The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Trail to Tincup: Love Stories at Life’s End by Joyce Lynnette Hocker

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

The Trail to Tincup: Love Stories at Life's End by Joyce Lynnette Hocker https://www.amazon.com/Trail-Tincup-Love-Stories-Lifes/dp/1631523414 In The Trail to Tincup: Love Stories at Life’s End, a psychologist reckons with the loss of four family members within a span of two years. Hocker works backward into the lives of these people and forward into the values, perspective, and qualities they bestowed before and after leaving. Following the trail to their common gravesite in Tincup, Colorado, she remembers and recounts decisive stories and delves into artifacts, journals, and her own dreams. In the process the grip of grief begins to lessen, death braids its way into life, and life informs the losses with abiding connections. Gradually, she begins to find herself capable of imagining life without her sister and best friend. Toward the end of the book Hocker’s own near-death experience illuminates how familiarity with her individual mortality helps her live with joy, confidence, and openness.

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Because you're about to go on a moment. Monster Education Roller Coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hey, folks, is Voss here from thecris Foss Show.com. Well, the latest in the early season, that makes official welcome the big show. As always, Chris Foss show for 17 years. It's going on, 17 years. In 25-100 episodes, we've been bringing in the Chris Voss show.

And we just keep doing with all the most brightest authors and all that good stuff on the show. Send your friends, family, and relatives to, Goodreads.com, Fortresschast Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortresschess, Chris Foss, and all those crazy places on the internet. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Foss show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today's featured author comes to us from Books to Lifemarketing.co.uk. With expert publishing to strategic marketing, they help authors reach their audience and maximize their book's success. Continuing an amazing lady on the show, we're going to be talking about her book and memoir called The Trail to Tin Cup.

Love Stories at Lifesend, out May 15, 2018 by Joyce Lynette Hawker. We're going to get into with her and talk to her about her books, her insights, and some love stories. Who doesn't like love stories, eh? That's always a good thing. Grew up in Texas, the oldest of three children born or progressive minister and seminary educated mother because their fathers stand on integration and in favor of it. The war against and the death penalty against. I'm a little lost on that.

The family moved frequently from parish to parish. Welcome to the show, Joyce. How are you? I'm not really sure even how to understand what that was sent to me for the bio, but I'll let you expand on that. Okay. I'll explain. I'm doing really well. I'm in Missoula, Montana, where I live, and I'm just back from the cabin in Colorado, which is the scene for a lot of the things that happen in the book. I always love being there. My younger brother lives there full time, and we cook together and fill his freezer with good homemade food because he's the only person up there at 10,000 feet all winter. Now I'm home, and things are good. Thank you. There you go.

So give us any dot-coms. Where do you want people look up on your interwebs to find out more about you? Joyce Hocker Author.com, which is being produced by the Books to Life marketing team. So that'll be out tomorrow or the next day. All right. That's exciting. It's a good place. And then Amazon and Barnes & Noble and all the usual places where you can buy books.

Awesome. themselves. So let's talk about the book. Give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside the book. Okay. Well, I noticed that you were understandably mystified by some of that bio information. I'll

just give you a little heads up and then tell you what's in the book. Okay. Our dad was a progressive minister, which is not an oxymoron in Texas. They do exist. But what happened way back when in the 50s and 60s and 70s,

is that his view on a lot of issues was different from his congregation. So he got fired five times in a row, which meant we hopped around Texas as a family. And therefore, I got interested in conflict resolution, which is what I did before I became a psychologist. So the book is about four family deaths that occurred within two years. my brother's wife, my dear sister, the middle child, and our mother and father, those last three occurred in 11 months. And so to deal with this, I talked about it, wrote about it, gave presentations. And the book is about each individual process of going through a family death.

they're all different and then how writing and speaking helps me deal with it come out on the other side in a joyful way that's a lot of deaths but I guess if you live long enough that's the that's the interesting part of life you know I had someone say to me he goes he goes Chris you know you're going to go through a period of life or you go to a lot of weddings and he goes then you're going to go to a lot of funerals and those are two periods of your life yeah yeah yeah so you wrote this as a memoir love stories at life ends is a celebration of those people that passed on then

passed through your life yes chris i'm sure do understand being a psychologist that a lot of people don't have a close warm family but i got a very good hand as a family it's my privilege to be able to go back into their lives and tell stories we were a storytelling family and honored them. And in addition, that helped me deal with the grief that I was going through. Yeah. But I loved writing about them because I loved them. And as I said, I'm very aware that not everybody has his privilege.

Well, you've had an awesome privilege. You've had a great family. It's the old joke. You don't get to choose your family. That's right. Can you share some stories from the book, some anecdotes? Yes. Our family, growing up in Texas, we went camping every summer. And so I start the book, we went camping in Colorado. And I start the book explaining in some detail our campsite arrangement. Because in many ways, and this was old-fashioned temp camping, we're talking, where you cut the wood. And there are no campers. There are no plug-ins. We're, you know, sleeping bags and army surplus things and all of that. So that made our family quite close.

And so I start the book telling the way we sat around the campfire and told stories, which is one of the ways that I know so much about my family history. So that's where I start. Isn't it interesting how people used to do that? And now we don't talk to each other. We just look at our phones. I know. Well, we didn't have phones. We did have phones.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, back in those days, people would get up and entertain each other. That's where some of the greatest comedians and entertainers came from because, you know, you didn't even, you know, back in the older days that I remember, you didn't have, of course, I didn't live them. I just heard about them. But you, there was no TV. There was barely a radio. And so what people would do is on like, I guess Sundays or whenever they gathered together, they would entertain each other. So they would get up and do stories or. sing or mimic, you know, do funny bits or whatever, you know, some of the greatest comedians came up that way, just learning to entertain the family. And, you know, that's how we communicated. I mean, back in the day, there used to be what they called Griots in Africa who were the verbal historians of the tribe because they couldn't really write stuff down or it didn't keep well if they did in the rainforests and whatever. But there would be like one or two people that it would be assigned to be the historian for the tribe and they would pass their stories on down.

I mean, I hope, hopefully they had security sitting and eaten by a lion because that would suck, you know. What happened to the historian? The lion ate them. So all the stories are gone. Oh, great. We got to start over. But, you know, that's how families kind of entertain themselves in the early days. Well, I guess I, I must have signed up as a child for that role in my family.

Oh, really? I'm very much the memory keeper, the scrapbook put together, the archiver, the storytelling. No wonder I went into psychology. So I've been doing this all my life, I think. I'll tell you another episode. We loved this place in Western Colorado where much later, when my folks retired, they built a cabin. And when my sister and I were little, she was eight and I was 11, And we explored a historic Tencup Cemetery.

Timcup is an almost ghost town in western Colorado. Oh, really? And so we were bored and we were, you know, climbing around like kids do. And my little sister sat down on a rail fence and said, when I die, I want to be buried here. I'm 11 years old, so I say, okay, we go on. Well, it turns out that is, in fact,

the plot that my dad bought. Really? Yes. And that's where our family members are buried right there in that historic cemetery. Wow. And so what was it like, you know, you're seeing your father as you're growing up. And I remember I had a father who was always getting fired all the time too. He was kind of headstrong, but narcissistic.

That might be an understatement. But his way was kind of the highway, but that doesn't work for working for other people. That's why I work for myself. And, you know, I know what it's like to get fired because you, you know, you kind of have some opposition with the, with the prevailing of leadership authority. You think maybe, you know, things can go better. So what was that like dealing with that? Because I would imagine, like, me as a child, seeing my father go through that because I would go to work with my dad. And it would, you know, I would see his abrasiveness.

and not getting along. He was really bad team player. He was really, he was like me. He's built, he was built to be an entrepreneur. And so he did not play well with others. And he was constantly getting fired. And I would, you know, at first I would be like, well, they fire my dad, you know, but then you kind of watch it and you be like, you know, you're trying to understand what it meant and why it was a big deal and why, whatever. What was it like going through that maybe with your father when you would see him, you know, trying to become a progressive person in the clergy and going through that journey. What was that like in that struggle?

Well, you know, we were fortunate because we kids thought he was right. Okay. And we admired him. He was not narcissistic. He was lucky. Whoa, I believe me, I know. Oh, that's true. You've probably seen a few in your time of service.

Not too many narcissists. I think of therapy. Let me tell you. But you asked how it was, and moving as a child and a high schooler was difficult. Yeah, that's always a challenge. That was hard. I moved in the middle of my sophomore year, and then again, right before my junior year. And so it was hard to make new friends, but I still think it was the right thing to do.

So I don't have any animosity. So we were a close. Well, that's good. You know, I mean, it's interesting how the, in those, I want to say, older days, maybe I should say a better time when we weren't looking into phones and ignoring each other and being so disconnected like we are now. You had that family unit that you could rely on that you could bill with. You kind of knew kind of had your back if everything went bad. And that was really important. How many siblings were in your family?

Well, there were three of us. My middle sister, our middle sister, Janice, died in 2004. And then my younger brother, Ed, now lives in the family cabin in Colorado. Three of us, two of us left. Janice and I both got a Ph.D. in communication and were professors of communication. We were very close friends, very, very much alike, although she was a little tiny blonde. When she had her first job at UCLA, she couldn't see over the lectern, and so she had to standoff to the point. And she said, you may not believe this, but I'm your professor.

And they're like, where is she? I can't see her behind the lectern. That's right. We were very close. My brother and I got much closer together after going through the deaths of all four of these people. Wow. Because we were together for three of the four. And you had a close-knit family that was, you know, relying on each other.

We did. We lived in different places. places, yes. As, how did technology and some of the things that evolved through life, I mean, did you guys all move apart like a lot of people did in the sort of Levittown expansion, you know, where we kind of went from these close-knit families that would usually live in proximity to each other. You know, they kind of scattered throughout America. Was that the case of your family? And how did you guys deal with it? We did scatter, but we stayed close.

I'm sure you remember Cassette. Back in the 70s and 80s, we actually would do round-robin tapes. We'd talk to each other that way, and we were always on the phone, and then we would get together whenever we could. So we stayed close. Now, what are round-robin tapes? That is interesting. Somebody would talk, like, I'd talk for Missoula, and then I'd mail it to Arkansas or Janice. The cassettes.

Yeah, she'd add something, and she'd mail it to its mom. the dad they'd add some more that's wild that's wild you know i remember i mean they're they used to be guys that would you know they make uh what was it they would make they make tapes or CDs they make uh you know tapes of love songs or whatever i think i may have made some for girlfriends when i was um but you know that was you know now my friends and i we speak to each other on the voice action of WhatsApp or messenger because i'm i'm too lazy and it takes too much time to type and it's easier just to fucking say it than to type you know 50,000 words and I I tend to overspeak too much if you know some idiot's got a

podcast evidently I hear um so he tends to do that but yeah the well we were writers and we almost everybody and our family kept journals so as I began to write about them after their deaths, I had access to letters, journals, lots of written communication, which helps put the stories together. Wow. Well, that's wild. Yeah, I can't imagine in 2025 sending a cassette to somebody, and then you have like this kind of, it's almost like a chain mail letter or chain mail cassette. Probably no one remembers what chain mail letter is either. Well, we don't do that anymore, of course. Like I said, no, we just get on our phone and we just hit, you know, we press record and then we say what we want to our friends and then, you know, sometimes they'll respond back. Sometimes they're like, hey, did you listen to my message? Hey, but, you know, and then the snail mail through the, through the, through the, uh, through the, uh, thing, what did you guys do you talk about on the cassettes? Because like, if you talked about anything topical, like the news, by the time it gets mailed and around, it might, the news may have changed or the story may have.

change to whatever the real facts were in an event or something. Well, back then, we were mostly talking about our lives, our work, our families, things like that, that were more personal. So you're giving updates to the family, maybe, you know, Janie's in school or whatever? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So when it came time for me to write this book, what helped me was a bunch of my colleagues

in the National Communication Association because, you know, I told you, I was a professor before I was a psychologist. So they would, they asked me to do presentations, and I would write up papers and give them at various places all over the country. So that when I got started writing, I had some drafts of chapters and stories to rely on. And that helped a lot. And so it was probably cathartic, too, to write. write these things down to pay homage to your family and the love and interest and support they've given you over the years. That's right.

Yeah. And I imagine, you know, some of the things we've talked about, you know, passing around like a set of stuff. I just love that idea. Maybe we should start doing that again. Maybe we should bring that back. Maybe that should, you know, some Silicon Valley company will be like, yeah, let's bring that back and we'll do an app or something.

Maybe they'll make an app that somehow does the same thing. but I just think it's wonderful and you you really look at maybe how that built the quality of a family or kept a family together as opposed to what we have now because nowadays you're just you know like some people you know maybe they might be named Chris Voss just send TikToks to people and that's like not very intimate well my second career was is as a clinical psychologist so that means I sit and listen to people during the day So conversation is really important to me. And I'm glad I had that family background and communication background because now I still remain fascinated by people and their stories. I love listening. Sounds like you're a story collector like I am. I love people's stories. I like listening to their journeys, their experience of life.

You know, I'm sick of mine. I had to live it and I'm over it. so I kind of enjoy other people's stories and their lives but I do mine I'm like yeah I know I know how mine ended up I know my stories ended but I enjoy listening to people's stories and also it's interesting you know why people make the choices they make why people do the things they do why they took a turn left when maybe they should turn right

but then they owned it and went with it you know it's really interesting the choices people make in life, how they live their lives, and sometimes how it comes out in the end. And, you know, you kind of realize there's no perfect, there's no perfect way to do life, you know, like I used to be trying, when I was young, I was like, okay, so what's the perfect trajectory to shoot through life on? And there really is done, you know, it's, life is like a giant catalog, and you just kind of pick what the lane you want and try and make the best of it, I suppose. After writing about these deaths and going back into people's lives, I think the one thing

I would say that life is about is life. Oh, great comeback and bring it right back to the book. Yeah. Because it is love stories. I showed you a picture of the book. Should I show you a picture? Yeah, go ahead. Okay, there it is.

The Trail to Tin Cup. Mm-hmm. And my husband helped me come up with the love stories at last. in tagline because he said, you know, that's really what you all did. You told stories and you loved each other. Yeah. I really appreciated him coming up with that idea. Yeah.

And the trail to Ten Cup is a metaphor for that family cabin and all the time we spent in Colorado talking with each other. My mother decided, because she knew she was dying, that she wanted to go to the cabin to die. and my brother and I and father took care of her there there was no hospice available we were in the wilderness so I call that a home death

the way people used to have and that's what she wanted to do and that's important too I think people feel comfortable passing their home I would never want to I'm not putting shame on anybody who does but I don't think it'd be preferred to die in the icy coldness of a hospital

with wires poking out of you and all that stuff. I mean, I think if I ever reached that point, or I'd like to think if I've ever reached that point, I don't know how conscious I'll be to make that decision, but, you know, most people would like to pass at home. They want to be where they're comfortable, you know, especially the food's better at home than the hospital food, I hear. I'm sorry.

Go ahead. When my sister was in her last days, and we only had five weeks from diagnosis to death for her. Wow. Because it was brain cancer. Oh, no. She was a brilliant writer. But anyway, a group of people gathered in her home with her husband in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she was a professor.

We called it the Divine Ensemble. Everybody had a role. Had something to do. There were five or six of us who were there during her passing days. And it was a wonderful experience to be coerone. cooperative and collaborative in that way. Yeah. Yeah.

And probably, you know, really, I mean, that's the support of having the family around you. Yeah. Right? And all that stuff. So what are some lessons that you think people will take away from the book? The importance of family, maybe the importance of communication. What do you think the lessons are that people will find? I hope that they feel, I hope some people feel less alone when they're going through grief

experiences because everybody experiences it differently and it takes the time it takes I hope people realize that you can't go lockstep through stages that's not the way it works and sadness passes and we feel what we feel

and it helped me a great deal to set up places where I could remember people I put up their pictures or certain objects. Oh, really? Yes. And that was very helpful, a way to kind of ground the grief.

I have a tangible place to put it. Yeah. Yeah. I did that. I think also, I hope people feel comfortable talking about death more than we sometimes do in our culture. We sometimes try to just pass it off. Or people will say, well, how are you doing?

Are you feeling better? And a lot of times the answer is, no, I'm not feeling better at all. Thank you very much. It's kind of rude to say that. So we need to be more comfortable talking about what we're actually going through when people we love dying. Yeah. And I guess that would come down to some communication, too, maybe a little bit. Sure.

I think it's important to not ask. how they're doing, but to say something a little more like, I'm thinking about you, is there anything you can tell me about what you've been experiencing, experience? I'm interested. Because if you ask a yes, no question, people feel pushed to say, oh, I'm doing okay. Yeah, yeah. And it's not very authentic. Yeah, and, you know, it's hard to, you know, some people, sometimes someone will ask how you're

doing, you'll go ahead and tell them, and you're like, well, I didn't want. want to know. I just was giving you that, you know, that sort of offhand or whatever you call it greeting. Need your greeting. But I didn't really, I didn't really care to know. I just was pretending. And you'll tell them, you know, you're what's going on. They're just like, yeah, I didn't really want that amount of information. But it's kind of interesting out of that works sometimes. I had one wonderful experience with a woman who's an indigenous person from Montana. And I met her at somebody's retirement party at the university. And we talked for a while, and she was very real, and I felt like I could be real with her.

And she said, do you mind if I do something? And I said, no. And she said, I want to get all of these things away from you that are stuck to you. I didn't know this person. She's a famous writer. I won't say her name right now. But she said, you're surrounded by ghosts that you think are real, but they're really absences. And I'd like to get those away from you so that you can live your life.

It's an amazing experience. I wrote about it. And that's in the book? Yes. And then I think you have another book, too, that we want to plug away at. Tell us about that one. Well, a long time ago when I was getting my PhD. at the University of Texas way back when, I did my dissertation on interpersonal conflict.

And so I wrote a text, which is now in its 11th edition, called Interpersonal Conflict. McGraw-Hill puts it out. And I'm not a teacher anymore, and I've given it over to a young professor. But it's all the basics I learned through the years about managing conflict well. managing conflict and and imagine are you the storyteller in your family yes indeed yeah sounds like you're the one who tracked everything you know it's kind of funny how i'm i'm also the oldest you're the oldest if i recall rightly right it's kind of funny how we kind of have a certain way about us i mean i don't know if you've i don't know if you ever studying psychology

the the first second third child earth order you bet yeah it's important it's not It doesn't fit everybody, but it's a good template to start with when you talk to someone. Plus, it helps identify that the first children are always the smartest and best children out of all of them. Like I tell my siblings, I scraped all the good stuff out of the womb, and I don't know, I left some rappers or something behind for them. He used to tease each other up, who is the oldest. We finally thought, okay, we all are, so it doesn't matter. That's true. It's, I mean, who's counting me?

Anyway, any future books that you have, stories from your family, your life, anything else you may want to be writing here coming up? I don't think so, Chris. I do hope to write a blog with the website that Books to Life is starting for me. So I'm writing a blog, but I think these days I'm more interested in actual conversations with people that I am writing. So I think I've done my writing. I'm not sure. You can never tell. Yeah.

I still journal. I spent 48 years in Union analysis. Carl Jung analysis. That's a long time to be an analysis. Yeah. A lot of analysis. That's a lot. Thank heavens for this wonderful woman who helped me with all of that.

Yeah. And I've gone through what started out to be 16 feet of journals, and I've now reduced those to about three binders. Do you say 16 feet? Yep. Yay! I know. That's a lot of feet. That's a lot of journals.

That's a lot of toenails. Anyway, 16 feet of journals. Now, is that your personal journals or the families? Mine. Wow. But I've now gone through them and decided what to keep and how to keep. what to give away, which is part of the morning process, not someone else, but for one's own life.

Yeah. Maybe you could convert some of them. I don't know how much you poured the morning experience into them, but maybe some of them might be good for, you know, the great thing about telling our stories is, you know, we're not alone. Everyone goes through kind of similar sort of things, sometimes under different terms, but, you know, there's still cathartic moments. and those are the things that not only shape us, but, you know, we have to overcome.

And maybe sharing those things might be really good. Well, actually, I did share a lot from my journals in the Trail to Tin Cup, the book we're talking about, dreams, memories, archives, journal, all the things are in the book. Yeah. So I've done a lot of that. Maybe you could do a book on each person from your family and profile them and homage them.

You know, like you say, it's, it's interesting when people come on the show and they've written about grief and overcoming grief or overcoming their challenges,

how many people it really helps and aspires people. You know, it shows them, hey, you know, you can survive this. It's going to be okay. And it also shows,

I think, I think that's okay for us to feel things about it. I think in today's world, we box things up, maybe a little too much, and we bottle things up and we don't really

feel, or experience what those mean. Maybe it's because we're so broken apart and living apart and stuff with each other. And we're not close as much anymore. Maybe it's because we're disconnected intimacy-wise with these phones. And so we don't really connect when these tragedies happen to us. And so maybe it's an experience that people need to learn from. You probably have a lot of insight to that with how people deal with death and process grief

and loss being a psychologist. I do. And one of the things I learned was always to ask my client. about their losses right away. Just rock right into it. Wow. And that really changed. It was astonishing how much I did not know about grief before it happened to me.

So now I do my practice differently. And I'm only working with younger therapists. I'm partly retired. I work with therapists who are younger than I am. And I coached them to ask their clients. about grief and loss. So I think that's helping. I hope that's helping.

Yeah. And then, you know, people, you know, there's a story I tell a lot of callback on the show. That's an example of telling our stories of loss. I mean, there was one day I was sitting around and I'd had my dog for about, I think, 14 or 15 years. And she'd been experiencing seizures. And they had warned me that there would be. there would be one final one.

But, you know, we were, no one had died around me for 27 years. I was pretty much, I had no calluses to that effect. And suddenly she went into a seizure. I was filming it because I was trying to share, we were trying to work with the doctor on what this looked like, and now we could make them less. And so I was filming it. And, you know, it normally was a few minutes or a five-minute seizure, went to half an hour. and I actually had to take her in the middle of the night to a hospital because she was still in seizure mode in my car and it was a hellish experience and so I came back and put down a bottle of vodka and starting to write out my feelings and my experience and kind of an homage to her as well of what it felt like and it was really raw because it was in the moment still it was the first time I went home without my dog yes yes and so

So I wrote about it. I remember sitting there for half an hour, maybe 40 minutes, just going, this is really raw. This is really too personal to share. This is, you know, like, who cares about my little, you know, problems on my little side of the world. Boo-boo-hoo. I just felt like it was way too personal and no one would give a shit. People would just kind of be like, Jesus, dude. That was a little bit much.

And it was, you know, I was sharing something I personally felt. And, you know, after a while I had enough vodka and it was time to crash and I was crashing. And I'm just like, fuck it. And I pressed send. And I think I pulled it back and then I pressed send again. And I woke up in the morning with just this flood of calls and outpouring of love. I'm not surprised. Yeah.

And by sharing how I felt, I had people crying and upset and they were writing, geez, I never processed the loss. of my father, the loss of my family member, I never had processed. I never got closure with my dog dying. I never dealt with it. I just packed it away. And you've opened that vein for me and help me bleed it out to where I can finally get closure. And it's still some people come out to me to now, what is it, 10 years later, 11 years later, and they'll, and they'll say, hey, you know, your posts that you did help me. And so that really was a powerful lesson. for me that telling our stories, sharing our stories, even though they're not all, you know, they don't always end well. I mean, that's important. And we help each other.

We feel what we feel. And the more we can acknowledge that and not hide it, the better. One other really important thing I've learned is that every experience of grief opens up the past experiences that we've had. And so if someone dies or if one dies, will you lose a beloved pet? It kind of opens, like you said, it opens the current to all the other grief. So it never really goes away. I've come to think of it as grief gets braided into life.

It's not like to get over it. It gets braided into life and we go on with our lives, but we still feel the grief. Yeah, yeah. It's a part of life, you know? I mean, sometimes you have to celebrate it. I mean, there's some people that are like, hey, when I die, throw a party.

Celebrate my life. You know, don't celebrate the fact that I'm gone. Celebrate what I did. You know, it takes a moment to be gone. It takes a lifetime to celebrate a life. And I think I would want people do the same thing. Have a party get drunk. Do some blow and hookers and have yourself some fun.

But we're all different. Something like that. I don't know. Don't do the blow, folks. That's bad. And pick your poisons. But, you know, To celebrate a life, you know, hey, you know, when people pass, you know, instead of fretting over maybe, you know, the end, fret over the parts that they were the most glorious, that they were the most celebrated parts of that person's life when they were at their best.

Well, I'll tell you one of the things that I'll tag on to what you're saying, not only agree with you about what happens after death, but I think if it's possible to talk to people in their last days, in a very real way, that that makes a big difference. I was able to have conversations with my mother that changed with an empathic connection to her, changed a lot about how I had felt about her and experienced her. I talked with my dad. There's a lot of writing about what to say at the end of life, and it's basically, I love you, you please forgive me i forgive you and goodbye yeah and i wanted to do that with everybody i did that with my father because maybe i learned from my dog going that you know it's not like we were

going to have a conversation i think but i learned there were things that i you know i didn't i felt like i got robbed of that i didn't get to spend time or or you know all that stuff and and uh so when my father you know we had a contentious in relationship most all of my life. And, you know, he was very religious, and I was not, and he couldn't never let that go for most of my life. We had a tough relationship as a father and a son. And I think his narcissism and probably a little bit of my narcissism, we battle each other

sometimes like kings. And, you know, his way was always the, it was either his way or the highway, and you reach a certain age where that doesn't work for me anymore. And so we had a contentious life, but at the end, I think this is important. I sat down with him and I said, let's carry all of the decks. You know, he was having strokes and heart attacks and always ended out in the hospital, and it was clear, you know, where the path was heading. And so I sat down with him, and then he was starting to get dementia and repeat things every day.

And so I sat down with him and we cleared the decks. And, you know, I remember asking him, is there anything, you know, resolve that we need to do in our relationship. And that was really good for, I think, him and me. In the end, he tried to understand me a lot more. He'd gone to a psychiatrist a few years before and understand his narcissism and understand how emotionally disconnected he'd been. He apologized for it.

And then he went right back into it. It's hard to change. It's hard to change. But he got better as he got older a little bit. But, you know, it was what it was. But being able to sit down with them clear the decks, I think your concept there of, you know, being able to sit down with some of their life. And sometimes it's better not to wait until then because sometimes you don't get that moment. Sometimes, you know, a car accident takes someone away immediately or something along that, something tragic, you know.

So sometimes you don't get time and that's something to remember. Well, that happened in our family. The first death was my husband's sweetheart. I'm sorry, my brother's sweetheart. I was going to say. No, that was, I guess I'm thinking about Gary, but I'm trying to talk about my brother, Ed. So Ed married his sweetheart, Diane, in the hospital.

Mom and Dad came. He knew she was dying, and she died a month later in his arms. But what was so meaningful was that the whole family supported their decision to marry, even though my brother knew that she was leaving. So that was a very unusual situation, and they didn't get a chance to talk about much at all, because she was still fighting it and didn't want to think that she was dying. She was. But with other members, we had more time to sort things out.

It's always different. Every death is different. Yeah. Every death is different. And you know, you want to reconcile before these things. You know, I live in a family that's still in the cult and they feel that they have all of attorney and afterlife to resolve these issues. I remember calling so many family members and saying, you know, dad's going. You should probably settle up business and clear all the decks before he goes because you're not going to be able to have these conversations after. And I found that they're quite healing for me. And they just refused. And they just felt like, you know, maybe we'll talk about in the afterlife that's really great but what if you're wrong you may want to and the other thing is too is you know i've lived 10 years without my father i'm i'm glad we had those conversations they set a lot of business for me um the uh and and it was healing for him too to go through it at the time i think it was important for him to see that i still cared and loved him in spite of it all and that you know there was always hope and that's

that's the great thing about human beings is their adulation with hope and everything else. So as we go out, give people your final thoughts and pitch out to order up your book, go to your dot com and get to know you better and see what you come up with in the future. Okay. Well, I hope that people listening will experience both the grief and the joy that comes from living so close to life and death. because they'll go together, at least I found that, and I hope that people will feel less alone. You can find my books at joyshockerauthor.com

and on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the usual places. And I don't hear from you. I'd really love to hear from you. I enjoy being in conversation with people who read my books. Feel free. And they can reach out to you on your website. It's being put up now. It should be up by the time we published the article.

It's been wonderful to have you on, and thank you so much for sharing your story, Joyce. These stories are so important. We need to take more time to think about them and to care about our loved ones, communicate with them, and, you know, make sure everyone's okay. Maybe we need to start that cassette business. Again, that's the pass-around, pay a forward cassette. Or some modern version of it. Yeah, put it on an app.

Thanks for having me. I guess I enjoyed it. Yeah. But you still have to have the pencil to swirl the cassette, to rewind it. You still had to do that somehow. Well, maybe we should do it back and take on. I remember, I think it was the big pen

you would have to use. You were like, where's my big pen? I've got to rewind this cassette. I listen it's stuck in the middle. I want it back to the front. You spent like half an hour going like this, walking down the street. I didn't get a chance to tell you this, but for about

10 years, I taught writing your life in our adult education. Oh, wow. University of Montana. And I loved helping people write about their lives. That was very rewarding. So I hope people will do that when they feel kind in all the ways that you and I've talked about tonight. A lot of successful people keep a journal. You kept 16 feet, was it? Yeah, yeah. I kept a journal from the time I was about 21. Wow. Yeah. I mean, you're used to writing a lot. I bet there's a lot of still great stories in there that you could share and stories about loss.

and people's, you know, how people live their life. And, you know, it's so interesting. We get stuck a lot of times as human beings where we feel kind of like life's kicking us in the bud or some sort of experiences, you know, badgering us. And we feel isolated and alone. And the great thing about these stories, the Chris Vos show and books like yours, is they share stories that remind us that we're not alone. That's right.

And that sometimes talking about our stories, sometimes sharing them, is the most important things we can do because they, inside of them, they have blueprints on survival and hope. And so when you can lose all hope, you can read someone else's story and go, oh, it's going to be okay. Right.

Because we're all humans together, and we're all going to share birth and life and death. So it's a good thing to read and talk about. Yeah, most definitely. Most definitely. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. really appreciate it, Joyce. Thank you, Chris.

Thank you. And thanks to us for tuning in. Order up her book, wherever fine books are sold. You can find on the internet or wherever fine books are sold. The Trail to Tin Cup. Love Stories at Life's End

out May 15th, 2018 by Joyce Lynette Hawker. Thanks for mineas for us for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss. Chris Foss. One of the TikTokany and all those crazy places in the net.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.