Kathy Joy reflects on grief and memory on her late husband’s birthday, uses harbor pilot and lemonade metaphors, and encourages sitting with difficult feelings, finding small comforts and community to hold them.
Today is what would be the 17th birthday of Kathy Joy's late husband, Roger. Kathy encourages the Cadre to remember that when life hands us lemons, we don't have to squeeze it into some amazing elixir. It's not necessary.
On March 6, the occasion of my late husband's birthday, it means sitting with my memories. Sometimes we measure our mental wellness by how many projects we're ticking off the list. Find a patch of sunlight and sit inside its nurturing warmth. Pull up anchor and keep sailing on.
When life hands you lemons, you are not compelled to make lemonade. Taste it, feel it, experience it, talk about it. Get yourself inside a safe circle of comrades. See you next week on caregiver day.
Well, hello. Greetings from Erie, Pennsylvania. My name is Kathy Joy, and in the Cadiosphere I am known as Speak Wonder, because I like to bend words into poetry and I like to use words as a means of communication to connect with the Cadre. And. And I also live near a harbor and I love harbor pilots. The imagery, the symbolism of boats coming out to help other boats and that's what we do for each other. There's so many ways of putting it. Some say we're walking each other home, some say that we are locking arms to understand this thing called life.
In my imagery and language, living near a harbor and loving all things boats. I like to say that we have harbor pilots, people that come alongside and assist us as we do life together. And they sometimes climb into the boat and they maintain steerage when we cannot. JC is here. Hi. Good to see you, buddy. Didn't occur to me till mid morning, but today, March 6th, is what would be the birthday of my late husband, Roger. And it was so long ago that he left us suddenly with a heart attack that no one saw coming.
Took him instantly. It was in August. It'll be 17 years, so seems like lifetimes ago. And yet it was yesterday. And I never know when anniversary dates are going to hit me in a particular way or not really affect me at all. And today is just kind of hitting me that today we would be probably going to a hardware store. He loved hardware stores. Sometimes he didn't buy one thing, but he would just look and browse and. And then instead of a cake, he would want lemon meringue pie. So I'm fine. I'm just feeling nostalgic.
And most of all, I'm choosing not to squeeze lemons into lemonade. I'm just sitting with the discord and the tart taste of life. And that's what I want to encourage you to remember today, that you don't have to make lemonade. Jc, thanks for being on here. Oh, your dad is Roger. Thank you for the love. And you love the smell of hardware stores. Yeah. Jc, you're fond of saying, if you're having a good day, that's terrific. If you're not having a good day, that's okay too. And that's kind of my narrative today as well, echoing that sentiment, is that when life hands us lemons, we don't have to squeeze it into some amazing elixir.
We really don't. It's not necessary. It's something that we can do when we're up to it, but we don't have to. And so, as I go into this Cadre, I just want to say that one of my small rules of life is that I stop whenever there's a lemonade stand. I just love it. I love to see these tiny entrepreneurs making lemonade. Sometimes it's watery and not very tasty, and that's okay. I always overpay them. You know, if it costs a quarter, I give them a dollar, and they think that they've just had the best day ever.
And then usually I take a couple sips there and tell them how good it is. Yeah. So when we think about measuring our mental wellness, is it by how we stay connected? Is it by how much vitamin D we're getting here in Erie, Pennsylvania? We're not getting much by way of sunshine. The sun made an appearance very briefly yesterday, and it was wonderful. But we don't get a lot of it this time of year. Sometimes we measure our mental wellness by how many projects we're ticking off the list and saying, yeah, I did that.
I completed that. Check it off. Yay, we're good. But. But we don't have to. We don't have to be productive. We can sit in immobility when the day requires it. We can relax. We can dial it back a few notches and give ourselves a free pass. Yeah, I wrote notes because I didn't know how anchored I would be today. We should. And we can pursue the industry of the day, but when it's time to log off, try not to swim extra laps. Try not to do extra credit. See if you can sit quietly instead. A long time ago, one of my therapists, Teresa, invited me to sit with the discord.
And I said, what does that mean? And she said, life around you might not be a melody. It might be harsh, discordant music. Can you sit quietly inside of that and learn from it instead of avoiding it rushing to the melody? I thought that was a fantastic way to describe sitting with the discord. It means sitting next to your problem and letting the problem occupy that space. For me, today, on March 6, the occasion of my late husband's birthday, it means sitting with my memories, appreciating them, missing him.
It means not running away from the grief, but letting grief be my companion and making peace with him being by my side. This thing called grief, which has followed me, and I've learned that this silent companion can be a gift, too, because it gives me empathy for others. So maybe we do need that sacred pause when we move our bodies strategically. That's good. We need to plan for breaks, we need to drink water in my case and perhaps in yours. I love to go for walks. Hi, Jules. I love to go for walks.
Even in bad weather. Just get out there and breathe in that air, listen for laughter and join in. Find a patch of sunlight, which there were some patches of sunlight yesterday. I noticed that on the cadmosphere too. Some of the speakers had sunlight coming in their windows. Find a patch of sunlight and sit inside its nurturing warmth. You know, take a cue from your cats and dogs. JC shared that his dog Hamilton likes to bask in the sun. It's a lot to learn from them. So the upshot is there's no need to squeeze something out of this day and make an elixir of happiness.
You don't have to make lemonade. We can sit with the discord, the mess, the disarray, the unsolved problem. It's okay to experience the gamut of your emotions because they bring you deep empathy for others, grace for yourself, insight into heartbreak and hope for a better day ahead. There will be days when you squeeze the heck out of those lemons and you make a good elixir and you drink deep of that. There are other days when you just let those lemons sit. So do keep moving. Yes. Pull up anchor and keep sailing on.
And above all, reach out to your harbor pilots. They are everywhere in the Cadre. You can rejoin a live that you particularly liked. You can do a replay of a live that you missed. You can join a live. There's some coming up today. At 1:00 it's Kelsey Schneider and at 3:00 it's Shannon Paul Comedy through the chaos. There are some pre produced. I mean, if you go in, do a deep dive into the Cadre and just go exploring, you'll find things that are scratching where you're itching and it'll help you so much.
It's beautiful how the Cadre community is set up that way. Just go and hit some buttons, go exploring. Somebody's voice is going to call to you and spackle up the cracked places in your fragile heart or echo your joy today, wherever it is you are in the mental wellness picture as a human being. Shannon posted something earlier. 15 sentences that live in my head rent free. And the two of the 15 were items number six and nine. Item number six, ships are safe in the harbor, but that's not what they're built for.
Let's keep sailing. And item number nine, you can do anything, but not everything. Focus. My focus today is sitting with my grief, which did kind of hit me sideways and remembering. I remember, too, my husband liked to whistle. So if you can picture a 6 foot 2 retired policeman just towering above the aisles, I could usually find him because I could see the top of his cap. He usually wore a John Deere hat in his retirement days. And he whistled, particularly when he's in a good mood. So if you can picture my Roger, handsome German dude, whistling, smelling the smells in the hardware store, picking stuff up and putting it back because it cost too much, he was forevermore a frugal German.
Yeah. Very frugal. Yeah. Jules. My brother's birthday, too. Thank you for being here. I think this is gonna be a little bit abbreviated today. And the takeaway is, when life does hand you lemons, you are not compelled to make lemonade. You can sit with that, which is tart and sour and just kind of tangy. Taste it, feel it, experience it, talk about it. Get yourself inside a safe circle of comrades. And that is the Cadre sphere. And I have people with within reach, geographically. I'll be reaching out to my bestie today, and she will.
She'll be a comfort. Thank you. Y'all are great. And don't forget to change your clocks this weekend. See you next week on caregiver day. My mom's doing okay. I usually give you an update on my mom, but I just wanted to talk about lemons today. Be well, be brave. Be victorious when you can. Be still when you need to be. Bye.
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