Why Turning 39 Hit Harder Than I Expected w/ Lauren Najar

What happens when you reach the age that changed your parent's life forever?

As I reflect on my 39th birthday, I found myself thinking about a number that carries deep meaning. Thirty-nine was the age my mom was diagnosed with colon cancer, and reaching that same milestone brought up unexpected emotions about grief, family, identity, and the passage of time.

In this deeply personal episode, I'm sharing memories of my mother's cancer journey, the challenges of losing both parents at a young age, and the realization that I never got the chance to know my mom as an adult. As I reach the same age she was when she was diagnosed, I reflect on how grief evolves over time and the surprising ways her influence continues to shape my leadership style, work ethic, and approach to building a business today. 

If you've ever lost someone you love, struggled with unanswered questions, or wondered how the people who shaped you continue to influence your life, this episode will leave you thinking differently about legacy, grief, and the stories we carry with us.

Chapters:

00:40 Why Turning 39 Feels So Significant

03:20 The Story Behind My Mom's Cancer Diagnosis

07:40 Losing My Mom at 21 Years Old

11:10 How Grief Changes As You Get Older

14:00 The Reality of Never Knowing My Mom as an Adult

17:00 The Questions I Wish I Could Ask

20:20 Why Reaching Certain Ages Feels Different

24:10 The Impact My Mom Still Has on My Life 

27:30 The Leadership Lessons I Learned From Watching My Mom

30:20 How My Mom Influenced My Business Without Knowing It

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hey there and welcome to Business Over Cocktails. I'm Laura Najar, your host and hype woman, bringing you real talk about entrepreneurship. This is the podcast where we dive into the bold whys, the messy middles, and the game-changing aha moments that lead to success. You'll hear unfiltered stories from entrepreneurs plus bite-sized solo episodes inside the Business Chaser series, where we cut through the noise and get straight to what actually drives sales, visibility, and growth. So whether you're here to get fired up or finally feel seen in your business journey, pull up a seat, pour your favorite drink, and let's have a real conversation. And today I have a little bit of a story for you today. So I am recording this actually right after my birthday, which was on June 20th, and I turned 39, which I feel like is such a big number. I actually think sometimes it's bigger than the actual big 4-0 because it's the last year and a very meaningful decade for me. And I'll I'll kind of go into some details around why this was such a huge, huge number for me. But first of all, thank you for listening to this podcast. I am the host of Business Over Cocktails. And if we don't know each other yet, I'm a business coach. I have a marketing agency as well, and I host dinners and retreats in addition to this podcast. So welcome, welcome. I'm so glad that you are here, and I'm so excited to get to know each other a little bit more. Please reach out to Business Over Cocktails on Instagram if you have any thoughts or want to hear anything on future episodes. So today I want to talk about turning 39, and I want to kind of like talk about my relationship with my mom and how that shaped with me today. And Business Over Cocktails definitely is the type of podcast where we're not education-based. So bringing it back to the story of it all, and you know, talking about things that have actually shaped to where, you know, us founders are in our business. And so I hope that you received this episode today and maybe you you'll resonate maybe a little bit about this. But in case you don't know, if you don't know my story, my mom passed away in 2008. She battled colon cancer on and off for five to six years. Like I think it, I think it was like five, it was between five or six years. I forget at this point. But she passed away in 2008. It was definitely kind of sudden despite her having a cancer battle. She was first diagnosed when she was 39 years old. So that is why 39 was a big number for me to reach. She ended up passing away at 46. So I guess, well, doing the math, that was seven years, I guess. She passed away at 46 years old. And myself, as I reach 39 and approach my 40s, and you know, I have a group of friends who are 40, 41, 42 years old. And to start thinking of my mom as somebody in her 40s, as I know people in their 40s, is really mind-blowing to me. I think growing up, especially over the course of nearly 20 years since she's been gone, you know, I think of her as my mom, right? You think of like child mom dynamic. And it has been very hard for me to get to a point where I'm remembering what she went through at certain ages. And, you know, I was 14 or 15 when she was first diagnosed. I think it was right before my 14th birthday. This 14th or 15th birthday when she was first diagnosed and she was 39. And I was very young and didn't understand it. I know that we were very nervous, and I know she was very sick, and she had lost a ton of weight. Where me as a 15-year-old, I weighed at, I think, like around 120 pounds. I played softball, I was athletic, I was muscular. I'm 5'6. I was 5'6 back then as well. And my mom weighed less than I did. And then her whole life she was overweight. She was, you know, for she was also 5'6. Even though she was very active, you know, she just overweight, struggled with her weight a lot. And for her to lose, she lost like 40 pounds, if not 50 or 60 pounds in a matter of a month or two. And it was just really scary for us to see somebody who had been there for us for all of our lives, did everything for us, ran around to all of our events. You know, there's three of us siblings, and she was with us every step of the way. Room mom, baseball coach, basketball coach. She was a lot of things to a lot of people. And, you know, she was definitely larger than life, I feel. She was definitely loud, outgoing, not loud in a bad way. Just, you know, she knew a lot of people. And when she came home from the hospital, and just like that whole summer, I remember just how thin she was and sickly she looked, and she couldn't really do much, and that really scared us. So she actually ended up going into remission for five years and then was diagnosed again. There was a tumor that came back, and something that maybe you don't know. And you might know if if you have someone in your family that has gone through colon cancer, but colon cancer is tumor-based, meaning that, like, you know, when my mom had colon cancer, she had a softball-sized tumor in her colon. It was touching like some of the other organs around those areas as well, which they had to take pieces of that out, like part of her colon and small intestine and kidneys and all of that. So she ended up getting cancer again five years later, and there was like a lump in her neck, and it was directly related to colon cancer. You know, from what we understood at that time, was that colon cancer jumps around and it's tumor-based. And it could be tumor-based, so she was just, you know, diagnosed again with like, you know, she relapsed essentially. What's different with that is I feel like I'm like the cancer expert here. Like you're gonna hear me talk about this a lot because I had cancer twice. I was diagnosed three years after she had passed away, was diagnosed in 2011 my first time, and I had a cancer that was a blood cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma or Hodgkin's disease. It's related to leukemia, and that is the infection of your lymph nodes. So where leukemia is a blood cancer, lymphoma is related to that, and it is the cancer of the lymph nodes, essentially. And so for me, because I had it twice as well, how it infects you is it doesn't necessarily like jump around your body. It is infected because your blood flows throughout your body, right? So, okay, now I kind of like gotten a little technical, but that is even though my mom had cancer in her neck the second time, it was directly related to whatever was, you know, causing her colon cancer. So that's what we found. And she ultimately passed away from having a blood clot. She had a couple blood clots that were found earlier that year, and then just one day one of the blood clots got loose and just immediately went into her heart and she died almost instantly, pretty instantly, I should say. I was not there. I was actually at work, and everyone else, my family, was home. My dad was asleep, my sister was home, my brother was home. And so they they got to witness all of that, and which very traumatic. But for myself, I was at work and my sister called me and I came rushing to the hospital. So so all of that is still, as you can tell, is very still fresh in my mind. And th these are things I carry with me on a daily basis. And whenever I tell these stories, I remember how old she was. And that is just something it's always in my memory. I remember her being 39. I remember her being 46 when she passed away. And as I approach my 40s, I really had a hard time with this number. And a few months ago, I was driving home. I remember I was like driving home, I think, from Chicago, and I was on the highway, and I just I was listening to something, listening to some music on the radio, and I just instantly started like crying because 39 feels really heavy. And if you follow me on Instagram around my birth on my birthday, I actually made a very like I made a post about it where I talk about all these things I'm gonna talk about. It was a hard number to get to because, you know, I don't necessarily think it's a hard I think 46 will be a hard number to get to because that's when she passed away. But I think what's really weighing heavily on me now is not necessarily like, oh, I'm going to get cancer because I I already had cancer. But I feel that it's weird to catch up to my mom in age. And not a lot of people can say that. Like, you know, your parent, like sometimes I, you know, I come across people who their parents died when they were only like two or four or seven, right? Ten even. So they didn't really get to know their parents at all. And I didn't really get to know my mom as an adult. I was 21 when she passed away. And, you know, I feel like that summer when she was home more and not doing as much. And, you know, I stayed home. I think I I was more conscious about staying home more to help her around the house, I feel. And actually then that summer too, my sister started dating her now husband. So she was actually gone more. And I I remember being at home with her a lot by myself, and I just felt like we started having these really good conversations when I feel my whole life essentially as like a teenager and like going into like being 19 or 20. And when I got to college, I feel like our relationship started to turn a little bit more into like being more positive. And I don't think we've never really had like a horrible relationship. I have like little things here and there that I talk about, but you know, we see a lot of things on on Instagram now about being the eldest daughter, right? Like, eldest daughter, you carry a lot with you. There's like this whole all of these things that you see on TikTok and social media. And, you know, even Taylor Swift wrote a song about it. And my mom was an eldest daughter, and my grandma was an eldest daughter, my great grandma was an eldest daughter. So I come from a long line of strong-minded, stubborn women, and I know that I'm the same way. All of those women, you know, my grandma was one only daughter, and with, you know, boy siblings. My mom was the oldest of three kids, and she had two brothers only. She didn't have any sisters either. But I got to have, I was, you know, I'm fortunate enough to have a sister, and we're really close in age and close as a whole. But my relationship with my mom and my sister's relationship with my mom, we have talked about this in the past, like it's just vastly different. And I just think that my mom and I butted heads a lot more. And we just we definitely had different experiences for sure. And so I'm I'm okay, you know, I share my experience, you know, where I feel like we just didn't get along. I wanted to do things that she didn't want me to do, and in the sense of just like I wanted to go away to college and I was mad because they weren't letting me go away to college, and so just like things like that, like differing opinions of what I wanted to do in life and you know, just stuff like that. But I feel that when I think about going back to just how old she was, it's you know, I'm getting to the point where wow, like that's that age is definitely not that far away. And at the same time, it's like it grief takes on a whole new meaning. Grief takes on a whole new meaning, and I had a big reflection of that actually on my birthday. The number is heavy because it feels like there's a lot of things. There's I'll say like it I'm getting further away from knowing who she is, first of all. I don't know her as an adult. I I did I was robbed of that. I didn't get to know her as an adult, meaning we didn't really get to have adult conversations. You know, she never met my husband. I, you know, I didn't even know he ex my husband existed when she passed away. I didn't meet Darren until like four years later after she passed away. And all of that's hard. It's hard because it's been so long since she's passed. I don't know her. Like, it's really wild to think like as much as I do know about her, I don't know her. And I, you know, I didn't get to know just a different side of her. And I think I think we all kind of go through that. Not everyone, not everyone has, you know, good relationships with their parents, and I totally I also hear about that and I understand that. But I know with like a lot of my friends, you know, obviously your and for maybe most people is your your relationship as a kid, then as a teenager, as a young adult, and even maybe as an adult, as you start having kids and move out, like your relationship evolves. And I just don't think my mom and I, and any of my siblings, none of our relationships never got to evolve. She was just still mom and we were still kids. So it's it's hard because I think even becoming a mom and even becoming, you know, even just doing things on my own, it I feel like I would always think about my dad before I had kids. I would I would always think about my dad and my dad, and if you don't know, my dad also passed away in 2010. But I think like I really missed him and I would go through waves, but ever since I had Danny and was pregnant, and my mom has just been constantly on my mind, and I know that I've mentioned her in a lot of podcast episodes here. I think that it's hard to it's hard to get to this number. I'm very thankful I'm I am here, right? In my own story, in my own right, and you know, I survived cancer twice and you know, I'm taking care of myself as much as I can, and I was able to conceive naturally and have a baby and get through that all healthily, that's a word. But I think like having my mom there would have been obviously a different story, and I just have so many questions I wish I could ask her. So that's that's the reasoning why 39 feels heavy for me. And if anyone has lost a parent or, you know, even a sibling, I had one of my clients reach out to me and she mentioned that her older brother he passed away when he was 25, and you know, now she's 31. And it's just she was never supposed to be older than him, right? And maybe maybe one day we all get to that point when we're in our late 70s, 80s, 90s, where we surpass certain ages of certain people. But it's hard to it's just hard to think about that because I I think about getting to that 46 number. And I feel like, you know, it's getting louder and louder, like I don't know who she is. Like the more I live life, the more I have questions. And I I really do have some wonderful aunts and uncles that are able to fill the gaps for me here and there. But you know, my and I had my grandma for a long time after my mom passed away. My grandma who I was really close with, she passed away in 2019. And so she was able to fill in a lot of gaps for me. My grandpa, you know, he was with us until 2016, 2015. He filled in a lot of gaps too. You know, I was really close with him. And I think like if I have any words of advice to like hindsight's 2020, right? And I think most of you who are listening are adults. So, because I would say, like, if I were to go back and tell myself when I was like 18, it's like ask your mom all these questions. I would have never asked her those questions about like having babies and stuff like that. That's not even something I was thinking about. But what I wish I could ask my mom now is like just like pregnancy stuff or how it was being pregnant with me. Like I know some, like she's talked about that sometimes, but like just like there's so many questions I would ask. And it's like they're so tiny, but it's like I wish I knew. I wish I knew I had those perspectives. And so I think like if you can take anything from this podcast right now, or this episode is there's anything that you wish you could tell your mom or do with your mom, or even with your parents, or whoever is special, important with you in life, is like it's gonna suck when they're gone and you didn't get to do that. There's something recently I've been thinking about too. My dad, so I'm recording this episode, and in a week's time from this date, on June 29th, my dad will be gone 16 years. And there's some parts of even him that really stick with me. And I remember, like, and it kind of goes into what I'm saying here, but I remember he really wanted to like go out to the bar with us that we always really like to go out to. He was like, Yeah, maybe one of these days, like they have live music on these days, like we all should go. And he was really wanting to take us out and go out with us, and we never got a chance to do that. I did get to have like a beer with my dad, and you know, he bought me my first beer at my at a Cubs game when I turned 21. And so all of the we definitely got to like have drinks together, but like that part makes things sting, like it makes my heart sting because it makes me really sad we never got to do that. And I and I look back, I'm like, I was just busy. We were busy, we're going out with our friends, and you know, that's what he would have wanted to, right? But like I knew that he wanted to go out with us, and like there's just and there's always like that guilt of like I could have done more, but not gonna go into that right now. So I kind of want to talk about my mom though, and I might talk about her. I'm gonna have always themes around her too, but I try and think about like what I have from her that's making my business be successful in a way. I feel that oh, I don't know, I feel like she really wanted things to change with you know, things that she was passionate about or involved in. And I will take, you know, softball friends, since she was our softball coach. My parents grew up in Hammond, Indiana, and that's where I was born, that's where we lived for the first six years of my life, and then my family, we moved to Dyer, Indiana. And when we moved, I played Little League baseball with all the boys. That was like that was the only like T-ball version back then. Now I know that there's T-ball and softball, like softball leagues. But myself and there were a couple other girls on the team, and then we were all with all a bunch of boys. My dad was my coach, and then our first softball year, my sister and I played, and we played for Dyer, like at Dyer Park, and we lived right down the street from softball fields, which is so cool. My dad was again like our assistant coach, but by that following year, my mom then was a coach, and she decided to manage my sister, and then my dad was just an assistant coach with me. I had to move up to another age group. By that following year, so it's like three years in, my mom started getting heavily involved, and she got onto the board and was the equipment manager and started making her voice very well known very quickly. And I remember always having to help her reorganize like how the equipment was being handled because it was just like such a mess, and she was so organized. And as I talk, I am smiling because I'm hearing myself talk, I'm hearing the things I have that are similar now that I'm just like, oh, I forgot about all this stuff. But you know, mind you, this is like 1997, 1998. So yes, computers existed, but like we don't use them the way we would now. Like my mom was definitely the equivalent of like she would use Excel for everything now, but everything was written down, everything was categorized and numbered and organized, and you know, she would do inventory, she would have systems for everything. And, you know, she was doing that. She was our coach, she would manage teams, she was on the board of softball, and she ended up doing that until she couldn't anymore. There was never really a direct like retiring aspect to it all. She was always our coach in some form. She She loved keeping score, so she always had a scorebook in her hand, even though she was our manager. She would be the one to argue. She's been thrown out of games, not a lot, but she would argue. She would bring out the rule book and like point out what the rule was, and the umpire would change. My mom actually was an umpire when she was younger, and then she ended up becoming an umpire like as we got older. My dad as well, my brother as well, which is really cool. So, like, she just definitely like got more integrated into the Dyer softball program, and then, you know, just started becoming known in different cities and around us. So, like, because you know, we would play on the All-Star team, and then my sister and I were on travel and we played in high school, and you know, we would play different towns, we were in these tournaments. Like, my mom got to know other coaches from other places and other girls. And she was definitely like, I to this day, and if you're listening to this and you're like, Lauren, you're wrong, like please let me know. But I feel like my mom was more well known than like my sister and I in softball. And then my sister actually was more well known because she was a pitcher. I was still there, and I feel like whenever I go places, like people recognize my sister a lot. Again, because she she was such a good pitcher. My sister like balled out, like she was so, so good. Like anytime she wasn't pitching, I hated it because it just wasn't the same. Like, my sister was so freaking good. So good. And I played center field. I was a leadoff hitter, and the people that knew me knew me because I was on like other teams, maybe throughout the years. They knew I had a good arm, they knew I was fast, they knew I would sell bases. So I was known in that regard by people who already knew me, but like I was, I don't think I was known. And my mom was definitely the one that was like known because my mom actually like would coach teams when we weren't even on them. My mom just was so passionate about that. And like as I talk about this, I wish I could ask her why she liked it so much. Like I can kind of take guesses, but I would just love to hear why she liked it so much and why she wanted to get involved in that. And she, you know, she went to she went to college for business management. She didn't work though until I was about 12. She became a substitute teacher. So she was actually involved with kids again. She thought about going back to school to get some more hours to then become a teacher. Because there was like some kind of thing where you can just get more college credit hours and you can become a teacher without like a teaching degree, something like that. I don't know. I could be, I could be totally off base with that. But I wish I knew why or what she got from being so involved. And like it could be impact-based, but I I will never know that answer because I never got to ask her that question. And, you know, she up until like literally weeks before she died, she actually ran a tournament where she was scheduling all the umpires. It was called the Umpire in Chief. And so she like did an umpire because she couldn't and she couldn't walk without any oxygen, but she was sitting under a tent at a tournament the weekend before she died directing a tournament in Griffith, Indiana. And I think my dad was umpiring, or my brother was, someone was. She couldn't drive herself, so someone had to like take her there. But yeah, like I I see a lot of similarities into like what I do. And, you know, I have these thoughts of what would she even think of what I'm doing now? And a lot of people will tell me, oh, she, you know, everyone says the same thing, right? Your mom's looking down on you and she's very proud of you. Or your mom is really proud of you, or she'd be so proud of you if she were if she could see you now, or whatever it is, right? And I and again, I just I struggle, I struggle a lot with that because anything I did up until the point, maybe even right before she died, she disliked. And again, I I didn't have I didn't make poor life decisions. It was just like I wanted to go away to school and she didn't want me to. Or, you know, just like there are things that I wanted to do that she just didn't want me to do. And so that is something again I carry with me a lot, is that when I decided to do this, I have this idea that she would probably have judgment for it. But I think at some point when she maybe understood more of what I do and maybe seeing the impact that I'm doing, and if it's a positive impact, I think that she would be happy. At least that's what I think. I think that I have this feeling of I think she would definitely like Darren. I tell Darren all the time that he would like sweet talk her, probably, and she would like that. I think that Darren would get along with my dad really well, and that's a good indicator because he gets along with one of my uncles, which is my dad's brother, really well. And they were pretty similar. But when I think about my business and I think about, you know, a lot of times people will ask me, where do you get your influences from and who is your inspiration? They always want to try and say my mom, but I just don't know where I get that. I feel like I have elements of some things. Her creativity was amazing. We say that she was Pinterest before Pinterest existed. She was the mom that brought all the crafts to school. She made things for our family every year for Christmas, magnets and crafts, and she made stockings that she hand sewed every year, which I ended up taking on tradition-wise. Like she made all the holidays the true holidays. She was definitely like mom, and she was definitely there for all of us for everything. And I take all of those memories and traditions, and she was very intrical in the traditions she did for us. So then I makes me want to do all the same traditions with Danny or make our own traditions. But I think without knowing and without her ever naming it and without ever having a conversation with her, I know that she challenged the status quo. And I, as I end this podcast, I kind of want to end with that because I think that is a powerful thing that I recently realized. And, you know, I remember, you know, a lot of people like I felt, and this again could I this could just be my perspective, but I felt like people didn't like seeing her come a lot. And that's because she complained of the umpires, she had the rule book, she was a stickler for rules, she was on the board, and she would she wasn't afraid to use her voice. She wasn't afraid to speak up. She impacted so many people. I mean, the her wake and her funeral were so crazy, busy, lying out the door kind of situation. People to this day talk about how they think about my mom and send my sister and I messages all of the time, which we're so grateful for. And so I think like she did have an impact. Whether she was trying to do that or not, she had such a positive impact. And I am definitely driven by impact. And I think maybe somewhere on the along the line, she might have influenced that for me. But I'm only making that connection now that wasn't like, oh, sh my mom didn't influence me to go this route. Even me going through cancer, I don't really have a connection to her because I didn't know anything about her cancer journey because we were too young or and she and she hid a lot of it. She didn't really talk to us about a lot of that stuff. So it's really hard for me to draw connections outside of I think that I'm also not afraid to think outside of the box. And I think that she so wonderfully has executed on in her whole life. She was always doing something different, wanting to be different, you know, again, challenging, making things better. And so it's nice it's nice to meet her at this age because I do remember her at 39 and having cancer with three children who were like 15, 14, and 10, that was probably really hard, especially for a mom that did every single thing for all of us, and so many other people too relied on her. So I'm gonna end it with that. I think that if you're experiencing something similar, or if you've lost a parent, and it's hard to draw those conclusions or those connections, I feel like sometimes when you just kind of sit and think and maybe talk it out like I just did, you will have those conclusions and you will, even though you might not have ever had a direct result from a conversation with them, or you have a long-lasting memory, there are a lot of positives I can draw that she's influenced my life and influenced my business. And I know I get my work ethic from her too. She was a very hard worker, especially with softball. She was definitely the coach that made us practice in the snow. So I get that mentality from her for sure. But thank you for listening. This was more of a personal update episode. And if you still have your mom, please just like ask her some questions that you are dying to know about her. But I wouldn't give anything to be able to ask my mom questions. That would be such a huge, huge thing. I love talking. I love diving deep, as you know from these episodes, and I love getting to know real stories. And I wish I got to have those moments with my mom where I could just ask her, like, what do you think of this? Or what did you think of this, or why did you do it this way, or what was it like to be pregnant? And what was it like to be pregnant with a baby, with a toddler, and all the things. So thank you for listening. I'll be back Friday with some educational tidbits, and we'll go from there. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Business Over Cocktails, where real stories and bold business moves come to life. If this episode lit something up in you, share it with a friend, tag me at Laurenajar or the podcast page at business over cocktails. Make sure to leave a quick review as well. It helps more than you know. Until next time, keep chasing what matters and building the business that feels like you. Cheers.