Stacy Waldman Bass, LIGHTKEEPER: A Memoir Through the Lens of Love and Loss
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[0:45]Stacey Waldman Bass is the author of Lightkeeper, and memoir through the lens of love and
[0:49]loss.
[0:50]Stacey is an author, artist, and photographer.
[0:53]From her first solo exhibition in 1988, Stacey's fine artwork has become part of numerous
[0:58]private, corporate, and hotel collections, and her images and unique perspective continues
[1:03]to tap into the emotion and sensibility of a wide spectrum of yours.
[1:08]Select pieces of her fine art are currently represented by Swoon Gallery in Westport,
[1:12]Connecticut.
[1:13]Always with an interest in all things visual, her career ambitions have taken her through
[1:17]numerous magazine positions, including a senior position at Fine Art Photography Startup
[1:21]on seeing.
[1:22]Stacey is a graduate of NYU School of Law, where she concentrated on copyright, art, and
[1:27]entertainment law, and later used her expertise to become vice president of a publicly
[1:32]traded motion picture and television company Savoy Pictures Entertainment.
[1:37]Stacey has been capturing the essence of place through an intuitive use of light color
[1:41]and composition for almost two decades.
[1:43]Her signature images of architecture, interiors, and gardens have resulted in three
[1:47]solo exhibitions and numerous awards.
[1:50]Her photography has been featured extensively in books and magazines, including at home,
[1:55]where she was lead photographer for more than ten years.
[1:57]Garden design, Luxe interiors, and design, House Beautiful L. Daycore, Veranda, A.D.,
[2:03]The Wall Street Journal, and many more.
[2:05]She is the author of two best-selling and critically acclaimed monographs celebrating the
[2:09]American landscape in the garden and gardens at first light.
[2:13]Lightkeeper is her first memoir.
[2:15]Welcome, Stacey.
[2:16]I will not call you Sierra, your short-lived little nickname, but I'm not talking about it.
[2:21]Oh boy, you did a close read.
[2:23]I did a close read.
[2:24]Thanks for coming on to talk about Lightkeeper memoir, Through the Lens of Love and Loss.
[2:29]Congrats on the book.
[2:30]Thank you so much for having me.
[2:32]I appreciate it, and I was especially grateful to be included in your most anticipated
[2:38]fall picks.
[2:39]So thank you so much for that.
[2:40]I was sort of stunned in surprise, they didn't get the note in advance, so I just discovered
[2:45]it on your social media and kind of exclaimed out loud in my kitchen.
[2:50]I'm sorry, we tried to reach everybody, we tried, I didn't do it on social, but we
[2:55]talked about writing emails and everything, so that's why I came as a surprise.
[3:00]No apologies, it was actually a lovely surprise, so thank you.
[3:03]Well, no, I really, really enjoyed the book.
[3:06]I really did.
[3:07]I want other people to read it.
[3:08]It's really good, and your story is beautiful, but also the way you told it, I found
[3:14]very original, and I'm a fan of the book.
[3:18]And you know, it means a lot, I know you read a lot, so why don't you tell listeners
[3:25]a little bit about your story, and why you decided at this point to write this book?
[3:31]Well, I guess what I'll say, and since you know your listeners probably aren't aware,
[3:35]I'm really a photographer by profession and by passion, so writing is, or has always been
[3:41]more of a recreational thing and up so much my primary purpose, but just about 30 years
[3:47]ago, coming up August 26th, will be 30 years.
[3:50]My father was killed in a plane crash on Black Island.
[3:54]He was piloting the plane, it was a private sea plane, and he had my two first cousins
[4:00]aboard along with one of my cousin's friends.
[4:03]And I guess it's obviously, as you can already imagine, having said only a few sentences
[4:09]that when you think about the horrific loss of losing someone in an accident in any context,
[4:15]and then add to it the complication of having his only sisters, only two children with
[4:22]him.
[4:23]The ripples lasted forever, essentially, they're still around, really complex family
[4:30]dynamic, a very, very close knit family from up until that very second.
[4:36]And it became extremely complicated to unravel what was happening in terms of not just
[4:43]the grief that we were all experiencing in different ways, but some of the blame as well,
[4:49]which I think my aunt and uncle for very understandable reasons carried with them for as
[4:55]long as they were alive.
[4:57]Which is not fair, by the way.
[4:59]I mean, you go in in the book, not that anything is fair and grief.
[5:02]I mean, emotions aren't logical and all of that, but you go through, like, there is no explanation
[5:08]for what happened with the plane, and you say, if it were today, we'd have a lot more
[5:13]of information, but you just never got everything seemed okay.
[5:17]We still don't know what happened to the plane.
[5:19]We don't really know.
[5:20]I mean, there were some eyewitness accounts that suggested that my father was attempting
[5:26]to land in the water as it was a sea plane off the coast of Block Island.
[5:30]And as he was coming in for landing apparently, or so it seems, he saw some kids sort of
[5:36]come up out of the water.
[5:37]They had been swimming, maybe underwater, came up out of the water, and obviously immediately
[5:42]tried to abort the landing to avoid hurting the kids.
[5:46]And in that process, perhaps too strong of a pullback on, I don't know, caused the plane
[5:51]to veer toward really like an electrical wire, which flung it into of all things in gas
[5:58]station.
[5:59]So there was an enormous explosion, and nobody survived very sadly.
[6:03]There was an older woman on the ground who was filling her car with gas, who also died
[6:08]in the crash, which is perfect.
[6:11]But you're right that the the blame piece is unfair.
[6:15]I think that what's so challenging in this particular circumstance is that because my parents
[6:20]and my antinuncle were very close and their social lives were intertwined, it was hard
[6:24]for people to manage what they were feeling coming from two, two different places.
[6:29]My mother had lost her husband, my antin lost her children, and for better or for worse,
[6:36]mostly for worse, people felt that my ant needed more support in that moment.
[6:40]And I think it's a bad idea for any of us to put grief in hierarchy as you suggested
[6:44]everyone is experiencing different.
[6:47]And as I think I ultimately say at the end of the book, it took me almost 30 years to
[6:53]realize that most of what I was still carrying around with me was not the PTSD from the
[6:57]crash, which I carried with me for many, many years and tried my best to process.
[7:02]But really how I was treated by my ant, in particular who I absolutely adored, I don't
[7:08]think with any mal intent just literally couldn't help herself.
[7:12]She was she was so distraught and really never recovered.
[7:16]So the silencing of the memory was a really difficult thing, like not being able to speak
[7:22]about my dad out loud in front of my extended family was it felt the worst kind of censorship.
[7:29]And I think that's when I turned to the writing.
[7:32]The writing was really something I did in private that mostly in private that was a way
[7:38]of venting, all of the complicated feelings that I was having.
[7:42]At some point, I started early on when Facebook was still sort of young.
[7:45]I started to post a picture of my dad on his birthday or anniversary of the accident and
[7:50]just say a couple of words about the loss and what I was feeling.
[7:54]And I think at the time, people weren't quite doing that on Facebook yet.
[7:58]Now there's a lot of that.
[7:59]But back then it was more about here's what I ate today and I went to this restaurant
[8:03]and it's in this beautiful place I visited.
[8:06]It was less about people sharing raw emotion.
[8:09]And even though I only did it a couple of times a year, it was obvious that it was resonating
[8:13]with people who were responding with not only thank you for sharing this, but thank you
[8:19]for articulating what I also feel about my loss and my life and I lost someone in an accident
[8:24]or something like that.
[8:26]So I think that the writing kind of at some point, I realized that I was needing to do
[8:33]more of the writing.
[8:34]I remember at some point I said to my mother, I think I'm going to write a book.
[8:38]I think this is a book.
[8:39]I don't know if it will ever go anywhere.
[8:41]But my purpose in writing it is to collect the memories that I feel like are important to
[8:47]hold and to have them in a place that I can share with my family, my kids and their kids
[8:52]and kids to come.
[8:54]And her first reaction at the time was, what about Anne?
[8:57]I mean, what about my aunt?
[8:58]How is she going to react?
[9:00]And I kind of said, I don't know.
[9:02]It doesn't really matter because I'm not looking to publish this and let's not worry
[9:07]about that.
[9:08]Let's just, let me just do this thing that I'm doing.
[9:10]And then many years later, my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer as you know from
[9:15]the book.
[9:16]And I think because my dad had died in such an instantaneous way with no preparation and
[9:22]therefore no opportunity to have closure, even no closure is a trick you were, but to
[9:26]even, there was no chance to say about it.
[9:30]And I think that they taught me, so horrible way to learn less than like that, but it taught
[9:35]me how important is to do something differently when you do know that someone is likely
[9:39]to pass.
[9:41]And because my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and we all know that that is typically
[9:46]one that is not survivable, I sort of braced myself for this is not going to end well.
[9:52]But what can I do differently?
[9:55]But now that I have an opportunity to do something, what can I do differently than I did?
[10:00]I did have a chance to do with my dad.
[10:01]And that's when I started doing this living tribute for her,
[10:05]where I posted a picture every day on Facebook
[10:07]with something about her.
[10:08]It was not chronological.
[10:10]A picture was something I thought up in the minute,
[10:12]when I woke up that morning,
[10:13]I just grabbed a picture that I felt like sharing.
[10:16]And it was really extraordinary how it fortified her
[10:20]during that battle.
[10:21]She connected to this invisible community,
[10:25]or maybe not so invisible,
[10:26]but growing an invisible community
[10:28]who asked her questions and engaged with her
[10:31]about even minutia.
[10:33]Like, oh, I remember I had a purple sweater
[10:35]just like that, whatever it was.
[10:37]And along the way,
[10:39]it became clear that that was something
[10:41]that was helping other people.
[10:43]The process of sharing,
[10:44]which eventually I'm not calling lightkeeping,
[10:47]keeping the light alive of people who we've lost.
[10:50]And I think that that's the combination
[10:54]of the experience with sharing that living tribute for her,
[10:57]and how cathartic it was for me,
[10:59]made me feel like there is an opportunity
[11:01]to help other people.
[11:03]Everybody has a drawer full or a box full
[11:06]or a slide projector full of old photos.
[11:10]Take a look at those pictures,
[11:11]explore what's outside the frame.
[11:14]Sure, it's a picture of your parents at the beach in 1965,
[11:17]but where were they?
[11:18]Were they on their honeymoon?
[11:19]What did they do before they got there?
[11:21]Were they with anybody else?
[11:22]Like, those kinds of questions are fun
[11:24]and actually incredibly restorative to explore.
[11:29]So true.
[11:30]Made me wanna go digging up all my family photos.
[11:33]And I'm so sorry, by the way,
[11:35]for all of the loss that you've had in your life.
[11:37]I know you started off doing that.
[11:39]I mean, it's a lot.
[11:41]And the fact that it fractured your family back then
[11:46]and even continuing through,
[11:49]I mean, your aunt didn't attend your mom's memorial service.
[11:51]Did I get that right?
[11:53]I mean, because she couldn't handle it.
[11:54]And I obviously, none of us can judge
[11:57]what it could possibly be like to lose two children.
[12:01]I mean, it's unthinkable.
[12:02]Of course, of course.
[12:04]But it put you in such a,
[12:07]it's just like hung you out to dry in a way
[12:09]and it must have made you feel so incredibly alone.
[12:14]And you still loved your aunt through all of it.
[12:16]And I know that's not the point of the book.
[12:17]I just was sort of upset by the treatment of that.
[12:22]Yeah, it's upsetting.
[12:24]Honestly, it's upsetting.
[12:26]It took me a lot of years to sort of face that fact.
[12:28]I think I was very conscious.
[12:31]You know, I would say to my husband,
[12:32]I'm going to go over to Anne's for a bit.
[12:34]And he would say, what do you mean a bit?
[12:36]Because ultimately, I would go for five minutes.
[12:38]They were intending to drop something off
[12:40]and I would be there for hours
[12:41]because I was captivated by her.
[12:44]She was someone who I was so really connected to
[12:48]in so many ways we shared a lot of common interests.
[12:51]So it, I felt like I owed it to my family,
[12:55]which had now diminished to almost nothing.
[12:57]I mean, everybody was gone at that point
[13:00]when my mom passed away practically.
[13:02]So I felt like if I don't, like you said,
[13:06]kind of put myself in this situation,
[13:08]then there will be nothing.
[13:10]And I guess I feel like it was a sacrifice.
[13:12]It was worth making in the hopes
[13:14]that there would be some breakthrough at some point
[13:16]that she would look at me one day and say,
[13:19]and my dream, I guess, is that she would say,
[13:22]this was so unfair.
[13:24]I'm sorry that I wasn't able to allow you to grieve also,
[13:28]but that never happened.
[13:29]And even till the moment she died,
[13:32]I mean, I was with her close to the very end
[13:35]and had been there daily to help.
[13:36]And there was, I confess, a longing,
[13:41]like if the longer I'm there on any particular visit,
[13:44]maybe there'll be a breakthrough.
[13:45]Maybe something will happen that she will be able
[13:48]to say something like that to me.
[13:50]So I feel like the book to back to your original question,
[13:55]because it's been a little bit meandering.
[13:57]But I think back to your original question,
[13:59]this book now, because I've come to another place in that.
[14:04]She has passed.
[14:05]So it gave me, in some ways, I felt less pressure
[14:10]to say what I needed to say in private
[14:12]and also opportunity and freedom
[14:15]to say what I wanted to say in public.
[14:17]And those two things together felt like important to do,
[14:21]both from my own journey and potentially
[14:23]to help other people.
[14:25]Well, that's a gift to give others, it is.
[14:29]By the way, you included so much about your parents
[14:32]so that we were able to get to know them,
[14:34]not just as your parents, but as young people themselves,
[14:36]which is really fun, I had a child
[14:38]go to Pierce Camp Burchmont, by the way.
[14:40]So what?
[14:41]Yeah.
[14:42]Oh my God, my favorite place.
[14:44]So really, seriously?
[14:47]Not anymore.
[14:48]But oh, yeah.
[14:49]That's amazing.
[14:50]And did he or she like it?
[14:52]Yes, loved, totally loved.
[14:54]And that's so what a nice coincidence.
[14:57]I know, seeing the picture of your mom
[14:59]when she was there from forever ago.
[15:01]And all the stories that you tell,
[15:02]a central that was to her life in particular and all of it.
[15:08]Not only Pierce Camp Burchmont, but really kinetic it too.
[15:11]And even the story of finding the house with the developer
[15:15]Jay who was there and knowing that was the right house
[15:18]and the views and Westport.
[15:21]And I don't know, it just so situated me
[15:24]in a particular place there.
[15:27]There, you just brought us along with you
[15:31]in such a tangible way.
[15:34]Thank you.
[15:35]I'm really touched to hear that.
[15:37]And I love that you had the camp connection as well.
[15:41]Yes, that's so lovely.
[15:43]Camp Burchmont, as you know, still looks exactly the same.
[15:46]Oh, as most camps.
[15:47]I mean, it's like there is no, there is no time.
[15:51]Do you mind if I read a little bit
[15:53]from one of these I have so many?
[15:54]No, not at all.
[15:55]I don't hear pages here.
[15:57]Oh, I also went to the golden door with my mom
[16:01]who used to go all the time.
[16:03]And that was also in the book a lot.
[16:05]And I was like, oh my gosh.
[16:06]I went once when I was 16.
[16:08]I was like, a birthday present.
[16:09]And I was like, thank you.
[16:10]You know, pride.
[16:12]So I think that you and I are probably 10 or so years apart.
[16:16]So maybe our moms are about that distance apartment.
[16:19]They could have been there at the same time.
[16:20]You never know.
[16:21]Very true.
[16:22]I know.
[16:23]I need to bring in my picture of my one time.
[16:25]They always do a group picture.
[16:26]And I'll go, yep.
[16:28]My gosh.
[16:28]OK, so I'm having the horseback riding trip too.
[16:31]I know, I kept arguing all the parts about Burchmont,
[16:33]which were beautiful.
[16:35]Well, even just the way this is all the way
[16:37]at the beginning, maybe I should pick something closer
[16:39]to the end.
[16:40]Well, let's just talk about body image for a minute
[16:42]since we were talking about the Golden Door.
[16:43]And yeah, you know, obviously at that time,
[16:47]a certain generation of women were particularly
[16:50]focused on body image and all of that.
[16:53]I'll just read this.
[16:54]Meal time for mom was a bit more complicated.
[16:56]While she was always very fit, think
[16:58]Robic's step mini-trampling classes in the like,
[17:01]she was also almost always trying out the latest fad diet.
[17:04]Most memorably, I recall one trendy regimen,
[17:06]where she ate one type of fruit,
[17:08]and only that fruit each day for a couple of weeks.
[17:10]Pineapple one day, only watermelon the next, and so on.
[17:13]I was always a bit envious when she got to eat one
[17:15]of my favorite fruits for dinner.
[17:17]And I had to have an actual balanced meal.
[17:20]Once a year, mom went to the Golden Door,
[17:22]a very exclusive spa and weight management resort,
[17:24]Escondido, California, not far from San Diego.
[17:28]And then skipping along, you say, surprisingly,
[17:31]the sequence of dieting and then not, or the yoyo diet
[17:33]as it has come to be called, never seem to indicate
[17:36]any serious body positivity issues or self-consciousness
[17:39]on her part, mom was a positively beautiful woman.
[17:42]On some level, though, very quietly,
[17:44]I believe she always knew that.
[17:46]So how do you square her relationship with her body
[17:49]and how it affected you and your body?
[17:51]Oh gosh, I have a very complicated relationship with my body.
[17:54]I would say that there was something
[17:57]about having diets be modeled as a thing to do
[18:01]that probably wasn't a great data point
[18:04]for me to have early in my life.
[18:06]I definitely succumbed to yoyo stuff as well.
[18:09]But I think overall, the impression I always had
[18:13]for my mom was self-love.
[18:17]And I think that I got so much confidence
[18:20]infused from my parents, a friend recently read the book
[18:24]and said that in particular, the letters from my dad,
[18:28]in her mind, explained exactly why I am who I am.
[18:32]And I think that that, even though I don't really
[18:34]include letters from my mom in the book,
[18:35]I feel like the messaging was very similar.
[18:38]So I think that is what came through,
[18:40]even though she was dieting, she didn't do it with a fierceness
[18:44]that made me think that she was looking
[18:47]in a mirror disapproving lay at herself.
[18:49]I think that she really appreciated her gifts
[18:52]and just wanted to be healthy.
[18:55]And if it meant she could have cheesecake for dinner
[18:59]because she was a little bit more careful for a couple weeks,
[19:03]then that would be a perk.
[19:05]I don't think that back then, as you suggested,
[19:08]there was as much consciousness about wellness.
[19:10]Obviously, then there is now.
[19:12]I don't really remember ever talking to my mom about
[19:15]what she was doing or why are you doing that?
[19:18]And I'm not doing that.
[19:19]So it was a little bit more understated.
[19:22]I've always thought it ironically,
[19:24]as I indicated, she wasn't much of a cook
[19:26]and I'm not much of a cook,
[19:27]but my daughter just graduated culinary school.
[19:29]So there's obviously some attempt to turn around.
[19:33]Yes.
[19:34]Generations of not being able to do a bunch in the kitchen.
[19:37]So I would say the body positivity thing
[19:39]is the thing that came through over the,
[19:42]you need to look a certain way and diet
[19:44]and that there's a model to adhere to.
[19:48]I don't think that that was at all what she taught,
[19:50]which is something I tried also not to try to teach to my kids.
[19:55]My mom had cottage, she's in fruit,
[19:57]literally every day for lunch for like 10 years.
[20:00]I can't believe the whole time.
[20:02]That's just like what happened, right?
[20:04]Don't deviate, this is the thing.
[20:06]I'm maybe slightly embarrassed to tell you
[20:08]that's what I eat for lunch pretty much every day.
[20:10]Okay, there's nothing wrong with no judgment.
[20:12]No, it's just really good.
[20:15]It's really good.
[20:16]Okay.
[20:16]Any kind of fruit is my go-to thing.
[20:19]Yeah.
[20:20]Well, I just meant the rigidity of like hearing
[20:24]to what was the thing to eat at the time.
[20:28]Well, that's my mother's a whole other story.
[20:31]I shouldn't even have brought her in.
[20:32]It was not bad, but it was not about the meal itself.
[20:34]But anyway, forget it.
[20:36]You write in the book about one of
[20:38]if not your first Thanksgiving after losing
[20:41]your father when you saw Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman
[20:44]and then nearby restaurant who were sort of local celebrities
[20:46]who came out every so often.
[20:48]And you said you had a star shower that day.
[20:51]Talk about like that moment and all the signs really.
[20:55]I mean, you scatter in so many times
[20:57]where you feel well one time where your father
[21:00]was, he felt literally there one time
[21:02]with the windsurfing, where your son saw your dad.
[21:05]And you have just so many signs.
[21:06]Tell me about how you feel about signs in general,
[21:09]his presence, the universe, the dream, all of the stuff.
[21:13]I feel 100% certain that the signs are indications
[21:19]that he's here and she's here.
[21:21]I talk to them daily from where we live.
[21:23]There's two swans who seem to travel together
[21:27]who kind of appear by our doc sometimes and just sit there.
[21:31]They don't seem to be doing what the other swans are doing.
[21:33]Makes me curious.
[21:35]This example about the deer during the wedding.
[21:38]There were lots of things like that that I feel like I look
[21:42]for them, but not in a way that I am creating them.
[21:46]But that I'm open to receiving them as messages.
[21:49]And that's something, I guess, you know,
[21:52]is incredibly grounding and calming
[21:55]when you're suffering and missing someone so much
[21:58]that you feel like they can hear you.
[22:01]They can see you, maybe not literally, but in that way
[22:04]we did actually go and talk to a medium
[22:07]several times over the course of the years,
[22:10]different medians or if you call them media.
[22:13]I don't think you'd do in that situation.
[22:16]Definitely mediums.
[22:18]And I don't know if you've ever had that kind of experience.
[22:21]It's not like as direct as your dad is saying X, Y, and Z.
[22:24]It's more like piecing together, you know, signs and puzzles.
[22:28]So I feel like it's something I look for as a way of staying
[22:33]connected.
[22:34]And I'm always grateful when there's some kind of a sign.
[22:38]The Paul Newman Joanne when we're story
[22:41]is was especially meaningful because it was right
[22:45]after the accident or just a few months
[22:47]after as I told.
[22:49]And, you know, first of all,
[22:51]why would you expect to see Paul Newman and Joanne
[22:53]when we're in a restaurant and Thanksgiving?
[22:55]You wouldn't.
[22:56]It was not a typical to see them in Westport out and about.
[22:59]They were lovely people who I interacted with
[23:02]a bunch of different times over the years,
[23:04]mostly connected to the Westport Library.
[23:06]But that particular day, it was really the last thing
[23:09]I expected to see.
[23:10]And it was sort of as I indicated a very unusual,
[23:15]I felt message to say, it's OK.
[23:19]What you were your perfect Thanksgiving that we had year
[23:22]after year after year for all of these years
[23:25]isn't the only way to be.
[23:27]You can be OK in this restaurant on Thanksgiving,
[23:30]even though the circumstances today are terrible.
[23:33]And to allow myself to open my mind up to different path
[23:39]and maybe not be so connected to or expectant of what was
[23:45]or what's always been.
[23:46]And that particular day, Paul was just so gentle
[23:51]and so understanding, not that they would have,
[23:54]but they could have easily just said, we're having dinner
[23:57]or we're about to get in our car.
[23:59]Like, please, don't bother us.
[24:00]And they must have sensed that it was important to connect.
[24:04]And there was something about that that just made me feel,
[24:08]I don't know, the hug from Paul Newman,
[24:09]and that particular day just felt it kind of elevated me
[24:15]from the ditch that I was in a little bit.
[24:18]And that was still very early.
[24:21]And 30 years later, I can say that grief is not over.
[24:27]I heard, I was listening to another podcast recently
[24:30]where the question was something like, how was your grief?
[24:35]And the person answered by saying, oh, it was hard.
[24:40]It was hard for a few weeks.
[24:43]And the implication was, and then it was over.
[24:46]And I kind of thought, I think people need to be reminded
[24:49]that it's okay to grieve for a long time.
[24:54]It doesn't mean that you're not functioning.
[24:56]It doesn't mean that you're not living your life
[24:58]or appreciating the joys or seeing
[25:01]you're being able to smile when your kids achieve something
[25:04]or take a walk on the beach and enjoy the water
[25:07]laughing up.
[25:08]None of those things have to go away if you're grieving.
[25:12]They can exist at the same time.
[25:15]And I feel like that is kind of what
[25:18]like keeping is in some ways.
[25:20]To me, it's become a healthier way, if you will,
[25:24]of continuing to grieve because I'm not really wanting
[25:28]to let go of it.
[25:29]I don't want to be over my parents and my cousins.
[25:35]I want to think of them always.
[25:37]I want to honor them always.
[25:38]And remember them as much as I possibly can.
[25:40]So is it true that I don't break down in tears as often
[25:46]as I used to?
[25:47]Absolutely.
[25:48]That's true.
[25:49]But I still feel the loss in a huge way in my body.
[25:55]And I think that what's been most remarkable about the book,
[25:59]writing the book, the process of writing the book
[26:01]and sort of completing it and feeling like it's out of me,
[26:05]is that I'm holding it in my body differently, which I didn't
[26:08]really know could ever happen.
[26:10]It feels different inside my body.
[26:12]And that I think is something that if people could know
[26:17]was possible, it might help a lot of people who are still
[26:21]in a very dark place about a loss.
[26:24]But there's a way, I don't want to say
[26:26]get to the other side, because that implies that you want
[26:29]to get to the other side, but to hold it differently
[26:33]in your body.
[26:34]And I think that that can be cathartic and super helpful too.
[26:39]There's a grief counselor, Megan,
[26:41]Rydan Jarvis, who I saw her talk.
[26:44]She, I mean, I've read her books.
[26:45]I published her book, whatever.
[26:46]But she says the active writing, according to all the neuroscience,
[26:49]shows that your brain no longer feels
[26:51]you have to keep circling through it to remember it,
[26:55]that you can put the threat down.
[26:58]And so your body is not like 10-step holding onto it anymore.
[27:01]So anyway, who knows?
[27:03]Yeah.
[27:03]That makes a lot of sense.
[27:05]Stacy, thank you so much.
[27:06]Thank you for keeping the light.
[27:09]And for sharing your experience, which I'm sure will help other people.
[27:13]So congratulations.
[27:14]I really appreciate it.
[27:15]Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.
[27:17]OK.
[27:17]Hope to meet in person soon.
[27:19]Yes, definitely.
[27:20]All right.
[27:20]Take care.
[27:21]Bye-bye.
[27:22]Bye.
[27:23]Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibi,
[27:25]formerly momstone have time to read books.
[27:28]If you loved the show, tell a friend,
[27:30]leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens,
[27:34]and spread the word.
[27:35]Thanks so much.
[27:36]Oh, and buy the books.