A Strong Relationship Can Outlive Death | C. Ryan Dunn | #181

We talk honestly about grief, loss, and why love can keep shaping us even after someone is gone. We share research and real stories that reframe mourning as both painful and meaningful, then land on practical ways to build a relationship that strengthens you now and later. 
• why grief is complex across mind and body 
• what predicts higher grief levels in young widowhood 
• loss-oriented versus restoration-oriented coping 
• how relationship length and intimacy relate to grief impact 
• continuing bonds and why remembering can help 
• why comparing losses creates a harmful grief hierarchy 
• how divorce and other losses fit the same grief principles 
• why grief can feel like physical pain in the brain 
• emotional estate planning through a relational piggy bank 
• three daily practices: time, talk, togetherness 

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Dr. Liz Hale: 

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Transcript

Grief, Loss, And Hope

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Today's episode is about something we don't always talk about openly grief, loss, and how life changes when we lose someone we love. But it's also about something hopeful, resilience, meaning, and how the relationships we build can carry forward even after loss. I'm joined by my friend and colleague, Dr. Ryan Dunn from Weaver State University. Ryan's research with young widows has led him to a powerful idea that the quality of relationship can actually reach beyond the grave. It's a perspective that really shifts how we think about love, our connection, and even how we show up in our relationships today. After earning a BS in exercise science and psychology from Utah State University, Dr. Dunn began a career in financial consulting. However, his passion for understanding families soon outshone his interest in financial markets, leading him back to USU for a PhD in family relations and human development. There he focused on parenting, healthy relationships, family finance, human development, and grief and loss. Ryan married a cheerleader from a rival school, and together they have six pretty awesome creatures, children whose ages span from second grade to the university. We hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Hey there, friends, welcome to another episode of the Stronger Marriage Connection Podcast. I'm Dr. Dave up here at Utah State University. Typically alongside Dr. Liz Hale, she's out of town today, so we'll excuse her, but I'm excited to be talking about a topic that touches all of us at some point, but one we don't always feel comfortable talking about, and that is grief and loss and the changes that come with it. We'll also get into resilience, hope, and how people find their footing again after life shifts in really hard ways. I'm really grateful to have a good friend and colleague joining me, actually just down the road, it feels like, right down at Weber State University. Ryan Dunn, welcome to the show, my friend.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

Hey, it's great to be here, Dave. This is exciting. Um, and as you mentioned, I oftentimes talking to people about death and grief, they're like, that's a real macabre subject, but it's one of my favorites because of some principles that come out of it.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Really looking forward to this, Ryan, because we have not had a guest um on the show about this important topic. So I think this will be something that will really resonate with uh with many of our listeners. So excited to dive in. Hey, Ryan, before we jump into the the bigger topic, I'd love for you just to give our listeners a little bit of the uh your story, a little bit of

From Finance To Grief Research

SPEAKER_01 2:50

the backstory. You know, what's your background? What led you to the work you're doing now at Weaver State?

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Well, it's a good question because I always use kind of the Rascal Flats story to tell people that it's a broken road that led me straight to where I'm doing what I'm doing today. Um, when I was an undergrad, I was up at Utah State and I was studying to be uh a physician. I wanted to follow kind of in dad's footsteps, maybe a little bit different practice. But while there, studying psych and some exercise science, some other things that were of interest to me, I got to the end of my time, and all I had left was the Medcat and to get into medical school. Some unfair advantages, you know, in dad's world, he knew folks on the board down at the U. And I was somewhat of a shoe-in as I talked to the chairman of the board, and he made a recommendation, kind of changed things, kind of broke the road up a little bit, if you will. He said, between now and when you enter school, you know how when you do like a job application and they say, hey, between January and and June, what did you do? And between July and December, what did you do? He said, do not have one of those open I studied for the test or I sat around or whatever. He says, that is one thing. I may not be able to speak over the rest of the board to shake that. So he said, Roof a house, uh, learn how to flip pancakes better. He said, Do something. And I thought to myself, in real quick succession, dad had said, I'd always made a lot of money, Ryan, but I didn't ever manage it well. So I looked to kind of my recent past, my little league baseball experience, had this super wealthy uh baseball coach who had extra time because of his job. He was a money manager. So I thought, I'm gonna ask him, and for six months or a year, I'm gonna learn how to manage money so that when I'm a doctor and I'm making it, I know how to manage it better. And I went and told him, I said, I'm not gonna stick with you and these other things, but could I learn under your wing? Brought me in. And there we were. And you know what? I went into that. And there's a longer story short here, but Janelle and I kind of counseled on this. That's my wife. Um, I stayed in finances for the better part of 10 to 15 years, really enjoyed working with people, and I and I got to know them. Dave, I was I was in their homes and of course was making them a lot of money, and I enjoyed coming back year after year to show those balance sheets. But they'd have tragedies or they'd have celebrations, starting new businesses. I remember one young man, he went from making $660,000 a year to making $400,000 a year in the course of just a couple of years as he jumped off into making us. We celebrated his growth and development. But I then had some unexpected phone calls of a 35-year-old whose husband went out on a bike ride and never came home, or um, others who, after a long fight with cancer or unexpected other car accidents. Uh, and and here I was meeting them where they needed me in the extremities. So some good, some hard. But I looked at my wife one day and I said, I should, I should have studied people. I mean, I really like the market and how it moves to make money, but I like what the money's doing for people. I really should have studied people. And she really supported me and said, You'd be good at this. And uh, so I went back up to Utah State, my alma mater, and I jumped in with a little bit of support from the admin there to say, where do you actually fit in? I said, I'd like to study people, and here's my background. Can you give me a chance? And I went into that program. And as a final note of that, how did I get to where I study grief? I found as we were talking about the stories of relationships, we're talking about development of family, of parenting, of getting ready for retirement, whatever it was, there was always this kind of interesting conversation that I could in classes use those conversations of the young widows or other things I had done as a financial advisor to make anecdotally to make points when we were talking theory or practice or whatever in mental health. And my teachers had pulled me aside from time to time and they said, Ryan, have you ever thought about studying that grief process? And I'm like, What are you talking about? They said, Well, you default to it often and you seem to have a real grasp for it. How about putting some science to some of that story and bringing it to life for people who might read and learn and grow from the research? And never having thought about that, I dug in more deeply. I sat down and did some early interviews with younger widows and realized there's a real passion in here. And as I mentioned earlier, some principles really helped it along. So from that point forward, I found a job down here at Weeber and uh have been loving my work and teaching and of course doing research in those areas ever since.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Wow. And that is actually a pretty fascinating path. I mean, a pretty unique uh path as you wound around for medical and then finance and then uh and then people. Um, I'm curious, Ryan, as you've studied loss and grief and especially at unexpected times in life, what have you learned about what makes those experiences uh especially difficult or impactful?

Measuring Grief And What Predicts It

SPEAKER_00 7:55

We tried to quantify, you know, when you study something that I was explaining this to students earlier in the semester, a construct. So it would be like saying I wanted to measure health. Um, of course I could measure weight or or something like that, and I could say you weigh 134 pounds, and then that's quantifiable, it's very easy, but but health, health is difficult, doesn't have a scale. So we did reach out and looked to the world who had measured this idea or construct of grief and and created, if you will, a quantity to say, my grief is good or my grief is bad. And I'm gonna put those definitely, Dave, in air quotes because I think for most of us, we recognize the pain associated with grief. Um, but as an outcome, it isn't always bad. But we use the Texas revised inventory of grief, and it gave us a path to run on because this is great scale that has been tested over and over and used over and over again for a variety of losses, most appropriately and specifically, you know, death of a loved one. But there are other things that someone loses. Like our good friend Travis Dorsh, I've talked to him a lot about this because I have a younger brother who is a contemporary, and they both got out of professional sports. I mean, they were known as athletes, like that was their moniker from the time they were little kids all the way up until their late 20s. And then all of a sudden, for the first time in their life, or most of us had already experienced this, they were cut from a team. And I asked him about that grief of changing who he was and whatever. And his, it was the real deal. But using that revised inventory, because the language in there primarily captures loss, um, I went out to see what other things kind of sidled up to that experience or the score of grief, and and found in a really long list of items that we utilized, especially in in my dissertation research with young widows, what were the variables that most impacted the levels of grief? Coming at it from the vantage point of being a younger married uh father of small children, I thought um losing someone at a younger age is definitely going to have an impact. And these are this is me theorizing. Or having children and having that loss, and now I'm a single parent. Um, or did they leave me money adequate to be able to take care of this? Or like some of my widows, Dave, like like they buried their husbands on Saturday and they were looking for jobs at Wendy's on Monday. I mean, was those sorts of things? And I thought, for sure, this is going to be, this sort of thing is going to be what matters for the score, that grief score. And in the end, when we looked through all of it, the interesting thing that washed out is there were there were

Loss Versus Restoration Coping

SPEAKER_00 10:34

really three main areas. One was using Strobenschitz's work on the type of grieving that's taking place or the coping mechanisms that follow after. Um, they have this oscillation model as opposed to like Kubler Ross that says we go through stages like like I go from freshman to sophomore to junior year of high school, I might be in denial or anger. The oscillation model looks like a really exciting ping pong game where it's like batting it back and forth between two kind of orientations. One is one is loss-oriented, the other is restoration oriented. Um, restoration is is there a way for me to kind of get on with my life, to move on with this loss versus loss-oriented is like I'm missing, I'm ruminating, I'm stewing over the things that I've gone. And and the women who scored higher in the fact that, like right here, right now, while I'm taking your survey, Ryan, I'm fairly loss-oriented, really kind of missing him and focused on those sorts of things. Um, quick aside, speaking of ping pong in my head, part of my data gathering stretch, Dave, was through Valentine's Day. And I I hadn't even contemplated that until I started to read some of the things that were coming out. Gratefully it was stretched over a few months. But um, one of the women, graciously, as she was doing the open-ended responses, wrote back and said, seeing as it's Valentine's Day, this is really kind of kind of painful to talk about this, but but here I go. And I I hadn't even thought because it took so long for the IRB to approve it, the review board to give us permission to gather that data, as soon as it was available to me in early February. It was like, send it out. I want to get going and knowing more about it. But back to the story, I mean, uh surely the timing of it could have been, but I wanted to know right then, right there, where is your orientation? Are you focused on the past, are you focused on the future? And those that were focused on on the past, they tended to have uh higher grief scores, meaning the grief was having a higher impact on them. The second of the two is pretty, pretty simple and lined up with some of my preconceived theories. And that was the longer an individual had been in their relationship, they actually had a lower, it doesn't mean that the grief went away, but the score of their grief lessened over time. So someone who'd been married for 20 years had commonly had a lower grief score than those that had been married for two. And the third, and the third one brings in kind of where, you know, your and you and I talked about this a little bit a while back, is the individuals, you know, speaking about reflecting on the past, but their their intimate or that their close relationship with their spouse tended to have kind of a buffering effect. Or in other words, the closer they rated their relationship with that sweetheart that was now gone, the lower their grief score. And though I think there's a lot to to maybe address in that issue, it it washed out just about everything else levels of education, um, religiosity, the power of the support system around them is how close were they to that spouse when they lost? So um all those things can have some complicating features, but those three tended to have the biggest impact.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

Wow. Some of I mean some of that is surprising, honestly, when you think, you know, closeness or the length of the relationship. Um I mean, digging deeper, what do you think that what was it? I mean, that is there something uh about that that they're just I mean, 20 years, 40 years, and they I don't know, have a different perspective, I guess, uh over time um can change, I guess, how you see how see each other, or what what is what's going on there?

Why Intimacy Can Buffer Grief

SPEAKER_00 14:31

That's an interesting question. And and certainly I'll I'll I'll say this throughout because I think some of this is is just scratching the surface of what it might mean. Um in the West, we have an interesting philosophy that people around the world look at us and kind of point their finger and say, You're you're death deniers. We we don't die at home with our families, we die in the hospital. We we we kind of we kind of scrub it, we we um trying to think of the word we kind of keep it squeaky clean behind closed doors because it's it's not something that people talk about in kind conversations. Now, I I was thinking about that very issue as I was looking forward to our chat today, and I thought if you look at the box office and the movies that are coming out, you would think, no, Americans love death because horror movies and scary, those kinds of things. But I think we like that kind of antiseptic Hollywood version of it. Contemplating our own demise and some of those things has kind of pushed that away. But over time, as we've looked at people's, especially if we talk about the, you know, the one item, as we move longer into our relationship, there could be two or three things uh being juggled at the same time in this. Why would it decrease with time? First and foremost, relationships have associated with them a commitment, not just between me and you, but a commitment to our future. And really great material. Gottman talks about this a lot, and others do, about this idea of allowing our partners to dream. Part of that is I'm dreaming with you. I mean, I could be dreaming about some business I'm going to start and some of those other things, but commonly, even that is associated with having these relationships and so forth. And and if if we're new in our relationship, there's a ton of dreaming that I have on you on the on the books in my head or my heart that still is incomplete when I lose you. So, so whether it's a breakup or a death in this set of circumstances, there may be a degree to that as I'm living more of the future I had seen with you, and I'm giving up less. Perhaps that helps in that grief score a little bit. But there are other aspects that I could I could speak to. And in short, I think bringing them into this conversation is that that idea of a continuing bond. It may be that the younger ones, when having lost somebody, have more questions about, well, what would they do in this set of circumstances? Maybe it gets to graduation with their kids and they want to know, should I pay for college or not? I really wish so-and-so was here. They were in charge of the money. Maybe there's more of those kinds of unsure about my partner if I only had so much time to build that knowledge and understanding of who they are and what they do. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Ryan, does that kind of touch upon uh one of the ideas that that you shared that really sh has stuck with me is that the quality of the relationship can reach beyond the grave. I think that that's a that's powerful. Can you unpack what you've seen in your research with with young widows that led you to that conclusion?

SPEAKER_00 17:42

Yeah, that's a that's a great point of this, and and one that's fascinating and still curious to me. Um, class Silverman and Nickman talked about this idea of the continuing bond in the great book and movie, mind you, most movies aren't anywhere near as good as the books. But Tuesdays with Maury is one of those ones I would suggest is really good. He says that death ends a life, but it doesn't end a relationship. And I think that there's something to that. Now, the lingering effects are are they positive ones? That's something that I can carry with me, right? So if you think about great relationships like going away to work and having that fond thought about my my spouse and carrying that with me, and it makes me happy, it makes me choose differently. I might even sit down to lunch and and not have so many of those V8 moments. I'm actually making better choices because I mean that the relationship extends beyond holding hands and hugs and kisses to when we're we're apart from each other. There may be some magnified version of this, or at least to some degree, persistent version of this, when an individual loses a spouse to death, as the fondness can still linger. Like some of the sweet stories I heard about those unwilling to get rid of some of their clothes for quite some time after the loss, but they could smell the aftershave, if you will. This idea of that lingering uh aftershave of goodness, of kindness, of what we meant and the fact that you lift or elevate me, not just when you're watching over my shoulder, but the very thought of you carries with me. And so to that end, as we think back, let me let me marry a couple of different points here. When we're death deniers, that also bleeds over into the fact I'm looking for a box of Kleenex here. But when somebody begins to cry in our culture, we whip out the disposable Kleenexes, like, take this away. I don't want you to feel that sadness, but if you start to cry, what's very likely going to happen to me? I'm gonna start to cry. And I don't want to have that happen. So we we push away the conversation on death, we push away the tears on that. The very thing that the at least it's beginning to suggest in the research that I've been doing, what might actually be a buffer is the fondly talking about this sweetheart. Um, let me share one great quote, comes from a fellow. I think that he uh does a lot of trainings for funeral homes and things around the country. Carl Jennings is his name, and he says, when we recall to the grieving, a story that honors their mate, we are at the same time validating their choice of that mate, their commitment to lifelong love and the worthiness of their shared sacrifices and challenges. So a continuing sustaining of that was a good choice when you said I do, it continues to be something that you do. And we have maybe that power, even outside of the relationship of the ones who've lost love, but those who surround them and try to uphold them by sustaining that's still a good relationship long after they're gone.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

Man, this is uh passing for me. We'll be right back after this brief message.

No Hierarchy Of Grief

SPEAKER_01 21:17

And we're back. Let's dive right in. Well, I and I want to be totally sensitive to this topic because I have not experienced uh that type of a a lot, right? A spouse, uh even a sibling or parent yet. Well, my my parents are still living. But so the closest thing that I can relate this to, and it may sound um you know funny to some listeners, but when we lost our dog, okay, so we lost a Yorkie that was nine years, and every night Ryan, he slept actually under the blanket with me, right? And it was less so it was like a family member in a sense. And um, when we lost Max, like I mean, just talking about it, right? I like I grieved so hard, and then we're longing, like when I come open the Door, he's usually there. When we drop food, you know, from the counter on the floor, we're like, oh, you know, he's usually there doing the dishes. I and I so it was all of this, just all this and this, and his toys there. We didn't want to put his bowl away. You know, all of these things that reminded of us of him, like it's taken months and even years, even to you know, when I'm mowing the lawn, Ryan, and I drive by where we buried him, like sometimes I'll get tear easy because I'll look over and I'll have this um this just longing, you know, this this missing, this grieving of him. And Ryan, when you're talking about some of this, I I think I'm guilty of this because sometimes I don't want to look at pictures or things because I know what it will stir in me on my phone. So I I in my own life, I kind of push that away because I don't want to look at videos or be reminded because I know you know it'll bring up all this sadness. The good times as well. So again, I want to be very, very sensitive because I'm not comparing a dog. It's a loss that is, you know, not comparable to that spouse. But that's that's the one thing I guess that that I can relate to is this this real loss. I don't know. Is any of that making sense?

SPEAKER_00 23:13

Oh, it absolutely does. I actually had and and it continues to be a principle from the experience that that kind of guides and directs some of the things that I do to this day. And it had to do with kind of the the hierarchy of grief. Um, part of what I was asking in in my research was say, for instance, um, if you were like one of my first interviewed young widows, her husband died of ALS, and she lost him over nine years from a proud, big, strong, healthy guy to someone who couldn't even roll over in bed. Um, she saw it coming from a mile away, if you will, versus I might have left her home and gone and done an interview later that same day with someone who lost their spouse driving to work and having an accident that day. Totally unexpected. And we we talk about it's like it's not fair. You got time and you were ready to say goodbye. And I didn't. It's like we we created a hierarchy of who deserved to be Saturn. And it was actually more punctuated. I backed away from that a little bit because, like you, you know, Janelle is alive and well in our home today, probably out in the garden living her best life after those rainstorms. Um, I don't understand in that empathetic sense. I think that, you know, cerebrally, like scholarly, I may know a lot more than some of my widows, but I've never been through it. But I was talking about this in one of my undergraduate courses. And after the class was over, and I think you've you've definitely had this experience as you've taught in so many different spaces. One of the young men waited, and he kind of did one of these. I could tell he wanted to make sure he was alone for what he was about to share with me. And as soon as he turned back to me, his eyes immediately went red and welled with tears. And I thought, following a conversation on death, sure, this young fellow is going to share his loss and connect with me in this moment. And he did. He choked through his tears and he kind of reached out and he said, You talked about today. And he like he was touching his heart. It was like he was gonna have to gesture most of what he was saying because of the tears choking him up. He said, We just buried my parent last week. Now, now, Dave, my gut reaction in that moment was, dude, we're talking about spouses and you're bringing up your bird. Are you kidding me, kid? Um immediately, that kind of voice that I think many of us carry around with with us, and for for many people, it means a lot of different things. But that voice came to me and it kind of, you know how you can see a lot of information all at once? Those arguments about whose death was worse in the widowed reason and all those things, so much of this just flooded to me immediately. And in my head, in my heart, was this idea of for what reason would I give order or place or a space in the line to this young man about his grief? Because maybe to that point in his life, that was the hardest thing he had ever experienced. Hardest is hardest. And so as you as you say what you do, I think it's tender. I what you say is is right. I think we need to be cautious and conscientious about those around us. But at the end of maybe this comment that I have for you on this as well, what I'm saying doesn't necessarily also say you've got a foist right in front of the individual, you're gonna deal with it. You're gonna, you're gonna do what uh Freud talked about, you're gonna work through this right here, right now. That's the healthiest way to do it. Um, I wouldn't think it would be a great point to say if you and I were smile and wave neighbors and you had a significant loss in your life, Dave, that all of a sudden I'm I'm your you know five-second hugger coming up to you and just pulling you in close. And so we would we're not gonna make weirdness out of what is the process. In the same way, we don't want to forget the loss of the individual to allow for some of that potential buffering that happens from the close and fond memories. We're also not gonna force somebody, hey, I heard from Dr. Dunn in a podcast that we're gonna shove it down their throat and say this is the best way to what's next is for you to stare it in the eye. It's supporting and sustaining people is the invitation, as opposed to avoiding making people sad. Because frankly, take my mom, for instance, after losing my dad. Do you think I ever remind her that dad is gone? Do you think she's like forgotten somehow till I go have lunch with her and then I bring something up and she'd be sad? And Ryan, how dare you? Certainly no. So talking to her about the fond memories I see may bring a tear to her eye, but there's a lot of gratitude and fortitude in that great relationship that she that she forged with him over all those years.

SPEAKER_01 28:06

Yeah. Wow, so powerful. Thank you. Uh helpful for me personally, but I think, yeah, for listeners who experience different uh different losses and people experience them differently. And I think that's important. Yeah, not to compare, you know, my loss was greater than your loss, or I lost in an accident, and yeah, one had nine years. I think we can get lost in in some of that comparison. Uh Ryan, you've you've referenced um Eric Ericsson, right? The idea of of intimacy. Maybe first give us a quick snapshot of that, and then how does that framework help us understand why some losses feel so much more destabilizing than than others?

Erikson And Why Loss Destabilizes

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Well, not to belabor something that folks aren't paying tuition for. Ericsson's lifespan stages of psychosocial development to me are pretty fascinating because you could find somebody at any stage along the way and kind of put some story to it. And and he really identified like what is our development in the presence of others, that that social aspect of that. I looked at this through the lens of young widowhood. When I was doing the research, most of what I'm referencing to you is around the idea of a regular and expected life stage would be to lose a spouse. And in in women, particularly in our culture, but around the world historically, women in uh a male-female relationship, they outlive their partners for a lot of reasons. Older men tend to marry younger women. There's a reason. Uh, women tend to go to the doctor more often than men do, so men let diseases go further. And men do more dangerous work or fight in wars, et cetera. So, long story short, it's normal and expected to have widows in our society. Of course, there are some widowers. I'm not, I'm not negating that. It's much more common for women to be be widowed. But it's normally, as many researchers, Jones in particular said, it's it's meant to be a late life experience. And I wanted to see, could you take a stage that's regular and expected, but shift it back somewhere else in the lifespan? Would that have a differing impact on a person's development? So I thought about when younger women are married, and we had anybody who was married up through the age of 50. I kind of made a hard stop at 50 years old and said, over that for this particular study, you weren't looking for your grief scores and your experiences. And um in looking through the lens of Ericsson, that would place them squarely in identity. So, like I'm a I'm a bride or I'm Mrs. Jones as opposed to Mrs. Smith, as I took on his name, right? In our culture, that's so so common. I'm um in an intimate relationship as the very next stage. So identity, intimacy, the one that you and I are talking about mostly. And then, of course, if there were the young parents, the generativity piece. And so I took from uh Domino and Afonso's work, they created this uh inventory of psychosocial balance, again, to quantify a construct to see what is your identity score, what is your intimacy score, what is your generativity score. And in this space, you would find that where people may have had you know the proverbial rug pulled out from underneath them, I'm widowed. So am I am I a spouse or am I not? Um, intimacy, the person that I want to go home to. I mean, but between me and you in the wall, if this is a great experience, I want to run home to tell Janelle about it. If if if I stumbled all over myself and sounded like a fool on camera, uh, I'm gonna run home to tell her about it. Hopefully she'll give me a hug, right? The intimacy piece, like what does that do to these women? And then, of course, generativity, I like a like I said, I was factoring in maybe raising children as a single parent or whatever might make it more difficult. But the identity and the generativity, those two outside pieces didn't have the impact that intimacy did. And intimacy is it was measuring the closeness of that relationship. Did you have that kind of right or die individual, the person that was like the the stronger they rated that relationship is what you and I have been talking about a bit today, is is this idea that that somehow, at least there was a relationship between that and lessening or lowering the scores that they gave themselves in terms of how their grief was going right now. And a quick aside, this is to me, is fascinating. The research tells us, it's kind of dumb, but it's fascinating. The research, if we look at large numbers of aggrieved individuals and then quantifying how their grief is doing, it tends to say about two years out, folks tend to kind of normalize. It's not that the loss or the grieving, the point of the grief goes away, but the scores aren't as impactful anymore after about two years, is what you see in the literature. On average, the women that I had in my study, I'd approaching 250 in this study. Um, the average time since death, at the time they took the paper and pencil um survey was about two, two plus years, but the scores on their grief was moderate plus. They were still grieving, which puts to bed this idea of two years, move on with your life, two years, get over it. There's a whole laundry list of things we could say, never say to somebody who's lost a loved one. That would be at the top of the list. I don't see any reason to suggest there's no reason for you to feel grief anymore. Frankly, what we're talking about today probably highlights all the reason you should. It's a reminder of the things that were so wonderful. But even in that, even in that conversation, this idea of Ericsson's intimacy was something about that bond really is continuing. And it's having, at least to some degree, like I said, it's just scratching the surface, uh, uh, an ongoing impact of my well-being in some of the same ways, a really healthy marriage, like you've learned in in several of your your uh podcasts uh with whiz, um, that a great relationship today is helping individuals to live longer, to have better wealth, to do better at work, etc. Uh, it tends to at least, as we're looking at it at this stage, have that impact even after they're gone, which is amazing to make.

SPEAKER_01 34:31

Yeah. Yeah. Along those same lines, Ryan, how does the strength or the intimacy of a relationship shape that that grieving process after losing a spouse?

SPEAKER_00 34:42

I love this. I'm gonna get a drink of water because hot air drives of personnel.

Firefighters, Builders, And Lasting Love

SPEAKER_00 34:49

Um David Brooks wrote an article some time ago, and it caught my attention because it was about death and grief, and either I seek them out or people send them to me when they see them. He talked about this idea that in our lives, when heavy-handed things happen, there are firefighters and there are builders. So imagine if we consider a grief or a loss or whatever it is we're talking about is something that burns the proverbial house down. Um, what does a firefighter do? Well, they show up and they blast their hoses and they put out the fire. And then when the fire is put out, where do the firefighters go, Dave? Yeah, they they they do. They're gone. They're gone from, I mean, they took care of the problem, but they're gone. A builder, however, though, comes and looks at an issue, a challenge, a problem. It could be a burned down house, it could be an empty allot, it could be whatever it is. But they take time and they methodically put out plans based on the wants and needs of the individual. And then they construct this edifice that then you can go and live in. And certainly the builder goes home at some point, but long after the builder is gone, the sense of uh the fingerprints in your life or whatever are ever present. And and that has touched me after read that, having done my work, and thought, David Brooks, you're you're kind of speaking my lay, my my my language. Again, I'm gonna admit a million times to Tuesday that this is just scratching the surface. But if the level of intimacy has the greatest impact on grief levels, and and what we were seeing is that the closer they rated their relationship, the less their grief tended to be impacting them at the time that they were writing about it. Um we think about in what ways, as we're talking about this issue or this this item of how is intimacy continuing to impact the individual. It's captured really well a long time ago in Leo Tolstoy's writings. He said, only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but at the same time, the necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and it heals them. It's like I still love you. Might cause me to go through a box of tissues because I'm crying about missing you, but that I still love you is an ennobling and an empowering and a strengthening factor. At least it seems to be. Um, while partners are together, Gottman says this is like nurturing fondness and admiration. Um, I can speak about my spouse in just geographical terms being separated from her, where we're not in the same space, but I'm fond of her and I admire her for a number of different reasons. And we don't necessarily need to get into those, those here. But again, like I've I've talked about earlier, it builds me and strengthens me even when we're not together. It certainly does. And it and it sweetens the pot for those reunions. Um, certainly for folks who have a religious band where they feel like they will see their loved ones again, I could see how that would strengthen it. But Dave, it wasn't only aligned with folks who had a strong religious score in the way that they identified their current set of circumstances. Um it seemed to be that intimacy issue seems to be something that was beneficial to everyone. So, this idea of a strong relationship being good for my current physical health and well-being, a strong relationship can continue even out beyond that intimacy, that closeness out beyond the loss, even including death of an individual.

SPEAKER_01 38:23

Yeah, man, this is also fascinating.

The Relational Piggy Bank Mindset

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Ryan, I really like your idea of thinking about relationships almost like emotional estate planning, kind of come back to some of your finance side. That's such a helpful way, I think, to frame it. What would it look like for couples listening today to actually live with that mindset?

SPEAKER_00 38:44

It's a great point. Uh, I think as you look at estate planning, if we look at it on a practical level, I sit down with some clients and we draw out, design, dream about the future, and we put it on paper. We and we could belabor this point, and I certainly will not. We could put legal structure to it. We could get contracts, we could buy life insurance, we could set aside money on a systematic basis for a rainy day. And I think that last one probably hits in one of the most ongoingly important features of great relationships, whether we're anticipating a loss or whether, like me, I have rose-colored glasses, I'm hoping to be with my wife until we're 150 years old, is this idea of the emotional piggy bank. And I know you've talked about that, and you're aware that you know, you go back to Stephen Covey's work, and he talks about it in terms of both familial as well as business relationships. But Gottman and others have kind of pulled this and said that this it's a relational piggy bank. And the kind of things that we do, like when I'm in class, and I've told my students this, I said, I don't advocate you get on the phone and stuff when other people are doing things in class is certainly a weird place for you to be on your phone as opposed to learning with your classmates and learning with me. But I told them as well, if we're talking about a principle and it reminds me of something that I just really love about Janelle, I'm gonna say, hold that thought, everybody. And I'll grab my phone and I'll text her, you know, like an I love you uh sign language emoji, or I'll just tell her she's hot or something like that. And they giggle about it. But indeed, I'm not doing it to be indecent about texting in class. Well, I'm trying to teach them a principle about if you have a contribution to make to your relational piggy bank, why wait till later? Because A, I forget stuff, not forget that how much I love my wife, but I get other things in my life that make it difficult for me to remember. Same reason take a shopping list to the grocery store. But B, why not give to that individual in the moment that may be good, bad, or ugly for them on the other end of that sharing of what you're doing, that little nudge, little wind in their sales, sorts of things. Those are contributions that hopefully later, maybe I'm on a business trip or we're away or whatever, and she feels like I really would just like a hug right now. She doesn't have one, but she might open her phone and see that, you know, that that picture or whatever it is. It's it's in the account. And then, of course, there's when I stumble and fall and I make dumb choices and things that I need to ask forgiveness for and whatever else. We may need to pull from that piggy bank, but by and large, as we're moving towards the future, just like estate planning, until you know, setting aside things so where I could live off of them. We're hoping that this emotional piggy bank will work to our benefit if we live to our 65th wedding anniversary. Now, because we're talking about what we're talking about, let's add in one additional wrinkle. What about if we only make it to our 15th, like some of my widows? Dave, I had a gal who had buried two husbands by the age of 40. Which to me, I'm like, most people don't even know what that means to do it the first time. And I had an 18-year-old that had already buried her husband, and weedest stories of the way what they were able to do with the short, short time that they had. But I think in life, let's say we're moving along in the regular and expected pattern and things are going well, we have the ups and downs of life. Is it going to be a week in the in the tropics that's going to really build our relationship to that next level? Or is it going to be the little things that we do over time? Um, I think that the accumulation of those things, and we can talk about this later as well, but the accumulation of those little things in estate planning normally isn't a big drop of money that I'm then set for the future. It's setting aside a bunch so that when the future comes, no matter how grisly that future might be, I've got something to live off. And I'm I think in a similar sense, the relational piggy bank does that for us. So it's in a sense, it's like that estate planning.

SPEAKER_01 42:51

Yeah, I I love that. Um, I'm curious then with that, with that kind of those deposits, you know, what are two or three things right now couples listening can can do starting right now today to build a relationship that not only thrives during life, but also provides strength and meaning even after loss, you know, if or when when that's going to come.

SPEAKER_00 43:13

Yeah,

Time Talk Togetherness Starting Today

SPEAKER_00 43:14

this is a great question. And I could go back through things that you've talked about in past episodes, the books that I've read, the ones that got me through grad school, and the ones that I continue to read because I'd love to just build with my wife. There's one in particular, and probably there's there's a couple of copies in that bookshelf back there, but Van Epp's work, you're familiar with of how not to fall in love with a jerk. Title alone is something that people should just carry the book around because it's a conversation starter. He's got a principle in there that's that's wonderful. And it's not his, other than he gave it this nice alliteration. He said, You need time, talk, and togetherness with each other. So if I think about time, maybe this goes back to that earlier question is the more time that I have, the better I can. Utilize the piggy bank of our relationship together. Maybe I'm not as aggrieved. It's not that I'm not sad. It certainly doesn't mean you look at somebody and say, hey, at least you got 60 years together with. Remember, we don't minimize each other's grief and that. But time with that spouse would allow me to, as Van Epp talks about it in his RAM model, this idea of I will get to know them and with that knowledge be able to trust or understand that I know exactly what would happen in a set of circumstances. So back to, I think I used the example earlier is, and I watched a woman kind of stew with this as she had her now teenagers getting ready to graduate, to go on LDS missions, to get married. And she had all these big financial decisions she was going to make. And he had been the money guy in their relationship, which is super common that one spouse is the money person over the other. Um, but in that conversation, she started to well up with tears and these concerns about the future. It's like, I really wish he were here. He makes better financial decisions than I do. I would feel more confident with it. But almost in that moment, she she walked back as a, but I know what he'll do. And this is what we're going to do with this graduation and with this marriage, and how I'm going to at what level help the university student and so forth. And it's it's almost like it just like elevated her, kind of puffed her up in that moment to feel strongly about something that was hard. So the time together allowed him to do it. The talk, of course, is not just talking at each other. I can talk to my wife about who's who's going to pick up who from soccer and take to music lessons or whatever it is, but but the talk that builds and adds to the piggy bank, the talk that allows us to get to know each other, the Gobman's Love Maps kind of talk where I know your greatest fears, you know mine. And the first person to be standing at an ovation at the finish line for you is me, and and vice versa. We just know we have the talk allows us to connect. So that builds intimacy. And then, of course, the last is togetherness. Um I'm grateful for the advent of modern technology, but this is something that, and I know they're going to say the older generation can play with the younger generation. Mobile devices, social media, even the fact that we have FaceTime and some of those other things can never, never replicate this. And I don't have to just say it from my vantage point. Even talking with all the military families that I work with and so forth, they love that from how it used to be, we had to wait for a specific time to have a call, to, to Skype and some of those other things in FaceTime. I can literally talk to them almost every day of the week if I need to now. Right from the horse's mouth. It is not the same as them sitting on the couch down next to me and talking about the same issue with how are we going to pay the bills next month or celebrating the championship uh little league baseball game or whatever it is. Those those three time talk and togetherness, how to formulate that in a person's life would be no matter how or high water comes in their life, or you're together until you're both centenarians, they're gonna be significant and integral parts of successful relationship.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

Yeah, man, I love that. Time talk togetherness. I it reminds me of something. Um I don't know if this is the most helpful thing to say or not. This is years ago, so I was not a counselor, and uh, you know, our listeners are asked Dr. Liz. So I do more education, but I was in actually a clergy position at this point in my life, and there's a couple, I mean, they were struggling. I offer, you know, refer, I've got connections, of course, here at the university. I refer to to therapists and counselors, but to this couple, I just felt like saying, you know, uh if uh if you knew that your partner was was gonna pass away in 30 days, I said, would would you treat them differently? How would you treat them differently? If you knew, like, okay, you have 30 days left. You know, would you prioritize your would you talk differently with them? Would you prioritize your time that is you're talking about, you know, that togetherness? How would you treat your your partner or your spouse differently if you if you knew, yeah, you had like 30 days, you know, I just said 30 days, but uh, but it's that period of time and and um you know what it made them kind of pause and be like, wow, it puts kind of things in perspective and realize people are more important than than problems. And I and I think it helped at least for a season to kind of at least shake them for a second and be like, hey, you know, what's most important here? I don't know. Your take on something like that.

SPEAKER_00 48:28

I think it's it's sage advice, those those exercises. Um, be because of the work I do, I don't dwell in the macabre part of it of like losing Janelle. I will be honest, like if she said she was going to be home by 11 and it's like 12:30 or whatever because I got stuck in traffic coming back from a game or something. My mind probably does some hamster wheeling that a lot of people's minds don't do. I will grab that. But for the most part, I think kind of like the the Tim McGraw, kind of what you're saying, this live like you're dying, is there something? And I'd love to say that I was perfect at it every day. That would be so far from the truth. But this idea of what is most important here? It's like great old recommendation about like washing the dishes or whatever, and you're cussing out the kids because they're not washing them right or whatever. And they said chores in the house are meant to bring you closer together, and if they're not bringing you closer together, don't bother doing them. Certainly, when you take a step back, like it's not like we don't clean the house because it's not bringing us closer together, but how do I wash the dishes and come closer together? How, how, how do I navigate this financial issue or the fact that I hate your hunting and you hate my shopping or whatever it is? Like, but but what is it the bigger thing that you want through this? Would you treat them or would you speak to them differently? I think that's that is a great, great question to make the time, the talk, and the togetherness that we do spend be contributions, donations, endowments into that that continue to give gifts long after the experience is over. I like it. I think that's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 50:06

We'll be right back after this brief message.

SPEAKER_01 50:19

And we're back. Let's dive right in.

Divorce, Abuse, And Rebuilding Wants

SPEAKER_01 50:23

Talk to me a little bit, uh, Ryan. We're we've talked mainly of loss, you know, uh, of death. There are other losses, as you mentioned, you know, loss of this is a job, or I thought that professional direction of a an athlete talked about a pet. Okay, I know many of our listeners have been through um divorces, separation, divorces, and that may, again, each one is is going to be unique because one, it's maybe like, you know, finally, and maybe one didn't see it coming, but even for those who kind of filing still have this sense of like, ah, this this loss. Uh what do you know? How much do you know kind of about that same type of a loss through through a separation or divorce?

SPEAKER_00 51:01

That is somewhat out of the tree of my research, in that that's not where I gathered the data. And then I think there would be an interesting wrinkle, and I don't want to walk this and then come around full circle to say, okay, big principles work, wouldn't depend, doesn't matter what you're talking about. It's kind of like that old adage of, you know, uh kind of scriptural in nature, faith to move mountains. And then I'll ask students when we're talking about coping and those kinds of things, and what different um challenges people might be going through, when would this principle work or not? If faith can move mountains, I'm like, how many times have you had to move a mountain? And everybody kind of, when they realize I'm asking them literally to tell me a time that it would have been needful for them to move an actual mountain out of the way. Like, well, never. I said, So if it can do that, it probably can do all of these lesser things, right? So maybe I'll try to come full circle with that. But one of the main differences, at least at the stage in grief and loss, and I am keenly interested in all sorts of grief and loss, is to this idea of intimacy to lose a spouse when you're still in love with them, has this kind of persistent impact. For many of those, not all, I just met somebody the other day whose whose spouse left them and they were still madly in love. For many, the love has been able to grow in a different direction. There are the accounts into which we've been depositing for quite some time might have been fairly negative, the coins that we're putting in there, if you will, so to speak. So the idea of that being a feature that sustains them thereafter, um, in all ways, but but one. And this one came to me in an extraordinarily heavy set of circumstances when I was given the privilege to teach uh stronger relationship education in an abuse shelter. And it was a it was a uniquely uh eye-opening experience for me for a couple of different reasons. First, as I walked in to this building, it was like hidden in plain sight. I could understand why as I thought about the architecture and the geography of where this was in the middle of town. Like I saw, I saw the building, but I didn't realize what it was. It would make sense that not everybody would want, they wouldn't want everybody to know what the building was, right? For very onerous reasons. And when I walked in, I'm in a completely mirrored room with a you know a conversation button to talk with folks behind the desk. It's like, why are you here? And I'm so on and so from Weaver State University. I've come to do these healthy relationships classes. And they buzzed me in. And then the second thing, I'm the only man in the building. And within 90 seconds of, you know, my hard head, I'm like, this is a pretty sacred opportunity that you have. Handle it with much care. As I sat down in a room with a bunch of women who had literally flee to this location for their lives. And we were talking about healthy relationships, and one of them called me on it, so to speak, in the middle of what we were doing. And I recognized, oh, yeah, I probably need to be more than just the Pollyanna-ish if we get it right, when we get it right, great relationships do X, Y, and Z for my health, my wealth, my my ongoing well-being. And she said, but what if from my grandfather to my father to every single one of my lovers and partners, I've only known what it's like to be a punching back? And I looked at that woman's face and I realized the difference in life experiences that we all go through and what she had experienced, I knew I could never understand at the level what she was doing it. Again, you know, I we we said that that voice that comes to you, and you know it's not yours, but it's it's gold, comes in and says, ask her if she hasn't gathered in all of her experiences what she does want, not the things that she's running away from for so very good reasons. And I posed that question, and I said, Well, I think that we have some pretty clear ideas of what you don't want and what you don't deserve ever in a relationship. Could you tell me some of the things as we're doing this handwriting exercise of what you do want? And she was, she was still angry. She'd been cussing at me and other things like that. And I embraced it. I think that was a good place for me to be able to, as an educator, to allow people to kind of think out loud to stuff that they've never been given the right or the opportunity to think out loud. And it would have been great for her to have a Dr. Liz in her life to be able to process that as therapy. But here, she was like, it was like she she she raised up to say something, and the question mark caught her, and she thought for a second. And Dave, she went from angry, ready to punch me in the mouth to tears just welling up in her eyes. And she looked, she got a look on her face of, I got you, and she went to riding. And she just, I thought she was gonna get tennis elbow, wrote and wrote, and wrote. So even in the losses like those associated with divorce, where all of the dreams in the future may have gone a different direction because we started living our lives in separate ways, and togetherness doesn't feel right, it's not right, or there might be like this this gal and and and all of those in that cadre that were there, um, not good for you to stay in it anymore. I think the persistence of A, you deserve it, and B, what are you looking for? Can with the listeners be both an invitation, and I was gonna say a dare. There's a word in Portuguese that works better, this idea of desafio, but it's it's like an invitation for something that's bigger and outside of this thing that we're talking about, like when you're a kid and somebody dares you to do a flip-bottom of a trampoline or something. It's a dumb, it's a dumb connection between the two, but I'm I'm getting this mental picture of how to describe that. Yeah, does that make sense to your great question? Yeah, yeah, it does.

SPEAKER_01 57:06

Can you talk uh even briefly a little bit about um the pain of grief and kind of you know in the brain and physical, physical pain. You know what I'm talking about? That type of explain that maybe for listeners so they can understand and not like deep into the chemistry and all that, but just kind of the principle about it.

SPEAKER_00 57:24

No,

When Grief Feels Like Physical Pain

SPEAKER_00 57:25

grief, and there's a great, if I can find the exact verbiage on this, I'd just like to share it with you. But it talks about the fact that grief is psychological, it's biological, it's psychosocial, it's spiritual, and it's cognitive. I mean, it is really taxing. And we can measure all of those things to then come back to the construct of grief to identify this is different than than depression, this is different than sadness, this is different. Like grief is unique in that way. Um, researchers kind of looked at the idea of pain and they they butted it up against that old uh playground um nursery rhyme, whatever you want to call it, where it is like sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me. And and really, when they when they looked at the fMRI images and some of those other things, of what lights up in the central nervous system is when individuals feel pain, especially pain associated with loneliness, it lights up the exact same regions of the brain. And all that that means, we're not sure, but it lights up the exact same regions as if I kicked you and you experienced physical pain. So, really, when we say the pain and anguish associated with grief, it isn't poetry. It's it's at the same time literal. And for many, I think it's it's complicating because they'll describe in some of the memoirs that are just so beautifully harrowing in the way that they're written, is this this hold in the chest, the punch in the gut, the the I can't breathe kind of feelings that has those physiological. So for whatever it is, and we're continuing to get to know more about it, this thing that we're calling grief is something that from head to toe, and including outside of yourself, if we include the the spiritual aspects and those sorts of things, it's it's something that has a significant and a painful impact on the individual.

SPEAKER_01 59:23

Yeah, yeah, well summarized. Thank you. Just want yeah, listeners to remember that, to know that that the pain is so real, lighting up the same areas of the brain is physical injury. Yeah, pain to them. Um Ryan, you've mentioned that you've you've interviewed, you know, many of the these widows. I would love to hear a story, uh, an example, you know, that shows these principles into practice. Do you have something like that?

SPEAKER_00 59:50

Oh, absolutely.

Stories That Prove Love Persists

SPEAKER_00 59:51

And it's one that I love. I share it all the time when I'm trying to teach the principle of the magnificence of a relationship, even out beyond death. So before Zoom was trendy because of the COVID shutdown and those kinds of things, I was using it in college because you could record and um uh you you could uh encrypt. And so I'm meeting these women from all across the country by word of mouth as uh it spread to be able to have these interviews. And one very care colourful individual. She was cussing up a storm while she was sharing the stories with me, really kind of animated, kind of angry, very passionate, of course, and made total sense to me. I mean, she's talking about her husband that she had lost in in the last couple of three years. At one point, she stops and she says, Ryan, I'm so sorry about my language and so forth. And I said, Hey, hey. I said, I am researching this. I I your candor is the most important thing in this story, like how it was for you, and if that's the way to get your points across, I appreciate you sharing these deep things with me. And she said, It's just uh, how do I put it, Ryan? She said, everyone needs to feel like this. And mind you, we were on Zoom. I do not know, Dave, because I don't remember what my face had done. And she pauses really quickly. She's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I hope that Janelle is not just alive and well in the other room, but for years to come. That isn't what I mean by that. I mean, oh everyone needs to love that deeply so that when it's gone, it hurts that bad. Boy, I was grateful for technology, my friend, because I went from taking notes to pondering things of the heart, like I was stuck in what she had just said and what that might mean to me about the value and the continuation and the strength of and the extension of those strong relationships. It was really something that was just so meaningful.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:50

Wow, yeah. Stop you like right in your tracks. And one of those things, I guess it just changes your perspective uh on a lot of on a lot of things. It rap Brian, that reminds me of I've got a um uh story I'm trying, I was trying to think, you know, during this of examples of people who I know who have lost um spouses. And I remember one now. Actually, is so we lived in Missouri for nine years. I was a professor at the University of Missouri, and uh the friend group that we had out there really was like family, it was been holidays and things together. And um, this couple, uh, his wife, I believe they'd been married um around, I don't know, 17, 18 years. They had three uh children. I think the oldest was about um 13 and maybe 10, and then about you know seven or eight years old. And his wife went through cancer and it was in remission, and then it came back with a vengeance uh in the brain. It was just sad to see them go downhill. We had kind of one last time where just the friends, we all got together and did things, and she was at a wheelchair and knew she didn't have much longer. And then he knew that I you know, I talked on marriage and things, and after she passed, and we I'm looking at a picture on my screen here, um, of all the friends together at the funeral. Um, and then he he said that I could share this, and so I shared this in presentations, but I think it really resonates with our our topic um today. And he says this This is a quote. He says, There have been many times over the past year when I would be contemplating our scenario, and I would feel not just guilt, but disappointed in myself for all the trivial things we would argue about. I wish I would have been more proactive about doing things for her, not just helping with chores around the house, but doing things that would let her know that she was special. We had a great marriage, best friends, but it's so easy to get caught up in everyday life and forget to do those things that really matter. And I just feel like wow, doing those things for each other that really matter, making sure that she knows that she is is is special. I'm I'm curious, let me ask you this. If someone listening, you know, were to lose their spouse tomorrow, what would you hope they could say about the relationship they built? And how do we start building that kind of relationship today for those who are living?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:11

Well, it's an extension of that great story and and quote you shared from your friend. I actually, at the end of many of my interviews with my widows, uh in talking to them what they had now been through, I said, Okay, you're you're a veteran now. And that'd usually get a little chuckle or at least a little side smile out of them. I said, What if your your best friend, your sister that's close to you, whatever, called you later today, and heaven forbid, uh said, He, you know, I lost him in a car accident or whatever it was. He's not coming home. I said, knowing what you know now, like what would you do? And it to some degree, the question you've asked me is not that, but it aligns because the very first reaction of every single one of them, Dave, was, oh, I have no idea. I don't know that there is a perfect. And I think if we can, if we can get kind of get that out of our minds, it kind of aligns really nicely with Pauline Boss's work when she says clother closure is a myth. So as soon as you can get rid of the fact that there's anything you were going to say or you were gonna do which is gonna make it perfect, then you can get on with the real action or activity of life, right? But within that, the real action and activity of life, if you will, like what you just shared out of that quote, I think is is a beautiful thing. Um, when those women, after thinking about it for just a quick moment, those widows would commonly then just say, you know what? I would go over and I would see a need and I would fill a need. If the garbage can need to go out to the street, if the dishes were in the sink, I wouldn't ask, hey, I'm here, what can I do for you? Because in the fog of all of that loss or in the heaviness of life and the way that it is, people commonly don't know the answer to that question. Just don't ask, just do. I mean, assume you are a person that's okay to be in their kitchen washing dishes. Right. Don't be weird about it. We've talked a little bit about that before, but I believe from the time that we're talking about right here, right now, um, it's very Buddhist of me to say this, but you know, the past is obviously something I should learn from. And the future, I really can't do a whole lot about it in particular, but I can build, like what Bowlby said, you know, Bulby and Ainsworth in those attachment theory conversations, a secure base. And the way that I do that is like my neighbor right now across the street is pouring the foundation in this home. It's doing those parts. He dug first, he laid gravel next, and then he bought and paid for and brought in the cement. They poured it and they formed it and they smoothed it. Like the work of the day today, instead of calling it a secure base, call it a secure bank. If you want to kind of dovetail it into what we've been talking about, to make those daily contributions. If you're listening to this and you're thinking to yourself, I've been a little lackluster. I can align my thoughts here, here with what Dave just read from his friend. Pause the show, or if you're watching it with somebody who's meaningful to you, go and give them a hug. Text them the I love you or whatever, a meme or something. Make a contribution in that today. And then, like my kids who can't give up a streak on their social media apps and things like that, do it tomorrow, do it the next day. And then don't break the streak. We're gonna be imperfect and we're gonna make messes, but control what you can by right now loving them, hugging them, holding their hand, both literally, yes, of course, but also figuratively. Check in after that doctor's appointment or that interview. How did it go? And if they meet something from you, don't necessarily try to fix it, hear them out, unless they want you to fix it and then do it, meeting them where they are, but doing little things day in and day out. When they look back and they can say, you know, we never scaled uh Kilimanjaro together. We we never spent two months in the Caribbean like we had thought about, and we certainly never had a million dollars in the bank. But my best friend and I knew it, and they knew it, and nobody outside of us would ever deny it. I think that's the kind of relationship people would look back on fondly, and is probably at least part and parcel of what we're talking about in terms of it would be meaningful, even in including the loss of that individual through death.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:26

We'll be right back after this brief message. And we're back.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:40

Let's dive right in.

Resources, Key Marriage Principle, Takeaway

SPEAKER_01 1:08:44

So powerful, my friend. This has just been such a I don't know, any uh, I think it's it's deep and it's an important discussion, something we haven't been talking about on the on the show that I think will really resonate with people. Before, as we kind of wrap up this, I'm curious, people who want to learn more about uh your work or dive deeper into this topic, you know, books, helpful resources, things that we can put in the show notes. You know, where can they where can they go? What what resources do you recommend?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:14

Well, if if you wanted to kind of be inert about it, you could look at my dissertation, which is the long form of maybe two or three studies that will come out in the next couple of years that I I suggest those will be more palatable, they'll be more digestible. Um my hope is to extend that to more. Can I hand this over to somebody who's not another academic reading it? Yeah, that young widow's grief that I wrote, it's been a better part of 10 years now, is a place you could look at it from an academic lens. But there are some other things that I've noticed since doing that work, is I've kind of steeped myself in the principles here to hear it through the lived experiences of others. And some there are some great memoirs out there. Um ones that come to mind as you ask the question is like Cheryl Sandberg. Uh, she has this great uh um book, and it's called Plan B, maybe Option B, but it's the idea of when she lost her husband at a young age and and being in the C-suite at Facebook at the time, she kind of journaled out loud to everybody else about what she was going through and the messiness of it all and so forth, but principles about you know how that relationship was meaningful to her, but what she could do to live and move on with that grief until not move on from that grief. That's powerful. Um, Joan Didian's year of magical thinking, I think is a classic one that comes out, which is a heavy one to read. But side by side, we remember we're talking about like the estate planning aspect of it, the things that you do today that benefit tomorrow. So when you look at the things that you and Liz have been doing, and looking down the principles of Gaudman and Van Epp and Love and Stosney, how to improve your relationship without talking, great book. Uh, and reading about Sue Johnson's work or Levine and Howler Wright, or going back to the classics and understanding at whatever stage of life you're in, what's the best ways to live healthier and happier? Those are all things that I think that a piece at a time we build our strengths and our abilities. And as we practice those, we bring our relationship into what we're learning and we we we elevate. We elevate the experience today, and heaven forbid if we need it, but for most of us, we're not going to need it in a I buried somebody at age 35, like we've been talking about. Even in including talking to my 80-plus-year-old mother, the fondness and admiration she has for my dad just carries her, and it's a beautiful thing to watch, even in including through those tears, a real estate plan. His finances are taking care of her, but their relationship, Dave, that's really what's what's carrying. So looking at those things and doing those things today, I think is maybe easier than we might consider in somewhat of a complicated conversation on death and grief.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:56

Yeah. Wow. Thanks, Ryan. Hey, as we wrap up, uh, we like to ask all of our guests a couple of questions. The first one, what do you what do you feel like is is a key, maybe not the key, but uh a key to a stronger marriage connection.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:12

Um looking through all the principles and and building kind of what you need, where you need it, is always going to be important. So I'd be remiss to not say looking back over the hundred and many episodes, the different principles you've highlighted through those guests, those are core ingredients. So always learning. I mean, how much time do I spend in the gym to be physically fit? How much time do I go to continuing education to build my career? How much time do I watch what I eat or whatever? And then I think for various people, but there's going to be higher and lower measures on all of those things. But how many of us are spending any time, let alone much time, to build the most important thing that will last longer than my career? And apparently, from what I'm researching, longer than my life, like, am I putting effort into that? So the Gottman-based principle of uh little things often, I I will write sometimes on the the chocolate or the whiteboard, and I'll write down a lot of little things, and then I'll just turn around and I'll ask the class, I'll ask the like the group, um, what is that? And they'll look at me like, what do you what do you mean? I said, Well, forgive the handwriting, but what what is that? And they'll say a lot of little things. I said, It's a lot, and I circle a lot. I said, it doesn't have to be the big million-dollar gift, it doesn't have to be the the house on the hill, it doesn't have to be the trip, it doesn't have to be what becomes a lot is so I I think the key, the core, maybe that that Ryan takes away from this, and he wants to live a better life, steeped in what he is, what I'm sharing with you today. I think that's at the at the core of many keys that we could we could be talking about.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:52

Yeah, amen, my friend. Yeah. Love that. And uh and finally, what's a takeaway of the day? Just man, from all the things we've been talking about, what's a take-home message you hope our listeners will remember from our discussion?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:05

Don't put off to tomorrow what you can do today. And I know that's something that you might have on your mirror, your refrigerator, or whatever, and it could get cliche. But like when I'm texting in my class with my students, he, if I'm feeling it, I want to share it with Chanel. But that's an important feature of our relationship. And you don't have to copycap me. I think everyone can find their own way of doing that. But the the point is we're we're living lives together in parallel, oftentimes, like you're going through one thing, I'm going through something, and it happens to be, you know, whatever o'clock on a Monday morning. I I get that, but but what about this idea of when we've made a we in a relationship, we are living it together, even and including when we're separated by geography, which is the more common, but we're bringing into the viewers today's or or the listeners today's lives, even when life separates us, don't don't put off because I I don't want to be macabre and not casting this on anybody like you're gonna lose them. But what if you did? The coulda, shoulda, woulda's can be awfully painful. As we're saying, the piggy bank can be awfully powerful.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:20

Oh man. Just gave me chills, my friend. This is what a what a great discussion. This has been so unique. Um you know, my takeaway, I I echo what you're talking about. I come back and I look at this quote on my screen, you know. I wish I would have been more proactive about doing things for her, not just chores around the house, but uh letting her know that she was special. Don't forget to do those things that really matter. And I it is just intentional effort because the natural person in us is just kind of drifts. We just kind of drift. It's the little the law of least effort, I call it. We just kind of give the the minimum to kind of get through each day and then do it again tomorrow. But man, yeah, intentional little things that a lot of little things often love that, Ryan. Um can't thank you enough, my friend, for making making time to to come on to share so much. Um yeah, deep, important, like the core of who we are type of of stuff. So already this has just been an episode to to remember. So genuinely uh appreciate you for coming on.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:27

Yeah, it's it's been great. And again, you and I talked about this earlier, but even preparing for this reminds me of who I want to be, not just for Janelle, but as in general. So it is a pleasure to to re-uh invigorate some of my own thoughts on things that we've been learning for quite some time.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:46

Yeah, yeah, same here. Yeah, feeling it, feeling it, my friend. Um, all

Closing And How To Support

SPEAKER_01 1:16:51

right, friends, that does it for us. We will see you next time on another episode of the Stronger Marriage Connection podcast. And Liz is not here, so I'll say her line, remember, is the small things done consistently that create a stronger marriage connection. Let's see. Thanks for joining us today. Hey, do us a favor and take a second to subscribe to our podcast and the Utah Marriage Commission YouTube channel at Utah Marriage Commission, where you can watch this and every episode of the show. Be sure to smash the like button, leave a comment, and share this episode with a friend. You can also follow and interact with us on Instagram at StrongerMarriageWife and Facebook at Stronger Marriage. So be sure to share with us which topics you love, which guests we should have on the show next. If you want even more resources to improve your marriage or relationship connection, visit strongermarriage.org where you'll find free workshops, e-courses, in-depth webinars, relationship surveys, and more. Each episode of Stronger Marriage Connection is hosted and sponsored by the Utah Marriage Commission at Utah State University. And finally, a big thanks to our producer, Rex Polanis, and the team at Utah State University, and you, our audience, you make this show possible. The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the views of the Utah Marriage Commission.