Surviving the Deaths of Two Children

Today I interview Susan Hutchinson. Susan is the author of a book called Forever With Me, a memoir about the lives and tragic deaths of not one but two of her daughters within a five year time period. In our interview, Susan talks about her book, her grieving processes, and how she ultimately survived with the determination to keep living life to the fullest and the desire to show others that they too can make it to the other side. 

Susan, thank you for being here. I appreciate it. No, I'm glad you asked. I am having you here today because I found your book. It's called Forever With Me and it's about the loss of your two daughters. It's a memoir about your life and about the loss of two children, which anybody can understand that losing one child, how absolutely devastating that would be.

And then also losing two is just, it's unimaginable. So I want to start by having you address. We will talk about the loss of your daughters, but first, after losing them, what drove you to want to write the book about that? First of all, it took me 10 years to, to write that book. And honestly, I was not looking at writing a book, not that one, let me put it that way, to give you some background information.

I work with a lot of different authors doing beta and alpha reading, which is similar to, I get to read the books before they send them to editors to give them some ideas to whether they're right on track and all this other stuff. Anyway, a couple of the authors, one in particular, kept telling me I needed to write a book.

Because she thought I had the talent to be able to develop a plot line and create characters and all that fun stuff. So I actually decided I was going to do this and this was during 2020 when everybody was at home and had a lot of free time and too much time on their hands. And so I had really decided I was going to write a romantic comedy because That's what I like to read is romantic romance in general, but especially romantic comedies.

But after sitting in front of the keyboard with nothing coming out, it's like forever with me started to just come. It's just the best way for it. It was like, it's just, It started in my brain and went down my arms and out my fingertips and onto the keyboard. And it really only took me two weeks to write the first draft of that book.

I was doing five, 6, 000 words a day, which is a lot for a writer. I sent it off to Laura, who was the author that had been really encouraging me and she got back to me. She says, now that I'm done crying, these are the things that I think you need to do. And it took another two weeks to get it into a program.

product that was good enough to send to an editor. And so the whole process took six weeks from start to finish to have a book that was ready to be published. Granted, it's a small book. It's only like 75 pages long, but there's a lot in that book. And I found myself during the process. Purging a lot of stuff that I didn't think I needed to purge, if that makes any sense.

You know, it was 10 years after the death of my second daughter. I didn't realize how much anger I still had. And there were a lot of things that I said in the book that I don't think I ever said out loud. I think that's interesting when you talk about it just coming up out of you. And that's what So much of what I like to do with my podcast is bring these things to light, like it's the life experience and what has happened in people's lives, but also the way in which it starts to come out in a creative way.

So that's interesting to me that it just, we could say poured out of you because certainly six weeks is a quick turnaround time and you had all that in you, but you didn't necessarily even realize it. Did you feel like there was then something that changed within you after having written it? Did you feel a difference in yourself?

I think I felt more at peace about everything. You need to understand that between the time that I lost my first daughter and the writing of that book, I'd had a lot of people comment to me that they thought I was very strong and I did not agree with them on that. I think I come from a real strong theater background and I think I faked it real well for a very long time because that pain was very personal and I really didn't want to display it for everybody, but, and I've really discovered this since writing the book that even though it was a huge personal tragedy for me, there was a silver lining in that.

I could use my experience to help other people who were going through it. I have had a few friends and acquaintances over the years who have lost children. Since then, because, especially since the book, because they know I've been very honest with my experiences, they could be honest with me about it and they weren't going to get a lot of, you're going to be okay.

You'll, you'll get through this. Because I can't guarantee that they can, but I could use myself as a demonstration of if you have the wherewithal to do it, you can pull yourself through this and come out on the other side. You'll never be the same, but in some ways you may be better than you were before it happened.

Let's talk about that. Obviously, it's not something you'd wish on yourself or anyone else. But that is an interesting concept. The parts of yourself that you maybe would see as coming out better afterwards. Tell me about that. What kind of a thing do you think of when you think of that? The saying don't sweat the small stuff.

I don't sweat the small stuff anymore. The things that used to really irritate me, it just doesn't bother me anymore. I think you become more focused on the important things. I do have one child left, Asad bless his heart. He's probably glad he lives 200 miles away or he would know he would be wrapped in bubble wrap and sitting on the shelf somewhere, but we talk very frequently and we never end a conversation without saying, I love you.

And my son is the same way. He says, my kids wake up in the morning with an I love you and they go to bed at night with an I love you. When I drop them off at school, there is an I love you that comes out. And he says, even when I'm angry with them, I tell them that I love them because you never know if that's going to be the last time you're going to be able to say it.

I think. Going through that experience, I think I can handle just about anything now. I have proved to myself that I can get through it. And it really is a choice. You can either let what happened to you control everything about you and bury you underneath it, or you can decide, I'm going to be stronger.

Then this and I am going to come out on top and I am going to be successful in what I want to do. And in this case, it was for me, survival as a mother, you think you can fix everything for your kids. And when I lost Kathy, the younger one, she was the one that was killed in the car crash. First, I kept waking up at night going, I can fix this.

I can bring her back and I can't, I couldn't. And so I think it gives you a more realistic view on what you can and cannot do. And once you figure out you're not superhuman, but just human, I think you learn to deal with things in a more realistic way. And you're more honest with yourself. You're more honest with everyone else.

And you just Learn to deal. That's the best way I can explain it, which I don't know if it makes any sense. It does. It does make sense. And you mentioned Kathy, the daughter you lost first in a car crash. And I had a guest on previously who was, is a grief counselor and deals with grief and grief support.

And she talked about how different people grieve differently and it's all okay. However, they need to grieve. And in your case, when you first lost Kathy, how would you explain your grief process? A roller coaster is probably the best thing to describe about it. And I speak about it in the book to some extent, anybody who has not lost someone special in their lives, whether it's a parent or a child or a best friend or whatever, Unless you've gone through that process, you believe that guilt is a linear trip, that this, the denial is the first thing, which I remember distinctly.

It's like that when I told you I would wake up thinking I can fix this when you can't. And there's the anger and the acceptance and all that. What people don't understand is that you might jump From the denial all the way to the acceptance. And then you'll go back to anger and then you'll jump to something else.

And then you'll be, it's, it's like this, like I say, it's a roller coaster with a lot of loop de loops and back. And I think going through the grief with Kathy was probably harder because I was. I would know I would get into another stage of it, and I'd have a bit of relief that I had gotten through the first phase, and then all of a sudden I find myself back in the first phase, and then I'd get angry because I got back in the first phase.

I was also, for lack of a better term, I was selfish about my grief. 1 of the things that I mentioned in the book is that somebody at the office where I was working, and he was trying to be helpful. I know he was. But he made a point of telling me  a couple of weeks into the whole grief process that a coworker of mine that I didn't know her very well because she was in a different location, I'm in St.

Louis and she was in Peoria, had also just lost her job. a child in a car wreck. And he thought it would make me feel better to know that there was somebody else going through the same thing I was. And I was angry. That's no other way to put it. I was angry. One, that he was stupid enough to say that.  And two, that this was my grief.

I didn't want to share it with anybody else. It was mine and leave me alone and let me do this and don't bring anybody else's grief into it, which is one of the reasons why when people that I know are going through this or I've had actual strangers contact me after reading the book, I never tell them, I know what you're going through because I don't know what they're going through.

I can only tell them what I went through and say, if what I tell you helps you relate to what you're going through. Then fine, I'm happy that helps you, but know that your journey is all of your own. I can support you through it, but I can't tell you how to walk through it. I can only support you and tell you that yes, what you're feeling is totally legitimate.

I have a degree in psychology, but it's a bachelor's degree, and I got it almost 50 years ago, so it's probably not worth much, but I think I know enough if somebody gets stuck where they're at, and that happens in the grief process, you can get fixated on the anger or whatever that I think I have enough sense to say, I think you need professional help.

And I'm not the person to do that for you, but on a, there's no such thing as a typical journey. But in the journey that most of us go through in the grief process, I can relate to them. I can show them the light at the end of the tunnel, but I can't lead them through that process that that requires a professional to do that.

Yeah. And I'm sure it's helpful to see that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, even for one person. And I am a living example that you can get to the end of the tunnel, not once, but twice. Exactly. Exactly. So then that leads us to losing your second daughter, which was a very different situation and who knows how the grief would have been either way.

But tell me about that, losing her and then dealing with your grief.  In the case of Jennifer, for those of your listeners who have not read the book, Jennifer committed suicide. So,  that grief process, I got stuck in anger for a really long time. Anger at my daughter for deserting me like that. Anger at her husband for leaving her alone.

Anger at myself for not being there for her. She was 200 miles away. In her case, she had attempted suicide and was hospitalized for three days or whatever. And she, if you knew Jennifer, she would have been the last person you would have expected to have done what she did, because she was very type A personality.

She was very jovial. She was very social, had tons of friends. And when she killed herself, it shocked everybody, absolutely everybody, including me.  But during the grieving process, I looked back and could pick up the hints of maybe things were not as good as I thought they were. And so then I got angry with myself for not being more observant,  possibly prevent what happened.

You go through this if I had only,  but that's not a healthy way to do it. Because no matter how many if I'd only you go through, it's not going to change the outcome. Sorry. No, I still have issues with this, obviously. So with, with,  with Kathy, I had to forgive the 18 year old that pulled out in front of her that caused the crash.

And that was so much easier than forgiving my daughter for shooting herself or forgiving me for not preventing it or forgiving her husband for not preventing it. And I think because there was so much anger involved in that grief process, it took a lot longer. And honestly, I think it took the 10 years between the death and the writing of the book for me to finally forgive her.

And I still get angry. She left behind a daughter who has some issues. She has something similar to Asperger's and  she needed her mom and her mom wasn't there. And I was 200 miles away. So yes, when something happens to her daughter. I get angry at Jennifer because Jennifer should have been there to take care of it. 

Both of the deaths were sudden. It's not like they had a terminal illness and I got to say all the things that you could say to somebody as they're gradually passing away. And I think that suddenness makes it.  That much more difficult to come to terms with everything. But even though they both died violently, the fact that Jennifer died violently by her own hand made it so much different in the process.

And I had fooled myself when I got the news about Jennifer, my first thought after, Oh my God, I'm not going to survive. This was, I've already gone through this once. Why do I have to go through it twice? And then conned myself into thinking, at least I've been through this once. I know I can survive this.

I know I can get through it. I'll be ready for this. And then to find out, no, I was not ready in the least about getting myself through it. So like I said, I think I'm bulletproof now. I really do. My mother passed away seven years ago and I was with her throughout, she had terminal cancer. Yeah. And I was able to start my grieving process with her before she died because I knew it was coming.

And my mother was grateful to me for not sugarcoating what was happening to her. And when my mother passed away, we had said all the things to each other that we needed to say to each other. And I think I had one semi breakdown after she died, when I felt things were getting too, there was too much on my shoulders because I was the administrator for her estate and everything, but then it passed and I don't know if it's because.

You're conditioned to losing a parent where you're not conditioned to losing a child or it's because I had already been through the most horrendous grieving processes twice that I felt more in control in the grieving process with my mom. There's probably a lot of factors in it, and like I say, I'm not a professional to be able to tell you yay, nay, or this is the way that was, or whatever.

But, getting back to my girls, the two processes were so different. And I think a lot of it, like I said, is because I had So much anger around Jennifer's death than I had with Kathy's and I got stuck in that anger for quite a while. I talked myself out of it and then I throw myself back into it and the slightest little thing would set it off that I don't think until I got to the point where I could forgive her for what she did.

That I could really move on. It's a good example of when you might have a whole mixed bag of emotions because you're grieving and you're so upset that she's done this, but you're also angry, which is completely understandable. It doesn't mean that you don't understand that she must have been Really struggling to take an act like this and then there's reminders her daughter needing her or her husband or you know It's like it comes up kind of thing so I can understand how that would be a really complicated Process and you could love her and be grieving her and be so sad and then also just angry It's normal to feel all those things At once.

Yeah. And I had conned myself into thinking with the fact that my, my younger daughter had been in Atlanta when she died and Jennifer was in Western Kentucky, 200 miles away when she died, that I wasn't used to seeing them on a daily basis, that I would be able to skate through it a little easier because I wasn't missing seeing them every day.

That doesn't work. It was just as bad. I have pictures of my girls. But I wouldn't look at them. I was afraid to look at them. I paint as a hobby, and I've sold some. But anyway, it's mostly a hobby. And I started doing portraits, and it took me forever to want to do a portrait of my girls. And when I finally tried to do them, I couldn't do them.

I still can't do them.  I can do anybody else's likeness, but I can't do theirs. And I think it's because I can't capture who they were. It's not just a likeness of what they look like, but I'm missing something. And so I've, I just gave up trying and I still haven't been able to do it. Yeah. And that, that leads me, you do in your book, talk about them and their personalities.

And I wanted to talk a little bit about that in this interview, because They seemed both like very special girls, and they were different, but they got along really well. So if you could just tell me, Kathy is the younger one who died in the car accident, and Jennifer, who died by suicide, but tell me a little bit about each of them.

Okay, Jennifer was the firstborn. She had me all to herself for two years, and I don't think she was too keen on sharing when Kathy came along two years later. Although she was fascinated with her younger sister. But as my mother put it, Jennifer was an old soul. She was born old. And my mom always said, I always have to make sure all my buttons are buttoned on my shirt because of the way she looks at me.

It's like, she's really getting into my head and studying me and whatever. And she was always the take charge kid. Very protective of her siblings, but her word was.  I think she had more pull with those kids than I did. Let's put it that way. Kathy was the middle child and in a lot of ways had that middle child syndrome.

She tried to ignore her little brother for years and she always tried to do everything that Jennifer did, but her talents were elsewhere. And so she never quite could do the things that Jennifer did. And it was frustrating. And I had to constantly hug her and tell her you'll find your thing. It's okay.

You don't have to do what Jennifer does. I love you just as much. You'll be really good at something. And she ended up being really good at a lot of things, but Kathy never came into her own while her sister was in the same school that she was in, they started middle school in sixth grade. So Kathy would.

shine in the fourth grade because she wasn't following her sister. She signed fourth and fifth and then she'd get into middle school and hear, Oh, I hope you're as good as your sister is and blah, blah, blah. It took Kathy a long time to finally figure out she had a lot going for her. She ended up not going to the same university as her sister did, which was a godsend.

Jennifer went to Murray State, and Kathy went to the community college in Paducah, which was 30 miles from our house, for two years, and then went to the University of Kentucky. And it was really when she went to the University of Kentucky that I think she really came into her own. Because even though there were a lot of kids from our county that went there, that's a huge school.

And so she was no longer following in her sister's footsteps. And that's when she really started to shine. And there were a few people that took an interest in her and helped her develop a lot of the talents that she ended up having. For a kid who could never do business algebra, she ended up in finance.

And she ended up getting a job as a financial advisor for a big bank in Atlanta, and she would tell me about some of her clients. And she had one elderly client in particular, an older gentleman, probably in his eighties, who every time he came to see her, he would bring her a rose because she thought she was so pretty. 

Yeah, exactly. And anyway, she was not only good at her job. She was good at developing relationships with the people that she worked with. When she passed away, my daughter, Jennifer was in charge of her service and insisted that she be brought home, which we wanted anyway, because she'd only been living in Atlanta for a year or two at the time, and there were probably 20 or 30 people who came up from Atlanta to go to her funeral. 

And to me, that says a lot about the relationships that she had with the folks down there. As far as Jennifer goes, like I mentioned earlier, she was a very social creature. If there was ever a need in the community, she was the first one to rally.  They had a friend who he had been hunting and had been in a deer stand up in a tree and fell out in the way he landed.

He survived, but he broke his neck and ended up paralyzed from the neck down and she organized. A fundraiser raised 30, 000 for the guy and started meal things and all sorts of different stuff for him. And nobody asked her to do that. She just did it. And it doesn't surprise me. When she was in school and there were those dreaded group projects, everybody wanted Jennifer on their team because Jennifer would make sure that they got it done if that meant she had to do it herself because she wanted her grade. 

And not that they did, although I'm sure in the In the course of her school career, there were probably some that did, but they could coast if they wanted to because they knew she would get it done. She was just that driven type of a person, but she was also a caretaker type. My youngest, my son James, if he fell down, he'd probably go to her first because she'd take care of him.

And that also meant that if he did something he shouldn't have done and she found out about it, she'd keep a secret because she wasn't going to tell on anybody.  Yeah. Oh, that's cute. They both sounded really wonderful. And I picked that up so much in your book about Jennifer that she was driven and so wanting to help and fix and all that kind of stuff.

And I understand that you go through that guilt that you spoke about earlier where, Oh, I should have known or whatever, but you know, someone like that, maybe there is no way to know. Not really. There is no way to know that she might really do something. I think it really came home to me how much she must have been struggling.

When we were going through the photos to put the video together for the funeral, I came across a photo of her surrounded by girlfriends and she was smiling, but it wasn't in her eyes. Her eyes look sad and I don't think I would have noticed that if I wasn't looking back on it instead of during it. She had also lost an awful lot of weight.

Like I said, I saw her this summer. It was probably in August of that year, 2010, and she shot herself in December, but I didn't see her between, and she had lost a huge amount of weight. And she wasn't big to begin with. She was five feet tall and probably weighed 120 pounds. I think when she died, she might've weighed a hundred, maybe.

And I think if I had seen her in between, I would have noticed it. But it's like anything with weight loss. If you see somebody every day, you're not going to notice it. It's only when you see there's either been long periods of time. Between when you've seen them or you've seen a before picture and an after picture that you realize that I've, I've lost 90 pounds in the last year on purpose and, and the people around me, they, they know I've lost weight, but they don't realize how much until they see what I look like a year ago.

And I think that would have been the same thing with her that I would have noticed it. If I had seen her, but I would not have noticed it if I had seen her every day. And so I can't fault the people around her from not picking up on it either. But that look on her face in that picture will probably haunt me forever because it with 2020 hindsight, it showed me what she was going through and nobody saw it.

And like you mentioned, I'm not surprised. Nobody saw it because she was a master at hiding things. But you know, cameras don't always lie. And, and I also understand how you, you can understand on a logical level, you can understand there's nothing anybody could have done. She had set her mind to this, especially someone like her and she was struggling.

You can logically understand that stuff, but I can also understand that you go through that whole process after she's gone. You analyze things, you look at the photographs, you wonder what a torture really is. Just  that's the right word for it. Because you get fixated on it and you can't let it go, even though you know if you don't let it go, it's going to bury you.

It's vicious. Probably a good word for it. It's vicious. In the preface to the book, I mention about how I'm not going to tell people how to get through grief, only that I will prove, I can show you that you can get through it. And I will be honest, there were times when I didn't think I could, and it was usually when I was looking at pictures or berating myself for not doing what I should have done or whatever.

The human mind can be a wonderful thing and it can be an awful thing. It can get you fixated on things that you know you can't fix. And in the process, it can really tear you up. But in my case, it didn't. It's making that decision to not let it bury me was a conscious decision on my part. And I will admit having the husband that I have who was not, he's not the father of my kids.

He's my second husband helped immensely get me through that. Not because he was constantly hugging me and coddling me and everything else. He let me rant and rave when I needed to rant and rave and he hugged me when he knew I needed it. And he never tried to tell me, get over it. He never tried to tell me that it'll be okay because he knew it wouldn't be okay.

And actually, I have used a lot of his phrases when other people come to me now. But as far as thinking back on the girls and what I did right and what I did wrong, and you so often want to zero in on the things you did wrong, like you could change it, which is crazy because you can't. Change it. You've just got to figure out a way to let it go.

Just let it go. And if you made a mistake, admit you made a mistake and move on, because you can't fix the mistake at this point. And if the mistake is that you didn't spot things that you should have spotted, I think this is why losing Jennifer was so much harder than losing Kathy, because Kathy died as a result of an accident, of a moment of stupidity on the part of a young girl.

And there was nothing for me to change with her, but with Jennifer, there's, there's too much mea culpa in that. It leads me to the concept of, you said it in your book and it's kind of a longer quote, but you basically say at some point toward the end that you consciously chose to survive. Anyone could understand how what you went through could, as you put it, bury you.

You could just fall under the weight of it all. And I think if somebody did that, it would be understandable. It would be understandable. But then there's the choice. There's the, as in your case, as you put it, a conscious choice to say, I'm going to pull myself out from underneath it, and I'm going to live my life again.

So tell me about that. What do you think that was for you? Let's start with Kathy and her loss. And I talk about it in the book. Jennifer was very close to her sister and very protective of her sister. And so she and I talked about The girl that caused the accident. I don't even know her name. I don't want to know her name.

I don't want to know what she looks like. I don't want to know anything about her. But Jennifer was insistent on going to the trial in Atlanta for this girl. And she wanted to be able to speak her mind at the impact, the victim impact portion of it. So she called me to ask me if I was going to go. And I said, no, I didn't want any part of it.

And then she said, what do you want to do? Because the prosecutors were talking to Jennifer about what she wanted. Because the girl was going to plead guilty. There was no doubt that she was going to plead guilty. But Jennifer wanted to know if I wanted to throw the book at her for this. And I can remember telling her that it wasn't that she was on drugs.

She wasn't drinking. She had An 18 year old's impulse to get to some place fast and as a result, she went around a truck that was too slow for her without really seeing what was coming and ended up hitting Kathy head on. And I said, if she was under the influence, it would be different, but we've already lost Kathy.

Let's not do it. Lose another human life as a result, the girl was going to live with us for the rest of her life. Anyway, there's no need to punish her more than she needed to punish herself. And I think it was at that point that I decided I had to let go of what was holding me up in the grief process.

And I did affordable housing as a living low income housing for older adults. I had told Jennifer. To tell the prosecutor when to call me. So I knew I would be available and the prosecutor was a little slow in getting to me. So I ended up being in the parking lot of one of the projects that I was over and I, It was a rainy day, gloomy, absolutely horrible looking day, and I'm sitting in my car on the phone with a prosecutor in Atlanta, asking me what I wanted to do.

And I basically told him the same thing that I told Jennifer. I said, if it was up to me, she would do community service. I was speaking to other teens about thinking before they act, but let's not permanently ruin this girl's life. And it was at that point that I said, I've got to quit doing this. I've got to let it go.

I forgive the girl. And at that point, no, it wasn't easy, but it became easier to work my way through the grief process. With Jennifer, it was a lot more complicated, not a little, a lot more complicated because of all the extra angst that went in into all of that. And, um, you know, Kathy was single. Jennifer wasn't Jennifer had two children that she left behind that I knew she absolutely adored.

And I just couldn't fathom how she could do that. And at one point I was speaking with an acquaintance and we were talking Jennifer and the suicide, and she said to me, I can't believe the amount of pain that girl had to be in, in order to do that.  And it was a light bulb for me, and she was right. And when I quit.

focusing on me and started focusing on what Jennifer had been feeling. That was another point in the grieving process where I, as soon as I quit focusing on what I was feeling instead of what she was feeling, it changed. And then it was my choice to move forward and to say to myself, if I ever have anybody else in my life go through this.

At least I can hug him and tell him he'll make it. And at that point, things turned. And I had to forgive Jennifer. I don't think I thoroughly for forgave her, as I said until I actually wrote that book, because getting it out in front of me in black and white about her life and what she had done with it and what she gave up when she shot herself.

Yeah, there were times. When I was going through Jennifer's that, that you can almost understand why she did what she did, because those thoughts go through your own head and you have to talk yourself out of doing something stupid. It's not that I ever went to the point where I was really going to do it, but those thoughts go through your head that you don't know whether you're going to make it through it.

And it's my husband and my son and my grandkids that I couldn't do to them what Jennifer did. To her family, the mind is a horrible thing. Sometimes it can be a wasteland of feelings rather than logic. And I consider myself a very logical person. And so if it threw me off, I can't imagine what it would do to somebody who was more driven by their emotions.

It's not that I'm not an emotional person. I am obviously, but I have a very strong logic. sense to myself that these are the facts and this is how it lines up and it all has to go in a row. Yeah, but, but I, I had to, after that acquaintance said that about Jennifer and her pain, it was like a light bulb went off in my head and I consciously started thinking about what Jennifer was thinking instead of what I was thinking and what she was feeling instead of what I was feeling.

And that was the moment for me that I said, I'm going to get through this no matter what. That was a roundabout way of discussing that, but no, no, I really appreciate your honesty in your book. I feel this way with all of my guests because putting a book out there and putting yourself out there on a podcast and talking very honestly, like you've done, that's the stuff that can really help people because they might be feeling all the same things.

And it might, they might hear a little piece that resonates with them or more than a little piece. And that's the kind of stuff that I feel is meaningful. And I think it's brave to be honest about these kinds of things. I know when, when I wrote the first draft of this, I sent it off to three author friends and, and one, one is a paranormal romance writer, one writes mafia romance, and the other one writes almost science fiction.

I mean, they're, they're different. Yeah. And the science fiction guy. Wrote back to me after he read it and he said, I think it's a phenomenal book, but are you crazy to put that out for anybody to read knowing the trolls that are out there? You're just setting yourself up. And I said, yeah, I know when I originally wrote the book, I really didn't have any intention of publishing it.

Until the other two read it and said, I think you've got something very special here, very important that needs to be shared because you're not the only one going through stuff like this. I'm not telling you to publish it, but you need to think very seriously about publishing it. And obviously, I took their word for it.

And even the one that said, told me I was crazy if I ever wanted to do it. He says, I think it's a really good idea that you did. I think it's going to reach out to people who will, like you say, find bits and pieces in it that they can relate to. And someone once told me who had read it that hasn't been through anything like what I've been through.

She said, even if I couldn't relate to it personally, I appreciated that you wrote it. Because I know you better now. I know your daughters better now. And you're honoring their memory by doing what you're doing. And to me, that's worth it. It's been picked up by Amazon twice for their Prime Reading program.

So, that shows me there's some merit. To it because they wouldn't pick it up twice if people weren't reading it. And that makes me feel good because losing my daughters was not a total waste. If you can use that word for it, that something good has come out of such a tragic loss. Yeah, exactly. And I felt that way when I was reading it.

I love reading something like this that a mother wrote about her two daughters, because what you did is, although you wrote about the pain of losing them, it's a lot about them too, and just their individual personalities and what they brought to the world. And that is so wonderful because I just feel like you have lost them, but they were also here and they also made an impact.

They made an impact on the people around them and on you. And they were special kids. And so it is, it's like you created something that made something positive out of it. And that, like you said, honors them. And I love that about it. I love that about it. Cause it's not just the pain. It's like life in general.

It's not just pain. There was a lot of beauty in them both. And I love that you honor that in the book. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, my whole thought process is people won't understand the depth of the loss if they didn't understand who they were. That was my thinking behind doing what I did because, and I'll be perfectly honest, if I had looked at just the grief process, that would have made a very heavy book that nobody would have wanted to read.

I, I pride myself on having a sense of humor and I hope that comes out in the first half of the book when I'm talking about the kids. And my sense of humor is probably one of the things that got me through a lot of the grieving process after Jennifer's funeral. A couple of people from my office had come to the funeral and afterwards they asked me what they could do for me.

And I, I talked to my suite mate and told her, go back. And tell people not to say they're sorry, because if I heard it one more time, I was going to scream and to tell me a joke, make me laugh and bless her heart. She went back and she did exactly that. And nobody said they were sorry. You could see a couple of them choke because they wanted to, but they were paying attention to what Marcia had told them.

And I heard some of the worst jokes in the world and I could have hugged them for it. Part of the problem with the grieving process. Is that the people around you don't know what to do with you, which is one reason why they say they're sorry because they can't think of anything else to say and that's fine.

I know you're sorry. Don't worry about it. But I had found out the first time around with Kathy that nobody felt comfortable laughing around me. Or joking around and that was almost as painful as the grieving process was for somebody who likes to joke around and so by Marcia going back to the office and giving them permission to say something funny, I think help them as much as it helped me because.

They were able to get back into a more normal routine with me quicker than maybe they were after Kathy died because they didn't know they had the permission to do that. I think that's right. I think a lot of people don't know what to say. They want to say something. They want to make somehow make it better, but they have no clue how to do that because it's just to the loss is too much.

And they know that. I have one more question I wanted to ask you because your husband, David, you talked about a little earlier that the way that he was during your grieving for both of your daughters, it sounds like it was very supportive of you and helpful. And you also mentioned that you will use things that he said when you're helping other people who are grieving.

So just tell me a little bit about what was it about how he behaved that was helpful. In a lot of ways, he was that proverbial rock for me. I don't know if it was easier for him because he had only known the girls from the time that he had met me. And they were grown. I met him in 2000 and One or 2002.

So the girls were already grown. So maybe it was he loved them, but he didn't love them like a parent. I think it was easier for him not to get embroiled in the emotions of losing them. It's not that he didn't care because he did, but I think he was more concerned about taking care of me than anything else.

He tried to keep things. As normal as possible for me, if we always went out to eat on Friday night, we went out to eat on Friday night. We're big symphony fans and we continue to go to the symphony. He kept as much of the normal routine in my life as possible, whether I wanted to participate in it or not.

And I think that helped because I let him force me to do those things. It's not like he said, we are going to go. He just assumed we were going to go and kept on. He was saying, It's one of the most wonderful things he could have done for me. But he also allowed me to break down. Nights were horrible for me.

Trying to get to sleep at night. I think I went for a couple of years getting maybe six hours of sleep at two hour intervals, which doesn't do much for your mental state. But he knew if I needed a hug, he would hug me. But like I said before, I think the biggest thing he did for me was being my sense of normal.

in a period of time where nothing was normal. And it was, I think a lifesaver for me. And you didn't do it once. You did it twice, which was amazing. Yeah. He's a good guy. I think I'll keep him. Yeah. It sounds like he's a good guy. Thank you so much for your time. I always appreciate it when people sit down and I really appreciate you sitting down today.

And like I said, telling your story, talking about your daughters and the pain and the loss. It's tough to talk about. I'm sure, but I appreciate it. I appreciate your honesty. And I just want to thank you for being here. I appreciate you, your willingness to have me on your program. I appreciate it a great deal.