Speaker 1
Good Saturday morning to everybody and welcome to your next chapter, a production of the Heights at Avery Heights, a one of a kind senior living community centrally located near all of the most exciting and entertaining historical spots in Connecticut. This show is dedicated to empowering older adults with helpful resources, ideas, inspiration, tips to encourage them on life’s journey. Our production is also dedicated to the younger generation so they can better understand how to develop greater communication and enjoyment for those elders in their community. Along with senior living specialist over at the Heights, Siobhan Mattingly. Good morning, Siobhan.

Speaker 2
Good morning. Nice to see you. Good to see you. How was your week? Week was amazing.

Speaker 1
Oh, it’s not excellent.

Speaker 2
No. Amazing. Amazing, yes. Yeah, we started our memory cafe at the Heights.

Speaker 2
You did? That’s right. Oh.

Speaker 2
Yes. Do tell. It was really good.

Speaker 2
We had a paint and sip type of thing. Yes. So we had these huge cupcakes from Tim.

Speaker 2
These red velvet cupcakes were just like for like Jolly Green Giant or something. They were beautiful cupcakes. And then we had, I always start with the food.

Speaker 2
It is a wonderful spread of food. I understand why, by the way. I’ve eaten it.

Speaker 2
But she did such a great job. She did kind of a heart and then she had birds. And so if you had three people in your family or two people, you know, if it was just you and as a couple and you put them within the heart and it was nice.

Speaker 2
And after we took pictures of everyone with their actual picture that they made with their loved one. And it was really good. We had some folks.

Speaker 2
We had a daughter and her dad and it was just really neat. But it’s just a cool way for caregivers and their loved one that has dementia and Alzheimer’s, you know, to really just relate, to connect, you know, just to have a good time, just to have fun. So you kicked it off.

Speaker 2
How often will this be? Is this an ongoing? Yes.

Speaker 2
It’ll be every month on the second Monday at 1 p.m. And we’ve got such a good lineup. We have coming. We have a wonderful singer for St. Patrick’s Day.

Speaker 2
She’s going to sing some great Irish songs. We have People Plant Connection. so people will learn about plants and they’ll actually walk away with a couple of plants as well so more of a hands-on type of thing we have a luau coming in June in May we’re going to have a barbecue in August of course we’re going to have an ice cream social and then we have our drum circle coming in July and drum circles are so music is obviously so amazing for people with memory challenges so this is going to be great

Speaker 1
the luau sounds great the barbecue has me thinking

Speaker 2
but you really had me at the ice cream social yes yes yeah it’s going to be good yeah i may have to

Speaker 1
pop in on that one and grab a cone and see hello yeah it’ll be good to see some of the uh yeah it’s

Speaker 2
one of those uh and it’s for people from the outside so it’s free to the public the general public can come themselves and their caregiver um we have four people coming actually the caregiver and three other people are coming and that’s fine as long as you know they have someone there a loved one there and themselves and it’s so nice um it’s one of those things where you when you do something and then you see it come together and you kind of stand back. And I was watching people pain and drinking their coffee and just laughing. And it’s exactly what you want.

Speaker 2
Because sometimes you come to, you know, you visit someone that has Alzheimer’s had mentioned, especially this is for people who are early stages or mid stages. And especially in that mid stage where the person is there. But like we were talking about the lasso, sometimes they’re not there.

Speaker 2
This is just a really nice way to just build, like she said, build those front load, those memories. And it’s free and it’s fun. We provide all the entertainment.

Speaker 2
All you got to do is just show up and just be ready to have fun.

Speaker 1
You really are. I have to commend the Heights really at the forefront of this. Listen, anybody can just, you know, you can open up a senior living and say, okay.

Speaker 1
But you’ve got ongoing programs, you know, and you’re always looking to, you know, one up and better yourselves. Really. You really, the Heights, I tip my hat to you.

Speaker 1
You’re raising the bar. Really. And you know what?

Speaker 1
I’m glad you brought up last week’s show because, I mean, Lisa Marshall, she did a phenomenal job with her book and how she related a lot of personal experiences. We have a lot of positive feedback from that show that it kind of segues perfectly into, you know, this morning show. We all we have yet another author who really draws upon her own experience with this.

Speaker 1
Perhaps you can do the introduction since you know her.

Speaker 2
Yes. Yes. I actually met Beth Robbins.

Speaker 2
I met her when I was working for the hospice company. And obviously with hospice, we deal with a lot of grief. And this book is amazing.

Speaker 2
It’s amazing the way she wrote this and kind of, like you said, took that experience and then something amazing came out of it. So I want to introduce Mrs. Beth Robbins. She’s an author of a book called A Grief Sublime.

Speaker 2
And she also is the owner of a publishing company, Keats & Company. And Beth, good morning and welcome.

Speaker 3
Good morning. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1
It’s a pleasure, Beth. I’ve heard a lot about you, but I like to hear from your own words. Tell us maybe a little bit about you, your life, what you do for work, and, of course, about your company.

Speaker 3
Yeah. Well, I’m a high school English and drama teacher at the Berkshire Waldorf School in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. And I’ve been a teacher there for almost 20 years at this point.

Speaker 3
And I most recently have been working, I was working toward two advanced degrees through Bredlow School of English at Middlebury College. And that’s relevant to the book that I ended up writing and the book that I’m working on currently. I live in the Berkshires.

Speaker 3
It’s where my husband, Steve, and I moved about, oh my gosh, getting old. Wow. A long time ago.

Speaker 3
I can’t even.

Speaker 1
Berkshires are nice.

Speaker 3
They’re beautiful. We moved up here from New York City. I was going to say the city, which is always such a little arrogant.

Speaker 3
Anyway, we moved up in the 80s, and this is where we raised our three children here. And I started this publishing company at the same time that I wrote this book. And I had a vision of creating a publishing company that would publish works that don’t quite fit into any separate category.

Speaker 3
And I was looking to foster conversation and communication and create events. And all of this happened right before the pandemic shut everything down. So the momentum was halted back in 2020 because the book was published in 2019.

Speaker 3
And I had all kinds of events going on and I was creating a publishing company. I had a board of directors and it all kind of came to a referring halt temporarily.

Speaker 1
So before I get into your book, I’m going to do that in a moment. In fact, I got a whole host of questions for you. Maybe you can share a little bit about, if you don’t mind. I know it’s a touchy subject, but some of the unexpected tragedies that happened in your life leading up to this.

Speaker 3
You mean about Steve?

Speaker 1
Yes. Dying? Yes.

Speaker 1
Yeah. Sorry. No, no, no. That’s okay.

Speaker 1
The impetus, if you will. Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Speaker 3
No, that’s okay. Yeah, well, Steve, in September of 2015, my husband of almost 30 years, was killed in a car accident coming home from a business meeting. And I was home alone at the time.

Speaker 3
Our youngest was still in high school at the time, but he was at an orientation up at a nearby camp. And so I was home alone, and Steve just never made it home. So I guess I would say that was a tragedy.

Speaker 1
Yeah, that’s one heck of a tragedy. I mean, obviously you’re waiting for him. You’re notified at some point, right?

Speaker 3
Well, yeah, I mean, this was the thing. This is what’s so, and I’m sure others have had this experience. You don’t, if you’re, he was in an accident, it was around 7 o’clock in the evening, but I didn’t have any knowledge of what had happened until the police arrived at my house at about 10 or 10.30 that evening.

Speaker 3
So, and I was unable to reach Steve. I kept texting him and trying to call him because it was very atypical of him not to be in communication. And I was getting incredibly worried.

Speaker 3
And I didn’t know what to do. I just didn’t know what to do. It never occurred to me that anything happened.

Speaker 3
On the one hand, I didn’t think of calling the police or anything. So I just was very, very worried for hours.

Speaker 1
All right. That leads to the book. Tell me why you wrote the book and what it was like to write it.

Speaker 3
Mm-hmm. Well, there’s a few different pieces to this, so you can help keep me on track if I go a little bit gray. But a friend of mine, after Steve died, I had always wanted to be a writer.

Speaker 3
I love literature. It’s my passion, poetry specifically. And a friend of mine said, keep a journal of this experience.

Speaker 3
She said, whatever you need to write down, just do it. And it was the best advice that I had received. So I started, I was journaling every day, multiple times throughout the course of the day.

Speaker 3
And in this journal, which is, you can imagine, hundreds and hundreds of pages, I wrote everything. I wrote Missing Him. I created a, I wrote it as if I were writing it to Steve.

Speaker 3
So in a sense, I was having a conversation with him. I kept track of the dreams that I was having about Steve and that our three children were having, which they told me about. And so I just kept this journal going.

Speaker 3
And then the summer after he died, I went to Oxford to study. It was my final summer getting my M.A. through Bread Loaf.

Speaker 3
And the summer I was in Oxford. And that summer, I was taking a course in 19th century literature, which is my particular area of interest. And I was having experiences with the poetry and the literature that was kind of blowing me away.

Speaker 3
It was so powerful. It was a visceral experience reading poetry, like from Keats or from Walt Whitman. And I was clearly in shock, although what I’ve realized is that when you’re in shock, you don’t know you’re in shock.

Speaker 3
So I thought I realized, and I’ve confirmed this with this professor since then, I went up to her and I said, you know, my husband just died nine months ago, and I wonder if I could write a creative piece of writing rather than a scholarly research paper for this course. And I realize now that she probably would have said yes to just about anything that I needed at that point. But I was able to create a conversation in my writing that not only was about these poets that moved me so powerfully and that were helping me negotiate these months after Steve’s death, but I was able, she kept pushing me to tell my own story.

Speaker 3
And so that was the summer I had a real breakthrough with my writing. And I discovered my voice as a writer. And I discovered that what I wrote seemed to have a power to it because I had been very harsh in judging my own writing.

Speaker 3
And after that summer, I realized I had to keep on writing because it made me… First of all, there was a healing aspect to it. And I felt there was a healing going on because I felt like I was dialoguing in a way with Steve.

Speaker 3
And I was also crafting something that in some way was honoring him. I wanted to write something that would give people a sense for who he was because it just seemed so outrageous that he just wasn’t here anymore. And I wanted everyone to know him.

Speaker 3
So I began to write the book.

Speaker 1
I find this fascinating that you were having, like, were you having dreams every night? And were these dreams, did you, was Steve, do you feel, I just, what’s interesting is just the other night, a couple of nights ago, I was watching a series of videos that are very similar in what you are articulating right now were were these dreams of steve communicating with you or are these dreams of that you were having about your past and some of the things that you did together or maybe the dreams that you’ve yet to have and were cut short sadly you know through um his passing or or or like i want to go back to that first one though yeah was he communicating with you like I’m okay or I’m in a better place or whatever, anything like that.

Speaker 3
Yeah. It never, he never, I never heard I’m in a better place. I mean, I, I appreciate what you’re asking, but it, but, um, and we all, and I would say, and my children had given me permission to share, um, their dreams, um, which I did in the book.

Speaker 3
Um, for me, they weren’t, they were, um, more, um, well, It’s easier for me to say it this way. So my two sons took over their father’s business. He was known as the Sprout Man.

Speaker 3
He was a bit of a character. He wasn’t a bit of a character. He was a character.

Speaker 3
It was a creative soul. And he had invented these ways of sprouting. And he used to have workshops in his New York City apartment back in the day.

Speaker 3
Yeah, the Sprout Man. Like Superman, but Sprout Man. And both Noah and Ari decided they wanted to take over his business.

Speaker 3
He sold seeds, and Steve’s written about, I think he wrote 12 books. And so they took over his business. But they, so their dreams, and this was what was wild about it, these were visits with Steve where he was telling them specific things.

Speaker 3
And this is what I just couldn’t get over. For example, Noah woke up one morning and he said, oh, I know who to call. Daddy just told me who to call for the best sprout supply, the seed supplier.

Speaker 3
Or Ari was told what to do with a certain bill. Like very practical. Yeah, no. So they were having those dreams, which was wild.

Speaker 3
Our daughter, Gabrielle, who’s an artist, was having her own kinds of dreams, which spoke to her. and my dreams were more about, I knew they were him and it was really they were reassuring dreams like they were healing dreams I was seeing colors and geometric shapes and I mean other worldly kind of figures that I had never seen before and it was, these were I felt I was being gifted with these dreams I did have some dreams where I was with him, and they were reassuring dreams as well. And some of them, one of them I remember was about us in a car driving on the road.

Speaker 3
Yeah, there were, so that’s kind of what it was. I’m going to have you read from the book in just one moment.

Speaker 1
Folks, you, no, because I’m, if you don’t mind, in just one moment. Folks, you are listening to your next chapter, a production of The Heights at Avery Heights, along with Siobhan Mattingly. I’m Gary Byron.

Speaker 1
Our guest this morning is the author of a book entitled A Grief Sublime, Beth Robbins. But before I have you read maybe one of your favorite passages from your book, Ron, in listening to this, and I know you worked at hospice for a time, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to have you draw a little bit about from that past and your experience there. Is this typical?

Speaker 1
I just I’m asking because strictly by coincidence, just a few nights ago, I was watching a few videos from people who not only people who lost someone near and dear to them. And it had to do with dreams in the middle of the night. They go to bed, you know, and they had this very vivid dream.

Speaker 1
Not that they can visually see their face, but their presence or their being, so to speak.

Speaker 2
Yeah. Is that typical for? There’s so much stuff with hospice that working there for five years that just kind of fascinated me, the things that happen.

Speaker 2
You know, I kind of more relate to like when people don’t pass, like when people say, oh, they have two weeks or they have two days and it seems like they’re going to pass and they don’t and they rebound. and I think that a lot of times there was that person that they needed to see. Or one lady, there was a CD she wanted to hear.

Speaker 2
They kept trying to find it. I can’t remember what it was. I think it was a Christmas song.

Speaker 2
And they kept trying to find it, and finally someone found it, played it for her, and literally she passed. I know my own experience with my mom. I mean, I didn’t have a great relationship with my mom, And I remember being in the car and driving and feeling like, OK, just go see your mom.

Speaker 2
And I wasn’t going to. She was passing. She had hospice.

Speaker 2
I made sure she was taken care of, but I didn’t want to see her. And then it was just like, just go check on her. And this was like at night after work.

Speaker 2
I was coming back from the Berkshires. And I figured I’d pop in, check in with the nurses, make sure she’s OK and leave. Well, I get to the desk and the nurse is like, you know, why don’t you go see her?

Speaker 2
And, you know, I’m like that guilt. And I’m like, OK. So I figured I’d pop in, hang out for a couple minutes and come back out.

Speaker 2
Well, I ended up sitting there for two hours. I went from crying to, you know, just loving her to crying again to yelling at her. There was all this stuff that came out.

Speaker 2
And I left there completely exhausted. And I had left my cell phone in the car. Because, again, I only planned to run in.

Speaker 2
I said to the nurse, excuse me, I said, let me go get the cell phone. I go out to the car to get the cell phone. I come back.

Speaker 2
Now, literally, this is like maybe five minutes. And she passed.

Speaker 1
Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 2
And I’m standing at the desk in disbelief. I’m like, no, no, I was just in there. I was just there.

Speaker 2
And, you know, what they said to me is that they probably, she didn’t want to pass while I was there. She waited for you. But those are the kind of, you know, these are just the kind of things that happen.

Speaker 2
And obviously, you know, after people pass as well, there’s those times where, you know, either through dreams or just from someone saying something to you, there’s always this, you know, you hear so many stories of people just having that connection.

Speaker 1
Beth, if you could maybe quickly, I don’t know, maybe if you could read a part of your book, maybe a portion that maybe that you love the most. How’s that?

Speaker 3
Oh, boy. Siobhan, you’ve read. I’m going to throw it on Siobhan for a minute. Is there a part that you would like me to read? I mean, the opening is, you know, the opening where I talk about the accident, but then there’s other parts there.

Speaker 2
Wow. There’s like so much, but I think, yeah, I think that, um, there’s like so many. Yeah, do the opening.

Speaker 2
How about chapter, oh, okay. Yeah. Go ahead.

Speaker 2
What were you going to say? Go ahead. Yeah.

Speaker 2
Yeah.

Speaker 3
Okay. All right. Preamble.

Speaker 3
Translation derived from Middle English, meaning to carry over. I translate my life with Steve and my life without Steve. I carry it over.

Speaker 3
I carry it across before. Shadow time, a borderlands moment, a pause. Dusk, early September, a muggy night.

Speaker 3
It is still light out, silvery-hued light. Off somehow, but a storm has been predicted, and it certainly feels like one is coming. I curl up on the couch with a glass of white wine and set it on the coffee table.

Speaker 3
I light a candle. Steve will be home soon, but for now I am alone. It’s so warm.

Speaker 3
The ceiling fan circles slowly, silently. The golden orb of the porch light shimmers through the screen door. The air is heavy.

Speaker 3
Things seem muffled. The candle flickers, but there is no wind. Everything feels hushed.

Speaker 1
Wow. Chapter one. Oh. No, no, no, no. I’m going to keep going.

Speaker 3
Oh, okay. Just chapter one. Fracture.

Speaker 3
Medusa. Police lights in my driveway. Flashing red lights I’m in my pajamas It is ten at night The glass of white wine on the coffee table is untouched Steve is hours late The lights flash red I think, don’t answer the door I hear a car door slam Then another Two men are on my porch They’re under the light from the porch They’re outside my screen door Under the golden light from the porch The red lights flash from their car And they see me I turned to stone.

Speaker 2
It’s such an amazing book. You’re there.

Speaker 1
Yeah. I mean, you’re with her. She’s taking us on the journey.

Speaker 1
You get transformed. With her. I’m running out of time.

Speaker 1
Just a couple of quick questions. The layout of the book, I find interesting. What is the thought process behind that?

Speaker 3
Well, it seems that the way the book ended up being written was in a fragmented style.

Speaker 1
Because I know you love poetry. You said that earlier. It’s very similar to that.

Speaker 3
And it seems to have a poetic or a lyrical quality to it. And so I worked with a designer to create a lot of white space around the lines of text and just to really give the story some breathing space and to have big margins because there’s some marginalia, some little comments or poetry in the margins as well.

Speaker 2
Well, it’s comforting, too. It is. Even the cover, the whole book is very, it’s almost like, again, you transform us there, and it’s obviously your story and so forth, but it’s still, it’s almost like you can relate. The white space helps you, gives you room for your own story, your own grief process.

Speaker 1
I bet that was by design, right?

Speaker 3
Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And I was very concerned about having the book have a particular texture to it, so the cover, it’s this, I got French flap.

Speaker 1
I’ve got to ask you a question because I’ve only got about two minutes left. Beth, how has your life changed since you’ve written this book?

Speaker 3
In two minutes? Okay. It’s changed completely in a certain way because what I’ve, well, first of all, it’s shown me that I write as well as teach, and I am working on a second book right now. There was a movie that was made, directed by Cynthia Wade, called Sproutland, that was an independent fictional narrative of my story, where I played myself. So there were, which is very weird.

Speaker 2
Yeah, I’ll bet.

Speaker 3
It’s kind of cool. And I always, and I’m a bit of a ham, so I always wanted to be an actress. I just didn’t think I was all that good. But anyway, I’m in that film, and that was kind of cool. and I’m just in a way stepped back into it’s such a cliche but I’ve stepped back into my own power so that I’m sort of doing this little bit of a dance between I’m still grieving I mean I guess I always will be grieving I miss Steve terribly but I’m also very aware of the gifts that have come out of his death which is a bit of a paradox

Speaker 1
are you at peace? can grief actually become something good or helpful to a person? I know those are three questions right there.

Speaker 3
Well, it has for me, and it has for me. Everyone’s going to have their own experience. I just want to keep on moving. I do appreciate life more. I took Steve for granted for a good number of years.

Speaker 1
I mean, I guess in a lot of long marriages that happen.

Speaker 3
So I’m trying not to take things for granted and just to pay attention to life.

Speaker 1
Are you at peace, though, going forward?

Speaker 3
Am I at peace? Yeah, yes. Yes and no. I mean, I’m excited about the possibilities of the things that have happened and what’s coming. So I guess in that way I am.

Speaker 1
Well, then I’m excited for you. I’ve got to wrap things up. Okay.

Speaker 1
I want to thank our guest this morning, Beth Robbins. She is the author of A Grief Sublime. Where can people purchase this book?

Speaker 1
I would imagine Amazon and Barnes & Noble or any place where you normally buy your books.

Speaker 3
Yeah, local bookstores. And also, if you just go on agreefsublime.com, you can buy it directly from me. Wonderful.

Speaker 3
It’ll take you right there. So there’s that too. But local bookstores, they can get it.

Speaker 3
Wonderful.

Speaker 1
Folks, you have been listening to the latest edition of your next chapter, Senior Living, with Siobhan Mattingly, the Heights Senior Living Specialist. Avery Heights is a beautiful senior living community. It’s nestled within 43 acres of nature, right in the heart of the junction between West Hartford, Newington, and Hartford.

Speaker 1
Those who live there have access to a full continuum of care, including independent and assisted living to memory care and a whole lot more. Please visit AveryHeights.org or by calling 860-953-1201. I’ll repeat that phone number, 860-953-1201, to learn more about their own special brand of community, unlike any other in Connecticut.

Speaker 1
For Siobhan Mattingly, I’m Gary Byron. Thanks so much for listening. Until next weekend, have a good one, everybody.

Speaker 1
So long.