Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
[Music] do do [Music] good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you are in the world it’s dr janice fortman with relationship matters i hope everyone is having a beautifully blessed morning afternoon evening wherever you are in the world well i’m still on my soap box and i know you know audience what soap box i am on the soap box is the covet 19 vaccination soap box have you had your vaccination now as i always say i know a lot of my audience a few of them anyway don’t believe in the vaccine um whatever but think about it think about it even if you don’t get it for you get it for someone that you love you don’t want to get it and then you give it to your children your parents your spouse and they get really really ill or pass away from it now i’ve had both of my as a matter of fact on monday i got my booster and um it didn’t give me colbit i haven’t grown any horns and i’m doing just fine so get your back seam now a lot of things are happening during covet i think they said over 700 000 people have passed have died from covet and think about this that’s a lot of grief a lot of grief and today i have as my guest emily thoreau three now let me tell you a little bit about emily before she comes on emily is a grief transformation expert and holds a master’s degree in english with a concentrating in writing concentration in writing she’s been teaching writing and composition on the college and university level for over 30 years i think she’s too young she must have started when she was 10. during that time she published three writing textbooks with princess hall and pearson education she participated with the bereaved persons association in bakersfield california which her husband co-founded she also assisted her husband jacques thoreau a bio-ethicist with multiple revisions of his popular text ethics theory and practice published by prentice hall and pearson education now with the loss of two husbands her parents sisters and many friends she has in-depth experience in the grief discovery process and she’s going to offer offer us some real answers on how to transformationally move through grief to a life filled with joy and love so i am going to bring emily in now hi emily
Emily Thoreau Thre
Aloha nice to see you
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Yeah yeah right hello and how are you
Emily Thoreau Thre
I’m just great it’s a beautiful day here in maui
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
You know stop bragging you are in maui i am jealous i know it’s beautiful i know it’s beautiful and we’re here in chicago and um it’s supposed to go down at least in the outlying suburbs to maybe 37 36 degrees just a little bit above freezing right so i don’t want to hear anything else about maui and hawaii okay and be before we get into the topic i was really curious about your husband’s book because i had never heard of a bio ethicist and so i looked it up and i looked up your husband’s book and it says um examples of bioethicist ethics rather yes is um organ donation transplant transplantation genetic research death and dying and environmental concerns and so what from what i’m understanding is that it’s the ethics that’s involved in all of that
Emily Thoreau Thre
Yes the ethics uh that has to do with living in general i think it’s probably the easiest way to to say it in anything related to life and death matters
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay and okay all right okay yeah um i was looking at that and i thought oh wow you know uh that’s that’s that’s pretty deep um and um and it said that you had helped him to revise his book quite a few times i think there are 11 editions
Emily Thoreau Thre
Yes and now now it’s available uh digitally it’s still used he wrote it in 1975. and still used around the world and most of it now is with the online education classes that the universities are doing now so the students have access to it online that i’ve got a whole row of the books in my bookcase of all the different editions
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay all righty well i i want to start out um talking about uh your journey and how you became i um well i know it’s not a grief counselor but but what would you call your title
Emily Thoreau Thre
Well my publisher says grief transformation expert okay and i it to me it’s more of a facilitator or coach to help people through the process especially with finding happiness while they’re grieving that’s that’s a very important part of what i do
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay so tell us about your journey to to becoming a grief transformational expert
Emily Thoreau Thre
Well i became very interested in actually life and death matters when i was pretty young my father got an ambulance company in a small town when i was 13 years old and my mom and dad and i ran it together it was a small town small company and in back in those days in the olden days you only had to have an advanced first aid certificate to be an attendant on ambulance calls and so and my dad was the first aid instructor in town so by my 14th birthday i was certified and ready to go on ambulance calls and my first ambulance call was two families and a head-on collision with multiple fatalities and it really made me start thinking about the fine line between you know now you’re here and then you’re not and what that meant and and how to deal with it and how to feel about it and um i continued helping mom and dad run the company until i went away to college i’m on purpose so i could be away from having this 24-hour business that we took care of all the time and then i just seemed like i always was in a position where i was helping people out in one way or another with um friends and and throughout my life have invited me to come and sit with people who are dying and and so i did a lot of that and then uh i was married to jacques for 22 years and we had even though he was a bioethicist he also was an actor and singer and had a great time in the community with doing that sort of thing we did a lot of theater together and we had a great happy life and when he didn’t really realize i think that he was dying he had been dealing with congestive heart failure and then renal failure and dialysis and all that sort of thing and the one friday morning we had just finished for the first time being able to submit a revision of the textbook online instead of having to mail in big boxes of papers that we printed off and so we called this editor and we celebrated and it was it was great and we had lunch and we’re getting ready to take him to dialysis and he just said am i going to get better and it just hit me at that moment that even though that he taught at the the college his main class that he taught was to the nurses on how to deal with living and dying and here he thought he all these times in the hospital all the doctors visits and everything else were to make him better to get well and it didn’t dawn on me till then i wish we would have talked about that in particular before but we didn’t and and i had to tell him no because he wasn’t he was getting worse all the time and uh he died about an hour later
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Oh my goodness so i i think he just kind of had to to know that he didn’t have to keep struggling to stay alive he was thrilled that he got his his book uh revision completed that was kind of what his goal was to get that accomplished and then he was gone just like that oh my goodness was was he at home or in
Emily Thoreau Thre
Yeah we were we were in the process of getting him into the car to go to dialysis and he was sitting on the edge of the car and he just looked up at me with this kind of shock look on his face and he said a not very nice word because he was shocked and that was it he was gone just like
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Oh my goodness oh wow i’m sorry to hear that oh my goodness and how long ago was that
Emily Thoreau Thre
That was in uh 2006.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay so now that was your first husband
Emily Thoreau Thre
Well actually my second husband i had a starter husband
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
But i never heard it
Emily Thoreau Thre
The father of my children and you know we just it was we were young and we weren’t quite really right for each other and it was uh good for both of us that that that marriage ended but then i met jacques and he was fabulous and been removed for 22 years
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Oh my goodness now he said in your bio that you lost two husbands
Emily Thoreau Thre
That’s right
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
And so so so okay your starter husband mm-hmm he’s still alive okay and jacques uh okay he passed and and so your second husband i know your third house their third husband
Emily Thoreau Thre
Yeah i got married again after shock i had no intention of getting married no intention of dating i we’d have a great relationship and i just thought i’m i can figure out how to do this on my own and i didn’t expect to meet anybody else but then i did and he was also quite wonderful absolute opposite of shock they couldn’t have been more different except for they both were very ethical uh honest uh very love based which was was perfect and we had a great time together good really good relationship it took me a while to be able to be willing to fully give into the relationship though and he he kept wanting me to marry him and i just i never felt unmarried to shock it wasn’t something i thought about before he died that eventually i wouldn’t be married because i i knew he was on his way out but it just i we didn’t get divorced you know i know they say from death do you pardon traditional battles but we wrote our own vows and we didn’t say that and it it just i just didn’t feel unmarried so it was it took me a while to get to the point where i felt like i really could get married again because ron and i became very very close and it just was the logical thing to do so there i was married another time and he was as far as i knew healthy when i married him but he ended up having congestive heart failure and renal failure just like shock it had and that’s what he died from
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
So how long were you married to him
Emily Thoreau Thre
We were together uh 10 years we were married uh almost seven that we were together for 10 years
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
So emily how did you deal with both deaths first of all how did you deal with jacques death
Emily Thoreau Thre
Well i just plain didn’t know what to do as much as we’d talked about death and dying i’d even taken the class because i was working as a nurse at the time and kind of felt like in a past life but um he had a the class that was on living and dying for nurses and i took that class and we talked a lot with that class and talked a lot about living and dying and i i thought i was prepared and one of the really interesting things that happened was we were very prominent in the community we were both involved in theater besides being at the university in the college and um we had tons of friends i had done lots of community service stuff so you know i couldn’t go in my grubbies to the grocery store because i’d either run into a student or somebody that i was doing something for in the community so with all that we had had tons of people that we knew and his celebration of life was absolutely fantastic and we at the time we owned a live theater and we had actually didn’t own it at the time that he died because i had uh given it to the non-profit foundation that was kind of went along with the theater so that i could stay home with him for the last or in the hospital with him for the last couple of years so we had that service at the theater and the theater was full the lobby was full there were people out on the street it was just an amazing number of people but what was interesting when he first started getting really sick and he’d be in the hospital he had all kinds of visitors and people hanging out and calling him and flowers and all that sort of thing and over the last two years of his life as he got sicker and sicker and sicker the people just started staying further and further away i don’t know whether they were having a hard time watching the process he was going through but they just weren’t there they came out for the celebration but then when he was gone they didn’t really want to be around me and that it bothered me because i thought hey you’re my friends you know we’ve done all this stuff together for so many years but they just didn’t know how to handle it you know and it was most of the people that i knew so i spent a lot of time alone i i had one really good girlfriend that had been staying with me and she was wonderful i don’t know what i would have done without her but she eventually had to move back home and i just i actually spent a lot of time alone i would go teach at the university and come home and sit and didn’t watch a lot of tv didn’t read a whole lot didn’t do a whole lot i was just it was kind of a time of contemplation with trying to figure out okay now now what do i do and i didn’t really know what to do and i didn’t at that point i didn’t write a lot which was unusual for me because i was i’m a writer job writing or teach still teach writing and love that but i i just wasn’t doing that i just really didn’t know what to do and then new year’s eve came along and i thought okay this is my opportunity i’m i’m not good with resolutions because i write a bunch of them and forget about them like i think most people do but i thought i’m going to choose one thing that this year i’m going to accomplish one thing but i didn’t know what that was going to be so i i did start meditating and did start writing and trying to figure out what that one thing was supposed to be and what came to me was to accept invitations and i thought that’s strange because i wasn’t getting any invitations but i thought it it came to me for a reason so when i started getting invitations i accepted them and it opened the doors for me like i never could have imagined would happen and i had so many opportunities that were just amazing and it wasn’t like people asking me over to dinner it was things like the newspaper for the county calling me and asking me to be on the editorial board for a year it was the film commission in the county contacting me and asking them to cr asking me to create a film festival for them it was my friend going to south africa and she said why didn’t you come with us and i did and i hadn’t thought before that of going to south africa and it was an amazing trip and my daughter convinced me to start going to a trainer who was a friend of hers and we got to be kind of chummy and he was a ultra marathon bicycle racer and he asked me to help him on the races and so i actually was his like caretaker on the race uh across america on a bicycle and he he holds many world records in that and that was quite an amazing situation so all these things and there was more than that there were a whole bunch of other things like the the county regional center asked me to be on their bioethics committee as a layperson uh jacques had been on there as an ethicist but they asked me to be a community representative as a layperson so it and it went on and on and on just all these things started happening i was so glad that i had committed to saying yes to invitations because it really changed my life and it’s ultimately kind of how ron and i got together because a friend of mine uh saw me and she said you know are you dating i said no do you want to i said no and she said well you need to go on match.com and i said no and then she said it to me so many times i thought you know what i made this commitment to say yes when people invited me to do something and she said it to me so many times i thought i i’m supposed to do this but i decided to set myself up by writing this list of everything that i had to have in somebody that i would even consider going out to meet for coffee you know let alone a long-term relationship and it was a really detailed list with a bunch of things and and then i i wrote my bio of what i was and and i went on um on a thursday night and the the guys i started looking at guys they said that this is not the place for me i’m not going to find anybody here they’re just totally different kind of uh people that i had no interest in and even having a conversation with and then i saw ron’s picture and i thought hmm so i looked at his bio and i started checking off things on my list and he was every single thing that i had really and more
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Wow [Music] and so i contacted him the way you do through that and we started emailing each other back and forth that was on thursday and on sunday we had decided we’d go out in the afternoon for coffee but i was still working on that film festival and and had people at my house screening and stuff and they they just kept going on and on and on and it was finally like seven o’clock in the evening when they left and i emailed him i said i’m so sorry and he said well i haven’t eaten yet of you and i said no and he says well meet me for dinner and i thought you know i didn’t have really experience with online dating but everything that i read said go out for coffee the first time you know okay um but we went out to dinner and never looked back we were together from then on
Emily Thoreau Thre
Wow isn’t that something that is a stir so how long did you all date before you got married
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
I i was trying to remember what that was because it was about almost four years i think yeah yeah because of that not feeling and married thing that i had so it wasn’t that i didn’t love ron it was just it was kind of conflicted so emily so you you did you deal with ron’s death the same way that you dealt with jocks so how was the difference
Emily Thoreau Thre
Totally different uh well there are two big things kind of had to do with religion jacques had been raised catholic all the traditional stuff but then when he became involved in philosophy and ethics he became agnostic and so he he yeah it was he just the the more he saw the more he just didn’t connect with religion anymore so that was that was kind of different and then uh ron was a religious science minister so about the opposite as you could get right and uh and jacques was half french half sicilian and ron was african-american so they they couldn’t they couldn’t have been more opposite and things like that yet they had a lot of things in common right uh like they’re they’re both highly educated uh both brilliant men and uh very love centered so it worked really well together but with with ron’s health he started having problems when we were living on the mainland in california we discovered it we went to a new year’s eve meditation retreat in joshua tree which is high desert and it gets really really cold and being at new year’s it was especially cold and we didn’t have heating in these places that they had to stay so it was it was cold there was ice on the ground the fountains froze you know it was it was that cold and in the middle of the night he said uh we have to leave we were supposed to be there like three days in the middle of the night he just said we have to leave and i said do you need to go to the hospital and he goes no i need to get out of this altitude because the altitude was really high and and he just he knew he had to get out of the altitude so we just packed up our stuff and and left in the middle of the night and as we got down closer to sea level he could breathe a lot better but he was really struggling to breathe and that was when we started getting him checked out and discovered that he had the congestive heart failure too like uh chocolate had so we he had that for about four years i think before he died starting with that but initially we were able to get medication and have things work and he stayed in good shape and had a trainer and all that sort of thing so he was he was really doing pretty well but then he wasn’t it just kind of he’s his health started going down and he’d have episodes where we would have to get to the hospital real quick because he he his lungs would start filling up with fluid and he had to get the fluid off and we we went through that a lot and we had honeymooned in maui and and had been here several times after that because he still had friends here from when he lived in maui before and we really enjoyed the the people that he knew i never came here like a tourist and it just was so comfortable there and he got to the point where he said you know why do we keep going back to california can’t we just stay here so we bought a house solder house there moved everything and right before we left i guess it was about three weeks before we left i had to take him to the hospital uh we didn’t call an ambulance because we lived so close to the hospital i knew it would be a lot faster and i knew that he needed help right then so i was able to get him in the car and get him to the hospital and they actually it wasn’t he didn’t stop breathing and have his heart stop beating but he was close enough that it was essentially a code that they had they had 12 people in the emergency room taking care of them and it took like overnight to get them stable enough that they could transfer them to icu and they did and then they told us that he had to have a pacemaker put in and he said well we’re moving to maui in a couple weeks can i have it done over there and they said no you have to have it like put in right away so here he he had a pacemaker and when you have a pacemaker they put your arm in a sling and you’re not supposed to move it for a while to make sure that the wires from the pacemaker get firmly implanted where they need to be so i was doing all of the moving and everything for the house uh because he wasn’t able to do anything he could sit and tell people you know point things that he couldn’t really help and so he was in that kind of shape when we got here and he felt his attitude was wonderful we lived very much in the moment all the time that that was very important to us to be focusing on what was good and at any one moment you asked us we were both being able to sit there and talk and smile and so all was well even though all this other health things were going on but by focusing on the moment like that instead of with jacques we were focusing on the health issues and how miserable he was and how hard it was
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay so this was different so it was different it was totally different with ron and ron had he had significant health challenges he didn’t feel great but he just his attitude toward it was totally different and he knew that he his transition wasn’t that far off and he was okay with that and i think being okay with it i think i think jacques never wanted to die i don’t think he thought he was going to die and and i think that was why he had as much of trouble as he did but uh ron looked at it very realistically and by being able to experience everything together it made it a lot easier for me because i was able to live in the moment with him and when it got right down to it the week before he um see two weeks before he transitioned he went into the hospital and he kept getting sicker and sicker and sicker and he he lost 35 pounds in five days and nobody could tell him why that was happening and they weren’t able to get give him anything that would make it stop they were he was having massive massive gut problems and nothing helped and so after he’d been there for that long he asked the doctor what they were going to do for him and the doctor said well we can run all these other tests and he said i’m not having other tests he said we’ve done all these tests i don’t know what other tests you’d do and he had worked in the medical field he had a master’s in public health and he did hospital administration and lots of things like that so he he knew how how things operated and he said is is there something that you can do for me that’s going to make me better or make me feel better make me stop losing weight make me not be so weak and the doctor said well we’ll we’ll keep doing tests and and ron said you’re not answering my question and the doctor said well you know there’s not really anything we can do but we can try and keep you comfortable and ron said well then i think i want to go home and the doctor said you can’t go home you’re way too sick we have to be here so that we can do all these things for you and he said no i’m going to go home and he said well if you go home it’s going to be against medical advice and you can’t take any of your medications home we won’t prescribe them for you and he said i don’t care i’m going home
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
And so that’s when you all uh went on and moved to maui
Emily Thoreau Thre
Yeah well now we moved here two years before before then would you say going home yeah home too yeah you wanted to go home to our house and we we had fortunately a very good friend who was a hospice nurse and i called her and told her what was going on and she arranged for care for him she arranged for a hospital bed by the time we got to the house there’s a hospital bed there and the hospice doctor was there to prescribe the prescription swarm that the doctors at the hospital wouldn’t give him and i said i asked him i said do you want to go on hospice and he said no i don’t think i need to be on hospice i said okay that was friday night and on monday morning he said now it’s time i need to go on hospice so we started making phone calls and called everybody he wanted to know what his situation was so if they wanted to come see us they could and a lot of people did they got on a jet and flew over here and we had people sleeping on air mattresses and couches and in neighbors houses and everything else and that last week was so did he pass did he pass uh he passed in the hospice the hospice uh at our house and you have the hospital here at the house so emily emily so now you you had both of your husbands um to to pass and i know you said your sisters and your parents what i want to know is as far as a year in the year span how how many years was that is it like 10 years or
Emily Thoreau Thre
Well we moved we jacques died in 2006 and ron died in 2017.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay okay and and i know this really led you to your journey um to um where you are today and so what i i’ve got to go to a commercial right quick and when we come back i want to talk about you wrote a book and i know you do workshops and you’re part of a couple of organizations and and uh very interesting in organization so i really want to get to your your advice and what’s in your book because it’s all of us sooner or later have to deal with grief
Emily Thoreau Thre
Absolutely yes
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
And and so let me go of this commercial right quick and then when i come back then uh we’re gonna go off into that okay
Emily Thoreau Thre
That’s great
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Alrighty we will be right back with emily thoreau three alrighty [Music] so [Music] and i am so happy that your relationship with your daughter has improved [Music] hi we are back with emily and so emily i know you wrote a book and so i told you i’m on my husband’s computer so we’re going to see if we can do your book trailer and then oops that was wrong and i’ve got to share and then i got to share my screen and then oh this is different his computer is different okay oh i don’t know if i know how to do it oh maybe it’s here yeah there it is okay uh i know i’m sharing the screen and oh you know what i forgot that you’re supposed to put on there um well let’s talk about you we can just talk about the book that’s fine no problem talk about you okay tell us the name of your book and tell us all about it and and how you really got to write this book
Emily Thoreau Thre
Okay um i after jacques died i started reading whatever i could get my hands on about grieving and what i could do and and there were so many that were sad memoirs as opposed to being what i was looking for i wanted something to help me something to guide me and so after ron died i decided that i would um write about what was going on and see what i could do to help me to to get through what was happening and i found some really cool ways of writing that i thought i could share this with other people so i formed a meetup group because i didn’t know that many people on the island yet and people came because everybody wanted to have help with grief and we had really wonderful meetings where we would do writing through grief and that i saw that that really helped and then about eight months after ron died a really good friend of his died suddenly who was a whole lot younger than he was and i was so concerned about his wife that i wrote her a letter right away that was like a list of these are things you don’t need to worry about right now because i know she had never thought about her husband dying he was he was too young and these are things that you do need to pay attention to right now and she had told me how grateful she was for that letter that i gave her and i thought i’ve got to do more than this so i decided that for the first year after her husband died every week i would send her a card with things in it that would be helpful to her during that time and so as as i did that once i i wrote out all the 52 different things i was going to send her over the year i realized i had an outline for a book and so i got a publisher and or an agent and then a publisher and we got the the book written and published but what was different about my book is that each chapter’s on like a different subject and at the end of each chapter there’s something active for the person reading it to do to help them deal with their grief and a lot of them are the writing things but there are other things in there too of different exercises and things that they can do to help them feel better and that led me to creating a group that is is just getting started now they’re just we’re in the process of forming a non-profit to support it so anybody who wants to can come to it it’s going to be a combination of writing and happiness that we’ll do online every week and the happiness came to me because i read happy for no reason by marcie shimoff after jacques died and it had helped me a lot and so i was looking through it again after ron died and i discovered that marcy had training to become a happy for no reason certified trainer and i thought this would be perfect with the grief work that i’m doing because i wanted to bring happiness in that to that so now i’m a certified trainer for that too so the grief and happiness alliance that we’ve formed that we’ll be meeting every week we’ll both will write we’ll have happiness practices and we’ll have that’ll all be on zoom be virtual so that we can have breakout groups so that people can talk together and get to know each other and support each other personally and and so um i’m gonna ask you this and i know it has to do uh with finding happiness after grief now do you what about gratitude
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Oh gratitude gratitude a part of it gratitude i’ve got a whole chapter on gratitude in the book and gratitude was one of the things that really helped me turn around after jacques died because i was kind of negative then and i had people kept suggesting that i write down what i was grateful for and i was saying i don’t have anything to be grateful my husband died you know and finally it was one of those things where enough people said it that i thought they must be telling me this for a reason and it was before i had decided to accept invitations so i started writing down what i was grateful for and i was shocked because the more i wrote the better i felt and the more i wrote and i just kept right i got to the point i was i felt like i was addicted to gratitude that if i’d be in the doctor’s office waiting for an appointment i’d i’d be pulling a receipt out of my purse so that i could write on the back of it because i didn’t want to forget what i was grateful for at that moment and uh doing that i finally got a little little book to keep in my purse so that when those moments happen that i’d have some place to write it but every day since then every single day since then i have written in my journal things that i’m grateful for every single day
Emily Thoreau Thre
Wow wow and you’re part of an organization and i hope i pronounce it right it’s nike oh emalia did i forgot it close no no kiki or ammonia i’m not really a part of the organization but i donate to them a portion of my book sales goes to them and i’ve given them books a friend of mine wrote a beautiful kiki stands for children in hawaiian and a friend of mine wrote a beautiful children’s grief book and so i bought a bunch of copies from her to donate to them so that they’d have them for the kids because it’s it’s a an organization here on maui where uh this woman’s uh daughter was pregnant and with her first child and she found a lump in her breast and showed it to the doctor and the doctor said oh we’ll worry about it after the baby’s born and so after the baby was born it had metastasized and the baby the baby was fine but he wasn’t very old when she died and her mom was a psychologist and she thought she was very concerned about this child and how he was going to be not ever having the opportunity to know his mom really how what was going to happen so she formed this group called nakiki illamalia her daughter’s name was amalia so it’s the children of amalia
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Yeah we never think uh really about how children handle grief now is this the same as the uh the doorway into light or is that a different
Emily Thoreau Thre
That’s a different organization okay doorway into light is mostly for grown-ups okay and they they deal uh very openly with dying and and grief and they have a death store they call it and they had a death cafe going on here and that’s how i got introduced to it when i started going to the death cafe because traditional grief groups just kind of weren’t for me because i didn’t want to go someplace where everybody’s sad i wanted to bring everybody else up around me as well as being able to bring me up and with the death cafe we met at a mexican restaurant and had guacamole and chips and talked about our loved ones and the wonderful experiences that we’d had together and it was so uplifting and and really nice and i i kind of started facilitating that uh for the organization until the pandemic put a check down on anything like that but they they do um they do things here like burial at sea uh green burials they they do things that are really different than the traditional way of handling things so i just i liked their or i like their openness and the the beautiful stuff they do and and how they welcome and support people and and are positive and in their groups and the things that they do so it’s kind of both ends of the spectrum they both happen to be on maui but that’s where i am right now so that’s where i’ve uh chosen to donate to
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
So i’m involved with them never heard of that that uh that’s a a unique concept the death cafe has meetings all over the country i think internationally too yeah that everybody kind of does their own thing with them um the thing about the the central one the people that founded it said it was all about eating cake people getting together to eat cake we didn’t eat cake at ours we ate mexican food but okay what depends on where you are yes and well you know emily a question two questions came in i want to get to okay uh it says um can you give us your definition of ethics in in your profession
Emily Thoreau Thre
I would say um integrity integrity integrity every everything that i do i tell the truth and it’s like when jacques asked me if he was going to die i had to tell him the truth uh i think that when when we tell the truth and we base everything i base everything i do on love then that’s that’s ethical to me to be truthful and basing everything on love
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay and we had another question uh from sarah crawley she says she asked was it the law of attraction that attracted the same diagnosis for ron because of the strong unending love energy for jacques
Emily Thoreau Thre
That’s a really interesting question and i’ve actually kind of thought about it before like why did i end up with two people with the exact same thing and in a way i kind of felt like even those early ambulance days and everything else all these things i did were in preparation for me being able to help other people to take care of other people and there was a lot of caretaking involved with with both husbands yes and i was i was fully ready and uh capable of doing that and grateful for the opportunity to be able to do them for both so it you could say it had something to do with the the law of attraction i know the law of attraction had a lot to do with me attracting both those husbands that were so wonderful
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay so but i would i would like to think that the law of attraction didn’t attract illnesses right but but but it attracted the love in your life
Emily Thoreau Thre
Absolutely
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
And and it put you on this journey to you know to help other people yeah you never know why things happen you know and you like why me or why is this and uh it all happens for a reason actually so that you can help someone else yeah you know now i have uh one other question what is something that you should never say to someone who is grieving
Emily Thoreau Thre
I’ve tried to get past saying this because i know people never say this with malice they’re doing the best they can but the thing that bothered me more than anything else was i’m sorry for your loss really and the reason for that is it’s become so commonplace it’s like saying have a nice day or how are you you know people don’t want an answer and they they feel obligated to say something because they know that you have are dealing with loss so they they feel like they have to say that so they can go on to the next question that can be how about those dodgers you know that that they just feel like it’s an obligation instead of something that uh that’s truly caring
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay now one other question uh the last question uh i read somewhere where it says that grief is a lifelong journey is in your opinion is that true
Emily Thoreau Thre
Absolutely grief is not something that you get over a lot of people think that you’re supposed to get over grief and move on with your life and i’ve certainly moved forward in my life but i will always hold both my husbands in my heart and my mom and dad and my sister and all my other relatives and friends that i’ve uh have gone before me they’re always going to be there in my heart and that’s just part of the love in my life and it’s i think when when people want grief to be over it’s it’s in kind of a negative feeling and if you can look at it positively in dealing with love then that uh makes it better
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay and we had a comment from sandy barney in and she said i hate it when someone would say um i know how you feel yeah that’s that’s no good because no you don’t know how we feel right right and so now emily if people want to get in contact with you and and really um get your journal your book loving and living your way through grief.com is that the way they can get in contact
Emily Thoreau Thre
That’s right they can contact me through there that’s my website uh you can also email me it’s emily loving and living your way through grief.com and uh it’s the book’s available and it’s traditionally published so any place that you buy your books you can get it it’s it’s on amazon but it’s also on barnes and noble and uh all the other independent book sellers it’s it’s out there all over the place so
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay and if they want to call you they can call you i got your number i gotta put it out here it’s 808 446-3555 and you can go on amazon amazon.com and um get emily’s book don’t go on there shopping for shoes and clothes and shop for something that you really all of us all of us can benefit from because all of us are going to go there loving and living your way through emily thank you so much for being with us today and oh got another question but sarah we only got a minute so sarah says uh so what do you say i guess if you don’t say i know how would you know i can tell you quick okay mention the person’s name and say a memory a positive memory about them like people said about my parents they said i loved how they were married all those years and they all still were holding hands all the time so that sort of thing is going to bring a smile to you instead of tears so
Emily Thoreau Thre
Okay
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Alrighty well we did get that last question in but thank you so emil so much emily for being with us you have really given us a lot of information that we all are going to need and i want you i told her before the show not to say anything else to me about maui well when you come you must visit me
Emily Thoreau Thre
Yes definitely definitely so aloha
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Aloha alrighty bye bye bye wow that was very very very very very interesting this is something that uh we are definitely definitely we all need we are we’re all going to need um at some point uh in our lives we’re all going to need that and i really wanted to have her on the show because especially now through covet with kobe going on it’s so much grief and and so many people can benefit from uh emily’s journal so i want everyone up to have a beautifully blessed morning afternoon and or even wherever you are in the world if you like to be on relationship matters just submit a headshot and a brief bio and just submit it to relationship matters tv gmail.com that’s relationship matters tv gmail.com this is dr janice hooker fortman coming to you again from relationship matters and i want you to remember there are all kinds of relationship matters and relationships do matter alrighty have a beautifully blessed evening and i’m on this other computer so i’m i’m doing this have a beautifully blessed rest of your day bye [Music] do [Music] you