Today, we delve into a heartfelt conversation about love, healing, and the often-complex journey of grief with our guest, Jacqueline Werket. With over three decades of experience as a nurse practitioner and a certified grief recovery method specialist, Jacqueline brings a wealth of knowledge and personal insight to the discussion. She opens up about her own experiences with delayed grief, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging and processing our feelings rather than suppressing them. Through her memoir, "A Grief Post Postponed," she shares her journey in hopes of reaching others who may feel isolated in their grief. Join us as we explore the profound impact of grief on our lives and the healing power of community and connection.

The conversation unfolds around the profound themes of love, healing, and the intricate journey of grief, as we welcome Jacqueline Werket a seasoned nurse practitioner turned grief recovery specialist. Jacqueline's three decades of experience in healthcare are enriched by her personal story of loss, particularly the heartbreaking death of her son to leukemia. Her insights shine through as she emphasizes the importance of taking the time to truly grieve, rather than succumbing to societal pressures to move on quickly. The discussion delves deep into the concept of delayed grief, a condition that many may not recognize, where unresolved emotions surface unexpectedly, often manifesting as physical symptoms or anxiety. Jacqueline’s memoir, “A Grief Postponed,” serves as both a personal narrative and a guide for those navigating their own grief journeys, encouraging listeners to embrace their feelings and seek connection and support during their healing process.

Jacqueline's narrative is not just one of sadness; it's a story of resilience. She reflects on how her experiences in healthcare helped shape her understanding of grief, particularly how the hurried nature of modern medicine often overlooks the emotional needs of patients. She shares her philosophy that true healing occurs within a community, emphasizing that we need to feel our grief rather than suppress it. Through her story, she encourages others to reach out for help, whether through therapy, support groups, or simply by sharing their experiences with trusted friends. This episode is a heartfelt reminder that grief is a personal journey, and there is strength in vulnerability and seeking connection during the darkest times.

Takeaways:

• Grief is a complex journey that requires time and support from others to navigate effectively.
• Delayed grief can manifest years later, catching individuals by surprise and impacting their mental and physical health.
• It's crucial to acknowledge feelings of grief openly and to reach out for help when needed, whether through therapy or support groups.
• Connecting with others who have experienced similar losses can provide profound healing and understanding during the grieving process.

Links referenced in this episode:

• www.jacquelinewerket.com
• https://facebook.com/jacqueline.werket

Welcome to Becoming Bridge Builders, the podcast where we explore stories, insights and lived experiences that help us build bridges of understanding, healing and transformation.

I AM your host, Reverend Dr. Keith Haney and today we're going to dive into a powerful conversation about love, healing and the complicated journey of grief. Our guest today is Jacqueline Workert, a retired nurse practitioner with more than three decades of experience caring for others.

She brings a unique blend of clinical expertise, spiritual depth and lived experience. Friends, today's conversation will touch your heart. Let's welcome Jacqueline to the podcast. How you doing today?

I'm doing good, thank you. Thanks for having me.

It's great to have you. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

We all deal with grief at some point, so you're going to help us navigate through those difficult times in our life?

Yes, there are many.

Yes, there are definitely many. I'm going to start to ask you my favorite question. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Don't go to worst case scenario. Don't always go to worst case scenario.

And where'd you learn that?

We tend to do that. Well, to be honest with you, I had a daughter who was born. This is different than my son.

My daughter was born and she had a heart defect and she had surgery at 17 days old and she wasn't recovering as fast as they thought she should. And then they decided she wasn't going to recover. So they advised us to take her off a respirator to die in our arms, my husband and I. And she lived.

And she is 41 years old today and she runs three miles a day and she has a very full life.

Well, it just goes to show they don't know everything they tell us they know.

That's true. That's very true, very true.

You may have your plans, but God always has different plans sometimes.

That's right, yes.

So, Jacqueline, you know, for listeners who are meeting you for the first time, can you tell us a bit about your three decade career of being a nurse practitioner and what drew you to into the healthcare field?

Well, I went into the healthcare field. I knew I wanted to do something in medicine.

When my son was diagnosed and treated for leukemia, and ultimately he died, I knew I wanted to go into a field that would help people.

And I thought of becoming a doctor, but then the role of the nurse practitioner emerged, and I liked that idea because I felt like I could spend more time with patients and probably have more of a work life balance, and I wanted to help people basically, medically. I was raised in a medical family. My dad was a family practitioner back in the old days, as he would say. Yeah, yes, yes.

After so many, so many years in that field, caring for other people, is there a moment or an experience that stands out most as defining kind of in your mind, your clinical career?

Wow. A moment that's stands out. I don't know. It's kind of cumulative. I think that there were many moments. Hard, Hard to quantify that.

What I realized was that. Well, what I learned was that, first of all, we don't have. In traditional medicine, we are governed by corporations, and we are forced to hurry up.

And I didn't like that. And I made it my point to take more time with patients.

And that when patients came to request me as a provider, they got referred from someone else who had seen me, and that let me know that I was doing a good job. Because I think patients want to be heard. That's really important.

And nowadays with computers and, you know, very short time slots, we're allowed to see doctors. And that is oftentimes not. Patients don't oftentimes feel that way. They feel like it's kind of hurry up medicine.

And so I think as patients referred other patients to me, that's when I knew I was on the right track.

Yeah, that's.

That's powerful because that's a testimony of other people you've worked with that says, this is somebody who really seems to care about you and your situation. Not just. You're not just a number to them. You're. You're a person.

Thanks. Exactly. Exactly. And so it really defined my career in that way that I. Mm.

So tell us about the transition from healthcare into grief recovery work. How'd that happen?

And I gave away all his toys and clothes right away, thinking that that was what I was supposed to do. I thought society was telling me, move on, get over it, get rid of painful reminders.

And so I ended up repressing my grief and then 10 years later, after I was remarried, I had a second child. And three months after Sarah's birth, I began to feel sick. And I had body aches. I had headaches. I had profound fatigue.

It was a fatigue so potent, I thought if I stopped and gave into it, I'd die. I was that tired. And so I went to the doctor. I had lab work done, and everything came back normal. And I was confused. I thought, what's wrong with me?

And that afternoon, the afternoon I got my results, my daughter and I went to the grocery store, and I had a panic attack. And then when we came home, we were trapped in the car during a severe thunderstorm.

And I'll get into this a little more when I talk about my book, but my grief exploded. And I realized that physical symptoms aren't always related to that. Your physical symptoms. They're underlying those physical symptoms.

There are other mental health issues. And that really was a. It was a defining moment for me.

And I knew that there had to be other people out there just like me who had these physical symptoms, who kept going to the doctor. They didn't know what was wrong with them. And then it turned out it was delayed grief. And delayed grief is really powerful.

And so I realized that it's really important to grieve that it affects our mind, body, and spirit. And it really led me into the grief work because I thought, people have to know about this. I can't be the only one who feels like they're.

I thought I was the only person because I went to the bookstore. I went to libraries. I couldn't find anything on delayed grief.

I mean, there were books on grief in general, but I didn't read anything specifically about delayed grief. And I felt very, very alone. And I don't want anybody else to go through that. And that's what led me to working in the field of grief.

Wow. So let's. Let's dig into your book a little bit more. You. The phrase delayed grief is a very powerful word. How do you define delayed grief?

Well, delayed grief is grief that ambushes us months or years later. It's very common, but people don't talk. Talk about it. So they remain isolated. So we often carry that alone. And it's. It's a secret.

We don't tell people about it. We may feel. I know I felt like there was something wrong with me. I thought, who doesn't grieve the death of her child? And what I.

As I worked through the grief, I came to understand why I suppressed.

That's Good. So, yes, whenever you write a memoir, there are usually very vulnerable events that you're doing.

What was the moment in your writing process when you realized, yes, the world needs to read this?

Well, I knew it when, well, I knew it when my grief exploded, that it was hidden for 10 years, but it had affected my life, it had affected the work I did, it had affected my relationships, and obviously it had affected my health. And I just knew that this was something that had to be addressed. And I think it's rampant in our society.

I think that we don't take the time, we're in a hurry up society where we don't take the time to grieve. And what happens is then we stuff it and then it impacts our whole life, mind, body and spirit.

As somebody who spends a lot of time working in this field, what are some maybe warning signs that people should be looking for if they're dealing with delayed grief?

Well, there are specific signs for delayed grief, like memory loss. For example, I suppressed the date of my son's birthday and the anniversary of his death.

But every spring, the time that Ian was diagnosed with cancer, underwent chemotherapy and died, I felt sick. Everything from my fingertips down to my toes ached. I had acquired a visceral response to spring. Another sign is, another sign can be overreaction.

We overreact to things, smaller issues. We avoid persons, places, and things that remind us of the loss. And we, of course, have the unexplained physical symptoms.

Also, you can have chronic anxiety and depression. And I had a chronic depression. It was low level, but I came to think of it as normal. I thought that was just the way life was.

You were always a little blue, as my friend calls it. So those are the symptoms you can look at that may signal that you have delayed grief underneath.

When people pick up your book and you really want to help people deal with this delayed grief, what do you hope readers take away from your memoir for their own personal life?

Well, I hope that, that they reach out for help because knowing when you need help is very deep wisdom. And reaching out for help is a sign of strength. It's not weakness. It's a mark of good health. You don't have to do it alone.

And I reached out for a therapist and for a grief group and they helped me tremendously. So that's what I want them to remember.

I like that. I know that all groups are not created the same or created equal. What are some key things you want to look for in a grief group?

Because I think you could probably Find groups that aren't going to be helpful for you. What are you looking for in a group that's going to be supportive versus one that may be detrimental for your healing?

Well, I think there has to be a structure and I think you need to look for someone who is a professional. That's the group where you're going to get most out of. They can pick up if you're clinically depressed.

They can identify if you have post traumatic stress disorder. And they usually are very clear about the structure of the group.

I know my facilitator was and she had a lot of wisdom because she had worked with people grieving for years and years. And I think some of the peer related grief groups can go astray if there's just peers we can go off on.

People can go off on tangents or maybe bring up things that could be dealt with in therapy rather than in the group setting.

I like that because you always got to be careful. You don't go into something that's going to make your life more difficult.

Well, and you don't want to trigger other people if they have some trauma in their life. You want to be careful. You have to have good boundaries, very good boundaries.

You don't want to necessarily go into your history of abuse in a grief group. You may allude to it, you may say you have a history, but you don't want to go into details.

And I think that's very important because you can trigger other people.

So many of my listeners are not familiar with the method. Can you explain what makes it different from traditional therapy or grief therapy?

Well, grief therapy is focused and I believe that healing takes place within community, not in isolation and in therapy. It's a one on one situation. And if you're in a grief group, you get the benefit of other people's wisdom, their perspectives.

I know what I learned in the grief group was that the only way to heal grief is to feel it. And that healing takes place within community, not in isolation. And I also redefined strong by witnessing other people bear their souls.

I realized that real strength is gained through vulnerability, not in being stoic. So there's such a benefit in being with other people who have been through the same situation you have been.

Or maybe not in detail, but the general they've had a loss, the kind of loss your specific loss might be different, but they still are grieving.

So I think the input of other people and that sense of love and connection, I think that's really necessary because when we're grieving, we Have a very deep void. And we need to fill that void with connection to other people. I think that's. That's how we heal.

And another benefit is that while you can do this in traditional therapy as well, but telling your story out loud now. When I told my story out loud, I was able to see where I got hung up. And I came to understand why I suppressed a group.

I think, you know, it was the grief, not the group was because my husband left and because his toys and belongings were gone. I gave them away. And they would have been cues to facilitate my grief. And then I had to move in with a group of strangers.

And it's really hard to talk about the death of a child with a group of strangers. I made it a point not to overwhelm them with my grief, but it isolated me. I felt alone. And I did my grieving in. In my bedroom at night.

So I'm getting a little astray here. But. But I just think that connecting with others is profound. It's profound.

As you think about the work you do.

If someone came to you and said, I want to go through your process of grief counseling, grief therapy, and support, what could they expect in working with you to work through their grief?

Well, they can expect to, first of all, look at the impact of society on what they believe about grief, the impact of what they witnessed in their parents and friends. So you can look at, you know, things that were said to you, whether it be, move on, get over, get over it.

You know, I mean, we have that saying, don't cry over spilled milk. And basically what that says is, don't feel your feelings.

And so I think it's important to look at the origin how we came to think about grief, because we're not taught how to grief. We don't learn it in school. We learn it by observing our parents. And they may be a good role model, or maybe not.

So that's what we'll do at first, and then we will make a list of our losses, and that will be a timeline. And then you will pick out which loss you need to work on.

And most people who have obviously just had someone die are going to pick that, and we are going to look at their feelings, especially their guilt. A lot of people have guilt that really gets you hung up. We're going to look at your anger.

We're going to look at those things that you don't want to talk about. For example, if you were in a relationship and your loved one died and it was more negative than positive, you really need to name.

You need to name what they did, what you wish they had done, and you need to explain how you felt, how what they did affected you. And I think we say don't speak ill of the dead, but our relationships are really a mixed bag.

So I think we need to be real and not only look at the good things, but the things that were hard. Where was the disharmony in your relationship? Because those are the things we don't want to talk about.

And then we're going to write a letter to our loved one. And the goal is to have no undelivered communications for healing.

You need to communicate whether it's what you wished you had said, as I said, what happened to you in that relationship, how you felt, if you were hurt, if you were angry. But you need to deliver all of the words you wished you had said, or also you can tell them what you wish they had said to you.

Because we lose our dreams and sometimes we think about the fact that we're not going to be able to resolve a difficult relationship, that there's no. There's no chance for healing. And now that the person has died and it's really important to talk about that.

Not just the grief, the anger, the bargaining, the guilt, but most definitely the things you wish you had said. Because we're all. Because we're left with a bag of mixed feelings. And in our society, I mean, we don't talk about grief.

In fact, most people within two and a half months of the death stop saying the dead person's name out loud after two and a half months. I mean, I thought that was shocking when I heard that. Two and a half months. I mean, I came from an experience where nobody talked.

No one mentioned my son's name after he died. There was complete silence. And you know, you have to think about what those dreams were.

And you grieved those dreams, what you thought you were going to do together, How you wished you had grown together, all those regrets. Very important, because I think we forget. We don't want to talk about it. We don't want to talk about those things because.

No, I like that. That reminds me of something else. I think people hearing this.

If you could share a message with someone who's dealing with grief right now, what would you share with them.

If they were going through grief right now?

Well, again, I tell them that I want them to reach out for help, whether it be me, a grief group, or a therapist, or their pastor, or a certified grief counselor. Grief is very complex and it's hard to do it yourself, you need other people's perspectives and you need someone to listen to your story.

You have to tell your story because you are going to learn all kinds of things by saying it out loud. And I believe that we can come to peace.

You know, they say that people say that losing a child is one of the worst kinds of losses and that I've heard people say that you never get over it. Well, I wouldn't say get. You have to go through it. I came to peace with my son's death.

And although I feel some sadness from time to time, I am at peace. I know he's okay. I know he's okay. And so I would offer them hope. I think it's really important to offer people hope.

I heard a speaker once tell a group of parents that they would never stop grieving. And I do not agree with that at all. And these were people who were newly bereaved. And what a thing to hear. You know, you're never going to heal,.

You're always going to be hurting, right? Yeah.

And that's not true, you know, but you have to embrace your feelings. You just have to embrace your feelings. Look at your own beliefs, look at what you wish had happened. You have to.

The most important thing is to feel and to go through it. You can't shove it under the rug. You can't go on like there was, you know, after a few months, like nothing happened.

And there are people who do that. And you know, then what happens is if you're a stoic, then your friends think you're stoic.

So you end up that you don't have a support system when people view you as being stoic. So I would say share your feelings.

Say the deceased name out loud because by saying it out loud, you give other people permission to say the name of your loved one. I think that's really important.

And another thing I did, and you want to pick your friend or not your friends, the people who are going to support you. You want someone who's going to listen to you, who's not going to try and fix you, who's not going to try and talk you out of your feelings.

So choose wisely, but definitely get support. It's huge. Yeah.

So as a two time best selling author, what's next for you? Any upcoming projects?

Well, actually more podcasts. Doing public speaking about my story.

I'd love to share some of my story because I think that the listener will learn something from what happened to me and what I did. As I told you, my grief exploded 10 years after my son died. And because I couldn't find resources, I reached out for a therapist.

And then I went to the grief group.

And another thing I did was I invited my husband to come with me to the grief group so that we could share, so that he could understand what I was going through. Because this is my second husband. Ayan was not his child.

And at first he thought 10 years ago that she should be done with that, she should be over it. And he verbalized that. And it was good to know. Even my mother in law said to me that sometimes you have to accept things and move on.

Well, you can't accept something that you haven't worked through. And what I did was because I didn't know Ian's birthday or the anniversary of his death, I decided to go back to the hospital where Ian had died.

And I went to the hospital and there was a nurse who helped me and she got Ian's chart. And then she gave me an office to read the chart. Well, I read this chart. And the beginning of it was about this happy, healthy baby.

And I, I thought, no, I walked down the hall, I was going to tell her that she gave me the wrong chart, but her office door was closed. So I went back to the office and I thought, well, there can't be two Ayan McCauleys.

And so I checked the end of the chart and indeed the baby had died. But then I began to take notes. Times of sitting up, crawling, walking. His first words. And then I was overcome.

And it felt profound because I realized that when I blocked out my painful memories, I had blocked out all, all of the sad memories too. I mean, my happy memories.

Excuse me, when I blocked out the painful memories, I blocked out the happy memories so much that I didn't recognize my own child. And those notes about a happy, healthy boy. So the nurse was very kind. She let me take the chart home. So she slipped it into an envelope.

And so I was able to take it home and my husband and I were able to share it. I xeroxed the chart from beginning to end. And I just held it. I held it because this was evidence that my son had walked on this earth. Earth.

And because I didn't have a lot of pictures. We were young when Ian died. We didn't have cell phones like kids do nowadays or, you know, where they're snapping pictures all the time.

We didn't have that. We didn't have that. And. And we thought we were invincible.

Because I was in my early 20s and I hadn't thought about the fact that I could die, let alone the fact that my child could die. So when I was ready, I brought the chart back. And my next step, I decided, was to go back to the hospital ward where Ian had died.

I needed to go there. And so this nurse came with me, and we opened that cancer ward door, and I dared to step back into my past. And everything was the same.

It was all the same. They hadn't updated it. There was no remodeling. It was a replica of how it looked when Ian was dying.

And so we walked around the station with her arm around me, and I shared difficult memories. I shared my anger, my sadness, my despair. And I was so glad I had her with me, because I had gone through the experience pretty much alone.

My husband had a really hard time dealing with it, and he wouldn't talk about Ayan or what was going on. And so I spent a fair amount of that time at the hospital all by myself. My friends didn't come to visit. My parents came every two weeks.

But they didn't think that Ian should have been treated. He had megakaryocytic leukemia, which is a rare form of leukemia.

And the doctors failed to tell us that no one, not even an adult, had ever had a remission with his type of cancer. And so I was very angry. I hadn't known anyone who'd gone through chemotherapy.

And we were urged to make the decision to treat him on the day that he was diagnosed. So we didn't even have time for it to sink in. It was. It was too soon. We made that decision way too soon.

So, anyway, the nurse sue, and I walked around the hospital ward, and then I decided that I needed to step into the room where Ian had died, where he had suffered and died. And the nurses had moved all the other children out. They were told that this was a mother who wasn't allowed to grieve.

And they had put a chair in the corner of the room. And so I decided to step into the room on my own. And the first thing I did after I sat on the chair was to look to his crib.

And he wasn't laying there sobbing, pulling his legs up to his hard tummy. And then I looked to his. The tiny wheelchair in the corner of the room. And he wasn't sitting there staring expressionlessly. He had dissociated.

He had separated himself from the hospital environment. I believe he separated himself from his pain, and he separated himself from. From my husband and I.

And I felt so guilty, as if I had betrayed him because all that chemotherapy did was to add to his suffering. So anyway, all of a sudden, all of a sudden, there was this profound white light. It was brilliant. It was white. It was golden.

And suddenly my son's spirit was there. He was with me, and he was telling me that he was okay, he was at peace.

And I realized that when he let go of his pain 10 years earlier, I picked it up and carried it for a decade. And so, knowing that I was at peace, I was able to begin again, to embrace my life.

And that night, my husband, my daughter and I went out to celebrate that Ayin was in the light and that I was, and that I was at peace. And I thank God for that. It was a gift of grace. It was a profound gift of grace to feel the presence of his spirit.

And I know now that I know that our spirits live on. I know that in the depth of my being. And I hope that that reassures people that they realize it's true.

When we leave our bodies behind, our spirits live on with God and we are healed. We're not sick anymore. So that's what I did.

Wow. That's a beautiful picture of what the Bible describes in. In Corinthians 15 about the life after this body passes away.

So thank you for sharing that story with us.

Yes. Yeah. It was really a profound experience and I was really, really glad that I did it.

So where can listeners follow your work and connect with you online?

Pardon? How can they? Oh, they can connect with me on my website. It is www.jacqueline and that's J A C Q U E L I n e work it.

It's w e r k e t.com Jacquelineworkit.com and I have information about delayed grief. You can see an interview. Jack Canfield interviewed me and he endorsed the book. He loved it.

He told me it kept him up till 2 o' clock in the morning because he couldn't stop turning the pages. So they'll find lots of information on delayed grief.

And a Grief Postponed is A nurse practitioner's journey through delayed grief is found on Amazon. You can find that. But we had to pull it because the first printing on Amazon had some errors.

And so we are going to relaunch that within two weeks so they'll be able to find it.

Good. So I love to ask my guest this question, Jacqueline, what do you want your legacy to be?

Oh, my legacy. I want it to be that I was a loving friend, that I was a loving wife, and that my husband found fulfillment in our relationship.

And I want to be known for bringing the term delayed grief out into the open.

I want it to be a topic that's discussed at the dinner table, that I help people understand what it was and I help them identify it and not only in themselves, but in their family members and in their friends. Because it's a conversation that needs to happen if we want to be happy people and be at peace.

Well, Jacqueline, thank you for sharing your story, your wisdom and your heart with us today. For our listeners, make sure you look up her upcoming her book that's actually coming out again the next couple weeks. Again, Grief Postponed.

Yes, A Nurses Practitioners Journey Through Delayed Grief and today today's conversation touched you. Please subscribe. Share this episode with someone who needs it and leave us a review View Together we can become bridge builders.

One story, one connection, one act of love at a time. Jacqueline, thanks so much for being on the show.

You're welcome.