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84. Ask Open Ended Questions- With David Richman
68 Plays3 years ago
An entrepreneur, author, public speaker, athlete, and
philanthropist, David Richman uses the lessons
learned in his life to enrich and inspire others. As a
former sedentary, over-weight, smoker, David knew that he
needed to focus not on what others wanted out of him, but on
what he wanted out of life. With his first book, Winning in the Middle of the Pack, David discussed how to get more out of ourselves than ever imagined. Now, David shares the interconnected stories of others overcoming obstacles—specifically cancer—in his second
book Cycle of Lives.
Cycle of Lives was created as the result of many years of
dedication to raising awareness and funds for cancer
research and care. David first started to form the idea
in 2007, after his sister was in the last few weeks of her battle
with brain cancer.
David made a commitment to his sister before her passing—
he would run 24 hours and raise money to support the fight
of others. Over the last 15 years, David completed several
more events: 24-hour runs, an 87-mile run from Cancun to
Tulum in the heat of a Mexican summer, a 104-mile run along
the Pacific Coast Highway, long bike rides, and various other
endurance events.
Hundreds of people have supported and joined David in these
events, and together, they have raised tens of thousands of
dollars along the way for exceptional organizations like the
American Cancer Society and Moffitt Cancer Center. In the
spirit of continual support, David is donating the profits from
book sales to the various cancer-related charities featured in
Cycle of Lives.
Connect with David Richman:
https://david-richman.com/cycle-of-lives/
https://david-richman.com/
Contact Kendra Rinaldi to be a guest or for coaching:
https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Biking and Grieving: A Personal Journey
00:00:02
Speaker
You know, I bike 41 out of 45 days, and I went nearly 5,000 miles. So if you do the math, it's like 120 miles a day, like solo, hardcore, ridiculous, right? But along that ride, I realized that I didn't need to grieve my sister. What I needed to do was grieve the thought that was in my head. For some reason, I hadn't come out until that ride, and I didn't just lose my sister.
00:00:31
Speaker
I lost the only person that knew me as a kid.
Introduction to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between
00:00:37
Speaker
Hello and welcome to grief, gratitude, and the Gray in Between podcast. This podcast is about exploring the grief that occurs at different times in our lives in which we have had major changes and transitions that literally shake us to the core and make us experience grief.
00:01:01
Speaker
I created this podcast for people to feel a little less hopeless and alone in their own grief process as they hear the stories of others who have had similar journeys. I'm Kendra Rinaldi, your host. Now, let's dive right in to today's episode.
David Richmond's Book: Cycles of Life
00:01:25
Speaker
Welcome to the episode today. We have David Richmond. David is an entrepreneur, an author, public speaker, athlete, and philanthropist. And David Richmond just wrote a new book called Cycles of Life. And his other book was called Winning in the Middle of the Pack. Today we'll be mainly talking about
00:01:48
Speaker
cycles of life, which I'm really excited to listen to because it's about 15 stories of people that were either caretakers or family members of people that were dying and their journeys.
Emotional Support: A Family Story
00:02:03
Speaker
It's like a compilation, kind of like taking these podcast episodes and writing a book, which you're giving me that idea. Thank you, David, for hopping on. No, totally, Kendra. I'm very excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:02:17
Speaker
I'm glad you are here. So tell us a little bit about you. We were starting to chat and then I'm like, wait, let's press record. So you live in Nevada, that part I got and tell us more. So yeah, my wife and I moved to Nevada. When the pandemic started, we were living in San Diego. But we had lived in LA most of our lives. And
00:02:44
Speaker
I, we met just like six or eight years ago, but, um, I have twins. Um, they're 23 now, which seems ridiculous because, um, you have kids, you know, it's like, you see them as a certain age. I see my kids as like five. Right. And maybe I don't treat them like they're five, but I see them as five. So say they're 23 is ridiculous. But, um, yeah, so we live in Nevada. My kids are often completing their master's programs and trying to make their way in the world. And.
00:03:15
Speaker
Um, yeah, they're, they're a big part of my story for sure. Just I'm sure anybody who has kids, man, it's, it's, it's a real joy. Oh yeah. No, they, they definitely are a joy and they're, they help us learn so much about ourselves, right? They're, I think they've been, my children have been one of my biggest teachers for sure. Uh, I've learned so much about myself and about life, just being a mother. So it's a big, big, big treat.
00:03:42
Speaker
Yeah, they were there when the inspiration for the second book came along because it was kind
Exploring Emotional Conversations on Cancer
00:03:51
Speaker
of shocking. I don't tell this story very often, but just to give you a little quick background, when my sister was going through brain cancer near the end of her journey, she was wanting to be part of this American Cancer Society Relay for Life, where
00:04:08
Speaker
You have people out there for 24 hours and they're walking around a track and supporting the team and either supporting survivors or remembering people that had deceased and raising money and that kind of stuff. It's a really good program. It's all over the country. I'm sure your listeners know.
00:04:26
Speaker
So I made a deal with my sister since she was so sick and she wanted to be there the whole 24 hours. I said, if you're going to be there the whole 24 hours, then I'm going to be on the track for the whole 24 hours. So I'm going to run the whole 24 hours. My kids were nine at the time, and they wanted to join me and be out there for the whole 24 hours too. Unfortunately, June died like two days before the event, so she couldn't be there to watch.
00:04:53
Speaker
Me and the kids were there and a bunch of other friends and family members and stuff like that. But there was one point, and I noticed throughout the day that people were kind of really good about talking about like the tasks of cancer. You know, like how do I get back and forth to chemo? When's my next PET scan? You know, how do I navigate work? Those kind of things. But when it came to the emotional stuff, they didn't talk. So when you said how much you learned from your kids, it was a really touching moment.
00:05:24
Speaker
There's a remembrance lap that goes on at the nighttime and people light candles inside of little bags that they write a note on and you walk around the track and everybody's very like silent and into their own little thing or whatever and the kids were walking ahead of me and I see all of a sudden this woman on the side of the track and there's a couple of bags that have caught on fire from the from the candles and
00:05:52
Speaker
And she's trying to put them out, and she's bawling her eyes out. And I kind of sit back, because both kids walk up to her. There's only nine, OK? They walk up to her, and they start talking to her, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I walk up, and I say, what's happening? And she said, oh my god, your kids are so sweet. She said, I lost both my parents to cancer this year.
00:06:16
Speaker
And these notes now burned up and I don't, you know, and it's, it's really affecting me. And I said, well, I'm sure, you know, the things have burned up, so don't worry about it, but it's the thought and the note and the whatever. And, and my son looks at me and he goes, Hey, is it okay if we walk with her? And I thought, Oh my gosh, like, like how sweet, right? How sweet and caring kids could be. And I definitely learned. And I thought to myself, you know, here was this,
00:06:43
Speaker
woman who was going through this just like emotional craziness Where most people weren't able to talk about the emotion and she could relate to these two nine-year-olds that wanted to hold a stranger's hand and walk her around the track because she was so emotional about her parents and so very moving scene when I think about it, you know, it's really gets me going but
Understanding Emotional Isolation in Cancer Experiences
00:07:06
Speaker
It's kind of like one of the sparks for the project was because it's so difficult for people to talk about the emotional side of it.
00:07:16
Speaker
that I wanted to do this project. So long story about kids. No, I love it. And how much you could learn from them. I love it. Yeah, their empathy right there. And the fact of you couldn't really fix what she was feeling, right? They couldn't fix how she was feeling. But just the being by her side and walking by her side was enough to show that support. And so many times, just like how you said, we get so
00:07:43
Speaker
focused on the tasks around caretaking, you know, of somebody that's passing or even after somebody's passed away, sometimes we don't even know what to do. And then just the just being there sometimes is enough. So thank you. Now, after your sister June, you mentioned was her name, June passed away. And you did then that 24 hour
00:08:07
Speaker
walk, run combination of everything, 24 hours on the track. What then inspired you to start researching about these stories? What was the catalyst for that aside from her passing? Right. It was a combination of things. I think I was a little perplexed as to why
00:08:33
Speaker
people self isolate when they're going through things or why people abandon not willingly but like they're not like all because you're going through something difficult I'm gonna disappear they don't but they don't know any better like like they
00:08:51
Speaker
You know, they kind of like, I don't want to be in your space and I don't want to say the wrong thing and I don't want to make you feel guilty. And it's just, it's easier sometimes to just not pay attention to the person going through the thing because you don't know what to say or what to do.
00:09:07
Speaker
Right. I mean, how are you going to brag about how good your life is when you're talking to somebody who might be dying? Right. And so it's this really difficult thing. And so I noticed that over a couple of year period where I was doing these events to raise money for the cancer center that took care of June. And as I'm not interacting with her family because they don't have the emotional ability to interact with, with, with, with, you know, with me and others about her death. And I'm wondering, why is this so common?
00:09:37
Speaker
So I start talking to people and I realize that it doesn't matter who I'm talking to, if it's a caregiver, a doctor, a survivor, somebody who was a kid whose parent went through cancer, a parent whose kid went through cancer, you know, just everybody I ran into said the same thing.
00:09:58
Speaker
When it comes to an emotional side, it's very, very difficult for us to relate, for us to understand what language to use. What's a safe place to go to? What are they going through? What did they go through? I don't want to get involved. I don't know how to talk about it. There was just so much angst over that whole part of it. And so that was my idea to say, let me try
00:10:22
Speaker
So I don't know about you, Kendra. You read a lot of books, you talk to a lot of people, okay? I'm not inspired by one person's story. It's hard for me to identify with them.
00:10:31
Speaker
Sometimes it's kind of cool to hear one person's crazy story, but if I'm trying to solve a problem or be better at business or whatever, I don't like one person prescribing to me what to do or preaching to me on what to do. What I love to do is to hear stories from a lot of people and then take a little nugget here, take a little nugget there, take a little nugget there. Hence what I do. Hence what I do. I said to myself, I go, what if I grabbed
00:10:57
Speaker
a ton of different people, all different ages, all different types of cancer, all different types of emotions, because people have a million different emotions related to cancer, right? One and done with cancer, just a fear of cancer, a doctor who's dealt with cancer their whole life, let me get a whole wide range of people. And then what I said was, their cancer experience is A to today, point B, A to B, okay?
00:11:28
Speaker
So if you were at point A, might've been you were an eighth grader who went on a field trip to a hospital, walked through the oncology unit and was fascinated by it and said, oh, I'm going to become a cancer doctor. Okay. That was point A. Or point A was, um, you found out your mom got pancreatic cancer and you're like, holy crap, cancer's in my life. That's point A. Point B is today.
00:11:51
Speaker
So what was the emotional journey from point A to point B in relation to all the traumas that took place before point A? Suicide, abandonment, abuse, making bad decisions, having bad relationships, having a good childhood, having a bad childhood, whatever, all the dynamics that made you who you are that I feel like we could all relate to.
00:12:18
Speaker
then let me see how those affect your emotional journey and your ability or inability to process the emotional side. And if I thought if I could get a wide range of people, you know, I got this cycle of lies. It's a wheel with a bunch of different like, you know, colors and perspectives in the wheel. If I could fill in all the little blanks on those wheels and provide enough perspective,
00:12:42
Speaker
and tell these really amazing, inspirational, moving stories about real people that we could identify with and then understand what they had gone through on the emotional side, then maybe perhaps I could better relate to people. And so when somebody says, oh, no, I'm fine. I don't need help. Really, are they saying that?
00:13:05
Speaker
Is that an excuse for them to go self-isolate or are they giving you an excuse to not offer you help? A way out, a way out. A way out, exactly. I wanted to go a little bit deeper because it was that over and over thing of how do we equip people to have the better conversations.
00:13:29
Speaker
That is amazing because that is exactly why I interview people on the podcast, is that what are these things that people have in common that's gotten them from that point A to point B? What was that journey? What has helped them in that grief journey and so forth? I am just as curious as you, and that's the reason I love talking to people to find out these stories.
00:13:53
Speaker
Now, did you find out any commonality that any things that you realized, okay, this is the reason that, you know, what's the common trait in these 15 stories? And you probably, maybe, I don't know if you talked to more and just picked 15. I did. You did. Okay. So in the stories that you gathered, what was something that was a common thread?
00:14:19
Speaker
Two points that was common to every single person and then one that was a secondary point. So the two things that were common with everybody.
00:14:31
Speaker
Okay, so what I wanted obviously was I wanted interesting, evocative, inspirational, kind of like extreme stories, right? Only because I think it's easier to identify with that. I couldn't get too subtle because I'm only going 20 to 30 pages per person, so it's got to be pretty stark.
00:14:52
Speaker
So no matter how crazy, ridiculous, amazing, insane their lives were, one thing that was common with every single person, they go, Ah, my story is not that interesting. I don't know. Right. So it's amazing. I talked to this one woman who
00:15:10
Speaker
Not only did she have five different cancers over a 35 year period, right? You name it. Every type of cancer you could ever imagine. Like basically she said to the doctor, whatever cancer comes next, just cut it, cut out whichever you need to cut out. And her oncologist said, there's nothing left to cut out. Wow. Right. There's nothing, there's nothing left to cut. We've cut everything out. Right. But her story's not about that.
00:15:36
Speaker
Her story is about she spent four years in
Cultural Taboos and Emotional Expression
00:15:39
Speaker
a ridiculously abusive relationship. She had to change her identity. She had to escape. She was sent to the hospital, all of these crazy things. And when I first talked to her, she's like, yeah, I mean, my story is not that interesting. And I'm like, what? So that was one thing. Everybody thought their story wasn't that interesting. And I don't know why that is, but I can identify with that for sure.
00:16:03
Speaker
The second thing is, without a doubt, every single person had that overriding factor. They either processed the emotions and hadn't talked to anybody about it, or they hadn't processed the emotions and obviously hadn't talked to anybody about it. So even a 40-year oncologist, even a critical care nurse, a pediatric nurse,
00:16:29
Speaker
people that were in the wellness and cancer support groups, even they hadn't talked about the emotional side of it. So those were the two common themes. And they weren't just the common themes on the 15 people that made the book. They're the common themes on literally every single person I talked to. The secondary one that wasn't with everybody, but was a lot of people, was some type of dynamic around isolation.
00:16:59
Speaker
Either they didn't know how to talk to their loved ones, or they were isolated because, you know, like in one case, one of the book participants, as he's getting wheeled in for surgery to remove a grapefruit sized sarcoma from his belly where he might die,
00:17:19
Speaker
And he was given virtually 0.0001% chance to live through all the treatments and everything. Once his girlfriend heard how serious it was, as he's being wheeled into the surgery, she says, sorry, man, you are on your own. This is not my life. I cannot handle this. I'm out. We want to talk about being isolated. So, uh, uh, either, you know, what happened to my best friend? They disappeared the second I needed them or.
00:17:48
Speaker
Or, you know what, I didn't ever want to burden my family with the emotional side of it, so I never talked about it because I didn't want to burden them. Whatever, isolation was not 100% of people, but in a large group of people, it was isolation. And I feel that's because we just are not equipped to talk about the emotional side.
00:18:09
Speaker
Mm-hmm. I wonder sometimes, too, if it's talking about the emotional side is so uncomfortable, like, because it faces us with our own mortality, just even, of these hard things, right? I've realized that not only is there a taboo of talking about grief and when we go through things, but there's just a taboo around talking about death. So therefore,
00:18:37
Speaker
it makes it really hard. And I wonder too, if things like don't air your dirty laundry, things like this that, you know, everything stays behind closed doors, those kind of, what are those called? With trite little sayings or whatever. Yeah, sayings and ways of upbringing.
00:18:56
Speaker
If that is what makes people not share that much what they're going through sometimes too and their hardships because of maybe just how we've been brought up to just kind of keep it all inside. Just curious if you noticed any
00:19:14
Speaker
of that or any realizations for yourself with that? That's a great couple of points that you make in that question. One thing is that it's impossible to put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You don't know what it is that
00:19:32
Speaker
creates them to be a certain way or not be a certain way. You know in yourself why you might be a certain way if you're reflective. Some people live in denial and they're not reflective.
Reflecting on Personal Loss and Empathy
00:19:41
Speaker
But if you're reflective and you're trying to attain some deeper form of grounded, meaningful connections with your loved ones and yourself, then you're going to be reflective. And you know what you went through, so maybe you can work on those things. But you don't know what somebody else went through. And so like with that guy that I mentioned,
00:19:59
Speaker
about being wheeled into the hospital, right? Or being wheeled into surgery and the girlfriend saying, that's it, I'm out of here, right? Now that would affect, I can understand how that would affect him, okay? But when I found out later, as I dug deeper and deeper and deeper into his story, when I found out later the reason that it so affected him was because he was raised in Puerto Rico
00:20:23
Speaker
to be a strong man and be macho and not to worry about the hard stuff that happens to you in life because what caused him to move to Puerto Rico was his mom killed herself when he was six. He was yanked from what he thought was his family, but it was not his family, to his real family in Puerto Rico. So you want to talk about
00:20:46
Speaker
Horrible. He walked in sees his mom dad. She killed herself because she ain't doubt and taken to a different cut, you know part Culture cold other culture And he you know, he comes to love his family and he's a wonderful wonderful guy But when he gets abandoned or he asked for help you think how hard it is for him to ask for help and so I
00:21:12
Speaker
taking a little bit of a walk in his shoes. I can never do that. Neither could the reader. But just to understand that when you have the chance possibly to be there for somebody, how hard it might be for you. Imagine how hard it might be for them to ask if they had gone through things like what he had gone through.
00:21:34
Speaker
So that's one thing that I thought was super important. And so again, another long rambling answer to your question. But those are some of the things that provided the impetus for me to try to bring insight into it. And so when you say these little sayings like, oh, be strong, or, oh, you can get through it, or whatever,
00:22:03
Speaker
They don't, it doesn't resonate because I don't understand what you mean by that, you know? Yes, yes, I can relate to that. Yeah, sometimes they're just kind of hallmark kind of statements or I don't know, I just call them that, but just statements that we say, but they're sometimes not even meeting even behind saying it. Sometimes it's just kind of like what we're used to programmed to say. Yeah. When somebody's going through hard times.
00:22:29
Speaker
And you said earlier in that question, you know, about are we a taboo to talk about death and that type of stuff. And, you know, like when you think about, you've heard this statement over and over and over, you know what, my life flashed before my eyes, right? Now, that to me is a trite saying, I don't get it, right? But when I was talking to somebody who's in the book,
00:22:54
Speaker
One of the first conversations that I had with her that made sense of her story was important was she said to me when the doctor told me about my cancer, I had to excuse myself because I needed to go into her room and collapse. And she said a million thoughts and a million memories and a million things. And she explained it a little bit more to me. But all this stuff ran through my brain. She goes, everything from being born to my
00:23:24
Speaker
childhood, to my grandma dying, to bad marriage, my kids, and all. Everything flew in my mind. A million things, a million emotions inside of five minutes. And then I realized I had to get up and walk back into the doctor's office and take out my notepad and my pen and say, OK, what do we need to do? And she said, I could write a book about that five minutes, but I never will. And I went, oh my gosh, that's what it means to have your life flash in front of you.
00:23:54
Speaker
Well, we were talking even just about our kids and how, like you said before we started recording that seeing your children now, you still see them as if they're five. And it's that, for me, the biggest reflection of life flashing before my life and seeing life like that is even just my kids that I'm like, wait, I just changed their diapers yesterday.
00:24:17
Speaker
literally, like, you know, it's like, you know, but it's like, they're already in high school. And, you know, so it's, it's this concept of time that all of a sudden just like kind of goes away. And you remember all these little milestones that they did. And, and you're like, Wow, I can't believe it's been x and y and number of years, right. So I'm assuming
00:24:42
Speaker
that that's the only little trace of relatability I would have to that concept of the flash before my eyes. And I say relatability because again, I haven't had that type of experience per se, but it is so hard. Now let me ask you in that journey then as you were collecting all these stories, how did that then help you process your grief of your sister's passing then?
00:25:10
Speaker
Well, so I'll try to not give you a super long rambling answer. I ask deep questions. So therefore, I can expect deep rambling answers. That's the reality. That's funny. I understand. And that's the purpose of this, right? We want to talk about things that maybe your listeners could gain some insight into or maybe be inspired to take some action in or whatever. So for me,
00:25:39
Speaker
You know, as June was dying here and I had a lot of talk, right? You were on the journey while your mom was dying. So you probably had a chance to reconcile some things, maybe not everything, but some things you were able to. And so that is the tiny little slice of joy and a horrible, horrible situation is at least you got that time. So it wasn't like I had to have somebody yank from me right away.
00:26:04
Speaker
But still, it's a sad thing to have somebody that's close to you pass away. But what I didn't do is I didn't grieve the thing that I ended up needing to grieve, and I didn't know what it was until I went on the bike ride. So what I did was- Yes, tell us. That wasn't going to be my next question. Go into it. So what I said, Kendra, was if I'm going to connect all these stories, okay?
00:26:28
Speaker
What better way to connect them to get on my bicycle and bike to all the people I've been talking to for a couple of years on the phone and meet them for the first time. I met some of them, but most of them I hadn't met in person.
00:26:41
Speaker
So I connected them. So I get on the bike and I start doing my ride and it's an insanely ridiculous, hardcore, you know, 14, 16, 18 hours a day on the bicycle bike ride. You know, I bike 41 out of 45 days and I went nearly 5,000 miles. So if you do the math, it's like 120 miles a day.
00:27:00
Speaker
like solo, hardcore, ridiculous, right? But along that ride, I realized that I didn't need to grieve my sister. What I needed to do was grieve the thought that was in my head. For some reason, I hadn't come out until that ride. I didn't just lose my sister. I lost the only person that knew me as a kid, right? That was in my life because my father died
00:27:29
Speaker
Unfortunately, my mom hasn't talked to me since I was a teenager. She just didn't like being a parent. And the only person that knew me from being a kid and the crazy childhood that we had was my sister. And so nobody's going to know me. And that's what I needed to grieve was that I'm not going to solve these problems. I'm never going to have anybody that understands what it was like.
00:27:59
Speaker
Everybody has the thing that they grieve, you know, and I don't know, maybe I don't want to take an assumption, but maybe what you might grieve over your mom is if you guys were super close and now you don't have that person to talk to anymore, right? Or whatever. If your mom was, you know, always the one that was go, go, go. And now you don't have anybody that you can look up to that was go, go, go. I don't know what the issue is, right? That you might secondarily need to grieve. But for me, it was that. And so.
00:28:29
Speaker
While I was on the bike ride, I was able to kind of process the stories that I was ready to write. I didn't write until I get back because I didn't know who was going to make the book and all of that.
00:28:46
Speaker
But I needed to go through that process. And so for me, that's what I needed to kind of deal with is understand that we're all like thousand piece puzzles.
Life's Puzzle: Accepting Missing Pieces
00:28:58
Speaker
And sometimes we're just going to have to deal with the fact that some pieces are going to be missing.
00:29:03
Speaker
Oh, I love that analogy that sometimes we just have to deal with some of the pieces missing. And of course, you can see me here on video as we're recording and how my emotions kind of, I can't hide them and that aspect of the role that your sister played in your life and how you no longer have
00:29:24
Speaker
that one person in your life that represents that, that knows you for all your life, in your entirety of your life. That was really moving. The secondary losses that you mentioned are sometimes the ones that people end up actually having the hardest time grieving over. And it could be, like you said, either the role
00:29:49
Speaker
that they had or because now that this person is no longer their life, they now have to move somewhere or live with. Even the example of the gentleman that was going to have the major surgery, right, his mom died and now not only did his mom die, he also had to then be taken away.
00:30:06
Speaker
to move to another community, right? That's a huge, huge grief there too. So there's all these stages, that stage is ways in which we can grieve and ways in which it could be reflected after someone dies that are not just about the death. So thank you for sharing that perspective.
00:30:27
Speaker
Now, in that riding then, so tell us a little bit about that bike ride and how it was to meet the different people that you had been talking to over the phone. Yeah, so it was crazy.
00:30:46
Speaker
It's a pretty big undertaking, right? To take that much time and get on your bike. And luckily, I had support along the way. So it wasn't like I was on my own the whole time. I was only on my own maybe 10 days out of the 45, maybe eight or 10 days. But I was biking by myself. So I went basically from LA to San Diego.
00:31:09
Speaker
then through the deserts in the Southwest, up to New Mexico, down all through Texas, and then the panhandle of Florida turned right, made it down to Tampa so I could visit a couple of book participants that were in the Tampa area and one of the cancer centers that I wanted to visit. Then over to Orlando and north all the way to New York City.
00:31:37
Speaker
So that's the, that's where you get the 40, 4700 or so miles. And it was crazy. I only took four days off in 45 days. And one of them was forced by a hurricane to take off, but it was the first, I think Kendra was like the first 10 or 11 days. The high never got below a hundred. So it was really hot too. Cause I left on September 1st and then, um,
00:32:05
Speaker
So it was hot, it was windy, it was flat tires all day long. I had to do it on the interstate because I had to get from point A to point B, like quick. So you can't be taking back roads. So I was on the highway, like on the interstate, trucks going by at 80 miles an hour. I still have PTSD. So it was really, really hard, but it was also.
00:32:29
Speaker
very good because when you test yourself physically and you make yourself raw, what I wanted to try to do was to process these emotions on my own and also kind of process the emotions behind the stories that I was going to write. And what better way to process it than being in a raw position so I could really draw on the experience, you know, to
00:32:55
Speaker
to do there. So it's kind of like being a war correspondent, right? If you're on the ground while you're a war correspondent, man, it's raw, right? And if you're trying to do it from a control room, in a van, in some other continent, it's not the same thing.
00:33:13
Speaker
Right. So you're started in a control room because you started interviewing in a control room, but then you went into the trenches. Yeah, kind of self-inflicted. It's not war. I'm using that as a terror. No, no, I know. But no, it's not. I mean, it's to be able to have, again, when you're going through this kind of endurance and you're putting your body through something like that, it also makes your emotions be more
00:33:43
Speaker
out there too, right? So therefore you can relate to things probably differently because so many different chemicals are released in our body. So plus the thoughts, the amount of time you get to think and be with your thoughts when you're on a bike that you can't be watching Netflix while you're
00:34:01
Speaker
It's so true. It's so true. And that's kind of why I continue to do endurance athletics. And why I was drawn to it is, um, you know, I was going through a really rough time. I was a smoker. I was overweight. I was just full of stress. My kids were four. I was in an abusive relationship and I needed to get out. And the thing that I, I found to help me get out of this
00:34:27
Speaker
mess I created for myself was endurance athletics for that exact reason because it allowed me to process things and think about it and you know when you are sitting down to watch a movie that's like an escape that doesn't allow you to solve your problems right which is fine we all need escapes but if you want to go like for a six hour run in the desert you could solve some problems
00:34:52
Speaker
So, okay, so now going to the fact of then meeting these people. So if you had been talking to them, how did you find the people you were going to talk to and interview for your book? How did you connect with these people in the first
Gathering Stories for the Book
00:35:06
Speaker
place? Were they somebody told you about them? Were they referrals? Were they friends? How did you connect? Probably the same way that you get guests on your podcast is some are friends.
00:35:20
Speaker
some are you're asking your friends who do you know I should be talking to some are like how in the world did we connect and did we get here I don't know but let's do it and then you know I made some co-calls I co-called a bunch of cancer institutes and cancer centers and I said hey here's a project I'm working on I do you have anybody that have interesting stories I got I got several from there I had a friend
00:35:47
Speaker
you know, like a friend of a friend at work say, oh my gosh, you got to meet this person. And so it was all pretty much by accident. There was only one person that I wanted to talk to that was a friend.
00:36:04
Speaker
Right? So she was a OBGYN whose family had escaped the night Saigon fell. So they escaped Vietnam on one of the last three barges that left the harbor in Saigon. And she made it to the States through ridiculous amounts of bigotry and just horrible circumstances. She becomes a doctor.
00:36:35
Speaker
And she loves being a surgeon, OBGYN loves helping people give birth, loves, I mean, she sits down and she holds her patient's hands, like she's the greatest thing ever, and she develops tumors on her brain. And they're benign, but they cause so many problems with her physicality that she has to stop being a doctor.
00:37:02
Speaker
and it drastically changes her life and for a long time the relationship she had with her kids and her husband and hers was the fear of cancer not anything other than that who can't relate to having the fear of cancer but what I thought was super interesting was that her fear of cancer was enhanced because
00:37:27
Speaker
When she was a little girl growing up in Vietnam, anytime anything bad was going to happen, her dad would look at her and say, you keep her mouth shut. Because you talk about this stuff. It's like a cancer. You don't tell anybody about this stuff. It's like cancer. You don't want to make it bigger than it is. You keep it inside. And so imagine being told that.
00:37:49
Speaker
and having this fear that everything's gonna turn into cancer if you talk about it. And then all of a sudden she has this fear, this real life fear of cancer and she can't talk to anybody because she's afraid to talk about it. Because if she talks about it, it's gonna be cancer. I mean, imagine that. So I was like, whoa, I gotta talk to her. I mean, she was a friend of mine and I gotta talk to her about it. So everybody else I just found by asking,
00:38:18
Speaker
But, but, uh, but yeah, and, and some people, honestly, Kendra, some people I talked to weren't able to talk. Do you know, some people weren't able to talk because it's so hard. It's so hard. It's so hard.
00:38:34
Speaker
Yeah, especially opening up about the emotions. Just like you said, if it's already hard in itself to reach out for help when you're going through something so hard, then to open up for somebody to write about how you felt through that. That's a lot.
00:38:55
Speaker
For the ones that you were able to bridge that level there of comfort, what created that space and safe space for them to be able to talk to you about what they were going through and allow their stories to be shared? Great question. I'd say that some of it was timing. They were ready when I needed them to be ready.
00:39:23
Speaker
So one of the people in the book is one of the most moving stories you could ever imagine, because I always tell people, don't assume that you know what's going on, right? And I don't mean that from a preachy thing. I mean, like, you can't assume. Because imagine I could tell you this, Kendra, you got six kids, okay? You have a husband, 25 year marriage, and you go to bed one day and you wake up
00:39:53
Speaker
to your husband telling you at four in the morning, you're going to go into surgery. They're going to remove a grapefruit sized tumor from your brain. You're most likely going to die. But if you make it through, we'll do everything we can. And imagine you saying to your husband and smiling and saying, thank God. Imagine that.
00:40:22
Speaker
So this is the husband telling the wife, what's going to happen to you. You're going into surgery right now. We're going to, they're going to try to remove and she smiles at him and says, thank God. Could you imagine that? Like, like, no, no. So I first talked to them when she was going through cancer and they were not able to talk to me. Um, after she died, um, uh, about a year later,
00:40:52
Speaker
death, a couple of her sisters and her husband were ready to talk. And that's, so they called me and they said, or the person that introduced us said, I think they want to talk now. And so sometimes it was lucky, the timing of it was lucky. Other times, if they weren't ready to go there, but I thought their stories were interesting enough and needed to be told, I just tried to give them a safe space by
00:41:23
Speaker
by listening, by really explaining what I was trying to do and giving them a safe space to talk. And people will talk if they have a safe space to talk. And if you're really actively listening, I mean, you're a very good question asker because you're actively listening. But if your brain is somewhere else, I'm gonna limit my answer a little bit because it's not safe, right? And that's what you need to give to people is a safe place to go
00:41:53
Speaker
And then the third type was they might've been intrigued and I caught him at the right time because I have a lady who was an oncologist for 40 years. And her story was fascinating, absolutely fascinating. The difficulty of becoming a surgeon and the difficulty of becoming an oncologist against sexism
00:42:16
Speaker
and building a practice when people would say to her, how am I gonna refer you clients who have curly hair? Nobody wants to go to a woman with curly hair as their doctor. Could you imagine that? I mean, that's the world that she- So not only sexism, but prejudice of different types. Oh, unbelievable. But her story really relied around, or was kind of centered around two things. One, when she was a little girl, her dad abandoned the family, never to be heard from again.
00:42:45
Speaker
How's that not going to affect you? Number two is she built this beautiful life for herself. And over a 40 year span of being an oncologist, she became more and more desperate to have her clients listen to her because if they didn't listen to her, they might get sicker. They might even die. And she now understood after being 40 years into it, what they might miss out on life. So she was getting more and more desperate. If you're not going to take my advice, get out.
00:43:14
Speaker
Because I need to help you. What a wonderful story. So I asked her, I said, hey doc, if we can, we need to talk about things you never talked about before. And she goes, yeah, that's fine. And I go, no, no, no, really. Things like you never even talked to your husband about maybe. She goes, yeah, we don't talk about this kind of stuff. And I said, well, things you don't talk about your coworkers. And she started laughing. She said, I'm a woman doctor. You think I'm talking about my emotions at work?
00:43:40
Speaker
Hell no. And I said, well, then your friends, she goes now. And I said, who have you talked to about all this stuff? And she said, nobody, let's, let's see what we find out. So sometimes it was lucky that people were willing to go where we were willing to go. But, um, you know, I definitely pushed with everybody. It was not easy. Uh, because when you get really deep down into it, it's not easy, right? Especially, you know, with a stranger and all
The Writing Process: A Long Journey
00:44:07
Speaker
of that. So that's why sometimes.
00:44:10
Speaker
I didn't uncover the most important nuggets until like a year and a half into talking them.
00:44:15
Speaker
Wow. Okay. So you're talking about time now. Now I'm curious then, how long did it take you to gather then all these stories and then to publish the book? How long was this process? Because if you're kind of going along with them in this ride and easing them into trusting and shedding a little bit of these barriers to be able to share their story, how long was this process?
00:44:45
Speaker
It took a while. It did have one bad side effect. And the bad side effect was that if I had caught somebody at really raw emotional time, then now a year later, you know, the stories are ready to be edited and processed and, you know, I got to have review it and have them sign off on it. They sometimes were beyond the emotion that happened at the time or like one of them, one story.
00:45:15
Speaker
was about some issues that created the main character to be estranged from his kids. Well, in the time that we talked to the time that his story was ready, he had started to mend the relationships. And so he was like, you can't talk about this. We can't talk about that. We can't talk about that because it's going to then potentially estranged me from my kids again.
00:45:43
Speaker
And I'm like, Oh my gosh. So, uh, so it wasn't perfect, right? That it took this long, but it was about two years of talking to people. And then about a year of, you know, month and a half of the bike ride, and then about a year of writing, um, the stories. And then my editor totally changed at that basis for everything. Um, and I had to rewrite the whole thing. So I'd say from the
00:46:13
Speaker
First phone call to most of them until I said, hey, can you sign off on your story, was probably about four years.
00:46:20
Speaker
I like that you're sharing this because a lot of times people do not know, when we're picking up a book, we do not know all the time that it's taken someone to get that. So four years for what you've done is actually in the big scheme of things. It's not that long of a time for what you were able to accomplish. Some books take much longer than that, right? So that's very, very impressive.
00:46:48
Speaker
Also, I'm assuming that being an endurance athlete, that you're so patient and you know that it's for the long haul. You're not like a short distance runner. You're an endurance athlete. That preparation, I'm sure, made a big part of you taking your time also with this. I can see that dynamic fitting into your book writing as an athlete.
00:47:17
Speaker
Yeah. Also, um, there was another facet to it, right? That also was that played a big part. And that was that, um, could you imagine if I asked you to be a part of this project and I said, Hey, Kendra, talk to me about all the crazy stuff that happened in your life prior to when you're, uh, found out about your mom and then let's talk about your mom and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And imagine that I say to you, okay, then.
00:47:45
Speaker
I'm going to now send you your story and I want you to read it. That's a lot of pressure, man. It's a lot of pressure. And so I was really, really driven to make sure that I did the most accurate and in best light. Like there was one story and I won't tell you which story. I don't want to give any details on it, but I know, but I felt like you, you could ask my wife,
00:48:15
Speaker
I was having such a hard time with it because every time I wrote her story, I made her sound pitiful. And I did not want her to have pity thrown on her, but you couldn't help but feel pity for her. Pity, like full on, like, oh, I just feel so bad for her, right? But she didn't feel bad for her in a lot of ways. And so how could I write her story without it being sounding pitiful?
00:48:43
Speaker
and without her sounding pitiful. So I had to write and rewrite and write and rewrite and rewrite and oh my God, it was terrible. And when I sent it to her, I'm just like, oh my God, what's going to happen when she sees this thing? And she sent me back a thing and she said, you know, a couple of things aren't exactly accurate, but I like what you did. It's good. And I went, ah. Whatever. Do you know? And a writer, anybody out there that's a writer will identify with this.
00:49:12
Speaker
So I talked to them for two years. I write it for a year. I edit it back and forth with my editor for a year. And then I press send, right? Like I press send on the story. And like five minutes later, I'm in my wife's office. I'm going, man, they hate me. They didn't read it yet. They didn't answer. And she's like, you just sent it five minutes ago. And I'm like, oh, but they hate me. Who's not going to read their own story in five minutes? I mean, come on, man.
00:49:39
Speaker
And she's like, just relax. So a couple of the people didn't have immediate love, but a couple of them did. And we worked it out with everybody. So it was wonderful. That's awesome. And now are all of these characters, as everybody in the story, are their names revealed or some chose to be anonymous?
Anonymity and Charity in Storytelling
00:50:00
Speaker
Great question. Only two. Only two chose to be anonymous.
00:50:04
Speaker
Okay. And one was because they didn't want their kids to have to go through the emotional pain of watching their mom die again, which is completely totally understandable. And part of that story was one of the kids had found his 18 month old baby sister dead in the crib.
00:50:31
Speaker
very emotional, unbelievable, emotional. And he didn't want to have to put his kids through that again. So he said to me, could we please go anonymous? And then the other one was the person who I mentioned just before who needed to go anonymous because, and I had to change a lot of details, facts and figures, not emotions and not the, not the crux of the story, but just the, so nobody could figure out how it was because it was a very public figure. So I had to change the,
00:51:00
Speaker
And I was hoping that they would stay setting everything. Yeah. Yeah. You know, if I gave this clue, you know who the person is. So I had, I had to make an anonymous, but the other 13, they are who they are. Real names, real numbers, real, real everything.
00:51:15
Speaker
Oh, what an amazing journey and the feat that you accomplished by doing this. And what an incredible honor, a way of honoring your sister as well in this journey. So yeah, thank you. I think so. It's definitely a way of honoring because by her passing away was what intrigued you to then find out more of these stories and
00:51:41
Speaker
I think that anytime we do something in life, in memory of somebody, in some way or another, I feel that it's a way of honoring their life as well. It's nice. It does keep a little energy, right? I mean, that's maybe what you're doing a little bit with your mom, right? Is that it's maybe just this little bit of energy that you're putting out there that just keeps them that much closer or just makes it so they're not forgotten, you know?
00:52:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that's the right word, like a legacy kind of continuing on somehow with that. Now, is there anything else you'd like to share before we close off and that you tell us how people can get cycles of life and how they can reach you? Sure. Thank you for that.
00:52:32
Speaker
100% of the proceeds are going to the charities. Oh, good point. Yes, that's part of it. I forgot to. Yes, so super important. I asked each of the book participants that I worked with. I said, can you do me a favor and choose an organization that you fill an affinity towards? So it's places like Children's Hospital LA, the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida, that oncologist I was talking about. She's at the Perlmutter Cancer Institute in New York.
00:53:00
Speaker
And other, uh, and so I said, just, you know, we're not going to raise a lot of money. There's not a lot of money in books, but whatever we do, raise a hundred percent of it will go to split up between these different organizations. So that's a good thing, right? That's a feel good. So if anybody wants to buy the book, they could go to, um, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, whatever, where they buy books. Um, if they want a signed copy, they could go to my website. It's cycle of lives.org, or they can look me up, David Richmond, uh, uh, and, um,
00:53:30
Speaker
you know find out about that book and other books and and uh yeah maybe um you know what if you just want to be um better um like exposed to what people have gone through then maybe you can maybe hopefully use that to relate to the people in your lives and form you know deeper more meaningful connections
00:53:52
Speaker
You know, David, it's actually something that a lot of people reach out to me about. And maybe this happens to you too. It's like, what do I say? Like they reach out like, I have so and so, you know, they just lost, you
Supporting Grievers: Open-Ended Questions
00:54:05
Speaker
know, a spouse. What do I say? That's one of the most common calls I get from friends is like, what do I do? What do I say?
00:54:12
Speaker
And it's exactly because of what you just said, of being able to find how can you relate and reading books like this that share real stories and these journeys help us have that little bit of relatability when somebody's going through something. So thank you, thank you for pointing that out and for sharing that. Sure, you're welcome. And I'll give your listeners the answer to the question. You ready for this one?
00:54:40
Speaker
I don't do this very often, but I'm gonna give them the answer to the question. Just ask an open-ended question. Just do that. Instead of saying, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry about your loss, or I'm sorry to hear that, or, oh my gosh, you know, that's terrible. Just ask an open-ended question. Like, for example, oh, your mom died of pain, oh, what was she like? Or, oh my God, were you close?
00:55:10
Speaker
Or, oh my gosh, how old was she? Anything that would be an open-ended question, which basically says, you could tell me more if you want to, you don't have to, but you could tell me more if you want to because whatever. And usually that open-ended question will be the beginning of you having the safe space to be able to talk to each other because I don't gain anything from, I'm sorry for your loss.
00:55:38
Speaker
But every once in a while when somebody says, oh, wow, so were you and your sister always close? Or what? Or, oh, what was she like? Or, oh my gosh, how is that for her family? It's always an opening to talk, right? And it's wonderful because a lot of us do really love to talk about our loved ones. Because back again to what we were saying, it's like we want to keep our memory alive.
00:56:05
Speaker
it by asking that you know what that person's ready to open up as well. And with depending on the question, that's an amazing tip. So thank you. Thank you for that tip. Thank you for your time. And thank you again for writing cycle cycles of lives. I'm like I'm saying it and I always mess up with how I say things partly because of my Spanish. I always blame it on my Spanish cycle of lives. Am I saying it right now?
00:56:30
Speaker
Cycle of lives, exactly. Cycle of lives. Yes, plural with the lives instead of a life. Yes. Thank you once again, David. You're very welcome, Kendra. Thank you.
00:56:47
Speaker
Thank you again so much for choosing to listen today. I hope that you can take away a few nuggets from today's episode that can bring you comfort in your times of grief. If so, it would mean so much to me if you would rate and comment on this episode. And if you feel inspired in some way to share it with someone who may need to hear this, please do so.
00:57:15
Speaker
Also, if you or someone you know has a story of grief and gratitude that should be shared so that others can be inspired as well, please reach out to me. And thanks once again for tuning into Grief Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.