Why Do I Miss Them When They're Right Here?

In this episode of Hope Floats, Rachel Coady and Shoshawna Rainwater explore the concept of ambiguous loss in the context of dementia. They discuss the unique challenges caregivers face, including the emotional rollercoaster of grief when caring for someone who is still alive yet psychologically absent. The conversation emphasizes the importance of community support, understanding grief, and finding creative outlets to process emotions. Listeners are encouraged to embrace “both and” thinking, recognize their feelings, and seek connection with others who understand their journey.

Takeaways

• Grief in dementia often begins before physical death occurs.
• Ambiguous loss is characterized by the presence of a person who is psychologically absent.
• Fluctuations in a loved one's cognitive state can intensify feelings of grief.
• Support groups provide essential understanding and validation for caregivers.
• Naming grief can help caregivers process their emotions more effectively.
• The concept of disenfranchised grief highlights how society often overlooks caregiver loss.
• Creative outlets can serve as powerful tools for expressing grief.
• Both-and thinking allows caregivers to acknowledge both presence and absence.
• Building a psychological family can enhance emotional support.
• Self-care is crucial for caregivers navigating the challenges of dementia.

Transcript

Rachel Coady (00:05)

Welcome to Hope Floats, a podcast for people navigating the challenges of caring for a person with dementia. I'm Rachel Coady.

Shoshawna Rainwater (00:13)

And I'm Shoshawna Rainwater. On today's episode, we want to talk about understanding “ambiguous loss” as a framework for navigating uncertainty and disconnection in the landscape of dementia. We'll help you identify ways to reestablish and maintain contact with a person with dementia and give you some practices that can help you as the caregiver process feelings of loss and grief that might be coming up for you on this journey. Let's get started.

Rachel Coady (00:48)

Shoshawna, I'm excited to talk with you about this today because I do think grief is a big part of the long journey that is dementia. Grief comes in sooner in some ways than other end-of-life experiences when you're in dementia. So I'm excited to unpack the world of “ambiguous loss” and what so many caregivers are experiencing.

Shoshawna Rainwater (01:11)

Same. I'm really glad we're talking about this today. And it occurred to me as we're talking about this concept of “ambiguous loss”–and the word ambiguous, of course, meaning uncertainty, inexactness, things that are unclear–it dawned on me that we're recording this Election Day, and we've all been sitting in a lot of ambiguity for many, many months.  And we have a muscle around that that has been being flexed whether we have wanted to or not. And so we can go into this conversation today about ambiguous loss, knowing that ambiguity is not an unusual thing for us to be

experiencing in our lives. But boy, can it be hard. It can be hard to live in ambiguity and the lack of clarity. 

Rachel Coady (02:05)

Shoshawna, today, we are going to talk about the idea of ambiguous loss and the journey of grief that you can experience in dementia. But I think it's worth saying neither one of us are actually grief specialists. There are absolutely experts on this topic, and we encourage people to explore and look online or in your community for additional support with grief and mental health professionals who can help you navigate grief if that would be of help to you.

Shoshawna Rainwater (02:35)

Definitely. I wanted to open by reading a quote that I've not been able to attribute to a source. It comes up as anonymous. And the quote is, “One of the hardest things that we will do as humans is grieve the loss of a person who is still alive.” And in the setting of dementia, this kind of loss–of grieving a person who is still alive–has a name, and that is “ambiguous loss.” And it's a term that was coined several decades ago by a PhD researcher, Pauline Boss, who has spent her career talking about researching different kinds of ambiguous loss. And there are a couple of different types and we won't go into the types that don't have to do with dementia. But if you do look up Pauline Boss's work, you'll realize she has a couple of different types. 

The type that we're talking about in dementia is a loss that involves when a person is physically present and yet appears to be psychologically, emotionally, or cognitively absent.

Rachel Coady  (03:46)

I think one of the challenging parts of this disease is also that their presence or their availability can change. And it's not necessarily always that once they are less available, that means they're forever less available. It can be a bad day versus a better day. And so there's just a lot of ambiguity and unknown in how a person's doing day to day when they're suffering brain changes, and as a result, you can kind of be on an emotional roller coaster with grief because it can really feel like loss some days and then less so at other times depending on where they're on the journey.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (04:26)

Yeah, you're naming one of the hardest aspects of ambiguous loss in dementia, which is the fluctuation of the presence of the person and the absence of the person. And as we've talked about in previous episodes, some of the dementia subtypes actually are more marked by fluctuations than other types. 

But I would say, what I see and hear from people who are caring for a person with dementia, regardless of subtype, is that there are fluctuations. People often refer to this as a “flickering light” phenomenon, where some days, some hours, the light feels on and that can feel really good. It feels normal. It feels connective. And it's followed by periods of time when the light is not on.  And that fluctuation and the not knowing “when is this light going to be on? When will they be available to me? When will they not be available to me?” creates its own kind of unease in the disease experience. So the fluctuations are very normal in this landscape and very difficult.

Rachel Coady  (05:37)

And really add to that sense of grief, I think, just overall.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (05:41)

That's right. And ambiguous loss and grief in dementia differs from what we traditionally think of as grief. When we think of grief in our culture and society, I think we are typically thinking about grief due to a physical death or a passing of a person, physically. And this is also known in grief research as “bereavement.”It's an irretrievable loss, right? There's a finality to it that gets acknowledged and in many ways held by community and also just acknowledged by officials. You know, when my dad died, I knew that for sure it had happened, but it also got validated by hospital staff, physicians, a coroner, a funeral home. Those kinds of things all pointed in the direction of this is a very final process to have lost this person to physical death. And often when our grief is because a person has died, it's a much more ritualized process.

Rachel Coady  (06:49 )

Yeah. I mean, even workplaces now increasingly are giving people “bereavement leave” for the loss of their loved one when that happens.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (06:58)

Yeah, yeah, and we've got some rituals around it, some natural grieving processes that get normalized and accepted by wider society. And I would say people generally know what they are supposed to do when someone loses someone to death, right? We're supposed to show up with cards and casseroles or in other ways. 

Rachel Coady (07:19)

Mm-hmm.

Shoshawna Rainwater (07:19)

And we have less a sense of that when someone is losing someone incrementally due to dementia.

Rachel Coady  (07:28)

Yeah. And again, when it's incremental on the dementia journey, that can be years. 

Shoshawna Rainwater (07:36)

Yes.

Rachel Coady  (07:37)

And so it's a very different pace, not that grief has any pace or cadence or routine as a whole. It's such a gigantic emotion. But it is even more kind of drawn out and dripping in over the course of a dementia journey versus having a moment in time like you're describing.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (07:57)

Yeah, you're talking about the long arc that is typically part of any dementia experience. As we've talked about in previous episodes, some subtypes have a shorter course. But when we say “shorter course,” we are usually talking about at least a couple of years. And then we have some experiences of the other end of the spectrum where people are living for 20-plus years through this disease experience.  So, yes, it's not just the fluctuations. It's also the length of the experience and what we call “compounded serial losses.” The losses accumulate over time. 

So, grief and loss in dementia can go unacknowledged by others, not understood or appreciated for what it is and how difficult it is, and how it affects us as caregivers. And there's work in grief research that talks about “disenfranchised grief”--grief that is under-acknowledged, under-appreciated by wider society.  And I would say it's also sometimes not very well understood by ourselves. As we're in this role as caregivers, we often under-appreciate how the role affects us; we can under-recognize just how hard we're working as caregivers.

Rachel Coady  (09:12)

I find that to be really true in the support groups and conversations I have with people on this journey. You're working so hard just to manage care and then manage life outside of being a caregiver that the idea of processing or having grief on top of that is, you're almost like in survival mode. 

Shoshawna Rainwater  (09:32)

Yeah.

Rachel Coady  (09:31)

You can't even acknowledge the fact that you're actually also really grieving something that's being lost.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (09:37)

Yeah, yeah. So, increasing our understanding of what's causing the stress can help us and others begin to work towards lowering our stress levels. And to me, that is why I think it is worth trying to name it–“naming it to tame it,” as you hear people say. So I want to spend a moment making sure we understand some of the losses that are unique to ambiguous loss. And some of these losses include dreams or plans for the future, what we envisioned our future was going to look like with this person we care about whose brain is changing. Loss of a confidant or loss of a partner–that could be a spousal partner, but also just a confidant partner if this is your parent with whom you've been close or a sibling with whom you've been close.

I talked about that a little bit, I think in episode five, maybe. I was naming, I had experienced something in my personal life that was really hard. And I wanted so badly to process that with my mom. And it's a loss of role of her being able to show up in that space of confidant. And the realization of that can be very difficult and lead to grief.

And then the loss of shared responsibilities and life tasks. I hear this a lot from spousal caregivers who say, “I never had to manage finances before. I'm learning all these new tasks that we used to be able to divide up in our household. And I could count on my partner to be able to do those things. And now I know I'm recognizing they can't.”

Rachel Coady  (11:18)

One other kind of grief that I feel like I experienced was that I had life plans for myself that I was really looking forward to with my career and with launching a business. And when I needed to step into doing more and more caregiving, I felt like all of that was going to be taken away.

In hindsight, I can see it was delayed. At the time, it felt like I was going to lose this whole plan and this whole opportunity that I had worked so hard to create for myself. So there's also just, I think, the loss of your plans and your vision for what you wanted in your life and what you work hard to create that has to be compromised or changed when something like dementia becomes a part of the situation.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (12:08 )

It's a beautiful point.  

Shoshawna Rainwater (12:20)

So, in the setting of ambiguous loss, people with dementia are both present and not present in the ways they historically were with us. And ambiguous loss involves holding that reality that in dementia, absence and presence coexist. Seeing this for what it is, this coexistence of absence and presence and the fluctuations in their sort of degrees from day to day, seeing this and working towards accepting this is one of the keys to surviving the experience of ambiguous loss. And it's a strange thing to begin to wrap one's mind around because grieving someone who is still alive defies logic in the ways that we've historically thought of and processed grief. 

What are some of the ways that we can learn to live better with ambiguous loss? You've heard me say, in order to be able to tame it, you have to name it as a good first step. So “name it to tame it” is a good way to start this experience of beginning to understand what is on your plate. “Why do I feel this grief when this person is right here? Right? I'm grieving and mourning the loss of a relationship, yet they're physically here with me.”

So we've talked about, we have a name for it and it's called ambiguous loss. And then that cracks the door open to beginning to heal it by feeling it. 

Rachel Coady  (13:56)

Hmm.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (13:57)

And feeling it is likely to bring up feelings that are difficult for us to feel, like grief. And giving ourselves and other people permission to grieve in their own way is a gift. And people really tend to show up with pretty different grieving styles, particularly in this disease experience. A lot of people grieve by feeling, and a lot of people grieve by doing, and a lot of people do both. It's a blend of feeling and doing. And I was thinking, Rachel, about one of the undertakings you took when your mom was alive and was living with you; I remember your backyard transformed into something pretty magnificent.

Rachel Coady  (14:47)

Yeah, I think we found a common appreciation for gardens and I could physically create it and she could visually enjoy it. So that worked really well as a medium for us.

Shoshawna Rainwater (14:55 )

Yeah, yeah, but I also wondered if part of you grieving was through doing.

Rachel Coady (15:03)

Hmm.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (15:04)

And in creating something that was helping you cope with what was going on.

Rachel Coady (15:08)

Absolutely. And we're going to talk some more about the invitation to do and to create, as a way to get through grief in a little bit. Yeah.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (15:17)

Yeah. So another way to help ourselves sort of live with and increase our comfort with ambiguous loss is to begin to adopt what we call “both-and” thinking. And that is instead of having “either-or” thinking in the context of dementia, “this person is either gonna be fully here with me and the way things used to be or they're dead to me, this relationship is over;” that's an example of “either or” thinking. But being able to open yourself up to leaning into “both and” thinking: “This person is both present here with me physically, and yet today their brain is not allowing them to show up in the ways that they traditionally have.” So both of those things can be true.

 Rachel Coady  (16:03)

We talk a lot about being present in this journey and that that's kind of a superpower and a key. And I think that “both-and” thinking, day-to-day, visit-to-visit with the people who are going through brain changes can really help you see “today, he is able to do this and this and this and he is not able to do this and this.”  And so it's really a presence activity also, 

Shoshawna Rainwater (16:34)

Mm-hmm.

Rachel Coady (16:35)

because like we were saying at the beginning of the episode, so many things can change over time. You know it's not just like permanent shifting.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (16:44)

Right, right. Another thing that can help us in this period of time is to have a support group of peers. Dr. Abby Nathanson, who does research in dementia and grief, talks about the power of a support group and talks about how “nobody gets it like somebody who gets it” and when you don't have to explain the why of what you're feeling, it's a huge relief.

Rachel Coady (17:13)

I really found that to be true in the groups we were in on Facebook and with other in-person groups we did; it was so nice to not have to give a lot of context to just come in and say, “Here's how my day was, how was yours?”  And I really think finding those people, and again, you can find them digitally, can find them locally in some situations by doing some Google searches can really help you start to find the group that can help carry you through this and help you navigate this.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (17:42)

Sharing your feelings with supportive others can really help and Pauline Boss has some really great information in her book, Loving Someone Who Has Dementia which is something we'll put on the website, a resource to connect you to her book. But she talks about this concept of developing the “psychological family” for yourself, which is a psychological family is made up of people that you intentionally choose to surround yourself in this disease experience. And it acknowledges that either because of geography or because of other relational limitations, your biological family may not be able to show up for you in the ways that you want or need. 

So, expanding our concept of what family can actually look like and who it can include, and that we increase our resilience when we are with people who stay out of judgment and stigma and don't bring those elements to the relationship. And sometimes families have a really hard time staying out of judgment of one another. And if we can sort of liberalize our idea or concept of what our family looks like, we can include people who we know are there to just be a supportive presence to us.

Rachel Coady  (19:03)

It's reminding me when I was going through some pretty challenging times towards the end of my mom's disease. I would talk to friends who were on my team who had really good intention and well-meaning people. They would listen to me talking about the challenges I was going through as a caregiver. And one of them had lost a parent and their comment to me was, “At least you still have your mom.”

Shoshawna Rainwater (19:25)

Hmm.

Rachel Coady (19:26 )

And a couple of things happened there that were so not helpful to what I was grieving and trying to express. But I think putting yourself in a circle that actually understands the caregiver world and the ambiguous loss world, and the dementia world is a great way to set yourself up for the kind of support you probably want in those tough moments without having to kind of defend or explain or break down the caretaker's world to a person who hasn't experienced it.

Shoshawna Rainwater (19:53 )

That's a great example, and it's a nod back to what we talked about several minutes ago around how our society shows up around physical death.

Rachel Coady  (20:01)

Mm-hmm. 

Shoshawna Rainwater (20:01)

And that that is held up as the worst thing a person would have to endure when, in fact there are lots of ways to experience significant grief. 

Rachel Coady (20:11)

Mm-hmm.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (20:11)

And in dementia, a lot of people feel like what's happening with them is their loved one's death by–I've heard someone say it's like “death by a hundred funerals.” “I am constantly saying goodbye to this person and hello to a new person.” 

Rachel Coady  (20:28)

Yeah.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (20:29)

And sometimes I like that new person who's showing up, and sometimes I find it really challenging.” So, yeah, thanks for naming that. I don't know if other people have had that experience of being told, “at least your mom is or your parent is still alive or your spouse is still alive.”  But I generally hear from people that that's not a helpful comment. 

Rachel Coady (20:48)

Yeah, I agree.

Shoshawna Rainwater (20:49)

And it wasn't said with ill will or mal intention. 

Rachel Coady  (20:52)

No.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (20:53)

I think it underscores the difficulty in understanding just how challenging this role is unless you've gone through it or are going through it. Pauline Boss also talks about the concept of “ the good enough relationship.” And I want to read a brief quote from a paper that she wrote; the paper's title is For Caregivers of Spouses with Dementia: a redefinition of marriage. But I think this is an applicable quote, regardless of whether or not you're caring for a person who is a spouse or not.

Pauline says, “I emphasize the hope in “the good enough relationship”–coming away from trying to have perfection in a relationship is what she means by good enough. “Actively making the choice to view your relationship in a new light shouldn't be seen as settling or surrendering, but rather as choosing a perspective that better fits your circumstances. If you change the bar, you don't have to feel you are failing. And because you make the choice, you still have self-control, the dignity of free will, and the possibility of new hope.”

Rachel Coady (22:05)

That's lovely.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (22:08)

So can read more about her thoughts around this idea of “the good enough relationship.” What's come away from perfectionism, which actually is not an attainable role in any relationship, by the way, right? But opening ourselves up to “the good enough relationship.” 

And then we'll talk a little bit more about this as we move into other helpful tools in a few minutes, but doing nice things for yourself; it takes strength and fortitude to be a caregiver in this disease landscape, and don't be stingy with treating yourself, giving yourself kudos, giving yourself small treats, whatever that might look like. You've likely really earned it and deserve it.

Rachel Coady  (22:48)

Listeners can look back on those self-care lists they made from our site and do some things on that list to take care of you and support you, too, because this is a time of grief and loss.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (23:00)

Yeah, yeah.  So, one of our goals today was to identify ways to reestablish and maintain connection with the person with dementia. Early on in the dementia experience, the person undergoing brain changes may be aware of and grieving their losses, and they may have the ability to sort of be thinking about and anticipating future losses that might be coming their way.

One of the things that we can do is encourage them to talk openly about this and express their wishes about how to live well with a dementia diagnosis. There's something that takes away a bit of the scariness when we open up a conversation about what feels unspeakable. And so just inviting someone to talk openly. “What does it look like for them to live well with dementia?” And this might open up conversations about planning for the future with the ability to stay in control longer or as long as possible in a disease that will eventually take away a good deal of that autonomy.

We can also focus on remaining abilities.  Dementia's losses are significant, but they typically happen fairly slowly and over time. And so what that also means is that there's a lot of remaining abilities that are still there if we can focus on them. So not to bright side the remaining abilities, but to think about them in what we call a sort of this habilitative approach, which is there's a lot of things that are probably still going well. 

Rachel Coady  (24:41)

Yeah. And I think anytime we could have my mom feel agency and do something that she was still capable of doing, and that was contributing and reaffirming that contribution, that gave her a lot of dignity back in something that she felt out of control and afraid of. So, whether it was flower arranging or going to the store and choosing flowers or setting a table or preparing things kind of effortlessly that she could serve for happy hour, those were all ways that she got to still contribute while she wasn't necessarily able to do everything that she had been able to do previously.

Shoshawna Rainwater (25:20)

One of the other things I think your family did so well, Rachel, was you helped others know your mom's interests, her personality–if they didn't know her well–her needs, those kinds of things. You were not afraid to sort of proactively communicate, “This is who she is.”

Rachel Coady  (25:38)

Mm-hmm.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (25:39)

“And these are the ways that would be really helpful that you could show up for her.”

 Rachel Coady (25:43)

Yeah, and it helped highlight what wasn't lost. You know, what was still available. Yeah.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (25:47)

That's right. And then we can always help people with dementia look for ways to meaningfully connect with the world and with their communities at large. One of the strongest organizations, I think, out there for this kind of support–it's for people in any stage of dementia, but one of the areas they really shine is in earlier stages, and they encourage their “first person voice” to be really involved in the dementia experience.

Rachel Coady (26:19)

Can you break down what that means? Like what the first-person voice is?

Shoshawna Rainwater  (26:23)

Yeah, you know, I think a lot of the resources out there don't include the perspective of or the voices of people living with dementia. So that's what I mean by first-person voice. The Dementia Action Alliance is an organization that does a great job of bringing in voices of people who actually carry a diagnosis and hearing those people say, “This is who I am. Here's who I am. Here are the things that matter to me. Here are my strengths. Here are ways that you could help me be myself for as long as possible.” So yeah, it's a really lovely, empowering organization, particularly, I think, for people who are carrying that diagnosis and have some awareness of it and willingness to engage in that. 

Rachel Coady (27:19)

Mm-hmm.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (27:20)

So those are some of the ways that we can help reestablish and maintain connection with a person who is experiencing dementia.

Rachel Coady  (27:41)

The truth is that this can be a really long disease journey, as we've mentioned. And so finding and establishing a practice for yourself or behaviors for yourself, as a caregiver, that can support you in the times you feel grief or loss can be really helpful. Many of those can look like creative activities, and I know a lot of listeners will go, “Well, I'm not creative.” But I challenge that actually everybody is creative, and the importance isn't that you are or are not something. It's that you're willing to practice and try to do something through a creative outlet that could help you process what you're feeling. 

So creativity allows you to create or make something or do something like we talked about, that can then help you express the feelings that you otherwise are holding inside. And in order for emotions to move, they need to be put into a motion. They need a way to kind of move on and change. So this can look like photography. This could look like starting a writing practice, doing some kind of sculpture or collaging or crafting or creating memory books, playing with music, musical instruments, even making playlists are all things that could allow you to begin to play with processing grief. 

And I use the word “play” intentionally because I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves when we do something to do it really well, or to have excellence, or to be great at something. And when it comes to grieving and loss and processing, it's okay for it to be messy and unsure and unclear as to what's going to happen. But making or creating something with your loss can help you express an emotion. 

I am a writer, so I did a lot of writing. I did some journaling. I wrote notes on my iPhone because it was always in my pocket that I could write to myself. And another thing that I did, that was a way to kind of process how I was dealing with uncertainty and change was this habit that all of a sudden became taking pictures of clouds in the sky. And what I loved about that was now with smartphones, you can pretty much take beautiful pictures even if you're not a great photographer. But the sky was a great companion to me because it always looked different. It was always changing. And it reminded me to look up and recognize that even in a matter of an hour, things will move and change and it won't always be this way. And now, even though it's been a couple of years since my mom passed, I have a pretty robust collection of beautiful cloud photography in my phone. And even when I'm having hard days or dealing with ambiguity or uncertainty, I still look up, and I still check out the sky and I find a lot of companionship and support in what the clouds can tell me. 

So that was my practice, but I encourage the listeners to begin to play with creating or making, or doing something with their own emotions and feelings of grief and loss and then see what it has to tell you.  It can be really valuable to spend even five minutes of writing or photography, or painting and notice how it feels different. See what's there, then. As our emotions move, normally something else comes up or shows up. 

And then one other thing I'll offer is it's very easy to find online prompts or groups for writing or journaling about your caregiving journey or grief writing groups. If that's too much, there's also an option to just write a letter to yourself in these moments of grief or to your loved one about how you're feeling. Like you said, “name it to tame it”; name what you're missing, express why that is so important to you and why that loss feels so deep, but let your grief have a voice and share what it needs to say. And oftentimes afterwards, even though that requires us to feel some big feelings, we will feel different and hopefully a little better through that part of the grief. 

I just want to offer a quote from Megan Devine's book, It's Okay That You're Not Okay. And what she shares is, “Your life and your grief are a work in progress. There is no need to be finished. There is no need to be perfect. There's only you and the story of the love and the loss that brought you here. So find ways to tell your story.”

Shoshawna Rainwater  (32:14)

Thank you, Rachel.

We also talked a little bit today about a book recommendation that's entitled Loving Someone Who Has Dementia by Pauline Boss, B-O-S-S. And we'll also put another resource on the website from the Alzheimer's Society of Canada called The Ambiguous Loss and Grief and Dementia Resource for Individuals and Families. And it specifically outlines and talks about this concept of ambiguous loss and grief and dementia and how it’s sort of uniquely hard.

So today, we talked about ambiguous loss and why it can be so prevalent in this landscape of dementia. And we talked about practical things that we can do to better understand why we're feeling the way we're feeling and also some ways to better live with it. 

Rachel Coady  (33:08)

In our next episode, we'll discuss what to do and prioritize after you have a diagnosis. We'll talk about actions to take and ways to support your person with dementia to set yourself up for a more successful journey.

Shoshawna Rainwater  (33:21)

Thanks so much for joining us today.

Rachel Coady (33:31) 

You can always reach out to us here at Hope Floats with your questions or with topics you'd like us to discuss on the podcast. We're here if you want to share your experiences, and let us know what could help you navigate this journey. We want to support you. 

Shoshawna Rainwater  (33:45) 

You’ll find us at our website, hopefloatspodcast.com, when you're there, you can learn more about the work we do. That's also where we'll share more tools, resources and libraries that can help people on this journey. 

Rachel Coady  (33:58) 

Never miss an episode of Hope Floats by following us wherever you listen to your podcasts and join our community at hopefloatspodcast.com.