Aging with Purpose and Passion

Kerri Lewis: Overcoming Betrayal and Rediscovering Love Through Resilience

• Beverley Glazer • Episode 108

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When the very people you trusted the most were the ones who betrayed you, who can you trust? Join me, Beverley Glazer, as I talk with the resilient Kerri Lewis, a Grief Practitioner, Author and founder of Second Act Mastery. Kerri shares her profound journey from a tumultuous childhood and many betrayals to a path of empowerment and love. Growing up in a household overshadowed by conflict, Kerri learned to make herself invisible to dodge her parents' unhappiness. Her story takes a dramatic turn when, at 19, she marries to escape her troubled past, only to confront the grim reality of her husband's alcohol addiction. With remarkable courage, Kerri ultimately chose her own well-being over a toxic relationship, making the heart-wrenching decision to cut ties with her parents after uncovering that she was involved in her father's deceitful financial actions.

Kerri's second husband betrayed her completely when she discovered a suitcase of papers, revealing that his true identity, was not the person she had married and was living with for five years. Her story is not only about overcoming adversity but also about the unexpected twists life can throw our way. In a heart-rending twist of fate, she finally found true love through a serendipitous reconnection on a social networking site. This once-in-a-lifetime encounter with a childhood friend blossomed into a loving marriage and a move back to California. Yet, just as happiness seemed within reach, Kerri faced the devastating loss of her husband to a sudden heart attack. Through her tale of rediscovered love and heartache, Kerri shares profound lessons in resilience and the unpredictable nature of life. Her journey will inspire you to face life's challenges with renewed purpose and determination, teaching us all about the strength found in vulnerability.

Have you enjoyed this episode? Please drop a review and send this episode to a friend.

And you may also enjoy a similar podcast 'Don't Be Caged by Your Age' by Ande Lyons. https://www.dontbecagedbyyourage.com/

Resources:
Kerri Lewis
https://secondactmastery.com
https://www.facebook.com/survivinglifeafterloss
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerrilewiscoaching/

Beverley Glazer
https://reinventimpossible.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverleyglazer/
https://www.facebook.com/beverley.glazer

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https://www.instagram.com/beverleyglazer_reinvention/

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion, the podcast designed to inspire your greatness and thrive through life. Get ready to conquer your fears. Here's your host psychotherapist, coach and empowerment expert, Beverly Glazer therapist, coach and empowerment expert, Beverly Glazer.

Beverley Glazer:

How do you rediscover happiness when life throws you blow after blow? Well, welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion. I'm Beverly Glazer and I empower women to overcome challenges in business and in life with renewed purpose and joy, and you can always find me on ReinventImpossiblecom. In this episode, you will hear a deeply personal story of betrayal, heartbreak and resilience and resilience. Kerri Lewis is a grief practitioner, an author and founder of secondactmasterycom. Kerri helps others to heal and rebuild their lives, and this episode is a powerful reminder that even in your hardest times, you have the strength to survive and to thrive.

Kerri Lewis:

So welcome, carrie. Thank you, Beverley, thank you for inviting me today and I'm very happy to speak with you and your audience.

Beverley Glazer:

You have such good things to say. You have an amazing, powerful story that will help others, for sure. I hope so. Yeah, and it starts way back in your family when you were growing up, way back. I think it was Baltimore, you said, and what was life like way back then?

Kerri Lewis:

As a child. I lived in California all my life. But it was different. My parents were not happily married people. They were not happy people, period. They weren't terrible parents or anything like that. They were doing, I believe, the best they knew how to do.

Kerri Lewis:

But there were a lot of challenges growing up in our house. I was the firstborn, so I kind of took the brunt of you know, this is how you know it's supposed to be with the parenting. And then of course I have two other siblings, two younger siblings, and that of course changed a little bit. But my parents were just very unhappy people. They fought a lot, a lot of bickering and a lot of blaming and name calling and that kind of thing. So it was challenging, to say the least.

Kerri Lewis:

So my way of surviving that was to just kind of become as invisible as I possibly could. We had a fairly large property so I would go out when I was very young. I'd go out and lay next to we used to have incinerators in the backyard and I would. There was always weeds around it so I'd lay in the weeds so nobody could find me and we had a swing back there near the apple tree and I would go do swing and I would think about things and how I was going to survive. But that's how I got through it. I was not close with my other two siblings as well, so I just kind of felt like I was just just there. So the best way to get through it was to, like I said, just become as invisible as I could, say as little as I could, and maybe nobody would notice me and maybe nobody would yell at me, nobody would insult me or whatever it might be.

Beverley Glazer:

Yeah, so hard, so hard, so hard as a child, so powerless. But the power you had immediately was to get out as soon as you can, and you got married at 19.

Kerri Lewis:

I did At 19,. Like many 19-year-olds, I felt like I knew everything. I had already been on my own for two years, working and, you know, just doing my own thing. I lived in my own apartment and met someone who I felt like was just Prince Charming and we got married. And right away I discovered that maybe he wasn't Prince Charming after all, because it turned out that he had an alcohol problem and while I saw some of that before we were married, I was so young and naive. I believed that, oh, our love will overcome his drinking and he'll stop that eventually.

Kerri Lewis:

And of course, that is not what happened at all. The drinking escalated and he, unfortunately, was the type of drinker that he was a very different person and not a nice person when he was drinking. So we had a very tumultuous relationship and you know, I was very much. I wanted to make that marriage work. We had a child, we had a daughter and I so wanted that marriage to work out. But as time went on there it was clear that was never going to happen and finally I just reached a breaking point with it and I moved on.

Beverley Glazer:

So when did you discover that your dad stole from you?

Kerri Lewis:

Well, that was later in life, I will give. To be fair with my dad, he had a lot of problems. Looking back, I realized that he was bipolar. I mean, I'm not a therapist where I can actually diagnose that, but I could tell you from his behavior that's exactly what he was, because there were many, many highs and then the lows were pretty devastating. But he reached a point somewhere along the line where he began to think that the laws and morals did not apply to him and he was very desperate. He was, he had a gambling problem and he drank. He did Well, he did drink some, but he was just. He just felt like he was above everything and he could do whatever the heck he wanted to do. He even told me that at one point.

Kerri Lewis:

So at some point I began to get notices from credit card companies that I owed this money and I didn't even know anything about it. So what he was doing was opening up credit cards in my name and he was taking money you know as much cash as he could take from those credit cards and using that to live on. So it became very it was. It was a bad situation. It was very, very bad and at some point I finally decided that it was kind of having a relationship with him and my mother as well, because she was very.

Kerri Lewis:

My mother never really matured past the age of about 15 years old, so she was defending him and there were a lot of problems in the family. So I decided that that relationship was so toxic, it was like living in a cesspool and I was not willing to do that. I had made the decision to break away from my family and go out on my own and the very first thing that happened was my daughter contacted me. She was in college at that point. She contacted me and she said Mom, I am so proud of you for doing that, because what was going on the abuse and all of it it was just horrible for me, but it was even worse for her, and I didn't even realize that until she said that to me. So that made me become really determined that I was not going to ever look back, especially as long as my father was alive. I was not going to return to the family, and that turned out to be probably one of the very best decisions I ever made in my life.

Beverley Glazer:

Yeah, sometimes you do have to do that and you also have a wake up call when you see it through your children. You don't realize the impact that you do have on other people when you're just struggling, just to survive.

Kerri Lewis:

and you remarried middle of all of that, I did remarry and we had a nice marriage. It was a comfortable marriage. It gave me a level of security that I hadn't had being a single mom. I had struggled a lot financially and for other reasons, and so it felt very comfortable. It was like, oh, I can breathe a little bit. It was nice and we were married for about five years. He traveled a lot, he worked for a government contractor and so he traveled a lot. And um no, I don't know, it was five years into the marriage, or so I was I decided one day to clean the garage and in the back of our garage there was a um, there were some cabinets back there that I had never even opened because they were there when I bought the house, and I found a briefcase in there and my first instinct was, oh, I've never seen this, I'm just going to throw it in the trash.

Kerri Lewis:

And I did. But as I worked my way around the garage, something about that briefcase was calling to me and so I decided to look at it and see, well, maybe I better just check, see what's in here. And what I discovered was truly shocking to me. My husband of five years had been lying to me about really about every aspect of his life his military service, his parents, his brother. It was just everything about his life was one big lie and my head was spinning. I didn't know what to think at that point. I thought, my gosh, is he some kind of? Maybe he's some sort of spy, or he's on some kind of government program, or, you know, they're protecting him for some reason. I didn't have any idea.

Kerri Lewis:

But at that time we still had telephone books with those big yellow things you know that were like what 10 inches thick or something.

Kerri Lewis:

So I went in the house and I got that book out and I called well, I called information, and I asked for anybody with our last name, and they gave me a whole list of people and I called one of them and it just happened that the very first one was an ex-sister-in-law of his. So she was able to fill me in on a lot of details that I had no way of knowing otherwise. So when my husband got home, of course I confronted him with all of this and he met all of that with another series of lies. So I realized at that point that the chances of our marriage surviving this were slim to none, but I did agree to go into counseling with him and we did that and after a few sessions the counselor said to me he said this is I hate to tell you this, but this is never going to work out, ever. It's not going to work out well for you or him, and my advice is just end this marriage now and move on.

Beverley Glazer:

And I did, and, but Kerri, you know I like blown away, literally. I hear a story like this.

Kerri Lewis:

It's, it's, it's like a, it's like a Hollywood script. It truly is. I mean the few people that I share that with in my own circle, they would say to me I can't believe this happened. I mean, this is it, and nor could I. And even as as I'm recounting the story to you right now, beverly, it's almost like did this really happen? This is so bizarre, it's so far out, but it really is what happened.

Beverley Glazer:

And then you can question every single thing.

Kerri Lewis:

Well, there was no way. I really did try to regain some trust in him. I didn't hate him, I just didn't understand why. I mean, that was my biggest question why would you be so dishonest with me? And the counselor helped me with that quite a bit and he explained that you know that just there are people like him who are so insecure and they just they live in a fantasy world and that's basically what he did. He just created this life. That was non-existent.

Beverley Glazer:

Well, I'm guessing also that he had two different wives, or maybe a few different ones, and there may be other women there too.

Kerri Lewis:

Well, it turned out later on, that's exactly what it was. When he would be gone out of town, he'd be with other people, and when I would discover things like that, he would always tell me that oh, they're just friends, or you know. But at that point, of course, I had. I wasn't that naive and foolish. I knew that that wasn't true, but it's still. You know, divorce is a funny thing.

Kerri Lewis:

Even though you might be in a really terrible marriage, there's a certain amount of security around that as well. You know exactly what's going to happen. So to step out of that and make the decision that you're going to move on, you're stepping into a complete unknown, and in my case, I had gotten to the point where I was really questioning my own ability to judge other people well, and so it took a while. For even even with all of that, it still took a little while for me to make that final decision. But I did finally make it, and what happened after that, it turned out, was one of the very best things that could have ever happened to me. What happened, and that was I met my husband, who made me a widow. But wait.

Beverley Glazer:

How could you start to trust another man? Number one didn't work. Your father didn't work Okay, I know. Now you know this one was, which is like trust. Forget it. You know how did you learn to trust again? How?

Kerri Lewis:

well, it took a long time. For one thing, in fact, I had this conversation with some friends of mine. They had come to visit me and it was a couple and and the husband said to me one day he said you know, you need to find husband. It would be so great if you had a husband. And I said that's the last thing on earth I want is another husband. I am perfectly able to care for myself. I had built a business by then and I had done some other things, and so I was. I was doing fine. I had bought a new home and I was doing, I was fine, I was very happy and contented. At least that's what I thought Until one night I was sitting, I was doing, I was fine, I was very happy and contented. At least that's what I thought Until one night I was sitting, I was living.

Kerri Lewis:

At that point I was living in Tucson, arizona, and I was sitting out on my. I had a courtyard and, of course, tucson. Well, that whole area has beautiful sunsets and I just love sunsets. So I was sitting out looking at the sunset and I was thinking to myself gosh, it would be so nice if I could find just a companion, someone who I could have dinner with once in a while, someone who I could talk with about things, that would be really nice. But I really didn't think that was possible. You know, looking at my history, that was that didn't seem possible to me at that point. Looking at my history, that didn't seem possible to me at that point.

Kerri Lewis:

And my daughter had mentioned to me one day. She asked me if I had ever heard of something called classmates and I said no, I didn't know what that was. And she said, well, it's like a social network where people from high schools get to reconnect with one another and so forth. And I laughed at her. I said do you know how many years I've been out of high school? And no, that doesn't interest me at all. So about two or three months down the road, I was working late one night and up popped this little ad for classmates. Well, because we had talked about that, I thought you know, I'm just going to click on this and see what this actually is. And they give you this little opportunity to put a like a one page, one paragraph bio about yourself. So, for whatever reason, I did that and that was not like me, but I did it anyway.

Kerri Lewis:

And the very next day my future husband contacted me and I had known him since kindergarten. My future husband contacted me and I had known him since kindergarten and we had gone to school from kindergarten all the way through the 12th grade. We lived two blocks from one another. We shared the same friends. We weren't boyfriend, girlfriend or anything like that, but we shared the same social circle and the same things and so forth, and we just began communicating as friends. But after a while things started to take a turn and things changed. And the next thing, you know, he said I love you, I want you to marry me, and can you come back to California? He says I love Tucson, but it's too hot down there. He was a professional golf instructor, so I did, I sold my home, I moved up to back to California, we got married and lived happily ever after until he passed away.

Beverley Glazer:

Oh, and how did that happen? Because that was also traumatic, you told me days before that.

Kerri Lewis:

But he and a bunch of his friends had eaten in a restaurant and I knew that restaurant and it was kind of a not a great place. So I kind of made the assumption that he had probably eaten some food that wasn't quite as healthy as it could have been. And the morning he before he died. In fact I had said to him I said you know, if you don't start feeling better in the next day, I want you to go to the doctor. And he said I think I might do that. So we went to bed that night. He seemed fine. I asked him how he was feeling and he said I was feeling great.

Kerri Lewis:

And at 247, he woke me up in the middle of the night and he said he thought he was having a heart attack. So of course I flew out of bed and grabbed my phone, called the paramedics. We lived in a place where they weren't that far away and they were there within probably five or six minutes and at 253 or 257 actually, he passed, he took his last breath and I it was so shocking to me I just couldn't believe it, because he was the picture of health. He did not look like he had anything wrong with him and I just kept. They started, the paramedics started CPR on him and they continued that for 30 minutes while they took him to the hospital. And then we got to the hospital and I sat there and just watched and I kept thinking, oh, he's going to open his eyes any minute now. And about a minute before the doctor said that he was gone, a nurse came up behind me and she put her arms around me and she said Mrs Lewis, I just want you to know, I don't think this is going to end well for you. And I still could not grasp that. And even after they called him, I just I just kept thinking he's going to wake up, he's going to be okay.

Kerri Lewis:

And then, of course, the next hour or so went on. There was a lot of, you know, flurry of activity and I asked the nurse to please take all that. My, my words were take all that crap off of him. I said he had all these tubes and things on him and she said that they would do that. And she asked me if I would like to have a private room to be with him for a while and I said yes. So they very kindly put us somewhere, and I don't even know where it was. They just took me to this room and there he was and I never took my eyes off of him until I looked at him and he didn't look the same anymore and I knew that his spirit had left his body and it was time for me to leave the hospital. And that was sometime midday. I don't even know how many hours it was, but it took me I don't know probably two or three months before I could really wrap my head around the fact that my husband had passed away and he was no longer with me because he was so full of life.

Kerri Lewis:

He was such a, he was a fun person to be with. He had a great sense of humor. He was always joking around, he would. He loved to make me laugh and he would tell me that he said the more you laugh, the more I want to make you laugh, and we just had a great time. He was my best friend. We were buddies. We did everything together. He made life fun. He made life just I couldn't.

Kerri Lewis:

Almost every day I would think about that.

Kerri Lewis:

I think my my jaws hurt from laughing and from just being around him.

Kerri Lewis:

Just I couldn't I.

Kerri Lewis:

Almost every day I would think about that.

Kerri Lewis:

I think my my jaws hurt from laughing and from just being around him, just enjoying his company, and he felt the same about me and I knew that.

Kerri Lewis:

And so you, you asked me how did I trust him? I just did, I just did. I think part of it was because we had the all that history, and secondly, because there had all that history, and secondly, because there just was no doubt. He wasn't phony, he spoke from his heart and I knew that and we just made that connection. And I came to realize later how I was so grateful and I still am that I actually experienced that kind of relationship with someone when I never thought I would. And I think he had the same experience, because he had a lot of drama in his life prior to us and it was. We both were just so grateful that we found each other and that we loved each other and that we were able to spend our lives together, and even to the point where, you know, I got to spend my life with him until his last breath, and I see that as a gift.

Beverley Glazer:

And Kerri, you have me in tears his last breath and I see that as a gift. And yeah, Carrie, you have me in tears, I it's.

Kerri Lewis:

It's hard to talk about it's, it's, it's still. It's been seven and a half years and it's still painful, yeah, but what I can tell you?

Beverley Glazer:

is that Lesson Lesson that you Learn from all this, all the deception, all that you've been through, you know, with your dad, with your first marriage, with this insanity of that second marriage. You know, and now this what did you learn from all of it?

Kerri Lewis:

what did you learn from all of it? I think that the one of the most important things is to that human beings are incredibly resilient and, through all of the things that have happened, there isn't one thing I would actually change, because I feel like, through the healing and through the all the experiences, I recognized in myself, and certainly in others, that regardless of what life throws at you, they're huge challenges, but you can. You can live through them and you can move forward through them and in some ways it makes you a better version of yourself. You grow. You know human beings.

Kerri Lewis:

The only time we really do our major growing is when we're faced with these huge life challenges. And so I recognize that, fortunately, and so I recognized that fortunately because I saw it in my own self. I knew you know you do, even though I don't think I was the greatest judge of character in my early years. But through all these experiences I have become that way and even now I still my instinct is to trust people. I want to trust people because I think, basically, people are good, for whatever reason. I attracted some strange energy in my early years, but I feel today I feel very, very strong for it all very, very strong for it all.

Beverley Glazer:

Mary, what would you say to older women who feel it's too late, too late for them, too late to start over, too late to find love, too late?

Kerri Lewis:

It is never too late. I honestly believe that, even though at times we feel that way, I felt that way after my husband died. It was like my whole world came crashing down around me and it felt like there was nothing left. But one of the things that did help me through that and I would say the same thing to anyone else listening, if you can just ask yourself, for example in my case, what would my husband say to me? What would he want me to be doing right now? And I knew the answer to that. It was very clear in my mind he would want me to move forward and live my life. He would not want me to pine away to be miserable the rest of my life. He might say something like, well, you need to mourn for a little while before you start dating again, or something like that, but he would want me to enjoy my life and he would want me to accept what had happened.

Kerri Lewis:

And I have Again. I still have grief when someone you love so much dies. You don't just forget about them and move on like they never existed. He's with me 24-7. He's in my heart, he's in my mind and I truly actually believe that he is. His spirit is around all the time. So I would say, don't ever, ever think that until it's really over, until you take your last breath, it's never over and you never know what's going to happen. If someone had said to me after my second divorce, you're going to find this marriage that is so incredibly wonderful and loving, I would never have believed that, not in a million years. But I did find that marriage, I did find that relationship, and that relationship is with me even now, even though he's gone. He's not gone, yeah, thank you. So I think that's incredibly important for people to remember To be grateful. Gratitude is a powerful, powerful thing. We hear it a lot. It almost sounds cliche anymore to be I'll be gratitude, have gratitude and so forth, but it's not. It really is a powerful thing.

Beverley Glazer:

Well, grateful from everything the good, the bad, the ugly, and that's what I'm hearing. Carrie, yes, absolutely. Thank you so so much. Kerri Lewis is a widow, a mother, a grandmother and an optimist. She's a grief practitioner, an author and founder of SecondActMasterycom, helping heal and rebuild other people's lives. Where can people find you, carrie?

Kerri Lewis:

Well, you just said it's. Secondactmasterycom is my website, and one thing I would like to let people know is on that website I have a little guidebook that I wrote. It's called Finding Peace in the Midst of Grief. It's a free giveaway. All you need to do is just give me your name and your email address so that I can put you on my list and you can download that book. And it's very, very basic, but in the early stages of grief in particular, it's very important to you know, follow us. It has something to help guide you through those rough waters and in the early stages of grief, and that's what this book is for.

Beverley Glazer:

That's terrific. And if you didn't catch her link, her links and everything else, everything that she's been talking about will be on my bio and in the show notes and that's going to be on my site, of course, on reinventandpossiblecom. And if you've enjoyed this episode, you may also like Don't Be Caged by your Age with Ande Lyons. So you could check that out, and she has a link also in the bio, in the links below. And now, my friends, what's next for you? Are you going through the motions or are you really, really passionate about your life? Get my weekly self-coaching tips to empower you through your journey. And of course, where will you find those links? In the show notes, right below this episode.

Beverley Glazer:

You can connect with me, beverly Glaser, on all social media platforms and in my positive group of women on Facebook that's Women Over 50 Rock. And if you think I can connect the dots for you to find your purpose, just schedule a quick Zoom and I'll talk to you there. So I want to thank you all for listening. Have you enjoyed this conversation? Please subscribe so you don't miss the next one and send this episode to a friend. And always remember that you have only one life, so live it with purpose and friendship.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for joining us. You can connect with Bev on her website reinventimpossiblecom. You can connect with Bev on her website reinventimpossiblecom. And, while you're there, join our newsletter Subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep aging with purpose and passion and celebrate life.