Born To Bounce Back with Lynn Moore | 030

The power of imagination. We need

to imagine because imagination opens doors to

our emotions, and we need

our emotions. Mhmm. Even good, bad, and

indifferent, they're all important. So

use your imagination. Decide

about anything in the way you would like it to be.

That sends out a tremendous amount of energy

to the ether. And before you know it,

those things are starting to be to be put together,

and some of those things are gonna appear in your life.

Welcome back to another episode of Resilient AF with Blair and Alana, but

only Blair today. I'm also here with Lynn Moore. What

I love about Lynn is not only is she amazing and inspirational, and we're gonna

talk more about that, but she lives down the highway for me. And I met

her from someone who lives nowhere near me, I think. I'm

pretty sure. But when I learned she lived down the High Dan. Yeah.

So I it's such a small world. But so Lyn Moore is a British Columbia

based author and motivational speaker who has embraced life's journey with

purpose and passion. Her remarkable story spends decades

weaving together roles as an educator, entrepreneur, wife, mother,

and adventure. With a natural talent for writing and teaching, Lynn

has brought her gifts to every chapter of her life. From a marriage that

thrived for fifty years to launching and running three successful

businesses, her entrepreneurial spirit knows no bounds.

Lynn's adventures have taken her across the globe, including teaching English to young

Buddhist monks in Kathmandu, Nepal. And at 74, her

insatiable curiosity led her back to university to study

psychology, proving that age is no barrier to

learning. Lynn's life mission has always been to

uplift, inspire, and empower others to pursue their highest potential.

Her book, Born to Bounce Back, Regain Your Zest for Life After It Knocks

You Down, is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Chapters Indigo, and her

website. And I'm so honored that she's here today. I've had the

pleasure of working with her, getting to know her. We're gonna be featuring her

story in Resilient AF, stories of resilience volume two, which is out.

And she has had a journey of life, eight

decades. Is it okay if I tell people that?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I want to be an example

to all women who are beginning to

reach the later years of their life, showing them that

they can just carry on and maintain

and live their purpose right till the

last minute. Yeah. Just It

it's amazing. Old. There's no such thing as age.

Let's see. I'm gonna say there's no really such thing as getting old in your

heart and in your soul. I

love that. And you want to do whatever you can to

help this world, to help other people

because that's how we feel the best about life ourselves.

So good. So true. And, you know, you've had quite the journey.

But today, we're gonna talk about when you lost your husband quite suddenly and

unexpectedly while he was on the Operating Operating

Room table getting a surgical procedure and that the surgeon called

you and told you over the phone and you were all alone when that

happened. Can you walk us through that story

of, you know, what was the surgery? What was your you know, and what were

you doing at home when you got the call, and and and what happened

next? Okay. Well,

we had had our fiftieth wedding anniversary the previous

year, And

he did have cancer.

It was a stage four, so there wasn't really a lot of,

maybe twenty percent chance of,

beating this cancer. So he's been having treatments

for approximately a year, and

they discovered that in his spine,

there were some cancer lesions, and he was

told by an orthopedic surgeon

that if he did not have surgery to

put rods in his back, that his

there were two vertebrae that were actually broken,

and he was in a lot of pain. And we didn't

really understand why until he had an

MRI. He went into the

hospital. It took approximately

ten days before he got the MRI.

Because he had, our hospital didn't have one at the,

present time, and he had to go to another city by ambulance

to have that done. So he stayed in the hospital for ten days in a

lot of pain. Finally got the MRI,

and as I just said, the result is surgery was

necessary. Otherwise he would- there was a hundred

percent chance that he would be paralyzed.

So, we weighed it all. Okay? Twenty

percent chance of beating this. % chance of

being paralyzed. Surgery necessary. What's the

choice? He decided that he would

take the surgery. So,

three or four days later, talked to him on the phone in the

morning. He was going into surgery.

And at that point, we just

I said, I'll be there when you come back from

recovery, And we told each other we loved each other,

and see you later. Later on in the

day, in the afternoon around two, I think it was, he went into

surgery about eleven. The phone I

was, get actually getting ready to go up

to the hospital. I was just flipping through the newspaper pages,

and the phone rang, and it was this the

doctor. And he said, are you in the hospital? And

I said, no, but I'm just getting ready to come up to the hospital. And

he says, well, I have to talk to you. I said, okay.

I'd Brother talked to you in person. And I my

mind you know how the mind goes? It goes

the thoughts go through in milliseconds, and all

these thoughts ran through my head.

He's he's been he's had

a bad surgery. Something didn't go right. He's

in ICU. And then when

the doctor said, I am so sorry to have to tell you that your

husband died during surgery,

And he went on to say he

formed a clot, a pulmonary embolism in his

lung, and we did everything we

possibly could, and we couldn't get him back.

Well, at that point, I didn't hear much after,

I'm sorry to say your husband has died. That

thought hadn't entered my mind. Everything else did, but not

that. And

I dropped the phone. I was

going no no no no no no no no no no no no,

and running outside. This was an April

day. It was sunny. And

I didn't even know it, but I was in my stocking feet

and racing. Left

the door open, raced outside, just screaming.

No. No. No. And one of my neighbours

heard me and he came immediately and he said,

what can I do? Are you alright? I said, my husband died. He said, do

you need an ambulance? He thought he was at home.

He said, no, he's in the hospital. He died.

And I was sobbing

and screaming, and I thought, I have to go to my

neighbour. So I ran over to my neighbour's house. Banged

on the door. They weren't home. So I

thought, well, maybe Fran is home. So I

ran over to her house. Again, no one was home.

And I just kept running throughout our community,

going to my people I knew the best,

and I went to three homes and no one was home.

And then I

noticed that there were some people around me.

People had heard me, and they were they came out, And

they were standing around me, but I could not see faces.

I I knew that there were people there, but I could not make out anyone's

face. I was in complete and total shock.

And,

eventually, I I can't really tell you the

time in which things happened. They just happened.

And one woman came up to me, put her arm around my shoulder,

and started to lead me back down the

road to my own home. And

she said, come on, let's let's get you home. And

then, wouldn't you know, two of the neighbors

that I had knocked on the doors for

came home at the same time. And they were both

standing out on the road. I ran to Fran

and slung

my arms around her

and stood friend, friggin'

dead. And she held on to me tightly and

she said, oh, no. Oh, no.

And and then I noticed my closer

neighbor, Lothar, and his wife,

Vivian. And I ran to him,

And he he just,

he again took my hand, put his arm around me, and he said, come on.

Let's let's go home. And we have the

dog. And I thought, oh my god. I left the door open,

and the dog, of course, had come out. She's very,

very, very close to me. I called her the

other half of my soul.

And, she they

had apparently picked her up and taken her into their house.

So Mhmm. I went into their home and sat down.

And before I knew it, there were so many people coming from

everywhere in our community. They'd found out where I

was, what had happened, and the word spread like

wildfire. And so many people were there in the house.

They were hugging me. They were talking with me. They were shocked as

well. And,

I got I borrowed somebody's phone. I called my sister who lives in

Parksville on the island. And

I told her, and she said, I'm on my way. I will be

there later today. So she actually got on

a plane, and she managed to get, or

my neighbor went to the airport to pick her up. And she got

to my home in the early evening.

And she stayed with me for two weeks. She had been

through this process with some of her clients with what you did after

your after someone dies, and all the procedures

and the paperwork. And she she stayed she

said, I'm here until you tell me to go home.

So I think it was three weeks that she was with me, actually.

Wow. Yeah. So that was,

you know, it's it's it's starkly clear, all those

images in my brain. It's like branded.

Some things that happened to us in our lives are branded into

our brain. Mhmm. They will never go

away. Yeah. I mean, first of all, thank you

so much for sharing, and my heart is so broken for you. I can't

imagine I can't imagine the heartbreak,

especially you were with him for decades, like fifty years. And

Yeah. And, actually, we met when he was 15 and I was 16,

and we went we went steady for the summer.

And then we went separate ways. We married other people. We

both had three year marriages and then

divorces. And you found yourselves back together.

Yeah. We both into each other on the street one day. And,

I mean, I had gone off to live in Edmonton. He went off to live

in Moose Jaw, joined the air force, and

next thing you know, there we are on meeting on the street in

Penticton. And what happened? Did he ask you on a date? Like, tell me about

it. Well, I saw

his, he was

driving his dad's powder blue

1953 or '4 Cadillac.

Mhmm. And I saw it coming down the road, and I thought, oh, that looks

like Greg's dad's car. And, that

car was the first

that car I was in that car the first time I got my

first real romantic kiss.

Mhmm. So that car was you know,

had a star on it. Yeah.

So but now this is few years later, of course. And, you know,

he pulled over to the curb. I had a little girl in

each hand, and we were walking to the store. And,

they're my girls, so my children.

And off we went.

Just, he said, how are you doing? Etcetera, etcetera.

And I said, I'm going to

find a furnace filter, but I don't really know what I'm looking

for. So he took over the furnace filter thing.

Got my furnace filter. It put it into the furnace.

I also needed my ironing board welded because the leg fell off, so we looked

after that. And that's the beginning. And then we're off off and

running. I love that. It was like a rekindling of love over

a furnace filter. Absolutely. I had I was

so sick and tired of guys by that time. I'd been

divorced and a single mother for three years. Mhmm. And I

had made up my mind. Okay. That's it. No man is

gonna cross my threshold again. I'm just gonna be a mom, look

after my girls, and carry on. Mhmm. Then about

two about two weeks later, he turned up. So Ugh. He came

across the threshold. Greg. Oh my gosh. I I

love that. I I didn't I had a couple boyfriends

in high school, but I always look at couples who, like, met in high school

and dated and kept dating and got married or, like, met in high school and

then they met later in life. And I always had this, like, not

jealousy, but, like, there's something so, like, romantic about it

and, like, you know, magical about it because, you know, there's

that history. And I I think that's really beautiful. Now,

what did you do to navigate your grief?

The odd the most,

let's see. How do I get my English It's okay. Take all the time you

want. Here. We don't care about grammar. If it's not proper English

grammar, so what? I can put a

preposition at the end of a sentence if I need to.

So, he decided

he wanted to rejoin the Air Force. Mhmm. He was not

having a good time trying to find a job outside of

the Air Force. And

within about a few months of us being reconnected,

he decided he was gonna rejoin the air force. So

he did that, and then he came and told me. No.

And from there, we would have no idea where he would

be posted until he received

that information. All the paperwork, etcetera, was

done. And didn't he get posted to

Portage La Prairie, Manitoba? Ah, what do you know?

What do you know? Halfway across the country.

And, so he he went

off there, and we wrote letters. There

was no Internet. There was

so little of what we have today for for communication. So

it was letter writing and long distance phone calls, which were expensive.

And after a couple of years of this, we just decided

that I would move, from Penticton, and I would

go to Portage. And, I did that in

January of nineteen sixty eight. And,

with my two little girls in tow,

and we began the air force life, and we were imported for nine

years. Yeah. And he was transferred to Edmonton,

and we were in Edmonton for three years, and decided

enough of this. And he got out, retired

early, and we moved to Vernon. Yeah. I

love that. And do you still have those letters?

I don't know. That's

I actually don't even quite know what happened to them. I had them in a

box, but it doesn't matter.

Yeah. How do you do you do anything special to,

like, honor him on his birthday or his you know, the

day he left Earthside?

I think about him probably even more. I go

over memories, And,

I don't have anything special that I do because I you know, I think of

him every day. Yeah. And I really don't

wanna dwell on the day he left Earth's

side. I'm fine with our anniversaries,

our birthdays, that that sort of

thing. Mhmm. The oddest thing happened three months

after he died. I I had a girlfriend who called me and she

said, I have friends who have asked

me if I would like to come to Vancouver

Island, Oyster Bay in particular, and where

they these people have a cottage. And they would like

me to use the cottage

for a couple of weeks for a vacation.

She phoned me and she said, this is what had happened, and

would I like to go with it? So

in, July, August, half

of part of July, part of August, we drove to the island. We each had

two little white dogs. One, they

each had their little baskets in the back seat where they were

flipped in. And off we drove from Vernon

here to the island, and, set up in

this lovely cottage right on the water. Wow. I was

sitting there one day

by the the beautiful ocean,

where actually I was born near the ocean, and had a great

affinity for the ocean and the

forests. And, then, of course, living

on, what

flatland out in the prairies

for sixteen years. It was so

nice to be able to come back to Vernon, the Okanagan, and then go back

to the coast and Mhmm. So enjoy the

water and the trees. Sitting there

on this porch, on this lovely little cottage

by the Pacific Ocean, and I had

this urge that came over me.

I have to write something down. So I ran into the house,

and I got a pad of paper and a pen, and I started writing.

Blair, I stunned myself. I was

writing poetry. I have never

written poetry. I have never liked

poetry. I dealt with it in school, and after

that, no more.

And for about a year, I wrote

poetry. I love it. And my friends

and relatives were all

in glee. They they said, this is beautiful.

You should you should make a book or

something. And I was sitting there saying, you've gotta be

kidding. But that's how I managed

my grief. I wrote poetry. I'm a writer anyway,

but the poetry thing just surprised and

stunned everybody, including myself. That's beautiful.

I think it is so beautiful that your grief

came through in poetry, and it helped you know, writing obviously

helps you process emotions and to heal. And and poetry

is such a gift. Writing is such a gift, and we all have the ability

to write. And poetry is just so beautiful. So I

really appreciate you sharing that story because that's that's amazing. That is absolutely

amazing. Sitting by the ocean, writing poetry. You know? I

I mean, I can't wait to read your poems one day. You're a poet.

I love that. As we wrap up here, you

know, you have a gift for everyone. The link's in the show notes. Can you

tell us a little bit about your gift? Well, it's about

how to overcome these

really incredibly

stunning and soul bruising events that

happen to us that I call IPCs,

instant pivotal crises. And it can

be a lot of things. Some, like the death of my

husband, was definitely one. And,

you know, another one would have been

when when Greg and I broke up when we were teenagers. Yeah. And

all that. So, you know, it's a full lifetime of

things that happen

that knock us off our feet. Mhmm. The gift.

It's a booklet, and it's called six new and

unique ways to bounce back

after life has knocked you down. And

I concentrate on, in this booklet,

basically, about the six

really important things in the

way of the needs of the human being. Mhmm.

And once we are aware of these needs

and the,

order in which they are in importance.

For instance, the first one is security. And

security gives us- means food, it

means clothing, it means

shelter. So those basic things

of life that we absolutely must have to feel secure. So that's

number one. And then it goes on up to the six. And

I have exercises in the booklet that people can do to

figure out their own,

using those six basic needs, how they all affect

their own life, and in what

order they are the most important for that individual

person. Mhmm. And that's really, really helpful when you're

going through something really rotten. You want to

know. You you you've lost. You you lose your security. You

lose your connection connections. You lose

your, desire to,

contribute. You lose so many of those needs, and

they go crashing down, and you need to rebuild. Yeah. That's amazing.

That's very generous of you. So thank you, Lynn. And, that link and all

the her social media links and website link and book links, it's all in the

show notes. And, right before we wrap up, what

advice do you have for someone who's going through something similar to you?

There is so many things I could say,

but I think

what I will do is is suggest some of the things that I

learn, because when it comes to

having these times and why we have them,

they're necessary. Because that's the way

we do our we grow.

So we grow through

these hard times, and that's when we're doing our greatest growth.

And it is you look for

the meaning and the message and

the value. So for me, I had some incredible

values over the years, and when I went decided to write the book, I thought

I'm going to go through all these things and realize just what I did

learn. Mhmm. I think

the power of imagination.

We need to imagine because imagination opens

doors to our emotions, and we

need our emotions. Mhmm. Even good,

bad, and indifferent, they're all important.

So use your imagination.

Decide about anything in the way you would

like it to be. That sends out a

tremendous amount of energy to the ether.

And before you know it, those things are

starting to be to be put together,

and some of those things are gonna appear in your life.

I love it. So that's it. You know, your power of

imagination, and

be flexible. Allow yourself

don't be too rigid in your future and in what you're

doing because when you're flexible, it's

like a a twig on a new tree, a tree that's just

growing. Those little branches are are flexible. You know?

They're green. They allow you to go in

many different directions. Whereas if you

are,

rigid, there's no way for you to go

except to be broken. Yeah. True. That that's

a beautiful analogy, and I think this is a perfect spot

to wrap up. That was brilliant advice. Thank you so

much for taking the time to share your story

of love. You know, we we grieve hard because we love

hard. We grieve deep because we love deep, and I really appreciate you

sharing some of you those, you know, journeys with us. And,

yeah, we're we're grateful for you, and thank you. Thank

you, Blair. I I love you, and

I just

I I'm so pleased that you asked me to do this. Thank you so much.

Oh, you're welcome. And to everyone who tuned in to

another episode, thank you so much for spending some time with me and

my friend, Lynn. Don't forget that life

is full of ups and downs. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes it's

easy. We laugh. We cry and everything in between.

It is okay to not be okay. You are

not alone. You have the support of our community

and mental health professionals, and we are here to

walk through the storm of life with you. Let us be that lighthouse in the

storm, and remember, you are resilient

AF.