Our Dead Dads

032 - Understanding Parental Bonds and the Path to Forgiveness with Courtney Moore

• Nick Gaylord • Episode 32

Share episode

Courtney Moore shares her heartfelt journey through a complicated relationship with her father, delving into the challenges of navigating grief after losing him to pancreatic cancer. The episode explores acceptance, healing, and the profound impact of their dynamics on her life. 

• Introduction and background of Courtney’s family 
• Childhood marked by loss and complex relationships 
• Reflections on leaving home at 15 for independence 
• The importance of understanding family dynamics 
• Journey of returning to a dying parent and reconciliation 
• Acceptance as key to healing from complex relationships 
• Creating space for collective grief and understanding

Courtney's specialty is acupuncture, the mind-body connection and intuitive counseling. If you are interested in working with Courtney, visit her website, https://courtneymoorewellness.com/  From there, you can send her an email or call/text her to set up a discovery call.


---------------------
To join the live interview with Justin Shepherd on January 8th, 2025 @ 3:00 pm EST, follow Our Dead Dads Podcast on YouTube here: 

https://www.youtube.com/@ourdeaddadspod


GIVE THE SHOW A 5-STAR RATING ON APPLE PODCASTS!

FOLLOW US ON APPLE OR YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST PLATFORM!

BOOKMARK OUR WEBSITE: www.ourdeaddads.com

FOLLOW OUR DEAD DADS ON SOCIAL MEDIA:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ourdeaddadspod/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ourdeaddadspod
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ourdeaddadspod
Twitter / X: https://x.com/ourdeaddadspod
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmmv6sdmMIys3GDBjiui3kw
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ourdeaddadspod/

Speaker 1:

Happy New Year and welcome back to Our Dead Dads, the podcast where we normalize talking about grief, trauma, loss and moving forward. I'm your host. My name is Nick Gaylord. Thank you so much for listening and for making this show part of your day. Thank you for continuing to support the show and if you're brand new to the show and don't know much about us, follow the podcast on whatever platform you're listening to us right now and do that so you don't miss any upcoming episodes. And while you're there, please leave a review and give the show a five-star rating. If you don't know how to leave a review, check out our website, ourdeaddadscom. Scroll down on the homepage and you'll see have helped so much already and your rating will continue to help the show grow and climb the charts. You can also follow the show on our social media pages on TikTok, youtube, facebook and Instagram. Most importantly, please spread the word about the show.

Speaker 1:

Here we dive deep into stories of grief, trauma and loss, and this is to give everyone who has a story the chance to tell it. And, equally as important, we're looking for everyone who has a story and either hasn't begun processing their grief or doesn't know how to begin. It's been a couple of weeks, but I really hope you enjoyed the family reunion episode two weeks ago with my brothers, my friends, my wife and my youngest sister. We're going to kick off 2025 with episode number 32, and today Courtney Moore joins the show. Courtney is going to talk about losing her dad a little more than a year ago, a relationship that was shaped in large part due to the passing of her mother when she was only a year old. It was a very complicated relationship with her dad and we're going to start back when she was a child, eventually leaving home at only 15, and accepting that her dad's perception of how his life turned out was very different than the plan he had laid out for himself before she was even born. We will discuss the end of his life, ultimately losing his battle with pancreatic cancer, and what it was like for her to spend the last nine days of his life with him as he passed.

Speaker 1:

Before we get started, I have one other reminder. Tomorrow afternoon, wednesday, january 8th, at 3 pm, us Eastern Time, will be my Before we get started. I'm going to also remind you that tomorrow, wednesday, january 8th, at 3 pm, us Eastern Time, will be my very first interview that will be streamed live on my YouTube channel and will ultimately be released for replay on the podcast as well. My guest will be Justin Shepard, and if you follow him, you know him better as Justin on TikTok, and more recently he has updated his account username to JustinTheNickOfCrime to align with his true crime podcast and all of the real-time work he does for the community to share breaking news, updates, working with families and authorities nationwide to spread information about adults and children who have been reported missing and helping to have them found safely, and so much more. He'll be talking about all of that, but he also has a very personal story that he's going to be sharing. If you'd like to see the interview, I'll be including instructions on how you can watch it on my YouTube page and how you can watch it on Justin's TikTok page. He has generously offered to live stream the interview on his TikTok page as well, in large part because my TikTok account is still relatively new and I don't have enough followers to go live on my own yet. So find my account, follow me and spread the word to others.

Speaker 1:

As you know, my goal is to normalize talking about grief, loss and trauma, which are topics that are not easy for most of us to talk about, but they're also topics that everybody should be discussing more, and not only discussing them but not feeling like they're taboo topics. Time may not heal all wounds, but keeping everything bottled up inside doesn't heal anything. Together, we are building a community for others to have a safe space to talk about their stories and their feelings, and for anyone who may not yet be ready to talk, just to listen to others and know that nobody is alone in this path. That is why I say we are a community and I'm so happy to have you here.

Speaker 1:

If you have a story of grief and loss to share and might want to be considered as a future guest on Our Dead Dads, go to OurDeadDadscom. Go to the Contact Us link and select Be a Guest, fill out the form, send it in and you just might be able to tell your own story and carry on this mission of helping ourselves and so many others. And now it's time to get started and welcome Courtney to the show. Please enjoy the episode and stick around for the end when I'll tell you about next week's episode. Good afternoon, how are you doing?

Speaker 2:

I'm good. How are you?

Speaker 1:

Good, good to see you again.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you too.

Speaker 1:

Happy Monday.

Speaker 2:

Happy Monday.

Speaker 1:

What better way is there to start off the work week than with an interview about terrible topics? Nailed it, that's right. At least we're still laughing. Hopefully we'll be laughing by the end of this as well.

Speaker 2:

Right, you got to keep your sense of humor with all this stuff.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely have to keep your sense of humor. If you can't laugh through this, then holy crap. What can you laugh at? Life's laughing at us. We might as well laugh back.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Well, hopefully it won't laugh too much at us, because we are going to try to have a little bit of fun, even though we're going to talk about some heavy topics. So I would like to officially welcome you back to our Dead Dads podcast. We have spoken before, but this time it is for real, on the record for all the world to enjoy our conversation. So give me one second. Let me where's the screen that I had?

Speaker 1:

I'm glad that we did have the chance to talk initially, because I know most of what you're going to say, even though maybe you'll pull a couple of surprises out. But you are here to talk about your dad, who you lost, and you're going to tell the story about, well, pretty much everything that you want to talk about. You can talk about your entire life, but obviously we're going to put a lot of focus on what ended up being the last nine days that you spent with him. But before we get into that, let's jump all the way back to as far back as you want to go, and this is your chance to tell your story. Tell us everything about you, your dad, your family, your relationship, everything. It's all fair game.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, let me really set the story up by giving some background about my family and my relationship with my dad. Okay, my mother died when I was a year old. She has breast cancer. She was diagnosed when she was pregnant with me. She wanted a baby so badly. She was 37 when she got pregnant. They had been dating for about 10 years, I think, on and off, and he wanted to move to Oregon from the Bay area and she said put a ring on my finger and let's have a baby and I'll move with you. And that's what they did. So she got pregnant. She had been diagnosed with cancer when she was 27. So she waited the appropriate amount of time 10 years before she tried to conceive. And you know, I'm sure it was one of those cancers that are estrogen receptor positive, because it was during the pregnancy that the cancer came back.

Speaker 2:

So I say all that because you know my dad loved me and was thrilled to have me, but the plan was clearly for my mom to have a baby and my dad to have a career. That was the setup and he was passionate about his career. He was an architect, he really loved solar design and he really wanted to, just like build awesome solar houses for his whole life, and that didn't happen. So she died when I was 18 months old, and this is kind of interesting. She had arranged for her brother to take me. I think she knew my dad did not really have the constitution or the nervous system to raise a daughter by himself, so she arranged for her brother to take me and it's funny they told me this when I was in my late 20s I'm 40 now.

Speaker 2:

This came to me kind of later in life. They actually waited to have their last child and named her after my mom, which I never put together as a kid. But there's a big gap between Sam and Karen and that's where Courtney was supposed to go. But he couldn't lose both of us. You know it was so hard. He loved my mom. She was on a pedestal. He couldn't lose both of us at once.

Speaker 2:

So he kept me and my grandma helped a lot when I was really little and my dad had a pretty difficult personality. I would always say he didn't play well in the sandbox with others. He was very rigid about what he wanted. He did not express himself with a lot of nuance or tact. He didn't have a lot of empathy.

Speaker 2:

And so right after mom died he got a job teaching high school locally, just so that we could kind of get our bearings. We were living in Southern Oregon at the time and he had been teaching at the University of Idaho and kind of commuting. They got this local high school job and that started this bizarre life where he got a different academic job every year. So every year in like August, maybe early September, we'd moved to a new city where he had this new teaching contract architecture usually. But he didn't have a PhD in architecture and so sometimes he taught grade school, math, high school, russian. My dad was brilliant. He had two masters and two bachelors Stanford, cal, ucsb. He was very, very educated so he could teach a lot of things. So we just kept moving to these different schools where he would teach something for the year and then in the summer we would move back through the Northwest, which is where his mom lived and sort of like where his heart was, I think.

Speaker 1:

Now, was that by design that you guys moved every year? Did he want to teach something different and somewhere different every year, or did it just kind of happen that way?

Speaker 2:

I think he wanted the perfect teaching contract where he would be a tenured professor at a prestigious university. But in the absence of that, it was like, okay, I just need another teaching job, another teaching job, another teaching job. He always said he didn't like the field of architecture because he had to do so much schmoozing and again, he just didn't have the personality for that. He was not a sales guy. He really didn't have friends. I can count on one hand the number of friends who came over to our house in my entire life. In my entire life he did not have friends. He didn't really date. I can also count on one hand the number of dates he went on during my childhood which you know it's hard as a single dad to date, but he just, yeah, he was not a very social person, not a very socially attuned person.

Speaker 1:

Moving every year probably doesn't help that either.

Speaker 2:

That's probably right. It's hard to create strong friendships and lasting connections. It's funny because I do actually remember when I was very young he was softer and a little more social. I remember him laughing more. Before I was like seven he did want to have a beer with a friend every once in a while and I think this lifestyle really got to him. I think it's really hard to move all around the country with a small child in tow.

Speaker 2:

Of course, we did eventually settle in a pattern between three cities. So from the time I was eight to the time I was 15, we were going between Yakima, washington, anderson Island, washington and Corvallis, oregon, and so there was some stability there. But it's funny because, even though that's how it shook out, we didn't know year to year if that would happen. So we still packed up the entire apartment, still gave up the lease, still relocated for the summer and then just moved back over and over again. It was a weird transient lifestyle. It was just me and him. He was just really tough. He was a tough man, he had a violent temper, he terrified me and I wonder if a lot of little girls just feel scared of their dads. I don't know if that's just a thing, I know I did. You know, we think of the masculine. The paternal is like discipline and structure and rigidity, and that was definitely my experience with my dad, you know.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I was really scared of him and I told him that once. I remember he could be really violent with me. He would shake me a lot, he would slap me when I was late for pickup he'd like chase me with a car, he'd throw things at me. It was all really frightening and none of it was like child abuse. Like I really struggle with this and I've talked to other women who also struggle with sort of I don't know was it abuse, I and who also struggle with sort of I don't know was it abuse.

Speaker 2:

I didn't have bruises or black eyes. Like he never like punched me and I remember actually when I was in third or fourth grade I think it must've been third Cause I was the new kid at this school that I was at for a few years and I tried to tell some kids about it and you know kids, kids are hard and they all banded up and decided that because I didn't have any bruises, and they all banded up and decided that because I didn't have any bruises, I was lying, I had made the whole thing up and so that kind of taught me.

Speaker 2:

you just don't talk about it. You know you keep whatever's going on at home, at home you don't tell people. It was like our big secret. I had a godmother, and I was very close to my grandmother, his mom, who both told me at different points of my childhood that I could go to the police if I wanted to, which that's something I really had to process as an adult that an adult would tell a child who they saw in a violent situation that the child should go get help instead of the adults getting help.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's a little strange that they wouldn't be your advocate and go to the police for you and or with you.

Speaker 2:

It made me feel even more alone in the world, you know, and it made me feel even more that these are just secrets that we don't talk about. These are not things that are discussed, these are not things that people want to look at Right. And so, you know, it got worse and worse. We had like this big fight when I was nine, and it was a big ugly fight. I ended up sleeping in the closet overnight and the next day he was silent, took me to school. He picked me from school and he said if that ever happens again, I'll go to therapy, which you know, for the boomers that was like the worst thing that could happen to them. I'll go to therapy was the carrot that stopped that behavior for him.

Speaker 2:

He was that terrified of therapy, that against therapy and it's interesting, I have my godmother now is aging, you know she's in that same generation. She very much needs therapy. She won't do it. It's like the last ditch resource. We will do everything we can to avoid talking about it. Connecting with another human being, about this human experience we're living. So in some ways I'm grateful because he stopped hitting me, but he still. He was just loud and angry. He'd yell at me a lot. He's very strict. I didn't have my own bedroom ever and it was never any sexual abuse. It wasn't that sort of thing. But again, my dad just I'm so sure he was autistic, like all of this is is me piecing together like doesn't read social cues well, kind of nonverbal, very shy, doesn't make a lot of eye contact. Really brilliant, really rigid in his idea structure.

Speaker 1:

And all of those things factored together, even though he was never diagnosed, make you think that it's a good possibility that he was.

Speaker 2:

I really do, and I didn't as a kid. You know, as a kid I was just like, wow, my dad is so different from the other families, our family is so different from the other families and I'd go to friends' houses and just you know, because we live this transient lifestyle, there were entire years we slept in a mattress on the floor, we used a cardboard box as a kitchen table. We sat in plastic kitchen chairs for my whole life like deck chairs. Those were our furniture. And again there's this sense of shame of like we hide what happens in our family so no one else knows. No one should see what's going on in our household.

Speaker 1:

Well, unfortunately, that's how we were basically raised. I mean, you said you're 40, I'm 48. So we're not all that far apart, but that was definitely a large part of childhood. It was anything that was going on. That was a little out of the ordinary and we don't have to elaborate. Everybody knows exactly what we're talking about. It was not discussed and in fact it was usually encouraged to specifically not be discussed with anyone ever.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, and you know a lot of that too for the, for the boomer generation, our parents, it's that whole keeping up with the Joneses mindset, right Of course, and I think that was maybe playing into it again. My dad also just didn't socialize with other people. He had sort of this weird superiority, inferiority complex where he kind of thought he was better than everyone. Like everyone else is kind of a slob in his mind, but also then in a social situation he couldn't connect with anyone. Like there was a way I think he felt really intimidated socially at the same time.

Speaker 1:

When you say he thought everybody was a slob, meaning the way they dressed, the way that they kept their house or their car, all of it.

Speaker 2:

I mean he had a whole commentary about Americans. You know he hated people who ate in their cars. He hated anyone who was vaguely overweight. He hated people who wore T-shirts and jeans. He was just sort of like this bohemian artist kid in high school. I didn't know him in high school, but that's how I imagined him. He's just this bohemian artist and it's funny because I actually know he was like a popular jock in high school, which I can't imagine at all, but that was his vibe as an adult. He was this cultured European artiste.

Speaker 1:

What sports did he play in high school? He was this cultured European artiste. What sports?

Speaker 2:

did he play in high school? He was a basketball player. He actually played at Samford too. Wow, yeah, he was six foot five. He loved basketball. He coached basketball for a couple of teams when I was a kid. It was rough being an athlete with my dad because it was just all criticism. And I'm trying to understand if that's part of how males express care for people, because I've seen that pattern of criticism as a way to show hey, I care about you, you can do better, let me help you do better.

Speaker 1:

I think there might be a fine line between encouragement and criticism.

Speaker 2:

I think that's probably right. It's something I'm really curious about. So it's interesting to talk to another male about this, because I have witnessed that pattern. It was really hard for me as a little girl with no mom. You know, like I think, if you have that critical dad, hopefully you also have a mom who can be nurturing and compassionate and plain encouraging. You know, no critical encouragement, just straight up encouragement. But I didn't have that. So I had this very, very critical force who I shared a bedroom with, and you know we always had two bedroom apartments. He just wanted one to be his office and so I had to like sleep in a bunk bed or sleep in a trundle or something like that.

Speaker 2:

All of this is to say when I got to high school which is a difficult time for dads and daughters to begin with, it got really rough and we would have a lot of. I mean I wouldn't yell at him because I was too scared, but he would just scream at me and I, just to be clear, I was a great kid. I was the lead of the school play, I was the president of the student council, I was the captain of the tennis team, I played volleyball and basketball and swimming and track. I was the top of my class grade-wise. I was ahead a couple grades in different subjects. Like I was a good kid, I wasn't like some rebel, you know.

Speaker 1:

You were the typical screw up.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, right, exactly. And because I was, you know, a single dad household, I learned to cook and clean and grocery shop and balance a checkbook when I was like 10 years old, so I was super on top of it and he would just lose it with me. And so, finally, when I was 15, I had enough of that and I packed a bag and I left and I lived with friends for a month and I looked into becoming an emancipated minor. For a lot of reasons, that didn't work out. He made me come home. I was devastated, but we agreed I should go to boarding school, and for him it was because I wasn't being challenged academically, which was true, and for me it was because I wanted to get the hell out of Dodge. I did not want to be in that house anymore.

Speaker 1:

I mean you were a couple of grades ahead. How unchallenged were you? Maybe the school, maybe it wasn't a good school, Maybe the education system was different at every school that you were at, because if you were moving cities and he's teaching at a different school, that means you're going to a different school.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that was part of it, and I also. He wanted me to go to this brand new high school, and so they they were not equipped to challenge me appropriately.

Speaker 2:

You know, like I started taking some college classes and that was helpful. But I remember, you know, I breezed through my first high school A's and all the classes without even studying really, and I went to boarding school and I was like, oh shit, I got to work now and I did. I worked my butt off at boarding school to keep up with some very intelligent young women who were around me and I'm so grateful for that experience.

Speaker 1:

How did you do there?

Speaker 2:

I did well. I wasn't at the top of my class anymore. I wasn't the lead in the plays anymore. You know it was definitely a little bit humbling, but you know I did well. I was on the honor rolls and feeling successful, getting a better education. My mind was definitely expanding a lot more there.

Speaker 1:

I'm curious if you expanding a lot more there. I'm curious if you now that you're not at the top of the class in a different school. Was that a disappointment?

Speaker 2:

to your dad. It's such a good question. I don't know. I think he was just really proud of me academically period School didn't always come really easy. He didn't give me shit about academics, he gave me shit about sports and he gave me shit about just sort of like it's like social things, like I'd want to hang out with my friends and he'd call me a lemming, or I'd be really sad about something, he'd call me a crybaby, like he just couldn't handle the emotional things.

Speaker 2:

But academically we were so nerdy we used to do math problems together. In our free time we used to like learn languages together. That was a place we met was the academic side of things.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so he knew that there was nothing to worry about there and there's no reason to give you any grief.

Speaker 2:

Totally. Yeah, I was on top of that one. He didn't have to help with that. Part of why I'm setting all that up, though, is if we fast forward to my late twenties, early thirties. I just forget how I got an inkling. Maybe my dad had Asperger's. Maybe my dad had Asperger's. Maybe my dad was all autistic spectrum. I think I was dating someone at the time and they just noticed how bizarre his behaviors were. You know. Again, he had a lot of trouble making eye contact with people. I remember once my my godmother threw a dinner party because he was in town and she had this lovely patio, and we're on the patio listening to music, eating food, grilling, and my dad went inside into the dining room and turned all the lights off, and he was just overstimulated. He just. That was too much for him. He needed some quiet space, and I think that was one of the first times I was like, oh, this person is not neurotypical, this person has a different nervous system. That's an interesting way to think about my dad.

Speaker 2:

So I tried to do some research. I took out every book I could about autism, and there are a bazillion books about kids with autism. Right, that's a hot topic right now I'm in the Bay area. There's a lot of discussion about this. They're not very helpful because I don't have a kid with autism. I didn't know my dad when he was a kid. The way a kid presents with autism is really different than the way an adult who's lived with it for 40 or 50 years presents. So then there's a handful of books on having a partner with autism and these were more helpful, certainly because they're talking about adult presentations. But it was sort of awkward right, like they talked about like physical intimacy and affection and I was like, oh, this is, this is not the dynamic.

Speaker 1:

I struggled with it. Regardless of how much time you spent with your dad and how close you were or not, he's not a partner.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, it's a different dynamic.

Speaker 1:

Right, it doesn't all line up.

Speaker 2:

That's exactly right. Yeah, so there's one book on parents with autism and it is an illustrated kids book. It's called something's different about dad and I just wept through the whole thing. It was so eye opening I was soon as I finished it. I read it again. I wept through it again. It was like my entire childhood just snapped into focus. It all made sense.

Speaker 2:

Finally, and for you know again, for years I was just like God. My family is so fucking weird, like I don't know what's happening, but we are different and I have to keep quiet about that and no one is talking to me about it. But there is something weird going on here and I got to get away from it because this is too much for me. I, I, I really believe my mom's nervous system ended up in my nervous system, even though I don't remember her at all. I'm a lot like her, I look a lot like her. She was a nurse, I'm an acupuncturist. I definitely got some genes from her and my genes with my dad were just like. That is not a match. I got to go somewhere else.

Speaker 2:

Yes, that's it. And it's so funny because even spending time with my dad's family, he has a brother. Well, he had two brothers and one of his brothers has three sons and I love them. They're my family, they're all super smart. They used to like draw mazes and play magic, the gathering and do math problems for fun in the summer. And I think the autism runs strong in that family. I think at least a couple other family members were probably autistic and I just never connected with them. I loved my cousins, I looked up to them so much but I just oil and water still and I didn't really grow up with my mom's family. But whenever I spend time with them I just feel like, oh, there's my people there, it's so easy. Oil and oil, like finally it's matching, it's making sense.

Speaker 2:

So I read this book and I don't remember all of it, but I remember some highlights. One is that the little girl is doing a project for school and she's so proud of it and they have like a parent teacher night and dad goes in on parent teacher night and just tells her everything. That's wrong with the project. You misspelled this word. You should have used a different color here. Wrong with the project. You misspelled this word. You should have used a different color here. This map isn't drawn correctly, and that was so my experience. I mean, again, my dad didn't push me academically, but he would be quick to point out my flaws, where I used the wrong grammar, I didn't spell something properly, where I made a math error. He was just so quick to show me what my mistakes were, which, again, and with what I know now, I do think that was a way he was caring for me. I mean, there's a question mark in there. I'm still trying to understand that, but that's how this book portrayed it.

Speaker 2:

This book was really about dad's trying to help little girl and little girl doesn't feel helped. So dad has to figure out a different way to express that help. Right? And the other big example in the book was, I think mom's sister was having a baby. So they threw a baby shower for her and there was lights and music and cake and people talking and dad freaked out and dad had a temper tantrum and stormed off and ruined the party because dad got overstimulated. And my dad got overstimulated all the time, all the time. That's why we live this weird hermit lifestyle with no friends coming over. You know he just we played quiet classical music. I was not allowed to play any other music in the house. We had dinner by candlelight every night. We would never eat in front of a television or with like a talk radio thing happening.

Speaker 2:

No, no, no, we like, we regulate our nervous system and with what I know about nervous system regulation now, I'm pretty grateful for some of that. I have a very regulated nervous system. I have a lot of friends and patients who do not have regulated nervous systems. I don't know the first thing about how to regulate their nervous system, and that was a gift my dad gave to me. It was a gift that came with a heavy price tag but I I did have a really calm, quiet space when he wasn't freaking out.

Speaker 2:

You know, that was the hard part for me and I think I developed a lot of my sensitivity because I had to constantly assess whether dad was in freak out mode or we're just going to be quiet mode. And the hard thing for me was there wasn't much in between. There wasn't a lot of like connection time, attunement time. Let's ask you questions about your lifetime. It was either we're going to be quiet and dad's going to go work over there and I'm going to take care of myself or dad's freaking out, and I need to figure out how to make the situation better.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 2:

Which again that book kind of normalized, that book was kind of like yeah, that's how this kind of nervous system can present Right, at least at this point you finally had almost a roadmap of sorts, which you never had before, Because again all the books were from the perspective of children or a partner.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, or even you know, for me as a teenager and a woman in my early 20s, I just didn't know what was going on. I just did not understand why this man was so difficult to interact with. And you know I'd be embarrassed Like my college had this thing called a garden party for college graduation and everyone would pick like a really nice restaurant in downtown Philadelphia to go out to dinner. And my best friend and I were trying to do it together and I was like I'm so sorry, my dad is going to need a really quiet restaurant on the main line. We cannot go into the city, it cannot be loud, there cannot be a bunch of people and a parking like he will short circuit. In the back of my mind I understood all this. I'd become my father's caretaker. That image of the parentified child I matched that perfectly.

Speaker 1:

Since a very young age.

Speaker 2:

Totally and I was really good at that. You know he had very specific food desires. I know exactly what to make him for food. I know exactly how many ice cubes he liked in his water. He was very particular and I learned to match all of those particularities. But you know, when I left home at 15, I kind of didn't go back, like I had to go back a couple summers and and at that point just kind of kept my headphones on, read books, kept myself, and then, I don't know, we just didn't really have a relationship after that. It's sort of sad and it's sort of you reap what you sow, because my dad had not created the kind of relationship with me where I felt loved, I felt seen, I felt important. I know he loved me, I know I was important to him, but I always felt like he saw me as like an extension of himself or a miniature version of my mom. He was always trying to make me into my mom.

Speaker 1:

Is safe, a word that you would throw in there.

Speaker 2:

Did I feel safe with my dad? Yeah, I never felt safe with my dad, even as you got older.

Speaker 1:

Well, I know as a child. But even as you got older, did that stay the same? Did that change at all?

Speaker 2:

You know, this really interesting thing happens. We talk so much about menopause for women when they have a big hormonal shift. We talk less about the andropause for men and I think some there's even like some controversy about whether that exists. I have witnessed that in multiple men in my life and when that testosterone drops, my dad became a teddy bear. It was crazy. I almost had to convince myself that what I experienced as a child was real, because he became so soft and gentle and just love dogs and babies and yeah, it was a total personality change. And you know, maybe part of all of this is the stress of raising a child. Children are very difficult, right, and even though I was a good kid, even though I was a good kid.

Speaker 2:

Kids are tough, you know. We throw tantrums, we won't eat our dinner, we don't go to bed on time, like oh, that's a lot. And again, just to go back to how I've set this up, my mom was supposed to raise the kid. My dad never wanted to raise a child. That was never his ambition in life, and so I don't know if also getting me out of the house and not having to be a solo dad was his nervous system could relax and some of that anger and rage could fall by the wayside. I don't know how much of that is compared to this. This hormonal shift that I'm hypothesizing was a part of it, but he was definitely a teddy bear in his later years. I didn't feel unsafe around him, but I definitely felt like I had to be the adult, the parent, and so you don't feel safe in the same way if you're like, oh, all the responsibilities on my shoulders. I have to really look out for this person in this situation. It was just his caretaker. You know, from an early age I was his caretaker and then, once he got to be older, I was definitely his caretaker.

Speaker 2:

He continued not to have a partner. He continued not to really have friends. He had interesting relationships with his brothers I don't exactly know how to describe that. I think they loved each other, but the Moors were just really distant. We don't talk about things. That covenant that was in my intimate family nuclear family clearly came from the bigger lineage we don't talk about things and so I can see that playing out even now. One of my dad's brothers has also passed, but he has one brother who is alive and I'm sure he has not done therapy. I'm sure he does not talk about the things. I'm sure he has seen a lot that is living in his body and causing all kinds of aches and pains that he's trying to deal with in frankly, inappropriate ways, because there are emotions that need to be dealt with and not some like weird back thing that a doctor is going to fix for you. You know, Right yeah.

Speaker 1:

How old were you when your dad died?

Speaker 2:

My father died last year. I was 39.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 2:

It was an interesting moment for me. My mom died when she was 39. And so I had always wondered what it was going to be like for me to turn 39. You know, that was like a big moment. Will I have had cancer by then? Will I even be alive? What happens after a woman's 39? I have no idea, and I didn't really get to have my moment with that, which is my big gift, because I was at my father's deathbed when I was 39. That was right in the heart of his process.

Speaker 1:

The reason why I asked how old you were is because I'd like to talk a little bit about between. When you left your dad's house, basically for good, when you went to college. You like to talk a little bit about between. When you left your dad's house, basically for good, when you went to college, you begin to start a life. From that point to when you went back and basically became your dad's end of life caretaker, how was your relationship during that time?

Speaker 2:

So we would see each other about once a year. He would usually come to me. I didn't like to go back to the Northwest, so you'd come down to California and visit me, maybe stay with my godmother, maybe come to the city for a couple of nights, and then we would talk on the phone for between four and 12 minutes every Sunday at 10 AM.

Speaker 1:

Very specific amount.

Speaker 2:

Very specific and if I missed the call, if I didn't pick up right at 10, we wouldn't reschedule a call, we wouldn't talk later that day. I'd get an email from him that said sorry I missed you, let's talk next Sunday at 10. That's fascinating.

Speaker 1:

That's a little bizarre. I mean, I can't understand the brain enough to know the space that he was in. I do understand that that is how some minds work. Right From not personally experiencing something like that, it's a little bizarre.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, not to be critical of him at all. Right, right no.

Speaker 1:

It doesn't make sense to me because I didn't live it. I'm sure you don't live that way either, but you lived that way through your dad, so I'm sure that it makes sense to you.

Speaker 2:

Well, and I learned again to work with his quirks. So it was just like another one of his quirks. This is what dad needs. Okay, I will accommodate dad's needs. You know that was like so the theme of my life accommodating dad's needs. The conversation was so short because it was really him talking about himself. He didn't ask me a lot of questions. He didn't, I don't know. Again, I just felt so unseen by him. I don't even think he knew what questions to ask. And this has plagued me continually in my relationships with men, because you know, this is a common complaint women have about men they don't ask questions, right? Why is it so hard for them to engage me with something?

Speaker 2:

And then I talked to my male friends and they're like we want to hear, just talk, just tell us things, we want to listen, we're open to it. And so I think my dad and I were caught in that dynamic a little where I think he happily would have listened to me if I wanted to prattle on about something going on, but without him proactively showing interest in my life. I did not want to go there. So we're at this stalemate where he would share some things about himself movies he'd seen, that he likes books, that he liked what's going on with his health, and that would be the end of our conversation. We do it again next week.

Speaker 1:

All right, and this went on for years.

Speaker 2:

Years, decades, I mean really. That was from college, so I'll say like age 20, 21 to when he first got sick, when I was 37. That was what our dynamic was.

Speaker 1:

Okay, when he first got sick, how did things change?

Speaker 2:

So my dad messaged me spring of 2021 and he said he's not feeling well. And it was a new kind of not feeling well, not just aging not feeling well. He was probably 76, 77 at that point, but something like really didn't feel good. So I went to the doctor. Doctor run a bunch of tests, great doctor. He caught pretty quickly that my dad had pancreatic cancer, which, as many of us know, is a very aggressive cancer. Most people with pancreatic cancer live months, maybe even weeks. It is not the kind of thing where you have years, even with treatment, right, it's just a very aggressive cancer.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's more often than not a death sentence.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, and so I thought that's what we were working with and I was sort of preparing myself for that. It turns out my dad was one of the 5% of pancreatic cancer victims were eligible for a Whipple procedure, whereas when they take out the tumor and pretty much anything it touches so for my dad they took out the head of the pancreas, a lobe of liver, his gallbladder, a couple of feet of small intestine it's just like anything that that tumor might've touched gets scooped out. It's a pretty miraculous surgery for pancreatic cancer in particular, and the surgeon after the surgery was like I think I just got your dad another five years, which is a big deal with pancreatic cancer.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

The caveat was the surgeon was also recommending chemotherapy and my dad watched my mom do chemo in the 80s for breast cancer, which was just ugly, you know. I mean that was like the height of the terrible cancer stories you would see from like the 80s and 90s.

Speaker 2:

you know just like losing your hair and being so sick and nauseous and so pale and just feeling sick all the time. And so he sort of vowed he would never do chemotherapy because of that. He would not even call the follow up doctor to talk about options. He would not even call the follow-up doctor to talk about options. He was just like nope, I'm done. You did your surgery, I'm going to go live my five years now. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1:

Wow.

Speaker 2:

So when it came back two years later, I wasn't surprised, right. He did not do chemo, he did not kill any straggler pancreatic cancer cells that were in his body and, sure enough, one of them took hold and by the time we caught it the second time around, it was pretty advanced. And I'm a very spiritual person. I really believe in an afterlife. I talked to my dead mom all the time Now I talk to my dead dad also and I was meditating shortly after he got that diagnosis and my mom came to me and she said it's going to go so fast, so be ready for this and don't hold back. Like this is the time to say all the things, do all the things. Be there Like this. This is going to go real, real fast. Noted, okay, thanks, mom, got it.

Speaker 2:

Unfortunately, I had planned to spend the whole summer in Costa Rica with my boyfriend, and so I wasn't sure what to do and I talked to the doctor and he was like you know, you've probably got three or four months, and so I went up to dad's house and I got him situated. You know, I called hospice. We started talking about what we might have to do. The house is a two-story house. He lived in a bedroom on the second floor. How's that going to work?

Speaker 2:

He clearly was in total denial about the diagnosis Understandable, I think all of us might be in a similar position. And then I went to Costa Rica saying, okay, I'll come back in a few weeks, right, like, do your thing. I can't like be by your side for every day of these few months of of dying, but I will come back soon and be with you. And as soon as I got to Costa Rica, I felt my mom again tapping me on the shoulder, saying you got to go back. You got to go back right now. Like, what are you doing here? You got to go back. And so I said, okay, fine, mom, I'll go back.

Speaker 1:

You couldn't have told me that before I got on the plane, mom?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly yeah. So I spent a week in Costa Rica and then I went back and, god dang, I'm so glad I did. What a gift. For a couple reasons. First of all, it was the last lucid week I had with my dad. It went so quickly that I think this is only. This was like three weeks after his diagnosis, maybe less, maybe like two and a half weeks after the diagnosis, but it was the last time I could have like full conversations with him.

Speaker 2:

And I also have witnessed so many people in my life reinvent their childhoods when they lose their parent. It's like the amnesia that happens, where you forget the reality of your parent and you sort of paint this hero parent. Maybe it's the parent you wanted to have, maybe it's the parent they tried to be, even if they didn't get there all the time. But I've definitely seen people in my life rewrite their childhood so that like, oh gosh, I was just a bad kid, I didn't show up enough, I didn't extend the olive branch enough, I could have been more loving, I could have had a totally different relationship with my parent, but I didn't. I missed that chance. That sucks. A totally different relationship with my parent, but I didn't. I missed that chance. That sucks.

Speaker 2:

And this week with my dad I got to remember what an asshole he was, and I say that with some respect for the dead. My dad loved me. He did so much for me. There were moments when he was so loving and sweet. All of us are complex beings and also he was critical. He was rigid, he was demanding, he did not ask people questions, he was highly judgmental. All of that showed up this week that I was with him.

Speaker 2:

Right, we got hospice there. The hospice nurse was sure heavier set, not unhealthy even by my assessment. She had a body. She was taking care of it. My father practically refused care from her because he thought she was too fat. And I was just like dad this woman is here to help you die. This kind nurse who transitions people out of this world. Like, can you just be nice to her please?

Speaker 2:

He had me take him for one last ride in his little car, which he loved. He had a little electric Fiat and I shut the door too hard and he was like Courtney, be nice to this car, it's my baby. And I was like dad I am literally your baby. I am literally your baby. I am the one who is so precious here, but he just couldn't see that. You know, and you know, the whole time I was there he would just sort of boss me around. He just gave me orders to do I want you to plant these flowers in the yard, I want you to go drop this off at the post office.

Speaker 2:

It was totally unimportant stuff and maybe it was his way of trying to hold on to a normal life in whatever way he could, and also it just felt awful to me. You know, it was my birthday, it was my 39th birthday. While I was there with him that week I don't even know if he said happy birthday to me I tried to engage him about like what was it like for you when your parents died? Like what was that? Like trying to get some conversations? He couldn't go there, he just turned it back to himself and his experience, which you know he was dying. It's his experience to have.

Speaker 2:

But that week really reminded me my dad was not accessible for the kind of dad I want. It wasn't that I failed, I didn't drop the ball on this relationship. My father was not accessible for that kind of relationship and I think it's really important for all of us to remember that as we are navigating, negotiating, grieving our relationships with our parents, they are all obviously human beings with their own traumas and woundings and hangups and if they haven't done inner work, they likely are not available for real connection, for intimacy and attunement and love in the way that we might recognize. They're not there for it, they don't have it, they don't have that capacity.

Speaker 1:

Tell me, while he was treating you this way, what was going through your mind during that last week and in the time immediately following his funeral.

Speaker 2:

I really remembered who he was in that week. That wasn't the last week I had with him. I ended up going back to Costa Rica and then coming back to spend the final nine days where he was dying.

Speaker 1:

Oh, this wasn't the final nine days.

Speaker 2:

This was not the final nine. This was like me coming back to spend time with him. I'm so glad I had this like lucid week of conversation with him and just remembering, oh, he was really hard. He was really really hard. And then I went back to Costa Rica and then I was like okay, again, I'll be back mid July. This is like end of June. I told hospice, if you need me, I'll get on a plane. I think I left there like July 25th, maybe 23rd, july 3rd. Hospice called and said if you want to see your dad again, you got to get on a plane and we cannot even guarantee he will be here when you arrive. So I did that. I flew on the 4th of July. I arrived and he was so sick he was again.

Speaker 2:

He was not conversational at this point, right, and I don't want to get into too many of the details because they are so graphic. But watching a body die is very intense. It's not something we talk about in our culture. You know all the images of death and dying in media are like someone in a hospital bed. They're sick and then they code. You know their heart stops. Everyone's very sad. They just sort of like go to sleep in the hospital bed, and that's the end.

Speaker 2:

That is not what death looks like. Let me just tell you all, especially when you're dying from cancer, it is a visceral experience, with a lot of body breaking down, moments. And so I was with him for those final nine days. Hospice kept expecting him to die. The next day and the next day, and the next day on Friday, they said we won't see you on Monday. They didn't come up for the weekend. Well, I called them every day on the weekend and said I need someone out here supporting me because now this is happening, now this is happening.

Speaker 2:

He kept trying to get out of bed. It was so interesting, they said, when someone is dying, they have the inkling that they have to go somewhere. But they don't understand they have, they have to die, their spirit has to leave their body. And so, like he, he wanted to go to the bathroom. He did not meet. He hadn't eaten in weeks at this point, right, but his body was like I got to get up, and so he kept trying to get out of bed, which was awful. He might've hurt himself. Putting him back in bed, he would just go with pain. It was so awful to experience.

Speaker 2:

And so, you know, I was asking hospice for more and more help. We started giving him more and more morphine and you know, I just watched my father decompose in front of me. It was. It was so terrible. I'm so honored I could be there for it. I would not trade that experience for anything.

Speaker 2:

It was hard. I was pumped up on adrenaline, so I think I had to process a lot of that. After the fact, you know, I wasn't even particularly emotional. You know, I was just in go mode, like this is a crisis. We have to, like, make dad comfortable as best I can like. What can I do to make dad comfortable? At one point I was waking up every four hours to give him a morphine. Um, just to make you know, keep the pain at bay, because otherwise he would just be moaning and in so much pain people say you, you die the way you live. And you know my dad was stubborn and he had to do things on his own timeline and he did not want to let go. So it was just nine days of him really, really, really holding on and I felt I felt at that time guilty for not being more sad. It's like his exit from this world was so difficult and, honestly, that's the thing I've had to grieve the most was watching that nine days and I didn't have a relationship with this person.

Speaker 2:

I'm so grateful for so much of what he did for me when I was a young person. You know, I think even those of us who have like the worst parents and I don't put myself in that category, but even with the worst parents, you know they changed your diaper, they fed you, they did these basic things so that you could be a little person who grew up to be a big person. And there's always more things they could have done, right as far as safety and love and emotional attunement and just like acceptance and care, right. Those are the things we need as children, and sometimes they don't do that. They just do the bare basics. But you know what the bare basics got me to where I am alive and and functional?

Speaker 2:

There's so much I have to be grateful to for my father and also I just didn't have a relationship with him. I didn't have a relationship with him since I was probably I don't know 13 or 14, somewhere around there. We just stopped relating and I don't know if that's partly those difficult teenage years. You know, I think I'll always have to live with like. I don't know, could I have somehow bridged my relationship with my dad in my older years? Quickly, I wanna share that.

Speaker 2:

He had a hip replacement a couple of years before his pancreatic cancer and I was there for that. And they're wheeling him back to surgery and he's so nervous he's really scared to go under. They give him an Ativan because he's clearly very anxious and as they're wheeling him back he becomes that teddy bear again and he just he holds my hand and he tells me how much he loves me and he gives me this gentle smile and I'm like, oh my God, there there's my dad that I always wanted. How have I missed it? Fuck, I missed it. You know.

Speaker 2:

Again, there's that sense of like I had this opportunity. How did I drop the ball on having this parent-child relationship that I yearned for so much? And I remember I called my best friend, whose father had been through many surgeries and and she said, oh no, no, that's what happens when they get vulnerable. You wait for him to wake up from surgery and then you call me, let me know how it goes. And Nick, she was absolutely right.

Speaker 2:

It was the most bizarre thing to witness when he was in that soft, vulnerable, scared spot, there's my sweet, loving dad, and as soon as he's back to the house and recovering, there's my demanding, critical, impossible, please, dad. And we contain multitudes. Both of those were my dad. Right, that's both part of him. But I experienced so much more of the latter that when I came to grieve my dad, I just didn't have a relationship with that person. I honestly and I feel no small amount of guilt about this I grieved for my soulmate cat who died, so much more than I grieved for my dad, because my cat gave me unconditional love and affection and she was there for me. I know she's a cat, it sounds ridiculous, but she was so important to me and my dad didn't give me those things. He didn't make me feel safe and loved and seen.

Speaker 1:

Not to get too far off topic, but I can completely relate to the cat. We have a cat who we adopted when she was six weeks old. She is now 18 years old. She turned 18 in May. We don't have human children. I tried for years, it didn't happen. So she's our baby, she is our daughter and luckily she is very healthy. We actually just had her most recent vet check-in and the vet said that she is one of the most active and healthiest 18-year-old cats she's ever seen. So hopefully knock on wood that means she's going to be here for a while. I can tell you when that day comes I'm going to be inconsolable.

Speaker 2:

Yes, that's the word, that is absolutely the word. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And I know that I will get past it. I will move on. I've had five cats over the course of my life and this one is going to hit the hardest. Yep, because I have always had her. She has been well. I don't want to say mine, but mine and my wife's. She's our baby. We have raised her since she fit in the palm of my hand and she is an absolute beast and we love her so much. And, yeah, I completely understand, I can relate to that. It's not crazy at all to say that you were so much more grieving of a cat than of a human who was half responsible for your existence. It makes sense. Let's take a quick break and have a few words from our sponsors.

Speaker 1:

Our Dead Dads podcast is sponsored by Kim Gaylord Travel. If you can dream up the vacation whether a getaway for you and your other half, a family trip or a trip for a large group, she will help you plan it. If you've never used or even thought about using a travel agent for your trips, you really should. Kim will help you plan everything the flights, hotels, transportation, excursions, all the places to visit and all the sites to see. You'll get a detailed itinerary of everything and if anything goes wrong during your trip, you have someone to contact. Whether you're looking for a customized European vacation, a relaxing stay at an all-inclusive resort, an Alaskan adventure, a Caribbean cruise, kim will work with you to make sure you have a seamless travel experience. Contact her today and plan your next trip with a peace of mind that only working with a travel agent can offer. And, as a special bonus for our listeners, mention Our Dead Dads podcast for a 10% discount on planning fees. You can find Kim Gaylord Travel on Facebook, instagram and LinkedIn, or email Kim directly. Her email address is kim at kimgaylordtravelcom.

Speaker 1:

Our Dead Dads podcast is sponsored by Dotted Avenue Creative Studio. If you're looking to build your first website or give your current site a facelift, you need not look any further than Dotted Avenue Creative Studio. They will work with you to customize exactly what you want in a website. Whether you want something personal and simple or a website for your business, you're in the right place A professional looking page that you and everyone who visits your site will be obsessed with. Search engine optimization, e-commerce all the bells and whistles.

Speaker 1:

If you haven't already checked out OurDeadDadscom, you should take a look fora. Couple of reasons. First, because there are a lot of really cool features to check out, including some interactive sections for the listeners, but also because dotted Avenue built this website, they work exclusively within Squarespace, who is the hosting company of our website, and customize your website exactly the way you want it and then, when it's done, you'll have a one-on-one zoom call to learn everything you need to learn about maintaining the website yourself. Go to dotted avenuecom and get started today. Mention our dead dads and get a 10% discount on any web design package. Dotted Avenue Creative Studio is the first, last and only company you'll ever need for website design. And now back to the show. While I didn't go through what you specifically went through, the next question I'd like to ask is what is the first feeling that you felt when?

Speaker 2:

he was gone. I honestly felt such relief that he was not suffering anymore.

Speaker 1:

Bingo yeah, that was me as well. That's why I asked that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and that feeling lasted for a while. That wasn't just like a flash of relief, it was like, oh, okay, it's done, it's done.

Speaker 1:

But did you? When you started feeling the relief you had the funeral, the feeling stayed there.

Speaker 2:

We have not had the funeral yet.

Speaker 1:

You haven't had the funeral yet.

Speaker 2:

This is on me. So you know, solo kid dad thought his affairs were in order. His affairs were not in order, which is so sad because he really tried to get on top of them. But PSA, for anyone listening, create a living trust If you have property you wish to pass down to future generations. He left a will but not a living trust, and so I have been dealing with his estate since, since he died.

Speaker 2:

There's still things that I'm wrapping up. Over a year later, I have his ashes. He was cremated and he has a plot next to my mother, but he had a really specific. There's my dad with his specific, particular desires and a very specific headstone design that I had to like, really outsource, and so I just found someone who will make it to his specifications, and they say it's going to take them another four to six months because it's this very specific design white marble, yellow sun on glass, all these different elements, and so when the headstone is ready, we will do memorial, but we have not done that yet and I'm not sure what that's going to be like for me.

Speaker 1:

The feeling that you initially had when he first died the relief. Is that still the case or has that changed?

Speaker 2:

I wouldn't say relief is the primary feeling I feel now. My dad really wanted his life to look different. He grieved my mother for 40 years. He really he couldn't move on from that relationship and in fact I'll tell you when he was dying. You know, people tell you that the children should tell the person dying I'm okay, I've got this, you can go like I'm good here, I release you, you can go.

Speaker 2:

I told my dad that so many times and I could tell it was not the thing. You know, it was not sinking in. That was not what he needed to hear and I was like, which kind of makes sense, because really my dad was not concerned that I was okay. That wasn't our. He's driving a force. You know, what he really wanted from me were grandchildren.

Speaker 2:

He was real pissed that I didn't have kids on his deathbed and that week when he was lucid, we had a conversation about why I didn't have kids. I know he like really I. It's so weird. He, he didn't see me. I don't know how to say it more clearly, but I was not this whole person who he could get to know. I was like an extension of his genetics. It was I was his passing the DNA on and so, yeah, I get lost with where I was going with that.

Speaker 2:

But he, um, he wanted a really different life. He wanted a lot more career success. You know, he did not become an architect with solar houses all over the world. He did not have the amount of money he wanted. He was raised with a lot of privilege and so he wanted this extravagant lifestyle of travel and beautiful things and art. And he couldn't have that and so he died a bitter man, and in my work I think a lot about the metaphors of the body and I think it's very interesting that my bitter father died from pancreatic cancer. The pancreas processes sweetness in the body and when I think of him I feel a sadness and a compassion that he lived this bitter, unhappy life.

Speaker 1:

I kind of hesitate to ask this question, but I feel like I have to anyway, and this is not obviously at all an attack on you. Do you think he resented you for not having the life that he did? Do you whether you, your mom, maybe your mom for dying you, for being the one that he now had to take care of without her?

Speaker 2:

It's a great question. He wrote his own obituaries. He had slightly different obituaries for his college, Stanford, for his high school in Portland and for the local newspaper, and in all of them he refers to me as the child. As in, Moore's wife died prematurely, leaving him to care for the child, this changed the course of his life. He would go on to be an academic rather than having the architectural career he had dreamed of, and in that moment I don't know if resentment is exactly the right sentiment, but I can see some of what you're asking about. I do think I was this figure that kept him from his dreams.

Speaker 1:

That's kind of where I was going, obviously not because he had anything to be resentful for. You seem like a perfectly amazing person, but he didn't get to build solar houses all over the world, he didn't get to be a professor or have so much money in his bank account and was filthy rich. Again, this is not toward you, but he was stuck raising a one-year-old by himself.

Speaker 2:

Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1:

Maybe in his mind he may have thought that.

Speaker 2:

Right, exactly, and I think a part of him loved having a child and cherished that experience, and a part of him, I think, he got really caught up in like my wife was supposed to be here doing this with me and since she's not, this is impossible. I don't get to live the life I wanted because my wife died.

Speaker 1:

That's kind of where I was going.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly what he experienced.

Speaker 1:

Based on that. Did you think about that after he died? Did you ever have any anger toward him after he died?

Speaker 2:

I didn't, and I've searched for it because a lot of people brought this up for me. I work in healing. I understand that it's surely in there, right? I went through a really rough breakup shortly after my father died when I realized how much of the dynamic with my dad was at play in my relationship and that's not what I wanted, and so there's anger there also, but I cannot find it. I am searching and searching still to this day.

Speaker 2:

I worked with this woman who does this kind of therapy where you just like yell at the person you're supposed to be angry at and see if it kind of like comes up and out of your body. Nothing, I don't know it's it's. It's either so deeply in me that it was going to take a lot more excavation, or I will also say I worked a lot in my late twenties, early thirties with a spiritual teacher to forgive my dad, and I really think I did. And one of the things she taught me, which is gold, is that you have to fully accept someone before you forgive them. If you're trying to forgive someone without accepting them, it's not real forgiveness.

Speaker 1:

It's almost like you grieved him before he died.

Speaker 2:

I think that's exactly right. I think that's completely accurate. I spent so much of my 20s grieving both my parents. You know I didn't understand what it was like to have a dead mom when I was a kid, you know. I just it was what I knew. And then somewhere around my late teens I was like, oh, this is terrible. I feel such heartbreak that I do not have a mother. This is a very painful experience and I think in my 20s I just did so much grieving and healing and accepting and forgiving and at the end of the day, you know, my dad got me from point A to point B and sort of released me into the wild. We're very different people. We're probably really similar in ways that I need to acknowledge more. That's probably the next step of my own healing journey, because I really want to see him as it's just really different. He's very different from me, but I'm half him, right.

Speaker 2:

I got those genes in here too, so I've got some Mike Moore running the show in here running the program.

Speaker 1:

There's as much your mom as you are your dad, and it's half him, half her. But it's also almost like he isn't the one who released you to the wild, especially since you made the conscious choice to leave on your own at 15. So again, I'm not saying for sure, because I'm not at all a therapist, but maybe you knew what was in store and you needed to kind of break free of that sooner than most of us normally would.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think that's absolutely accurate. Most of us normally would. Yeah, I think that's absolutely accurate. I'm curious for you, Nick do you see your dad in you at times and what's that feel like?

Speaker 1:

I absolutely see him in me all the time. My wife and I joke about this. We have obviously so many traits of both of our moms, both of our dads. It's weird sometimes there are parts of him that were good. This is something that I wasn't really able to realize on my own until within the last several years of his life, and my wife is the one who pointed it out to me. He was an asshole for most of his life toward most of the people in his life, but there were definitely times where he had the biggest heart and my wife has told me that that's a big part of something that I get from that. I have gotten from him, not that my mother doesn't my mother is wonderful as well, but she definitely with the time that she spent around my dad, which wasn't a ton, I'm sorry. The time that my wife spent around my dad, which was not a ton. She saw it in him. My dad was a charmer, he was a schmoozer. The man got five women to marry him.

Speaker 1:

So you can't be a schmoozer and be a ladies' man, be a charmer. Or you can't get five women to marry you without being all of those things a charmer or you can't get five women to marry you without being all of those things, but not just that part. There are definitely parts of him that I know, that I have, that I really do like, and there are parts of him that I have that I'm not a big fan of. He liked to I don't want to say he liked me. He would frequently get angry, he would yell, he would scream.

Speaker 1:

He sometimes had a very short fuse and there are definitely times over the course of my life where I've been the same way and I have done a lot of work to keep that in check. Never with me, never to the point of destroying things and throwing things like he occasionally did. My wife and I definitely over the course of 18 years, we've had our screaming matches. Plenty of them were probably because I was being an asshole. I definitely recognize that. It took me a while to recognize that, not to say that my wife is a hundred percent perfect a hundred percent of the time, but she's pretty close.

Speaker 1:

I know that I definitely needed to change some things and I have worked toward doing that because there are certain qualities of him that I didn't want to be like that I recognized were kind of coming out. So it's weird, it's kind of conflicting, to see things about a person that you can't stand and then you see them in yourself. And there are qualities of all of my siblings that I see in my dad and in their respective moms, Because my mom was his second wife, so it was only myself and my next brother, Jack, from her. There were no kids that I know of from the first marriage, but then it was one from the third, one from the fourth and the last three from the fifth, one from the fourth and three the last three from the fifth.

Speaker 1:

And I look at all of my siblings and see how they are like my dad and different from my dad. And in many of the cases it's very obvious and no matter how hard you try to change certain things, no matter how hard you try to not be like someone, it's going to come out. But everything in life is a choice, so we might have to work a little bit harder to steer those choices in a certain direction. But it is possible and, like I said, I recognized some of those things earlier on that I really just did not like in him and I saw at times in myself and I have worked to not let those be the case, not let those control me or define me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, it's all about consciousness right, being aware of what the pattern is and being aware that you have a choice, that you can work on yourself to do something different.

Speaker 1:

Definitely. Yeah, that's pretty intense. You have a lot that you went through. What do you think about now when you think about your dad?

Speaker 2:

When I think about my dad now, I only think about the sweetness. It's interesting because I'm trying to write a book about him, because I think it would be helpful for folks to have more resources about parents who are on the autistic spectrum. I think it was a lot of our journey and a lot of it was difficult and I had this, you know, distilled experience because I had a solo parent who was on the autistic spectrum. And so I got like a very direct experience of all that.

Speaker 1:

He didn't have another adult to kind of keep him in check.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, yeah, and it was my whole reality. And so I'm writing this book and I'm trying to dig out some of those harder moments, harder dynamics, harder patterns. And it does take some digging because I largely, when I think about my dad, I think about how smart he was, how much he loved art and movies and cats, how, how some of his quirks were so bizarre. Like he, he would cut the tags off anything he purchased and just keep them all on a stack by his bedside table and he would leave. You know, furniture comes in like plastic covering when you first get it. He would leave that on for decades mattresses, couches, chairs. So I just think of him and sort of like, there's like a sweetness in the way I think about him. Now he's like oh Mike, that's what a funny, quirky, brilliant man.

Speaker 2:

He really was brilliant. I think about that a lot, how smart he was and how he tried to leave his mark on the world. I also think about how different his life might have been if he were more resourced. I think that's the biggest resentment I have about my childhood. I get that it was a lot to solo parent, a daughter especially, moving all the time and guess what. We can all ask for help and he didn't. He was too proud, too stubborn, maybe too autistic, I don't know, but he couldn't ask for help. He didn't ask for help and that really would have changed my life if we would have had a little more help.

Speaker 1:

Now, obviously I didn't grow up in your house. I didn't know you when you were a kid, or know your dad when he was raising you as a child, but back in that time period nobody asked for help. Yeah, 40 years ago was a very different time, I mean if your dad was here now and 40 years old.

Speaker 1:

Like you are Right. Maybe he might be more inclined to ask for help because society is fucked up, as society is on many levels. I think we have improved on some levels and I think it's a little bit more acceptable socially, culturally, to ask for help where 40 years ago it just wasn't. You're the man, you figure it out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's right. I mean that's right women.

Speaker 1:

I mean my mom was raising two boys as a single mom because my dad was large. I mean once they split he we saw him on weekends but even as we were growing up, a lot of times he was more concerned with which wife he was married to and which kids he was raising at that time.

Speaker 1:

And so it was just the way he was. I don't know. I mean, it was a very different time. Maybe he again if he were 40 years younger. Maybe now he could ask in living in 2024, maybe he would be able to ask for help.

Speaker 1:

You and I recognize that if you were in a situation where you needed someone or something, there are plenty of resources to get it, but there are more ways to ask for help. You know, now you have the tools to be able to ask for help if you need it. You may also have some of his stubbornness and you might say, fuck, I'm going to figure it out. But you also know that at a certain point there comes a line where, if you can't figure it out, there are ways to ask for help. I don't think that our parents in a lot of ways had the tools they needed to do certain things, whether as adults or as parents, and that is a lot that I have reflected on about my dad and why I've kind of changed course from a lot of the anger that I had for toward him for many years and even after he died. When he first died, my initial feeling also was relief, for that lasted for probably three or four months, and then the anger really started to build in.

Speaker 2:

And.

Speaker 1:

I was. I was so pissed at him for everything, for how he treated us, for how he treated his ex-wives, for just the way he lived his life and thinking that he was number one with everything. And that was what got me into therapy and I was able to find a place for all of those emotions and realize that I could release the anger. I don't need to hold on to all this anger. It's not serving anything. But a lot of people don't get to that point. Your dad, when you were a kid, you guys had that one huge fight. He said if this ever happens again, I'm going to therapy. Well, I mean, you guys had plenty more blowups, maybe not to that level, but he never ended up in therapy. And maybe if he had I don't know, I mean, based on what was probably something, a condition that was undiagnosed, maybe he could have gotten help. But at the same time, 20, 25 years ago, maybe there weren't the tools nearly as much then to give him the help that he might have needed.

Speaker 2:

So, and again, I'm not trying to give you data Right and I'm not trying to give your data pass.

Speaker 1:

I'm not trying to give your dad a pass. I'm not trying to give my dad a pass, but I also recognize that we lived in a very different time and maybe they just didn't have the tools. I think that both of my parents did the best they could with the tools they had, and especially my dad I give a lot harder time to, because he had so many natural gifts in life and he just squandered all of them. He wasted them, and some people do that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely I felt that way about my dad also. He was given so, so much and somehow ended up so bitter and unhappy and resentful after so much privilege and blessing.

Speaker 2:

I remember my dad had a book called Raising a Daughter, had a pink cover and this thing was just earmarked to shit, you know, like he had clearly poured over this book, highlighted, circled, underlined, and I kept it when he died, because to me there's the love that I never necessarily felt from him. The love that I never necessarily felt from him, but God, he wanted to be a good dad. He wanted and again, I know my dad loved me. He was so proud of me. He loved to go to, you know school plays and games and award ceremonies and all of that. I know he loved me. He was also just so difficult, so difficult, and I wish things would have been different, where we could have had a relationship holding both of those truths, both of those sides of him. But we can never quite figure it out. I don't know why, but we could never quite walk that line together.

Speaker 1:

Couldn't get on the same page.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

There might've been times where you're within the same chapter.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think that's right. And again, especially academics is where we connected and later in life, when we'd have those phone calls, we figured out we both liked movies, so that was the thing we could talk about. Have you seen any movies lately? You know we'd had to find. We had to really search for the pages, but when we found them we could coexist nicely.

Speaker 1:

I'm curious, since you say you, as he got older, toward the end of his life, you did find things that you connected on. Did that mean that those four to 12 minute conversations ever became longer conversations, more in depth?

Speaker 2:

Definitely not Four to 12. Wow, yeah, I know, and always again I felt so unseen. I think that would be the primary experience being with my dad and maybe that's the primary experience with an autistic person. I'm still doing a lot of research about that. It was just so much about him and you know, now people talk so much about narcissism. I think too much. I think there's too much sort of like armchair diagnosis of narcissism. But I do really like how people talk about the narcissist wounding of being a young child and realizing your parents are not going to take care of you, so you got to take care of yourself. Everything's got to be about you, and I see that in my dad. I see this tendency to be like Mike takes care of Mike and it was hard to be Mike's kid because Mike took care of Mike usually before he took care of Courtney. You know that's not what a good parent does. A good parent put their kids first, at least most of the time. You know there's exceptions to that, I'm sure. Oh, of course.

Speaker 1:

But Mike took care of.

Speaker 2:

Mike and that was um. That was one of the hardest things about being in that household.

Speaker 1:

Well, I mean, I hate to say it, but look how you were identified in the obituary you were the child Exactly, you weren't. Courtney, you were the child that upended his life.

Speaker 2:

Exactly. Yeah, what's been hard for me is that then go try to date men and form a partnership with a man, and I'm so drawn to that familial neural groove in my nervous system of find a man who says you're not a priority. Find a man who wants you to take care of him. Find a man who expects you to take on all the responsibility. Find a man who's critical and I have done that, I haven't done that a few times over, and nothing against the men I found. I don't want to be finger pointing here. This is really about me choosing something that feels familiar and not knowing how to get out of that trap.

Speaker 1:

I can understand the familiarity part of it. Do you think that that's all you deserve? Do you think that you deserve Consciously?

Speaker 2:

no right, Like consciously, I can sit here and say no, I deserve more. But I think you know I've been getting really into parts, work, internal family systems and the idea that there's all these different fragments of ourselves inside of us and some of them are running the show. Maybe you don't want that fragment running the show, right? Maybe that fragments making another really important fragment not come out to the extent that it could. And I definitely think there are some inner child fragments who are probably running my dating life, who do think that's what they deserve, who do think that is the maximum that they are allowed, and so my work right now is to have some conversations with them and make sure they're not the ones with the reins, that this more conscious part of me that wants a fuller connection is the one making the choices.

Speaker 1:

Courtney needs to be in control, not the inner child.

Speaker 2:

Exactly. Yeah, it's hard, it's a it's a hard shift.

Speaker 1:

I think, yeah, it is. It's a complete mind shift.

Speaker 2:

And the thing that feels familiar feels so good. So the thing that's actually good for you might not feel good at first is what people tell me. You know that you're the familiar thing that you're so drawn to and you want to make a different choice. When something else presents your nervous system Like what is that? I don't recognize that. I do not know how to interact with that. I don't know where I stand in relation to that. There's nothing here for me, nevermind Go away.

Speaker 1:

Not trying to play therapist here, because I'm not one. You've already talked about the way that you felt as a child when your dad would treat you that way, even though that's familiar. Is thinking back to that feeling, the way that you were treated, the way that you felt as a 10-year-old, as a 12-year-old, as a 15-year-old, when you left his house. Is that enough to maybe sway you to say you know what? This isn't what I need.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, and I really think we do so much of the healing of our parent wounds in relationship and this last relationship I had that ended shortly after my father died. It was kind of eerie timing. That was the one where I said, oh, we're done. I do not want to be in this dynamic ever again. I do not want to choose a person who thinks about me and relationships in this way ever again. I'm done with that. I would rather be single. So either we're going to change this up and I'm going to figure out a way to meet a very different kind of man, or I'm going to get a whole bunch of cats.

Speaker 1:

You're going to be the cat lady Totally. I'm going to be the cat lady, totally. You're going to have the bumper stickers and the window decals and all of the big scratching posts and the cat jungle gym. Yep, yeah, it is okay to need a minute to figure all that out. Sometimes it takes a minute, sometimes it takes a lot more than a minute.

Speaker 2:

You know. Thanks for saying that. That's exactly where I am. It's been a year since dad died. It's been a year since my breakup and I thought I'd be dating more by now, and I am still not there. I am still really processing all of this. I'm still being with myself, I'm still trying to understand a lot of these patterns. I've tried to go on dates and I feel nothing, and so it's just my body saying you know what? Let's just stay home again tonight. We got more work to do.

Speaker 1:

Are you okay with that? Do you feel comfortable? I am, you know.

Speaker 2:

I'm 40 years old and I would like to find a partner sooner rather than later. You know I don't want children of my own, so luckily I don't have that motivation driving me. But yeah, I'd really like to find a partner and I do worry about just you know, just the shallow things. Will I still be attractive in five years? Will I still have access to people I find attractive in five years? It's hard to date. When you get older it's a new playground. I'm getting used to that right now, for sure.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I completely get that. I hated dating when I met my wife. I was 30 at that point dating when I was. When I met my wife I was 30 at that point I was in a lot of the wrong relationships and I was starting to get convinced that I wasn't going to find anybody. So was she, and then we found each other on matchcom and uh, that's great yeah, we, we met in 2006.

Speaker 1:

We just instantly clicked and we were both in a place, kind of mentally, that if we had found who we knew to be the right person, we were ready to settle down, get married. This is before we met, but I really didn't. At a certain point, I really didn't think that it was ever going to happen. When I turned 30, on my 30th birthday, I hated the job that I was at, I hated the fact that I was single, I hated a lot of things about my life and, luckily, when I turned 40, it was the exact opposite.

Speaker 1:

But I can understand the feeling like you're stuck and you're never going to get out of it. What you ultimately should probably I don't want to say should, but maybe something for you to focus on or continue to focus on at 40 or whatever age you end up being is what makes Courtney happy, because there are a lot of things that you know, that you have ingrained in you that do make you happy, that do not make you happy and kind of like. We were talking when I was talking before about making the choice. Actually, what we were both talking about, about making the choice to not react in certain ways like my dad did, because I knew how he reacted and I also knew enough to know that I didn't want to be like that. Relationships are about choices as well, and not just a relationship with the next person that you're going to date, but the relationship that you have with yourself, because whether you start dating somebody tomorrow or in a week, or in a month or in a year, or you don't, you're always going to be stuck with you.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely Yep.

Speaker 1:

So, no matter what happens with whoever you do or do not end up with, you have to be happy with who you're stuck with in the mirror.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely Wise words.

Speaker 1:

Jeez, who would have thought? I don't know where that came from. I'll tell anybody about it.

Speaker 2:

I do have a completely non-interview related question.

Speaker 1:

Sure, the phone that's on the shelf behind you, was that your dad's?

Speaker 2:

No, and I'll tell you. When my father died and I went through this terrible breakup we won't go into the details, but it was dramatically terrible Okay, I realized I needed to live a different life Because I thought this was my person, right, I thought I was going to spend my life with this person. I thought we were going to live together. I had a condo, but I barely lived in it because I was with him all the time. So I was renting it out and I kind of took to the road.

Speaker 2:

I don't know if it was a part of my transient childhood coming back, but I started doing cat sitting through trusted house sitters, which I highly recommend, and I was in a new house every week or two and I was just on the move all the time. I did it for October, november, like four months of this, like transient life. It was. Maybe that was my grieving process, right, and at the end of that time I was like you know what I hate my condo. I never want to move back in there and so I found a furnished sublet for a year, which is where I am living now. So I have no idea the story behind that phone, because that is the original owner's, it's not mine.

Speaker 1:

Wow.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I'm in this house for a year, maybe a year and a half. I feel so fortunate to be here, and who knows what happens after that. We're still in the throw, life up in the air and see where the pieces land after that we're still in the throw, life, up in the air and see where the pieces land.

Speaker 1:

I was curious about the phone to see if it was your dad's, because I have one that is very, very similar to that, one that was actually my grandparents, belong to my dad's parents and then, after they died, he got it and many years ago he gave it to me and I had actually bought a.

Speaker 1:

It's one of those old four prong adapters that nobody can plug in any more at this point. But I bought an adapter I don't know probably 10 years ago on eBay that I was actually able to connect it to a standard phone jack and it still works, I mean.

Speaker 2:

I don't use it currently.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean I don't use it currently because we don't have a house phone at this point, but if there was a, a phone jack, I could plug it in and use it and I did a you know dial that has a little rotary dial oh my gosh, it was great that's amazing that phone is probably 70, 80 years old wow, that's pretty cool.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Speaker 1:

That's one piece of history yeah, definitely, that's one thing that I will never get rid of. Uh, no matter what, that thing will come everywhere. Uh, yeah, all right. Well, uh, all right, not your dad's phone, but uh, definitely it came with a great story I bet it does, yeah, yeah yeah, well, I mean, I meant your that phone, yeah yeah, um, yeah yeah, even though it's not yours it's it's nice to have there. Yeah, it looks pretty cool up on the shelf too.

Speaker 2:

It's a good background. Yeah, definitely is.

Speaker 1:

Well, this has been quite a story, thanks. How are you feeling after all that?

Speaker 2:

You know I feel good when I share my story. The voice that comes up in the back of my head is always your story isn't that interesting. You didn't have it that bad People are going to think. Why did he even bother interviewing her?

Speaker 1:

It's always the thing that comes up.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's not funny. Our heads, our voices.

Speaker 1:

Not even close with this story. Nobody is going to say why did he interview her.

Speaker 2:

Well, I hope it is interesting, informative, maybe useful to whoever hears it. I personally think it is.

Speaker 1:

If there was any piece of advice you could give to anyone who either is or was in a less than ideal relationship with their dad, whether it is something similar to yours, if it's just somebody who didn't have a great relationship, maybe has lost their dad and is figuring out how to process, how to grieve, what advice would you give?

Speaker 2:

You have to accept them for who they were. You have to accept them for who they were. You have to. As long as you are wanting or expecting them to be something different, you're only causing yourself suffering, and I really think forgiveness is the only way to heal from these relationships. And, like I said, you cannot forgive someone if you don't accept them. And it's hard, but it's sort of what you and I were talking about earlier.

Speaker 2:

Our dads come from their own traumas, their own family lineage, lineages with secrets and shame and wounding and not a lot of inner work, and so we have to have some modicum of compassion for what they were born into whether that's a family or a time period and accept that some people just do not have the capacity for loving, parenting, relating that we need it. It doesn't mean you didn't need it. That can still be real, but that person couldn't, didn't give it to you, and you have to accept that about them If you really want to move on and find peace. You know what they say Resentment is like a poison that you take. You expect it to hurt the other person, but it hurts yourself. So if you're feeling that resentment, if you're working with that resentment, really try to explore this angle of acceptance. It's hard, it is hard. I'm not going to sugarcoat it.

Speaker 2:

And I also think it is absolutely worth it because that is the way to liberation it, and I also think it is absolutely worth it, because that is the way to liberation.

Speaker 1:

It is hard, it's yucky, it's messy, it's all of the things. If it wasn't, everybody would do it.

Speaker 2:

That's right yeah.

Speaker 1:

Well, thank you for that. I really appreciate that. Yeah, and now I love that you just took a nice deep breath. You've got a smile on your face, would?

Speaker 2:

you say we have a little bit of fun to end this?

Speaker 1:

Sure, all right, this is what I do with every interview. We always end with some random questions, nothing that had anything to do with what we just talked about. We're going to get to learn some fun useless nuggets of knowledge about you. Maybe not so useless, who knows. We'll see what comes up.

Speaker 2:

All right.

Speaker 1:

All right, here we go. Scale of one to 10. How good are you at wiffle ball?

Speaker 2:

Two, two. It's been a while.

Speaker 1:

Okay, you think there's some room for improvement. Maybe get back into wiffle ball someday.

Speaker 2:

Maybe someday We'll leave it on the table.

Speaker 1:

There might be a league out there. You never know.

Speaker 2:

Actually, I think there probably are wiffle ball leagues.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I've seen the videos on Facebook where guys are throwing weird curve balls that make no sense, how they make it from their hand to the little plastic plate that's set up behind them.

Speaker 2:

I don't understand it. Maybe that's where I meet my soulmate, who knows?

Speaker 1:

Maybe it is. If you get into a wiffle ball league and you meet your soulmate, you need to invite us to the wedding.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. You got a deal.

Speaker 1:

It will be an Our Dead Dads feature. What is your favorite dessert?

Speaker 2:

Anything chocolate the darker the better.

Speaker 1:

Oh, I love that you said that too. The darker the better. That's absolutely the way to go. All right, Fresh food or fried food?

Speaker 2:

Fresh food Definitely.

Speaker 1:

Do you have a favorite fresh food?

Speaker 2:

When you say that, I think about fresh spring rolls versus fried egg rolls, and I do love myself a fresh spring roll. That is very delicious.

Speaker 1:

Very nice Sticking with the food. What is your favorite ice cream flavor?

Speaker 2:

I love good coffee, ice cream.

Speaker 1:

You and my wife would get along so well. You and me with the chocolate and you and her with the coffee.

Speaker 2:

We're going to have a good dessert party.

Speaker 1:

And she's a chef, so oh yeah, it's on.

Speaker 2:

Better go on a crash diet now, because you're going to gain about 10 pounds.

Speaker 1:

Oh, all right, I apologize because this one does have a little bit to do with the interview. Do you correct other people's grammar?

Speaker 2:

I do yeah.

Speaker 1:

You mentioned how that was something that your dad was a stickler for.

Speaker 2:

You know, in my last relationship was actually a very sweet moment in our courtship because he texted me something about oh gosh, I wish I could remember the word. It's a word that's commonly misused. People think it means negative, but it actually means neutral. And so I corrected him on that over text and like we'd only been on like three dates, and he was like, did you just correct my grammar? And I was like, oh, this is either. This is like a make or break moment. Either he was into that and we're gonna play with it and it's good, or he's horrified and wants something to do with me, and luckily he was so into it I think it was a feature. He was wow, this chick really like knows her grammar and isn't afraid to call me on it. So it totally worked out. But yes, I do correct people on their grammar.

Speaker 1:

He may not have said it at the time, but he was probably thinking that's kind of hot.

Speaker 2:

I think so. I think that's what was going on. He was totally into it.

Speaker 1:

As he should have been. What? What do you think people misunderstand about you?

Speaker 2:

Well, I'm very shy and quiet when I don't know people and I always think that people project a lot onto shy people and also maybe assume that we don't have much to say. And so I think some people assume I don't have much to say because I'm not bringing like a full extroverted stream of consciousness moment to the conversations. But I do have a lot to say. I just need the right context to feel good about bringing it to the table. Okay, that's fair.

Speaker 1:

Do you believe in love at first sight?

Speaker 2:

I don't. I believe in a universal love that we feel for all beings and all creatures, and I believe in lust at first sight, but I think that kind of romantic love that you're talking about is something that's built with a real intimate knowing of someone.

Speaker 1:

Agreed. Is it wrong for a vegetarian to eat animal crackers?

Speaker 2:

I was a vegetarian for 15 years and I loved animal crackers, so I'm going to go with no, not wrong, absolutely not wrong.

Speaker 1:

Do you prefer the morning or the evening?

Speaker 2:

I love both. I'm such a morning person and from 6am to 10am I am at my best. That's when I'm really productive and clear headed.

Speaker 1:

Okay, scale of one to 10. How good are you at keeping secrets?

Speaker 2:

Nine.

Speaker 1:

What would it take to?

Speaker 2:

what's that little line that's every now and then there's something so juicy you just got to tell your best friend, and my best friend is a vault, so I feel like I can just drop stuff in there as needed.

Speaker 1:

Does anybody ever tell you a secret that they'll say you can't tell anybody, you've got to keep a secret. But you tell somebody else that will never find out, that they'll never find out about it.

Speaker 2:

My best friend.

Speaker 1:

That has been known to happen, yes, okay so that's why I can understand the nine as opposed to the ten exactly um. Have you ever won a bet?

Speaker 2:

I'm sure I have. Couldn't name it for you, but I definitely have where do you live?

Speaker 1:

san francisco what is your favorite work memory? Oh.

Speaker 2:

Oh gosh, that's a tough one. I'll just go with the first one that came to mind, which is that a patient who had sort of become a friend came to me in really extreme back pain and really thought he'd have to like go to the hospital Like he could barely walk, and I did one treatment on him and he was totally cured, just like mobile, feeling good in his body, not taking painkillers. I felt really good about that moment, nice.

Speaker 1:

Do you have any tattoos?

Speaker 2:

No tattoos.

Speaker 1:

What was your favorite subject in school?

Speaker 2:

In grade school was a tie between math and English, and I ended up majoring in philosophy in college, so that's what I loved as I got older.

Speaker 1:

Nice, okay. What makes you hopeful?

Speaker 2:

Being in nature makes me hopeful, recognizing that this planet has a lot of wisdom and a kind of a spirit of its own, despite whatever is happening politically with people.

Speaker 1:

How tall are you?

Speaker 2:

Five foot 10.

Speaker 1:

What is the best non-cursing one word insult. The word that came to mind was imbecile.

Speaker 2:

I don't know if that's the best, but that's what I got. I like that one. You don't get a lot was imbecile. I don't know if that's the best, but that's what I got.

Speaker 1:

I like that one. You don't get a lot of imbecile these days.

Speaker 2:

You don't. You know, it's kind of outdated.

Speaker 1:

Definitely. What is your favorite month? June? Why June?

Speaker 2:

Well, my birthday's in June, but I also just love the weather. That time of year. It's like we're between spring and summer. It's warm, you can be outside, there's a light breeze, long, long days, lots of light, good stone fruit, good berries. I love June.

Speaker 1:

Fill in the blank. Taylor Swift is.

Speaker 2:

Successful.

Speaker 1:

Good word. Do you think you would make a good spy?

Speaker 2:

No, I don't think my poker face is good enough.

Speaker 1:

Okay, do you know how to?

Speaker 2:

salsa dance. You know, after a breakup I had years ago, someone said you should do something brand new to get over the breakup, which I think is good breakup advice, and so I decided to learn how to salsa dance. What I learned is that I'm not very good at salsa dancing. So the real answer is no, but I have in fact taken lessons and tried to learn how to salsa dance.

Speaker 1:

You did give it the old college try.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, that's it.

Speaker 1:

That's wonderful. You got two steps further than I would have.

Speaker 2:

I wouldn't have even thought. Who is your favorite Disney character Favorite? You know I always loved Bambi. I identified with Bambi. We'll go with that. What motivates you the most. You know, having two dead parents is very motivating in that they did not get to live any longer, and that reminds me that every day really is a gift and it will be taken from us sooner than we want it to, no matter what our life circumstances are. So remembering that my dead parents would probably love to be alive right now is very motivating.

Speaker 1:

What is your guilty pleasure?

Speaker 2:

I'll go back to the chocolate. Darker the better.

Speaker 1:

Chocolate never fails you.

Speaker 2:

It's all good.

Speaker 1:

Have you ever seen a kangaroo in person? What the hell.

Speaker 2:

These are great. Yes, indeed, I went to massage school in New, zealand, so I spent some time in Australia and New Zealand when I was in my 20s.

Speaker 1:

Did you ever get close enough to one to have to fight it? Thankfully no, those things aren't mean and big and strong. That's what I've heard. Anytime anybody mentions a kangaroo there. There's one particular video on youtube and probably by this point all the platforms, and you've probably seen it where I think the kangaroo was going after like a dog or something and the guy I think the owner of the dog went up to it and just kind of like got like a boxing stance and punched the kangaroo.

Speaker 2:

They're like people. It's crazy.

Speaker 1:

It is crazy.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

I would never want to mess with a kangaroo. I don't care how cute they seem. Yeah, they do seem cute but no, do you enjoy running?

Speaker 2:

I used to enjoy running. These days not so much. What do you think changed? I had an injury in college that kind of stopped me from really seriously running.

Speaker 2:

I was training for a marathon and I had to stop. Yeah, I don't know. You know, I think a lot of runners have a kind of masochistic relationship with themselves. Running really is all about pain. Really is about like feeling pain, pushing through pain, running away from the pain, and I guess I just got to a point in my life where I didn't. I wanted to go towards sensation instead of running away from sensation.

Speaker 1:

That's fair. Do you know what the acronym SCUBA stands for?

Speaker 2:

No, I do not.

Speaker 1:

Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus Excellent. Last question what word do you hate hearing?

Speaker 2:

Literally, it was literally so good. Oh my God, over it.

Speaker 1:

Courtney, thank you so much for this. This has been really great. I'm grateful for your time and for your willingness to share everything. I always feel bad that I have to have these kind of conversations about terrible things, but at the same time I've gotten to meet a lot of really wonderful people through this process. I think that it just continues the healing process, or at least I hope it does. I hope that some of what I'm trying to do is helpful for somebody.

Speaker 2:

I think it's beautiful. It's a beautiful intention. I think it absolutely prolongs the healing process and you know we talked so much today about the secrets we feel like we have to carry and hold, and what you're doing really lets people be transparent with how they're feeling and what their experience was, and I think that's priceless. What a gift.

Speaker 1:

I really appreciate that. That means a lot and that's exactly what I'm trying for. I'm trying to give people the opportunity to talk, to heal, to be transparent, which is probably a big part of why I'm doing this the way that I am, because I think transparency is everything. I think authenticity is everything. I think authenticity is everything. I realized that very early on that this has to be done in an authentic way. That's exactly why episode one was me telling my story, not because I needed to make this all about me, because, quite honestly, I didn't want to do that. I hate being in the spotlight, which, of course, I had to get over pretty quickly if I'm going to do a podcast, because I'm going to be part of every episode. But I kind of felt from the beginning that if I'm going to ask people to tell me some of the most vulnerable things that happened in their lives, maybe I should do the same Kind of a lead by example, rather than a do as I say, not as I do.

Speaker 2:

Yeah right.

Speaker 1:

But it really does mean a lot that everybody so far has really enjoyed this, that you and everyone else are so willing to share this, because I do think that it promotes the healing process. I think it continues the healing process for all of us, because we all have been through our share of shit of us, because we all have been through our share of shit. I've never tried to make this a comparison to anyone else or for any other guests to each other. It's not a comparison, it's not a pissing contest. Grief is real. Grief is not linear. We all deal with it, whether we want to admit it or not, because, unfortunately, too many people try to run away from it and it's not healthy, and that's the thing that means the most is everybody that has been willing to come on the show is not running away from it. Everybody is running, if anything, right toward it, and thank you so much for your time and for sharing everything tonight.

Speaker 2:

So my pleasure. Thank you, nick. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Nick Courtney learned a long time ago that her father was a hard man to live with, which was a big reason why she left home at only 15 years old. She was able to see the glimpses of the loving father that she wished he could have been more often, but she also saw that there were only glimpses. This was a truly heartfelt conversation and I'm so thankful that she was willing to share her story with me and with all of you, and we both hope that anyone who may have gone through or is currently going through something similar with your father or with another family member that you're caring for can both find peace and a way to coexist. While there is still time, and if you have a story similar to Courtney's and would like to discuss it on the podcast, or if you have any story that you'd like to share, please go to OurDeadDadscom, go to the Contact Us tab and click the first item on the drop-down called Be a Guest. Fill out the form and you just might be able to be a guest on the show and carry on this mission of helping ourselves and helping so many others.

Speaker 1:

Again, there are no rules to navigating grief and there is no timeline for doing it either. Everybody needs to go at their own pace, but the most important part is taking the very first step. Whether you want to tell your own story or you just want to listen to others tell their stories, the most important thing is to understand that nobody is alone in their grief or should ever feel like they don't have someone who will talk or listen to them here at Our Dead. Dads, within the safe space of this community, you always have both. Thank you for joining me and tune in next week when I am joined by my friend and fellow podcast host and best-selling author, tony Lynch.

Speaker 1:

His show is called Grief let's Talk About it. I've also appeared on his show and now he's here to have a very in-depth conversation about his life, his loss, his grief and how he has taken everything that life has thrown his way and built it into being a top figure and role model in the grief community. It's going to be an incredible conversation, though a bit long, so bring a snack and get ready for another emotional ride. Also, don't forget about tomorrow, january 8th, at 3 pm, us Eastern, as I go live on YouTube to interview Justin Shepard, better known to so many as Justin on TikTok. Make sure you're following Our Dead Dads on your favorite podcast streaming platform, because you will not want to miss this episode or any other upcoming episode. This is Our Dead Dads, where we are changing the world one damage, soul at a time. See you next time.