The Retirement Success in Maine Podcast Ep 061: How to START Being a Bad Widow

 

 

Transcript:

Ben Smith:

Welcome everyone to the Retirement Success in Maine Podcast. My name is Ben Smith. I'm joined by my co-host, the Andy Griffith to my Barney Fife, Curtis Worcester, how you doing today, Curtis?

Curtis Worcester:

I'm doing great, Ben. How are you?

Ben Smith:

Good. Well anytime I hear Andy Griffith, the whistle just starts in the back of your head, right? The theme song starts going.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah.

Ben Smith:

Well, we've kind of covered a lot. I think we're through 60 episodes at this point.

Curtis Worcester:

We are.

Ben Smith:

Right? And I think when you're turning 60 in life or in podcast, there's lots of things in life that's changing. And I think it was a few months back with one of our clients that we work with in our practice. Their husband passed away after a sudden cognitive decline. And of course, anytime you see that it is just terrible. Right. And especially when you're with the person that's left the spouse, they're many times just completely lost. Right? And they're trying to figure out their place in the world. And they expressed to us that they're taking on everything that their spouse did and it's just leaving them continually overwhelmed. And this specific client, she made the comment about how is it possible to find out who she is without her husband because the majority of her adult life has been made up of being in this relationship with someone she loves more than anything.

Ben Smith:

And I think that's one of the things Charlie Dibner said in like an episode, I think 11 or 12, was that's the thing with us, especially with our family members and some of our spouses and kids is these are people we care more for than we even care for ourselves.

Curtis Worcester:

Sure. Yeah.

Ben Smith:

We wanted to explore this as a theme because I think us as practitioners, we're the lifeline, we're the friend, we're the person walking with them, especially during their financial lives, but financial lives aren't siloed. It goes into all areas of their lives. We wanted to kind of go through and kind of figure out this occurrence of losing our spouse. So how common is that?

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah.

Ben Smith:

So according to US census numbers, 40% of women and 13% of men age 65 or older have lost their spouse. It's quite a few.

Curtis Worcester:

It is. It is.

Ben Smith:

So we wanted to discuss being a widow or widower and how we can find our place in the world after this happens. So that's something where I think that the title of today's show is how to start being a bad widow. And you're going to go, wait, what?

Curtis Worcester:

What did they just say?

Ben Smith:

How the start being a bad widow?

Curtis Worcester:

We want to be a bad widow?

Ben Smith:

We want to be a bad ... Yes. We're going to teach you in today's show how to start being a bad widow after losing your spouse.

Curtis Worcester:

That's right. And so obviously we like to have guests on this show. So our next guest is a lifelong New Yorker and entrepreneur who loves music, art, travel and adventures. Her husband, David and she were together for 25 years and they were married for 20 of those. On October 12th, 2015, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer, a life expectancy of six weeks to four months. So as David's energy waned, they reprioritize their activities to spend time with people and do exactly what he loved, which was make art, be with family and friends and play tennis. To survive these heartbreaking months, she had to remind herself that she was still a woman who loved to sing, still an entrepreneur and not just a caregiver. They learned to live fearlessly in the face of death itself.

Curtis Worcester:

She and her husband wanted to be home together alone at the end, Saturday, September 10th, 2016 at 10:10 AM holding him in her arms, she promised she would take care of herself, his mom, his studio, and his legacy of art. She told him in a body you need breath and love. When you leave a body, you only need love. When you are ready, go out on the love. And without pain or fear, David took his last four breaths and she was a widow. But what did it mean to be a widow? It's impossible to prepare for such a loss. Being a widow meant variable energy, memory gaps, inability to focus in a wasteland of grief. She lost trust in herself. She did not know who she was without him. As a result, she was isolated and lonely, but could not find resources to solve how to reconnect, get back to work and open up to love again. So she created them. She began badwidow.com and it resonated for people who had suffered such a loss too.

Curtis Worcester:

So our guest is now a grief resilience coach, a number one bestselling author on Amazon, global speaker and Affluence Code consultant who lives in Manhattan. Her recently published number one bestselling book, The Bad Widow Guide to Life After Loss: Moving Through Grief to Live and Love Again is now available on Amazon. She also has a free three video mini series supplement to her book in ongoing grief resilience tips. And I will say real quick to all of our listeners, in our show notes, we'll have links available for you to find both the book and the video mini series. So we'll kind of talk about that at the end of the show, and we'll also have it in the show notes, but with that, I would love to welcome Alison Pena to the Retirement Success in Maine podcast. Alison, thank you so much for joining us today.

Alison Pena:

Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

Ben Smith:

Well, and I will say after just watching and listening that read there, what a story, and also the detail of David, and you can just kind of see the love that you had for each other even in the kind of the life story, but even in the death story part of that. That's really phenomenal. So even with that backdrop, I know there's a lot of people just will really connect to what you just shared there. That's really great. So Alison, what I want to dig into is, of course, we have lots of questions and again, how to start being a bad widow, right? That's something where I think we're going to grab some people's attention with today, but we also want to dig into you here is get to know you a little bit, get to know a little bit about your story, about who you are, what makes you tick. I'd love to just hear a little bit about your childhood, where you grew up and your kind of the professional career.

Alison Pena:

I grew up in Manhattan. My dad was an investment banker and I come actually from three generations of investment bankers. He and his partners sold their firm, which was called White Weld and Company to Merrill Lynch in 1978. So that was how I grew up New York City, a lot of travel, not a lot of working on the weekends. I was sort of expected to get married and have four kids.

Ben Smith:

Okay. Different times. Right?

Alison Pena:

Different times. Way different times.

Ben Smith:

Yeah.

Alison Pena:

Yeah. Which left me a little bit a drift. So I've done many, many things in my career. I have been a financial consultant, including for Merrill Lynch actually. I did over 20 years of proofreading and editing. Most recently I worked as assistant editor for the General Assembly at the UN this last year, a temporary appointment.

Ben Smith:

Fantastic.

Alison Pena:

So I did that. I worked at an advertising firm that did pharma advertising. So I was a liaison between the advertising firm and a pharma company.

Ben Smith:

Okay. Excellent.

Alison Pena:

And I was about to turn 50 and asked myself if this was what I was born to do. And the answer was absolutely not.

Curtis Worcester:

Okay.

Alison Pena:

And so I became an entrepreneur.

Ben Smith:

Well, and I'll say Alison is I'm sure, especially right now, from a labor perspective 2022, and I think there's lots of people reassessing their lives right now. And I know from your end maybe going through that well early of kind of what people are going through right now, but yeah, from a reassessment and trying to figure out what my purpose is in life. So going through that a little bit, so what was kind of, "Hey, this is not what I want to do." How did you kind of get to, "Hey, this is where I want to go."?

Alison Pena:

Well, I mean, I decided to leave the company to start building my own business. Being an entrepreneur is not easy. You're sort of building from the ground up and not getting a paycheck. The buck stops with you.

Ben Smith:

That's right.

Alison Pena:

And so it's different. It's a different way of being. And so I started serving people first with something I called the Excellence Code, which was, how do you thrive no matter what kind of person you are? How do you thrive if you are good at work, if you're good at one-on-one relationships, if you're good at leveraging community? Those are three different things that everybody cares about. And so how do you lean into that to find solid ground, to actually make money, be happy? All of it. And this became relevant when my husband was sick because his thing with work and mine was community.

Ben Smith:

Okay. Interesting.

Alison Pena:

So I knew what we needed to thrive.

Curtis Worcester:

So you just teed up my next question, Alison. So can you just share with us? I know we read that bio there and that read, but can you just tell us about David and your relationship with him over your life?

Alison Pena:

Yeah. I met David at a church retreat actually. The only one he ever went to in his life, because he said he got what he needed out of it and so then he was good.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah. He picked a good one to go to.

Ben Smith:

Right.

Alison Pena:

Yep. And met him in my 30s and about four years later, took him much longer to know than it took me, we got married and were together. He was an artist. I, when he me, was a Merrill Lynch financial consultant. So over the course of our marriage, my trajectory changed a lot. And he was always an artist. Although, he took a day job being an usher at the theater towards the end. Okay. And we had the ups and downs of a marriage. One of the things that was remarkable when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and this is a remarkable thing about grief, is that what matter grows to the surface. So the love that had gotten pushed down by the busyness of life, go to work, make money, take care of the house, all these things rose up again and became a real priority. To express it became a real priority. Yeah.

Ben Smith:

Well, and Alison, I know we're going to dig into lots of that there because I think in terms of the coming to grips of losing your life partner is also the grieving process while they're still with you to then going through that death experience together and then getting to the other side of it for yourself and then figuring out who am I and who am I as an individual now that my spouse is gone. That's really what we're going to ask lots about that here today. But I want to ask, because again, this is the Retirement Success in Maine Podcast, right, so we have this Maine connection going on. And I was reading in your husband's bio that you both spent summers in Maine, on North Haven and Leadbetter Island where he painted landscapes and seascapes [alla prima 00:12:14]. The attic would fill with paintings as he followed the light and typically produced two or three paintings a day. So I want to ask you about Maine. So what did your time together in Maine mean to you both? And do you still find time to come up to Maine now?

Alison Pena:

Yes. I, myself have been going to Maine since I was six months old as a summer person, but my grandparents on my mother's side had a place on North Haven and my grandparents on my father's side bough Leadbetter Island with another family in the '40s.

Ben Smith:

Excellent. Okay.

Alison Pena:

So a long relationship with Maine and this painting behind me is actually of Leadbetter island looking out across the Leadbetter narrows to Vinalhaven.

Ben Smith:

Okay. Wow. And for those that are on the audio side of the house here, listening to us on the podcast forum, feel free to check it out. Obviously, we'll have the YouTube link as well. You just want to go in and kind of see this, but it is a beautiful backdrop that David has painted here of you said Leadbetter Island.

Alison Pena:

Yep.

Ben Smith:

So, yeah, it's really great.

Alison Pena:

So a long, long history on Leadbetter Island. And so when I got together with Dave, he came up and he started painting and he was terrible at vacationing because all he wanted to do was paint. And so his goal was three paintings a day. And we would go to Maine for 10 days and come back with 30 paintings.

Curtis Worcester:

Wow, wow.

Alison Pena:

Wow. About a third of which were amazing, which is a later part of the story. But I wound up when he died with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of paintings and because he was so prolific and he never threw anything out, I had to decide what had to go.

Ben Smith:

Yeah. And, of course, that's a tough experience too, because it's the emotional wrap up there of, well, if I'm shedding this, would he have wanted me to shed this and which ones would he have thought valuable versus what I'm thinking? That's a mind field of emotional issues. I'm sure.

Alison Pena:

Yeah. How do you decide when he's not there to back you up or to say, yeah, I would've liked to get rid of that one? Or no, how dare you?

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah.

Ben Smith:

Right.

Alison Pena:

It feels like betrayal.

Ben Smith:

Yeah. I bet.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah. So I want to kind of rotate Alison and really get into the topic of today's show. So I know we've said it a couple times and we'll catch everyone's attention one last time. So how to start being a bad widow. So I guess I'll start right off the top. Why do you call yourself a bad widow?

Alison Pena:

I call myself a bad widow because typically what it gets so exhausting to explain what the experience of grieving after you lose someone you've loved for 25 years, that for the most part, widows and widowers just go along. "Oh, thank you for being so kind." And what I realized was that what people were saying and what they were doing were not actually helpful. And the reason they were not helpful is because we don't talk about it, what it's like to grieve from the inside. And so they just had no idea, they were clueless. And I started clarifying. So I'm a bad widow because I decided I was going to blow up the assumptions that people were making about who I was and how to interact with me and provide them with a more helpful set of guidelines.

Alison Pena:

For example, how are you? And my thought, especially in that first year after my husband died was how the heck do you think I am? I just lost the man I love for 25 years, almost half my lifetime. My future has disappeared in a cloud of dust. I have no idea what the future holds for me. How do you think I am? And I realized that was not very helpful. Like spewing all that was probably not going to help them out. Right. And probably drive them away. And so I said, I can't answer that, but I can answer, how are you today? How are you this week? A narrower timeline. That was possible. And so being a bad widow was how do you get it right? How you help people get it right? Because they're not getting it wrong because they're being mean. They're getting it wrong because they just don't know.

Curtis Worcester:

Sure.

Ben Smith:

And I think some of this is in just kind of what you explained there, Alison, is I think the bravery just even say, how are you doing? Is there might be even the I don't know what to say to you. So I feel awkward and then they turn it about themselves and it's like, I feel awkward approaching you about this situation and/or coming up or how do I address it? How do I sympathize? I know I'm, I'm not making it about you as the person that's a widow. I'm making about all the people around you maybe cocooning themselves from you saying, "I'm not sure how to handle this situation and I'm not sure how she's going to behave or is she doing okay? How do I assess if she's doing okay? Is it because she's faking it or is it because she's actually doing okay in this moment?"

Ben Smith:

So I could see where all of that structure that gets maybe pre-built without somebody maybe even knowing it or realizing it is all of a sudden that maybe in a time where you need your community and your people and you're rallying around you and helping you is that people are maybe more disconnected and separate and broken from you because of those feelings.

Alison Pena:

Yeah. It was really common for people to treat me like I was broken and especially at the beginning, feel like I was broken. But from broken, there's not very many ways to go. There's not a path forward from actually broken. There's a path forward from heartbroken. And what the people really wanted was they wanted to know that I was going to be okay. That's what they wanted underneath the questions, underneath the fears. And they didn't necessarily understand that the feelings were feelings not being broken. So very often a widow or a widower will hear, "I don't mean to make you cry." Tears are tears. And what they're really saying is, "I want you to be okay. And I'm worried that if you cry, it means you're not."

Ben Smith:

And so from a caring perspective, and you're saying, it's okay to let yourself feel, let yourself care, let yourself be emotional. And I want to ask the question that maybe the flip side of this is what Curtis asked was, why do you call yourself a bad widow? Can you just juxtapose here? What is a bad widow versus a good widow in your mind?

Alison Pena:

Yes. So in my mind, a good widow doesn't want to ruffle any feathers. So if someone says, "How are you?" They're very likely to say fine because they know that's what the other person wants to hear, except that doesn't allow them to feel heard and doesn't allow the other person to actually support them in any kind of meaningful way. Whereas if there's a way to actually say what's going on in a way that you can get support, there were so many people who care about widows and widowers who came to me and said, "Thank you so much for telling me how to support them properly, what to actually do because they felt helpless."

Ben Smith:

Yeah, love it. I would gather as what you're describing is that in your book, The Bad Widow Guide to Life After Loss: Moving Through Grief to Live and Love Again is not only for the people that are the widow or the widower, but also for the people that have a widow or widower in their lives that they want to find ways to connect with. Right. And they want to find ways to support them and help them kind of get back to finding that center of themselves. Right?

Alison Pena:

Exactly. As a widow or widower being allowed to be, as you are, is a great gift because there's an awful lot of trying to make you go back to who you were, except when you lose the love of your life. When you lose someone you've been with for a long time or even for a short time, you're not that person. You'll never be able to be that person again.

Ben Smith:

Yeah. I want to go into a little bit here and this might be a little bit of the heavier part is let's lean into the experience of finding out about your husband's prognosis. And I want to hear a little bit about having to manage his death experience while also working through your own feelings about losing him as you know, this is coming down the road, you know you have finite time with him as he and you are coming to grips with the end of a relationship and the end of his life. What did you learn about living fearlessly and taking bold action when your husband was dying? Because I could see where you get paralyzed in that moment and you maybe just don't do anything. And you just, I don't know, you could see where you could afterwards feel regret about not doing more in those moments to maximize that time you have together. So what did you learn about what you guys did and how did you get there? Because that's an important part.

Alison Pena:

Yeah. When you get a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, it's a really short lifespan typically. And my husband lived 11 months, which was long. And part of why I think that happened was I decided to curate our lives so that we did what mattered. We surfaced what mattered so that he painted more within the limits of his energy, which began to wane. So he didn't go out and paint for 12 hours. He went out and painted for two. Played tennis when he was stretching his length on the tennis court because his balance was off. So the doctor said slow down, reduce your activities. Essentially, the communication with that kind of di a diagnosis is prepare to die. And so for us, it was prepare to lose this person at the center of my life and never see or touch him again. So divorce is heartbreaking, but the person exists in the world.

Ben Smith:

Right?

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah.

Alison Pena:

As humans, we don't think about how important touch is until we have none. And so what we decided to do was we decided to just live. So he kept painting. He finished his last painting the Thursday before the Saturday, he died in my arms. He lived 11 months and the oncologist just said, "Whatever you're doing, keep doing it." For me, I had to survive it. Once he passed away, this suffering was over for him. And I had to live on, I had to find some way of living on. And so for me, it was, I had wanted to sing on cabaret stages for a decade. I had sung in gospel choirs. I had sung all my life, but I really wanted to just get on a stage. And so I took the opportunity to join two workshops and sing on four stages in the time he was sick.

Alison Pena:

And the songs that I chose were to remind me that I was going to go on without it. So the Tuesday, before he died, I sang, I Am Woman. Everybody says don't because people are telling me, "Well, you must do this. You must do that. You must do the other thing. You must put him in hospice." And he wanted to die at home. We wanted to be together at home. And the last one was called the Secret of Happiness, which is about being present. And so I knew that I had to keep moving the emotions through my body or I wasn't going to make it.

Ben Smith:

So I also want to ask you a question about that because this is not just you saying to David, "Hey, you need to live and you need to maximize the time that you have. And let me enable you to do those things." It sounds like he's also saying this back to you that, "Alison, you also need to be living and doing the dreams and not stopping your dreams while I go through this." That you were both were kind of complimenting each other in those areas to allow each other to do it together, which I could see where all of a sudden the caregiver hat comes on. You go, "Nope. Table my stuff. I have time. I'm going to rotate to you to make sure your list happens and the things you want to do happens. And I'm going to put a pause on me." Which that sounds a little atypical to what I think we have heard in our experiences when this has happened. Is that what you find as well?

Alison Pena:

Yes. It's very atypical. So a caregiver of someone with a terminal illness has a rotten job because they are helpless in the face of it. So my husband was told with the chemo, he would lose his hair. And so he got a really short haircut, so he would be ready. And the next day he got on a city bike, which is one of the ways we people ride around the city on bikes. And his eyelashes started coming off as he was riding. And that seems like a very small thing, but he was heartbroken and I was heartbroken for him and there was nothing I could do.

Alison Pena:

So there's this helplessness and the person who's ill very often is angry. They're angry about what's happening. And the person they get angry at is the person who's there because that's the person who loves them and they're not going to leave. And so it was really interesting. The other thing that happened while he was sick was that we were both grieving and afraid separately because we didn't want to scare the other person. And what that wound up doing is siloing us in similar experiences alone. And when we finally started actually talking about what was going on, we could be in it together. And that changed everything.

Ben Smith:

Wow. Love that.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah. So I want to kind of keep going here, Alison, and in your role now as a grief resilience coach, I'm sure you're assisting many people process a lot of feelings after losing a loved one, especially relating to the loss of a spouse. How can we handle the depression, fear, anger, shame, grief, tears, and really any other disturbing feelings that we might have when they just show up unexpectedly?

Alison Pena:

It's a matter of planning, honestly. It's a matter of understanding that to stay healthy, the feelings can't just sit because volcanoes when they explode are ugly.

Curtis Worcester:

Yep.

Alison Pena:

Right?

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah.

Alison Pena:

So there needs to be a way to express them, to let them out. And that can be a variety of things, that can be with self-care, that can be with singing, walking, exercise. They're all different ways that people move the emotions through their bodies. So that's one piece. The other thing is to plan for it. So for example, if you are at work, there's no just control yourself. If the tears rise, they rise. You can put them off. So if you're at work and you're in the middle of a meeting and suddenly get very sad, if you plan for it, you're in better shape to deal with it. So excuse yourself. If it's a safe space, allow it. If it's not, put it off. Okay. I'm going to deal with this sometime today. I'm going to just let myself be as I am.

Alison Pena:

With gatherings, I have this conversation a lot during holidays, anniversaries, things like this. Let the people who are going to be there know that fundamentally, you're okay. You're going to be okay because that's the fear underneath and give them some guidelines about what to do if you get angry, what to do if you burst into tears. If you do this, I'd really love to hear stories about my spouses. If this happens, I'd really love for you to come over and give me a hug. It's really individual for each person. But if you plan ahead as to what you would like in that instance, you can prepare people so that you're actually supported.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah. I really like that.

Ben Smith:

Yeah. And I think that requires a lot of, I think confidence in kind of saying, "Hey, my friends, my family, it's okay. If you see me this way, I'm okay. And I would just appreciate if you just even give me a hug or even if you told me a story in that moment." To be able to do that, and again, I think that's where from the outside then looking in on this situation and saying, "Hey, I don't know if that person starts crying in the middle of a birthday, when everybody's happy and everybody's trying to celebrate, do we just all leave? Do we just all like go to the next room and let them have their moment?" Because again, to what you're saying, Alison, is they want to feel supportive. They want to make sure you're doing okay, but they don't know how to handle it, because they've never been in this situation and they don't know what the needs are.

Ben Smith:

I think sometimes disconnecting is maybe the easiest step for them sometimes and say, "Let's just disconnect from you. And we'll step into the next room. You come back when you're happy." And maybe you're not going to be happy that a dire rest of the party or day but I could see where it's your point if you said that, now will of a sudden, hey, two people might surround you real quick and say, "Let's talk about it." And they go with you and help you surface those feelings. And why are you feeling this way and process it to then go to the next thing that you want but to your point of not processing leads to other issues. And that's where I want to ask you another question here.

Alison Pena:

Yep.

Ben Smith:

Because the state of Maine has a eight highest suicide rate for ages 65 and older. And that's according to a 2021 America's Health rankings. And it's also 43% higher than the national average. And I know we gave the statistics of the level of widows and people have lost a spouse at these ages, but for us as Mainers, we're the only state east of the Mississippi that has a higher rate than 22.1 suicides for 100,000. So what would you say to those that have suicidal thoughts after losing their loved one? And did you have any of those feelings as well?

Alison Pena:

Absolutely, I did. And I had enough of my husband's hospice drugs in the house that I actually could have killed myself. There is something called the widow effect for the four to six months after the spouse dies. It's not uncommon.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah. Wow.

Alison Pena:

It's really uncommon. It's a big thing. So suicide, I'm going to talk about it from two perspectives. If the spouse committed suicide on top of all the feelings is added, "Could I have done something? What did I miss?" No time to prepare. So on the one hand, it's just over. So there's not the long grieving that someone who lives with someone with a terminal illness goes through. There's not the time to prepare. So if that happens, you're either prepared or you're not and the will is either written or it's not. The plan is either made or it's not. There's no time. But for someone who becomes a widow or a widower for about that first year, I would lie in bed and think of a reason to be alive that day before I put my foot on the ground.

Alison Pena:

And it was worse at the beginning, but that was really how it was. Okay, what can I think of that's going to be something that I can look forward to today? It was that stark. It was really that stark. And that's what got me through and really allowing the baby steps to be enough because one of the things about loss, about grief, about losing a spouse, especially is you can't go back. We've referenced it. You can't go back to who you were. And one of the things that happens is your ability to decide things on your own is harmed because you're looking to the side for agreement, disagreement, someone to back you.

Ben Smith:

But also Alison, I can see where if you're saying, "This is the reason today for being alive. Or I want to try this thing or I want to do that thing." I could even see where there's even more pressure on you as the widow or widower in that moment of the person that would, I'd look to the side and they would give me agreement. It's okay, honey, you can do that. Or yes, go. Or they would cheer lead you has been replaced by maybe others in your life that haven't been that role before or that you are not fitting into a social construct that they think that you should be. And they're trying to mold you into a version of something they think or society might think you should be, for example.

Ben Smith:

So I guess that's where I could see that's even more difficult is that knowledge is, "Hey, I want to do this." And I get the confidence and courage to say, "This is the thing I'm living for. And I want to sing cabaret. I want to do this thing today. And that's what I'm really excited about." And somebody says, "No, you shouldn't do that because that's a waste of time. Or you have to do these 40 other things to get your life back in order and the next two weeks has to be all this and you need to do this." Yeah. I could see where all of those are really hard, conflicting points in the moment as well is try to figure out what my structure is.

Alison Pena:

Yeah, absolutely because there's what do I want? And frankly, after my husband died, I was clueless because we were together for 25 years. What would he want? And then there's, what everybody else thinks.

Curtis Worcester:

Exactly.

Alison Pena:

And the advice that you get in ... So there's kind of this void in the ability to decide things. And what happens is that people pour in their advice about what they think they would want if they were in your shoes, which they haven't been. And they're very decisive about it because what they're trying to do is they're trying to support you in the only way they know how, except they get it wrong. And so for your widows and widowers, I would say, listen to the advice and trust yourself because honestly like a financial decision, the decision that you make, you are the one who lives with the consequences.

Curtis Worcester:

That's right.

Alison Pena:

Right? At the end of the day, you can take the advice but if it's not true to who you are and what you actually want going forward.

Ben Smith:

That's right.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah.

Ben Smith:

It's pointless.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah.

Alison Pena:

It'll be bad.

Curtis Worcester:

Yep. I want to circle back a little bit here. So obviously we talked about a client we had in the introduction who lost her spouse. Naturally, it can take quite a while for someone to work through the shock of losing their spouse, especially if it's a sudden loss. So I know, kind of in our conversations with her, we were met many times with this response. "I'm just not ready to move on with my life." So that's what I want to ask you about Alison. So what steps did you take to rejoin life again? Including going back to work, reconnecting with people in and ultimately opening up to intimacy again.

Alison Pena:

It was really challenging because I had reduced the amount of people. I had very limited capacity to be around people and very limited capacity to do anything. Some days I had lots of energy. Some days I had no energy. I was a coach who couldn't deal with people. I was a proofreader and editor who it felt like I had lost my mind. I could lose 10 minutes. I could lose an hour. I could lose four hours where I literally had no idea where they went. I could be told something in one second and the next second forget it. So literally as basic as when I remembered I was hungry in five seconds, I would forget. So if I wasn't in the kitchen in five seconds, I wouldn't eat because I had forgotten that I was hungry again.

Alison Pena:

So there's a lot of that that happened. So how did I get back out? I had to figure out how do I reengage? So the first thing I did was since my thing was community. I started leaning into my community and doing things like, "Okay, I recognize that when I'm exhausted, I need to up my self-care." But when I'm exhausted, I can't think of anything. So give me all your tips. And I got a list of a hundred self-care tips from my community. So whatever your thing is, if it's work, go to work. People might say, "Don't go to work." But if work is your thing where you feel most yourself, work.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Alison Pena:

If it's one on one, do that. So reengage was get out into the world, start working again because we value ourselves based on, are we doing something and receiving something back for it? The first thing I did was I worked in a Halloween popup shop, hanging up costumes for $10 an hour. Now I get paid much more than that in my other roles, but I couldn't. And so the point of that was to reengage and to start expanding my capacity. The second thing was reinvent. Part of the great resignation, what they're calling the great resignation, people, changing direction, quitting jobs, doing all this stuff is grief. Because one of that happens when you're grieving is what matters rises up. Am I going the right way? Am I being the person I want to be? And so reinvent was who am I now? I was single. I was a wife. I am a widow. What does that mean? No idea.

Alison Pena:

And so that piece involved a lot of try this, try that. There were things my husband and I did together. Some were his, some were ours, some were mine. Which of his was I not interested in? So I could let them go. And then rebuild. People step back and step out of your life when you're grieving and largely, it's in the first two years. The timeline of grief, nobody understands that it can go for decades. The first year in my experience and that of my clients is all grief. Grief is the predominant emotion. There's all the other ones but grief is the thing that's the loudest. And the second is rage in the second it gets real.

Alison Pena:

Now at the end of the second year, everybody leaves because they think you're over it. In the first year, you're numb. And when someone says, "What can I do for you?" You have no idea. So reinvent was, what exactly do I want? Who exactly am I? And in this new life that I've been essentially forced into, not my choice, how do I want to go forward? And who are the people I want to go forward with? Who likes the same kind of exercise? Who likes to go sing? Maybe even at work, there were people who were your people and they're not so much your people anymore.

Ben Smith:

Well, and also I think that also speaks to another point what you just said is if I'm reinventing myself and I now have said what I used to be, to your point, I used to be this person before I've gone through this life experience. And I used to love tennis, but by the way, maybe in my reinvention, I don't like tennis anymore. Right? So the people I used to play tennis with, and the friends that were around only to be around tennis is maybe they're not the people I want to be around anymore because I don't have that shared interest. So I could see where even your social group, because you said, now I want to get into more singing. And that's really what I want to dive into as a self-interest now in my reinvention.

Ben Smith:

So I'm going to now find more of, I use the word, but everything [inaudible 00:41:23], the tribe. It's my tribe around singing now. And I want to be around people that also have the same passions that I do as part of my reinvention. But man, that could be tough is I'm going to now say, "Hey Sally, and hey John, I know we played tennis for 30 years or we did that a lot. But you know, I'm now changing where I'm going." Doesn't mean you're not friends with them anymore. You don't like them or don't care for them, but you're probably not going to spend as much time with them because you're not doing those kind of common activities together. Right?

Alison Pena:

Exactly. And I want to come back to something you said Curtis, about your client saying she wasn't ready to move on. I never say move on. I have not moved on. There is no widow that I know that doesn't refer to their husband as their husband because the parting wasn't a choice.

Curtis Worcester:

Yep. You're right.

Alison Pena:

It was not something we chose. Even though I have a boyfriend. So it's a really weird thing. So I speak about moving forward so you can move forward and reengage in the world. You can reinvent yourself. You can rebuild your community. But you are who you were and then there's this tipping point where you are, who you are now. And honestly, it's pretty wild. And it's not very understandable. As a widow if you have friends who are couples, for the most part, you are never invited to dinner again. So in a divorce, people choose his side or her side.

Ben Smith:

Sure. That's right.

Alison Pena:

In a death, in the passing of a spouse, what happens is people choose not to be around the discomfort of who you are in the grief.

Ben Smith:

Wow. And that's pretty tragic. Right. As you just said, there's things that he had, things that you both had and things that you yourself individually had. So it's like you're almost kind of, you lose almost some of like two thirds of those things in a way that is really, really pretty difficult.

Alison Pena:

Really difficult. Really difficult.

Ben Smith:

And I want to ask another question here, Alison. Your husband's an artist. And so as you kind of mentioned, he did paintings and he was doing 12 a day. And he had obviously had done a lot of work and he passes and now you have 800 paintings of his and this is his legacy, right? This is a representation of his life and his feelings and he's expressing themselves in those moments and what his interpretation of the world around him. So I guess my question here is you have the library of his things, but you all also have, as you've kind of explained, your own legacy, your own kind of, this is who I want to be as an individual. So how do you go about balancing, living for yourself, but also feeling like you owe your late husband's legacy energy to also keep his spirit alive. How do you navigate those two kind of worlds?

Alison Pena:

That has been very, very, very complicated because his artist friends said, "Okay, how are you curating the legacy of his work?" And I thought, "What about me? I mean, I'm the one who's alive." He had a studio downtown that he was in. He was in that building for over 30 years. So I wound up ... so 500 square foot studio, about 800 square foot apartment and all the paintings came home with me.

Ben Smith:

Whoa.

Alison Pena:

After 11 months. Every widow or widower at some point goes through the clothes and the shoes and the everything. For me, it was going through his lifetime legacy of work. And these paintings, my husband's side, these painting would be an easy turn into cash to support me. Except the idea of letting go of a single one broke my heart. So it actually was not that easy. So there was the, how do you decide which of the paintings will never sell because they're unfinished and he got rid of nothing. How badly am I of betraying him, letting go of them because 500 square foot studio, 800 square foot apartment?

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah.

Alison Pena:

So it's been complicated. It's been finding a way to move the paintings. In the book, there's a piece of a chapter about how I literally walked the paintings, walked an eight foot easel through the streets of New York as kind of Chautauqua, which allowed me to grieve. People ask me about him on the way. It was very weird, but it was the only way that I could think of to honor it and also move forward through it. When I decided I was ready to open up to love again, which was really, really hard, biggest betrayal of all. If you have the love of your life, how do you move forward from that? I needed a guy who was okay with hundreds of my late husband's paintings in the apartment, which is not that easy. You know?

Curtis Worcester:

I mean, yeah, no, yeah.

Alison Pena:

It's not put a couple photographs in a drawer. They're everywhere.

Curtis Worcester:

Wow. I'm sorry. I was just processing everything you've kind of shared with us. It's just incredible. So I want to kind of keep going. So one thing you've said, learning to make better distinctions is essential in reinventing yourself after a loss. So can you just kind of explain that to us and our audience listening today what you mean by that?

Alison Pena:

Making better distinctions really lies in the clarity is a superpower. So if you can figure out what you want and where you're going, even a baby step in the direction that you want to go, then you can ask for what you need to support that move. Right? So it's not taking the assumptions that you had about what you wanted in the past into your future. What happens pretty often is people would really love to bounce back and they would really love to have what they had before. And so sometimes what they try to do is they try to go back into the old track. Making distinctions is about looking at the track. And if it has gone off on a tangent to take that path, if that's the right path at this point. So that was a lot about the assumptions that we make about what is it to be a wife? What is it to be a widow? What is it to honor your spouse? What is it to move forward? All of these questions.

Ben Smith:

Yeah. And Alison, I want to ask a question that goes right along with that then because you're talking about tracks and finding out well what fits in my life and what doesn't fit. It's a reflection point. It's a reassessment point. It's kind of all those things. And again, as you're saying, it's forced on us, right? It's not like we chose to reinvent or reassess or do this.

Alison Pena:

Nope.

Ben Smith:

So as a widow and widower, and we've talked about our friends and family support network might be different after we lose our spouse than maybe we had when they were alive. So obviously, you're kind of making the point about, "Hey, you got this track and this is what I've declared I want this, and this is where I want to go. And this is what I need and don't need." And as we go on down this road, not that easy though, right? With family and friends and people that have been there from the first day, your kindergarten, best friend to ... These are the people that I've poured a lot of time and my care and feelings into. And I do care about lots of different levels. So how do you assess and rebuild your kind of family and friend support networks proactively? So the right people are in them who can deliver what you need over time.

Alison Pena:

It's largely a matter of energy assessment. My capacity and my husband passed away over five years ago at this point, my capacity for people and activities is still less than it was before he died. And it may never come back. My fear that I'll lose my mind, that I won't be able to focus all of these things. I took the UN job to prove to myself that I could remember and focus again. And I was scared that I would lose it again. So there's this residual terror from that experience right after that continues on through.

Ben Smith:

Yeah. So I guess in terms of the question of, hey, I have my family and friends around me and if I'm deciding that there's a track, as you're saying, from a work track and I need support if I got this. I'm going back to work as my purpose and that's who I want to be. But there be people in that friends and family network that say, "Alison, what are you doing yourself? You shouldn't take that UN job. You have 800 paintings you have to focus in on. You got to get rid of that clutter." As we talked about, judgements and people deciding things for you.

Alison Pena:

Yeah.

Ben Smith:

How do you get to navigate your support network there? And who's kind of supportive of your network or not for track?

Alison Pena:

So this is the advice thing. This is the giving advice without actually knowing what it's like. It's a matter of energy. So ultimately what I wound up doing and what my clients wind up doing is looking at who are the toxic people in their communities, who are the people who are easy and who are the people who are comfortable. You can't get rid of everyone who's toxic. We all have toxic people in our lives, but you can choose to focus energy on the ones who are easier.

Curtis Worcester:

I like that.

Alison Pena:

The ones who provide real support, the ones who are open to actually having a conversation, the ones who are not scared of you. By focusing there, those people will fuel you. And the idea behind rebuilding the network is how do you get more of those in the equation when it's people of who've known you for a long time, their desire is to have you be a known quantity again, who you were. And they don't actually fully understand that that will never happen again because it's incomprehensible. I mean, it seems like it should be possible, except that it's not. And so for them, they need to be willing to have you be who you are, including the history, but not have the history define you. And that's a recalibration.

Ben Smith:

But Alison, I could see where, again, there's these legacy friends and family. And to your point about here's they want you to be who you were. And if you are not who you were, you are irreparably broken from the event that changed you to not be who you were. It almost feels just a hearing this is that a lot of the energy they're putting into you is to get you back to that person. And as you're saying is I'm going forward. I'm not really interested in going backwards because I can't be the person backwards because I don't have the person that was with me that made me that person backwards.

Alison Pena:

Super confusing and disorienting.

Ben Smith:

Yes.

Alison Pena:

Honestly, it really is. It really is because you've got the comfort of that history and that love, because there's love there. And yet they need to be willing for you to also be who you are or you're constantly going to be stressed when you're around them.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah.

Alison Pena:

And it requires saying no to some people or no to some behaviors. The people who are easiest are the ones who allow you to be how you are because there's judgment around joy.

Ben Smith:

There is. A true statement.

Alison Pena:

[crosstalk 00:53:58] judgment around joy. When I decided I was going to start dating again, there were people who said it was too soon and there are people who said I should wait.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah.

Alison Pena:

Everybody had an opinion.

Ben Smith:

But it's again, but they have an opinion about, okay wait, but they're all going to have different opinions about when it's okay. Is it a year, five years, 50 years? Do I have to be 99 to be dating again? Man, all that's really tough if you're just letting everybody else guide your life.

Alison Pena:

Really tough. And especially sometimes widows and widowers when they have children, they wait to experience their grief until the children are out of the house.

Curtis Worcester:

Sure. Yep.

Alison Pena:

What that means is that they're restarting the timeline when the kids leave. But at that point, nobody's listening because you're past it. It's been 15 years. It's been five years.

Curtis Worcester:

Right. You're right.

Alison Pena:

So there's, there's not an understanding of the fact that it really is taking baby steps. Okay. What do you know in this next step? We're accustomed to think in horizons. I had a life planned out with my husband and then I didn't. And it was not my choice. And so our inclination is to try and see that long horizon, but you can only see as far as you can see. So if it's the end of the day, then that's what you got. If it's the end of the week, the end of a year, that's what you got. And the baby steps are valid. Yeah. They're charting a path forward into the future just not the way that we are accustomed to doing it.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah. I like that a lot. So we have kind of a final question for you, Alison, and it's really a you question. So obviously the name of our show is the Retirement Success in Maine Podcast. So we love to ask all of our guests, how will you plan to find your own personal retirement success?

Alison Pena:

So my own personal retirement success is really on this path of grief resilience, of changing the conversation of grief globally. So as a speaker, as a writer, as a grief resilience coach to shift how we grieve and support people who are grieving. Yeah. Because if you look at the world right now, everyone's grieving something. Yep. So there has to be a path through it. And that is my retirement success.

Curtis Worcester:

Oh wow.

Ben Smith:

Alison, that's fantastic. There's so many things I think we could take away from our conversation today, especially around the reinvention and rebuild, because I think as you experiences as losing David, I think a lot of people experience that as they retire from their occupation to then get into this next stage of life and they don't know how to reinvent and rebuild. So I think there's a lot of things that you brought up today, obviously from especially directly related, being a widow and how to start being a bad widow, but also maybe how to start being a bad retiree and doing those things that really kind of give you more purpose in your life. So I really can't thank you enough because I think there's so many great lessons that you shared with us today.

Ben Smith:

And allowed the people that are especially going through this, but we now have some resources here, especially with your book. And again, we got that mini-series supplement to your book with ongoing grief resilience tips that we'll share with the audience as well. I think this is fantastic. And thank you so much for coming on our show. It's been a real pleasure and a treat.

Alison Pena:

Thank you very much for having me.

Ben Smith:

All right. Take care. So how to start being a bad widow with Alison Pena. This is a heavy topic, right? This is not your, "Hey, let's talk about dining with David Page, right?" This is a heavy one. But these are things that we want to be willing to go into, is really lean into what does it mean to lose somebody? And what's the other side of that experience look like? What are some lessons here? And I think Alison did a really fantastic job.

Curtis Worcester:

I agree.

Ben Smith:

Kind of going through the pre during and post there of losing her spouse, David. And again, I think there's lots of different takeaways and parallels we kind of take from it, but as we like to do in wrapping up our shows, we like to kind take the yellow highlighter and kind of take some things that we personally took away. So Curtis, what was something that you kind of took away from our conversation with Alison today?

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah. I think we both try to think about how these conversations relate to kind of us personally too, and a piece that stuck out to me, so it came up when she was actually talking about, and I wrote it down because I liked it so much, the idea of planning for the grief. So if you're the person who suffered this unimaginable loss, knowing that, hey, I'm probably going to get emotional or I could get angry. The example she shared was being at work and just planning, knowing like, "Hey, is it a safe space work? Do you have to kind of pundit to later in the day?" But kind of having that plan and then a little further part of that conversation, she talked about the people around the person suffering the grief and that's where kind of it stuck with me.

Curtis Worcester:

And so there's someone in my life who's kind of experienced a very similar situation here recently. And just the idea of, I think she talked about being at a family gathering and knowing if allowing the other people around you to know how to approach you and just reiterating, "I'm going to be okay, but you know what, I might be not okay today." So things like that. And again, I know, I'm not trying to make this all about the person who didn't suffer the grief, but that's just where I am in this scenario and it just really stuck out to me to know how to approach someone in that situation. It's really important because she hit on the whole conversation. People will drop out of your life. People will stop asking how you're doing. And so I just, that whole piece of the conversation really resonated with me just because of what's kind of snippet it into my life recently, but the whole conversation was just so good. And yeah, she just has a tremendous story to tell and she does a great job telling it.

Ben Smith:

And I think even she's kind of saying is letting people know ahead of time, if I'm going to be somewhere at an event is even ... Again, even with today's technology, if you can say even at a text, Hey, I'm really excited about being at this event today and seeing everybody, but I'm still grieving and you might see me get angry or cry or something. If you see me do that, as she said, is here's, here's how to approach me as I like to be approached in this way or I might step out. I might step out for an hour and allow those feelings to get out and come back and reinsert. And if I do that, here's some steps of it's okay.

Ben Smith:

Those sorts of things of kind of giving ground rules to people, I think allows you to kind of re-assimilate in the easier way and allows them to feel comfortable as you're feeling comfortable too. So I thought it was a fantastic advice there.

Ben Smith:

And I want to also add, as I think from ... she talked about the reinvent and rebuild part and again, I think there's a lot of that where I know she's talking about grief in terms of spouse, but I think there's grief that we experience on almost daily basis talking to our clients that are looking to retire here soon. So there's a grieving process they're going to, and they need to rebuild and reinvent themselves of who they are, what their time's going to be spent as. And I think that's, that's been a lot of the premise of us as financial planners is you have this money, what are you going to do with it?

Ben Smith:

And they haven't gone through those rebuild, reinvent processes. I know she's kind of saying, hey, she did this at a different age, but I thought those steps were a very good parallel to what I think a lot of our clients are experiencing on a daily basis.

Curtis Worcester:

I agree.

Ben Smith:

I know, obviously she has a specific lens about how to start being a bad widow, but again, maybe start being a bad retiree here.

Curtis Worcester:

That's right.

Ben Smith:

Doing some things that you really want to do. So again, I know we mentioned she has her Amazon book, The Bad Widow Guide to Life After Loss: Moving Through Grief to Live and Love Again. So we'll get that link on Amazon in the show notes. And then she also has her three video supplement on grief resilience as well that we'll share there. But if you want to see those links and some more of our podcast, you can go to blog.guidancepointllc.com/61 for episode 61. And you can find that there. We really appreciate you tuning in today. Again, 61, we're not quite social security age yet. So 62 coming up.

Curtis Worcester:

That's right.

Ben Smith:

But we really appreciate everyone tuning in. And if you have any comments or feedback or want to leave us a review, feel free to go into any of the popular podcast forums and give us some feedback there about how we're doing. Love to hear it, but always appreciate your attention and catch you next time.