Losing Your Mormon Husband - Janae Thompson (@TheKingofRandom CoFounder) Pt. 1 | Ep. 1755

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon stories podcast I am your host John delin today we have a really fascinating and compelling story for you we're going to be answering the question what happens when you jump on the Mormon train um get married have kids and your spouse dies we're going to be talking about the grief of that we're also going to be talking about the Mormon Church's Temple ceiling policies and how they differ for men than women and what that means for you in this case as a Mormon woman who's trying to date again as a widow Mormon woman and what how that impacts your dating opportunities and what your dating experiences are there's also going to be Faith Journey stuff here and just a really compelling Mormon story joining me in studio as my partner in truth and righteousness is Margie hey Margie hey thanks for joining us yes my pleasure and our guest for today is a woman who I don't know who who knows Janae or not but it's Janae Thompson and I met Janae at a Stephen Hassan uh Thrive event last week and she uh has a really cool story but just as a side of Interest she owns and runs a apparently very popular YouTube channel called The King of Random or tkor has like 12 million subscribers at this point but that's just kind of a fun little thing to note on the side but Janae Thompson welcome to normal storage podcast thank you I'm excited to be here yeah well we're excited to have you uh anything you want to correct about the introduction no I think you got it um the YouTube channel is a fun side note in our family and you know other than that we're a regular family and we do the day-to-day stuff and I have four kids and life is crazy and amazing and it's a science channel so there's a lot of um things that my kids like to try to emulate on that channel so we've had you know some explosions and fires that are inappropriate for children my age but my my kids age but other than that we're surviving should we should we mention your late husband well people even know his name is was he kind of a known yeah yeah he was yeah Grant Thompson is my late husband and he uh he and I created uh The King of Random about 10 plus years ago okay all right well this is obviously really sensitive stuff but really important stuff you came to me and shared with me your story and briefly and I'm just like yeah this is a story we need to tell um really quickly would it make sense for you to kind of start with an intention obviously we want Believers to watch this obviously your family is going to hear about this and there's always kind of like whoa you you talked about the church you know publicly that means you must hate it or want to tear it down or take people's Faith away or it's lots of assumptions yeah what would you like to share about your intentions to start yeah so this is kind of I mean this is really near and dear to my heart because this is a story of a journey and you know what happens when in life you start asking questions and they're the hard questions and then you know do you have the courage to listen to what the answers are and be open to the truth whether or not it's you know supporting what you have believed your whole life and you know I've always felt like faith is one of those things that when life tests your faith it comes through and if it doesn't then that's a whole new story and so my intention is just to kind of just share where I've been and you know how I got to this place and where I'm at now because you know life is a journey and I'm in this place now and I love to have the ability to share that and just have understanding with people that you know I really love and care about yeah and and I imagine it's excruciating to have four young kids and to lose a spouse and so I'm sure there's a lot of people out there if they're in a similar situation who might feel like they may not make it I don't know yeah and I think it's a hard thing to ask you know death is a really personal experience and it's different for everybody and when it happens inside of a family where it's one of those deaths that's unexpected and kind of you look at that and you're like oh my gosh I hope that never happens to me I would never have expected that it's hard to engage with those people in that grief space and process and know what to say and how to like relate because it's kind of one of those things where you're like I just don't know what to do so I'll create distance and then that creates isolation and it's like you want to connect but you don't know how yeah such a good point yeah yeah well thank you for being willing to share your story so let's do it let's jump in right where's your Mormon story begin Janae Thompson well I guess it begins on the day I was born in 1982. okay um I I was born into a really wonderful family um my parents were both born into the church uh my grandparents on my mom's side were also born into the church my grandparents on my dad's side one was a convert and immigrant from Denmark so he was the convert and then um yeah we uh we were very you know close as a family growing up religion was you know the center of our families the center of our culture so you know I did all the things I was blessed as a baby real quick where where did your parents kind of set up shop City wise or yes so they met in Provo at BYU at BYU okay and uh then they set up they bought their first house in West Valley my mom's from California my dad grew up in Provo okay yeah okay and so they set up in West Valley yes that's the first home they bought okay and you're you're of how many kids uh so I have four there's four of us and I'm the oldest of the four oh so you're the oldest so were you born in that West Valley house or yes I was yeah okay yep and then um and then they kind of upgraded it to a bigger house in another part of West Valley and I was there until I was 12 and then I we built a house in Herriman okay what are you able to share what your dad or mom's professions were yes my I come from a long line of school teachers so my mom was a school teacher her parents were School teachers she does special ed and she's amazingly talented um and she did a lot of ESL so she worked with the kids that were learning English and had you know special education needs and then my dad um he worked for a corporation for a little while and then he started his own business doing real estate and so he does that still so I mean there's a heavy education bed to tkor yeah you get that from your mom yes and growing up there I mean as much as it was we go to church every Sunday it was these children you children will get a bachelor's degree it was never like a question and it wasn't it wasn't this like commanding thing it was just like yeah when you go to college and get your degree what are you going to do or what are you going to study it was just always so all four of us have college degrees I'm the only one that doesn't have a higher degree than a bachelor's my all my siblings have master's degrees and so yeah that was definitely like a very important value for my parents so how more money was your Mormon home when you were under 10 let's just say um it was very more money it was everything I mean we did the whole thing you know we did the scriptures in prayer at night and everybody was complaining and fighting while we're trying to read and um we did family home evening and um you know we we definitely went to church every Sunday non-negotiable when we went on vacations we would find a chapel and we would you know meet the people there and go to church there and um when we when I was ending high school we went on a family church history tour we went to New York and so we saw Palmyra and we went to Ohio and Kirtland and you know all those things and we were on the road for like a month and it was such a fun trip and it was so amazing to see all the you know places where some of these church history events took place that I had you know learned about my whole life okay so it sounds like a traditional idyllic Mormon childhood yeah I would say it was idyllic I I mean we were happy most the time I mean our family wasn't perfect you know my parents yelled at us sometimes still but you know there was never anything where I felt like afraid or you know like I just felt really safe growing up and I felt like my community supported us and my parents were really loving and you know I generally liked my siblings and you know like we got along fairly well we had our sibling fights nothing like the way my boys fight now but you know um I only have boys and I think that my sister and I were a little less aggressive than my boys and my brothers were not you know I mean they were just a little more lower energy and so I felt like we for the most part got along really well um and how do you what do you how do you reflect on your the Mormon aspects of your childhood in terms of like church and the hymns and primary and your relationship with Heavenly Father and Jesus and the scriptures and so my mom always had the calling of the primary coaster and she just loved it like she would just get into the songs and she'd make all these beautiful like posters and and she'd teach it with this like uh you know just such a This Love that she had for music and so I remember being in primary my mom was always the chorister so she'd always be teaching us the songs and I'd kind of already like watched her go through all the like you know visual aids that she made and so I really liked singing time because my mom was there and she loved it so much um and I I really love music and so that's another part of just it was a good connection that I had with the music growing up and it's funny like going back in my memory like remembering these times it's like yeah that was really nice and and then the rest of it I remember just feeling like I was kind of checked out like this is really boring I don't know what everybody's talking about um I I just want to go home so doctrine of the and theologically not so into it as a kid but as a kid a musically yeah yes as a kid I just I would listen and you know I would absorb everything that was being taught to me it wasn't super important to me it just was it was the way the world worked it was the reality it was the truth about everything and so I just kind of it was just there and I just accepted it okay anything else about your childhood years before we go to adolescents that are important your story [Music] I think I mean it was I I finally got a baby sister when I was eight so I was really excited about that and well your second sister came at eight uh so my so she's the youngest I'm the oldest and there's two brothers in between us so I was just really excited to get a sister and that was you know like amazing because she was born and I was getting baptized and it was like this really just fun space to be in to you know be growing up and then get a baby sister but I have a quick question about if you happen to remember or reflect if just reflecting now are there certain messages that you either you know showed up in your childhood that drove you forward either about yourself or the world or families or you know kind of became a plant from which you yeah I think the message that I was really special um like that message really drove this uh culture in my mind that I created around you know this group that I was a part of my family in the church that I was just really special and chosen because I have the truth and you know not everybody had that opportunity and so I just remember feeling like wow I don't know why I get this opportunity and you know so many people don't but I just remember feeling really special and that it was a huge blessing and responsibility and that um like in some ways I was more privileged than a lot of the world all right well let's jump to your adolescence let's talk about your Mormon adolescence yeah yeah I was a little bit the black sheep in my family because everybody really um was you know by the book uh you know with the culture and going to church and everything that was taught and I you know when I hit about 13 I was like I kind of want to explore the world and my parents will tell you you know I snuck out of the house at night I you know I never did anything that was like bad but I just wanted to like explore so I'd sneak out and you know go out with my friends and you know we just kind of walk around and um and then my neighbors would tell my parents that their daughter was sneaking out of the window so that's how I found out they knew and um I remember one time I wanted to this is just an adolescent story before I started dating um I want to go snowboarding with a boy and I wasn't 16 and you know the rule is you no dating until you're 16 they were super my parents were very strict on that and they didn't want to even let me go to this dance like two weeks before my birthday they did end up letting me go which I was really grateful for but I'm like I'm 16 like in two weeks it's the same as two weeks now two weeks later but it was a fight to go to this homecoming dance as a 16 year old and um so just prior to that I wanted to go snowboarding with this friend he was a boy um and my parents were like no that's a day I'm like no we're just friends like I just want to go with this friend and so um you know I I was asked to pray about it and and then whatever answer I got you know go with that and I was like oh yeah I prayed about it God said yes it's great like I think I think God's supportive of me you know so that was the approach that you know like was taken and I was like yeah I'll do that yeah and I was like yeah I think God would want me to go skiing with my friend and whether I actually prayed about it or not I honestly don't remember I think I probably did and I was like yeah I think it's fine so they and they did honor that and they let me go which I appreciate that um yeah ability for my parents to say okay here's the choice and I in my mind I think they know you know you're gonna feel like it's not the right thing to do maybe maybe not but when I was like no I think it's fine and they were like yeah okay you can go um I appreciated that and you know I felt like I did have a choice voice which was really nice as a teenager okay so your adventure adventurous but not crazy not not crazy yeah okay and how did your testimony develop into your teen years yeah yeah and I I always ask shame and the church you know Bishops interviews and shame is such a part of so many Mormons people's story I'm also curious if that entered into your story yeah yeah it definitely did um I think during the teenage years I was a I was I was kind of removed from it again I just wasn't super interested in it it was just the way we did life and I I didn't have a strong desire to like look deeply into other than anything other than what I was kind of just taught at church um and I liked it I always felt good at church you know it felt like a safe place and it was what I knew so it was our routine um but as far as like doctrinally I didn't really have any interest in going deep into the doctrine um and then as I you know continue to grow up and progress um just in my development as a human uh and like starting to date and you know go out with boys and I was pretty conservative um with the guys like I didn't I wasn't super interested in dating but I'd go out you know when I was asked out and I had fun we liked the group thing a little bit more but I do remember um there was a heavy emphasis on you know physical affection as teenagers and there was a lot in young women's around you know do this don't do this this is appropriate this is not appropriate um and me as a kid like in my home environment you know like those were not things we talked about and so I was really trying to figure out like okay um you know here's what I'm learning at school here's what I'm learning at church these are more taboo subjects with you know family so like how do I navigate this and um you know I just remember like making out with this guy and then you know feeling like super super guilty and like you know I'm gonna like I probably need to talk to my Bishop like I'm not sure what to do now and and I remember like writing about it in my journal just feeling like so shameful and you know and we hadn't done anything you know beyond like making out and you know just like maybe some heavy like not but just like you know kids making out and so I was like oh I think I need to talk to my bishop and I was just so scared to because I thought I was gonna get in trouble and I remember thinking I was in the church and I was like well if the bishop comes up and asks me how I'm doing and you know wants to talk to me then you know I'll I'll tell him and so I'm like sitting there in the hall and I'm kind of waiting around for class to start or whatever and the bishop comes up to me he's like Janae it's so good to see you I want to talk to you will you come to my office and I was like oh my gosh like you know God is like taking me right to what I need because I clearly have to confess this and so I went in you know and I was like yeah I I made out with this boy and he he was just kind of smiling and you know and he was he he asked for some details and you know I gave him some details which I I was like oh I don't really want to talk about this but you know like I'm going through the whole process and and he's like yeah you're you're still worthy and I was like oh okay phew I'm still worthy phew that was a close one you know like I just remember thinking like how do I live life and be in this culture and in this church and like not do things that I feel like are kind of like par for the development course because I because I felt like I shouldn't be kissing boys you know you want to hear that a bishop gives you that answer that you're worthy even if you've quote messed up in according to love Chastity but there's because of the worst if you said you're unworthy and that's a lot of people that we talk to yeah but I'm realizing there's a problem with just him saying that you're worthy yeah because it's still him declaring that he has the right to evaluate exactly what your worthiness is before God that he is he's allowed to assess it and ultimately gets to make that decision that feels problematic now that I think about it yeah and in that moment you know when I when I had that conversation with him I felt like oh okay I'm okay like I'm not damned you know like I'm not gonna go to hell and it's because he said that it's not because I felt like I'm making a lot of good choices in my life it's not because I felt like I'm exploring relationships and it's not because I felt like I'm doing really well in these thousands of aspects in my life it's this one thing that I focused in on I'm like I think I did something wrong and therefore I will be damned forever but then he said you're okay but also there was no Direction beyond that it wasn't like well don't do it again or like even if it's like well you know that's a natural part of growing up is to want to like explore and kiss a boy and all that kind of stuff and it's like I I mean I walked out of there thinking like okay if I just never do it again then I'll be fine which that led to a lot of you know uncertainty the older I got yeah I think also inherent in that question and what goes on oftentimes in Bishops offices is this idea too of uh just like you said like oh am I worthy and it's kind of like we go outside of ourselves to get the to have the Judgment of like oh and he said I am so I am but it starts that kind of pattern of looking to someone else to give us yes optimally we would want to develop inside ourselves yeah and one of the things I love the most about my life is I Feel Complete stewardship if you will around you know my value and my worthiness of you know being a woman and a mother and and it just is so empowering now to feel like I can I make that decision versus someone outside of me totally I was gonna actually do a follow-up if you were gonna think about that time in your life how would you have talked about where you felt worthy or where your value came from do you remember how you felt valuable or how you felt worthy 100 I felt valuable and worthy based on what I did and it was you know if you do good things you're better and if you do bad things you're you need help you need you know you're not as valuable and you've got to move from that space back into the you know valuable space so it was never like you're worthless now but it was like you're not where you could should be and you're not Reaching Your Potential and so that needs to change so inherently I feel like okay that needs to change which means I'm not good where I'm at yeah and so if I were gonna ask particularly with like within young women's and the messages that you got within the young women's program where would you what were the messages around where you felt valuable and worthy that way and then I have a question within your family just to see if they're the same or if they were a little bit different yeah I think um I mean my biggest memory of young women's is I loved being around the girls my age for the most part um and then I remember the um what is it the thing you'd say over and over what's that common theme the theme yeah I just remember thinking like within that theme I don't remember the words exactly and I know it's kind of changed a little bit now but like we making keep sacred covenants and um you know like I just remember every time I would repeat that I would be like what does that really mean and what am I really getting into because I I'm saying this over and over and I don't know what it means and and I don't I I don't even know what that is so like I know I have to do this thing but there's not Clarity around what it is and it sounds really big and important and what if I don't do it like what if I fail at this thing I'm repeating over and over yeah then would you say your family culture valued similar things to the young woman's theme and the messages you were getting at church or it sounds like they had an education emphasis and that's an area maybe a little bit of difference yeah um but where did you feel valuable at home uh definitely in school and academics and church activity I would say those were the um the top things that were emphasized as these are the accomplishments and the achievements that we want to put as Central cool so uh let's just say for those high school years any important elements to your Mormon story you know I guess I do want to hear what for those especially for those who have never been Mormon kind of what were you taught was the life you were supposed to be living you know what were you supposed to work towards as a Mormon woman what should your goals have been how much did you internalize that and and kind of the I call it the train but like the life that the church and that your parents probably wanted you to pursue what what what did you perceive that um ideal to be and how much were you bought into it yeah so I would say I I was bought into it 100 what was it first yeah as as far as what it was it was like okay um we go through school we get good grades we go to college um my mom was actually a working mom she worked most of our growing up years as a school teacher and she chose that profession I for a lot of reasons but one of the reasons was that she um could you know be working when we were in school and be home when we were home and have the same days off as us and and it was this um this culture of you know there's a huge emphasis on prioritizing motherhood and for my mom to not lose that priority she chose a profession that matched with it and so I kind of thought well that's probably what I'll do too because I want to you know I want to be a mom and I was definitely uh taught and believed that you know over and over again I kept hearing motherhood is the most important job you will ever have and no other success can compensate for failure in the home especially with mothers and so in my mind I had these two values being given you know one is education and one is motherhood and so this this was a challenge as I went to college because I was like well I want to be a mom so do I really need to go to college and I like to learn so I want to go to college but what should I study um and so that affected me in a lot of ways because I didn't have a clear Direction on what I wanted to study because at first I wanted to do um like a chemistry undergrad and then go to either dental school or med school but then I was thinking if I do that you know that's 12 to 15 years of school and if I get married and have a baby am I going to want to continue to do that and so uh at the time I was doing um like a chemistry type thing but then I changed it to exercise physiology because I was like well then if I quit I can you know still be in the physical uh you know therapy type I could be a personal trainer or physical therapist or something if I didn't go all the way to doctor um and then I got really interested in like psychology and the social sciences and the in the Child Development classes because I you know I did take it quite a few of those because I was like well if I'm going to be a mom I should take these classes uh yeah in high school and college both yeah and uh so then I I um decided that you know maybe I want to get a social like have a social background and go to law school but again like the same thing was like well that's a lot of schooling so in high school I think mostly I just focused on doing stuff that I enjoyed and you know trying to get good grades even though there was an education emphasis in my home it was not the most important thing to me I really liked being social and um I I liked engaging in all of the activities and stuff and being in class for the social aspects and um but but I still you know did my work and got good grades and I mean you know decent grades B's and A's and but it wasn't high school was not as important to me because education was more one of those things that I was going through until College then kind of those values between the education and motherhood really started to set in as I started Living on my own and seeing how the world worked for real not just in this home where I was always taken care of and so that's kind of where I got more of a desire within myself to actually educate myself and actually look into like what is it going to take to become a mother you know so like the real life aspects of these things that I'd been taught but they were definitely seated throughout the whole you know duration of my upbringing so it's a fair to say your parents emphasized education but as you contemplated professions that you might pursue like medicine or whatever that you felt like uh there's going to be a cap there because there's only so much education I could do before I need to get married and have babies yep so maybe you self-limited yeah what you thought was within the realm of your possibility education and career-wise yeah 100 because I and I I came from this background as well like you know like Mom's a stay-at-home mom and dad works and so if I'm mom and I have you know a hundred thousand dollars of student debt is it fair for me to expect dad to go to work and pay for all that when I'm not working because I have a baby you know and that's kind of the and I really wanted to be a mother like I really was just looking forward to the day when I would have a baby of my own um and I wanted to do these other things so I I constantly felt conflicted around that yeah and it wasn't this like you can do both it's either one or the other and I'm not I'm not saying that that was the messaging that was given to me like you can't do both but it was certainly an emphasis on motherhood is the most important thing and education is secondary and in our family education is very important so you'll still get your education and then be a mom yeah and where the rubber meets the road for me as I'm thinking about your story is the the the path for a Mormon woman is dependent on number one finding a husband number two that the husband's the primary provider and number three that the husband lives yes correct you can provide all the way that's the map you gotta follow it and so that's great if you're gonna build your whole life around a man that you hope to marry someday unless something goes wrong with the man that you marry someday right and I did build my whole construction around I I'm do I'm gonna do everything that I've been taught I'm gonna go to school I'm going to get a degree um I'm gonna get married I'm gonna have kids my husband's gonna be the provider and we together will build this world you know and hopefully like I'll be able to help him with my education but I I don't want to be the primary Breadwinner ever I want to be the support yeah okay so anything else about your high school years worth the faith the church you know I there's a funny story I was in one of my um Family development classes and I I copied one of my friends papers so I cheated you know and my teacher gave me the paper back and I knew that they were um also in the church they were kind of neighbors not in our direct Ward but like outside of it and when she handed me the paperback she wrote this sentence on the paper and it said where's your integrity because she was saying you know I know you cheated and I just like that never never left me and I felt horrible that I had cheated um and I felt really embarrassed because you know we're in the same church and I cheated and she knows that's wrong because we don't you know cheat and lie and that's a religious value and so I felt super embarrassed but then um it also really stuck with me my whole life as a question that I always had to answer myself where's your integrity and so I remember feeling so shameful about it but then how impactful that question was from a teacher that really like guided my life in so many ways um around like a simple thing you know copying somebody's paper it's not that big of a deal is it wrong yeah um what what does it cheat you it cheats you out of learning yourself um but to have a teacher come out and say that and I felt like she was doing it because um you know that's what the religion taught and it was such a religious community that I went to high school and I mean there were hardly any kids that were outside of the church what's high school I graduated from Riverton High School and so um like I just remember feeling like that's why she wrote that is because we're all part of the church and it was really impactful and really shameful and what'd you take away from I took away from it like I'm not gonna get away with lying and I do want to know where my Integrity is and I want my Integrity to be in line with honesty okay so it's a positive yeah it was a positive even though I was like mortified and I literally couldn't look that teacher in the eye the rest of the school year yeah okay um so as you're graduating high school from Riverton High School are you like Molly Mormon are you like viewed as like super churchy faithful are you having doubts about your faith um I didn't have doubts uh I I don't think that I was considered Molly Mormon either I think that it was just again like where I grew up it was just this sub culture of like everyone just is this way and so I just didn't have a lot of opinion or thought around anything outside of that yeah yeah look like a bubble yeah yeah it was okay okay so what'd you do after high school oh gosh let's see After High School I started at the community college I was just kind of trying to find my way I didn't really know what I wanted to do um and I wasn't really vested in a lot of opinion around that and it took me time to uh just really develop desire and you know like I feel like that was kind of like everything around me was just kind of given to me and it it was what it was and I never really developed my own opinions and thoughts and feelings about a lot of things and so I you know again like the values of Education I liked learning so I went out and I you know was taking classes and learning and I just didn't really have Direction yet and this is when you know my mother again like this really valuing education um she started looking into these programs that I could do and I ended up doing a um study abroad to Mexico with BYU and we were International volunteers and that really opened up my eyes to different ways that other people in the world live and because we were going there as BYU students I was like you know we are coming in to help save the world and this little orphanage we're working in and you know we're making a difference and that was impactful for me um and it also gave me the idea maybe I could go to BYU um and so that was that was one of those things where I was like okay like maybe maybe I do want to do this and I didn't really want to go to BYU because I actually didn't want to be surrounded by you know such an LDS dynamic in school um and I I don't really know why I had that I always just had this little bit of like I want to learn more I want to learn more I want to explore more outside of the church even though I've never gone outside of myself to do that um but the desire started you know surfacing so anyway I went to um so I took a few more semesters of college and then I actually started kind of questioning the church at that point and I got to a place when I was about 20 where I was like you know I don't really feel like I'm into this organized religion thing um I think it's great I believe in God um you know I want to have a relationship with spirituality but you know like I don't really see that there's this connection between religion and God um and so my mom kind of was picking up on this and was like oh you know what's happening here and she found this other program for me to do it's uh BYU Nauvoo and so I went to Nauvoo I lived there for four months and I going into that I had decided like I'm not going to be religious but if my mom wants me to do this it's cool it's outside of Utah I want to go you know like it's for four months how bad could it be and I remember getting there and I was I hadn't been to BYU other than that study abroad so I was not steeped in the BYU School culture and it was definitely different from my college experience previous to that everybody just like not not to blanket statement what everybody was doing but it just seemed everybody had this like elevated way of living like smiling all the time and just excited about everything and I was like what is so happy about everything and can I ask for our never Mormon listeners explain what why Naboo had a BYU study abroad yes and what is Nauvoo and what important it it holds it more and even the significance of your mom offering it to you yes exactly yeah yeah so it's this intervention you know I've got a daughter that's losing her testimony let's send her to Nauvoo as a mecca for church history like Joseph Smith uh was there during you know the time that he was alive and that's where he was also killed and there's a lot of church history that went down in that space and there's a Temple there it was first temple that was started started in Nauvoo and um so right next to the Nauvoo Temple which was reconstructed several years ago um because the original saints that lived there they never finished it but they um there was a like a dormitory and so the church owned that and you know they would have students coming in for semesters at BYU or through BYU at Nauvoo to study church history um we could do all of our religion credits there and um and then just it was like touring the whole like everything within you know so many miles of that space it's almost like an efy uh yeah kind of although it was more I mean it was very rigorous as far as the schedule because it's like here's the schedule here's all the uh like here's the his church history classes you take here's the religion classes you take and then there was I mean I actually never went to efy so I can't I I assume it was probably pretty similar the FY is like very geared around social fun even the classes are meant to be like highly interactive and fun it sounded like the Jerusalem Center BYU study abroad but you're instead of studying Holy Land you're studying yeah Mormon history yeah yeah I'm sure those programs mirrored each other okay yeah okay because it was very rigorous and academic it was social too but it wasn't like what I hear the stories of efy where you're like all singing together and you know having all these like sleepovers and testimony meetings and I mean there was some of that but not it was definitely like more rigorous academically especially around church history were there like stick dances though and social stuff no no oh wow yeah I would imagine they'd be trying to get everyone married off oh yeah they were definitely doing that it was interesting though because there was like it was probably like 70 women 30 men so there was a lot more women than men there interesting interesting so there was a lot of group dynamic with the men and women and I think probably half the men there did find you know someone that they went on to marry from that group okay and just for our viewers and listeners like Nauvoo is really it Nabu is basically think of the last four years of Joseph Smith's life from like 1840 to 18. 44 like prior to that they've been kicked out of you know left New York kicked out of Curlin Ohio kicked out of Missouri persecuted you know extermination orders in Missouri and it's like the last place Joseph built the city but this time he was mayor and judge and he built a temple there and he was the commander of the navu Legion and it ends up where he started doing polygamy really in an accelerated Pace he probably married 30 plus women during his four years at Nauvoo including all the underage girls you know and it's also where he was martyred kill you know put in jail and killed because he just got too power hungry and the polygamy thing got out of control and they'd ended up just the surrounding Neighbors in the state threw him in jail where he was shot and killed and and then that's when the saints had to eventually leave Nauvoo and move to Utah so it's a really intense yeah a really Carthage Jail I'm sure yeah we went to Carthage Jail and um Liberty Jail and we went to all those places that it was kind of nicknamed the city of Joseph yeah like because that's where he I mean that's where he really established himself in the church and to Margie's point I'm guessing your mom is thinking if I send Janae to Nauvoo she'll get a super strong testimony yeah so it played out just as she had hoped so I remember looking at all these kids and I'm like oh you guys are faking this like this there's no way you guys can be this happy and I I was fairly unhappy at the time um I just think that I was kind of lost trying to figure out what I was going to do and where I was going to go and not super um like in the culture of Mormonism which I had grown up in I was like looking at you know shifting out of it and so I just felt like there was a lot of uncertainty in my life and and I looked at it as like you know I'll go try it and when I got there I was a little bit um I don't know if I'm gonna like this and then after a couple weeks you're going to the classes and you're in the you know you're surrounded by the people and it's like okay maybe I'll open up to this a little bit more and then I'm getting deeper into the church history classes and I remember we were studying the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith so I was reading through that book and you know the kids were just like commenting on how powerful it was in every class would be like here's a story that directs um you know what is being said in this book to how it's helping me in my life and you know it's just like all this uh evidence going back and forth about how amazing the gospel is and how helpful it is in your life and how it just kind of to blanket statement what it does it solves every problem in your life and so I'm like okay I'll try it so then I was like I'll make a commitment I'll do all the things like all the things everybody else seems to be doing like the prayers the scripture study the going to church I'll just do it all 100 and see what happens so after a couple weeks of doing that I was feeling like oh yeah this must be how you get to that place of being really happy I think I'm happier and you know I feel better and um I this must be working and so I remember I was in church and I had kind of like not gone to church and you know everybody's like why aren't you in church and I'm I was like I just didn't want to go and anyway so I was going regularly to church I'm in sacrament meeting and I just feel this draw to go outside so it's beautiful day summertime go outside sun shining and I sit down and this is like this place where Joseph Smith had given many sermons and you know there's a Podium up there and there's like some seating and I'm just imagining you know what it would have been like for the Saints in those early years listening to the prophet and I open up my scriptures and as I'm doing that you know it falls open to this verse in the Bible that was along the lines of trustee and the Lord Jehovah for in the Lord Jehovah is ever Everlasting strength and as I read the word Jehovah you know the trees above me kind of parted and this light came down on the scriptures and I was like that's it that's my answer like I am you know like this is where I draw the line between questioning and being faithful and from this point forward I will never question the church again like I know it's true and I know that this is the path that I'm supposed to be on and this is the path that I am choosing and you know there's a God that loves me and cares about me and is teaching and guiding and directing me and that's when I really bought in for my first time in my life ever and I felt like that's where I got my testimony I didn't have one before it was kind of that concept of you know everybody else is doing it living on borrowed light this is my culture this is just what I know and so you can go on that for so long until you can't anymore and and I hadn't had an experience until that point that really helped me to feel like it's what I wanted to choose yeah and I just have to and that's a beautiful experience that I know meant a lot to you and probably uh sustained you for a lot of years I do have to ask like you're in the place he was propositioning 14 year old girls had they in that City like there's the image of Joseph Smith that that the Church offers us oftentimes and then there's all this history where if we knew it we might not have that spiritual experience but because we've been handed kind of an idealized whitewashed version of Joseph Smith then when you're troubled young adult and you're trying to figure out what life means and you're not feeling super happy or connected and you see all these happy Mormon kids and you've got this idealized version of Joseph in your mind and you're in Nauvoo you could say that's very impressionable yeah and then when you have these strong feelings that are affirming it's like a spiritual experience but it's almost your it's Joseph Smith as a caricature not as actually knowing what he really did yeah because if if they had educated you well he propositioned Nancy rigdon's daughter and threatened her and sent a man off on a mission and then married his wife like if you knew all the things he did maybe you wouldn't have had that experience so I guess that's a long way of me asking did they educate you about the real Joseph Smith before you had your theophany you know I had no idea I'm sitting there in this space and we had just been there and it's like Joseph Smith gave this great sermon and there was light and that the spirit was there and it was like there was like the word of God being given to the people right here and that was what that space meant to me you know I had no idea that at the time I was you know I was 19 years old that you know like this same man giving these sermons was you know how however old he was 37 or something propositioning a girl my age I would have been like what like 37 is so old that's disgusting at that time that's what I would have thought I would have been like no way he never did that I mean I just I wouldn't have believed you if you told me yeah yeah so in a way you're LED and not nefariously but your mom wants you to be a faithful Mormon you're led into a scenario where you're where you don't have real informed consent right you don't have the full information right and then a context is created where you'll have an emotional experience and then you've been primed or prompted to interpret those emotions in a very specific way yeah to the church's benefit which is yeah 100 well I mean I'm living in the city of Joseph there was not one conversation about polygamy ever the entire time I was there right yeah not what not once I mean nothing that I can remember if it was mentioned it was so you know I was there four and a half months and unbelievable the focus there are kids teens yeah who are internet with like young adults who are internet Savvy no we weren't the internet was not really this was 2000 so I mean there was the internet okay okay we did not have 2000 is pre yeah so this was 2000 yeah we had our weekly phone calls that we could make on the phone with the cord you know and there were computers there yeah and they were you know restricted as far as like what we could do on them so yeah it was not like it is now I have a question around Nauvoo just because I it's been years since I've been there but as like the town of Nauvoo is there a history like a neutral ground where you could have been in the town outside of kind of the Mormon bubble or lens of it that you might have had in from like is that even possible yeah at that time do you think yes I'm just curious if like you were out and about if there's a historical lens on Nauvoo that might have mentioned some of those things yeah but you were in a very controlled setting yes yes and actually it's funny that you asked that because it's just bringing up this memory that I had so there's Nauvoo all the spaces that the church owned and that there's like all of the like reconstruction of like whatever you know they were doing at that time there's the blacksmith shop there's the you know Trading Store there's all these things right and they have missionaries in there that teach about like you know what happened in Nauvoo well in uh I can't remember what it's called I think it was like uh it's like okay the culture there was the locals so there's there's this big influence of the church there and then there's the locals right and I actually made really good friends with one of the locals and this was actually very very impactful because he would tell me stories about things that had actually happened in Nauvoo with Joseph Smith and like some different things and I I can't believe it I kind of like forgot about this but I think he is the one that actually opened up my interest for actual reality historically speaking facts of what happened because he would tell me stories about other things that happened in navu that I was not learning at the Joseph Smith Center and as kids we we weren't allowed to um like go out without having somebody with us I think it was kind of missionary roles like you had to have a companion you had to be home at a certain time um you couldn't be alone with the opposite sex but it wasn't like I don't think there was dating allowed among the people actually no I remember the rule there wasn't dating among the students but the students were not prohibited from dating outside the students but there just wasn't options so I think it was like this thing where it wasn't like a rule but it just didn't happen and this young man happened to be he was probably around 24 ish so and he he took an interest in me dating wise and um so we did start to spend some time together and he'd had quite the past as as well and he started kind of telling me some of the stories around like growing up in Nauvoo and and how isolated it was and anyway but then I now I remember him telling me you know and you know this is another historical piece of this is something Joseph Smith did and this is another thing Joseph Smith did and and he was actually the first one that told me Joseph Smith would drink alcohol in Naboo and I was like what no I don't believe you and he's like no it's you know like it's part of the history of the city like and you know it's documented here and and I was like what for real and it kind of just was like but that was after the word of wisdom was given so how could that be and so I think that actually in Nauvoo and I've never made this connection before but in Nauvoo was when I first started thinking wait there's things that aren't matching here yeah because of the history interesting but you had your spiritual experience yeah but I was I would be a BYU student I was there to you know feel the spirit I was there to get the shiny eyes that all the BYU students had you got him yeah I got them tiny eyes so your mom got her wish yes yes okay and she was very happy and I was very committed to the church after that so where'd you go from from Nauvoo uh from Nauvoo I made the decision to get into BYU so I kind of got my yeah I got my academic life together I got an associate's degree I got my grades high enough to get in and I was accepted and I so I went to BYU and that's where I was like okay I'm committed to the gospel I'm committed to the church I'm committed to this whole thing now um I know what I want to do I want to go to BYU find a husband graduate and you know start my Mormon life like that was what I had planned okay so you got on the train the Mormon train yep got your seat you got my seat Got My Ticket got my seat um how was BYU I loved it I I thought that I kind of always looked at it as this institution where it was like okay this is where like all the best church member goes and the smartest and I'm not the best church member and I'm not the smartest so I probably could never get in there so I felt really proud of myself that I got in and I also felt really special that I'm now one of the good Mormons and the good church members and the Good gospel followers and the Smart Ones so I you know I just I felt like I I'm actually one of these people now whereas before for whatever reason I I felt again like just not part of it it just was what was around me yeah interesting what'd you study so I did a social science degree with a family studies emphasis when I got there I was pretty committed to you know finding a husband and getting married and so I took more child development classes and then I thought you know I would really actually like to go to law school and do family law so the social science kind of um like tied into that as a as a good undergrad for law school and then the family studies I wanted to do family law and so it seemed like a good tie and then if I didn't end up going to law school I would have a social science degree with lots of Child Development classes and that kind of thing and you know it would serve me either way so that's kind of how I approached that and how was how was being a BYU student dating wise in the honor code and all that kind of in a unique situation where I lived my grandma lived like maybe a five minute walk from BYU campus I lived with her and because I lived off campus I didn't really get that on campus experience a lot especially like when you go through your first couple years but um Honor Code was never an issue for me I um I think I I tried to follow it but I just didn't really put a lot of emphasis on it and I didn't worry about it too much I wasn't really doing anything outside of that I actually do remember the first time I ever tried alcohol was when I was going to BYU and it was yeah I know and it was at a party and I don't know that I even knew that it was alcohol the kids were mixing drinks and it was uh it was really close to campus and this like really surprised me because I had never really engaged in like the really rebellious culture like anything that was a No-No in the culture I didn't do um but now that I was living on my own I was I was like I kind of you know like what is that you're drinking I want to try it I tried it I had a sip it was disgusting and I was like oh that's horrible like why would people do this it makes no sense to me and I want to say there were BYU and uvsc students there both and you know I it wasn't I wasn't like looking out for who's BYU and who's not but I just remember thinking like this is odd because like I thought at BYU Provo I wouldn't get any of this and my previous college experiences like I had gone to UVU and community colleges I'd never had any college party that I'd been to that you know had drinking or anything like that like I'd never been exposed to it and so to finally get into like this BYU ideal and then like have a party so close to it that was had alcohol in it it was it was it was another thing that was like this is off to me and so okay so you got exposed to some party stuff at BYU but overall your experience there yeah I mean overall it was good I I'm sure you were trying to find your Eternal companion before you graduated yeah I was and I failed at that so I didn't get my Mrs degree four friends did you engaged yes I actually did get engaged not to a guy that went to BYU to a guy that was I had dated him previously I met him when I was living in Orem before and uh he was 10 years older than me and he had been divorced and so I kind of like when I met him I was 19 he was 29 I was like oh that's kind of that's a bid a big gap but you know I'll be friends and so anyway um yes we got engaged for uh reasons that were not the right reasons to get engaged um and it was kind of one of those things where I was like oh I don't really want to go out of BYU not at least being engaged and it was kind of one of those things where oh the timing is good so I'll just yeah sure this works right and so I did get engaged not a BYU student which I was disappointed about because I really wanted to find a BYU student so we could say we met at BYU and we I mean that's my parents story and you know like we're true blue BYU students marriage everything came from that but it worked well enough from from like a more secular point of view now asking this question is going to sound stupid and offensive because most people don't get married in college and feel the pressure to get married when they're 21 or whatever but I'm going to ask you from a Mormon brain why couldn't you find a natural companion at BYU you had three three years there there's lots of return missionaries there you dated boys yeah what what kept you from being able to find your Eternal companion at BYU yeah that's such a good question because when I would come home people would comment like oh you still haven't been scooped up yet you know like those what are those BYU boys doing over there and I was like ah I you know I don't know so every time I would go out with somebody I just I don't know I just didn't really like I there was not this connection like there were several opportunities I could have had to be engaged in a couple weeks and married two months later you know but I was like uh I don't want to I don't want to do that which was kind of unique because I did want to get married and be a mother like that's what I really wanted but at the same time I didn't want to just marry some guy just because he was there and I think that I think that that happens a lot more than we realized just because like in proximity you're just so caught up in the moment and I would see my friends doing this and I was like uh I think that's going to be a divorce you know and I just didn't want to I just didn't want to put myself in that position so even at that point in my life I had more foresight than I think was kind of typical for that age group and I think that's why I didn't marry anyone at BYU because I could see far enough ahead that I was like no yeah but it was heartbreaking for me because I was like oh I'm failing at the BYU game yeah it's like I have a significant box unchecked yes yes and there's nothing significantly wrong with me so yeah why isn't this happening other than I would just say no yeah you didn't feel the right person no I didn't you didn't find the right person no yeah you said Mrs degrees Yeah the Mrs the Mrs degree you get married and then you get your Mrs degree that's what that's a big joke at BYU that you're there to get your Mrs degree yes and if you graduate without getting it you've failed yeah I mean it's all said in good fun but there's definitely like some structural you know belief around that yeah okay so what'd you do when you graduate unmarried but engaged to a non-boa student from BYU yeah well okay so I'm just gonna rewind a teeny bit my so after I had had this commitment to the church I and I got into BYU then I was like okay what's the next step I'm not engaged well I guess I should probably go on a mission so I'm totally committed to like doing everything right in my life being super Integris you know like Integrity is my new mantra related to I'm a religious person and I'm you know I am just converted so okay I'm gonna go out and share the gospel so one of the challenges so I'm filling out the the you know sheet for the missionary one of the challenges I had is in the first couple of years I had struggled with um an eating disorder and I you know was bulimic for a little while and um I that's a different story but I was able to really heal from that and again I was in a good place like I want to honor my body and I I want to you know respect my body and this is one of God's gifts to me and you know so that was like one of those things where it was like I know God can heal me and I felt like that that had happened and so as I'm um so it'd been months and months and I was just in a really good place still and just really gung-ho on the church and on the questionnaire for the missionary uh um form that you fill out it's like do you it's one of the questions was do you have a an eating disorder in the last I can't remember the wording of the question now I didn't feel like at the time I did but I had struggled with it so I checked yes so I had gone through my Bishops interview I'd gone and he referred me to the stake president I'm going for my final interview so I've gone through all the steps I've got the immunizations you know I've done all the things and my stake president looked at that question and he was like you know sister I think we should wait six months and I'm just like what devastated because now I have to go out of this interview and say like what do I say he said no I couldn't go on a mission and it was because I was honest and I'm not even struggling with this thing anymore and like I'm ready to share the gospel and like the Lord should know my heart like he the Lord should know my heart and the stake presence should have felt that and I am just really confused as to why when I am being 100 honest not because it's a struggle now but because it's something I did struggle with why am I being denied this opportunity when I know how whole I am right now when I know how ready I am to go teach the gospel and you know like everybody's just waiting for me to get my mission call you know and now I'm gonna walk out of this interview and what am I gonna say and explain so hard to non-mormons why what it means when all your family and Ward members know you're going in to do an interview for your mission and then you come out and say something like uh they told me to wait six months what goes through the minds of everyone I think that the first thing is like oh you did something wrong you got to repent like what it's usually related to morality um yeah like you had sex or something like that or you know like I don't even know or you have a problem with masturbation those are typically the things that missionaries yeah um and for me it wasn't any of those things and so I was like people are gonna think that about me yeah and it's not true and like I'm embarrassed about this phase of my life so I'm not going to tell the truth about that either it's not that I was gonna lie because I was committed to being very honest but I was like that's something I'm keeping to myself which face um the whole like eating disorder thing like I had I had struggled with that privately and I didn't like my family didn't know about it then you're in a position right trying to explain exactly really it's not it's not that but you're not you're not comfortable saying but I don't necessarily want to tell myself yeah right and I was like you know I've worked really hard to heal myself from this and get to a better place where I feel comfortable with myself and my eating and my body and I just don't want like I don't want to talk about it which makes all the sense yeah and so I was like oh my gosh like people are gonna think that yeah I like am immoral or unchaste and I'm not you know know and so I just remember walking out of there thinking like what am I gonna do what am I gonna do and you know my mom's waiting in the car and she's so excited and she's like how did it go and I'm like oh I'm just I think I'm gonna wait a little bit I don't feel quite ready to go and she was like you know disheveled like what and she didn't ask and she didn't ask any questions and you know I definitely wasn't going to tell her and you know that's something I don't know that I ever told her but that was the reason why it was because I had marked yes on the eating disorder thing and you know missionaries at the time were struggling heavily with um a lot of mental issues like it was so I think that they were telling the steak presence you know if there's any issues just just have them wait because there's so many problems coming out into the mission field with this type of thing um but I also just knew that it would not be a struggle for me and you know it wouldn't have been and it's just like that's like my heart was so pure at the time like I just knew I was ready to serve the Lord and I just felt so almost betrayed that my heart wouldn't have had wasn't seen in that moment and that it was a a you know like this logistical question that prevented me from that so so then like back to this engagement so then you know this guy comes back into my life just a few weeks later and we kind of start dating and he's like let's get married like we've known each other for four years and in my mind I'm thinking yeah okay that's a great idea because I just said I don't feel ready for my mission this will be a great cover for that like oh you know I wasn't supposed to go because I was supposed to get engaged look how the Lord Works yep we're right back on track and everything's good and I'm not embarrassed anymore and people aren't gonna think they're just gonna be like Oh look The Lord had other plans in store for you and so it just fell into line perfectly and um he was more on on brand of the kind of guy that I thought I could see myself with like and so it just seemed like this is the option yeah and you say he was divorced he had kids he didn't have kids okay um he he was actually he was he had married one of the general Authority's daughters and one of the general authorities had married them uh and one who later became a prophet but um and you know it's yeah it's past pass but there were there one of one of the reasons that I was really excited about this guy is he had these inner Mormon connections even though he was not part of that family anymore he had those connections and he would make little references to how he was going to be you know probably called as a general Authority in in the future you know and he was going to travel and do missions and do all these things and I was like yeah that's what I want to do I want to travel and I want to be part of the Mormon Elite and I want to know all the general authorities and I want to be in that world you know and he would never say things directly because it was more one of those ideas where it's like I have to say it very subtly but you know what I mean wait but if he's divorced from the general Authority's daughter or granddaughter yeah granddaughter granddaughter they're not gonna [Music] it kind of goes back to the special yes I am you know you're having that feeling again yeah and where I'm committed you know and I've got my own testimony it's like I want to give my whole life to the church and the gospel and what better way than to serve missions and you know serve in the leadership and that's what we're gonna do like I can I can see that in my future and so as I can see that as a vision it's like okay this works out really great timing wise now I don't feel embarrassed anymore I'm gonna say yes so what happens so we we get engaged and it turned into a very tumultuous year-long engagement that just a lot of issues came out with the the type of person that he was my reasoning for saying yes it was all wrong so I ended up moving out of the state to kind of get some space from him to keep myself in a space where he couldn't continue to manipulate basically yeah all right so you've and these are I just want to know the Ping the almost like the pinball decision making that you're making about really critical life decisions based on really unnatural things like pressure to get married early pressure to get on the Mormon train oh better go on a mission because I didn't graduate from BYU which is a major decision it's like I didn't graduate from BYU with a husband so Bing obviously I gotta go on a mission right oh being my my Bishop wanted to delay me being I better get engaged yeah being up the engagement didn't work out better move yep like that's a lot of ping pong yeah it's a lot of reactionary decisions based on the path I should be on that's not working out the way I thought it should be and based on what other people think in reality yes and that's like yeah that's a hard place to be when you're making life decisions based on how you feel other people perceive you well it doesn't set you up to make the best decisions for you no right right no but can we just recognize though the vulnerability in you being 19 and then a 29 year old who as you say has these crit these credentials that within the church world are something um and still you have a level of discernment to make the call around you know being manipulated and creating space and that's formidable for a 19 year old yeah and I you know I'm really grateful that I had that and I think that's something I've always been good at without knowing it like it's kind of been a little bit more natural and as I've gone on to develop it I'm very aware now but at the time I just remember observing I like to observe things and then make you know judgment calls decisions and there was a lot to observe and my original decision to you know leave the church before I went to BYU naveu was I'm observing all these people in this religion and it doesn't seem like they're actually like really better off than anybody else you know like the marriages aren't better the you know it's just like I don't I don't see it as beneficial the one thing I kept going back to every time and this is another you know cultural side note around like what kind of kept me from saying I will leave the church was the temple it's like there's no other Church that has Temple covenants that can keep families together so even though I'm questioning it that is one point that I can't dispute I can't argue I can't find anywhere else so I'm gonna pin that one because I don't know what to do about it yet and I want that and I also think that led to me like still being open to like well I want to be converted so makes sense yeah so the engagement didn't work out yeah so I moved to Arizona I went back to school I started a master's degree in business and education and quit both of those because I was like I still don't know what I want to do um and then this is where my wonderful mom again she was like oh you know if my daughter finds somebody out in Arizona she's gonna live there and I want my grandkids to be close to me so my life goal at the time was to buy a house and her and my dad had just bought this um uh foreclosure at auction uh in Salt Lake area and it was just little this little condo and it was in my price range and so they're like why don't you just come home and come look at this condo if you if you like it we'll sell it to you for what we bought it for and I was like well okay you know that sounds great so I went there loved it I was like yeah I totally want to buy it so by this time I'm 23 still not married didn't go on a mission my engagement has been broken off it's like okay what else can I do to now kind of like negate all these things I haven't done so I'm still feeling like I'm progressing it's like okay buy a house so I bought a house I bought this house I moved back to Utah um and that's where I met my husband and he had bought a town home in that same complex and my dad tells this story when he was at auction they were bidding for the this condo and you know it just went a little higher and he's like the spirit just told me you know bid one more thousand higher and you know then the other person did and it's like okay I'm out and then he she's like I just felt this nudge you know one more thousand higher and so he did and then he ended up getting it and then that was the condo that I bought and then that's where my I met my husband and so you know it was the story of like you know you've been LED and guided to this place to meet this person at this time and when I was at the county you know judge where they were doing the auction it's like I just I felt this prompting and it's like yeah yeah okay this is I'm on I'm on track I'm on track still yeah yeah so yeah instead of just self-exploration you're like trying to meet some arbitrary deadline that's been handed to you yeah feeling like there's something wrong feeling like yeah and I'm listening to what everybody else is saying yeah and I'm saying yeah that's yeah that's right that's okay now I can make a decision because you told me you know that the spirit told you to bid higher on this which means it it you know it was obviously meant for me versus you know like is this the right space for me like if I would have just asked that question is it do I really want to move back to Utah do I really want to buy a house in this you know I didn't ask myself those questions I listened to what was being said around me and I was like oh yeah okay I'll do that because I heard that I observed it I heard it I still made a decision but I wasn't asking myself the questions that's right yeah okay so what happened so I got back on track I my husband and I dated for six months or no I'm sorry a year and after six months my dad was like why haven't you guys gotten married yet and we were both kind of like well you know like and tell us tell us his name again grant grant okay yeah Jimmy Grant so meet Grant we just totally like hit it off we've got such a great story we we meet at Ward prayer we lock eyes across the room is a signal a singles word yeah singles word okay and so we're at word prayer which is where all the um youth get together on or the young adults get together on a Sunday because it's like how many opportunities can we have to get young adults together oh we're gonna say a prayer every Sunday night you know then we're gonna have an activity on this day then we're gonna do this so we're at word prayer it's after church you know and someone had said oh that's Grant Thompson he lives in your condo complex and I was like oh I need to talk to him because I just bought this condo and I want to find out is he renting it did he buy it I want to find out what rent rental rates are so you know like we're all in the room I'm at the corner of one side he's at the other Corner we're folding our arms we're saying the prayer we open our eyes and say Amen you know and I just lock eyes with him and walk clear across the room and I'm like are you Grant Thompson and he's kind of like yes who are you because I'm new you know and I want to make friends and um so then I was like you know can you answer some questions about the area and you know so then we got together and we started talking and um kind of hit it off and this is when text messages were just starting so we started texting each other back and forth and yeah and he just he was just somebody that was really really incredible and unique to me and he had grown up in Canada uh he was a pilot so he had his career established and he had bought this house he was running it out to roommates and that's kind of where we connected because I was doing the same thing as a young woman you know and he was impressed with that and and so you know like we started developing a friendship he started dating somebody else and I was like okay and you know things progressed with us in a really um slow healthy pace and that had never happened before in any of my other dating relationships it's like you got a few times like are you gonna get married or not and it's like yes forced a little more pressure yeah and at this point I was just kind of like I think I'd kind of also already resigned myself to like I may never get married I may just be an old maid you know at 23 I'm thinking this I hope maybe I've timed out yeah maybe I'm too old now and never gonna get married uh but anyway I when we met it was like it was it was real and it was a real like possibility to find like what is it we both want and we had more things to talk about than just like we got to get married and what do you want to do and let's go out to ice cream so and I think part of that had to do with you know we were both we had both bought a house we were both trying to establish our lives and like I think I for sure was starting to see life isn't this illusion of all these things around you and they just work all the time you know I I think I'd have had enough experience now that I was starting to realize like I need to be in charge of making decisions for myself and if something's gonna happen I need to make it happen like nobody outside me is gonna make it happen and I'm always waiting for someone to tell me what to do yeah okay so it sounds like you had a really healthy courtship with Grant yeah we did we dated for a year and you know after six months people were like why are you guys not married yet are you guys gonna get engaged like what's going on like what's how come this isn't progressing and even my dad kind of took Grant aside and was like why haven't you asked her to marry yet like what's what's taking you so long you know and I don't know that my dad remembers that but anyway it you know but Grant and I talked about it and we laughed about it you know and it's like yeah I think this is great and he was actually coming from a place he's like well I want to date for like three years and I was like whoa three years that's a long time I'm gonna be really old by then so so I basically just said I'm willing to date for three years however after a year if you know that you like if you don't know you want to continue dating me and be with me and like work towards marriage I will start dating other people but also that you and he was like oh so that kind of um it just kind of like prioritized us to each other and then after a year um he went up into this mountain and asked God if he should marry me and he saw this Cactus Flower and he brought the cactus flower down and you know he said God said yes and so then we you know went to Hawaii and got engaged and it was magical oh so you you feel like he had a happy healthy courtship it's sort of a magical engagement yes and we you know so my parents dated for two months and got engaged uh were married shortly after that I was born nine months later so there there's kind of followed that more standard Mormon time frame of just fast and I just felt like I wanted to get to know my partner and like delve through all these issues that I could see coming up that I feel like they should be dealt with before you get married and so I feel like we created this really solid foundation of friendship and communication and you know talking about finances and all the things that kind of make a marriage relationship work when you actually commit to it and so by the time we got married you know we were ready and one of the things that was kind of unique about us um Grant grew up in Canada and he became a pilot and when he did his Pilot training before he started any of his training he went and he interviewed several pilots and was like how did you get from where I'm at to where you are now and he kind of Drew this line between these stories of efficiency like what are all the points that they kind of made as far as you know how you get to this outcome you want in the most efficient successful way so we took that into our dating and you know we went around and interviewed couples that we could see had a good relationship and we were like tell us about your relationship what makes it good how do you guys you know work through issues what are some of the routines that help you you know what are your success secrets and so we did that and that's amazing yeah it gave us a lot of insight and you know we felt really prepared yeah I you know reflecting that's really interesting too how you left BYU with this sense of letdown or like personal failure that you weren't able to and almost to confusion like I don't know what went wrong there yeah like I feel like yeah to this place though where it plays out and gives you your own you know you have your own story now that's really quite different than likely the story you you would have had within the BYU structure yes and I just I love that I love that for you that there's this moment where you're viewing it as kind of a negative or a loss of some sort but then you tell the rest of the story and it gives you something that's actually really really valuable to you yeah and another lesson I tied back to that whole experience is when I was engaged to this first guy I felt like I was not the best version of myself with him like I didn't really love the person I was when I was with him and I was like why are these less than my favorite qualities about myself coming out more when I'm around him you know and then I met Grant and I was like wow like all the best parts of myself are coming out with him you know and I really like the person I am when I'm with him and he brings out the best in me and so that was a really good contrast so then I I tied that to like well that's why I had that experience like the Lord wanted to teach me appreciation and how to really see you know contrast because if I hadn't had that horrible experience I wouldn't be able to really appreciate and enjoy this great experience and that's the whole purpose of life it's this you know you come to Earth get a body gain experience I love it I love it yeah so how was the wedding and and uh and I guess let's see you may have already said this did you attend the temple take out your endowment right right before your yeah right before yeah yeah so how was the temple your temple experience and how was the wedding and yeah so um so we flew back our engagement was actually really short we had dated for probably actually a year and a half and our engagement was only three weeks because once we knew we knew and we just wanted to take the next step so we called our friends and family and we're like Hey we're gonna fly back to Hawaii we're gonna get married in the LA Yee temple on this day it's in three weeks if you can make it we'd love to have you if not we totally understand but we're doing it and at this point we had kind of made this decision like this marriage is about us it's about what we want it's about our covenants it's about you know the promises we're making and we're just gonna do what we want and we're not gonna worry about what everybody else wants and part of that was coming from this place of like you know this is the life I create and I don't want to have this big Mormon wedding with a reception at the church and all of that stuff so we just we were like we want to get married in a beautiful place so that's kind of what we did and like a week before we left for Hawaii I went through the Salt Lake Temple I really wanted to do the Salt Lake Temple because they have the live sessions um and that just felt really special to me and I remember walking in and I just felt like I've made it like I am I'm here and you know this is the epitome of where I've wanted to be and to get and I've got a marriage that's about to happen and now I'm going to get to learn the secrets of what goes on in the temple and I'm just super excited and um I thought it was a little interesting but I was just in this like happy happy state that I didn't feel like looking at you know anything that was done in the temple I was just kind of like this overwhelm of like I gotta make sure I'm following the directions and doing all the things and I feel nervous and I feel super happy and excited and um so I just kind of it was one of those experiences again where I was just like okay I'm just gonna let this happen and it's just gonna be until I can have time to kind of process it yeah almost you have to kind of go through that to get to the thing you want and also how hard what the journey had been to get there yes the other aspect of that is well we're gonna get married in the temple in a week so like I have to do all these things and there's no like there's not a question of whether I want to do it there's not a question of if I'm okay with everything it's just this is the process you follow to get this outcome and I was committed to following the process so I I didn't even look at it with any degree of you know skepticism or Oddity or you know I definitely saw that there was interesting aspects to it but I was like well if this is what my parents have been doing for years and years it's it's got to be the way you do things yeah so yeah and so you got Temple married in the LA a Hawaii temple okay all right and there you're on it you're on the Mormon train you did it yeah you got your you got your return missionary you got your Eternal companion yep I I know what you're supposed to you know do next as far as the Mormon train goes yep so have a baby um well you know again we wanted to take some time to wait like we wanted to establish so we really liked the pattern of dating for a year and establishing what we wanted for our marriage so we wanted to have be married for a year and kind of establish our marriage and then you know add a family member to it so um but you know my husband knew how excited I was about having a baby and I didn't want to push him but I he knew I was really eager to you know like take the next step so um I remember six months after we were married he leaned over and whispered in my ear he's like we can start trying for a baby now if you want and I was like what are you serious you know and I was really excited because I was committed to waiting for a year and he's like well yeah I mean it takes like nine months to get here so we'll still be married over a year by the time the baby gets here and you know like if you really want to have a baby sooner we can try and I was so excited so we um you know we started trying for a baby I got pregnant right away and um I miscarried that baby and so then I was like wow this is like my first baby what if I'm not gonna be able to have kids now so it was another thing like oh man okay I thought I was all good and now this is there's another you know speed bump here like you know what if I have problems getting pregnant because this is my first pregnancy and I just you know I was really really inwardly nervous and scared about like my ability to continue on this path and this plan that I had set out for myself because you know like things were just still in my mind supposed to work out the way you planned them yeah especially if they kind of follow the plan right yeah so had you ever I I have had you ever considered that as a reality for yourself had it ever been talked about this idea of like some women you know have a really hard time getting pregnant yeah some women can't get pregnant or or was that like a whole new reality for you do you remember how you so it wasn't because I I remember growing up with you know motherhood is the most important thing and if a woman can't get pregnant that's like the saddest thing that can happen to a woman it's just so hard and it's I mean it's the worst thing that a newly married woman could be cursed with in my mind that's how I kind of interpreted it and so I was just like oh my gosh what if I have that curse you know like what if I can't have children I'll be worthless in the whole scheme of Mormon motherhood I will be worthless exactly and so it really was coupled with a lot of fear and and and what's interesting about that is I don't think that I even took thought to grieve losing a pregnancy I was just so scared about my ability to have children that I didn't even like process that whole experience wow yeah yeah and that makes so much sense to me that experience and how you processed it yeah and I was just so anxious to get on to the next try so that I could see like is it gonna happen again or can I actually have a baby what does it mean for me yeah because I mean doctors were like well you know like this is pretty common it happens like just try again when you're ready and I was like but like what does it mean yeah you know yeah so um you know I think a lot of the focus for today's interview is going to be on kind of when Grant passes and managing life afterwards you were married how long before he passed away we were married we were coming up on our 13th wedding anniversary yeah so you had four children with Grant in those 13 years and you built a really successful super successful YouTube channel at the time one of the top YouTube channels in the world yeah yeah it still is but I mean even more so I guess you were saying a few years ago how do we condense how do we tease out the most relevant portions of those 13 years yeah to to make sure we distill the important stuff for what comes later yeah yeah that's a great question so just it was just a wild ride it was like okay we had this miscarriage I got pregnant again we had a healthy baby and from that point it just continue to follow the plan again you know and it was like I never had a problem getting pregnant again every time we wanted to have a baby we were able to and you know as we continued to add to our family and you know Grant was working and I was taking care of the kids it was like everything's we're playing our roles perfectly everything's working out the way it needs to be working out our business is growing um there is this little thing that you know is kind of exciting posting videos on YouTube it was more of like a lifestyle type thing it's just something that you know we did and then we started seeing it as a business and then you know that did become our primary focus that and our family became our two most important values for how we spent our time and at that point you know we had established ourselves as you know adults married couple homeowners um you know all the things that kind of Encompass responsibility and the things you look at as a child and you're like wow that's what I want to be when I grow up like they're doing all the things like I'm now doing everything my parents did so I felt like we had made it to that point um you know we went to church every Sunday that was a non-negotiable like we were both really committed to that um we were not super Temple attendance goers until you know I kind of brought it up and was like well you know like this is part of a really important aspect of what we do and we're not prioritizing it because we're working and so it's like every time something would come up we would address it and we would find a solution so we start going to the temple every month and that became on our calendar it was like every second Tuesday of every month we'd go to the temple or every second Thursday and then you know it's like oh you know we're both working a lot I'm with the kids and you know you're doing the YouTube thing and we're figuring out the finances and we're not connecting and so you know like what do we need to do to remedy that oh we need to have a specific date night so Tuesday night was our date night every single Tuesday night we had a date night so we could start counting on these things and we we created this environment of stability and prioritizing what was most important to us so that we could not miss out on you know even though we were so busy and our Focus was to build this business we weren't we didn't want to miss out on the important things and so that's kind of how we operated like we'd create a system for everything that's amazing the level of awareness and to your life and what's important and then your ability to reflect in process with all the you know all the demands of Life coming in and then edit accordingly like literally make changes um that says a lot for your partnership did it feel like a partnership like if you felt something um strongly that um you know within your marriage you were heard and that you oftentimes would you know yeah yeah yeah 100 I feel like we had such a good open communication and you know we brought up things freely we were honest about just about everything you know that I know of that we could be honest about and you know we would say the things that and this is where you know I kind of go back to this question like can you ask the hard questions and really be willing to get the answers and that's part of an aspect of relationship that when you're communicating with each other can you say the things that are not just the flowers and roses or the things that you want to hear or the things that you're used to and can you really lean into answering them without taking it personally or without being offended and if you do take it personally and if you are offended can you process through that so we can get to the information so that we can really connect yeah and and we had a really good formula for doing that for you know the majority of our marriage that's so rare yeah it really is a rare yeah yeah so how many years between your marriage and you're like living off of your social media like um so I think so Grant actually stayed employed as a pilot for until like 2006 17-ish so we kept our we kept our full-time employment he cut his hours way back um like income wise we probably from when we started in 2011 we probably could have retired him from the job like within a couple years but it was this security piece like we had Insurance to get your own business and get your own insurance it like is like astronomically more expensive and we were just kind of afraid to take that last leap outside of the like the structure of having employment but we were fully running our own business and you know making plenty of money to sustain ourselves within like a couple years Casey you're married what year again so we were married 2007. okay started YouTube in 2008 but we actually started the like what it is now in 2011. okay and um Yeah by this time so 2011 so I remember 2013 in January was when we hit a million subscribers and I remember that 2003 or no 2014 14. yeah so it was just January 2014 and I remember that because I had had my third baby in 2013 in December and he was just like this teeny tiny baby on the carpet next to dad's desk because we were like oh we had a million you know and he was just like barely moving around because he was so little I mean it's amazing that he's teaming with you to create a successful YouTube channel while he's a full-time pilot or part-time eventually in the year having two three four kids and then you're able to partnership together to create like if someone was doing that full-time they would have a hard time doing yeah without kids yeah so it's kind of amazing yeah just going back to it I'm like wow yeah we were doing a lot do you want to do you want to just talk just briefly about the invention of the idea of the King of Random or tkor and kind of how it blossomed from just an idea into a full-time yeah so uh before we um bought our first house we rented this basement apartment our goal was to again like we go back to our goals and our systems and our goal is to buy a house for cash and we wanted to buy our first house with cash so we didn't have a mortgage so we moved into this super tiny uh basement apartment and rent was like 800 bucks included everything and so we just saved our money and worked as hard as we could but we spent a lot of time together because we just didn't have much going on outside of this goal and working so during this time we started like Grant just like loved experimenting so we'd put these experiments together and we'd try them in the basement and like they just turned into the content that so for that two years we lived in that basement apartment and saved all our money we just experimented and then our first video was done in that apartment it was a fire with a water bottle video and it got like it went viral it got like a hundred thousand views which at the time you know there wasn't anything there was nothing that had a million views there was things that had five views so you get a hundred thousand views it's like whoa this is like viral um so then we moved into our house where we established the King of Random and that's when you know everything started coming together but that's also where we were like okay let's actually focus on this and make it a business versus just a hobby and so we just we branded everything from the beginning as if it were going to be a business not just a hobby anymore so we took that from let's just do this to let's let's create this business around it so that you know we're starting to see people get subscribers and you know have income on YouTube and you know like why don't we just do that and so we did that from the very beginning yeah but that feels like I remember starting podcasts a decade before anyone had even thought about monetization a podcast um and still people have a hard time with it but but it must you probably didn't know a lot of people that were making a full-time living off of their YouTube channel no we there was nobody until we heard a news story of someone that had done it once and we were like whoa you can make a living off this that's kind of cool well we'll set it up as a second business and just you know have fun with it and what whose idea was it to do science education and come up with a name and how'd that happen yeah so the name was given to us by a friend a friend came over and was like man you guys are always doing like the weirdest things at your house like you're always doing these random projects and he's like man dude you're like the King of Random and so that's kind of where it came from and that um it wasn't taken and it kind of gave us the liberty to you know explore whatever it was we wanted to do because we didn't know like we want to do science it just kind of fell into that category okay and so you just you just went with that yeah so we just went with it and did you all grow up on Bill Nye did you have him yeah I did um I know Grant did a little bit but he he wasn't super into exploring and learning either it was both of us kind of lived this childhood where we didn't like super engage with the world around us it was just like everything was happening to us and we were getting to this space and then once we found each other and got married it's like this insatiable curiosity and desire to learn like just kind of overtook both of us and we were like there's so much more to the world than we ever could have imagined and like we want to know it all and so it just really became this like insatiable curiosity that we both had to ask questions and get answers and ask questions and get answers interesting yeah fun well what an amazing ride you guys have had and that I think the story of of tkor kind of could be its own epic stories interview yeah for sure how so how would you describe the health and obviously only share what you're comfortable how would you share how the health of your marriage and then the health of your testimonies progressed towards the middle and end of your time together yeah so I think one of the things we loved about each other is we were both committed to the gospel but we weren't overly zealous about it like we could kind of just engage in life while this is a part of our life but we were both like really committed I think um this is also where I really started to desire and have a a like a deep yearning to learn like when they say you know like study the scriptures and learn the doctrine and that's when I was like okay I wanna like I want to know now like what is this really that I've committed to you know and Grant had kind of done that on his mission and uh he had a you know an intense Mission experience and after that he kind of just put that away and was like okay I've done the mission thing I've done the church thing like I I still have a testimony I want to be involved but I have like done the Deep work and I'm not going back to that but I hadn't experienced that yet and so I started really like digging deep into the gospel into the scriptures I wanted to you know ask questions at church and like be involved and I wanted to go to the temple and I wanted to have family scripture studying families prayer and you know he he didn't really want to do any of those things and so I was kind of always like leading those discussions like well can we start reading scriptures with the kids can we start having discussions about the gospel can you know like you're the priesthood holder like this is your job you're supposed to be kind of doing this like will you do it and he's kind of like hey it's not like it's not that big of a deal we don't like we'll learn as we go like let's he he just didn't want to prioritize it with intention I really wanted it to be intentional and so this is kind of where we like we didn't fight about this at all but this was always like a source of conflict where I was always wanting it and he was resisting and you know and and we slowly incorporated into our family um so I would say like so you're trying to ramp up your Mormon game yeah and he wasn't he was into it but not super zealous right yeah feeling a little bit of frustrations like come on man let's get into this and do it yeah like this is your responsibility it says here in the proclamation like you know you got you gotta follow the follow the rules here and so um he was always open to those discussions but like when I would ask him for a blessing he'd be like ah you don't really need a blessing like you'll just get better and I'm kind of like wait like how are we supposed to exercise our faith if we do that if if we just you know do the things that'll make us better versus getting the blessing that's supposed to heal you know and and he was he's always been more of that logical scientific mind which is kind of where the channel came from in that you know like he wants to know the nuts and bolts of how things actually work and so I think that he kind of filtered religion through that a little bit as well which made it so he could see the logic of it and it's like well like yeah maybe a blessing will give you comfort but like it's probably not actually going to heal you and I know their stories and all that but like it's just a process and if if you have faith in it great it supports that but you know like you've got to do the things and so that was always like part of where he was coming from is this really logical space where I was like no let's just like have all the faith in the world and be the most spiritual people and you know like everything will be magical for us and you know that's why we're having so much success is because you know we're a good Mormon family and you know the Lord's blessing us and we're paying our tithing and and he really loved playing tithing um and I just really loved trying to like build our family culture around the gospel and so as we were building this it's like now there becomes three things it's like committing Our Lives to the Lord building our business taking care of our kids and family and so in that you know we we made a lot of other sacrifices anything outside of that didn't fit into our lives because we were so busy um you know we didn't have friends we didn't go out we didn't do activities with our kids we stayed home we built our business and we went to church in the temple and that's kind of our that's what our life was primarily consisting of it for years into that change in those last couple years or was that pretty much all the way through yeah um so once we got our business to a space where it was um sustainable on its own that's when we kind of stepped back and was asked ourselves the questions like what else do we want to do in life and and that's when we started saying like I wanna I want to go do yoga teacher training he wants to go you know do power paragliding um and so it wasn't he the face of the show yeah for a long time when he actually stepped away before he died and we had it running with different hosts at the time of his passing and so we had made this decision like now we want to focus on being with our kids um having experiences doing trips living the gospel like you know let's retire ourselves in a way that we're not doing that grind and while our kids are little let's spend this time with them let's homeschool them you know let's teach them the principles we want them to be raised with and just really be involved in our family and you know family was always the priority for us and it was always like family is the most important thing and everything we do is for the family all this work that we're doing is for our family all of this that we're establishing is for our family so that one day we can enjoy it okay wow and so you you start looking at you're saying other Pursuits and ways to get fulfilled yeah and so at that point and this is around 2018 we start you know exploring other things that you know piqued our interest and we we just started like living really what it felt like for the first time not just working and raising kids and going to church and so I think both of us really started to explore what do we really actually want out of life what do we want to do who do we want to become um like how do we want to live our lives and and that's when like new questions started coming up so between him and I you know we were still really United but we both had different things we wanted to do and now we didn't have this you know United Mission and purpose to grow this business anymore and so we were both kind of going outside of that exploring it um for me one of the things I started to question was you know like how does this religion play a role in my life and how can I really integrate it in the highest and best way um for him he was like I want to go do extreme things I want to like I Just Want to Have Fun um and so we both kind of like respectively went on those paths uh separately I mean we were still together we still had our family we still did a lot of things but we started spending a lot less time with each other and we just started getting interested in different things and you know his things I wasn't super interested in I didn't want to power paraglide because like that just looked really scary to me and I was like you have to learn a lot and you know you're a pilot you already know all these you know Concepts around air and flight and it's just so such an overwhelming learning curve to me and you know like if I do one thing wrong I'm gonna crash and get hurt and I don't want to do that so you know and for me I was like well I want to do yoga and I want to really connect to my spiritual side and you know like I just I just want to create this being Within Myself that's like such a powerful you know spiritual space and like I want to be able to heal the world with my touch and you know I just and he's like okay that's weird but you know like if you're into it go for it you know like I'll support you so we so we had very polar opposite different interests that we wanted to start pursuing and so he so he went and got his power paragliding training um this was in November of 2018 once he came back from that we were living in Salt Lake Valley at the time and he was like I don't want to live in Salt Lake Valley anymore I want to be in a space where we can I can go power paragliding all year long like year round so I'm done with the snow he's from Canada he's like I've shoveled enough snow for my whole lifetime I'm done so um he went out to St George and was looking for a place and we had talked several times about getting a place out there but now he had a purpose to do it so before I just wanted it because I thought it was a nice area you know now it's like oh I can go power paragliding and so I want to be out there so he found this perfect house for him to do his power paragliding and and we had talked about actually like moving down there full time and so we wanted to build a house and all these things but then we decided like before we build a house in a place we've never lived how about we just like buy something that's in a nice area live in it for a couple years and just see how we like living down there and he was like oh that's such a great idea because then we'd have to come in and we you know don't have to make such an investment and all these other things and so like as soon as he gets an idea he just runs with it so he went right down there found a house calls me up he's like hey I found this house I'm gonna buy it and I'm like well aren't you gonna show it to me first you know and he's like yeah I want you to come down but anyway so we bought the house you know it was a really nice house it was a good area and and he's like I can't be here anymore we were running our business out of our house in Salt Lake Valley at the time he's like I just need to go and I'm like okay like what does that mean and he's like I just like I want you to come with me but if you can't I'm going anyway and I was like okay so what we decided to do is I decided to stay in the house in Salt Lake Valley for a few more months uh my second grader at the time was just doing super well in school and he'd never done well in school he he'd always struggled so I didn't want to pull him out yet my our oldest was really struggling in school and so he decided Well I'll pull him out and I'll take him to St George with me and I'll homeschool him and you can stay here with the other three and you know and then we'll you know meet back up when the time works out so that's that's kind of what our plan was and this is interesting so we weren't separated at all we were just living in different places planning to get back together in a little while but this was really interesting because people were like wait Grant lives there and you live here like are you guys getting divorced is there something going on you know it was all these like we we just got so many odd looks and questions from everybody around us because like if you're married you live together like that's what you do and for us we we're not necessarily in a bad spot but we were exploring different things and just kind of wanted some space and we had the opportunity to do it and so we did and it was really nice and during that time I kind of had some space to really like ask myself those questions in life like what am I doing with my life and where am I at and you know like and being away from my spouse my time was spent differently and and so it really kind of opened up like what do I really want out of life and I was able to orchestrate life with my three little ones really well and I had this wonderful routine to the point where I was like I really love living here I don't know if I want to move out there but then I was like you know I can feel the distance that's being created between us and this is not healthy for our marriage so I'm gonna I'm gonna go move out there and so I did end up finally pulling my second grader out and we all moved down there and and it and that was a hard adjustment because it felt like I I felt like going into this house that he'd picked for his reason to go power paragliding like I I it didn't feel like my home and it didn't feel like my space and we had a hard time integrating back and so that brought up a lot of issues like just within our marriage and our relationship like where are we going with this and like what is our marriage and what does it mean to us and like where are we really at and and this is like we had never had any like space to ask these questions because everything was always just going so well and we were you know doing things and following our routine and everything was working out great and as soon as we kind of stepped away from that it was like um actually is this working um and that's not to say is our marriage working but just like every aspect of our life Parenthood Church each other ourselves individually and it's like it all just kind of came crashing down on us when we had the space to kind of step away from what we'd been doing as a grind for 18 hours a day for 10 years so in I don't know how much you do or don't want to talk about this in your outline you mentioned that he had some rough stuff that he experienced growing up and um that probably affected you know your marriage and your Intimacy in various ways and there's all sorts of types of intimacy yeah and that that even maybe came to a head the the last couple years of your marriage yeah yeah very badly because I want to let you decide what you want to disclose um so he so he had grown up in a out of the out of the United States in Canada and it it was an interesting Dynamic there he had been very bullied as a kid um the Dynamics in his family were difficult when he was a baby um and you know there were some really hard things that happened to him as he was really young and then um he had had some abuse happen uh sexually with like neighbors and things like that throughout his like younger years and then um through adolescence like this bullying like really got heavy with him and kids would just go out of their way every day to call him a loser and he just had no self-confidence at all and his mission kind of brought him out of that and gave him really the confidence to like do the things that he could do because he was given this outline like you follow this precisely which he did and then you get this outcome so he would follow this precisely and and that kind of went from The Other Extreme of like he was like this rejected kid to this like kid that could do everything and so he kind of felt like from childhood to Mission he had processed all of that trauma that kind of like came from that experience and and this is where what I didn't realize is you know that that hadn't happened he hadn't processed through it and you know I'm just thinking as a good wife you support your husband through anything you know and nothing nothing bad was happening in our marriage like there wasn't abuse he wasn't an alcoholic you know he wasn't cheating or I wasn't cheating you know like on the surface it seemed like everything was really great what I didn't see is his compulsive need for something and during the 10 years we were working together it was the building of the business and the validation of the comments and the videos and everything that was coming and and we were getting it at such a great incredible rate that there was nothing other than we are the most successful and this is all working so once that kind of went away this validation left and then it was like he he continued to need validation and so so he had he had a compulsive Behavior a compulsive Personality yeah but because it wasn't drugs or alcohol or sex you know it was like oh he's perfectly fine what I didn't realize is it was one thing after another after another so when we first got married he got really into skydiving and I was like oh this is so great this is cool and then you know there was um this kiting phase that he went through he got in this kite and all he wanted to do was kite you know and then we start our business and then it was 100 in the business and I was like see this is such a great quality he has he can just really hyper focus on things and get stuff done um and because like this is producing income and it's supporting our family there is nothing but positivity to be said around you know this compulsiveness which I didn't see it as that at the time and then when he took up power paragliding it was just the same thing it was like he lived a breathed dyed you know power power gliding it's like all he wanted to do every waking moment and you know to me at the time I was kind of processing it as like well you know he's worked really hard and this is the next thing and it brings him a lot of Joy what I didn't see was the compulsivity and addictive nature of it like The Addictive nature of I need something that I'm not getting because I don't have it and you know that to me relates to when especially as a child you have a need that's not being met it's like unless you really go through and have that filled for you that that need met and that that place in you that's kind of um Hollow healed it's always there I didn't know enough about psychology to really see that or understand that or understand like why he constantly needed to have something where it was like extreme to get you know a reaction from people and it was because like the extreme reaction provided validation that he's better than like the average person and so this was kind of like an overarching theme in our marriage that we're above like what normal couples do like we we dated better than everybody else we you know we had this um courtship that was more intense and we addressed all these issues and you know um then we got married and like we planned our family in this way very intentionally so that we could do it better than everybody else and and I think like for me that also came from this place of like well I am more special than most people so I'm gonna do things that are more special than most people and he certainly had that mentality of like Superman like the Superman complex you know I'm so capable of doing things that other people can't that I am above like what's normal like I can perform better I can do bigger and better things and you know I'm more immune to like the consequences of those things and so this is what he believed about himself I trusted him completely so I believed that about him you know we would talk about power paragliding and I would say you know there's nobody more qualified to be up in the air than him he's a pilot he's been kiting skydiving he's got every single aspect of how to be successful and safe in this down like he's got it you know and so I just never worried about him in that way because I was like well if something were to happen he'd know right what to do so he'd never get hurt because you know we've preeminently planned for that and we're special you know so so that's not going to affect us and we just both believed that I think and I I mean from the first time I saw him take off and he's a thousand feet up in the air and I'm like whoa that's really high you know and like if anything happens and you fall a thousand feet out of the sky you are dead but I saw that and I was like wow that's really high that's so amazing never once was I like oh like you could die doing this it just didn't cross my mind that that would ever be an outcome for not not even just in this in the sport of power paragliding but in our like he's in our marriage like he's 38 you know people don't die at 38. we got married in the temple we plan to have a family we plan to raise our kids together this is our plan we're following our plan there's nothing outside of that that's going to affect the main things like yeah we've had speed bumps but here's some more evidence for why you're so special you've been able to get over those speed bumps and get right back on track before we talk about his death um you mentioned and I don't again I don't know how much you want to talk about this but you mentioned maybe a lot of sexual shame or torment that he experienced and maybe you'll say this was his story to tell or not yeah and then you mentioned how some body image things yeah maybe the last couple years of your marriage uh it all kind of coming to a head in terms of your intimacy is that an important part of his story or not really I mean it's it's an important part of who I am because like now as I've been able to let go of those things that I didn't even know were issues at the time because they were part of what like I thought reality was and then like being removed from that so so back to your question like one of the things that I thought was super interesting is he grew up in like more of this very like prudish culture of you know like don't talk about sex don't look uh you know like any like if you're getting dressed cover up all the time like it's just like extreme prudishness and um so he was very very curious he's always been very curious and so you know he wanted to see well like why can't I see what naked people look like and so you know a young boy that leads to magazines and you know like where can you find pictures of that to figure it out and you know that was something that was really exciting to him and and so like again like The Addictive nature of his personality was kind of like I need to find out and so I will be on a mission to find that out and it was one of those things where you know you can't talk about it in any aspect and you know growing up in the church if you have a problem with porn or masturbation or or if you engage in any of those not even have a problem don't tell anybody and that's kind of how that was portrayed for him and you know it is his story to tell at the same time he's not here to tell it and I'm what's left and what I want to take from that is not like the negative aspects or you know the embarrassing parts or any of that but like this is the reality of what happened and also how it affected me in our marriage because of what actually happened and so you know like the effect of that on me was that you know porn was an issue but it wasn't a big deal uh that's how we looked at it it's like oh yeah well sometimes you know you see porn but like everybody does it and you just don't talk about it and I and to me I'm like well you know like we're in the church and the church says that's a sin so shouldn't you confess it to the bishop and it's like no it's just you know like it's not very often but what that started to breed around sexuality was an inauthenticity around honesty in sexuality and so then even though we're a married couple and you know we had disclosed everything you know he said yeah I've looked at porn and um you know like it's part of my childhood it's part of my experience but in my mind I interpreted that but after we get married you won't need to look at porn anymore because we'll be married and so then we can be intimate and it's allowed and that's also not the reality of how things work you know you can have a wonderful great amazing beautiful intimate life and you can still go outside of that in a personal way that your partner doesn't know about it and then it creates that disconnection and disassociation from each other and the problem with that is when you can't talk about it so if I can't talk about you know like well are you looking at porn is it my business is it not my business you know we're partners and if we can't even establish those ground rules then it just becomes a taboo and so once you have a taboo in a marriage that creates distance even if it's just one thing and you know like we could still talk about those things but for me personally I felt so much shame around talking about any of those things that I didn't feel comfortable bringing it up in a way that I felt empowered to have a conversation around it because it was just like so uncomfortable for me and so you know I remember thinking how do I do this and I don't know so I'm just not gonna do it so do it meaning like just have a conversation about it or you know like ask like is this something that's still part of your life and you know like we were still open enough that I knew in like what aspects it was still playing a part but even in those aspects you know I would say well you know instead of you taking care of yourself like why don't you come talk to me and like we can see if it would be a good time for us to be together you know and then like if if I want to be intimate and you're not in the mood because you know you're you've already like taken care of yourself then it's like well like that affects our intimacy and so but for him it was like this um I don't want to go outside of myself and ask because I'm not sure how it's going to be responded to because as a child I was criticized for asking for what I need and I was made fun of and you know it's not that I wasn't a safe person to for him to ask it was that he had these issues within himself and so he made decisions that affected our marriage that affected our intimacy that we couldn't talk about because of the healing that he hadn't done based on the culture that shamed all of this you know everything so in every aspect of our marriage we had a great relationship and there was this one part that was kind of like we don't talk about it we just navigate around it and it all came from shame and addiction and not feeling safe to talk about things that are not all of the good stuff so we could still have hard conversations just not about one topic you know and it's it was around sexuality we could talk about our sexuality with each other but like the personal sexuality and like that aspect of it it wasn't something that either of us could do within our marriage and you mentioned in your outline that the last couple years of your your marriage yeah were you kind of estranged that way a little bit yeah yeah what was interesting is um and I like I I couldn't figure this out but our our intimacy kind of just tapered off and I was like well you know like your sexual yeah sexual intimacy and like you know we used to have a really great sexual life and now it's like we're not sleeping together anymore he's sleeping with the kids or I'm sleeping with the kids and they're so far that can go before it's like well actually like you're not and the whole time we were living apart you know like I went and visited him a couple times and we just never like came together intimately so it was like six months that was going by and I was like like asking my friends like is this normal like do other people do this and it's like oh yeah it's normal like when you when you've been in a marriage so long like sometimes you have phases where you uh are more intimate sexually and and then you have time that goes by where it's not and you know I'm hearing from other couples like yeah we we only have sex a few times a year and I'm like what like so I'm I'm starting to ask and like starting to get feedback because I'm like I don't know if this is normal and one of the things that I felt was happening at that time um well first of all I was like I wonder if his testosterone's low so it could be a hormonal thing you know like that phase in your life but it was it was this transition that we had gone through and this was like a new rejection for me because he I didn't feel like he wanted me or needed me in the same ways that he had before like when we were working together it's like we had this mission to accomplish and now he he wanted his paragliding and he wanted to like really focus on the kids and I was like but what about me and he's like well yeah I mean like what are you doing you know and it's like wait this whole time I thought we were doing this together and now I'm questioning are we doing this together because you know he doesn't like my yoga and and this is not to be critical of him but it's like he's not into this thing that I'm into but I need to be super into this thing he's into and it's like well uh you know like I love you and I support that for you but like what does that mean like do I need to do it with you do I need to be there every time you take off and land do I need to you know like how do I show up and support you for this because you know he became and then this was the other aspect coming out of the business and into like this family culture that we had created like we neglected a lot of like the systems within our family we're just getting by day to day so you know he takes his Focus from building the business to the family and it's like oh here's all the things you're doing wrong in the family and I'm like wait like this has been working for 10 years I'm open to changing it but like there has to be like some integration it's not like you come in here and you're an expert and you change everything you know and so we were struggling uh in that way of like kind of butting heads on like okay how do we want to run the family well I want to run it this way and I want to run it this way and so like we were we were navigating how to figure that out and and it was rough because we never we'd never really like had any kind of fight like the Whole Decade our first Whole Decade and it's not that we hadn't disagreed it's that we were always able to just talk through it but I think again it's like this there's so many deeper issues that we either weren't aware of or didn't know how to talk about or didn't know how to address and so we couldn't get through them so this is like the second you know decade of a marriage where I think you start really addressing those things even though we had this amazing Foundation um because because of this trauma and I didn't understand like how trauma really affects someone that's actually been abused I I didn't see the signs and I didn't know how he was interacting he was he was trying to find satisfaction and fulfillment and value in life by doing things which I understood that and at the same time um so one of one of the examples is he he was very body conscious and for a man he was always saying like oh you know like I'm too fat or I've got this belly and you know I'm looking at him and I'm like well I'm really attracted to you I think you're a really handsome guy and he's like no I've got this you know extra five or ten pounds and and I'm looking at my friends you know and the the men are complaining about how their wives say that you know and and I'm looking at him I'm like oh man I just love my body and he's like oh I I think my body's fat and I'm like we're kind of Switched in that role like that's kind of interesting why is that happening and I realized like he had placed value on how he looks because of you know some of the sexual trauma that happened and how taboo the body was and so he became a little bit over conceptualized about body image and one of the interesting things about that is once I realized like I could say all day long like you're so handsome you look so you know like you're in great shape I mean an extra five pounds you look fine like you look fine like you're more in shape than most of the guys your age you know like how can you be so obsessed over this and then I realized it's because he doesn't believe it himself like he doesn't believe that he looks good he believes that he's five pounds overweight and until that's gone he's not valuable so then I realized I can't fix that for him and I can't tell him you look great because he doesn't believe that so then not only am I telling him something he doesn't believe I'm lying to him because he doesn't believe what I'm telling him and so then that became another like source of disassociation because I'm just telling him when he wants to hear in reality I'm telling him how I actually feel but that's not how he's hearing it and so because I didn't realize that I'm like just trying and trying to fix the problem the problem being how he sees himself or you know how we communicate over this or that and and then you know like I can't fix what he thinks and that's when I realized oh my gosh like I've been trying to please him this whole marriage that we've had and one of the books that I read that kind of like really brought this out was The Four Agreements uh by I can't remember the author but it's called The Four Agreements yeah yeah Don Miguel Ruiz and I just realized like again I've fallen into this trap of doing everything outside of myself because that's what I feel like is expected that's what I feel like this plan has been for me that's what I feel like is what you know like there's nothing outside of this that I should be doing when really it's like myself that I should be asking these questions to like how do I want to interact with my husband is it my job to make him feel good about himself is it my job to you know support him in everything he does and give up the things I want to do and it's not that that was what we did in our marriage but those things would happen and because I didn't realize it it put us on this path so when we started asking ourselves you know what do I want to do in our life uh you know after we kind of put the business as a secondary priority it's like all these questions come up that we didn't have the capacity to answer because there had been so many things that we just didn't know how to address and you know like I started to feel like oh this is how men and women like really start to not be able to understand each other in communication because everything had been so great up to that point and I was like I wonder if this is like how couples fight most of the time you know like these issues that you know I hear couples have these unbelievable fights and at that point we like neither of us really liked conflict and so we would always just solve problems really peaceably but I think we left out really important critical key points that we were not allowed to talk about like taboos like can I talk about the sexual abuse you had and is that related to how you feel about your body like uh I don't know or why we're not having sex now right right yeah exactly and yeah and is that because you know you're more concerned about taking care of you know what you need without bothering me because you see me as something outside of yourself like are we really like a marriage companionship or am I just an accessory are you just an accessory for me because we were both very independent people and we would always joke about how we didn't um want Let's see we would always say we didn't need to be with each other I don't need you you know I want you I want to be with you I want to love you but I don't need to love you I don't need to be with you if you were to go away like I'd be just fine you know like of course I'd miss you and all these things but you know we we always felt like pretty empowered around being like interdependent versus codependent and um maybe to an extreme where we didn't understand like uh like really like integrating ourselves together yeah yeah yeah so it sounds like towards those last couple years you started to grow apart it's our first day yeah yeah we did yeah well maybe is it time to talk about his passing yeah yeah we can go there okay yeah so the actual day that it happened I had just come back from a yoga retreat and to set it up I'd been gone for seven days and he'd been with the kids for seven days without me and he's like oh man I haven't been able to do the things I want to do and like this this has been like so much and I need to take a break so he'd gone power paragliding that morning yeah so we were all living together now and in my mind I'm thinking yeah like this has been the last you know like 12 years of my life like not just a week and now you need to go like take a break and go power paragliding but I get it like I support that and so um you know he went that morning came home it was great so he would usually go once a day but because he was feeling neglected like he hadn't been able to go as much as he wanted he wanted to go again that night and so I and I had just been traveling I had a headache and I was kind of feeling like needy and I I didn't want to tell him not to go but I didn't I really didn't want him to go and I had never felt that way before so what was interesting is that whole day we were just like together like it was really low-key we were just kind of like in and out of each other's space like in the house all day and you know normally we would go out and we would do things and but today we were just home and we were just like crossing paths all day and it was really kind of sweet and I remember um I was laying down and like just taking a little a little nap and you know he came down and laid next to me and and like you know we were like hugging each other and kind of spooning and I was just like oh this is just so nice like I could just do this forever you know and feeling like for some reason this is not like this is just a moment and this is gonna be over and like enjoy this and it was just like this weird like longing feeling for something that was gone that was right there that was happening and I couldn't quite like comprehend what that was and then just like an hour later I I had said to him I was like hey remember how your GPS tracker is connected to your phone and like if anything ever were to happen to you when you're out paragliding I don't remember how to access your location on that GPS tracker so can you just remind me how to find you if you know if anything were to happen so you know he pulled up his phone showed me like oh yeah here's the tracker here's the app here's how you locate it here's how you find the location here's how you refresh it so you know as the location is moving or whatever I was like okay great thanks so much so um you know like I asked that question that day like what was on my mind like why did I ask him that and I kind of felt like I was guided or LED and you know like that was a question I was supposed to ask and then and then in my mind like well if if I knew that I was supposed to ask that you know like what was going to happen and how did if if I was supposed to ask that then obviously like whatever caused me to ask that would have known that you know something was going to happen and like why couldn't why couldn't they have prevented that from happening instead of like prompted me to ask this question you know this is like kind of one of the things that as I'm looking back I'm like and I'm really grateful that I asked you know because that's how we found his body but um so that so that night we had done our little family routine we did scriptures we did prayer and I had kind of got gotten him on a um I I had come up with this whole plan to get him to do scriptures and prayer with the kids I was like okay if we read the book of Mormon all together as a family we can go to Disneyland so that was our goal and we we had actually we had gotten into a good routine doing that we had just finished the book of Mormon I think and so anyway we were in this good routine we'd done our scriptures in prayer you know we talked to the kids about their day and and you know we'd talk to each other and and then you know we kissed all the kids and about to get him ready for bed and then he said hey can the two older boys stay up tonight so that I can put him to bed I just want to give them this experience of playing some video games tonight I just really want to give that to him and the way he said it was so weird I was like you want to give them playing video games tonight like okay like I guess if that's really important to you so I put the two little kids to bed um we kissed goodbye he walked out the door and you know that was the last time I saw him so he had said I will be home at 9 30 and he was always pretty much on time and I'm sitting in my bed I've got one of the older kids next to me playing on his game and you know I'm looking at the clock and I just feel like immediately at 9 30 I just looked at the clock I'm like it's 9 30. now nothing out of the ordinary had happened yet but in that moment I said I wish grant were here so he could see how cute Riley and I look in the bed because I'm reading a book and Riley's right next to me and he's just gonna be so excited when he comes home and sees us you know like cuddling in the bed and we're together and I'm letting him play this video game and you know it's just he's just gonna love walking into this and I look at the clock and it's 9 30 and immediately I felt I was like Grant and like I was like are you here like it just felt like immediately when I said I want Grant to be here and see this like he was there I couldn't see him but I felt like he was there and I was like oh that's really weird like why would I feel like he's here and it felt like this very overwhelming feeling of like when a person walks in the room and you know who it is without seeing it but they're actually there that's what it felt like like he was actually there I just couldn't see him and it was very very distinct it was like Grant standing in that corner and I was like no he's not you know like in my logical brain but in my heart I was like he's right there that's weird and then I went back to my book you know I was like oh he'll be here in a few minutes and so but I felt uneasy and so that's when I checked my phone it's 9 45 as soon as I checked my phone I saw my neighbor calling and I was like yeah something's off because he's not home yet he said he'd be home at 9 30. it's 9 45 and I just like got this Panic feeling at 9 45 I pick up my phone and my neighbors calling me right at this moment when I'm feeling panicked so I answer the phone he's like hey it's your neighbor across the street I'm just like is Grant okay and I was like uh like what do you mean he's like well his truck is still at the park and his you know his flying paraphernalia is not on the back of it because it was always on the back of it and you know it's just getting dark and I just wanted to check in I was like well no you know I haven't heard from him and he it's he said he'd be home at 9 30. sometimes he gets you know caught up in the park talking to people about the paragliding but then he'll come straight home so it's also not totally out of the ordinary for him to not be home at 9 45 if he were to get talking to somebody but he should be home any minute you know so I'll call him so I called and I called and I called and it just went straight to voicemail every single time and I was like what is going on and I knew he wanted to fly in this area that didn't have reception so I just figured oh he's out of reception so then the neighbors called again and they're like it's totally dark he's not here um you need to call the police and I was like what like why would I call the police he's he is not gonna like that he's gonna be totally embarrassed if the police found him and you know he's just like run out of gas or something I'm like no I need to go get him because he doesn't want to be embarrassed with everybody finding out some mistake that he made and that was stupid so I get on the computer I look up his location and I see he's like right on the border of Utah in Arizona so we're in St George which is close to there but it's an hour drive from where I'm at and I'm like why is he an hour away from where I'm at so in my mind you know I'm self-sufficient and I you know I do everything I don't go outside myself to ask for help I I'm like oh well I guess I need to get in the car and go pick him up you know so I'm planning to get in the car all my kids are at home two of them are awake and I'm planning to drive an hour to go pick up my husband because I think he's run out of gas and and this just and like I already knew something was off and this is where I can already see my brain going into the space of like illogical thinking so then my neighbors are kind of like no no no no you're not like you don't you're not gonna get in your car I was like why not and they're like well we just need to call the police first so finally like I'm just fighting myself on this like I don't want to call the police I don't want to make this a big deal I don't want to embarrass him I don't want to you know all these things I don't want to do and then finally it's just like something ends me in me is like you have to call the police so I I'm like okay I'll just do it and against everything that I wanted to do called the police submitted a missing persons report and I'm like he's only been gone an hour you know like you can't they're not considered missing unless they've been gone so long so they're not even gonna listen like I just didn't know how any of this worked and I was just really nervous about like the whole process so I called him I looked up the GPS location gave him the GPS location I kept trying to call him but I was like well he's out of service that's why he's not answering looking back if I would have been so first of all he had a like a an Emergency thing on the GPS that he could have you know sent out if he was capable of doing that he didn't do that the other thing is his GPS location never moved once as soon as I found it it was just stationary and so I mean he's not a stationary person in my mind I'm just thinking oh he's just sitting there waiting for us so I'm already going into this space of like panic and like trying to figure out like how this logically could work because everything works out in the end so what are the ways that this will work out even though something's off so you know some time goes by like we're just waiting and waiting and waiting and like nothing's really happening they're out looking for him so then a dispatch finally calls me it's like 12 30 at night and they're like okay um we're gonna send a helicopter out to the location because it's pretty remote there's not really roads to get out there and you know we'll let you know I'm like okay how long is the helicopter ride they're like oh it's about 30 minutes I'm like okay so once you pick him up how long will it take to get back she's like oh probably about an hour so I'm thinking in my mind okay it'll be about an hour and a half before he gets home so like in my mind I'm like a helicopter and at this point I hadn't told anybody so I finally send a message to his parents his brothers I didn't send a message to my family because I was like I don't want to worry them and my mom just loves to worry about things and you know when he's home safe tomorrow then I'll tell her about it so I send a message to his family I'm like hey look nobody freak out like Grant hasn't come home tonight just send us some prayers because I want to make sure that you know like we find him and I just wanted to make you aware that he's gone and we don't know where he is so they start freaking out and I'm like why are you guys freaking out like it's fine like he just is somewhere and we're gonna find him and he'll come home like it's fine so then more time passes we don't hear anything we don't hear anything and now it's like so it's 12 30 that I guess call from uh the the helicopter people so I'm thinking okay in my mind 12 31 too so he should be home by two so then two comes and goes and then three comes and goes and I'm just like what is going on here so then I'm like man it's three o'clock in the morning I'm so tired like I'm not going to be able to function with the kids maybe I should just try and get some sleep but I felt guilty because I didn't want him to come home and have everybody have the lights off and we all just fell asleep and you know forgot about you so I kept the lights on and I just kind of laid back and closed my eyes and then 3 30 my doorbell rang I run out there I open the door I see four guys I'm like looking for Grant's face you know I'm like oh I don't see Grant out there which if he was out there why would he ring the doorbell right and it's police officers and there was two people from the church there and they just said can we come in and I said yeah and then I'm thinking in my mind when I see this in the movies that's not good so I was like did you find Grant and they're like yeah we found Grant and I was like oh good and they're like it's not good and I was like what does that mean you know like maybe we're gonna go to the hospital so then you know they're like can we sit down I'm like oh that's also not good in the movies when they tell the the wife to sit down that usually means they're dead so I was like oh no and the thing is like from the moment that 9 30 hit and he wasn't home I already knew like and I would not even look at that as a possibility until it was confirmed but I knew everything was different and I knew that I had been ignorant to the reality and I would not face the reality until it was confirmed and so the moment it was confirmed was when the police officer walked in and he said we found your husband he's been in an accident and he did not survive and my response to that was I know and he kind of looked at me like uh I don't think you understood what I said we found your husband and he was in an accident and he didn't survive he's deceased now and I was like yeah I know and everybody just kind of looked at me like how do you know that and and then in my mind I was like well they can't tie me I wasn't even there when he died so it's I didn't do anything that's not how I know I just know and then you know they're like can you sit down let's ask some questions and I was like yeah okay sure and they're all just looking at me with this face of like just complete horror and and I was like I like the way you guys are looking at me is really uncomfortable because it's like you're waiting for me to react and and so then they start offering like my wife can come over and sit with you I'm like I don't want to sit with some stranger that I don't know like I want to be alone I want to go like just look at my kids sleeping like I have no interest in talking to anybody that's you know your wife or The Bishop's Wife or anybody you know and so then I I just like kind of got through the questions and they didn't want to leave and I was like you guys please leave like I need you to get out of my house and they were super hesitant because I I don't think they knew like if I understood or you know if you were suicide risk yeah exactly or yeah emotionally yeah stable for your kids exactly and and I could definitely see that there was like uh I don't think she should be left alone and I was like get out of my house so anyway I just so then I called his parents and I told him they were the first people that I told and then I just went back up to my bed where I had been well actually I went up to the bunk room where all my kids were sleeping and I just laid down next to him and I was just like what like what do I do like I'd should I wake him up and then I was like no number one rule in parenting is never wake up a sleeping child and so I just looked at him and I was like I don't know how I'm gonna tell you what I'm gonna tell you when you wake up can we just all not wake up because if we don't then we don't have to or maybe this is a dream maybe if I go to sleep and then I wake up it won't be real you know so then my kids got up and I just kind of stared at him and I took him outside and I jumped on the with them and I'm like jumping up and down in this like comatose state you know like thinking like oh yeah everything's normal it's just fine and in my mind I'm like what am I gonna do like what do I even do I just you know and there's no textbook on this like how do you tell your kids their dad's dead how do you like go through your days now like I just I was like I I don't know I don't know I was just at a complete loss the first time in my life I was just like I have no idea about anything I'm not sure I even know how to keep breathing hmm so how did you like thank you for telling us that's so hard I mean I it sounds like it I'm relating to one thing that I think I might be hearing I'm I don't always have the emotional reaction to things that people sometimes prefer want or except for me yeah specifically I I it's rare it's rare that I cry in fact my sister died of colon cancer and I know I've never cried about it yeah even though I loved my sister yeah and I feel things it's just that's not the way I react and I never did and I don't know whether that just means I didn't process it or or um that I I just accepted it I don't know yeah anyway I'm just I'm relating to the idea that you were watching them watch you yeah expecting a certain type of reaction and that isn't how you're wired or is it what you were feeling or something yeah so how do you how would you describe what you were feeling I think that I was feeling this sense of okay you're giving me this information I don't know what to do with it yet so I'm just going to kind of put it right here for a minute and like I'll start processing it when I'm ready but it doesn't mean anything yet like in my mind logically I know it means like my husband's dead the first thing I thought was my kids don't have a dad anymore like what like that's why I married a good Mormon guy that's family centered so that I would have children that would grow up with a father the second thought I had was who am I going to have sex with now and the third thought I had was my life is going to change forever but like I don't like I don't comprehend that so I mean those are in my opinion kind of three really odd thoughts to have and there was no emotion with them because you know I feel things for sure and I didn't cry for weeks I mean I think I tried to cry a few times and it felt so forced that I was like this is really dumb um but it's just like you know we all process emotions in different ways and it's not that I didn't feel something it's just that I had to take the information and look at it for what it was and I couldn't react to the information I just needed to know like just what to do next like just take another breath you know because it was so big and I knew that this would impact me but in that moment there had been nights that we'd been apart like so my life had not changed one bit yet in reality like I was still in my house I still had my kids my husband was away just because he wasn't going to come back this was not outside the realm of normal for me yet and so that's kind of how I was interpreting all of this I think you know as you're describing yourself and just how you know uh yeah mind-altering Earth shattering this is in so many ways it reminds me of a freeze response honestly and and I think it's really important in traumatic situations in times of like mental and emotional survival to just say we don't choose how we cope with what we're given yeah you know it's some it's a reaction yeah um and so that that's what I feel from kind of what you're what you're saying we don't choose our thoughts either yeah in those in those times and um anyway I just feel you know I'm feeling all the feels for those moments thank you for going there and being willing to to describe it a bit and I also feel um you know in an indirect way um you know there are so many ways that you're feeling this situation um you're you have your partner but there's also this large parent thing that in my moments oftentimes of times of trauma or where a reality flip happens in a really in a moment is you it's like a sharpened focus in a way where you have this realization of like I'm about to change their life yeah like we're in the pre but we're one step away yeah from kind of we're all um changing for them and I'm I'm hearing that from you too yeah and it's like we're in the last moment that this will ever be a semblance of reality and how can I hold on to it and just keep it a little bit longer because I know I can't yeah yeah yeah and the freeze response I've never really thought of it that way but I think that that's insightful as far as like how I responded to that was you know just everything stops yeah yeah well that's devastating I I also the the second reaction you had who am I going to have sex with was interesting because you guys weren't really well well it was because he was the only person I'd ever been with and I was married to him and now I'm not married anymore that makes sense and so it was like this is a part of my life regardless of like the phases that we've been through and like this is a part of my life I'm used to so now what am I supposed to do because like you're only supposed to have sex with your married partner that's the opposite sex of you and that'll that'll come into play in part two yeah exactly but then the other thought I didn't hear you say was um what about our livelihood so I guess maybe financially you were fine or yeah yeah I didn't yeah I didn't think about that at all I just thought my kids don't have a dad I don't have an intimate partner anymore to share in physical intimacy with and everything else too I mean that was part of it and everything in my life is going to change those are the three things that just were really so present to me in that moment where I knew everything that I had founded my life on would no longer be yeah I mean those questions are so they're so interesting because on a level you have the parenting part of your identity you have your own identity with your partner and what that means and then you have this existential the world as you know it that's really interesting yeah yeah yeah and that's exactly kind of the questions I went through because it's like you know the money is easy you can make money doing anything right and like some people get another one can well everyone is capable of it but it's like yes like that's an easily solvable problem is where I'm coming from but like you can't replace a child's father you can replace an income you can't replace a father you can replace you know a home or you can go live somewhere else but you can't replace a partner you can get a new partner but you can't I mean death is so final there's nothing you can do to undo that and that's the concept that I didn't really have any understanding of but I knew that I would have to figure it out because in my world when we hit a speed bump you can undo it go around it figure it out and fix it and make something as good or better but like you know like when a person dies you can't undye them unless you're Jesus and then he can resurrect true true if that happens I mean yeah like even that I like I go through the into intricacies of those stories and I'm like I don't know but yes supposedly you know but even that I mean I mean that's a whole nother Mormon stories podcast right so I guess I think I've decided I want to split this up into two parts because I think we're going to go a little bit over four hours and uh so what I want to do maybe for this part one this will be kind of when when your Mormon husband dies kind of the episode and then part two will be like the questioning the building rebuilding a life after your husband dies as a Mormon Widow mom Widow right yeah in other words but I guess I I would like to end this episode by talking about everything up to his funeral that that you still want to share in terms of theology religion how the church dealt with it just anything dealing with the Mormon or the really important personal aspects of his death in your story does that make sense yeah yeah that makes sense so so when you know I found out about this and I told his parents and I am processing it and you know I'm like okay how do I reach out like who do I call what do I do who do I talk to I just I didn't I didn't know I was like I don't even know who to call so then I thought okay I'll call my parents I called my mom um told her she just couldn't believe it I mean she just started crying immediately you know and I'm sitting there on the phone thinking like I'm not crying why are you crying you know but again like different reactions and she's she's just more emotionally connected in that way and things touch her whereas you know I'm just like I gotta get this information out and figure it out and she's like well do you want me to come up and I was like I don't know I just so then I I think that we had this conversation she's like well I'm just gonna come up so she you know got in the car started driving up I didn't really know it wasn't like present to that and then I just went up and I like went into my kid's room looked at them all they're all dead asleep and I'm just thinking like how I like I feel so sorry for you guys that you're gonna have to wake up to this like this is not right this shouldn't be happening like how did this happen and and the other thing that started really coming up in my mind was how did this happen like he is so capable like how could this have happened how could this be possible like what happened so then I start thinking like well you know he was he was kind of in this territory where they're like really territorial it's like over Colorado City you know and if you know anything about that culture it's kind of like this well yeah we didn't ask what happened how if they don't yeah well I didn't know yet so like I'm like what happened it don't make sense to me and I'm like what if he was power paragliding and someone shot him because like he wouldn't have like gotten in an accident what if this is Mel like there's malpractice Mal play in here and you know like what if some and I'm just like yeah I'm like wait what happened because I didn't know and so I don't know if you want me to tell you what happened now or as I find out but like I can it's up to you go either way okay so I'll just say what happened because that's easier to put it into context without like all this time of not knowing which that's what it was for me and that experience was difficult did you not know um it was like a week and a half it was a long time and because it was an unattended death they took the body straight to Salt Lake and so I didn't even see him for like seven days and so I was still like watching the front door like it wasn't really him he's gonna walk through the door and then every day would go by and he didn't and then I'm like oh maybe it's real you know and so um and he had had a um GoPro so he had filmed like the whole thing was on film and so I was like where's the video where's the video where's the video I need to know what happened so the police took the video they watched it because it was an outward angle you couldn't see him or really what happened but you could kind of get a sense of it and what we finally ended up you know figuring out from the video and everything that happened is he was on these um these Cliffs where they go up high you know and then they go flat and then there's some hills down this way so he was on these Cliffs that go up really high then came to a plateau and then went into this like hilly area well when wind does that what wind does is it goes like this you know it kind of eddies and spins around and then it kind of gets like flat over the flat part and then it'll drop down and then it'll Eddie again and so as he was along the edge of the high Cliffs and then went into the plateau part the wind was fine it was when he kind of went into this um like Valley area and there was more distinction between the altitude of the you know sky to the ground and it was more like it was just a faster slope it wasn't like the sheer edges of the cliffs but it was flat and then it was a slope that's where there was different space in the air and with the winds as high as they were the winds were editing through that and as he flew into that a winded he caught his parachute and just took his parachute down so in the video you see he's flying along it's fine and then all of a sudden it's this bam like this something hits him and it was wind and what was super interesting and this like still adds to The credibility that we both had in this belief of like nothing can happen and if something does he'll know exactly what to do so it's six seconds from the time you see this you know like kind of gush of wind you hear it and he's on the ground dead six seconds and in that six seconds he grabs his um alternative parachute because he knows his parachute has been and he deploys it so he like in like two seconds he had got his reserve parachute out as he's spinning around like because it because when the wind got his parachute it took him down so the wind is thrusting him to the ground so it's faster than free-falling and he's spinning and as he's spinning like all of these things are happening all this input and he pulls his reserve shoot and the only reason that didn't save him is because he was just low enough that it didn't deploy like the parachute didn't um like come out all the way like it was completely extended it just wasn't deployed and then um because he was at an accelerated fall he was at a level where it maybe could have deployed but because it was an accelerated fall so he was just high enough that it it was fatal and he was just low enough that his parachute didn't deploy and so it was just like this sweet spot of like 50 to 100 feet if he had been lower he could have survived if he had been higher his reserve shoot could have saved him you know and so it's like gosh like I I really trusted that if anything were to happen he would know what to do and I was right he did know what to do and he was just in this like wrong spot for every single aspect of training that we were capable of of you know expressing and it didn't work because of that one little Factor and it's like but there were other factors too it's like that when that night the wind was very high you know it was higher than he should have been flying in it was later than he usually goes out he was further than he usually goes and so all these things start stacking on top of each other and then that's what creates this inability to get through something you know and you you can't fight nature like you can't argue with nature and win and and this is where it's like no I think I can so I'm going to try it and then it doesn't work and then in this case death is the result so yeah so anyway that's what happened and um you know then it was about like then I had to start making all these decisions and you know like where do you want the body sent and what do you want to do and yeah do you like what kind of a casket do you want and I'm like these like these are decisions like we've just like barely talked about once in a while we've never made decisions about this like I don't want to buy a casket and bury it like that seems so stupid and then I'm starting to ask myself like what are these Customs we have around death like why do we do these cement boxes and why do we spend all this money on these really nice wood boxes and then bury them and like this is all really weird to me like this is just weird like where do these Customs come from about how we and why do we fill them with all these chemicals and like why do we put makeup on them and make they look horrible like so I just started like going through this process of this and also Mormonism you're buried in your temple close yes which is your Baker cap and your white robe and your you know the green apron and all that yeah so we so the the funeral home that we went through there like well do you want us to get all new temple close for him and I was like yeah I decided I was like well like okay what do I do with this body what do I do what do I do and I'm just asking myself this question and then I felt like I was on this walk with my mom and I I felt like I heard this voice come to me and say I want to be cremated and I was like oh Grant is that you you know like and I was like of course you do because your body looks horrible and you don't want people to see that because I was like a good Crush yeah yeah and he you know like he he did have that body image and I I was so deep into that connection with how he would feel about how he looks but I knew he would not like an open casket and at the same time I was struggling with that because I was like people like I think it's part of the whole process like if you see them you get the closure you know so like do I take that away from everybody I'm not sure and if I cremate you know like I know the church has said you shouldn't do that and I think that was kind of rescinded and and then this is where like a theological question comes up like if an all-powerful God can't like put together the ashes of someone it's all chemical element anyway and if a God can't like play with the elements to make whatever he wants like that that makes no sense to me that God can't resurrect a cremated body because I'd heard that many times you know and I was just like well if that's true then that's ridiculous so you know I was like I don't have a problem with cremating some of you know I got a little bit of pushback like but nobody was really like oh you shouldn't do that because of the state that I was in and so I didn't get I I didn't get a lot of like any input on any of the decisions I had to make and I think that was just like people just were afraid to say anything like I don't want to say the wrong thing and so I felt like super isolated and alone making these really intense decisions and I didn't really have an opinion on a lot of them like so I was like well I don't want to buy a casket and bury it that seems like a waste of money so they're like oh well you can rent caskets I'm like really okay I'll just rent one and I decided to do an open casket and you know and they're like you have to make this decision right away because you know if you don't make it within the next few hours we're not going to be able to get the all these like formulas inside you know and I was just like oh this is so weird like can't we just like love him and then bury him like why does it have to be so complicated but um anyway I was like well I guess I'll just go along with the process because that's how it's done and I don't know another way and uh yeah okay go ahead and do the things and so we ended up I I did it I was like you know I don't really want to focus on life I want to or on death I want to focus on life so I planned a celebration of life in St George and one in Salt Lake and then just an open casket right before the funeral so that you know anybody that wanted to be there could but it wasn't going to be like this big funeral thing and so we drove him back to Salt Lake and you know planned and prepared for everything on the way home this was another thing that was just like really special to me um it was like the middle of July and in Utah it's really hot in July and I'm driving home and it's just raining and this thunderstorm is like incredible it's just like thunder all over the place lightning all over the place and I was just like and all these tears and by this time I was feeling really like the sadness of it and I I just felt like you know the heavens are Weeping for me like this is this is my storm like this is this is the heavens like expressing like we feel you we see you we hear you you know and we're with you and the lightning I mean Grant was always playing with fire I'm like ah he's up there like playing with the lightning bolts and you know exploring all his new uh talents that he's got with you know all of his new non-limitations now that he's out of his body and he's just having so much fun out there you know and like telling myself all these stories you know but at the same time it was it was really meaningful because it connected with you know his life and how I felt like the heavens were responding to where it was at and you know it rarely rains in July in Utah so I was like this is and it rained every day that I was there and then I went back to St George and stopped and I was like you know maybe I'm just seeing this I don't know if this is reality but it felt very customized to where I was at and I I really felt you know loved and and seen and understood just from what was happening outside of me did you announce it on the YouTube channel did you let everyone know yeah the day the fans want to come to the funeral yeah yeah so we announced it on the on the YouTube channel um it was just obviously like really somber it's still on there you know like if you Google Grant Thompson death you know that's usually the first video that uh pops up that our hosts at the time just made that announcement I did say you know I was like so many people love him I want to give them the opportunity to come and see this and you know this potentially could be another good opportunity to share about you know how we view life after death and what's going to happen and like share the gospel because you know this isn't the end and you know this is like an opportunity for the whole world to kind of experience what happens through the process of death when you know you're still in the temple and you're going to be together forever and you have these beliefs around you know this isn't the end even though this is definitely the end so um I'm just noticing that I I was just looking up um him on Google and this is like the New York Times covered this story NBC News USA TODAY the BBC this is a global yeah news story yeah TMZ the sun which is in the UK like okay so I I I apologize I had never seen your YouTube channel before this morning really yeah and I I don't think I'd heard of this because I I guess I'm not plugged in to that scene I don't know yeah well it's okay I mean we always used to make this joke between us like we don't watch YouTube we make YouTube so you know we don't have time to watch it because we make it yeah so but but yeah I mean the the reach that it had I mean this was a world throughout the whole world everybody you know I mean we had fans in every part of the world and so when this happened it was just like what uh you know it felt like everybody kind of lost this icon that was part of the YouTube creation of a celebrity because I mean Access Hollywood like that's yeah I know it's crazy yeah because I never I never heard of them so yeah yeah yeah I mean this was our full celebrity too or I mean I'm I'm I'm I was kind of like the wife of Grant Thompson you guys do red carpet stuff yeah we did some of that we went to some events and you know it depended on if we could make it or not and I mean it wasn't a lot of that but we did do some really fun things and you know we have the the photographs and all that of the red carpet and I mean it was still relatively a new world every time we went to like an event it was like the first one they'd ever done so we just like it was just what we were doing and we didn't put it into context of like we're famous YouTubers until the end you know and then it was like oh yeah we're famous YouTubers that's like what we do but yeah but until then it was it was our life and our family and you know we were just making videos in our basement that's the reality of it like so did we feel like celebrities not really when we went out and got recognized it was like oh yeah this was a little bigger than we thought and you know even that's kind of an adjustment to figure out like oh how do I interact with this like people coming up at the store and like are you Grant Thompson are you guys The King of Random did you do this project and it's like yeah we did and they're like oh my gosh you're like uh you know I I've done this project and I've done this project and I've watched you from here and you know now I'm going to college and I'm getting my engineering degree because it's it's really amazing it's really amazing to see the impact of how when you share your gifts how they affect other people's lives and so there's that beautiful aspect of it you know when you're giving your life for something how it really changes other people's lives and that was part of our mission I'm curious um you know how you experienced the balancing of feeling a deep personal loss and specifically too with your children you know losing a dad and having to balance the public loss though and how they felt about that yeah that's such a good question and if I'm being totally honest I don't know that I've processed my personal loss with it because I have I've been in everyone else's experience with the loss and that's not to say I haven't felt the loss I have I mean when I'm you know laying in bed by myself every single night I feel the loss but I don't feel like I've allowed it to like really touch me and impact me because I'm taking care of my kids I'm taking care of you know like the business I'm dealing with you know the logistics of that I'm talking to the employees I'm helping with the channel I'm doing all these different things and again I'm just like continually going outside of myself to make sure everybody else is okay around you know what happened here and that's not to say I'm neglecting myself because I'm not um you know I do feel a deep sense of um kind of like crippling inability to engage in life at times and it's not because I'm not capable it's just because I'm like so overwhelmed with everything that's happened that you know in that first year I I would try to commit to things but then that day would you know I'd wake up and I'm like I you know I'm I'm not going to be able to get out of bed today and there's really nothing I can do about it and I just have to wait until I feel like I can but it's like the moment I can I'll do again and so but so but even in those experiences where I'm like okay I'll honor how I feel I'll stay in bed I'll do all these things I'm not feeling the loss I'm feeling how do I get through this to the next thing so I can keep going if that makes sense so survival yeah that's kind of what I'm hearing yeah are you staying super busy yeah and that that's also a defense mechanism that I use because it it feels good I mean I've done a lot of things since he died I you know I've moved my family twice I've bought a house I renovated the whole thing I've you know restructured the entire business I've written a book I've you know I've run a blog like so the book that I'm writing is not about this yet that's coming this is just a book I'm kind of I love to write so I have a Blog where I kind of go through a lot of the things that is yeah it's called followtheenergyoftheday.com okay so I've been doing that for two years and and I've really just been like focusing on finding myself healing myself and like being really in touch with reality and accepting reality and then trying to make the most beautiful situation out of every reality no matter how undesirable reality is because that's kind of the process so in the loss I guess I've found so many things that again I don't feel like I've suffered from A Loss within the loss I'm suffering if if that makes sense because I I keep looking for things to to fill the space where the loss would be and so you know again like just being totally honest like I don't think that I've been I've had the courage yet to allow myself to feel that loss and I've been able to keep myself so busy through the whole process that you know it's been it's been there that I can do that so yeah I mean it's interesting how we approach grief as humans because it's like in in some aspects I still don't feel like I want to accept that he's gone and like that's not going to change so I'm like it's almost like I'm getting everything ready for you know when he comes back which logically I know that's never going to happen I understand you know all of the logistics of how this happens but at the same time it's like in the back your mind I'm wanting to say how can I fix this still so I choose other things to fix and and you know this year's been interesting because I think I've gotten closer than I ever have to just really feeling that loss and allowing myself to feel that but I just do it in Little Steps because it's it's it's too much to you know just say okay I'm ready yeah yeah yeah yeah so I'm just checking out your blog and looks like you've done a little YouTube video and anyway well that's that's really powerful um and that's really hard what you've been through people I don't think anybody can imagine what that's like unless they go through it yeah yeah you can't and it's one of those things where it's like you know if you lose a spouse and a child those are those are experiences that are so much more impactful in your everyday life than it is when you know your mom dies you love your mom but it doesn't affect your everyday life you know you lose a spouse and it's like every aspect of your life is different every minute of the day you lose a child and it's like similar to that you know and so those two losses where you know they're way younger than you think they should be and they're a part of your everyday life it's like those are just just different losses that people not many people experience and not many people can comprehend I mean it does happen but that's not the normal experience you know other than your miscarriage you didn't lose a child right right yeah okay yeah do you want to share what your kid's reaction was when you told them we never yeah so my oldest boy he had stayed up that night and he this I mean this was like this just broke my heart the night we were waiting he got on his one will and he just drove to the park and he didn't tell me where he was going and I was like I just see him like going off I'm like where's my child going it's like midnight and he's just like taking off so I get in the car and I go try to find him and he's at the park he went straight to where his dad was parked and he's just sitting there on the table I'm like what are you doing he's like I'm waiting for Dad to come home I'm like son first of all we're missing somebody you leave and now I don't know where you are so now that's two people that are missing like this is not helpful and you can't just wait here on the Park Bench like you have to be in a safe place but he just I mean he wanted to make sure his dad got home you know and I just was like in my mind even at that moment I was like yeah you're gonna be waiting here forever so we gotta go home you know I didn't say that to him but I was like we need to wait in a safe place and let's try and get some sleep so I brought him back home and he didn't want to come and I think he had a hard time falling asleep that night and he finally did and then in the morning he he's my oldest and the first thing he said is did they find Dad and and this is where it's like gosh I wish there was a handbook to like tell you how you tell your child that their parent is dead but there's not a handbook for that and so it's like he was like is he dead and I was like yeah because that's what he asked he's like did they find Dad I was like yeah and then he said is he dead and I was like yeah and he just kind of looked at me like silence you know and he I don't know that he was even like comprehending it because it was just such a Brash conversation of the truth but how do you process that when it's that is the conversation and you know and I think then I you know started explaining yeah he was paraliding and he crashed and um he didn't you know survive the crash and you know my son's like contemplating it and then and then what he said was just really another just interesting thing like he's like can I have his go GoPro I was like what you know like let's not get on to the things like this is your dad like I just I was like I don't know you know and then and then it's like as soon as I said yes like he's dead I just saw this like slump happen in his little body you know and then he asked the you know the question about the camera and then he just went into the other room and we have swings all over our house and I like to leave the swings up and he just like he just started swinging you know and I was like okay you know and then the other kids slowly woke up and I didn't tell them and and I and I said to him I was like I don't want to tell the other kids until we're ready and so then my mom got there and we took them all into my room and I was like okay I guess I'm gonna tell him now my mom's here so I I guess this is how you do it and so I just told the kids you know like dad was in an accident last night and he died so he's not coming home and my five-year-old at the time just kind of looked at me like what am i nine-year-old at the time or eight he was eight and he just looked at me and just got up and ran out of the room and started crying and I was like that's an interesting response because he's my less emotional kid usually and then my baby he's two and he's like no daddy's not not coming home you know and he just said like he's like no that's not okay for you to say dad's not coming home and it was just so cute and sweet and you know and then I was like uh you know if I could go back and do it what I would do is I would take each one of them individually I'd sit down with them I'd hug them I'd hold them and I'd say I have something really hard to tell you and this is going to change your whole life and you're not going to want to hear it and I wish I didn't have to tell you you know like kind of prep them and I wish I could have done it individually so you know that's something that if I could go back and do it better that's what I would do so you know maybe that will help someone at some point to do something like that a little bit better but you know I I did it the way I did it and it everything about it was just hard yeah and they all had completely different reactions yeah as we're kind of wrapping up this episode is there anything you want to say about the Mormon funeral or the way the church or its members reacted in positive ways and maybe in not so positive ways and I saw a blog post about out of support someone when they're grieving so I don't know if you want to if you want to incorporate any of those ideas into this kind of final thing to talk about yeah so you know um I just recently about a year ago had a girlfriend who was a college roommate lose her husband they have five kids and it's like I'm like oh my gosh I'm reliving this through you like I just went through this two years ago you know yes and she's going through this now and as I watched her kind of interact with the funeral and like everything that was happening there's this space and and I've heard many people who have had like incredible losses like this talk about the same thing that happens it's like you you're in this phase of like shock and a lot of you know what I would call Grace it's like your mind's not really functioning but you can interact with the world but you're not there but you can still get things done it's very interesting and so like during that time yeah like a disassociation and during that time I think that there is a lot of space for people to be really supportive and I I I felt like during that time people were kind of distanced and were like I don't know what to do and you know but I feel like one of the things that was really great is I I had a whole group of friends and family come up and just stay at my house you know and just being there felt so good and so safe for me and I didn't have to talk to him I didn't have to do anything but just being there and that's an impactful time because you are disassociated but if you're left alone it's really scary but if you have someone there and it doesn't matter what you say because the person's probably not even going to remember it you know but just like showing up as a supportive space like there's a lot of impact to be had during that time so don't be afraid to interact with the people like right after it happens like one of my friends was like oh I want to give you space I was like I felt abandoned you know like I didn't want space I wanted people around me and and probably everybody's a little bit different on that but one of the biggest things I would say is don't be afraid to do what you're feeling like you want to do if you feel like you want to call them call them that doesn't mean I'm going to answer you know or if you want to come over and bring cupcakes that doesn't mean I'm going to eat them but if you come over like I might feel great or I might not want to see it doesn't matter just do what you feel like you can do and want to do and that's what's impactful and meaningful yeah I think the Jewish people have a ritual called sitting shiva where like everybody shows up at the house yeah it's like a whole weekend I think yeah we're just you just go yeah and you just hang around yeah and if you're not actually talking to the person who's grieving you're talking to community members yeah siblings or children or yeah it's just like Community showing up to be a presence around the time of the death yeah and I think where I was coming from it's like well we should all be doing something and you know I wish I could have felt like that was okay because that's exactly what I needed and I couldn't be really present in it because I was like well I have to entertain everybody and you know everyone's like no you don't have to entertain us and I was like oh okay you know and and just you know like the culture around death it's like rather than it being taboo and we don't know what to say what if we could just let it be what it is and sit in it and be okay saying the wrong thing because it actually might be the right thing but if you're afraid to say it because it's the wrong thing and you don't know and then you don't say it then you we I see us constantly missing out on these opportunities to connect out of fear or uncertainty yeah yeah okay so and then as far as the funeral you know it just I wanted so one of the things that I referenced so I spoke at his funeral and I just felt like no one can honor him the way I could because I know him like every detail about him and so I really wanted to be the one to speak I had another speaker that was really great and you know we did some songs and my objective around the funeral and and this was because I wanted to um really show the life he lived the intention the energy that he lived with um like I wanted people to come to the funeral and feel like they were uh edified uplifted motivated to live a better life and inspired and so that was my objective with what I spoke about in the funeral and and then one of the things that I talked about he just loved paying tithing you know and in the Doctrine and Covenants there's this scripture that talks about it it's like it'll save you from being burned at the last day or whatever you know and you know we kind of joke that it's fire insurance and so you know I like I kind of leaned over and I was like I sure hope that's paying off for you now you know and like tried to make it like kind of this like like I know isn't it like this light-hearted thing but like he was so committed to paying tithing he just loved it so much that I'm like you know I hope that's true for you you know because now that's when it's going to be tested but but at that point I was like that you know this isn't a separation this is just goodbye for right now we're gonna see each other again um this is a graduation it's not a death it's just a transition I mean this is kind of where I was coming from and all the things that I was saying at the funeral because this is what I had been conditioned to believe and this is how death you know every time I was at a funeral these were the things that you say and you know families are together forever and so you know like this is just it's it's fine like we are going to see him again and everything's fine like that's kind of really like the nonchalant approach that was like oh well you know it's okay because you'll see him again and I guess on a level that provides a lot of just support it's just like hey this really isn't a tragedy like it's an inconvenience but we're going to just pick up right where we left off when I die and everything's gonna be great yeah and I think in the moment like right after it happens because life hasn't really been altered those were comforting words yeah it's not until like six months later and it's like oh you're gonna see him again and I'm like well I haven't seen him for six months and like life has gotten really hard since then so that's don't that's not comforting do not tell me that again because I actually don't want to see him again you know and that's when that shift comes but in those first moments it's like oh yeah it's okay like you know I'll see him again it'll it'll feel like the blink of an aisle at 50 years will go by and I'll look back and they'll be like oh it was nothing you know like these are the kinds of things that I was saying and feeling and believing and you know even if it's you know a couple years or 50 years it will all feel the same I'm sure you know I think it's hard too because kind of right after right after someone dies oftentimes you know there are there are sort of stages to grief and they're not uh organized in any way or yeah they're not linear um so it's it's interesting right because when you have a loss like that it really depends on where you are in that moment and I think oftentimes when we attend Memorial services or we attend funerals um you know for the family members the really close family members most of the time they happen so close to the death and all those decisions that need to be made you haven't even really started for Mo for the most part we're still in shock you know uh when we're attending funerals and witnessing people give talks or it's oftentimes that the days after where it kind of really settles and then the grief or loss process begins to really kind of take root I just think it's interesting because I think the way we show up as a culture is like a photo uh yeah it's very much like a memorial service and that's kind of our concept of death it's like a moment or a meeting of two hours um when really it's this whole process where you feel just right such a myriad of feelings and emotions and it looks so different from person to person yeah and so holding it all with like a lot of gentleness and softness for people and realizing that there's a lot missing um when it goes to like what's going on on the inside or what's to come if we're only looking at a memorial service for people yeah yeah and during that whole first month I just felt like I'm not even on the ground I felt like I was just as Angelic as my husband was you know like I just felt like I was being held in the hand of God and that's the only way I was able to get through this and I even remember you know like a month after two weeks and like he he it felt really close and then after three weeks it started I started to feel this dissonance a little bit and then four weeks it was like it was almost as if I was feeling this hand starting to set me down like okay little one it's time for you to walk on your own and I was like no no no no do not set me down like let me just stay in here forever but it's like no this is the process of Grace like I'm gonna hold you for a little while and then I'm gonna put you down you gotta walk on your own and I'm like nope don't want to walk on my own don't do that to me like I will not function because now I'm starting to see what this life is really going to be like it's been long enough that I'm starting to actually see that and this is going to be way too difficult but also having that feeling of like God's holding me right now and that is how I feel and that's what I believe and and it was very comforting and beautiful and wonderful and it's the reality of what I was experiencing like how I interpreted what I was experiencing and it felt that way and I mean even now when I think back on that it's it's this very peaceful Heavenly feeling of just things are as they are you're going to be okay and you don't have to think about any of that you're just being held and it's it's a really it's one of those feelings I wish that I could explain in words and I can't and I wish everybody could feel it and you know maybe people have felt this but the closest thing I would describe to it is you know on each day when my babies were born that first day that they were born it's just like there's this magic in the air and it's so happy because cause you've got this brand new little baby and it's like they're just sent from heaven you know and this is like the the opposite end of that it's like there's another transition into or out of life right and there's the same feeling that's around it and so that was that was another interesting aspect of like how I'm feeling around this you know transition and it reminded me a lot of a birth too which you know helped me connect life process here like this is all part of it I love that that's really beautiful it reminds me also of you kind of talking earlier about um not you know oftentimes when we think about uh the loss of someone it's like someone being taken or something being taken or reality is being taken or love being or whatever um The Presence the physical presence of someone you know but also that something can be given too that things can be you know you can lost but you're also given yeah and and this is where the concept of you know every new beginning comes from some other Beginnings end it's a song like really uh famous song but anyway like that just gave me a whole new perspective on that because you know I think of a new beginning as the birth of a baby but that's also the end of your life without a child you know and you know the death of my husband is a is a new life without him you know or it's a new life in myself I mean there's just so many so many ways to look at it when you're willing to again like ask yourself those hard questions and it's like well it doesn't mean I am glad he died it doesn't mean I wanted him to die but you know I've got to ask myself another question so what now what is my life gonna be like and how can I make it actually better than when he was here like and is that okay and I hope it is because that's what I want and I don't want to feel guilty about wanting that yeah yeah well that is the perfect way to end part one of your story which we have envisioned is only being a one-parter but it's too good and now we got to figure out how to do the second part but um Janae Thompson this has been really powerful thank you and we still have the meat I think the meat yeah you wanted to talk about it really fun things you didn't come to me wanting to talk about your husband's death and grief you wanted to talk about like what happens after and being a widow woman you know in Mormonism dating dealing with the aftermath yeah because after that that whole transition like this I mean this thing happened but then it's the life after that and it's like oh the life I had before does not work at all anymore and so then it's like okay what else is not working yeah yeah there's a lot yeah so that's going to be part two so so thank you uh Janae Thompson for part one uh this has been really powerful thank you I know it's gonna help a lot of people and Margie it's so so lovely to have you riding shotgun so glad I'm here yeah so please don't go away uh come right back for part two of our interview with Janae where we're going to talk about you know rebuilding your life as a Mormon Widow is that the way to describe identify how do you um yeah that's a good question like this was another funny question my kids after asked me like just a couple days after dad died you know they're like Mom are you a widow now and I was like uh yeah I guess so um I mean yeah that's the term for this situation like do I consider myself a widow no I don't Define myself that way I'm um I'm a mother you know I'm I'm a woman I'm living my life I'm expressing my dreams like that's kind of how I relate to myself and that's just one of the many titles that can describe a certain aspect of who I am yeah maybe like rebuilding your life after your husband dies you know yeah okay yeah well can't wait thank you so much oh go ahead yeah well I was gonna say if you want to use the word Widow I'm totally fine with that like however yeah yeah I think actually that would probably be more powerful for a title so for that aspect yes you can say Widow what do you know about YouTube titles yes I do that's why I was like that's a much better title word just so you know anything you want to plug before we end this episode other than your amazing Channel which you don't need my plugs but uh tkor well you know just like if people want to hear more about like the whole grief process and what I've been through my blog is a really good resource for that let's follow the energyoftheday.com we'll have a link to it in the show notes yes and that was one of the things Grant would say just every day when we were just trying to live our you know best life is I'm just going to follow the energy of the day and see where it takes me you know and I was like that's a really great Mantra I'm happy you can do that but I've got too much to do right now and then you know like I've I've had a shift in my perspective on that and so it's it's a really meaningful concept to me beautiful yeah yeah all right thanks Jay thanks Margie yep thank you thank you all right join us come right back for part two with Janae thanks everybody

Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast

Views: 265,740

Keywords: Mormon, mormon, the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints, Mormon Stories, Mormon Stories Podcast, LDS Church, Exmormon, LDS, John Dehlin

Id: 82EsSjVObYQ

Length: 202min 34sec (12154 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2023