Jarie Bolander - Grief and loss. A male perspective

Hey, and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled and with me today, Jarie Bolander. Hi there, Jarie How are you?

Great. Doing great. Thanks for having me on the show.

Is that the right way to say your name? Because it's a great name.

Oh, thank you. Wow. My mom and dad will love that. Yeah, it's Jarie. So, the way I always say it is, it's a jar full of e’s and you remember for that you'll never get it wrong.

And you make us all high? No, a different sort of e. So where in the world are you?

I'm in the Bay Area. San Francisco, California.

So you must be just about starting your day as I'm coming to the end of mine.

Yes. Around 10:00 a.m. here.

We just had a conversation about Mondays and how Mondays were great. And, of course, you're just starting yours. I'm just about a clock off.

Yeah. I don't understand the Monday’s thing. I guess since being an entrepreneur you are doing something that you're sort of constantly working. I think we talked about that. It's just a day. It's another day, and some days I work, some days I don't. But generally, it's just another day.

Just another day. Good. Well, great to meet you. So, tell us a bit about what it is that you do, Jarie.

Well, I do a bunch of different things. My day job is sales and marketing consulting for business-to-business companies. So, I do a lot of strategy, trying to figure out how to make sense of all the craziness the buzzword bingo that most of our clients have. So that's what I do during the day. What I've been doing lately is talking about my book Ride or Die, which is about my late wife Jane and I's relationship and her battle with leukaemia, which she unfortunately lost. Almost been seven years now. Yeah, it's sort of the discussion. I wanted to make sense of it and understand my feelings on it and what I learned and what I could help other people with. So that's how I make sense of the world, is to write. So, it was just natural for me to, like, let's write it down.

So that's what I did. And, yeah, I mean, I'm a podcaster, so I appreciate being on shows. Just generally love to tell stories and really kind of, I don't know, contribute to the world in a way that's positive. And your show about resilience just struck a chord with me because there's no way I got through what Jane, and I went through without some form of resilience. Right.

Well, tell us a bit about that. How did you use resilience to get you through? I mean, tell us a little bit what happened, first of all, and then perhaps we can unpack that.

Yeah. So were married, and so were in the newlywed glow, trying to have kids. And long story short, we found out she had leukaemia the day after Christmas 2015. And, you know when people say your life changes in an instant, you're like, really? Can things really change in an instant? And you're like, yeah, that day, the world changed, and it was no longer the way it was. And so, I up until this point, was an entrepreneur. We were like a power couple kind of thing. And one of the other things that I had done routinely was endurance events. So, Iron Man, multi day endurance events, just crazy stuff that people would be like, how did you ever be able to do that?

And part of the reason I did that was now that I know, through going through all therapy that I've gone through for all this stuff, was I was trying to fill the void in my life. But more importantly, what it taught me was how to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

Right. Tell us more about that. What do you mean by that?

Yeah. So, a lot of times in life, you either get past it or you don't get past it, especially challenging circumstances, if you can be comfortable with the unknown. So, when Jane got diagnosed, I had no idea leukaemia. I thought that was a kid's disease. What's going to happen? And it was extremely uncomfortable. In fact, I remember it's in the book where I had to call her Dad and say, you need to come here. Something's not right. And there was just day after day, minute after minute of these very uncomfortable situations where I, as her husband, had to be part of Team Jane, try to help her. And so, what I learned through all my endurance events in life in general. Because I'd gone through some other stuff as well, was not to let the uncomfortableness overwhelm you, to take a breath, take a knee, just take that moment of clarity to be like, okay, something's wrong, but don't revert back to either not doing it or, like, freaking out. Just take a knee, take a pause. What's the next step? Just literally, in endurance events, they usually tell you, like, I just got to get to the next pole. I just got to get to the top of that hill. I just have to walk to the next aid station, then I'm going to run. So, you learn how to do this incremental thing which is really important when it comes to when you get sucker punched in the gut because your 34-year-old wife's got leukaemia. It was just a series of those uncomfortable events that I just had to get comfortable with.

It's interesting you say I had to get comfortable with. It's quite an odd expression. What do you really mean by that? Do you mean cope with it?

Well, there's two parts.

Ride through it. I mean, there's all sorts of management phrases around this sort of stuff.

Yeah, the buzzword bingo. Right. Well, so there's dealing with it, obviously, and then there's doing something about it. And what I've found is that most people, depending on the situation, their training or whether they have done, they can deal with it fine, but then they can't take the action required to move forward. So, you can imagine the inundation of just fast and furious, all these, like, were going to have kids, and if she does chemo, she's going to be sterile. So, we got to do IVF and then we've got to do. There's like a process. And some people, I think the statistics are, I don't know if it's a half of couples, but a double-digit high double-digit percentage of couples break up when something like this happens because it's completely overwhelming, like you lose your life. Right.

So I had to embrace that I didn't have all the answers right away and that there was a general, like, oh, how is this going to work? And I think why that was important was in order to make those, like, I could cope with it, but order to make those decisions and move forward and try to fix the problem, you had to just really lean into. You're not going to know everything. You just got to find out and you just do the best you can. And you know what? You're going to be frustrated and there's going to be days where you just want to collapse, but you can't do that. You got a job to do. And the job is to make sure that she's got all the help and support she needs.

Because what had ended up happening was, I became her full-time caregiver as well as running her business.

Which in a funny sort of way probably helps, doesn't it? Because in a strange way, the more you can control, the more you can bring stuff into your own individual frame of reference. And I guess giving something around her cause and purpose is actually that classic thing about doing something bigger than yourself, so you don't lose that sense of perspective. So how did that work?

Well, I mean, I was an engineer. I am an engineer by training.

Yeah.

Thank you. Now I went to the dark side, right? So now I do sales and marketing. Shenanigans. Crazy. But her business was PR and marketing for professional athletes, start-ups, and non-profits. So, I didn't know anything about this. I had gone to some of her events, I'd helped her, but I can't run this thing. Like, how the heck am I going to do that? So, within a couple of weeks, I started running her business, doing all the things that she would do. She really wanted to keep the business because it gave her a sense of hope and a sense of something to look forward to. I personally wanted to shut it down so I could focus 100% on getting her better. We thought about that a lot and ended up, okay, I'm going to run it.

And you're right, having some semblance of normalcy was good, and it just gave you something to look forward to in some case, for her, for sure.

Otherwise, I think you can get lost in the detail of the issue, can't you? You become focused on the trivial details of your own condition rather than having something else to sort of broaden one's.

Yeah, I got lost in it. Several know, I write in the book about how you sort of lose yourself and the patient. No one cares about you. They just care about how's Jane. Right. So, you do have a sense of a greater good, and you are now dedicated to knowing your partner, get better, but you lose a little bit of yourself. And it took me a while to find that back, to find myself again.

I think you're making a fascinating point that I work a lot in my practice around people who are caregivers. And I love what you just said there. How's Jane? Not how's you. How are you coping? Are you taking a breath for yourself? Are you coping? What's happening to your self care, respite care, whatever that might be. And you can often find that this quantity or the quality of the care that we can offer gets eroded because we're just not well ourselves. We're not sleeping, eating, we're not thinking about ourselves. I just wondered how you sort of tried to balance those different needs.

Yeah, I was really horrible at it and smoked a lot of pot and drank a lot of alcohol to try to cope with it.

You hid away from it.

Yeah, I hid away from it. Yeah. Now I'm almost six years sober, so I eventually dealt with it. But one of the things that was it showed how much Jane loved me and how much we loved each other and how much respect she had for me in that she would force me to take time off. She would force me to go be with friends. I had some rituals that would help me kind of do some self-care. I still tried to work out. I still tried to have some sort of normalcy, but when you're wrapped up in it and it's just all consuming, you have two full time jobs. It's hard to have some self-care. And that made a dent.

I had some serious issues after she died because even though I was in therapy and I met my fiancé, who's now my fiancé, Minerva. And it was just hard to deal with because it defined yourself again. And I think why I wrote the book and why I'm trying to talk more about it is the best analogy is putting your oxygen mask on first is good. I know it's hard to do, and you think you're selfish, but you cannot be a good caregiver unless you're caring for yourself. And I just did not do a good job with that.

Yeah, but it's easy to say it and reflect on it and ponder it, but when you're in the middle of it's actually, you know, the logic. But of course, you're being swept up with this emotional drama of what's going on and how you're handling it and the day to day and such like, I've got a friend, I've got a family member who's been looking after a sick relative for many months, and they are in a terrible state, and they can't understand. And they can't. It's not that they won't, is they can't understand that they need to look after themselves because they're not in a position, never mind the guilt of if I spent time looking after myself, I'm looking after the person that needs my care.

And then you get into the other stuff, which is no one can look after that person as well as I can anyway, so all those things happen. So, you've written the book, and it's a memoir. And why this and why?

You know, when I was going through the grief and sorrow after Jane died, I really didn't find any good material, good perspective from a male perspective, I didn't find anything. And I had done the grief groups. I had been to a lot of them. Most of them are women. And again, I had a different experience. My experience was I wanted to do something to get better, whereas all the groups that I had been in, and I don't know if this is the way they all are, but the ones that I found, they were in their own private pity party, and it was more rumination on the loss. And that woe is me. And why did this happen to me? And I'm like, how do I get better? How do I do something to make the world positive?

So I didn't find any really good materials. I didn't find any support from a male perspective. So, I decided, well, I use writing to process the world. I love to write. Write. Okay. So, I decided, well, let's do it. Let's write a memoir. And the first goal was to get better and to really be able to talk about the story and not feel so bad and just to process it. And it did that. It was beautiful. And the second thing was, when other men went through what I went through, I wanted them to be, like, not feel so alone, and that it's normal what you're feeling and how you're doing. So, I think that was pretty important. And the people that have read it, that are widowers have felt that way.

Then the third thing is, if you love a man that's going through this or you love someone that's caregiving and they happen to be male, you could understand a little bit of their attitude, a little bit of how you can support them, what it feels like, because it's different. And I can't say it was hard for me to find that point of view and that bearing witness to the thing, especially from a male perspective, where I'm like, I'm failing my wife. I don't know what to do, which completely not my fault that she got leukaemia, but, boy, felt like it was my fault that she died for a long time.

That's a heavy burden. And it's interesting you can talk about it, because you can still see in you that it still affects you even to this day, which is right and proper. How do you move on then? How do you start a fresh relationship? Because you just mentioned that earlier, and I heard you say that. Is that part of you. So, this sounds really cold. Is this part of your coping process? I don't mean it like that one, but you know what I mean. Is there something about coping by being able to move on, but also, you have to be okay to move on in the first place? Does that make sense that.

I never. I don't really think you move on from it. I think you move through it, and you process it, and over time, it gets a little less scary. And one of the things that Jane and I talked about before she died, which was the gift, best gift anyone's ever given me, was that she wanted me to be happy, find love again, and not be like I would be, which he always would say, it's like, you're going to drink. yeah, I did all those. I did all the dumb things you're not supposed to do. So, getting permission, quote unquote, to find happiness and love again was extremely. Just opened, uplifted. It was sad, but it was like I knew she wanted me to be happy.

So processing all that and then trying to find love again, which I have, was a natural thing for me. I liked being. Was. I loved Jane. I loved being her husband. I just love that. So, to me, it was not as hard as what I found. Other people. There are other people that I know who know took them years, and they just had the guilt and the trauma. There's a lot of things that go through people's heads. I didn't have the additional responsibility of raising kids. We never had kids. So, there's that. There's just the general depending on your attitude, right. And how much you want it, and your support network. I had a fantastic support network. Her family was great. My friends and family were great. There were people that loved me and wanted me to be happy.

The other thing is, Jane had told them in no uncertain terms, look after Jarie. Make sure he's taken care of. I want him to be happy. I want him to find love again. And that's, again, the gift. That. Best gift anyone's ever given me. You're facing your own demise, and you care more about how I'm going to be than care about yourself.

Sounds a remarkable, woman. So, tell us more about the book. What's called, where can we get hold of it?

Sure. It's called Ride or Die. Loving through tragedy, a husband's memoir. You can get it anywhere books are sold. Amazon, Barnes and Noble and independent bookstores. And, yeah, I'm working right now, about to work on the audiobook, which I'll narrate. Not sure how I feel about that, but everyone's like, you need to tell us. It's your story. You need to be the voice. Right. But, yeah, it's been a great journey. Been a lot of really wonderful people to talk to. And when you do something that you're really proud of, that came out great. And then people really enjoy it, and it helps them. What more can you ask for? So that wasn't the original title. And this is the power of having a great editor.

My great editor and publisher is Brooke Warner over at Sparkpress. Actually, Brooke's the one that recommended it. Jane and I would always say we'll ride or die to the end. And it was a really great saying and sort of metaphor for your wedding. You know, you say, in sickness and health, do your part. Those are just words. When you have to actually put that into practice, things get a little more real. And we just had this. We're in it to win it till the end together, no matter what happens. And, yeah, at first, I was not happy with changing the title. But of course, I listened to her because she knows what she's doing and everyone's like, oh, it's perfect time.

And probably anybody listening to this, including myself. I'm going to ask you later on what the original title was because you got me curious now.

Oh, I'll tell you for sure. Yeah. The original title was Say a Prayer for Greenie.

Okay.

Yeah, good. And I, of course, was in love with the title because it was very meaningful. And Greenie was a stuffed animal. It's in the book about Greenie's role with Jane. But, yeah, she, of course, she crushed it.

Very good. I've got this image in my head now about religious sprouts. But there you go.

There you go.

Good. So, you can get this book in all good bookshops, as you said. Just remind us of your name. Jarie Bolander. So, the links to your name because I'm not going to start spelling it out. They'll be in the show notes. It's been joy. And I think the idea of having something that's written from the male perspective, for the male perspective, I think, is really powerful. And I think I'll be adding to my reading list very soon. So, thanks for spending time with us today, Jarie. I really appreciate it.

Yeah. Thank you so much. It means the world to me. I just love what you're doing. And I think we can all learn to be more resilient. I think the world would be a better place. It's not that hard. I mean, someone like me with a generally negative attitude to it, I think an engineer.

That's all I'm saying.

There you go. Right, exactly. Everything's a problem to us, right? Everything. There are no problems. We don't have a job. Therefore, everything's a problem.

Of course you're going to tell us later on. Of course. Having gone to marketing, how easy it is. It is. The marketing really is.

Yeah. Not as hard as engineering, that's for sure.

You take care.

All right. Thanks.