Learning with Friends: Reflections on Episodes 6-9, Season 2 with Nancy Gabriel

Transcript: (lightly edited for clarity)

Speakers
Beth Tener

Nancy Gabriel

Beth Tener: I’m here today with Nancy Gabriel. We have made our way to the end of Season 2. This season is called Kinship Through Life Transitions. The tradition here on the podcast is that every four episodes, Nancy returns, and we have a Learning with Friends episode where we reflect on the themes of the previous four episodes. Welcome, Nancy.

Nancy Gabriel: Thanks Beth. It’s nice to be here.

Beth Tener: We will discuss the events of an unfolding story that began in earlier episodes. If you didn’t listen to those yet and don’t want a spoiler, then please listen to the earlier episodes and then listen to this one later. Or you can just listen to this one and you’ll get a flavor of some of the experiences in the stories that were in the previous ones.

The last four episodes focus in on a relationship I had with my partner at the time, Rick. It starts with us making some big life decisions and changes about where we’re going to live, getting married, having children? I’ll recap the four episodes and then Nancy and I will talk about themes.

Nancy, you were my friend and colleague through these times, so you might remember some of the details, right?

Nancy Gabriel: Yes

Beth Tener: Episode 6 was called Big Decisions and Ways of Knowing with Tenneson Woolf.  We looked at times when you are at a threshold or a crossroads and you have to make big decisions. How do we go about that and how can relationships and groups support us in holding those choices and making better decisions?

In the story I was telling, Rick and I were deciding where to live. At the end of the episode, I shared that we got engaged and decided to move to New Hampshire and build a house out in the woods. The next episode was called Community Through the Cancer Journey with Margie Zohn.  We were looking at times when life throws events at us that we didn’t have a choice in. In our case, two weeks after we got engaged, we learned that he had kidney cancer.

Suddenly, we were thrown into the life of hospitals and doctor’s offices and surgeries. We explored how we brought more humanity and connection into that time and how our community rallied in many creative ways. We’ll be talking about that.

Then in the next episode, it was called Love and Presence in the Hardest Times, and that was with Greta Bro. That looked at the experience of what I called “a Crucible,” or Greta called the “Dark Night of the Soul”, where everything you’re doing isn’t working and we have to face loss, letting go and dying. In this case, the cancer Rick had was terminal. Greta beautifully held that conversation with me about “how do you go through that time of life and how can we support friends in those times of crisis and endings?”

This feels relevant on many levels. It’s not just losing a loved one, but many people are in such times of transition; with weather events and natural disasters, job changes, and other kinds of transitions. Many of the themes and patterns we discuss can be applicable at different levels of change right now, and in organizations and teams as well.

The last episode of this series was called Grief Held in Community. I was joined by my friend Adam. We tell the stories of what happened after Rick died. It begins in his hospital room and follows me going home to our house, how friends and family were there and just so supportive of me and each other. We created some beautiful rituals for honoring him. We discuss what it was like to move through that process, move through the loss and how I came through the times of grief and what I called “Slow Time.” That is the arc of the podcast episodes we’ll talk about today.

Beth Tener: One of the themes I want to talk about is this phrase that Tenneson Woolf said in that first episode. He talked about “being good humans with one another.” I thought I would start with that one.

We were in the space of trying to make a lot of big decisions, and Tenneson was sharing a story. He’s a facilitator and a coach. He talked about working with teams or individuals where they know some changes are happening or something else is possible, but they’re kind of nervous about it. They’ve been, as he said, “beat up by systems.” They want to lean into the new, but there’s nervousness and there’s fear. There’s grief of letting go, always all mixed together. I said that I see a choice point like that as a tangle of yarn: there’s many dimensions going on, like threads that you have to pull apart.

As a friend, healer, or facilitator, it’s about holding the space long enough for us to untangle each of those threads and honor them, even when it’s really hard. Often, that can open up the space for something new to move, or at least shift out of feeling so stuck and in fear. Healthy social connection actually builds that space of trust where our nervous system can relax. We know it helps us think better and get out of just the “yes/no – either/or” mindsets and the level of stress around making big decisions. For a lot of us, we are trying to make big decisions operating too alone or in workplaces or teams in low trust environments with a lot of pressure and urgency.

In one of the stories I talked about talking with Greta Bro, as a healing guide. She helped me name my situation, confirming “you’re making a lot of big decisions all at the same time. That there is fear coming up is natural.”

That ability to pull apart the different threads helped me work my way through those changes and make some decisions. Nancy, I’m curious for you as a human being, but also as a facilitator and coach who helps people in these moments of tangles, how did that all land for you?

Nancy Gabriel:  I love the yarn metaphor with the tangle. I think the way Tenneson talked about it, and I know the way that you work, it’s definitely a way that I work, is that untangling process. What I love about being a part of it, either helping someone or getting helped myself, is that I know the answer, or they know the answer. It’s the gift of the friend or the healer alongside us to help us untangle and get to what we already know, name the things, and then make sense of what to do.

I was having a text conversation with my son last night who’s far away and adjusting to a different situation. I was appreciating his ability to name what was coming up because that ability to name it means it doesn’t get stuck, right? You name it, you acknowledge it and then it can flow.

But I think that when we don’t do that, then it can get stuck and it can become almost like a form of invisible resistance. We have to see life “as it is” to help us move through that tangle that we’re in.

Beth Tener: Yeah, I like that “invisible resistance.” We feel stuck or like we’re spinning or cycling.

Nancy Gabriel: And things don’t move, right? Those tangles are such rich learning opportunities, but if we can’t untangle them, we can’t access the learning. Often when the learning comes, the processes of untangling can be uncomfortable, right? Those are the times when there is a lot of learning or growth or development.

Beth Tener: Exactly. Yes.

One of the things Tenneson said about these moments is how important it is to give permission to slow down. I loved how he said that. I was thinking about our conversation last time in the last Learning with Friends episode. We talked about the process of receiving each other’s stories. People think they have to be efficient and fast and do their job well by just getting through it and making decisions and moving on. But being in the slowness can allow us to realize, “wait, there’s something going on in this group.”

Tenneson said, often it is grief or fear and it’s key to be able to slow down and not sweep those worries under the rug, instead to just pause. In his case, he was working with a group where they threw the agenda to the side to really hear what’s happening in the room, with the grief of the changes underway and what we’re losing. “Let’s just acknowledge that.” We do that too as facilitators.

I said to him that “you allowed the whole room to breathe.” It was like releasing a pressure valve for that conversation to happen. In these times, many of those kinds of conversations are needed and we’re not giving ourselves the time or the space to have them.

One thing we mentioned Nancy, was the “soft shoe shuffle” about naming tensions. That’s one I’ve learned from you.

Nancy Gabriel: Yes, that story makes me think about the Soft Shoe Shuffle I learned through Deep Democracy, I think it’s now called the Lewis Method. When when we’re trying to make some change or navigate through something challenging and we don’t give ourselves time to acknowledge the fear or grief, it often goes under the water. In that methodology, we call it a fish. These fish are swimming under the water. We don’t see them but they’re holding back the group from doing what it really would like to do or what it aspires to do.

It’s incredibly important to slow down and take that time but there’s always this tension and pressure because there’s so much urgency around so many of the issues that people are working on today. People feel like they can’t take that time because that’s going to slow things down. But we know, like you’ll often say with groups, Beth, sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. And that’s part of the  tension that we feel in our urgency culture. I think it’s changing with young people today. They’re much more aware of their emotions, but emotions weren’t part of the workplace that I entered into.

Beth Tener: You know, me neither!

I was in a conversation the other day. It’s clear we’re in our fifties. I was telling a story about burnout. People were saying, “well, of course you’d talk about your boundaries.” And I said, “when this was all happening, no one even had that word.”  Now there’s language for boundaries and we can understand that. That wasn’t “a thing” when I was doing this. There was no talking about boundaries.

Nancy Gabriel: I’m in my sixties, so I’m even older than you. I remember being called a pip squeak. I don’t think they do that anymore. “You’re pretty tough for a pip squeak.” There would be a boundary right there that I didn’t set because that just wasn’t how life was.

Beth Tener: So back to the naming, in terms of my story. When I was making many big decisions at once about getting married and moving to a new state, it was so helpful to have someone just name that. Greta said “holding that many decisions, it’s understandable that there would be a feeling of frozen fear, not being sure what to do.” I interpreted that fear to mean this is the wrong choice. She reminded me to look at all I was holding and that reframed it. That acknowledgement of what is and naming the complexity is so helpful. It’s such a beautiful way to be human together, as Tenneson says.

Nancy Gabriel: Yes, there’s so much value in love in the validation. Just validating what the person is experiencing and what they’re in the middle of. There’s no advice in that. There’s no judgment in that. There’s just validating: “Wow. That’s a lot. That’s hard. No wonder why you feel uncertain. It would be weird if you didn’t feel uncertain with the kind of change you were embarking on.”

Beth Tener: Okay. So it’s not just me! It’s not my failure. We so need that.

Nancy Gabriel: Yes. We really do.

Beth Tener: I want to bring in a new theme here from the last few episodes, which is this question: in those times when it’s really hard, how do we want to be in a relationship? When Rick went into the hospital twice, for two major surgeries both Margie and I were amazed by how he created such a sense of connection with everybody he interacted with. She shared a story about him joking around with the phlebotomist, and with other nurses, asking questions or giving career advice. He really formed a connection with them, whomever it was.

Margie asked him, “Even when you’re feeling so crappy, and you have every right to be irritable, how do you do this?” He said, “Whenever I’m in a situation like this, I think to myself that these people are my family for the next few days.” That was how he interacted with people. In another example, after he died, as we were cleaning up the bedside table, I found a note about me. He had written a little note of intention that said, “As long as I’m able, I’m going to invest in this relationship and stroke Beth’s hair daily.” His body is falling apart. He is in so much pain, and that was the intention he chose. So that idea of “how do you stay connected”, and as Adam also said in the last episode, “even in the most trying circumstances, one can build relationship and connection.”

Nancy Gabriel: I think that’s just an amazing story in so many ways. It just personifies who he was as a human being, as you know, so much light and love. I think about that and I think, “Wow, he really impacted all those people that were around him and he was getting so much back from that.”

There’s science now about, I can’t remember what they’re called, but these secondary relationships, like Rick was making family in the hospital or when you go to the grocery store, when you interact with the bus driver when you get on the bus.  Every single one of those, they’re little nuggets of love and connection that feed us. Those people feel that, and they probably interact differently as they’re going through their day.

Beth Tener: I trust he probably got better care because the nurses were all looking out for him and delighting to come in his room because the spirit of the interaction.

Nancy Gabriel: But the thing about Rick is that that’s not why he did it. It was never transactional. It was just, when you humanize people, when you treat people as human beings, that flow just naturally happens. Yes, I’m sure they paid more attention. I mean, they wanted to go in his room, right? And he wanted them to come in. So it was just a beautiful flow. I think we forget sometimes how much those small interactions matter.

Beth Tener: Yes, I think so.

One of the exercises I learned from one of my teachers, Joanna Macy, is an exercise called “Learning to See Each Other”. You have people walk and mill around and you invite them to imagine they’re in Times Square and they’re late.  People are in your way. You can feel it right away. Then you have them slow down and find one person. As you look at each other, you’re invited to think about how this person’s been through all kinds of things in their life. You have no idea what they’ve lived through. Then you find a new partner and you imagine working with this person and collaborating on something you’d love. You’re looking through those eyes and smiling at each other. There’s something to the intentionality of how we interact with each other. A friend who I work with had done that exercise four years ago and he just mentioned it to me last week. I totally forgot I taught him that. He said that stayed with him. Often people are crying during it. It’s such a small invitation, but you realize how often we don’t look at each other through those eyes, with that intention.

Nancy Gabriel: Right. It’s such a different mindset to bring to the interaction.

Beth Tener: What I think’s interesting is the intention Rick had was around a relational goal. In the facilitation and the social change work you and I do, we want to get results and they want to move forward on their mission. You and I always have a shared goal of enhancing the trust and the strength and the quality of the relationships in this community, so we’re working on both. Often people just look at the outcomes. If you get to those outcomes it’s a success, even if it’s done in a way where the relationships are a mess and no one ever wants to work together again.

I had a dear friend named Michael Bischoff who I was friends with during the last few years of his cancer journey. Sadly, he died of brain cancer. He was someone I learned a lot from. He had a philosophy that said, “Healing is possible without a cure. Healing is possible even while we’re dying. And we can’t make healing happen. We can’t predict when it will happen physically, emotionally, or in relationships. But what we can do is make a hospitable space where healing can come as a gift of grace.”

Nancy Gabriel: I love that.

Beth Tener: This is the first time I’ve heard it and thought of hospitable and hospital, but they don’t often feel like the same. In that quote, they’re different.

This leads to the next topic, which was, in this time of crisis it felt as if was our lives were like an hourglass. Before cancer, we roamed far and wide and had all kinds of interests and lots going on in our lives. Then as illness comes, your whole world shifts, your geography gets smaller. As he got more debilitated, it got focused in just the house and hospitals and doctors offices. And then just the first floor, as his legs got heavier with edema. Everything was falling away that wasn’t central to his wellbeing, our love, and keeping him alive.

I was so moved by was how our community showed up. Margie talked about this as an amazing connecting force. People who loved us and we loved, seeing all the challenges we were going through with his illness, and we’d just moved into a new home. There was so much at once. It was a perfect storm. The way people showed up and helped at our time of greatest need was profoundly moving. The showed up with their gifts at the right moment. We had a story of Margie, Jack and I creating a little Water Fire pizza party for Rick’s birthday when we planned to go to Water Fire, a public art event, but it fell through because he was not well enough.  Or Christmas where she organized for our Jewish friends to come in and bring Chinese food to Rick in the hospital so I could go home for a couple days with my family.

In these times of crisis, everything is so special and potent. Our creativity can get accentuated because it matters. When we think of a crisis, we imagine that in the  breakdown as it’s going to be horrible. Yet, within it, we come more alive. We open our hearts and we don’t take anything for granted. We just step up. I’m curious if you’ve experienced that or how that part of the story resonated for you.

Nancy Gabriel: I have experienced that and it’s amazing. When you’re in a hard time or a time of grief, people show up in these incredibly surprising ways that are so meaningful. They’re so meaningful for you as the person going through it, but it’s also meaningful for them.

I have a neighbor who’s ill and she’s said, “I don’t want you to do anything for me if it’s in the least bit of inconvenience for you.” And I said, “But what if I want to be inconvenienced? What if I find meaning in being inconvenienced, so that I can be a part of your life in a way that’s meaningful and helpful to you.”

I think that your ability to receive meant that you had the joy and the love of experiencing that outpouring. It also meant that you allowed people to come together and have their own version of love and support and outpouring, because you’ve done stuff for people in a group. It feels so good even in a hard time.

Beth Tener: A story I didn’t share it in the podcast was that one of my best friends went through losing her husband to cancer about a year before all this unfolded for us. And I was that friend. I was so upset. I wanted to take my care and do something tangible. I remember being at their apartment and they were off at the hospital. I cleaned the kitchen, I cooked food.  I did everything I could. I knew it was nice for them. I could feel like that care had to flow into something tangible.

We were talking about the tangle of yarn blocking that flow of life. There’s a strong kind of cultural norm of “Oh, don’t go to any trouble for me” and “No, no, I can’t receive”, and “No, I don’t want to be a burden on anyone.” It’s so common because we prize self-sufficiency and not troubling anyone.

Nancy Gabriel: Rugged individualism, right?

Beth Tener: Part of how I was able to receive was having lived through being the friend and having the imprint of that experience. I knew I was doing something nice for my friends by receiving their offering. I was doing it for them! That’s was in my mind. As Rick’s primary caregiver, I was just delighted to see how receiving the help delighted him, for him to see this cup of love continually being filled in all the creative ways his friends showed their love for him by helping us. Those were some of the most profound experiences of his life. It was really beautiful.

Nancy Gabriel: I hadn’t thought of this until now, but what comfort that was for him to see and know that they would care for you when he was gone. I’m sure he was hugely concerned about you and how you would be. Seeing them doing practical and loving things for you both provided that comfort.

Beth Tener: It’s very true. I think he had conversations with friends about wanting to make sure that this community there for me. He was able to witness it.

Nancy Gabriel: What a huge gift to him. Because you think about being able to let go when the time is right and to have that peace when you do that.

Beth Tener: Exactly.

My dream is that we reweave the bonds of friendship and community at so many scales because we know there’s so many lonely and dying alone, they can’t let go because they’re so worried about their partner or their kids not having the support.

Nancy Gabriel: Right. That makes me think about the epidemic of loneliness that we’re experiencing right now in this country and how it could look very differently if we get back.

Beth Tener: I was reading this thing about the concept of good and evil and that evil is really just the absence of the good. It’s this different way to look at it. But often like to make evil the devil or an embodied force, but we kind of do it with loneliness, too. It’s like an epidemic of loneliness or poverty as a war on poverty. Poverty is lack of wealth. Is wealth not flowing? The good is wealth flows. The good is belonging. Tons of kinship and peer support and layers of help. Partly why I want to name how important Kinship is in life transitions and in what it can look like. I know I was very blessed to have these layers of friends and family who could show up and come and help in so many ways. That’s a picture of what it could look like. That’s the opposite of loneliness.

Nancy Gabriel: We hear how isolated and separated people are and the antidote to that is belonging. Your story is such a beautiful example of what belonging can look like and what belonging is and how nice to be talking about things from that level and not from a lack level, which is what we do so much in this country. You know, there’s so much about what we don’t have or we pathologize or it’s a scarcity thing. And so just in this conversation, you’ve helped me kind of flip my own thinking about that and it’s like, “Oh yeah, I went to the epidemic of loneliness.” But so much more thinking about this as just a story of belonging and what belonging looks and feels like.

Beth Tener: I think of it as a weave of community, like the way that different people could find their place at certain moments, knowing us, knowing time was of the essence. He had cancer that wasn’t looking good. Things were getting very, very hard for us. So, you know, there’s often a clear way that people can be like, “I can come chop wood or I can bring you your favorite food” because he was watching cooking shows all the time and he loved food. My sister said “I’m going to make potato latkes and bring them over” and that made his day. There became such a creativity in it. Our friend who was a physician assistant said, “Beth, I’m here for you. Like when you have medical questions call me.” Or sometimes he would call us and say, “No, do not get an appointment in three weeks. Call them back and make a stink and get an appointment next week.” You know that kind of thing, and that was his way to show up. You know, he wasn’t bringing casserole, but that part of belonging is we see where we can fit in and bring our gifts and bring our generosity.

Nancy Gabriel: Right. If you’re an introvert out there and you’re like, “Oh my god, all these people around all the time!” That isn’t it. I feel like sometimes people might be like, “I wouldn’t want all those people in my house.” It’s what your story looks like. Belonging for who we were and for who you were.

Beth Tener: What would be helpful. In my conversation with Adam, we were saying something similar about grief. What each person needs and their process of grieving and coming through that might look quite different. So what was nourishing for me for someone else would feel highly uncomfortable, you know? Keeping that right and that honoring going.

There was a story I didn’t tell. I remember after we did all these different funerals, which I’ll talk about in a minute. Our little group that had gone through it, by the end we had been so overwhelmed with people and I’m sure those who’ve gone through bigger funerals know this. I mean, you’re just so raw and you have all these people who’ve just walked into the tragedy of your story who are trying to say something. You know, it was really hard. I remember we finally got through everything and went back to the house and at that point you’re with the core group of people you’ve been going through this with. Sometimes you get into that weird giddy kind of humor. And I remember there’s, it was a dark winter night and they’re like, we see these headlights coming up the long driveway and my friend Margie’s going, “Oh no, there’s one more casserole coming!” <Laugh>

She was joking, saying “Bar the door from another casserole!” and “No more casseroles!” We pictured the person trying to get in and give us the casserole. She’s like, “Stop it!” We laughed so hard about that.

The last part of the story I wanted to kind of weave in here is back to this theme of being human together is also the importance of ritual. One of the things that I’ve found really beautiful and helpful for the way we navigated it after Rick died was the way our group kind of very organically came together and designed kind of three different rituals. In this time where a lot of traditional religions and community spaces are not as present in our culture, a lot of people aren’t in religious community anymore. That’s often the space where you just show up at church and have the funeral. But if you’re not in that, and Rick and I weren’t, and we had just moved to a new community, so we sort of had to create it ourselves. We did one small ritual the first evening he died and then that following weekend we had about 25 people.

That one was so beautiful because we started the ritual asking people to reflect and share stories of Rick and it was so beautiful just hearing different people who knew him from his work life or as an uncle or as a brother or as a friend, newer friends, older friends. Hearing so many people share stories of him. It was kind of this like multifaceted diamond in the center of the circle and everybody got a fuller experience of what he was about and how he had affected other people. I remember then the next part of it was we had some music and other things, but then we took a big wide bowl of water and had tealight candles and we invited people to talk about how they would keep Rick’s spirit and memory alive? One way to do that is to live the qualities that we loved in him in your own life.

And so we invited people to think of a quality that they would like to carry forward that they learned from Rick or even from to that day hearing about how he was and then light the candle. I remember at the end of that being so moved by the stories, I learned so much more about him. When it was all done, I really felt in my heart like a sense of completeness. It was like something had really shifted in the group holding him together, crying and laughing together and then sharing food. I just feel that the need for this kind of storytelling and ritual, going back to our tangle of yarn, honoring everything that was great is so important.

Nancy Gabriel: I think it brings us back to that idea of flow and how naming everything allows it to be present and to flow. It can really be a profound healing experience when you are together in the way that you describe being together and just loving and honoring him.

Beth Tener: When there’s space for that, what I felt for the friends and family who were coming together, even at the ICU when he was in his final days, there was a way we all bonded so deeply going through that together.

Nancy Gabriel: Totally. That’s such a deep experience to share together. I don’t think there’s anything more meaningful than that. In earlier episodes we talked about the loss of my baby, Ned, and I will say I’m not glad that happened. I don’t wish that on anybody. But I’m different because of it and I’m better because of it. Part of what that experience did for me was show me what community meant and the way community showed up and the different ways that people just held me and held my family during that time. I hadn’t ever experienced anything quite like that before and these times are so painful and they’re not anything we wish, but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t joy and connection that come from them. Those are the parts of Rick that are still present that come through.

Beth Tener: Picking back up on the “being human together” theme and the honoring the need to slow down. I mean the last part of the episode with Adam, I talked about after all the rituals and everyone was going home and then that gets into the really hard part of the grieving their loss. That also felt very much like the tangle of yarn almost having to unravel. I was doing a lot of writing and just a lot of honoring. I think I mentioned at one point having like 19 different things to grieve about, the ways to think about the loss, and how important that “Slow Time” was, and that not rushing back into work and figuring out a way to be able to take the time when I was having a really hard time, calling my colleagues and saying, “I can’t pull it off today,” and having the grace that they could cover for me.

But as I think about a way to be wrapping up this season with this Kinship Through Life Transitions, if we were to redesign a culture that was humane and really about helping people handle the level of change we’re going through… because let’s not forget we have so much to be grieving about the Earth right now and the scale of some of the wars and challenges, and running at the pace that so many things do. It would not be how we would design it, right? <Affirmative> I would slow it all the heck down, right? So we can actually feel and be together and process things. As we let things go we can be intentional about what we create.

Nancy Gabriel: I wonder are there one or two (or three or 10) things that you point to in ways that you were changed by this experience? I’m wondering are there things that you feel like were a shift for you? Or I look at things differently now?

Beth Tener: That’s a good question. I mean I felt like through the process it was like my feet got on the ground. I was living more in the truth of what life is. I think I had been living in this kind of “ we can make a better world”, that things can always be better and be kind, and optimistic. <Affirmative> But there was a way that wasn’t always coming face to face with the truth of life. Having gone through someone I love dying and seeing the dying process, I’d never been with anyone going through that. It was hard and it was sacred and I felt like, “Okay, I’m much more connected to life and death in the reality of life and innately, my heart opened.”

You know, sometimes when you don’t know what to say to a person but there’s just a way now that I can be with people, and I just can trust because I’ve lived it. I will know what to say or not say. You know, there’s sort of a wisdom there. I remember going back in the workplace and I was putting on some training workshop and this young woman who was volunteering with us was really stressed out about people not coming and not having the flip charts and everything, and I was just like, “that is so not anything I’m going to stress about.” So the scale of what I could hold and what was going to ruffle me and what was just in perspective of not worth getting stressed about. I would say those are a few.

That and then the quality of Rick’s love for me that was so intense. I think part of what I had to do helped me enhance my own self-love. That’s always a challenge for a lot of us. But having the imprint of how he loved me and he was good at loving himself with a lot of care and compassion. I remember saying that at the second ritual that that was going to be my learning edge because I had an imprint of how good it felt, and I know I didn’t always care for myself that kindly.

Nancy Gabriel: Wow, that’s beautiful and I can see so much a part of who you are now.

Beth Tener: Well, thank you.

Nancy Gabriel: Yeah. So more ways that you’re honoring Rick.

Beth Tener: Yes. It becomes who and how you are in the world.

Nancy Gabriel: I’m sure you probably know this poem, Kahlil Gibran “On Joy and Sorrow.” It’s “the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.” I think about that because there’s so much joy in your relationship with him.

Beth Tener: Yes. There was a lot.

Nancy Gabriel: And also that source of deep sorrow. They do go together.

Beth Tener: They do. Yes.

Nancy Gabriel: They do go together. I had never thought about it that way before but they really do.

Beth Tener: Yes they really do. I remember at one point I was driving home in the countryside, and it was like a beautiful fall day and I was really missing Rick. I remember I was like in tears missing him. But then the beauty of the New England colors and the blue sky and the late day sun. At the same time, I was in total tears in awe of how beautiful it was. And I’m thought, that’s it. Once you open your heart, as Greta was often talking about, going through that level of “Dark Night of the Soul”. It’s like it’s both, it’s absolutely both.

Nancy Gabriel: It’s both. I think that circles for me back to what you said about being able to see life as it really is. Sort of grounding, that’s part of it because life is just one big contradiction. You know?

Beth Tener: <Laugh>. Yes.

Nancy Gabriel: And so, no matter how much we want it to be one way or the other or something, and we’re in that kind of mode right now, that’s very binary. But you know, it isn’t that.

Beth Tener: No, it’s both.

Well, thank you so much, Nancy. I feel that’s a wonderful place to end this. I thank you for being on the journey with me on the Kinship Through Life Transitions season. This will be our final episode.

Nancy Gabriel: It’s such an honor and a pleasure to do these with you, Beth. I appreciate you taking me along for the ride.

Beth Tener: Thank you. And thank you to all the listeners for coming along on this journey and always love to hear any feedback. You can go to kinshiphub.net and on the podcast tab, you can find today’s episode, the audio and show notes and the transcript. If you ever want to go back and read the quotes or things. If you would be so kind as to go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and give it a star or put your likes, that’s always really appreciated too. Or share it with people.

We’ll be back for season three. We’ll take a little break and we’ll be back soon and let you know what the theme of that will be. So thanks again for listening.