, emmanuel, was born in April of 2002, he did not survive. So what we have is or who we have, I should say Levine, zachary, our son.
Speaker 2:And through all of this I was just a bit of a soldier. I just felt like, if I played well with others and I didn't let this get to me, I was going to make lemonade out of lemons. So when our daughter passed, I decided to become a pediatric ICU nurse, which took a couple of years. I jumped into an accelerated program, took my boards and in the meantime got pregnant with Zach. So Zach came soon after that. So, yeah, I tried to kind of pivot with like okay, we've got this special needs kid at home, I've got this degree, now I can work nights.
Speaker 2:My then husband was going to night law school. We had a pretty good routine for trying to cover all the bases, and then at some point I couldn't do the sick kids at work and sick kids at home thing. So I had to choose, which was an easy choice, and, by the way, I was working in the pediatric ICU, the neonatal intensive care unit and also the newborn delivery nursery at the very hospital where I had delivered Emmanuel and he had died in my arms. So I see that as a really good move that I got away from the bedside because I was exposing myself. I didn't realize it's just how unaware I was. I was just so focused, like I know what I'm doing. This is going to make things better and nobody get my way.
Speaker 2:So I did get away from the bedside and I opted into a little bit of a career path from there, which was to get into legal nurse consulting, because I had this background of clinical work but I didn't want to work at the bedside any longer. So I then shifted again, became certified as a legal nurse consultant and in that role I was working for myself. I started a company, mcfarland RN LLC. I ran that company for almost seven years where I was working now with attorneys on their medical cases, and I was able to draw on my expertise and my experience without having to actually be at the bedside. So I could work on my own time, market as much or as little as I wanted, to take on bigger little projects, however I wanted to do it. I consulted on about 100 cases ultimately, before I then left that role to move back into really the corporate mainstream, where I was a sales leader in the legal services industry and managed a team in the Mid-Atlantic for another seven-ish years, and I guess, chris, through the whole thing, and that was a really long introduction.
Speaker 2:But and I guess, chris, through the whole thing, and that was a really long introduction but through the whole thing, I was just waiting to feel better and with each step, I mean, I'm a very spiritual person, I have a good family that was there to support me and friends and things like that.
Speaker 2:But honestly, I was just waiting to feel better and I tried, you know, a lot of different approaches and what I found over the last, you know, maybe decade or so, is I was starting to get these like intuitive hits I don't know how else to put it, but they were.
Speaker 2:I was having a lot of trouble sleeping, like most people I know, and then in the beginning, like, also like a lot of folks, was frustrated that I was getting, you know, very disrupted sleep and after a while, after, you know, reading and trying to find a way out of that issue, I realized that I was unavailable to my own consciousness during the day and the only time that I could hear my real true self was at three o'clock in the morning or four o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 2:And once I kind of realized that and again it was through, like reading different things and just trying to understand it became more of a blessing than a curse and I started sitting up, I might make a cup of decaf tea and like all right universe, I'm awake, like I can hear myself, I can hear you, let's get to it. And that began a period of transition and in a very short amount of time I had to reconsider my major, most major relationship, my marriage and my living situation, my corporate role as a sales leader, and in the end, by this time last year, I was just submitting my resignation and my corporate job and in fact my husband and I did divorce, but we're extremely close. So I couldn't make the changes I needed to make earlier because I couldn't cure them.
Speaker 1:So I would call that a crossroads that you had reached and I think, in grief and now that you can kind of take that 30,000 foot view and kind of look down and kind of see your situation, I see a lot of folks in the same predicament when I'm working with folks, or even in my own predicament. You can't really see yourself out of it until it's your time, you know, for things to happen. And as you're speaking, I'm hearing kind of a lot of similarities that you know you and I have shared and the similarity, you know, where you kind of were waking up at three o'clock in the morning and you just chose to embrace it. It took other people in my life to kind of say, other people that are really well respected and I would never question their judgment, to say to me hey, chris, um, you know you need to do some things that are a little bit different than you're doing them now. And my I'm a spiritual person as you are. My priest said something to me that was so profound and during my time of grief I was nasty to a lot of people, very nasty, had a short temper, and that's not necessarily my nature. I'm usually a very patient person, my wife might tell you different, but generally other people will tell you that I'm very, very patient and my boys will probably admit that I'm very patient with them as well. But I was not patient.
Speaker 1:And I remember one of my guy friends, my closest guy friend. We went to college together. Something happened between us and I remember saying to my wife you know what, I don't care if we're friends any longer. He can just go by the wayside. And she looked at me and she said you've been friends with this guy almost 20 years and you're just going to discard him that quick.
Speaker 1:And she said well, father Leo, my personal priest that has been my dear priest for such a long time he said that you need to apologize to people that you have scarred and it took a lot. And I went to my friend his name is Charlie and I said I'm sorry and I had a list, a long list of people that I had to go back and apologize to. Probably the biggest person on my list was my wife she took a lot my brother and there was a numerous people. And that was a very healing point in my life when I went back to folks and I apologized to them. So and again that kind of similarity where you know you reached a crossroad or a transition in your life. I reached the same transition and it took someone else, kind of a higher power, to expose me, to let me know that I need to change this dynamic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, the first thing that's coming to me, chris, is like just the sheer courage that it took you to do that. Most people can't muster that up. That's a higher level. That's what good looks like in grief. I just don't want to have people think that that's an easy thing to do. It's a terribly hard thing to do, because when we're in pain, don't we want to be the ones that are? I mean, who's apologizing to us that our mom is gone or our dad is gone or our child is gone, right?
Speaker 2:Sure so I just want to call out how incredibly courageous of a move that was and it does make sense. It does make sense that it brought healing because, ultimately, what we're talking about whether it's having someone else call out the fact that we're not ourselves or that we're missing something really important, or whether it's waking up at three in the morning the idea is, when you're grieving and you get into this kind of grief cloud, you shut everything down because you don't want to feel the pain and it just kind of closes up all the communication in general. So you kind of you know deep.
Speaker 2:I call it like a deep freeze. It's like a heart freeze. So, yeah, I might not be bawling my eyes out every day, but I'm also. I also have no sense of self. I also have no sense of what I like or what makes me happy or how I want to contribute to the world. And when you get to be 50, like I was, I'm now 52, you really do. I mean, it is a transition. You're right, it's a crossroads of saying like I'm aging through this whole process, time has not stopped and I have two choices really I can continue unconsciously and be asleep, and by asleep I mean eating the wrong stuff, not exercising, drinking too much alcohol, binge watching, you know, netflix. Another favorite is, you know, watching old movies that I know will give me an outlet to cry, like Steel, magnolias or you know some of those you know, movies were because I wasn't allowing myself to have those feelings on my own.
Speaker 1:So even take it a step further, Lisa, even committing suicide. Some people take it to that extreme.
Speaker 2:Yes, tragically, and I think it's interesting because I was just blogging and podcasting about this idea of connection today actually and really, when we are not connected to one another, the isolation is so painful, we don't know what we're missing, but all the same we can't get real happy. I mean, we can get happy. I don't want to confuse happiness with joy, because joy is that pervasive feeling that everything is okay. Happiness is that fleeting, you know transactional type of everything's good. In this moment I'm going for joy. I don't know what other people want.
Speaker 1:I'm going for joy.
Speaker 2:So I knew that if I wanted to be able to feel that, those parts of my heart that I had to let the other stuff out of the you know, had to let it out of the ground and out of my bones and let it have a life. So, yeah, I'm going for joy and I knew there was a very distinct period of time of about a year maybe, maybe a year and a half, 18 months or so around 2017, 2018 is when I really started to crave meaning and I really couldn't shut it up and, yeah, I was talking about being asleep. So I remember I'm a big U2 fan, I'm a big music fan period but I'm Joshua Tree to the end and love U2. And they have a song that talks about being wide awake. And I remember going into that new year I believe that was 2018, with awake being my word going into that year and listening to that after I meditated and listening to that while I was walking and really trying to understand for myself what that even meant.
Speaker 2:Because, again, when you're in that spot, you don't realize all the white space that's there. You just know your own routine and that feels normal to you. But it wasn't. It's not that it wasn't normal, cause I think a lot of folks. There's so much despair and pain in the world that you know everyone is carrying pain and there are very few of us and very few of you shared what you just did is. So. It's a profound way to address what's happening, but most people don't so, whether it's grief from losing a job or our home tragically burning down or a death, no matter what that grief is, most people aren't processing grief in general in our communities and in our culture, because it's about as popular as talking about, you know, dying and aging, and so we don't have a language, we don't have a conversation that goes on in our culture, which leaves us to not know what we're missing.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, wide awake became a little bit of a mantra and I got courageous myself and started thinking all right, if I pull away all these anesthesias, what's here? And that was traumatic and that went on for a couple of years and during that time, yeah, I did, I made some major changes when I left my corporate job, I didn't so much leave it thinking, oh, I'm going to start a business to share what I know. It was more like I just want to create space to have these conversations and thrilled that you are already creating that space and whether or not it develops in a particular way. In other words, I'm not attached to how it manifests, but I just wanted to start putting it out there. And the truth is, my blog's about a year and a half old, but my website's brand new, because I was trying to get a lot of those things out into the ethos before I tried to do anything else, because that, as you know, is traumatic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a journey. It is absolutely a journey. Yeah, it is absolutely a journey.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 1:There's a couple of, there's several things. You got my mind racing. Now, you know, when you reached your crossroads it made you take a step back, pause and say you know what's my life all about here? No different than mine, and so I've explained. You know, previously when I hit my crossroads, so to speak, I hit rock bottom like I was a drug addict. For me it was either die or do something else with my life. For me it was that cut and dry, because I just felt like I was an open sore. I just had to figure it out.
Speaker 1:And that process began of healing. I felt that I had a lot to give, and not that it was so much me thinking this, it was other people telling me hey, you've experienced this at a very young age and you have a lot to give other people. You know, in the way that you carry yourself and the way that people have done things for you, the people that have mentored you and that really helped me out. And like you said, lisa, that you know you didn't kind of start this journey out to either make money or do things. It's kind of just developed and it's developed into a great thing that you're doing, you know, helping other people, you know, through your blog, through your podcast, through, you know, one-on-one, you know, interactions with folks, whether that's coaching or otherwise, it's a tremendous avenue, you know, for some other folks. So I would, you know, commend you and it's, you know, very interesting. So the more people that I bring on and that are on my podcast, I realize how well educated the folks are that I bring on and I I assure you that is not by design but just, lisa hearing you, you are very well educated, lisa hearing you, you are very well educated, very well educated.
Speaker 1:And you know some more similarities pop up. You know you talked about being a pediatric ICU nurse, which, for folks that don't know anything about nursing, that is one of the absolute hardest nursing jobs that is available. That is, you know, available because you're dealing with sick kids, sick adults is different, folks that have had to live, they've had the time to live their life. Kids are just starting out and when they have traumatic stuff it's tough. My wife did not want to be any kind of a peds nurse, kind of a peds nurse, and so something else that stuck out and I'm, you know, taking notes, you know, in regards to having to choose between being a nurse, a pediatric nurse, and, you know, having to, you know, care for your son. You know, the two worlds are so close and it just it dumps on you and it makes it hard. My, I have a very, very remote kind of not necessarily similarity, but a feeling. So, as you may or may not be aware, lisa, I'm a volunteer for hospice.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, yes, I think you told me that. I'm sorry for that.
Speaker 1:And so in my travels with hospice, they put me in the same facility. My mother was in, and it took me a couple of times to go visit that facility, and it's the only way that I can describe it. Going there, it felt like I was walking into a burning house. Every time that I walked in, I just had anxiety and I didn't, and I was like, ah, you know what, I think I can stomach this, I think I can get through it. And finally I had to call my care coordinator and say, hey, I can't do this. And I actually spoke to one of their counselors it was one conversation and I said this isn't something that I can do, it's not something that I need to revisit in my life, nor something, a road that I want to travel down. And I think I can liken that to your experience Not that it is the same, but I can liken it to your experience, sure, of being a nurse and then having to care for Zachary at the same time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I want to say my son, zachary, who's almost 23, is very complex, so it's more than just having for my own experience. It went from oh my gosh, my daughter died to oh my gosh, my daughter and my son died, and then it went to and now I have this child who has a feeding tube, who has all kinds of learning and communication and absorption and digestion challenges and every kind of therapy modality and working to care for him.
Speaker 2:I marvel now in great humility at what I was able to do during those years where I was managing everything and I feel compassion for the then me that felt like, okay, I'm going to run right into my fiery fear and work in the very place that is at the heart of the death of my children.
Speaker 2:I don't hold it against myself, I just have compassion because it's not a choice that I would make now and I wish I had had an earlier wisdom or it might have been nice to have it a little earlier of yours, which is to say, yeah, this isn't okay for me. I just didn't have that sense of self, which I think is also, you know, sometimes heavier on the female side, not that we don't all experience it, but this idea that I'm a person outside of my children, outside of my husband, outside of my career, that came late for me, even though I have a lot of reasons to have gotten it sooner. I just didn't because I was on that treadmill the whole time. So, yeah, and I will share too for you and your listeners, the very moment. This is how visceral grief is for folks listening that don't know, and maybe a lot of folks do know listening to this. It's so visceral that, chris, you can describe walking into that facility and I instantly felt my heart rate jump.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:My stomach turned and it's still hanging around. I can get a little goosebumps here. It's so visceral because I know that experience of just it's just horror and it's not. It's not that we're the only ones that feel this way, but it is that we live in a world where we do everything we can not to feel bad.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:So when you lose a parent or a child or a friend or a spouse or a pet, even it doesn't matter you have to learn how to live in that world without that person, and no one talks about it or tells us how to do it. So here we are. Here I am at the age I'm at now, just starting to say wait a minute, what the heck just happened.
Speaker 1:It happens, life comes at you fast and my father used to say that there's a couple of things that I'm thinking about because I am a finance guy and there has been some advice and this is really near and dear to you, having lost children. And one of my clients came to me probably in the last six to eight months and said to me and I'm going to put you on the spot here, lisa and said to me, I'm thinking about getting life insurance on my child. And I gave her some advice, which I'm going to withhold until after Lisa speaks, and we talked about it and my client is in a very good financial position the end of the day. What I said to her any money that you get from the death of your child how is that going to make you feel? And so I'm putting you on the spot, lisa, just to kind of ask you, since you've been through so much, what is your thought on that subject?
Speaker 2:It's a great question, Thank you. I'm going to answer it in a couple parts. When we had our daughter who died at 13 months, we never thought about life insurance because we were living literally at Children's Hospital. I think our longest admission at Children's was nine weeks straight. So in between were crises and infections and it was a very difficult time. So that never crossed my radar as a first time mom.
Speaker 2:When we had Zach and I was working in the pediatric ICU, they had a financial planner, probably from someone they contracted with at the hospital to kind of come through and present different options, and one of them was life insurance for Zachary. And I said you know, he's not really that healthy of a guy, to be honest. He has a feeding tube, he's got this that. The other and the person talking about the plan with me said look, you don't need to buy insurance, but what you might want to do is just get this rider. It's like 10 grand and then, and you don't, he doesn't have to get it. And this may all be either sales jargon, it may not be true. Like, this is not my industry, so I'm gonna let you respond to all that.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But what he suggested was hey, do the rider. If nothing else, he doesn't need an exam. If, god forbid, he dies before he's 18, you'll get $10,000 and that will help for the funeral. Now, if I had never planned my child's funeral before, I might not have thought that was a worthy goal. But having buried my daughter and knowing the costs incredible costs involved, I thought that if they're going to give, if they're going to approve a $10,000 rider if Zach dies between the time he's now and 18, and it only costs me $20 a month, that's worth it to me. So that's the way that I approached it, but I think that there's probably a lot of different ways to, but that's my short. That's my short answer.
Speaker 1:Okay and I appreciate that because that's very candid. So as a financial planner, what I said to my client and again, my client was in a very good financial position, currently is in a good financial position and to them $10,000 would probably not be a lot of money their child I'm being very careful here their child is very healthy and there is nothing wrong with their child. And so my conversation with them on the financial aspect and I took it on both sides and I said financially you guys could afford to handle the death of your child. Because they asked me and it wasn't something that I solicited of them I said if it's $10,000, you guys can stomach that, it'll be a drop in the hat and would $10,000 help you feel better? And it is really ultimately what I said to them If something happened to your child and the mother said no, and then I said, well, financially speaking, this is because the child brings in no income for you guys and the child. From that aspect, if there was a loss financially, it really wouldn't hinder you guys.
Speaker 2:Because it's not affecting an income at all.
Speaker 1:That is correct, and so are you now reaching for something to make you feel better, and I said so. The question was will it make you feel better? And the answer was no, and I said well, financially, you don't need it, and then, emotionally, it's not going to make you feel better. And so the advice is not to have the life insurance on your child and the situation you know, like yours, lisa. By all means. That is something that comes up and it's not often talked about in regards to, you know, children, so specifically a child that is ill very early on, and again, I throw in.
Speaker 1:I try to throw in some financial things you know, here and there it would be interesting to kind of get your take on that a real life person.
Speaker 2:And what a gift for you to be able to bring that to your clients and your colleagues. I know that it's, you know it's a unique. Like I said, we just don't have the language and the space. But it's bringing something else up for me which I'm thinking about, and that is that when Alexis died in 1997, I was sure that some things had been done wrong. I wasn't just sure, I mean I knew, because there had just been mistakes were made and there was a lot.
Speaker 1:So I felt Are you talking about medical mistakes?
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm talking about medical mistakes.
Speaker 1:Okay, I didn't have to infer that because, yes, I've been there, yep.
Speaker 2:Thank you. No, I'm glad that you did, for everyone else too, just to clarify, but I felt pulled toward finding out, I mean literally, like I'll give you one really quick graphic example. Alexis had a Broviac catheter which went right into her heart where we gave her her food. She did not get her food from a feeding tube because she couldn't absorb it. And one of the ways and nursing people know this medical, but you know one of the ways that we keep a port from clotting and being no good is we squirt heparin into it. Heparin's a blood thinner. Let's keep everything from clotting so that the next time we go to access that port it's open, it's patent.
Speaker 2:This is just a quick example, but there was one night that we had been discharged from the hospital after several weeks and we're back at our apartment. One night that we had been discharged from the hospital after several weeks and we're back at our apartment, and at some point I went in and Alexis was fussing and crying and the nurse, I don't know she had stepped out of the room or something, and when I picked her up we were covered with blood and it's all it actually came down to, as I won't go in the whole story. But she never hyperlocked the poor. So I know that that mistake was made. So there were mistakes made. There are mistakes made. We can't do everything perfectly.
Speaker 2:But what I wanted to do was get some perspective around what happens next, because I happened to be married at that time to a lawyer lots of lawyers in my circle, lots of legal stuff going on. So I thought, you know, I'm just going to, I'm just going to take a look, and I took all the records in front of mine, referred me to somebody and I took all the records in and I was devastated because this is still very fresh in the aftermath of her death. And I went back a couple of weeks later and I felt very. I was just open to whatever the recommendation was going to be. The attorney gave pardon me. The attorney gave me what I consider to be one of the best, most generous and compassionate gifts in that moment, which was you know what. There's some stuff here. Would it have prevented her from dying? Probably not. I can't say for sure and we can look into that.
Speaker 1:I'm smiling because I have a very similar experience and I give advice on that subject, so go ahead, lisa.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So just wrapping it up is you know? Basically, you know you can, we can litigate this and you may get some financial restitution. You may not. But when we do that, no matter what the outcome is, you're still gonna have to grieve. So if you get into this whole project of litigation, it might serve as a good distractor and I'm not trying to downplay the value of a good distractor, and I'm not trying to downplay the value of a good distractor, because sometimes we need it to survive. But he basically said look, you have a broken heart, you've buried your daughter. There's some stuff here, but, big picture, she was a very sick little girl and if it were me, I would just want to get on with the process of trying to figure out how to I hate the term move forward, but how to integrate and move forward. So that is a situation where I was like, yeah, so it's very personal.
Speaker 1:I wrote a blog specifically to that and I've consulted a few clients in that regard and your attorney gave some very, very good advice. And what I call in that situation, when you're going through the legal process, one is you're very angry and upset when you're in grief, and then, two, you're extending your grieving process and there's no right answer and there's no wrong answer in regards to the legal process. But I think it really comes down to is did the facility and or a doctor or medical staff, did they do something that drastically shortened I'm being crude here, but drastically shortened a person's life?
Speaker 2:No, or you're saying in general sorry, no.
Speaker 1:You're saying in general, sorry, yeah, in general. And in my experience, if the answer is no, if they were going to expire in a shorter time than normal, then it doesn't really make sense. And conversely, I had a client whose husband went into the hospital and they did everything wrong and the husband was the breadwinner, and so that had a dramatic financial effect on the family. So in their situation it made sense to go after some funding, but again it extended the grief of that family.
Speaker 1:So in my situation my mother and I've been in some other ones which I won't disclose, but my mother the facility said not to put her on anything that would diminish her cancer, so to speak, at the tail end, and they said her cancer is going to be slow moving, which was far from the truth. So she was admitted in May and she had one or two lesions on her spine. By August she had 12 to 14. So it was fast moving and it was very aggressive. The doctor said no, we shouldn't put her on anything as far as for cancer. And looking back I could have gone after the doctors and said you made a definitive wrong decision here, but my mother was going to pass anyways and so it didn't make sense for me to extend my grief, but there's no right answer there. There's really no right answer. I'd say the right answer is to get the best consultation.
Speaker 2:Objective consultation as possible and that was those are human to human conversations and it's reminding me so as a legal nurse consultant going. The irony would be that then I would go into the legal community in Maryland and Virginia and DC where I'd lost my own daughter, thought about litigation, realized it probably wasn't a good idea, made a different choice and then here I am testifying to standard of care deviations for other cases and I did that. So I was very intimate with that process and what you're describing is what's coming to me and I have come to call the but-for rule. So it's a but-for, but for that what would be different? And if it's significant, then that gives you a direction. If it's not significant, that gives you a direction. So, but for that mistake, but for whatever we're looking at, it just takes us. I just like those two words together just really helped me through a lot of different things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we share some very similar experiences.
Speaker 2:We do, we're going to have to talk again. You're going to have to come on to the Healing Path podcast, and when I get there, I'm not. I haven't done any interviews yet, but I would love to invite you to be the first.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would love to be on there. You know it's it's very easy for me to talk about these things and it kind of roll and roll and some folks, when I'm interacting with folks, they're like man, how do you know about all this stuff? And I used to wonder, like my father, how he knew about a whole bunch of stuff. But he just had a whole bunch of life experiences and it's no different than mine. Mine are just in different places.
Speaker 1:And so I've kind of ingratiated myself in this aura to where I can give this advice. And I expose myself to good people like you that help me continue to learn. So thank you, Lisa. Thank you for being on the podcast. I appreciate you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. It's great to connect with someone who has similar experiences and I think you know in grief work, that's what it's really about is connection.
Speaker 1:Sure, I would agree with you, so it helps me.
Speaker 2:I know Helps me.
Speaker 1:Is there anything that I didn't give you an opportunity to talk about, that you wanted to talk about?
Speaker 2:I think the only thing I would take advantage of the opportunity to throw out there is, I think about what are the? What have been the big levers that I've been able to pull from my own grief and healing path? And I just want to throw out there just the self care aspect of grief. And you know, physically, we know that we grieve in our bodies, we know that that traumatic pain is in our bones, in our body, and so we're already struggling physically. So that's not really the time that we want to put stuff in our bodies that's going to make it harder for them to stay afloat. Also, just the sleep factor a lot of us aren't good resters and so not to harp on it, but self care.
Speaker 2:If someone were to say to me, like, what's the lever, what, what can I pull, I would go right down to and I do this in the coaching space go right down to fundamentals eat, move, breathe, sleep. How are you taking care of yourself? Because it's such a major tectonic shift when your body is getting taken properly care of than when we're not taking care of it, and it made such an impact on me, so I just want to share that as well. If you're not taking care of yourself. Be kind, be kind to your body, be kind to your mind. Get some sleep, be with people that care about you. It will make a huge difference.
Speaker 1:And I'll just add to that it's okay to be selfish.
Speaker 2:I call that self-advocacy.
Speaker 1:I don't call it selfish, Chris.
Speaker 2:It's okay to advocate for ourselves.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm a little more crude because I've had to tell people that I'm being selfish in this moment and take it or leave it. So it is what it is. Some folks have cast some ill opinions of when I've been in difficult situations. That I'm caring for myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my mind is spinning again, it should be a gift, not a sin. I mean it should be something we're proud of, and we need people to show us how to do, because we don't know how to say no, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yep, I agree with you 100% and hopefully you know your writings, your podcast and you know what I'm trying to do on my end. Help you know with all that self-care. So again, lisa, thank you for being on the podcast, so I want to give you an opportunity to tell how people can reach you. What's your website?
Speaker 2:Great Thanks. Yeah, it's actually my name lisamicfarlandcom, and all the information about podcasting is on there. My blog is included in the website and I look forward to seeing you there.
Speaker 1:So I'll just add to that. There's a newsletter that you can sign up for to hear from Lisa directly, and I will put that in the notes for this podcast. And so, lisa, thank you again. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you again, Chris.
Speaker 1:And for any of my listeners. Thank you for listening as well and I hope I've given you some more exposure to kind of some other folks, some real life folks out in the world, and please feel free to pass this podcast or any others, on to any friends, colleagues, family members, on to any friends, colleagues, family members, and also, if you wouldn't mind, go on to Apple Podcasts, spotify, google Podcasts and add this to your listening pleasure, take care and be well.
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 dot com. 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.