Cheryl Espinosa-Jones, AN OCEAN BETWEEN THEM

[1:39]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time To Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. Happy Monday. My book blast continues for Memoir Monday. This is part two of the memoirs I've been releasing as part of the book blast because I love memoirs And of course other books, but I really love memoirs. Anyway, enjoy this collection of diverse voices, thoughts, feelings, topics, and everything on this Memoir Monday. And you can go back a few days and listen to part one of the memoirs I'm releasing as the book blast. Enjoy, and I hope you connect and really enjoy them like I did. Cheryl Espinoza Jones is the author of An Ocean Between Them. Cheryl has spent a lifetime exploring human loss, revelation, and transformation. When she was training to practice psychotherapy, her first wife lived with and died of cancer. That experience more than any other taught her that human beings are capable of astonishing epiphanies and inspiring grace. Cheryl's radio show Good Grief on Voice America tells the stories of people who have changed their lives through confronting loss. Cheryl has written articles for Open to Hope, a website dedicated to inspiring grievers. She has also been a contributor to two books, Journey to the End and Who Will Take Care of Me When I Die. Her first novel, An Ocean Between Them, came out of a belief that fiction is the perfect vehicle for telling the truth. Welcome, Cheryl. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm really happy to be here, Zoebe. Thanks for having me. Of course. And you were so nice to have me on your podcast, which was like such a heart to heart. I feel like you really like get people to open up. Anyway, thank you for having me on. Absolutely.

[3:47]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: I just love those conversations so much. If you can talk about death, you can talk about anything. Right?

[3:53]Zibby Owens: Yeah. You might as well start there. I mean, death, as we, like, laugh. I mean, I guess that I mean, that's part of that's part of grief. Right? It's finding the humor in in the saddest of moments. There's always times to to bond over the funny and the crazy and the unexpected.

[4:11]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: It's so true. I I like to tell people that I didn't have a sense of humor before my wife was dying, and she was sick for ten years. So time is everything. But at a certain point, things became very funny. Gallows humor, I don't know, whatever you wanna call it. But people started laughing at my jokes, which I'd never experienced before. And and I've retained some of that. She died twenty five years ago. But life is funnier, which is paradoxical,

[4:42]Zibby Owens: but true. So take me back to when you started writing. Tell me what happened with your wife. Like, give me your whole story. Where were you born?

[4:52]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: I was born a mile from where I live at the moment Okay. In Oakland, California. However, I I lived all over as a kid. My dad was a minister. It's kind of like being in the military. We moved all over the place. That was probably my first grief experience. I didn't realize it till later losing because now people keep each other when they move. But then it was just a hard stop. True. So true. So then fast forward, my next grief experience was probably coming out because people are not happy about it. Right? I was happy about it, but other people weren't. So there's a loss in that of kind of feeling accepted. And but again, you know, I weathered that pretty well because I was so happy to realize who I was. You know, there's a big relief in that. So then when I was about 37, my first wife was diagnosed with an extremely virulent cancer that at the time people were dying within six months or a year. It's called multiple myeloma. It's a blood cancer. And in her case, she had a broken back, but it had taken a year and a half to diagnose. I like to tell this story just to get the word out. She was black and none of the doctors she went to, which were many, would x-ray her. Why? Because a doctor later admitted that when a black person shows up with back pain, they assume that that person is malingering, which means making it up to get out of work. What? And we would have thought so, but then this doctor apologized and confirmed it. So when people talk about the differential in healthcare, that's an example. Wow. And that one doctor who eventually said, Oh, I'll give her an x-ray, whatever. And he x rayed her back and it was broken from this illness. So that's it. That's a parentheses, but it's an important story to me just because of the lack of knowledge about what it means to be treated unfairly by healthcare. It's such an extreme example, isn't it?

[7:07]Zibby Owens: It's Anyway horrific. I cannot even believe it. It's just horrific. But Yeah. And the pain that

[7:14]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: she must have been in at the time. A lot of pain. She was a very physically stoic person. She could handle a lot. But by the time it got diagnosed, she couldn't work. You know, she was really disabled. So anyway, then she lived for eight and a half years beyond her diagnosis, which was supposed to be six months to a year. And at that same time, was studying to be a therapist. And so the two are kind of inseparable. You know, I've always called myself a grief counselor because the intersection of that experience with becoming a therapist, it can't be separated. So then years and years of spending time in my office with one or two people. And I just started feeling like I wanted to do something bigger in the world. That's a big thing, actually being with one or two people and and helping them navigate to whatever their future is going to be. But I started feeling a little hemmed in, you know, And then I thought, well, what should I do? I should write a book. Now I'm a very erratic writer. Could I just say? Was

[8:26]Zibby Owens: this after your wife had passed away? Years

[8:29]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: and years after, for sure. I started having that thought, you know, two years afterwards, I met my second wife that compelled me. I was raising kids. You know? So it was long. I like to say it can be really long, this thing of making something out of your grief. No rush. No rush. So I started playing around with writing a book. I'm an erratic writer which means sometimes I write a lot and sometimes I write nothing. I'm not very disciplined. And it's usually something really hits me and I've got to get it out. But mostly I sing actually to deal with grief. Wow.

[9:14]Zibby Owens: Is this like singing in the shower or you belong to a singing group or

[9:18]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: know what type of singing? Belong to a singing group, the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir. But in the year following my wife's death, I sang every day by myself in my house. And I had like three or four songs I sang every single day. And then others would come in and out. But I had to do it, had to do it. Have you noticed in grief whatever it is that you do to try to get through that it becomes like you must? Yes. I'm sure you've heard that from other guests and maybe your own experience. So that was one of my I musts in that year. Not writing, maybe I dabbled a little. So then I started thinking, okay, the way that people put their message out in the world is they write a book. But honestly, Zibby, I tried for two years to write this informed grief help book, and it just did not work. I was already doing the radio show and I thought, well, I'll just talk about all my guests. It just came to nothing. That's

[10:26]Zibby Owens: all right, as many books do.

[10:28]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: So then at some moment I had the thought, what if I just created characters that carried my message forward? I had never been one of those people who always thought they'd write a novel or I'd written a little fiction. And I was thinking about this today before we came on. Probably the heart of the fiction I'd written was wanting understand something that I found very disturbing. Like the first short story I ever wrote that I can recall was about an abusive mother. I just had no way to understand that, and so I wrote a story to try to understand it. Right? So this idea of characters, once I had that thought and I tend to work from the gut up, like I'll have a feeling and then my mind starts to click in after that. So once I had that thought, well maybe I want to write a fiction story that captures the ideas I'm trying to talk about. And once I had that thought, people started populating the story. And I never thought it was true what people say about novel writing, like your characters live in your head. I thought, ah, they're making that up. But it was very true for me that the characters in the book became very real to me to the point where people say, Oh that must be your story, but it isn't. It's just that I know those people. You know, I know who they are, I know why they did what they did, and so that was a really interesting process actually to be interacting with these people who were basically made up. But the idea, what my gear is, and you probably know this from being on my show, is that our losses are terrible and grievous and then we grow. If we choose to take those steps through instead of around or over, then something comes out that's very transformational. And I chose a rather extreme example, or it chose me, I don't know, which is that the two main characters are a mother and daughter who have been estranged for ten years. And the reason is because the daughter is a lesbian. And that is only partly a made up story. It's not my story but it is many many people's story that they've been deeply rejected by the people that ought to support them no matter what. You know, you're a mom, I mean I'm a mom, I would support my kids no matter what, but that is not always the case. So the book became about how the mother transforms as a result of the daughter's cancer. And I chose cancer partly or it chose me because I know that world and because I've seen so many transformations in those times when something wakes you up to the fact that you don't have time to be mean. You don't have time to kind of not do the work to repair things. And so that's what the book's about, the repair that they undergo.

[13:59]Zibby Owens: And I've witnessed that process so many times as a therapist. Well, in the book it was super, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. That's okay. I didn't. No, I was just going to say the whole thing was so heartbreaking, both from the point of view of the mom and Chloe, who reflects back on how they were so attached for so long, right? The oldest daughter, like the firstborn, and how she was just completely cut out. I mean, it wasn't like, I'm not going to talk to you as often. I mean, this is like a what's the word from like the feudal times when people are like, just what you know, completely Communicated. Yeah. Right? That's what I was thinking. I communicated. That's literally what I was about to say. And I was like, why am I even saying this word? But yes. And how she would even go about saying how the mom would go about saying she only had three kids instead of four kids. I mean, that is like a real inability to process some news. This is not And

[14:54]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: honestly, I've known so many people. Of course, this was so relevant during the height of the AIDS crisis. So many people whose families said, You're dead to me, literally. And some people came back around, you know, and some people did not. And so the family that Chloe's built, the community she's built is really a family and that is also very common in the experience of me and many people that your family is really your chosen family more than your birth family. In my particular family, my parents, after a short period of adjustment, were completely on board with me, which I feel very lucky about. And they did a lot of work to try to change the environments they were in around these issues. But most people I knew, not the case. And so it was a big long distance for Sal to come. One of my editors got to the end of the book and said, communicated to me, I hate Sal. She didn't deserve forgiveness. And I was like wait you missed the point because we have to be redeemed by our changes don't we? That's the only way growth matters is is if we if we actually change and grow and we're able to do better. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[18:49]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: So I love Sal.

[18:51]Zibby Owens: I don't know how you feel about her, but I think I feel like Sal had some interpersonal issues. You know? Like, all her relationships were flawed. You know? Her sister, her I mean, the people who have really big issues with all the people closest to them, that's like a red flag on what, you know, what is going on with that person? Why? Like, why are they pushing everybody away? Like, what's going on deep down? Although I do I did find it sort of redemptive in how she was open to counseling. And now that, you know, with your own station. Right? Yeah. Well, still. I mean, she didn't have to go that way, you know, counseling via the barista station or whatever. But, you know, that was good. I mean, there were slowly changes and, but, you know, it's hard to forgive when someone's hurt someone else so much. I mean, it's great that she could come around, but I see what your editor means. I mean, the pain that she caused Chloe and then for her to go on and get sick and not have a mom and like, I mean, that is a lot to put on someone by choice, really. Mean, you know, it's not like she Yes. And I feel as if maybe this is a piece of it that having

[20:07]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: I came out at 17. I'm 67. I have a long history with being in part of that community. And we either get bitter or we learn to forgive. That's the truth that Chloe had done her work, right? She had forgiven her mom before her mom came back because you know that saying a lack of forgiveness is taking poison and hoping the other person dies. Eventually you can't carry it around. And I mean I could give you so many examples where I've been the one to say you know someone's acting homophobic and everyone else all the heterosexual people around me are freaking out and I'm saying gotta give them time. People grow at their own pace, just keep showing up. Say your opinion but don't judge. They're attached to what they think for reasons. Obviously this last period of years has been very challenging in that regard because so much harm has been done. And so carrying that viewpoint, sometimes there are moments when I don't say that at all. Like we get to be angry. But in the end I hope it brings about change not just you're off the list of humanity forever.

[21:39]Zibby Owens: So when you do your shows and when you work with patients, do you still work with patients A by

[21:45]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: lot. It's pandemic therapy. Busy? Yes.

[21:51]Zibby Owens: How do you maintain your own sort of sense of equilibrium when all that emotion is coming at you? Like sometimes I feel at the end of the day if I've had like even like three or four back to back really emotional podcasts, like by the time I like open the door again, I'm like, oh, like I have to regroup here. Like I have to now like go back to the other roles of my life. Like how do you do that switch?

[22:16]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: Oh, that's such a big and good question. So I had the idea to be a therapist a long time before I became a therapist. And the reason was that I knew instinctively I didn't have a good enough boundary. Like people's stories, people's struggles were just gonna sit with me and take me down. So I did a lot of therapy myself because that was an issue in my life, not just in the possible future where I was a therapist. So that was number one. Number two, while my wife was sick, we did a lot of work with how to sit with difficult emotional states. And what that led to is I'm really, really good at letting a feeling come in, register it, and letting it go. It's just a flow for me. And that's practice. That's practice. That being said, I have to do stuff that keeps me emptied out and that's been a little hard in pandemic because some of the things that I used to do do that, For instance, I haven't been in a room singing with other people for a year and a half, almost, no, a year ago at the beginning of March. We've continued to rehearse but I can't hear anyone else except the conductor. And we've continued to create music but in little boxes, right? Each of us singing to ourselves basically. So that was one thing. Second thing, every year I went to a workshop with a man named Francis Weller, fantastic grief worker. And it was just an emptying out. So every year I had that emptying out. I would meet with friends to talk about what we were going through. All these ways got interrupted. And so I kind of had to do it for myself. Okay, are things getting to be too much? I guess I need to go sit in a park somewhere. I had to come up with new ways. But what is true is I know when I'm getting overloaded. I don't know how you do what you do, Zibby, because I read a book a week almost for my show because almost everyone has written a book. And sometimes that's a lot, right? So this thing where you have numerous interviews a day, But then on the other hand, I have numerous clients a day. They didn't all write books and I didn't have to read them all.

[25:01]Zibby Owens: That's a little different. That's why I try to mix in some picture books and, know, cookbooks.

[25:06]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: I'm like, look. I need to mix it up. I can't have a No. I relate to that because sometimes I'll say, I really need a filmmaker this week. Know? I really need a poet this week.

[25:17]Zibby Owens: Poet, poetry's great. Because

[25:20]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: people do all different things out of their grief Not just write books, although that is a very, very common thing that people do. So a lot of book reading in all in grief. Yes. Your reading is more various, I suppose.

[25:37]Zibby Owens: It is. Although I actually just started moms don't have time to grieve. So I should put you in touch with Sherry Poosey is running that. And we have like a column which you should write for and moms don't have time to write. Oh, that would be fantastic. I'd love Instagram account, and she's starting to do Instagram lives, which all just makes me very happy. But she's had a lot of grief in her life as many of us have, and she's doing a really great job. So I'm gonna put you guys in touch. That would be fantastic.

[25:59]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: Yeah. I mean, this time is strangely ready made for people who are already in the grief world.

[26:08]Zibby Owens: Mhmm. Because

[26:09]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: now huge number more people, many more people are listening. Many more people are saying woah yeah grief happens and you know how do we get through it and how do we stay well in this kind of circumstance. So I'm not happy it happened, but I hope that that I don't wanna go back to normal. I wanna go back to better. Yes. Especially in that area of how we stay humane with each other around our challenges and how we love each other through it and all of those connective tissues. We do have that possibility at the moment, don't you think? Improve which in that of course is what my book's about too. How we connect despite our differences? So do you have any advice for aspiring authors? Well my advice might be weird but I went to a book reading once. A quite well known author in the lesbian world was reading, and then there was a discussion. There were three authors. I knew her work the best of the three. And someone said, what's your writing process? And all three of them said, I don't have one. You know, no, I don't write every morning. No, I don't. You know, they were very unstructured. And that was very relieving to me because the way this particular book got written was that it swam around in my head for a really long time, and then it suddenly spilled on the page. And like I had to keep writing. And it was a very few number of weeks that got the obviously, the edits took forever and years and whatever. But the actual original book really fast once it was ready inside of me. So that's my writing process. And it's the same I've done a lot of blog posts and that sort of thing. It's the same with that. Something hits me and it swims around for a little while and then it just must be said. I don't recommend that necessarily as the best way to write, but it's just the way I am as a person. The most structured thing I do is show up at discrete times for my clients. Everything else is a little circular for me.

[28:39]Zibby Owens: That's okay, that works for you.

[28:42]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: Most of the time it does. Most of the time. But I think the thing is, feel compelled by what you want to say. I really felt compelled by somehow expressing this idea in a way that people could take in. And narrative story for me is the way. That's what my radio show's about. You know, we all have our own way, but the idea that there is a way,

[29:08]Zibby Owens: it's really compelling to me. So Cheryl, if people wanna listen to your show, all the stuff, where do they find you? So the

[29:17]Cheryl Espinosa-Jones: first thing to do is just put Voice America all one word comma Cheryl Jones or good grief in a search bar. There is an actual URL but it's easier to find it that way. People can remember that just Good Grief Voice America will get them there. My website which is another way is www.weatheringgrief.com and it's both words are complete not just one g, two gs's weathering grief like in weathering the storm. Those are the best ways to find me. Excellent.

[29:52]Zibby Owens: Well, you, Cheryl. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing your story. I'm sorry about your loss in the past and having to go through that illness. But like you said, more growth and we wouldn't be here, I guess, if that hadn't happened to anyone. Thanks so much Thanks for having for coming. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to part of my June Book Blast. I hope you enjoy it. Come back tomorrow for more. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.