My Story, My Treasures and My Gifts

[00:00:00] Paula: Welcome to “TesseLeads” with your host, Tesse Akpeki, and co-host me Paula Okonneh. Tesse Leads is a safe, sensitive, and supportive place and space where guests share how they are navigating a diverse range of challenges, and also how they confront their dilemmas and shape their futures. Our guest today is Jane Duncan Rogers, and the theme for today is ” My story, my treasures and my gifts “. So I’ll tell you about our wonderful guest, Jane. Jane was devastated when her husband died. This was not their plans. Her greatest fear had come true, and she was on her own again at age 54, very young. However, little did she know that three years on, she would’ve published a book called “Gifted by Grief”. How could she be gifted by this terrible loss? And yet she was. And that has led her directly to what she now does. Her background of 25 years in the coaching and training field has been perfect for the now six figure business she founded in 2016. And together with her worldwide team of end of life planning facilitators, she offers products and programs to help people complete their end of life plans, which 90% of people say is essential, but only 14% actually get around to doing. So welcome, Jane to “TesseLeads”. This is a topic that everyone needs to hear.

[00:01:54] Jane: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Wonderful to be here.

[00:01:59] Tesse: Hi, Jane. It’s really lovely to meet you, and I’m a great admirer of the work you do. As Paula saying death and dying really difficult sensitive topics for people. And I know that lots of people, including myself are sometimes avoiding discussing these things. I’m rather curious about your journey, how you came to seeing this work as something that was important to do. What was your journey like along the way?

[00:02:31] Jane: Well, my husband was diagnosed with stomach cancer, this was in 2010. And you know when something like that happens and it’s a life-threatening situation, you’re stopped in your tracks. So we did what people do, which is he got treatment, we hoped for the best, but actually the worst happened. So I ended up being a widow. Oh God, I hated that word. I found that really difficult. I didn’t want to be called that. But that was the label that society was putting on me. And I knew that I would always write about it. Because I had been a writer, I had been a blogger. And sure enough, that’s how “Gifted by Grief” came about. It just poured out of me one day. Literally, I woke up one morning and I thought, oh my God, this is the time to write, and it was reader’s responses to that book, which I did feel gifted by the grief by this point. But they responded to something else in the book, which was a different kind of gift, and that was about the questions that I had asked my husband before he died. And the very practical ones about what kind of coffin do you want? What are your passwords? How do you want your body dressed? Really practical things. And lots of people said to me, oh my goodness, I need to answer those questions too. And really that was the birth of what I do now running before I go solutions. So that was definitely not in the plan. I can tell you.

[00:03:58] Tesse: Paula, I see you pensive.

[00:04:04] Paula: Because I’m also a widow, and so I can relate to what you’re saying. You know, your whole life changes. And the first day I had to fill in on a form widow, I cried because I was like, I’ve never had to write that. I’ve always written, married, still a mother, but widow. And you know, I was going in to see an orthodontist and I went by myself. Now I think that was foolish, but I went by myself and I went in there and they were like, your blood pressure’s very high. And I realized why it was very high, and then they’re like, we can’t do anything for you today. So I just went and sat in my car and started thinking, okay, I can’t make my children orphans, so I need to figure out how to get this down. Yeah, immediately or as quickly as possible.

[00:04:55] Jane: Yeah. It’s really interesting that I can remember, because I didn’t think of myself as a widow until I had to fill out that forum, like you just said. And I also cried on the very first time I had to do it, because I didn’t want to be a widow. Who wants that? You know? But anyway, we had not had children, so I didn’t have that reason, you know, to have to continue. But there were plenty of times when I, I Wouldn’t say that I felt like doing away with myself, but I certainly didn’t want to be living. The grief was so strong, and even though you know my background as a counselor, I had learned about grief. Theoretically, I had worked with people who were grieving, but my goodness, me, after Philip died, I was completely blindsided by the extent of the emotion. It was so strong, and I, the only thing I knew was that I had to allow the feelings to be there. I thought I was going a bit mad actually, but I have since learned that that is not an uncommon way to be thinking. But I don’t know if you have heard of Louise Hay, Louise El Hay. Author of “You Can Heal Your Life”. But I trained with her way back in 1990 and she said something that stuck with me in that time, and it was “what you feel you can heal, what you feel you can heal”. So I really hung onto that to get me through some pretty difficult feelings.

[00:06:22] Paula: Yeah, I can even see now that you’re still emotional and you think about it because yeah, that feeling never goes away. And as you said, what you feel you can heal leads me to my question is that what gives you that deep conviction that your work is something that is really, or can really make a difference?

[00:06:41] Jane: Well, I’ve always done work and I really care about making a difference. It doesn’t really matter in a way what way I do that. But I would say my bigger purpose in life for many, many years now has been to make a difference in a positive way to one person or many, or whoever it is. At the moment this is the way it is showing up. And because I have had my own experience with my husband, but also with my parents who have now died and other people as well. I know the difference between when somebody has faced the elephant in the room of their own death or their parents’ death, or somebody else in the family and have been willing to prepare for that. Because when you don’t prepare for it afterwards, there’s potentially and often is a terrible mess left behind from an administrative point of view and trying to make decisions and everybody in the family may be wanting to know what to do, but nobody has been left any instructions. So the potential for arguments is enormous, even in families that say that they would never do that sort of thing. So I know what people need to do in order to avoid that. So whenever there’s anybody who takes up that mantle, if you like to think about it and be willing to face grief to face the fact of their own mortality, then I know it’s going to make a difference. They don’t know that until a bit further on down the line, but they do get there.

[00:08:12] Paula: Absolutely, Tesse.

[00:08:15] Tesse: I’m listening very deeply to Jane to what you’re saying. And you know, I’m sensing you’re a compassionate person, care and you like people and you say you have counseling expertise as well. Are there other things in your life’s journey, you know, that have contributed to where you are now and are you prepared to share them with us?

[00:08:39] Jane: Sure.

[00:08:39] Tesse: I was curious. Yeah.

[00:08:41] Jane: Well, yeah, I only just realized the other day that, you know, I was 54 when Philip died. And whenever I’m telling my story, maybe on a podcast or whatever, I quite often will say, it sounds as if the story starts when he died. But of course there was 54 years before that. And I would say that I’ve always been a spiritual seeker since a teenager when I had what I might call an awakening experience one day in nature. It was a glimpse of another way of being. A glimpse, some might say, a glimpse of God, some might say a glimpse of love of the essence of life. It doesn’t really matter what the word is. But it was just a glimpse. And so then I started out seeking, but one of the benefits of this seeking journey is that I was doing a lot of personal growth work and understanding myself, lots of stuff about communication and allowing my heart to open more and more, and that’s been quite a journey. When I was married, I was married for 20 years and we had a good marriage. It was quite a tempestuous marriage, let’s say that, but it was a good marriage. And yet afterwards I felt on reflecting that my heart had been broken open in a different way with the grief, and I realized that I had not been fully able to have such an open heart in my marriage. And I promised myself that if I ever got the chance again with another man, that I would do what I needed to do to keep my heart open. And I’m really incredibly lucky to be able to say that I have found another man and I have married again just two years ago. And I have had to practice keeping my heart open. Because we would, in the early days, we would describe me as being spiky, you know, like putting little spikes out to keep him away, cause I was. I was afraid, you know, of getting involved again cause he might die too. But I haven’t let that get in the way. I’ve been quite good at not letting fear stop me doing what I want to do in all areas of my life, so.

[00:10:49] Tesse: That sounds beautiful, elegant, very gentle as well. Curious and discovering type tones coming to my mind. And you know my curiosity leads me to ask this question, which is what does an open heart look like? Or what does it feel like, you know, for you from your perspective?

[00:11:11] Jane: Well, nags, I’ve practiced it a lot, I can tell I think a lot in images. So if I’m aware of an image of, and it’s usually a set of gates across my heart, literally inside here, sometimes there’s no gates there at all, that’s when I’m fully open. Then I’m usually vulnerable, but not necessarily vulnerable in a painful way. It could be vulnerable in a very open and joyous way. And then there’ll be other times when the gates are there and they are open, and there are other times when the gates are there and they’re closed, and sometimes they’re even locked. But if I notice that they’re locked, I know what to do to unlock them and to open them up again. Because it doesn’t work closing down your heart, it doesn’t work locking it away, it really doesn’t work. Because you separate yourself from not just other people and the love that other people want to give you, but you separate yourself from being love itself, which is one of my beliefs that we are manifestations of love. So yeah, I don’t usually talk about all this on podcasts. I don.t know what it is you’re saying to get it out of me.

[00:12:20] Tesse: This is what we love doing. We actually love Paula and I, we love creating spaces for people to have their voices amplified and explore things safely. And you can see our viewers are listening, so they can’t see us. But I can see you, Jane, and I can see Paula, and I see that kindness coming out from you. And actually you’re speaking into things that Paula and I care about, you know about caring about people in our lives while they’re alive, you know. And singing the song that we want to sing when they’re there to hear it. We care about that. Paula, your thoughts?

[00:13:00] Paula: I absolutely agree with you, especially when you mentioned Tesse, that this is a safe place. Because we’ve had many of our guests say, oh my gosh, I don’t know what happens when we come here. But at the end of the day, this is a space also to help people. And so, you know, I know our generation, Tesse and my generation, we weren’t openly vulnerable. We could be vulnerable in private, but being openly vulnerable was something that we were taught from a young age that you don’t do. But I’ve seen the difference that makes in so many other people’s lives, because many times they feel alone that this is only happening to me. When one has an opportunity to say, and me too, this is also happening to me. It’s amazing the trickle down effect that it has, and that in turn helps so many others and helps the world and helps you know. Now we talk so much more about mental illness and we realize it’s all part, it’s holistic, you know, spiritual body. It’s not just physical. But we also have emotions and emotions and our minds and, you know, we need healing there. Being vulnerable opens up a wide, wide, wide range of healing practices, I believe for people to know we are not alone. We are all the same, really struggling with similar things, but sometimes at different stages of different times, different seasons. So thank you. Thank you.

[00:14:26] Jane: It’s a pleasure. I like it. My first husband, he had a saying which was, in your vulnerability lies your strength. And I’ve always remembered that, cause it’s like, oh yeah, that’s right. You know, because we have in our culture have this idea that vulnerability is something that is, you know, you shouldn’t do it. But it’s not true, it really is not true. And so I’m happy to be out there. That’s how I am in my book, “Gifted by Grief”, the first book, because I couldn’t do it any other way, and I wouldn’t have wanted to do it any other way, you know?

[00:15:00] Tesse: You come across as authentic, you know, and, you know, personable, likable, connected, as I said, with the broader world. And you know, when, you know, just seeing you, you know, I can see us having a cup of coffee and a croissant, you know, and just sharing and joining Paula, you know, not remotely getting her to come and join us over as well. But you know, there’s a question that comes to my mind, Jane, and that’s about success. You know, given what you have been through your journey in life where you are now, what would you describe success as? What was, what’s it mean for you?

[00:15:35] Jane: Yeah, that’s really interesting one, isn’t it? Because I definitely used to equate success with having lots of money in the bank, and that’s what I thought it meant. But I have learned along the way that looking at the outer things on our outer level, which traditionally society says is the marks of success, like money and cars and holidays and all that kind of stuff. That’s all nice if you like that kind of thing. But that’s not the hallmark of success. I think the hallmark of success for me now would be being able to wake up in the morning and feel grateful that I’m here and that I’m alive and that I have my health, and to go to bed feeling like that as well. And to be able to have learned enough about connecting and communicating with people that we are not playing games with each other. There’s no room for game playing. So we are authentic and vulnerable and open and joyous and having a good time. And when emotions like anger, or grief, or fear or sadness come, they’re all welcome as well. So in my book, I wrote about what I call front door, back door thinking, and this was how I dealt with the emotions that were coming my way cause there were so many of them. And I couldn’t understand it, because it was even one day, about 10 days after Philip had died, I was walking in the woods, it was a winter’s day, but it was blue sky and sunshine and I heard the birds chirping. I was on my own, but I felt happy and I couldn’t understand how I could feel happy when I was going home to an empty house, but that was just one part of me. The essence of me was feeling joyous and happy, which was wonderful. So to come back to the front door, back door thinking, I learned to, whenever a feeling came, whatever it was, it didn’t matter whether I liked it or not. I learned to open the front door of my house, so to speak, and open the windows and let it in, and open the back door as well so that the feeling could come in, inhabit the house for a little bit or however long it was, and then easily go out through the back door and the back windows. Because that is what happens with feelings. They come and they go always, all the good ones that we wish would stay and all the bad ones that we don’t want to have at all. So I didn’t frame it like that at the time, but afterwards reflecting on it, that was a useful metaphor for me to think of and to speak of. And that is what I do now, you know? And it’s kind of second nature to me now.

[00:18:18] Paula: I love that. I love that. The front door, back door, I love. So you allow the emotions to come in and you give them space to leave.

[00:18:28] Jane: Exactly.

[00:18:28] Paula: Because they are going to come. I love it.

[00:18:31] Jane: Well, cause the thing is with the ones that we like, like we like feeling loving, we like feeling happy. We like all those kind of things. Usually if you take the metaphor of the house, what we want to do is we want to welcome them in and keep them locked in there. We want to have them forever, but it doesn’t work like that. So we have to let those go as well. And the ones that we try and keep out, it doesn’t work to try and keep them out because they will find their way in eventually and they will cause damage as well if they don’t get a space. So that’s the whole point really, is giving space to the emotions and that allows us to blossom.

[00:19:06] Tesse: This is such a powerful thing.

[00:19:08] Paula: Yeah, it is. I was going to ask if she could think of words that are powerful or useful or helpful or soothing to anyone who’s gone through grief of any kind, what would those words be? I mean, I thought when you started talking about the back door, front door, like yeah. And then these other words too.

[00:19:31] Jane: Yeah, I think knowing that it will change because others before you that has happened for them. That was very helpful for me. It didn’t necessarily make me feel any better in the moment, but I knew that it was happening. Now, the person that I knew that I held onto as somebody who had done this was a very famous person indeed, Paul McCartney. I knew that he had been in love with his first wife, Linda, and that when she had died, we hadn’t heard of him for at least a year. You know, we, he must have been grieving, but I thought, if he can do it, I can do this too. And that was helpful, very helpful. Because there were plenty of times when I was awake in the middle of the night Googling,” how long does grief last”? You know,? Well, I never got an answer, of course, but there isn’t an answer to that.

[00:20:20] Paula: There isn’t.

[00:20:21] Jane: No, no.

[00:20:23] Paula: Tessie?

[00:20:24] Tesse: Yeah, you’ve been so real in saying things, and even in the examples you give, they’re very relatable examples. How long does grief last, you know, what practicalities from your experience would you say to people who are grieving that can at least help them on the journey. And as Paula said, I love the front and the back door analogy. I’m going to hold on to that. You know, it’s very powerful. What other things that from your experience could be helpful?

[00:20:59] Jane: You know, I love writing and I always have a journal on the go. In those days, my journal was getting a lot of very angry words, lots of scribbles, lots of rage, and that was okay with me. You know, that’s the purpose of a journal. You pour out your feelings into it. It’s not meant to be read by you unless you want to, and it’s certainly not meant to be read by anybody else. So that’s one thing. The other thing that I did a lot was expressing myself through color on paper, big sheets of paper. That was also really important, you know what? Cause I was quite angry quite a lot of the time. That was one of the emotions that came for me. So stomping when I went out for walks and I loved walking, so that was fine. But allowing myself to stomp angrily, you know, and to also to wasn’t necessarily shouting, you know, because you don’t want to shout if you think that people might hear you. But it’s amazing how well you can shout in your imagination if you need to. But I think the thing that I want to say about the journaling is that when I came to write my book, I was going back over my journals to see what had happened, I was of course confronted with the pain, the rawness of the feelings that I’d been writing about, and the very first time I did that was probably about a year on, maybe a bit later than that. And I realized that I wasn’t feeling as intensely as I had been. I was still having really bad days. But they weren’t as intense as they had been in those first few weeks, and that was actually really helpful to know because I’d forgotten, I’d just forgotten. That showed me that I was on a journey and that I was actually healing from grief and I was living into this new life that had been put on to me, not of my choice, but that it was happening and I found that very helpful.

[00:22:59] Paula: Yeah, great points. You know, two of the things that you mentioned, I also had to do the journaling, and I’m not much of a writer as Tesse would let you know. But my journaling came in the form of saying I wanted to write a book and I actually wrote the book, but I never published it. But it was so therapeutic for me. And then the coloring, yeah we got some coloring books and colored, you know. I had been introduced to that some years prior to my husband passing, but the coloring came in even more handy after he passed. And I also did Sudoku. I guess it was something to occupy my mind, but it was so thrilling and so helpful. So, wow, those are some great points as we are wrapping up. Tesse, is there anything else?

[00:23:52] Tesse: This is so real. I’m touched by what you’re saying, Jane, about intensity. You know that the pain remains, but intensity can over time reduce so you don’t feel you’re suffocated every day. This is just such a moving thing to talk about cause as we started, so we’re finishing, people don’t talk about these things and I think because there’s that silence alongside such pain, there are not many gains to be had in the journey that is not actually thought through in some intentional way.

[00:24:33] Jane: Yeah, yeah. I think just one last thing on this is. Somebody had told me this, I think, but it was also my experience, which is that it wasn’t, especially in that first year, it wasn’t necessarily the intensity that felt less, but the gaps in between the bad days grew longer. I could see that, which was helpful because those days that were relatively speaking okay, and they weren’t maybe still brilliant, they somehow gave me strength to get through the really bad days. And sometimes the really bad days were so bad I just went to bed, stayed under the duve, hugged my new little cuddly toy that I had bought and read ridiculous novels that nearly always ended up with somebody dying. It was awful. I don’t know how I managed to do that. But that’s all I could do. That’s all I could do, and I just let that happen.

[00:25:31] Tesse: Well, Paula, to you.

[00:25:33] Paula: Yeah. So I was wondering if there are any key takeaways that you can give to our listening audience who have gone through this? We know we’ll go through this at some point. I mean, death is part of life.

[00:25:46] Jane: I think it’s this idea, the sooner that you are willing to accept that, whether you like it or not, you’re having a different life, the easier it is to go with that different life. Because the man that I’m now married to, he was also a widower, but he dealt with his grief in a very different way. He fairly soon, I would’ve said after his wife died, he came to the conclusion that if somebody had told him when he was 20, cause they met when they were 20, that they would’ve had 43 years of marriage together and then it would’ve been over. He would’ve said, well, that’s fine, thank you very much, that’ll be great. And of course that is what happened. She also died of cancer, and he came to the point in himself where he thought, oh well, It was a bit like video games, you know, game over bonus life. I have a bonus life now. The difference between me and him was that he was, he felt good about having a bonus life. If I had thought that, I think that I would’ve thought, but I don’t want to have a bonus life, you know, this is not okay. So the more that one can be accepting of what is happening, that’s impossible, by the way, to start with. But that is what happens as part of the process.

[00:27:02] Paula: That’s powerful. Willing to accept that your life has changed forever. I think that’s something that we have to process as we can. Because that’s the reality, you know, you wake up every day and you try to, oh, that was a dream. Oh no, it wasn’t a dream. It’s real.

[00:27:21] Jane: Yeah,

[00:27:21] Paula: Yeah. And so to our wonderful listeners, we want you to know that as Jane has shared, all stories are important and all lives do matter. So sharing them with others could support, encourage and nurture them. We want also our listeners to be reassured by knowing that they are never alone. And we encourage our listeners to head over to “Apple Podcast”, “Google Podcast”, “Spotify”, or anywhere that you listen to podcasts and please click subscribe. And if you have found “TesseLeads” helpful, please let us know in your reviews. If you’d like to have any questions or topics covered, send us a note. And if you’d like to be a guest on our show, “TesseLeads”, head over to “tesseleads.com/contact” and apply. And with that same note, I want to mention to our listeners, we now have a new website dedicated to “TesseLeads”. It’s of course, “www.tesseleads.com”. Join us in celebrating. Thank you, Jane.

[00:28:35] Tesse: Thank you, Jane.