Grief Lessons Men Rarely Hear Until Life Falls Apart

SPEAKER_04 0:00

What would you like to say to grieving fathers?

SPEAKER_03 0:02

I would say this this is a season. It isn't it isn't forever. Yes, you are going to always remember. Yes, you're always going to have some type of grief, but it isn't going to be this intense. It isn't going to consume your life. You are going to be able to be happy again. You are going to be able to laugh again. Yes, you will cry. But there is great joy in knowing that the person that's not there would not want you to be sad all the time. What their hope would be for you would be that you have joy in your life, that you build new memories, that you remember them, but you keep m living your life. There is nothing sadder I I can imagine. I cannot imagine anything sadder than when I'm gone that people stop living. And so just remember that the people that have left don't want you to be stuck.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

A father is often expected to be the strong one to hold his family together, to keep moving forward, even when part of his world has fallen apart. After losing his daughter Jessica to cancer, James Moffitt discovered how few places existed for grieving fathers, and how many men were carrying their pain in silence. The Father's Refuge podcast was created to give those fathers a place to be seen, heard, and reminded that they don't have to walk through grief alone. Through honest conversations, personal stories, and faith-rooted encouragement, James explores the realities of loss, trauma, emotional healing, and rebuilding life after the unimaginable. Grief may change a father forever, but it doesn't have to destroy his faith or take away his hope. This is the Father's Refuge Podcast, a place for grieving fathers to find understanding, healing, and refuge.

SPEAKER_04 1:54

Hello and welcome to Father's Refuge Podcast. My name is James Moffat, and I'll be your host. So today on Father's Refuge, we're talking with Jay Jacobson, a man whose leadership was shaped not in boardrooms, but in the sacred moments when families face loss. Jay spent years as a funeral director walking with people through grief. Those experiences now fuel his work in leadership and personal development. We're going to explore the lessons grief teaches, the weight men carry, and how real leadership shows up when life gets hard. Jay, how are you tonight?

SPEAKER_03 2:25

Well, James, I'm doing great. It's uh been a wonderful day, and I'm kind of looking forward to having this conversation with you.

SPEAKER_04 2:31

Yeah, very good. Glad you're on the show. So, Jay, do me a favor and introduce yourself to the listening audience.

SPEAKER_03 2:37

Well, James, like you said, I've been uh a funeral director for 45 years. I spent uh the bulk of my career in rooms that people rarely want to be in, sitting with families doing something that they really don't want to be doing, and trying to help and guide them through that process. I have been involved in taking care of people who did not survive mass disasters. I cared for 112 people with the assistance of other funeral directors, with the people who did not survive the United Flight 232 crash in Sioux City, Iowa back in 1989. I was later asked to talk with the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging about funeral ethics, in particular in regards to price disclosures and protecting consumer uh protection. And so those are some of the areas that I've come from in terms of where my uh career has taken me, where it has built my leadership uh training. I now work with young funeral professionals, training them to be the best funeral directors that they can possibly be, so that when they sit in those rooms, the people across the table from them are getting the best possible care they can.

SPEAKER_04 3:43

Very good. So I have a story. We like stories. Stories are wonderful. Sometimes. Yes. So our daughter passed away on August 5th of 2001. Her birthday was September the 11th. So every time September 11th rolls around, she was uh 10 years old when she got diagnosed. Cancer, she had a brain tumor, two different types of cancers. One was more aggressive than the other. They did a MU SC Children's Hospital in Charleston. I did an emergency surgery. They got rid of most of the tumor, but some of it was wrapped around her brain stem, which is a you know death sentence, basically. They said if she lasts if she lasts 12 months, you'll be lucky. Well, she lasted 14 months. So we passed away on August 5th of 2001, around two o'clock in the morning. And uh, I'll never forget that moment as I watched her take her last breath and all that. And uh we we were we went to church at a it was a Pentecostal church, but it was more like a a lukewarm Lutheran church. And uh the pastor and the church obviously were very aware of all what was going on and and uh so I called my pastor and he called the funeral home, I don't know, like at three in the morning. And so they came out at six to pick her pick up her body, and uh that was kind of weird. And so they they asked me to help them get her off of the bed onto the gurney, which I did. And uh anyway, the next day, about I don't know, seven, eight, nine o'clock, whatever time it was, whenever the business owned it opened, it was a local funeral home. The funeral director told me that, well, ninety percent of husbands and wives have failed marriages when their children die. And I my pastor was sitting there and I looked at him and I said, Well, sir, I said, I'm sure that this experience is gonna shake our faith. And but I'm gonna tell you that I'm gonna rebuke what you just said, because my wife and I are believers in Jesus. We've been married a long time, and that's not gonna happen with us. And uh I probably took him by surprise when I said that, but our faith was shaken down to the foundation, and we, you know, as a family, we're we were never the same.

SPEAKER_03 5:53

But when it it it changes everything. And i i you you create a new norm. Nothing will ever go back to the way it was, but it's navigating those those hard times and navigating it together instead of pulling it apart. Now, I've had that kind of a conversation with husbands in particular, but it's been much later on as they're starting to struggle, as you see the pain in their eyes uh weeks and months later, and they don't know what's going on and they don't know how to care for their wife, particularly when it's a young baby, it's very difficult. And so having those conversations and and getting across to the importance that, you know, the odds are against you. The odds without, you know, particularly if you have no faith, the odds are almost impossible. Right. But by being aware, by leaning on your faith and leaning on each other, uh, you can survive that. You can grow stronger. Uh those dates, like you you talked about in August and in September, are important. And every year they come around, and every year it's a reminder. Now the average person doesn't realize that those are important. It's that I mean, the world goes on, and you you're still stuck with those dates in your head. And they're a blessing and a curse. You you get the chance to remember, but you also have a chance to to grieve once more. And hopefully as time goes on, it's more memories and less grief.

SPEAKER_04 7:11

Well, somebody has said, no idea who it was, they said is they said that time heals all wounds. And I have to say that probably about 10 years, I would say about 10 years, I wouldn't have been able to have a dry-eyed conversation about it. You know, it's been almost 25 years now. And uh Chris I've got the podcast, and and I I actually had a vision for father's refuge way back when, because I noticed that there's not a lot of support systems out there for men, for fathers. I noticed that there was, you know, my wife and I went to a support group at MUSE Children's Hospital while she was alive, and there were parents in there, you know, going through the same thing that we were childhood cancer, leukemia, whatever the disease was, or childhood, you know, ailment. And uh, of course, after she passed away, we no longer went to that support group because, you know, parents that were in that group were still they're hoping. Still had hope. Yeah. Right. And uh so I don't I don't remember if we decided on our own not to go or if we were told it probably wouldn't be a good idea. Anyway, we didn't go. And uh I noticed there was support systems for women, and I thought it was odd looking back. Love my pastor to death. He was he was uh the chaplain of pastoral counseling at a major hospital here. And he never he never offered pastoral counseling, and he never suggested to us that we ought to, you know, get some sort of therapy, you know, especially for the for my kids who were they weren't quite teenagers yet. They're like, you know, 10, 12 years of of age. And and looking back, I fully believe that we kind of missed the vote on that. And because we because we were kind of toughing it, and you know, just like just like when a baby is born, they pat you on the head, you know, send you on your way, and there's no manual. There's no manual for raising children short of what's in the Bible, right? And uh some some families are close knit, and so you have patriarchs of the family, grandmothers, you know, mothers, whatever, that grandmothers that can uh lean in and and provide some support and some guidance, you know, when things are going south. Why is the baby crying at two o'clock in the morning for hours on end? Well, maybe it has colic or you know, whatever, you know.

SPEAKER_03 9:31

And uh so maybe babies just cry. Sometimes well, there you go.

SPEAKER_04 9:37

When they're hungry, they cry. When they're when they got a wet diaper, they cry. That's how they communicate. Exactly. And so so I I wanted to start up Father's Refuge as a in-person sort of a support system for men. And I talked to counselors, I talked to, you know, people at the hospital, social workers, blah, blah, blah. And the thing that the thing that I was told and I observed is that men don't talk about their feelings too much.

SPEAKER_03 10:05

Oh, they don't, especially 25 years ago.

SPEAKER_04 10:08

Right. And, you know, you know, I I'm I was a child of the 70s, and you were you were taught to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, men don't cry, all of that stuff, all that macho stuff, right? And uh we've learned the error of that thinking process. And so anyway, I was talking to a doctor on my parenting podcast, and after I'd stopped the recording, I was talking to her about Father's Refuge, and she was like, Wow, you've got a you got a lot of stories to tell uh around that. You ought to start a podcast. And I was like, it's kind of like an epiphany of because I'd never in my wildest dreams thought about starting a podcast called Father's Refuge. And then I was like, I think I'll do that. And so, you know, it's it's only about a year old. I don't I don't have a whole lot of episodes, but I've had several fathers and parents uh come on the podcast and talk about loss and grief. And my my dream and my vision is that I want fathers to have not just fathers, but definitely fathers. I want fathers to have a safe place where they can come and tell their story and and share their story with other people that are walking in the their same shoes, right? And so I know that you you probably have a lot of experience in all of that. You've witnessed the emotions and the disappointment and the grief and the loss and all of that.

SPEAKER_03 11:30

Part of what we're supposed to do as husbands is we're we're supposed to fix things. We're supposed to make it better. And we're we're in a position when we have loss that it's not in our control. There is no manual, there's no toolkit, there's nothing we can go to to fix this. We can't fix the fact that somebody has died, but then we turn into, well, let's fix the my wife that's grieving. And you can't do that. Right. It doesn't work. And so we have to retool, we have to decide figure out, okay, what works, what is actually helpful. And and the best way to do that is ask. Say, what do you need from me? And then provide it. We're not good at that. We we want to jump in, we want to solve the problem, we want to move on. And grief doesn't allow you to do that. It it changes everything. You're supposed to be able to fix things. That's the whole role that you have. And uh we don't aren't given that opportunity when it comes to our own children and grief and our spouse. Now, the other issue that that I deal with in particular and have dealt with is when you lose a baby before the baby's born. That's a whole different set of problems. And my wife and I went through that. We had uh twin girls that uh we were expecting our first babies, and uh about three months into the pregnancy, she lost one of the twins. The other one's fine. But just navigating through that and navigating the the attitude out in the in the the real world that, well, yeah, at least you have one. That doesn't change the fact that you had planned on two. It doesn't change the fact that that you had visions already of of a life together, of having twin girls everywhere. And so it's hard for somebody who's not walked through that to even begin to understand it. It's even harder for a husband to understand what the needs of the wife uh are at that time because they've carried that baby. That baby's been part of them for, in our case, three months. And it's a totally different experience. Now, there's some things that we did in in our life that even you know, this is you know, 42 years later, every Christmas we have two ornaments, matching ornaments that we hang on the Christmas tree, so that we acknowledge the fact that yes, there were supposed to be two. And we found out right about Christmas, just after Christmas, that there was only going to be one. And so it changed the way we looked at Christmas. And we decided we weren't gonna let that negatively affect it, but we were gonna honor the fact that that that was the reality. Right. Sorry about that. Yeah, and and it it's I mean, it it's tough. It's and and that's something that I encourage men and and women to do and as they go through hard times, hard, difficult days like you're going through this week. Uh 9-11 has to be extremely hard for you because all of those memories come up. August 5th had to be extremely hard for you. Acknowledge the elephant in the room with your spouse. Say, I know today's gonna be hard. Today is August 5th. And a lot of us don't want to even bring it up because we're afraid, okay, well, maybe she won't remember, maybe I'm gonna upset her. They remember. They're going through exactly the same thing you're going through in terms of remembering and trying to hold it together. So you might as well address the elephant in the room early in the day and plan to do something that honors their memory.

unknown 14:39

Right.

SPEAKER_03 14:40

Then it changes from that terrible thing to, okay, we're gonna do something productive today that that is in in keeping with honoring the one that's not there anymore.

SPEAKER_04 14:51

Well, strangely enough, I'm gonna have to admit that while we were cognizant of the importance of the day, August 5th and September the 11th, I would say that we didn't dwell on it too much. We didn't really we, you know, my wife would post something to Facebook, you know, a picture of Jessica and her sunflower hat, and you know, would uh in remembrance of, you know, and I'd I would add a comment to it and uh and we'd kind of talk about it a little bit amongst ourselves, you know, in the evening or whatever, but we never really got into the habit of doing something special. So I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 15:27

James, I let me make a suggestion to you. Before next year, on those two days, stop at the flower shop, get one white rose in a vase, bring it home, and set it on the dinner table. Start a new tradition. It's a very simple act and it's a very visible act. And you know, you can tell your wife, this is why I'm doing it. And so the next time when you walk in the door and you have that white rose and you set it on the vase, there's a recognition. It's a recognition that you remembered, she didn't have to remind you, and there's something visible there, and it's so simple.

SPEAKER_04 16:00

Yeah, we do that a sunflower.

SPEAKER_03 16:03

Yeah, and we do that a lot around the holidays. I mean, one simple thing in place that that reminds us, yes, there was supposed to be somebody else here.

SPEAKER_04 16:11

It's a good idea. I think we'll do that.

SPEAKER_03 16:13

Yeah, they don't have to be grand gestures, just small things. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:17

Right. I don't know. It's it's just been ingrained in our lives for 25 years, and you know, you think about her, you know, once or twice a week, all the time anyway. You don't, you know, grief is something that never goes away. You know, people people are like, oh, it's been six months, or oh, it's been two years. You ought to get over it. You know, you just want to you just want to smack them. Like you grief is and loss stays with you. It's part of who you are, it's part of your family. And yeah, it gets easier and easier to talk about it as time goes on, but you know, you still things happen, you know, a TV show, music, restaurants you go to, there's always something you you'll be driving down the road and you'll see something and it'll remind you of her, you know. And uh so you you just learn how to cope with it.

SPEAKER_03 17:06

Yeah, and I often talk about it in terms of a roller coaster. In the beginning, it's it's very rapid. It's rapid up and rapid down and up and down and up and down and very close together. And as time goes by, it gets stretched out. So the highs aren't as high, the lows aren't as low, and they aren't as often uh combined together. And so it never goes away, but it isn't constant. And we have time to regroup in between. And it's important that, you know, people do recognize the fact that grief is always there. It isn't always on, you know, it isn't always on a shirt sleeve, and it shouldn't be, you know, 25 years later. It it shouldn't be. If it is, then then we have some other issues that we need to to deal with. But those highs and lows kind of even out and and we can still process that grief and process it in a way that's that's productive. And you've done that way by putting a podcast together and giving an opportunity to talk about issues of grief in men, it's very important. We like I said, 25 years ago, that wasn't possible. Men did not uh seek counseling, men didn't admit that they had issues with grief and sadness and sorrow. I mean, you were supposed to buck up. And I went through that after we we served the plane crash. There was even with funeral directors, you would think funeral directors would have their act together and they'd know that, okay, when we get done with this, we're all going to need some kind of support. We're gonna need to have at least some d debriefing and and a way of processing everything that's happened in the last week. There was nothing. And so we all went home and we were almost all catatonic at home because we couldn't re-engage. And it took a while, and it took a lot of faith in my case, and it took a lot of of support from family to bring us out, and so you could be present with your family and present with your friends in your community.

SPEAKER_04 18:46

I remember when did Katrina come through here?

SPEAKER_03 18:49

I don't remember the actual year, but yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:51

Yeah, it's been probably a decade or so. Yeah. So anyway, I was working security, armed security, a company. I don't even remember the name of the company anyway. We actually loaded up about five or six of us on a on a an R V and traveled down to what was the name of the city? Oh my god, I can't think. Louisiana. What's the Baton Rouge?

SPEAKER_03 19:13

Gulf Shores. Huh? Down in Gulfport or yeah, Gulf Shores or yeah, down in that area.

SPEAKER_04 19:19

Yeah, the yeah, the the Gulf right there, you know. The either it was Baton Rouge or one of the other little cities right along the waterway. And uh so we we did security. Half of us worked security during the day, like at a Home Depot, Lowe's, whatever, just to kind of keep people in line. And uh then the other half of us would work the night shift, you know, and we were there to make sure that you know nobody tried to break in and steal a generator or whatever. Right. And my pastor from Grace Fellowship Church, he went down there with uh because he was a director of pastoral care, he went down there with several chaplains. And uh they got the they got the uh experience of identifying bodies in the water. I was like, I can't even imagine. Yeah. So anyway, talk about that.

SPEAKER_03 20:06

Those are all things that humans aren't really designed to process. Right. And so we all need help. Even your pastor needs help, I'm sure. I've had many, many conversations with pastors in the front seat of the hearse, debriefing, and and just kind of giving them an opportunity to share things that they're processing because a lot of us don't realize your pastor has literally no one in the community they can go to.

SPEAKER_04 20:30

Right. And they're human, just like the rest of us.

SPEAKER_03 20:33

And they're human. And so when when we have joys in our life, we're not calling our pastor. When we have trouble in our life, we're calling our pastor. Right. So it's very lopsided on their end in terms of the way they get to experience life and joy and and grief in within their church family. So as we look at what's going on in the church, it's important to pick up the phone and call your pastor when you know they've had a really tough week. Say, how are you doing? There isn't a pastor out there that has an easy time with burying an 18-year-old that just graduated from high school that's killed in a car accident. It's not supposed to happen. But everybody in the community fall calls on them to support them and and and help them through it, but there's not somebody in the community that's helping your pastor process all that.

SPEAKER_04 21:18

Guess not. So you spent years with families in the first hours after a loss, moments most people never witnessed. What did those experiences teach you about the emotional responsibilities men carry that we rarely talk about?

SPEAKER_03 21:31

Well, in in those moments, when you when you enter into a family's home or into a hospital room where someone's passed away, you have to be able to give them the gift of time. You have to give them the the the time to process, you have to give them permission to process things. And over and over, and uh, when I would go into those homes and into the bedrooms where someone has passed away, I would make sure not only the women, the women were were very open about what they needed. I mean, they they know how to process a lot of things, men not so much. But inviting them to come and spend some time with their loved one before we take them away. Inviting them and here's where I I differ from the gentleman who came to your home. I always ask, do you want to help? Not would you, but would you, is this something you want to participate in?

SPEAKER_04 22:16

And I and I think that's I think that's probably the way he he presented it to me.

SPEAKER_03 22:21

Because a lot of times in that moment, the men are standing there and just there's nothing for them to do. And just to give them something physical to do, to help, to assist, it later on it means everything. Right. But they don't know they can help. They don't know that, okay, yeah, the funeral home has enough people there, but maybe you want to be part of this and part of the care. And so that invitation a lot of times is made.

SPEAKER_04 22:46

I yeah, I as I look back on that uh situation, you know, watching her take her last breath. She was Jessica was such a trooper, and she, unlike us, she I think she knew that her time was coming to an end.

SPEAKER_03 23:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:01

And she was a ray of sunshine, and she'd smile and light up the room. And uh, of course, when we had several instances where we had to rush her down to MUSC because of this, that, or another. And towards the end, we were like, you know, the the medical staff, they would triage her and find out, you know, typically the issue, breathing issues or whatever she was having was indicative of her getting close to the end. And they were like, we can make her comfortable, but that's about all we can do. And uh so we'd asked her, we were like, Do you want to stay in the hospital or do you want to go home? And she was like, Oh no, I want to go home. I don't want to be in here anymore. So we we took her home and you know, she we got a hospital bed for her and oxygen and all the medical equipment that was there. Not a whole lot, some stuff. But uh so yeah, she she fought to the very end, and I just I just went into her room and said, Honey, it's okay to let go. I said, You've fought the fight and you've been very positive and upbeat, and I don't want you to I don't you don't need to hold on for me or your mother. So, you know, I kind of gave her permission to go and she was ready to go, actually. And uh so she stopped breathing and uh I went and woke my wife up and said, Hey, Katie, she's she's gone. And so we both spent a little bit of time in the room with her and called her next door neighbor. He was very actually was our landlord. We were renting a double wide mobile home from them, and and uh so yeah, that's you know, you just can't scrape it out of your brain, it's there forever.

SPEAKER_03 24:34

Now what before Jessica got sick, what were the things she really enjoyed doing?

SPEAKER_04 24:39

She liked riding her bicycle, she liked uh she was real close to our other children, and we found out later that that she took responsibility for some of the stuff that they did, and she'd get in trouble for some of the crap they pulled. Yeah. And we got pretty we got pretty wise to that before she even really got sick. And we're like, who did this? And she'd raise her hand, you know, or step forward. I'm like, yeah, you go sit down. Because she was the most loving, patient, gentle-spirited child. You know, you're not you're not supposed to favor, play favorites. You're not supposed to favor one child over the other, even though a lot of times every child has its own personality, its own strengths and weaknesses. But my other two kids were next to her, they were rotten.

SPEAKER_03 25:26

Yeah, but you you learn as a parent to appreciate the different personalities within them and different things about all of them. Right. I've got one daughter who is is very warm and caring and and and always concerned about others and and very well organized. I've got one other that that is a planner and she's you know very high strung and and just the differences in the personality. But when you sit back and you look at what are those gifts and appreciate the gifts that God gave them in terms of of the compassion or the organization, of the structure versus the the the welcoming, those are different gifts. And you learn to appreciate, you know, you you love them differently. You don't love one more than the other, but but you do love different things about them, and you love them differently in different situations.

SPEAKER_04 26:10

So working around death changes how a person sees life. How did being a funeral director reshape your understanding of what it meant to be a man, a father, or leader?

SPEAKER_03 26:21

Well, as a funeral director, you understand very early on that none of us are given tomorrow. In our training, they call that an eschatological urgency, where you understand that every moment that goes by that you are closer to your death than you were the moment before. And so it teaches you a different way of approaching how you live your life. You live it with faith, hopefully, but you also live your life. You don't wait. You don't wait and say someday we're going to. Um, you would form those experiences early on. And and my wife and I always promised that, you know, we would do things when we were young enough to enjoy them. Uh we watched too many people wait until they retire and said that when we retire, we're gonna travel. When we retire, we're gonna move somewhere. When when we retire, we're gonna do this or that. And within months after they retired, one of them's gone. Right. And they don't have those memories. Or one of them ends up in a nursing home and they don't have those memories to hold them together in. And so we promised ourselves we when presented with the opportunity to live our life, we would always do that. And that that's probably one of the the pieces of advice I try to give to young people is don't wait to live your life. Your life is only once. You only have like everybody else, you only have twenty-four hours a day. Make sure you spend them well. And make sure you do something today that makes tomorrow better.

SPEAKER_04 27:34

Good advice. And yeah, you're right. A lot of people uh I don't know. I think we're all s we're all busy just paying bills. We're just we're just slaves to a paycheck. And many many families live from paycheck to paycheck. The wife works, the husband works. You try to pay try to pay the bills, you try to put a little money aside for your for your uh when you become a you know, when you do retire and hope that what you can save and the social security benefits that are there that hopefully you can be comfortable at least. And of course that's another topic for another show. Most leadership books talk about strategy and communications. What leadership lessons did grief teach you that no leadership curriculum ever mentions?

SPEAKER_03 28:16

My leadership skills were developed through being in those rooms. I actually did write a book on leadership. I wrote a book called Lead by Legendary Example. And that book, I never set out to write a book. That book was born out of spending hours and hours and weeks and months in hospital rooms and waiting rooms. About three years ago, my wife went in for a routine knee surgery that went horribly wrong. And over the next 18 months, she would have 12 major surgeries. We spent a good deal of time wondering whether or not mentally she was ever going to come back, physically if she was ever going to be able to come back. There were times when we couldn't be promised that she would they would be able to save her leg. There were times that they didn't know if she would ever be able to walk. Today, three years later, she's walking with a walker, and hopefully by the end of the year, she'll be walking with a cane. But in the process of going through all that, I started writing. I started journaling. And for men who are going through difficult times, I encourage you to pick up a piece of paper and a pencil and just write. It doesn't have to be the great American novel. It doesn't have to be anything else that somebody else even looks at. But start writing some of your thoughts. Start writing what's going on. Start writing about how you're making decisions. Someday your children, your grandchildren may pick that up and say, I'm going through the same thing. What advice did dad have in his writings that might help me today? And so when it got done with all of this writing and getting, you know, not spending all the time in the hospital and the and the waiting rooms, I started reviewing the notes that I put together and it it it became a guide for my grandchildren ultimately of what does leadership look like? What does decision make? And I met with a publisher who says, yes, this is uh this is unlike any other leadership book that I've ever published, and it's very good, and I want to publish it, and I w I wanna to help you do that. But this is a leadership book that identifies six major pillars of leadership that everybody who wants to have what I call legendary leadership that is beyond one generation. It helps you develop that, helps you understand how those traits and and those leadership skills develop from a boy at age nine as a paper boy all the way up to somebody sitting in a hospital room taking care of his wife and hoping that she survives. All of those things and all those trials that came along that you processed are all part of that leadership boat.

SPEAKER_04 30:34

So I'm sitting here thinking about your wife going into the hospital for was it a knee replacement or they were it was a knee replacement.

SPEAKER_03 30:41

I mean, she was it was supposed to be simple, nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary. She's a nurse, she worked 12 hours a day before she went in for the surgery, she hasn't worked since. And she will never be able to go back to the ability to do nursing ever again. But overnight everything changed. And the grief we went through is a lot like the grief that fathers go through when they lose their child. It's not exactly the same, but the the dynamics are similar. It's the the loss of a dream, the loss of the hope, and the the processing what now? Those are all things that are very important for men in particular to to work though through those things as they process grief.

SPEAKER_04 31:18

Was she was your wife looking forward to recovering and go going back to her profession?

SPEAKER_03 31:24

Well, yeah, she already knew the date that she was going to be her goal for being back at work when she went in, and and literally overnight that changed.

SPEAKER_04 31:33

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 31:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 31:34

Well, I'm sitting here thinking, did did they not know what they were doing? Well you wonder, right? Wait a minute. All these thousands of dollars that we're paying for this and there were a host of issues.

SPEAKER_03 31:47

And and this isn't really the price the the place to do that. But just to say there were a host of issues that involved to getting us to where we are today. And fortunately that we had we ran into some amazing medical people at the Mayo Clinic up in Rochester, Minnesota that were able to reconstruct her knee, rebuild everything, and get her back to where she's is today. And she's still improving every day.

SPEAKER_04 32:11

That's awesome. I hope I didn't I hope I didn't probe too deeply there.

SPEAKER_03 32:14

No, you didn't. That's fine.

SPEAKER_04 32:16

So funeral directors often carry emotional burdens that families never see. What was the hardest part of the job that no one outside the profession ever realizes?

SPEAKER_03 32:26

Aaron Powell W when you've got to deal take care of a family of a really close friend or a really rung young child, those are the most emotionally demanding things that we can do as funeral directors. We are charged to hold it together, be the the strong person in the room, much as men are in in any kind of grief situation, but funeral directors more so in the professional world that they live in, uh help guide everybody through and and get them all well and and start on the right road. And then after everything is done and gone and everybody's processed their immediate grief and and had their funeral, then we break down and then we we fall apart and we do that privately. Those are the tough things. Right. And you know, we we had several times when not only was it a close friend, but it was a close friend that lost a young child. And it becomes very difficult. And uh in one of those cases it was a child, somebody who was going to school with our our daughters. And so you have all those layers of grief that you're dealing with and and helping your own kids process it in in a way that is productive. I got you.

SPEAKER_04 33:30

So you talk a lot about leadership, but leadership looks different when people are hurting. How does leadership change when the people you're guiding are grieving, scared, or in crisis?

SPEAKER_03 33:40

We have to get very skilled at being fully present. We have to be present enough to see that anxiety, the fear, the the not knowing is going on in the room. We need to be able to slow the conversation down, to hear what's being said and what's not being said, to recognize when we have somebody in the corner who's got their arms folded across their chest, leaning back in their chair with kind of a scowl, that maybe we should ask them a question. Maybe we should call them because they probably have something to say and they haven't been invited into the conversation. And and those people skills of being able to observe the room and understand the emotion that's that beneath the surface become crucial uh elements of of success for any funeral director. And I was very fortunate. I grew up with two very large families. On my dad's side, there were five kids, on my mom's, there were there were ten. And every other Sunday we would go back and forth for Sunday dinner. And so as a kid, I got to watch a lot of adults. I got to understand their personalities and how they reacted in different situations, when they were happy, when they were, you know, uh sad, when when they were grieving, you know, all of those different things and how they processed it. And when you get to look at 15 different adult models and different personalities, you can start to draw on that when you're sitting in a room full of people you don't know and start identifying some of those personality traits and be able to help them in a way that is helpful because you've seen it help in your own family.

SPEAKER_04 35:07

Right. And everybody is unique for sure. Mm-hmm. Yes. So you've seen families at the moment when legacy becomes real when someone's life is being remembered. What did those moments teach you about the kind of legacy men should be building long before anyone writes their obituary?

SPEAKER_03 35:24

Part of that is just living a life. Living a life that you would want to put in into a, for lack of a better way of putting it, into an obituary. What what will people say when I'm gone? What will they remember most? And I can tell you that most of them won't remember the bank account. They won't remember the Christmas present they didn't get because money was tight, but they will remember that you were there. They will remember that you attended their ballgame. They will remember you stepped up and volunteered to be their scout master or their church leader. And those are things that build legacy. When you can take the time to model good ethics, good balance with life in terms of faith, family, and work, those are the things that really build legacy. If if you don't have that kind of balance, then everything's out of whack. And you you end up losing at least one of those things. And so it's important to make sure that that all three legs of the stool are in place. Otherwise, it tips over.

SPEAKER_04 36:19

Very good. So I always like to give my guests an opportunity to talk directly to the listening audience, like an elevator speech or whatever, like three to five minutes or whatever. What would you like to say to grieving fathers?

SPEAKER_03 36:32

I would say this this is a season. It isn't forever. Yes, you are going to always remember, yes, you're always going to have some type of grief, but it isn't going to be this intense. It isn't going to consume your life. You are going to be able to be happy again. You are going to be able to laugh again. Yes, you will cry, but there is great joy in knowing that the person that's not there would not want you to be sad all the time. What their hope would be for you would be that you have joy in your life, that you build new memories, that you remember them, but you keep m living your life. There's nothing sadder, I I can imagine, I cannot imagine anything sadder than when I'm gone that people stop living. And so just remember that the people that have left don't want you to be stuck.

SPEAKER_04 37:15

Well, Jay, thank you for sharing your experience and the wisdom that comes from serving people in their hardest moments. Your perspective reminds us that leadership is presence, compassion, and responsibility. Every man listening, keep building a life. Your family can lean on. This is the Father's Refuge podcast. Stay encouraged and stay connected. Thank you for the privilege of your time. And Jay, thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_03 37:38

James, thank you for inviting me.

SPEAKER_04 37:40

Yeah, tell us about your book. I forgot to ask you about your book.

SPEAKER_03 37:43

It's it's called Lead by Legendary Example. It is available in a hard copy as well as audio formats. It's available on Amazon and also Apple. And it uh is a book that, like I said, is unlike any other leadership book you'll read. The first two-thirds of it talk about how leadership was built in my own life, the stories behind it. We talk about the United Flight 232 air disaster. We talk about the testimony before the United States Senate. We talk about the eight and the nine-year-old paperboy and the lessons that were learned there in terms of presence. We talk about perspective, and there's a lot of good information in there. And in the last third of the book, we give you a 10-week session where you can build leadership in your own family and your own organization through lesson plans that are that are already part of the book. But I encourage you to get it. Um it is written at a very personal level. In fact, the gentleman who recorded the book for us and narrate it, uh, he would email me back uh several times and he would say, you know, I understand why you couldn't read this yourself, because even me who this is not my story, but I'm breaking down reading it just because of the emotional way that it is written. So it is it's definitely one that is you want to sit and you wanna to quietly either listen or read it. What's the name of it? Lead by legendary example. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 39:03

Well, very good. That'll be in the show notes. So if anybody that's listening wants to get a copy of it, they can.

SPEAKER_03 39:08

Appreciate that.

SPEAKER_04 39:09

All right, brother. All right. I want to say goodbye. All right.