Cadre Today - Collaborative Grief

Hey. Hey there, Cadre. Happy Happy Friday, TGI Cadre, right? I hope you are doing great, y'. All. I'm a little crooked, aren't I? One whoop or my phone's a little crooked. I try not to be very crooked myself. But we're all human. We all do stupid stuff from time to time, don't we? How are we? I hope you're doing great, but if you're not, here's your daily reminder that that is okay, too. You are still thoroughly capable of some pretty amazing stuff. Even when you're not feeling great, thinking great, performing great, you're still incredibly capable.

I'm glad I'm here. I'm glad you're here. I know what I know, and I care about you. Hey, on Fridays, we often talk about grief and loss and all the evidence that we spend a good chunk of our lives caring about people. Happy Friday, Andi Mac. Good morning, Marisa. If we do love and passion and vocation in our lives, we are going to lose those things. Hey, Amar, nice to see you. Later on today, Adam Standiford from St. Croix Hospice, one of our wonderful partners in this Cadre sphere, is going to be talking about how comparing our grief with others and our joy can often dilute the power of that grief or joy.

So check out Adam's livestream later on today. This morning, I wanted to talk about another C word in relationship to grief, and that's collaborative grief. Let me tell you what I mean. So sometimes the algorithms of social media can be a little too much, right? You say, oh, I need a new toothbrush, and all of a sudden, all over the place it's toothbrush, toothbrush, toothbrush. But I'll tell you, my algorithms right now are throwing me animal grief stuff, and they have been for quite a while, and I'm not surprised.

I talk death with my animals every day from the day they're little puppies. Willow's turning three years old next week, and every day for the last two and a half years since she came home, we've talked about the day that she will die. I've always been like this with my animals because you never know when something's going to happen. And I want to make sure that those conversations are frequent and normal so they know that this is a part of this weird relationship we get to have. But since I'm always used to having kind of grief animal content in my social media world, it gets extra loud when, you know one of your animals is getting more and more showing of signs that that they're not gonna be around forever.

Hamilton, who's almost 11, has a lot of stuff going on. Okay, I'll get to the point. So yesterday received a little story on the Instagram talking about how animals, once they get across the Rainbow Bridge, the way that time passes in, in doggy heaven is by the time they look back, you're already there. So let's say Hamilton dies tomorrow. By the time that Hamilton goes, where am I? Where am I? And then he looks back to see if I'm there, I'm already there. Even if it's 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years until I die.

That one hit me really, really good. Because I think one of the things I didn't realize is I don't want Hamilton to be somewhere where I'm not. Hey, Nettie. Nice to see you, my friend. And in my mind, without even thinking about it, I was like, oh my gosh, if Hamilton dies now, it's gonna be a long time before he sees me again. And of course before I see him again. Then all of a sudden this thought that the time on the other side of life passes at a different rate, that literally within a moment, we're there too.

That made me feel really good in like a glassy eyed type of way. So I started sending it around everybody else who knows Hamilton, I was like, ah, this made me feel good. And as we know in social media, it's really easy to share something. It's really easy to share, you know, a story or, you know, a message or a screenshot. And I hope you do that with your fellow peeps here in the Cadre sphere. Because you never know how something that resonates with you will resonate with somebody else. Grief is a very personal, lonely, lonely journey.

And as Adam will talk about this afternoon, comparing the way that you grieve to someone else's grief doesn't serve a lot of purpose. It doesn't grow a lot of fruit. But I will say nobody knows how to grieve. Every moment you're grieving. It's the dance, it's am I doing this right? Does this hit the right place? And you can help out those people within your sphere by sharing the things that resonate with you, not telling them, this is the way you're supposed to grieve. But to put it in front of them and to go, huh, this meant something to me, maybe it'll mean something to you.

So it made me feel really good in my stomach hurts kind of way to know that once Hamilton or Jefferson or Willow or any other animal that I'm ever gonna have within my life that once they say, peace out, world. Within a second, we're right back there with them. Cadre. It feels like the second I say we'll see you tomorrow, I'm right back with you. So I'll see you tomorrow morning. And actually, now I think about it, Hamilton's got a vet appointment at 8am So I will bop on a little bit earlier. And maybe just like when Hamilton jumped into the live stream earlier this week, I'll go and bring them along as well.

We'll go into our livestream right here together before we go into the vet. All right, Nadia, Amar, Andy, Marisa, everybody. Have a great Friday. Check out Adam's live stream later. We'll see you later. Peace, everybody. Yeah.