Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 50: Joe DiNardo, Grief and Meditation

Episode Date: December 14, 2016

Joe DiNardo, a businessman and attorney from Buffalo, New York, was married to his wife Marcia for 15 years when she was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. DiNardo used to his years of meditation practice to help get through the grief of losing her and in his new book, "A Letter to My Wife," he shares anecdotes about the relationship they had and the love he found. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey guys, this one is, this one's quite raw. Joe Denardo is not some professional meditation teacher, not some professional public speaker. He's a lawyer who lives in New York State who

Has happens to have meditated for a long time. Has it made a big deal out of it But he went through something really difficult the loss of his wife and Meditation helped him a lot Where he really needed it. And he wrote a book, it's a letter to his wife, and you're gonna hear him speak about why he did it, and you're gonna hear some, as I said, it gets pretty raw, it's really an honor,

it was an honor to sit with him and talk about this stuff, and I think it's gonna be very useful to anybody who listens to it, so I give you Joe DeNardo. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Well, first of all, my condolences has not been that long actually since I was a child.

How do you earn a half? Yeah. How are you doing? I'm doing all right, I think, under the circumstances. Normally, I start by asking people to give me their backstory about how they started meditating, et cetera, et cetera. But I think maybe today, given your circumstances, it would be better to start with your story about how you met your wife and what happened from there. Okay, well the way I met my wife was that I had a personal friend, Elliot,

Lasky, who had a home building company in Western New York. And I, being an attorney, would be speaking to him from time to time. I invested with him. And there was always this woman that answered that answer the phone but sometimes answered the phone. Her name was Marsha Anastasi and you know somehow something somebody mentioned to me because she didn't know me that she loved my voice on the phone she loved when I happened to call and she happened to answer the phone. Yeah you have a good radio voice. Oh thank you. So we started to I started to flirt and she happened to answer the phone. Yeah, you have a good radio voice. Oh, thank you. So I started to flirt. You know, phone just casual flirting on the phone.

I asked her to lunch and I fell in love with her. The good news for me was she fell in love with me too. And you know, after a few years of dating and I had a son from a previous marriage and he was only four or five and I didn't want to introduce him to a new woman unless I knew I was going to marry her. So I sort of kept that separate for a while. But then we married in 99. My daughter came when 2000.

And, you know, I have to say that from the very beginning of our relationship, I loved her completely. She loved me completely and we just were friends. I mean, we had fun together. Every day was sort of like enjoyable being married and being together. I never felt like I wish I was doing something different or being with somebody else or fantasizing. I just didn't do it anymore. And then a couple of major events. In 2005 we came home from a vacation in Italy. I've been going for about two weeks and I had not had a chance to work out, you know,

physically work out in a gym or anything or run during that time. So we got to the house and it was Sunday morning now and I decided to go downstairs and just exercising this little gym that I have And I was doing that and suddenly my head exploded It was later. I was told it was a thunder clap headache I could barely walk I couldn't talk I was delusion, you know delirious But I didn't feel I needed to go to the hospital at that moment. I had migraine headaches for many years. We thought they were migraine headaches. The next morning at the office, the same thing happened again, about 9.9.30 in the morning.

My head just exploded. So, people at the office took me to the emergency room and they did the normal protocol for in my brain which is to hydrate you and give you some heavy-duty pain medication. And before you know it, you feel great. That's what happened But one of my friends said to the doctor, why don't you give him a CAT scan? Doctor said we don't do that for migraine headaches. He said yeah, but he said him this is this is way different than a migraine please anyways, they did and By then my wife was there at the hospital. I'm in the emergency room. The doctor walks over and says, Jo, gee, here's your problem. And he shows me this film and he says, you have a large tumor on there, right side of your brain.

I said, really? He goes, yeah, he said, but the real problem is it's spiraling into the basalier skull where there's a very little room. I was later told they called that an elegant area of the brain, but your basic functions of breathing and seeing and hearing are all in that space and They felt they needed to do he said you need to see a neurosurgeon and I said, okay, well, you know tomorrow I want to get to the office. I'll call one. He said, no, you need to send neurosurgeon today. And so they took me in an ambulance to Roswell Park Cancer Institute, not because they thought I had

cancer. But I have connections there. And also, they do brain tumors all the time. I thought, that's good place for me. And they said, we're going to have to do surgery on you as quickly as we can, but you first have to, anyways, long story. What happened interestingly for Marsha and me was that a part of me wondered how she was going to react to this. And to my very pleasant, pleasant experience, she stood up and was there for me every step of the way. That allowed me to deal with what I thought was even more important than just the tumor, and that was that the pending surgery they said to me very realistically, A, you might not come out of this, or B, if you do, you might be blind, you might be deaf, you might be all of those. And for the first time in my life, and especially since I had been practicing meditation

by that time for many, many years, I was confronted with my own mortality. In other words, I really had this challenge. It stopped being theoretical. It wasn't theoretical anymore, right? It wasn't a meditation exercise. It was like this could be it. The thought occurred to me, what am I going to be like mentally before they take me in for surgery. And I'm going to finally say, and I was raised Catholic, and I was nine years in a Catholic school, went to mass six days a week, was completely indoctrinated with all of those Christian Catholic things. Nothing wrong with them, by the way. But I'm just saying that later in life,

I began to feel that I would like to know what it is, not to be so indoctrinated, but just to find out for myself what's going on. That's what brought me to meditation practice. Well, now for the first time I was gonna find out whether at the last moments I was going to pray, ask God for forgiveness or protection, ask a saint to intervene, or whether I was going to just be in the moment and see what happened right up until I was given anesthesia.

Because after that, I didn't know what was going to happen. And it is very comfortably, never relied on any crutches. And stayed present. I felt very strong in my practice, especially in those days leading up to the surgery, and at the moment of going to the very last moment of consciousness. That was a big moment in my life and in my practice, because it't like you said it wasn't theoretical anymore and I felt I had reached a certain I don't know plateau is so to speak in my disconnect from all of my previous conditioning. My wife continued to be a pillar of strength for me, and as a result I only loved her more. We spec'd at her more and understood how strong a woman she was for being able to deal with me after the surgery. So that was sort of how our relationship got started continued to improve and we continued to have my daughter raising her

daughter you adopted when you got together. Correct? Correct, we adopted her in 2000. And, you know, the very few problems the result of the surgery. I mean, I have a, what they call, damaged my trigeminal nerve on the right side of my face, which gives me the opportunity when I'm sitting to always have some physical sensation to focus on. You're meditating, right? If I should run out of you know following my breath there's always a physical sensation of some sort of going on

on the right side of my face. You describe your wife as just from my memory of reading your book of being a great cook, not only being really supportive of you, and you had a really, and you had a pretty warm relationship, but being a great cook, a great mother, really stylish, very kind. Right. She, yes.

She loved Madison Avenue. She called it Disneyland for adults, and she was very stylish. She loved Madison Avenue. She called it Disneyland for adults and She was very stylish. She somehow had a knack for Understanding fashion and what the new fashions were going to be even before they became You know well-known choose beautiful and you know, but you know, she was a kind of woman that always made me feel that she and I were together as a team. And we were funny together, too. I mean, I know that my friends, our friends, always enjoyed being with us because we would do riffs on each other and not our relationship and be

self-deprecating. And it was fun. I mean, I enjoyed being with her. And at what point did you find out that she was having health problems of her own? Never found out that she was having health problems. That was the, again, the constant surprises that life can spring on you at any instant. I was in New York for something, came home. She said, this is in 2013. She was 52. She said, I have a stomach ache and my stomach feels hard to the touch. And it did. I said, well, let's see, let's see what happens. It was short and sick. The next day she developed like a little ration was scratching. We thought there was unusual, but still not enough to rush to a doctor.

But the next day she turned out she was turning jaundice. I said, we need some help. And that's when we were told she had probably gallstones blocking maybe a duck causing a backup. And they were going to do gallbladder surgery. That's how that all started. And along the way they had to do a test that you thought was going to be reasonably simple piece of business in it pointed out that in fact it was not gallstones who was cancer, pancreatic cancer.

Right. And then it was so interesting because it just kept getting more difficult. Sure, being told that your wayphid pancreatic cancer, of course for her, was horrific. But they kept saying that there was this little shadow on her liver in addition to the tumor on her pancreas. But it was nothing. They did, they just did like that. It's nothing, we see it all the time, but you know, we have to tell you about it.

I went for a second opinion down here in Sloan Kettering. Same thing. Little shadow. I have to tell you about it, but it's nothing. And the doctor here said, my chief radiologist is not here today, but I'm going to have him read it over the weekend. Just to look at the films, I really like his opinion. But you go on your vacation show. When you come back, bring

your wife here, pre-op, we're going to do the surgery. And we think this is the best option. We went to Florida on that Saturday, Monday, my cell phone rings. It's the doctor, Dr. Alan, a wonderful guy here at Sloan Kettering. And he says, Joe, I think we need to get your wife in for a biopsy on that little shadow we see. I said, what would he mean? He says, we think we should biopsy it. I said, when? He said, when can you get her here? I said, what changed? I said, what happened? What did your radiologist tell you? Well, he thinks we should buy Ops here. So that we left Florida.

Always bad when the doctor's not giving you a straight answer. Right. Well, they didn't know the truth is they didn't know. Yeah, but there is certain elliptical nature to the answers that you gave. I think so. Yes. So we came down here.

They did the biopsy. The next morning we go in to see Dr. Allen. He marches into the office with his, he'd the younger team of doctors learning from him. And he said, I guess we should talk about biopsy. I get nervous just talking about this. And we both said, yes. He said, well, it was positive.

So I said, what does that mean for the diagnosis, which was just pink we had a cancer, stage one? He said, well it jumps to stage four, meaning it has been testicized, no surgery. It just is what it is. Stage four is not a good diagnosis. And he said, you should be treated in Buffalo. They're probably going to do chemotherapy. They can do it just as well there as we can here. It's flown. And you'll be home and so

on. And we went home and we started to chemotherapy. How did your wife react in that moment when she grabbed my hand, squeezed, and fought back at her. She didn't like to cry in front of people. She didn't know. She cried in front of me when we were alone. And I could tell she was stealing herself for clearly what was going to be the fight of her life. She knew that. She didn't know enough about it, but she knew that much about it. So my wife wasn't somebody who

would talk about a lot of these things and her own mortality or fears of her own mortality To a lot of people but in private she would do it It was more her style and how brutal did the It was how brutal did it get in the ensuing months? I've ever seen anybody go through chemotherapy but like when they first bring you in, they sit you down and they hook you up and all the different things that they do, they start pumping basically poison into your system. The first hour she was fine.

She could talk and so on, but then by the second hour, she would start to curl up into a little ball and then reclining chair that she was on. And by the third, fourth hour, she was just huddled in pain and discomfort and nausea. They would unhook her after a leg. I think it was like four or five hours. But she refused to take a wheelchair. She said, I'm not doing that. I'm walking down with you. I would walk her down, get the car. She couldn't talk anymore. But there's a months of war on of this kind of treatment where they just... I didn't know who I wasn't prepared to go into all of this. I'm sorry.

Take your time. Take your time. So as the months war on, the treatments became more and more difficult because the chemo builds up in your body. It's not a goes in goes out. It goes in it stays in and then it builds up. So the toxicity of the chemo to the rest of your body. First forget what it's doing to the cancer. But we had a lot of good news during the two years that she was treated. Because each time they would look at the tumor shrank. Oh my goodness. Her cancer numbers would go down. But then all of a sudden, two weeks later, they skyrocketed again. They found more

They found more many tumors on the back side of her liver than the fondum elsewhere. In the middle of what happened over the course of the two years, it was always a glide down as she continued to sustain herself. It was a slow, but then she stopped eating and started to lose weight drastically at the end of the last three or four months and losing her hair. All of those things. Just a husband's worse nightmare. Well the worst nightmare. She was living the nightmare. I was watching the nightmare. And to say it was challenging, we'd be putting it mildly. Well I have just a tiny bit of experience in my wife just went through breast cancer stage

zero, so she's going to be fine. But you know, double mastectomy and so I watched that. But that I think is just a fraction of what you endure. So I have just a, I can only extrapolate from my experience as a husband who loves his wife as to what you went through. So yeah, I can imagine how difficult it was. Let me ask you at this juncture before we keep going with this chronology of your story. You mentioned that you've been a meditator for decades since the 70s. Right. And I just wonder as you were going through,

I mean, she was obviously going through hell. So I didn't know. I know neither of us want to minimize what your wife was going through. But as you were going through your own miseries here, how useful was meditation and if it was useful, how so? Well, I started practicing in 75, earnestly, and with, with, you know, the tutelage of Joseph Goldstein who you know and you've written about and you sat with as well and others, many others. So by the time that this started to happen, I'd been sitting multiple, multiple courses at home practice for four decades by that or three and a half decades.

So I had what I considered to be a fairly solid practice outside of the retreat center at home practice, and it was just part of my life, it became just part of who I was. So my thinking process may be very different than a lot of other people who don't have a practice to understand the verbage and why people think a certain way, but even in the darkest moments of all of this, I recognize that these were challenges for me or opportunities for me to challenge myself to still stay focused, to still be open to the suffering that my wife was experiencing and the feelings and the emotions that those felt that was generating in me. I continued my practice through all of this. And I just hope this doesn't come out the wrong way.

I mean, those dark, dark moments are also opportunities to grow and to understand what it is to be human and to be have life just coming at you. And I didn't want to get lost in all of that and get overwhelmed by all of that and be unable to function really be there for my wife. I think that my practice allowed me to hear her and to listen to what she needed me to say and how she needed me to be there for her. Better than if I didn't, certainly better than if I did not have the practice. Can you just jump in for a second? Can you walk me through, because I think people like to really get a nuts and bolts sense of how this works.

So you're having a bad day, I imagine you had a lot of bad days in this period, you're feeling scared, you're feeling angry, whatever you're feeling. You sit and meditate and how does, literally, what are the nuts and bolts of how the meditation practice can help you confront these very overwhelming difficult emotions? I think that the practice allowed me,

I can't speak for everyone, but it allowed me to be more open to the pain that, and those emotions that you mentioned, as I was experiencing them. I was able to sit for long periods of time and allow the sadness and the sense of despair, the helplessness to sort of be there and let me feel it, observe it, not try to correct it. And that practice, I think, allows me to feel more confident, to be open, to be free to be open, to be free of self-chargement and of feeling separate from my wife's pain and other people's pain and suffering. And so one example of what I mean in terms of being able to be open to hearing what she needs versus what I want to say. In other words, I might want to say to her, you're going to be open to hearing what she needs versus what I want to say. In other words, I may want to say to her, you're going to be fine or I may want to say to

her, you know, you need to do your will or we need to have a talk about. But those kinds of comments would be more like what I wanted to do or what I needed to do, not what she needed to do. She needed me not to ever take her whole way. I believe she needed me never to say to her, you're not dealing with straight way. We need to deal with this. We talked a lot, we cried a lot together. Every night I couldn't hold her anymore, but I would reach my hand over and just grab

her shoulder and just hold her shoulder in the bedroom, and the nurse had just left, but before she left, she was expressing to me in front of my wife how Serious the situation was And when the nurse left them just my wife and I in the room my wife was basically laying down ice clothes Not talking she suddenly sat up and she looked at me and she said Do you think that I'm ever going to get better? And I said, I don't think so honey, I don't think you are. And she just sort of like, it was just a powerful moment for me.

She just turned and looked out at the window, gazed at something, turned back and looked at me and said, Oh, oh, and laid back down again. That was the first time that I think she asked me, what do you think? What do you actually, you think about what the doctors are saying versus, you know, more generic stuff? I could just tell. So I think by learning to be open, by learning to be open, you can listen to someone else, especially someone in great distress. And instead of imposing on that, your needs,

your need to feel better, your need to say certain things, whatever you think you can hear what they need. My life, my wife lived with a diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer for two years. When she was diagnosed, they told me she had six months best. If she ever made it 12 months, it would be a miracle. And anything passed that they didn't have any records for it. People did live, but it was just like a rarity

of something doctors talk about. She lived for two years. So I think that she did that because she, that's what she needed to do. That's what she needed to do. That's how she needed to do it. And I think all of the meta and rosaries and prayers that were said for her, sort of gave her an additional energy boost that I witnessed. The prior to that, I would have just said that sort of like, you know, stuff people talk about.

But I think that it all my experience was that it actually worked, that it actually had an effect. So that's how the practice allowed me to sort of shed some of the weight of my own needs, my What I needed her to be like versus what she needed me to be like so as in Every time Everything in my life the practice is always there for me now even stronger than was before because I've had these for me. Now, even stronger than was before, because I've had these experiences that on the one hand are just like people could say, wow, that's so sad. What if it's a sad story? And then joy, you had this tumor and, oh, man, you've had enough. But the reality is, I mean life does not make judgments. It's not it that I mean life is a rough thing and it's how we respond to it that really creates our next experience.

And even though I would never say that I would like to go through any of this again with my wife ever, nor would I ever say to someone else, that would be say that I would like to go through any of this again with my wife ever Know what I ever say to someone else. That would be a good thing for you to go through I'm not sad that I had the experiences I Feel that the experiences have made my practice stronger and have made me back is stronger and it made me 10% happier. That's user phrase that I've heard. Maybe 15%. Yeah, but you're defining happier in a way

that most people wouldn't. Most people think of, most people confuse happiness with excitement. I'm 10% happier because I'm 10% richer or because I got more ice cream last night or whatever I just got a promotion et cetera, et cetera, but you're me I think what I take from what you're saying is like I'm 10% Stronger as a person I'm 10% more alive and in the fullest sense of that word

In that I'm in touch with reality as it's actually unfolding. So you're really, you're talking about 10% happier and a much more holistic way than the Wise-ass Dan Harris often does. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground

up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discussed their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges and how to lead through uncertainty.

So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app. So I'm reading a book right now by Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama and it's about joy and the fact that both of them experience a sense of joy that is different from having ice cream at night, your favorite ice cream, or all these temporary experiences that we have of happiness, but that they both, both of them have suffered greatly in their lives, both of them continue to have those experiences and yet they both are very joyous. And the joy that they have is more profound and not temporary.

And I, yes, so I have, I have 10% of that going on for me. I think. But what did put some, can you just say more about what that joy feels like and how one accesses it? Well, the joy, it is not an ecstatic type of joy for me. It is not something that is energizing. It is a type of joy. And I'm not sure I would have picked that word, but that's the word that they use for their book and the description to have with it.

It's a greater sense of balance, it's a feeling of centeredness. It is a source of strength for me. And it is an opening. It's like, you know what, I feel like, let's say you're climbing a mountain, the mountain being life itself. And because we are always judging everything, including ourselves, and commenting on everything, and having a variety of different responses to things, this like hearing an 80-pound napsick on your back as you're climbing up the sill. But through the practice you begin to let go of all those things. You try to work with non-judgmental states of mind and to learn in the practice of you suddenly notice that you're getting caught in a storyline in your head and just say to yourself, oh,

that's thinking. It's sort of that's an objective description of what's happening. You're not saying that's bad thinking or good thinking. You were just thinking, and let me come back and be centered again. After a while, it's like taking off that backpack. You're still climbing the hill. It just feels a lot different, the hill being life.

But now suddenly you have released this way down your back always judging people and judging other and carrying anger and negative emotions around and storylines that keep you trapped in doing the same thing again and again. As you begin to shed, you begin to let go of some of that weight on your back. It just makes the climb a little easier. That's how I experience it. Well said.

So why did you decide to write this book? Well, very moving book, I should say. I think it's very short. I mean, I wrote a book and I wrote the book and what happened is one my wife passed away Of course, there was a dare so between that and the funeral and Usually had a funeral like that, nieces and nephews are asked to each say a few words about the rant and that's great and that's a wonderful way to do it. But for some reason I felt that something my wife, I wanted to do something different for her. And I had been working myself on a letter to her, not necessarily to read it to her because she was really not conscious, the last couple

of days, but just to sort of like, as a catharsis for me. And so I finished the letter right after the next day and I said, you know what? I think I can do this. I can read this letter as her eulogy. And when we're at the church and they said, you know, Joe the Narno would like to speak now. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to do it, you know, without breaking down. But all of a sudden I had this experience of like, as I was walking up to the podium, I was like, wow, I'm going to, I feel, I felt so centered. I felt so focused. I felt so sad. But I wasn't didn't feel like I was rejecting any of this. And I said, I just had the I didn't think it. I had the experience of I can do this. I can read this in honor of my wife. So subsequent to that, so many people, friends and even people I really didn't know that well, for months would keep stop me or call me, gee, we heard

about the letter, you know, could we get the letter and people that were there said, Joe, was so inspiring and we really liked it, could we have a copy of it or something? I thought of maybe I put a little book together, call it a letter to my wife, it'd be the letter. Maybe put it into some of the emails I had sent during the two years where I would describe Marsha's situation, what the diagnosis was, diagnosis was and what was happening for us to our friends both near and far. And so I asked my friend Charles Coppillmann, who would you ask to help you put this together? He had lost his wife to Bankrad, a cancer as well. He said, my daughter-in-law, Amy Coppilleman, is a writer and she can help you. So I called Amy up, sweetheart of a person.

She said, I'm swamped with deadlines of my own, but this woman, Joan McDonough, who is an editor of mine, and maybe she can help you. I called her and we put together the book. And that's what this little book, a letter to my wife is. It's fundamentally the letter which is a couple of pages. And then various chapters about me and about my wife and about us and things like that. And then I put at the end of the book some tips that I had learned and felt I could share with other caregivers in the same situation with people themselves

who might be suffering with some serious illness or mortality issues. So you had mentioned this as we're walking into the studio, something I've never thought to do. And I wouldn't have thought to do but you said you'll be willing to do it. I wonder if you could just read that opening bit because I think it is quite powerful. Okay. Medears Love. I write this letter tonight on tear-stained paper. My heart lies in pieces on our bedroom floor. But I wanted to share something with you before you go on your journey.

How or why this happened, I don't know. But I do know that I love you so desperately that the thought of you not lying next to me ever again is too painful to think about. Watching you suffer an endure one treatment after another, seeing you ravaged and unable to eat for months was the hardest thing I have ever done. But nothing compared to your suffering, my love. I know that. For two years, I knew this day would come, but you made me never really believe it. I begged and prayed that you would never leave me, inevitably, here I am holding your hand. Surrounded by family and you slowly slipping away breath by breath.

But how can you look so beautiful? Even after you slipped away I knelt there, asking you to please turn to me and say you felt okay, but you were gone. I know how my heart broke into pieces. I remember two years ago when you were admitted to the hospital for whatever one thought was a simple scope or snip out gallstones and maybe put it a small stent. Well, they did the stent. There, but the doctors did not see any gallstones. And of course, Dan, we talked about this. I'm going to skip over this part. Okay. I saw your face go white. Your eyes teared up for a moment.

And in that instant, I had too overwhelming feeling. This is right after they told us it was cancer. First, the fear and sadness of what this might mean for you, for us. But at that same moment, I was completely awash with the most incredible sense of love for you. Pure unconditional love. I knew then that I wanted to be and would be there every step of wherever this journey might take you. I never knew how much I loved you, and in that moment I knew and experienced the love I'd never shared or experienced before. Thank you, Miss Weed. Know this. Juliana, our daughter, is going to be okay. You have skillfully built a wonderful

village around her with Haley, Aaron, Mona, author cousins, and of course family and friends. We will all protect her and guide her and let her know she's loved and accept it in this world. Your family is going to be okay. What a fierce protector you were for them. How you loved them all. I'm so happy that in your final moments, they could be there right beside us and say farewell to the daughter, sister, and aunt that they loved. Your mom, she will be okay. I know the thought of her burying her young husband and now her even younger daughter caused you such distress. But all of us will care for her now, so please do not worry.

Me? We promised each other that we would always tell each other the truth, so no lies now. I'm not okay. I will never be okay. Okay is coming home from work, lying in the couch with a glass of wine and watching you glide around the kitchen working your magic, preparing dinner. Okay is going out to Hutch's or Giancarlo's or wherever for dinner and just talking and sharing for hours. Okay is taking one of our trips to Naples or somewhere else you plan with the whole family or with Chris and Andrea. Okay is

holding you in my arms and loving you so hard that tears often flowed from our eyes. Okay, is here, is you here with me? That is okay. So I'm not okay, but I will be there for Juliana, our Vastarea friends and families, and I will be fine. My Angelo wrote, they will never remember what you said, they will never remember what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel. And O how you made us feel, your smile, your sparkling eyes, your pure pleasure and family

and friends, you made each and every person that knew you feel the real connection or real affection and a real acceptance without judgment. A song that we loved by Bruce Springsteen went like this. We said we'd walk together, baby, come what may. Let come the twilight should be lose our way. If as we're walking a hand should slip free. I'll wait for you.

Should I fall behind? Wait for me. Well, your hand is slipped free. So go. And if it takes 10,000 years, I will find you again. Have no fears you travel. You are slipping away now. I see it.

I know it. Holding your hand is the greatest privilege of my life. Thank you. Now go, sweetheart. Your work is done here. You're suffering as soon over. Take as much of me as you want. And bark upon your journey. You devoted husband. Joe. So incredibly powerful. Thank you for doing that. I appreciate it. Cannot have been easy even though you've been through it before. I guess in our

remaining time I'd love to know you are very clearly and admittedly dealing with a lot of grief, deservedly justifiably dealing with a lot of grief. You've lost what sounds like an amazing partner. How is the meditation helping with the grief? Well, there's no question that I have strong feelings of depression and loss and loneliness. But again, maybe to non-meditators is going to sound a little crazy. Again, maybe to non-meditators is going to sound a little crazy. But there's nothing I can do about that. I mean, those are perfectly natural human responses to that. And I know that.

But how I respond to them is under my control. And I have decided that I'm going to open myself to them and the practice allows me and helps me to do that. As a result, I'm not feeding them. I don't feed them any additional energy. When I wake up on a day and all of a sudden I have this sense of loneliness or depression, I leave it alone and I just let it be there. And you know, my practice now, I mean, there's no question that's sitting

at a retreat as you've experienced, is a very powerful boost to anybody's practice. But sitting at home in your normal life and continuing that practice is the bridge and the link between those opportunities you might get to go on a retreat, which don't always come so often in a busy life. And during the two years at Marsha, with suffering, didn't come at all. So I feel now more than I ever did before, that I am doing to practice every day, almost all day. I find myself continuously checking back in to my breath or to whatever might be happening. As I sit here with you, I'm aware of the feelings of sadness and talking about and having read

the letter that we just did. I'm aware of being here and I try to be able to make myself pay attention to as much as I can that occurs that is occurring to me on a regular basis in my life. So I feel that the practice, again, I have been doing it for a long time, four decades, and it has become such a fabric of my life. It's hard to imagine not... There isn't a difference between what I do in my practice anymore. I just feel that confident and that comfortable with it, that I can talk about it with people. If people ask me that question, I would answer the same way whether they were meditators or not.

They could then scoff at like, what are you talking about? Or they could say, wow, you know, could you talk to me a little bit more about that? I'm happy if people respond that way, but I'm not said when they don't. You said you worried before that maybe you would sound crazy, it sounds like the apex of sanity to me. We are, or seriously, we're constantly beset by uninvited emotions, uninvited events in the world. So what are you going to do? Put your head in the sand, drink a lot, kick the dog, those are all dumb ideas. But the radical alternative offered to us by meditation practice is to actually just lean into it,

allow it to be there without feeding it as you say. And if you think about it with any clarity, it's really the only viable option. Well, you know, it's this, when you sit and when you sit for some period of time and cultivate your practice and gets you some more clear, additional clarity, you begin to think in terms of like, is what I'm doing skillful or not skillful. Skillful meaning helpful in my life and my mental process and my emotional well-being, or is it not skillful? Which is different

than saying, is it good or bad? Because good or bad are typically defined by somebody else, some religion that you may belong to, or some philosophy that you might describe to. Skillful is more of an objective, like, is this going to be helpful? Or not helpful? And I find myself more in that world, more often than anything else. And I'm happy in the 10% way because of that. Yeah, and skillful, it doesn't need to be measured in a lab.

It can be just measured in the lab of your own experience. Right. Okay, so if I'm feeling grief and I drink a ton, how do I feel then? Or if I'm feeling grief and I allow it to be here and I'm with it as bravely as I possibly can, and therefore I'm minimally yanked around by it, how does that feel?

And in any rocket science. It's not rocket science, right? But it's counterintuitive, deeply counterintuitive, because we are trained to do the upward, trained to, you know, self-soothe with shopping or or booze or or pills or whatever, but you're actually what you're talking about is I'll just go back to that phrase that I use. I think the apex of sanity. Well, yeah, but by the way, of course, I agree with you 100%. And so I think that when you say we were trained, I find for myself, I'm not trying to speak for anybody else, but I find for myself that almost every time I look at a judgment that I make, it's really not my judgment. It's somebody else's judgment

that had previously told me or schooled me or whatever. I'm finding more and more though as I work with myself and as I look honestly at myself, you know, that I don't make those judgments so quickly anymore. And that I find known, when I first started meditating, you're following your breath. You describe that to somebody, they say, well, you're just being hypnotized. So I asked your good friend Joseph Goldstein once about that. I said, this person said, is there any, what do you think? I mean, we are just focusing, focusing,

you know, watch this spinning, that sort of thing. He said, if anything, we're being de-hit, Mattak. Disenchanted. Yeah, yes. But it's the opposite of him. The opposite, right. Because you're You're not allowing yourself to fall under somebody else's spell

You're waking up to what's happening right now in your own reality And then not taking it so seriously so you might a judgment might come and then you realize okay, that's a thought I don't need to act on it. You know what you just said is very very important. I don't want to have your listeners miss it. Not taking it so seriously. Not taking ourselves so seriously that we're walking around and adding that more weight to the back pack. Take, don't take yourself so seriously. You know, we're just human. Thank you very much for doing this. I know you're not a, You know, we're just human. Thank you very much for doing this. You know, you're not a, you know, you don't do tons of interviews,

but you did a great job with this. And especially since we're talking about such a difficult and personal topic, you can have both at all extremely well. I think it's going to be a enormous use to anybody who listens. Well, I appreciate those comments. Thank you very much for having me. I genuinely enjoyed it and appreciate it very much. Thank you. Okay, there's another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. If you liked it, please make sure to subscribe, rate us,

and if you want to suggest topics we should cover or guess we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. I also want to think heartily the people who produced the podcast and really do pretty much all the work lore and effort on jojko hand sarah amus and recall steve jones and the head of the bc news digital dance silver uh... i'll talk to you next Wednesday

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