Losing Sammy Part 3

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Burman, a sex and relationship therapist. And for the past three decades, I've been helping people learn how to love and be loved better. That's what we're doing here, on the language of love where I get to answer calls and emails from people just like you. My goal with the language of love is to help you discover more meaningful, emotional, and physical intimacy, and to help you build more awareness of how precious and sacred your sexuality really is. Be sure to email me or reach out with your very own, love, sex relationship questions, and I might just answer them live on the air. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the language of love. This is another really special episode for me. I have so many of you reaching out and wanting an update and responding to some of the things that I'm posting on social media about what's been going down for me over the past several months and especially over the month of August, where I basically planned two funerals and a birthday party. You know, my youngest son turned 16 and I was not going to let the tragedy that happened, you know, with my, his older brother, Sammy, stand in the way of his big celebration. So I really just planned it and did a good job. We went and played paintball and we got a party bus and cake and, you know, he had a great time. And at the same time, I was planning that. I was planning two funerals now. It's been six months since Sammy passed and, you know, hopefully you've listened to the two other podcasts I've done one when he first died and one sort of updating after my sort of deep dive into the redwoods and over the past six months, you may have been following on social media. I post a lot about just the day-to-day winding, crazy up and down inside out road of grief and how I'm managing it all. And it's been a ride. It's still a ride. I certainly feel like I'm out of the shock bubble now, you know. I feel a little more tuned in. I have a little more energy. But some days, you know, just last week I couldn't get out of bed for two days, but I've said this before on those other podcasts about Sammy and those other episodes, but I'll also say it here because I can't say it enough to you and to me that the way that I get through this and quite frankly, I think the way we all get through a tragedy and grief, whatever it is we're grieving is by staying the frick. And our bodies and boy has that been hard for me and boy, am I aware how few of us are able to do that? And boy, would I not have been able to do that? Had I not been through as much grief in my life already? You know, I was talking to a girl friend the other day, she's like, holy shit, I'm definitely not naming my daughter Laura, I feel like it's cursed. I don't see it that way and I knew she was joking, but it's true that I've been through a lot in my very lovely life. You know, in many ways, I've lived a life of beautiful privilege. I had a family that loved me, I had resources, I got my education, I've had a beautiful career. You know, I have a beautiful marriage of 19 years. I gave birth to three beautiful children. There's so much to be grateful for and at the same time, I've had a lot of pain in my life. You know, even my oldest who's now 24, when he was just three years old and I was a single mother, he went through three years of chemotherapy for leukemia, thank god he's okay. But like, I guess that was probably my first big maternal trauma. And then my mother died, then my father died, then my spirit mother, who was in some ways more my mother than my mother herself, Sandra Flowers died and, you know, it's just been a lot of a lot of loss. But through all of that grief, especially after losing my mother, which was the first big gut-wrenching soul, just painful loss, you know, that I didn't even know if I could survive ahead of that. And I shared a lot of that. I remember I was doing Oprah radio at the time while she was dying, because she had an ill, you know, she found out she was terminal like three months before she died. And so I didn't, I was doing a radio show every day, a live radio show. So I just moved out to Florida where my mother and father were and I did the radio from their office. So the listeners heard a lot live of what was going on in my life. And I think I did a really good job. I was really open about it with myself and with all of you. But I think what went wrong for me is that I did what I always do. I jumped to making meaning out of it. The cool part of that is having made meaning out of it that actually led to my last book, Want Some Love, because that was the impetus for it, that sort of healing from the loss of her and also coming to, you know, and I was already starting to make all this meaning of our spiritual connection and just focusing on that and not really focusing on the grief and the pain. Just bypassing the pain because let's just all admit we're scared to death of it when we feel it it hurts and we don't want to feel it. So I would just go quickly to the spiritual stuff, which I think a lot of us do or we just squelch it all together. And it's not that the spiritual stuff isn't real and isn't important, but it can't be used to bypass the pain. And that's what I did. And I think in large part, that's why I ended up with breast cancer in the same breast my mother had it within a year of her dying. And that was a big wake up call for me on multiple levels that I share in my book. I've shared here. I share often. But I think what it prepared me for, you know, when my dad died, he'd been sick a really, really long time and I was his person and his caretaker and anyone who has been a caretaker knows that the grief that you feel after someone who has lived such a poor quality of life and who has drained you so deeply, there's grief and loss mixed with relief, if I'm honest. And so it was a huge loss, but it was a loss that I griefed slowly over time. And, you know, it wasn't as hard to get over. And Sasa's Sandra Flowers, my dad called her Sasa. She was the same. You know, I had a long time to get used to her going. But Sammy, you know, the story of Sammy, and so I just committed to myself that I was not going to do that again. And I can't tell you how easy it would be to go to spiritually, I do spiritually connect with him, but to focus on that, to focus on being a beat and not being sad and doing whatever I can not to be sad. And, you know, I just wasn't going to do that again because I need to stay healthy for myself and for my family. And one of the things I know a lot of parents who lose children, whose children die feel like there's nothing left to live for, I don't feel that way as much as he was the center of my life, just like all my children are. One of the things that happened from him going is that I realized how fragile life is and what in astounding gift being in these bodies are and how short life is. And yeah, of course, I have people who depend on me and I want to and need to be there for them. But it's not just that. It's that I want to live. And I got really clear on that. So then I got really clear. I had to stay in my body because that's what I didn't do before. I had to feel those freaking feelings. And that's what I've been sharing with you on social media with my crazy dances and my crying and my, you know, every single day. If I don't already feel in something, I make sure to force myself often to take those 15 minutes, you know, and I've shown you how to do this on IGTV videos. Take those 15 minutes, round yourself, round your energy into your body, you know, where you're really in your body. Do a body scan, notice where you're feeling any tension or pain or tightness, move your consciousness awareness all the way into that sit-weight, thierself there and the shit comes out, you know, and it takes about five to 15 minutes. And it's like a pressure valve releasing. And when I tell you that has been one of the key, key, keys, not only to my healing, to my survival over the past six months. And still is, it's one of the most important parts of this for me. The other huge part of my survival has been my dogs, I mean, especially this one, one of my dogs, the little itty bitty one, who's only four pounds is obsessed with my husband. And she loves me, but like, she just is certain cries when he's gone. So she's not that attend to me. She's obsessed with him. Really, who many of you've seen online is like my soulmate and knows when I'm upset and comes running over to me, connects with me, cuddles me, I can't tell you how much love you know if you know dogs or pets, any pets who you love. But there's something, you know, someone said to me, I'm sure you've heard it too, dogs spelled backwards as God, you know, I really do feel like they're angels. And this angel understands me so deeply and sometimes my husband gets jealous because Bailey's such a good color and is always on my feet or cuddling next to me. And I finally said to him, listen, I think Bailey just goes to whoever needs him the most. You know, and I think I just need him the most. So that's been a big part, another huge, huge part, which I think I had talked about maybe in part one of losing Sammy because I was really struggling with it then. And it's less of a struggle now. It's more something I deeply appreciate is allowing myself to receive love. Like I've always been more of the caretaker, more of the one that reaches out to others when they're hurting, more of the healer. And I was raised in a family where there wasn't a lot of room for need, especially emotional need and needy-ness and pain and people inconveniencing themselves. It's not that my parents didn't adore me and do everything they could for me, but that wasn't my role in the family, that wasn't something that was met with any acceptance or permission. And I got, you know, I was very clear that I could easily be a burden and that was a bad thing. And so most of my life, it's been very uncomfortable for me to receive anything, even a compliment, but especially someone's inconvenience or someone's holding. I'm the holder. You know, I'm the one that helps, right? So there are lots of reasons for that, but what immediately happened when Sammy died is that a whole bunch of my soul friends from all over the country, there were a couple different groups of friends in Chicago where I had moved away from after 17 years, just three or four years ago, when I moved to LA, there were my friends in LA, there were my friends from college, from graduate school, and somehow they all connected. I have no freaking idea how. And I thought I was just meeting with some of my friends from Chicago on a Zoom call. And there were 40 people, I don't even know how many people were there, but all these women who had never met any each other, most of them. Other than the New Yorkers and the Chicagoans hadn't met the LA ones in vice versa. And they all like did this beautiful service for Sammy. And it became something that we, they just showed up on Zoom every two weeks for almost four months. And whoever could come, sometimes there were five people, sometimes there were 20 people, sometimes there were 30 people. And we would just talk and I would tell them what was happening and they were just holding, they were holding me. And what was so cool about it, because it was really hard for me to accept that and accept the love and the check-ins and the care and be the one that needed. That was what it was, is being the one that needed and not the one meeting needs. Was really hard for me in the beginning and I've really gotten good at it. And I cannot tell you how grateful I am for this circle of soul friends who just are there, not just the ones in the love bubble. We took a break over the summer because everyone, including me, was traveling so much. We're about to pick it back up. But many of them have told me that it gives them as much as it does me because the honesty, the authenticity, the spirituality, the presence with which we're all there is healing to everyone. And that's been one of the biggest lessons for me, is that when I'm receiving love from others who really care about me, I'm not just getting help from them. It's helping them too. People need to give to you when something horrible has happened. And when you don't let them, it hurts them as much as it hurts you. And it's been so beautiful for me to see the ways that my friends and loved ones have circled around me and certainly given me more than I can ever say. But also, they have all made clear how much it is meant to them to be there and to give, but that they are also receiving through that giving and through that presence with me, which I just think is so beautiful. So I just feel so lucky, especially as a woman who as a young girl and an adolescent got bullied enough, a lot never really fit in. I always had a lot of social anxiety and to have discovered that I've somehow collected this community of these beautiful souls who love me as much as I love them. It's mind boggling to me and astounding and I'm so grateful. And I'm also grateful for the amazing community that has happened remotely through this podcast and through my social media, the love, the connection, the community and how much I've realized that me, you know, because at first I just shared the pain and I don't even know what made me do it the first time. I think I was just sick of hiding it. It was like one of the first weeks after he died. And also I'd been on TV so much trying to warn people and I couldn't care about how I looked because I was in too much pain. So I was on there nodding and crying and it is. And so I sort of stopped caring, which was a blessing in many ways. And so as soon as I started posting these videos of just dancing my pain out or beating a pillow with a bat or crying or screaming or whatever it was, just to show people how to be in body, the amount of people that reached back to me said, oh, that's how you do it. Oh, okay. If you can do it, I can take the first step. Oh, I haven't walked by my son who passed his room for seven years. I don't even go in there. But seeing what you're doing, maybe I can do it. And I can't tell you what that means to me and it allows me to keep it like it holds me accountable. So I keep going, which has been amazing to me. So that's everything that's been happening now. Let's get to the two funerals. I had been trying, I didn't want originally to put him in a graveyard. It just felt wrong. He was cremated after he died. I didn't want to bury him. I wanted to spread him. I wanted to spread him in some place beautiful. And I wanted to do it in both Chicago and LA, which were both of his homes. And my son, my middle son who's 16, kept asking me saying, I really need a place to go with a marker. Like, can we just bury him by a tree and to Muscle Canyon and like carve his initials into the tree? And he said, no, like I need a place I can go to talk to him that has a proper stone or marker. So then I started calling around to all the parks. Can I put a bench? Can I put plaque on a tree? Can I sponsor a tree and you know how you can do that? And of course, because of COVID, none of those offices were open. So I just started focusing at first on the Chicago thing. And I had chosen this specific beach. I'm just going to be honest with you. I know a lot of you are going to think I'm absolutely crazy, but I'm just going to share the truth of my journey. I have a very dear friend who is also a medium and psychic. Her name is Tiel Swan. She's a spiritual teacher. And she had been in a lot of communication with Sammy and also channeled Sammy a few times for me to communicate with, which was, okay, I would tell you, I'm profound. That was one of the things that I asked her as I was deciding where to spread Sammy's ashes was, I didn't even know then that I was going to do it in Chicago. I just said to her, where does he want to be? You know, because I wasn't getting any clear picture. And she came back almost immediately and said, he is saying he wants to be somewhere gilson beach. She spelled it with one L. She said, do you know some place name when Neckah, you know, she spelled with one T. She's like, I don't know where these places are. And I said, well, there actually is a gilson park beach in a suburb called Wineca in Chicago. And her response was what Chicago has beaches, I didn't even know that because she'd never even, you know, she'd flew through Chicago, but it never really spent any time there. So she had no idea what she was saying, but what she was basically saying is this beautiful beach and park in Chicago in this area called Wineca is gorgeous. And it was the perfect place to spread his ashes. So that's how it began. And I basically reached out to all my soul tribe in Chicago. And I told them the date I was coming and I brought my ashes, you know, I was going to bring my ashes and do this very beautiful release ceremony. I didn't want it to be a burial or a memorial. I wanted it to be celebrating his soul's release. That's really what I was focused on. And as I was getting ready to go a week before I left for Chicago, by the way, let me just say my husband had told my son, my middle son was just starting school his junior year. My oldest son was going to meet me in Chicago. My husband was really struggling with traveling with the ashes. He's like, I can't even imagine traveling with the ashes. And I said, well, I'll travel there, you know, and you can meet me there. And he's like, let's create like, let's just I will do the thing here. You do the thing in Chicago. So that's what we had decided. And that was fine with me because I really felt like the Chicago thing was really more about me and Sammy and of course, my oldest son could come along. But it was going to be very woo woo, especially for my husband who's not very woo woo. So I, you know, it was just as well that he wasn't coming to that one. He would have been fine, but he would have been like, you're crazy. So I was still planning. I'd left several emails for the park district, but I didn't feel like there was any rush to take care of the other half of the ashes here. But as I'm talking to my husband leading up to this trip to Chicago, it's about a week before my trip. Actually, two weeks before my before. I was actually going to do this release ceremony for Sammy, but a week before I left. And he said, okay. So after this Chicago trip, you know, we're done with the ashes, right? And I said, no, you know, we still have half that we're going to do something. So Jackson can have a place to go. And he just got so sad and so upset. And I said, why are you so upset? And he said, because, you know, he looked at me like I was crazy. What do you mean? Why am I so upset? I'm upset because I want to lay our son to rest. And, you know, it dawned on me because we feel so differently about life after death for him and for many, many, many, many people. You may be listening to once you die, you're done. Like that's it. You cease to exist. And I could not, like I could not believe something farther from the truth. I have zero doubt my body and it's not after Sammy. It's because of all the things I've experienced in my life and all the things I've learned and all the things like I know for sure that death isn't the end. That our soul lives forever and that energy never dies. But my husband doesn't believe that. And that's okay. Very quickly. And I think I've mentioned this in podcasts one and two of losing Sammy that very quickly we learned in large part, thanks to the help of the wonderful grief counselor, David Kessler from grief.com, who was like a mentor to us. And he very quickly told us, listen, the way marriages survive this, in the way everyone survives this is you can't make each other at all wrong. For any way you're grieving there is no right way to do this, you know, so do not get in each other's way, don't doubt each other, don't question each other, don't make the other wrong or right for the way they're grieving. And so we have held firm to that. And so we just feel differently about it. But I hadn't connected the dots that because he thinks that all life ends when we die that those ashes and his mind were all that Sammy ever was. And to me it was just his bio bodysuit, a gorgeous, glorious, beautiful bodysuit that I gave birth to that held his soul, but it wasn't him, him, it wasn't his true essence, it wasn't his essential self, it wasn't his soul self, it was just the package that he came in. A husband saw it very differently. So as soon as I realized that, I felt a heartbroken for him. And I said, okay, we're going to do this. Like you need to be finished with this, like you need closure. So what do you want? He said, well, I want you to find a place to bury him. I want a marker. I want a rabbi. I want to invite the kids from his school. I was like, okay, so I kicked ass. I ran all over town. My friend Tina helped me go to the funeral parlors and figure out the plots. And I found this beautiful little memorial park in the middle of the city about 10 minutes from our house. I didn't even know it existed before. I found a plot right near a beautiful tree. I knew Sammy would love it because Marilyn Monroe is buried not far away. And within a week, I had the funeral plan, the burial plan, had gotten a friend of a friend, this wonderful woman named Rabbi Cher Hirsch, to do the service. She did the eulogy, like the whole kit and caboodle, and 10 kids from his football team came. And all these teachers and administrators and my friends and my husband's friends and some of our family friends. And it was just so beautiful. And I had no idea that I needed that or that it was going to have any impact. In fact, I thought I wouldn't like it because we were burying him. But it was so beautiful. And I could see what it meant to everyone. And I could feel Sammy's enjoyment of it that these kids came. Many of him, frankly, were not very nice to him or at least didn't stand up for him when he was being bullied so much. But I could tell, you know, they would not leave until that grave was filled in. And those boys insisted on filling it in up until the top. And like would not let go of the shovels. And they stayed until the very end. It was almost like they didn't want to leave. And each of them came up to me and said, "How sorry they were." And I knew that Sammy was just like loving the love, the acknowledgement, the appreciation, and the depth with which his loss and his death had affected these kids, even if they didn't understand him or do right by him in life, they were going to do right by him and death. And I just thought that was so beautiful. And I think it really helped. I know it helped my 16-year-old. I know for a fact it deeply helped him. And I know it helped my husband. And I could feel the relief. And so it helped me too. And it was beautiful. And then a week later, so that was on one Friday. And then a week later, I was in Chicago with the ashes. And boy, that was a journey. I won't waste too much time telling you about getting the ashes to Chicago. And I've written some blogs about it and stuff too, and videos about it. But I'll just tell you about the service in Chicago, because you'll see the difference between the burial with the rabbi and the cemetery and what we did. So about 25 of my friends in Chicago, and a couple of out of town, or might me, my son, and one of my college roommates all flew in. But the rest were all from Chicago. And all I knew was that I was going to Gilson Beach. I didn't know where I was going to put the ashes, but I just told everybody to show up at 8.30. I said, I'm going to wear white, not black. And the theme is Love Lives Forever. Like, that's what this is about. We're releasing him knowing and remembering that Love Lives Forever. So what did they do? My college roommate, who loves graphic design, made these adorable t-shirts and shopping bags that say Love Lives Forever, Sammy Berman Chapman was here. She gave them to all the guests, which I thought was hilarious and wonderful. But I also brought all these bubbles, because Sammy, his whole life, loved bubbles. And I also brought Gardenias. I wanted magnolias, because those really represent Georgia to me, but Sammy loved Georgia. My hometown. We went there every summer. He spent his summers there. He loved it there. And I wanted something to release into the lake, and I wanted it to be a flower. Really I wanted it to be a magnolia, but I couldn't get mass magnolias. I could get gardenias, so I got a whole bunch of gardenias. And so what we did is I brought the gardenias and the bubbles, and my friends brought food and drinks, and we all showed up at 8.30, and I immediately see the tree. It's a gorgeous tree right on the entrance to, like off the entrance to the beach on not a well-worn pathway, but faith, you know, right by the ocean base. I mean, by the lake, excuse me, not the ocean, by the, by Lake Michigan. And it was gorgeous. I was like, that's where we're put in the ashes. So we all go there. And I even had the rabbi there, rabbi Lizzy Heidman who had bar mitzvahed Sammy three years before, and knew, you know, he was actually her first bar mitzvah class because it was this new congregation of very, you know, progressive, inclusive, and we were in her first, Sammy was her first bar mitzvah. So in that congregation, so she, it was beautiful that she was there in full circle. And so Ethan, my oldest and I spread the ashes, and I cannot tell you, I mean, I touched them before. I had poured them from one container to another. I'd even, you know, truth be told, eaten a little bit of it that would have, you know, drifted on to the counter when I was transferring it. And I couldn't throw it away. And I knew that part of his DNA is already in me, so I'm going to have more of it. Turns out that's not an uncommon thing, but I hope you're not grossed out hearing that. But I did. But there was something about spreading those ashes and touching them. And I started to rub them into the sand and combine them with the sand that surrounded the tree. And then my tears started falling. And I was oblivious to everyone else who was all they were watching, it was just me and the ashes. I was even oblivious to my oldest son who I think was also wrapping it in. But like, I just, I don't even know how long it was, but it was, I can't tell you how profound it was to combine us, making me cry now, to combine him. With the earth, you know, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. And this beautiful sand that had been worn down from centuries of water and wind hitting rocks, combining with, you know, the timelessness of my son's essence was just beautiful. And I felt so held by this community of people who know my heart, know my soul and have been in my love bubble and have shown up completely. And so then we all circled around that tree and the rabbi sang and had us sing along with her, Psalm 21, yay, though I walk in the valley of death. And then I spoke and then my oldest son spoke, said something really beautiful. I'll post the videos at some point of all that. And then whoever wanted to spoke, some people wrote, read poems, some people talked about memories, Cammy's best friend from Chicago, and he was really close to his friend's mother and sister, the three of them came and they brought butterflies to release, which is ironically they didn't even know this when they got the butterflies, but that's my symbol for Sammy. I always know he's giving me a winker, a toucher, a reach out when I see a monarch butterfly, and they brought like 50 monarch butterflies that we released. And then we went down to the lake and everyone had a gardenia and we let those gardenias drift beautifully into the lake. And then these two old ladies, they were so cute. One had a bright purple swim cap and the other had a bright pink swim cap and they were swimming together in the lake and they swam right into the middle of these magnolias. It was just such a cool image. And then I turned, I had this little speaker, I turned on some music. My college roommate Dana had, is she was always a DJ, so she had already found some songs for me that one of them was, you're fucking awesome by pink. Isn't that the name of it, I think? And there were some other songs, I don't even remember where they were, but we just started blowing bubbles and dancing. And it just became this beautiful moment of all my friends dancing and blowing bubbles and the flowers in the lake. And it was just perfect. And then I gave everybody a bunch of bottles of bubbles with a little tag on it that said, "Love lives forever." Sammy Burman Chapman was here and I asked them to just leave them in random places around Chicago so that people could, you know, little kids, parents, adults, whoever would come upon a brand new bottle of bubbles and Sammy would bring them a moment of joy as they got to blow some bubbles. And that was it. And it was just beautiful and perfect and I felt so complete after that. I did not know that I was going to feel so much better, but I think the combination of both services, which were so different on totally different coasts, or not coasts, Chicago is not a coast, but you know what I mean, across the country from each other. I think the combination of both just really brought closure. It really made a difference, a difference I didn't think would be made. And I just want to say that because, you know, a lot of people hold on to the ashes and I'm not saying you shouldn't hold on to the ashes. I put some in a necklace that a wonderful jeweler in New York that I found on Etsy actually. Pablo Valencia is his name. He made me a beautiful necklace with the ashes inside and a beautiful little paperweight that has the ashes inside. So I still have some of his ashes that I can wear, that I can hold, that I can connect to and that I can keep forever and give to his brothers and so forth. But for me, and I'm not saying it's true for everyone, I had an unbelievable closure. I didn't even know I could have by laying him to rest. And I have to thank my husband for that because he knew he needed it more than I did. But I guess I needed it too. And my friend Tiel, who I told you about, who told me to go to Gilson, that same thing wanted to go to Gilson Beach, I told her I was going. I don't think she was aware of the dates. I think I posted maybe the day so maybe she knew. But she reached out to me two or three days later and said, because she had already been, had already told me, and I knew I'm just going to be crazy again. I'm just warning, not crazy, but to many people it seems crazy. It's not crazy to me. So after he died, we, through many of our conversations, she had told me and I knew that his, the energy of his personality was still in the house. That's in essence what a ghost is, according to most spiritual teachers, including Tiel. And I believe this too, that when people die very suddenly, very often when children die, their thought form, the energy of their personality is left behind. It doesn't leave with their soul. It's like our thought form or the energy of our personality and our ego and, you know, not our soul's self, but our personality's self is like a sock. And our soul is the foot. And when our soul leaves, you know, the foot pulls out of the sock and goes back to oneness and all that is. But the sock sometimes remains. And that's the ghost, you know, that's really what most ghosts are. And she had been communicating a lot with that ghost and trying to get him to go to the light. And he, you know, she didn't know Sammy at all. She'd never even met him. But she told me many times I've never met someone so stubborn as this kid. And he was the most stubborn person I'd ever met. So I thought that was funny, but he would not leave. He did not feel like he could, mostly he didn't feel like he could leave his dad. Like he felt like he needed him. And he was still accepting, he knew he was dead, but he was still accepting that. And he just wouldn't go to the light. And you know, you can believe this or not, but I totally believe it. And I feel it as truth. And I've seen too many other things to not believe it. But what she told me, so Tuesday morning at 4 a.m., I woke up and I couldn't go back to sleep. And then the next day, or later that day, Teal text me and says, Sammy's thought form went into the light at 4.27 a.m. this morning. He finally did it. He finally was ready. Once he made the decision, he just left. It's like he was done. And so whatever you did, he felt like everyone was now complete and he could go and join his soul, you know, and go back to on this and not have to stay in the house with us. And I love that thought. I can also say another weird thing, just to kind of demonstrate the point is that I have this lamp by my bed. And I don't even turn it on that often because I read on a Kindle. So I don't need a reading lamp. But I would say maybe 10 times over the past six months since Sammy died. I have turned on that lamp. And every single time it fades in and out, it does all these weird things, blinks on and off. It fades like it's on a dimmer, but it's not on a dimmer. You know, it was a new bulb. I changed the bulb. I mean, I had already changed the bulb before this happened, I screwed it in tighter, I unscrewed it, screwed it back in. And I finally said, okay, Sammy, you know, I know that ghost like to, you know, that light is easy for you to manipulate. And it would be right up your alley to manipulate this and to mess with me right now. But like I'm trying to read, can you stop? And it would be like these funny conversations I would have in my own head or sometimes I'll laugh when I was alone imagining that it was his ghost there, like trying to show me he was there. And I accepted that, you know, and I didn't even turn on that lamp very often, but and then part of me thought, you know, maybe something's wrong with the electrical system and the lamp and eventually I'll get it fixed. So I had both, I was in both minds. So on Wednesday or Thursday, after Sammy had evidently left the house, I went to turn on that lamp because I needed it not, I hadn't even been thinking about the flickering. I just turned on the lamp, but it shocked me because the lamp didn't flicker. It was pure bright, steady light for the first time. And when I just used it the week before I left, it was still blinking and wobbling and doing all, and I'm the only one that uses that lamp. It's on my bedside, but it was, it has not blinked since I'm just saying. I don't know. All I know is that I feel complete. My husband seems to feel his own level of completion, so do my children. And I'm going to be posting a video. My friends took some videos and pictures, I'll try to put it all together just like I did about my time at 1440 Multiversity when I went deep into the red woods and into my grief. I'll try to post this video as well so you can see what happens. But I just wanted to share it with you all of this because you've been such an integral part of my journey. And, you know, the language of love is also about speaking the language of grief and I'm the host. I've been grieving, and this has been such a huge part of my learning. And for me, the heel-learned teach is still in there. I'm not rushing to teach, people have been asking me when I'm writing a book, I'm not going to do that for a while because then I'll be jumping to meaning and bypassing my feelings. So I know very clearly that my job is just to be right now and to share as I go and not jump to making it into something yet. I will eventually, but I'm not going to rush. I'm going to be here now, all the terrible beautiful pain and beauty and grace and messages and flickering and steady lights and love bubbles and everything else. And I just so appreciate the ability to share this with you and your willingness to take it in and how gracious and wonderful and loving you've been on this journey with me because you really have and I hear it from you every day, so I thank you for that. I promise we'll get back to relationships and other things next time, but I thought this would be good to share with you this week on the language of love. And let me know if there's anything on your mind or anything you want to talk about, learn about. I'm always here for you. LanguageOfLovePod.com and you can leave me a voice mail message or an email question. I love you. I'll see you next time on The Language of Love. [Music]